One of the World's Oldest Cities — the Umayyad Mosque's 8th-century mosaics survive intact in a city settled since 8,000 BCE, the covered Souq al-Hamidiyeh leads to a Roman temple turned Byzantine church turned mosque, and jasmine flowers and Damascus Rose petals perfume every courtyard of the old city
Damascus (دمشق, Dimashq) is one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities — settled since the Neolithic (c. 8,000 BCE), capital of the Aramaean kingdom (1200 BCE), Hellenistic city (Alexander the Great, 332 BCE), Roman provincial capital, Byzantine episcopal see, and the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE) — the largest empire the world had seen to that point, stretching from Spain to Central Asia. The Old City (UNESCO World Heritage, 1979) is a dense medieval urban fabric of souqs, khans (caravanserais), hammams, and mosques built over Hellenistic and Roman foundations. T…
Damascus's 10,000-year continuous habitation has left geological strata of civilisations. As the Aramaean capital (c. 1200–732 BCE), it was the dominant city of the Levant and the centre of the Aramaean language (a Semitic language that displaced Hebrