Syria, a fallen civilization that will rise again

Despite the shock reverberating around the region there are the first signs that Syria will not die as an ancient, pluralist civilization

The destruction of Syrian Christian churches in Deir Ezzor 2019 - photo: Vanessa Beeley

Mouin Rabbani on X. A thread covering the chequered history of Syria:

I started writing a thread about recent developments in Syria, and ended up delving into the country’s very long history. This first instalment attempts to summarise aspects of Syria’s history until the First World War. For those interested, I’ve here and there included references to a number of accessible texts for further reading. These are included in brackets at the end of the relevant paragraphs.

[My note - I have also added links and videos]

With the unanticipated, rapid collapse of the Syrian government between 27 November and 8 December 2024, sixty-one years of uninterrupted Ba’thist rule over the country has come to a sudden end. The repercussions are expected to be seismic, first and foremost for Syria, but also for the wider region, with potentially geopolitical ramifications. How did we get here?

Roughly the size of New England in the United States or China’s Hubei province, Syria is the product of some of the world’s oldest civilisations. Its capital, Damascus, sitting astride the Barada river, is a leading candidate for the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. Syria’s second city but at various points its most prominent urban center, Aleppo, situated along the Quwayq river, is among the few competitors for this title, and is believed to be permanently settled since the sixth millennium BCE.

Reputedly even older is Idlib, which was first settled during the ninth millennium BCE (some ten thousand years ago). Periodically abandoned and resettled, it once again re-emerged during the previous millennium as an important center of cotton, olive oil, and soap production in Ottoman Syria. Homs and Hama, sustained by the Orontes (‘Asi) river, were permanently settled during the third millennium BCE.

The ancient trading entrepôt of Palmyra (Tadmur), situated in the Syrian desert and nurtured by an oasis, is also several thousand years old. It made its enduring mark on history during the third century CE when its Queen Zenubiya, believed to be of mixed Aramean-Arab descent, rebelled against the Roman Empire then dominant throughout the Mediterranean basin. Proclaiming herself Empress, Zenubiya controlled a realm stretching from central Anatolia to Upper Egypt before being captured by a Roman expeditionary force while on her way to add Sassanid Persia to her possessions.

Over the millennia the Syrian lands spawned or nurtured a breathtaking number of civilizations, cultures, religions, sects, and cults, as well as innovations in material culture, economic relations, statecraft, sciences, and the arts. Most of these have left a mark of some sort on contemporary Syria.

[Trevor Bryce, Ancient Syria: A Three-Thousand Year History (2014) provides a good introduction to ancient Syria.

[For histories of specific cities see, for example, Colin Thubron, Mirror to Damascus (1967) and Philip Mansel, Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Great Merchant City (2016).]

To this day Syria remains among the most heterogenous of Middle Eastern states. With its population primarily Arab in composition, there are also substantial Kurdish, Turkmen, Circassian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Yezidi communities. In terms of religion its primarily Muslim population is largely but not overwhelmingly Sunni, and also contains Alawite, Ismaili, and Shia populations. In addition to a substantial number of Druze, Syria boasts a large and diverse Christian population. About half of these are Greek Orthodox, half the remainder Syriac Orthodox, slightly less than half of this remainder Armenian Orthodox, with the rest adhering to a bewildering number of denominations.

[William Dalrymple’s “From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East” (1999) provides a fascinating account of this extraordinarily rich diversity.]

The villages of Ma’lula and Jub’adin in Syria’s Qalamun mountains are the only places on earth where Aramaic, among the oldest languages that have been in continuous use, remains the native spoken language. Syria’s once-thriving Jewish population began, like other Syrians, emigrating westwards during the nineteenth century (Egypt and the Americas were primary destinations), before ultimately falling victim to nationalist and sectarian forces unleashed by Zionism and Israel. By the early 1990s the community had dwindled to approximately 4,000, most of whom left in 1992. Approximately forty per cent of Syrian Jews emigrated to Israel, with most others to the United States and Argentina.

While Syria’s various communities tend, as in Lebanon, to be concentrated in particular geographic regions, they have never lived in isolation from each other. Virtually all are to be found in the country’s major cities, and regularly in smaller population centers as well.

Boasting one of the Middle East’s most sophisticated urban cultures, Syria is also home to several thousand villages, where about half its population lives. Its Bedouin tribes are today largely settled within or on the peripheries of Syria's rural areas, and are often part of larger confederations that extend into Iraq, Jordan, and/or the Arabian Peninsula.

Although the term “Syria” is generally believed to be derived from Assyria (‘Ashur), and its territory was under Assyrian rule or domination for extended periods, the latter was in fact centred in Mesopotamia. Whether “Syria” was initially employed to distinguish the lands west of the Euphrates from Assyria in Mesopotamia, or for some other reason remains unclear.

Over time Syria or the Syrian lands, what is often called Greater Syria, came to denote the area encompassing modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, parts of Turkey, and in some cases Cyprus as well. In Arabic, Bilad al-Sham refers to Greater Syria, while Al-Sham can refer to either Syria or, colloquially, Damascus (formally known as Dimashq).

Situated in the Fertile Crescent, Syria is among the regions where animal domestication, agriculture, and settled life made their first appearance. Its first civilizations spoke a variety of Indo-European and Semitic languages. Among the latter, Amorite-speaking tribes, city-states, and kingdoms established themselves in much of Syria during the third millenium BCE, to be followed by Aramaic-speaking successors who dominated much of central Syria, including Damascus.

[My article about the theft of Syrian Arabian horses during the first proxy terrorist invasion of Syria can be read here ]

[The following video is a history of the Syrian Arabian horse by breeder and historian Basil Jadaan]

With its lands extensively cultivated, and situated along vital maritime and overland trade routes including the Silk Road, Syria was a source of great wealth for its various rulers. Predictably, all or parts of it was during ancient times repeatedly conquered by regional powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Alexander the Great, and others. They sometimes replaced local rulers with their own, and occasionally went so far as to deport existing elites, but more often retained existing leaders as vassals in exchange for tribute, soldiers, and a variety of goods and services.

During the final three centuries BCE Syria was part of the Hellenistic Seleucid empire, which established its capital in Antioch. During this period the Greek language and culture, augmented by Greek immigrants, spread throughout its territory and particularly among its elites. This influence would remain for centuries after the Seleucids’ demise, continue during the similarly Hellenistic Byzantine era, and persist long after Syria came under Muslim rule during the seventh century.

In 83 BCE the Seleucids were supplanted by Tigran the Great of Armenia, who two decades later lost Syria to Rome. The latter annexed it in 64 BCE in an effort to put an end to persistent civil conflict among various claimants to Syria’s wealth and power, establish its own pre-eminence, and keep the Parthians, whose empire was expanding westward from Persia, at bay.

Syria was among the Roman Empire’s most productive provinces, which helps explain why a number of its nobles achieved senior positions in Rome including, on several occasions, the supreme office of Emperor. Julia Domna, matriarch of the Severan imperial dynasty which ruled Rome during the late first and early decades of the second centuries CE, hailed from a wealthy Syrian Arab priestly family in Emesa (Homs) devoted to the Arab-Roman sun god Elagabal.

In addition to herself achieving the position of Empress and wielding considerable influence, two of her sons, and several other relatives, became emperors themselves. Emperor Philip I (Marcus Julius Philippus), also known as Philip the Arab, and who ruled during the mid-second century, hailed from what is today Shahba in the Suwayda region abutting the Jordanian border. Philip’s tolerance of Christianity would later produce disputed accounts that it was he rather than Constantine in the following century who was the first Roman emperor to embrace the new religion.

During the Byzantine era that commenced during the fourth century, the wealth of its Syrian province was rivalled only by that of Egypt. According to some historians, during this period “Syrian” came to specifically denote its Aramaic-speaking Christians, as distinct from their Hellenistic, primarily urban neighbours. Like Greek, Aramaic remained in widespread use, particularly in rural areas, until well into the Islamic era, during which both were gradually supplanted by Arabic. With few exceptions, Aramaic became a liturgical rather than spoken language.

[The following is a post from Telegram Channel Enemy Watch. Aramaic is still taught in the Syrian Christian town of Maaloula. Now under attack, again, by the HTS-affiliated sectarian forces.]

Syrian Christian Abu George has passed away due to heart attack:

He was the one whose videos we shared. He was very poor, and his farm was looted by terrorists while his grandson was beaten in front of him by Israeli-Turkish terrorists (aligned with Julani’s group).

Abu George, a native of Maaloula, was reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Western Neo-Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ (A), when the attack occurred.

This is what Israeli jihadists did to him and his family just two days ago.

Just as Roman control of Syria had been challenged by its Persian Parthian rival, so it was between their Byzantine and Sassanian successors. Constantinople’s emperors appointed the Ghassanids, an Arab Christian tribe that had migrated north from Yemen after the Ma’rib dam burst during the second century, as rulers of over much of Greater Syria and defenders of its eastern frontiers and associated trade routes.

The Ghassanid Kingdom, which emerged during the early third century and made its capital initially in Jabiya in the Golan Heights but later moved it to Bosra southeast of Der’a in the Hawran, would last for more than three centuries until the Muslim conquest of Syria. Many of its battles would be fought not against the Sassanians but rather the latter’s Lakhmid clients.

The Lakhmids had established an Arab Christian kingdom encompassing southern Iraq and the eastern Arabian peninsula. Unlike the Hellenized Ghassanids, who shared the faith and theological doctrines of Constantinople, the Lakhmids belonged to the rival Church of the East and were aligned with the Zoroastrian Sassanids, who supported the Church.

The numerous, mutually debilitating wars fought between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and by the Ghassanids and Lakhmids on their behalf, form the crucial background to the rapid expansion of the religion and polity that emerged in the Hijaz during the seventh century. From this springboard, the Islamic Caliphate would expand its dominions from southern France to the Indian subcontinent and eastern fringes of Central Asia in little over 100 years.

[Juan Cole in his landmark Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (2020), explores how this imperial conflict, as well as Muhammad’s journeys to Damascus as a merchant on behalf of his future first wife, the businesswoman Khadija, and his interaction with Christians and Jews in Syria, helped inform his religious development.]

As noted above, Arabs and Arabic-speakers were already part of Syria’s demographic mosaic long before it came under Arab-Muslim rule during the 630s, and were already well-established in the areas of Palmyra, Homs, and the Hawran. Indeed, in the campaign led by the Muslim military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid to conquer Syria, whether in the decisive 636 Battle of Yarmuk or others, its main defenders were the Arab Ghassanids, who had already been there for centuries, and had been preceded by others.

[For an early account of the Muslim conquest of Greater Syria, see Hamada Hassanein and Jens Scheiner, The Early Muslim Conquest of Syria: An English Translation of Al-Azdi’s Futh al-Sham (2021).]

Such realities present somewhat of a challenge to those who recently discovered “Arab colonialism” in Syria and other Arab states in order to deflect from Israel’s indisputable (and formerly self-proclaimed) colonial practices in Arab – including Syrian – territory. If Arabs were indeed colonial usurpers in Syria, how do Israel flunkies explain that it was also Arabs – in the form of the Ghassanids – who led what they would describe as the “anti-colonial resistance” against them?

The silly polemics deployed to exonerate Israel’s contemporary practices additionally fail to account for the reality that after the Muslim conquest Syria’s existing population was, in contrast to the Palestinians or Syrians of the Golan Heights under Israeli rule, neither expelled nor exterminated. Evidence that Arab immigrants to Syria ever outnumbered the local population is also non-existent. Rather, and over the course of several centuries, the region’s Aramaic and Greek-speaking majority came to adopt Arabic as their lingua franca and eventually as their native tongue.

During the same period most of its overwhelmingly Christian inhabitants and many of its Jews eventually, and for a range of reasons, adopted the religion of Islam as their own. Rather than being excluded by the new rulers Syria’s existing elites were, whether or not they converted to Islam, often incorporated into the new polity and would eventually come to dominate the new elite. Contrary to caricature, the forced conversions employed to Christianize Europe were rare in Muslim Syria.

(Parenthetically, Israel flunkies habitually claim that the term “Palestine” disappeared with the Romans and didn’t re-appear until the British “invented” it during the 1920s. In fact, and among many other examples, one of the Caliphate’s military districts was named “Filastin”. Rather, it was “Judea” that fell into permanent disuse, even as Jewish communities remained in these territories).

The second Islamic Caliphate, that of the Umayyads (661-750) established its capital in Damascus. Drawing heavily on Byzantine traditions on matters ranging from administration to architecture, as well as influences from further afield, and fusing these with their own, the Umayyads developed institutions, patterns of rule, and new approaches in fields such as commerce and science that would in many respects serve as a template for those who succeeded them.

[For a standard introduction to the Umayyad Caliphate see G.R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate 661-750 (1986).]

After the Umayyads were deposed by the Abbasids, the center of gravity of the Islamic empire moved either eastwards to Baghdad or westwards to Cairo, which unlike Damascus were new cities. Syria would once again rise to prominence during the twelfth century when the Muslim military commander and first Sultan of the Ayyubid dynasty, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), united Egypt and Syria under his rule.

Of Kurdish origin, Saladin hailed not from Syria where Kurds already had a longstanding presence, but rather from Iraq. Saladin would launch his final campaign to defeat the Crusaders from Syria, and in 1187 liberated the Holy City from their control. His name synonymous with chivalry on account of real as well as mythical conduct attributed to him, Saladin lies buried in Damascus’ imposing Umayyad Mosque complex, where according to Christian and Muslim tradition the head of John the Baptist also lies buried.

[Amin Maalouf, best known for historical novels such as Samarkand and Leo Africanus, has also produced a fascinating work of history about this period, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1989), drawn primarily from contemporaneous accounts.]

During the thirteenth century Syria was once again dominated by rulers based in Egypt, in this case the Mamluks, a caste of slave-soldiers. In a number of battles in Ain Jalut in Palestine, Homs in Syria, and in the Orontes (‘Asi) river valley over the course of half a century, the Mamluks successfully kept the Mongols, who had in 1258 sacked Baghdad, at bay.

In 1516, after a decisive battle at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo, the nascent Ottoman Empire dealt a death blow to the Mamluk Sultanate and added most of the Arab world, from Basra to Algiers, to its Anatolian and Balkan dominions (Morocco, Sudan, Oman, and the interior of the Arabian Peninsula were the main regions that did not come under Ottoman rule). While Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz along with Jerusalem held the greatest significance on account of their religious status, Damascus and Aleppo together with Cairo would form the most important cities in the new Ottoman domains.

The initial Ottoman province of Syria, corresponding to its Mamluk predecessor, comprised much of Greater Syria, and was governed from Damascus. That said, Aleppo was for much of the Ottoman period the more prominent and wealthy urban center. Improvements in security and administration along with widespread public works and expanding trade networks produced substantial economic growth and increases in agricultural output throughout Ottoman Syria. Persistent conflict between rival empires based in Anatolia and Persia continued, this time between the Ottomans and Safavid Iran, but to Syria’s good fortune their wars were primarily fought in Iraq.

[The distinguished Syrian historian Abdel-Karim Rafeq, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 93, published one of the seminal studies of Ottoman Syria, The Province of Damascus, 1723-1783 (1966). Jane Hathaway, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800 (2020), extensively discusses Syria/Greater Syria.]

Prior to the nineteenth century Ottoman rule in its Arab provinces was fairly decentralised. Governors and other senior officials were directly appointed by Istanbul, while revenue was primarily generated by tax farming, in which the right to collect taxes from particular lands, goods, or trades was auctioned by the state in exchange for fixed payments to the treasury.

The Ottomans, who until the nineteenth century related to those under their rule as subjects rather than citizens, also organized society according to religious affiliation. Muslims held a legally privileged position. With respect to religious minorities, the Sultan would appoint/confirm a religious leader from each of the various communities. These leaders were responsible for organising the affairs of their community in accordance with its own laws, traditions, and courts, and for ensuring the community’s loyalty to Sultan and state.

While hardly a recipe for equality, which arrived only during the second half of the nineteenth century, it allowed for considerable autonomy which served the interests both of these communities and of the state. On the whole, Syrian religious minorities and Jews in particular fared much better during this period than their European counterparts.

The nineteenth century was a period of profound change and disruption in the Middle East. An Egyptian rebellion against Ottoman suzerainty led by Muhammad Ali Pasha, its Albanian-born governor who is often considered the founder of modern Egypt, saw Greater Syria fall under Egyptian rule from 1831-1840. The effectiveness of the Egyptian administration led by Muhammad Ali’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, and particularly its tax and conscription regimes led to widespread opposition.

This culminated in a peasant rebellion that erupted in Palestine in 1834, and quickly spread to other sectors of society and as far as the province of Aleppo. The Egyptian interlude ultimately strengthened the population’s Ottoman loyalties as well as local identities.

[Incidentally, Israeli scholars Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, in their Palestinians: The Making of a People (1998) trace the formation of a distinct Palestinian national identity to this rebellion, which long preceded both the Zionist movement and the British Mandate]

A combination of growing European influence in Ottoman affairs coupled with inter-European rivalries, together with a series of administrative and constitutional reforms emanating from Istanbul designed to consolidate central rule and modernize the Empire, during this period helped transform largely inconsequential sectarian distinctions into tensions and ultimately violent conflict.

In 1840, during the waning days of Egyptian rule, in what is known as the Damascus Affair, the city’s Jews were subject to a blood libel after an Italian monk and his Muslim assistant disappeared. Incited by the French consul, the city’s Egyptian governor Sharif Pasha imprisoned and tortured to death a number of prominent Jews before extracting the required confessions, which in turn led to a rampage through the Jewish quarter by a Christian-Muslim mob.

When Ottoman rule was restored later that year the authorities publicly denounced the blood libel as a fabricated slander against the Jews, released the surviving prisoners, and executed Sharif Pasha.

Two decades later the city’s Christians would meet a more calamitous fate. Amidst Franco-British rivalry that saw London and Paris not only sponsor different communities but also seek to define and promote their interests, a peasant uprising in Mount Lebanon in 1859, initially by Maronite Christian peasants against their Maronite landlords, descended into sectarian warfare that primarily pitted the British-sponsored Druze against French-sponsored Maronites.

The unprecedented sectarian slaughter, fomented by a combination of local and foreign agitation, spread to Damascus, where in July 1860 some 5,000 of its Christians were massacred over the course of eight days in an orgy of violence that also left many of their properties and institutions in ruins.

In sharp contrast to the Ottoman authorities’ conduct during the subsequent Armenian genocide, the Sublime Porte on this occasion intervened decisively, imposed accountability and reparations, and restored the co-existence that had for so long dominated relations between the region’s various communities. [Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (1995) and particularly Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2024) provide excellent accounts of this traumatic episode.

[Indispensable for a broader discussion of these themes is Ussami Makdisi’s Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019).]

During the latter half of the nineteenth century intensified European political and economic encroachment in the Middle East; the accelerating centralization of Ottoman governance; the growing dominance of Turks in administering the Empire‘s Arab provinces – perceived as transforming the multinational empire into a Turkish state; the dissemination of European concepts of nation and nationalism; Ottoman territorial losses in the Balkans, Caucasus, and North Africa; and a revival of interest in the Arabic language and culture known as the Nahda, or Arab Awakening, laid the basis for the emergence of Arab nationalism.

Although the Arab nationalist movement had prominent Christian leaders from the outset, the caricature of an ideology imported into the region by Western missionaries and pioneered by Arab Christians in order to replace Islam as the region’s unifying bond with an Arabism that would provide them with full equality does not hold up well against reality.

As C. Ernest Dawn has demonstrated, for example, Christians were in fact underrepresented among the first generation of Syrian Arab nationalists relative to their proportion of the general population, and most of this generation were graduates of Ottoman state schools rather than missionary institutions. Additionally, Islamic modernists also significantly contributed to its development. Not all forms of Arab nationalism were secular, and those that were often acknowledged Islam’s prominence in the region’s culture.

[For a study of the development of Arab nationalism in Syria during this period see Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus 1860-1920 (1984).]

Some Arab nationalists took their inspiration from German romantic nationalism. Sati’ al-Husri, for example, who was born into a Syrian Muslim family, promoted the view that the Arabs had been a people united by bonds of blood, soil, and language long before the advent of Islam, and saw little room for any Muslim dimension in Arab national identity. Shakib Arslan, who was born into a Druze family (and is the grandfather of Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt), by contrast viewed Islam as the central component of Arabism and the basis for nationalism.

In other words, like its counterparts elsewhere nationalism in the Arab world came in multiple forms, some of them contradictory or even incompatible.

[William L. Cleveland has written detailed biographies of both individuals mentioned: The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (1972), and Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (1985).]

Syria and particularly Damascus emerged as important centers in the development of Arab nationalism, complemented by Syrian émigrés based in Egypt. The activities of these advocates, who tended to focus their aspirations on Greater Syria and Iraq (and at times Egypt and the Hijaz), and tended to exclude North Africa from their calculations (Arslan was an exception in this regard), took more organised forms in secret societies such as al-Fatat and, for military officers, al-‘Ahd. But until the First World War their ideas gained only limited traction, with most politically-engaged Syrians either remaining loyal to the empire to which they had belonged for four centuries, or advocating greater regional autonomy and political freedoms within it.

The Great War changed everything. Most importantly, the Ottoman Empire was defeated, lost all its Arab provinces by 1918, and in 1922 ceased to exist.

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Thank you all for reading, watching, listening and subscribing. Wishing everyone a peaceful new year and a 2025 of resistance against the powers that would steal our Humanity.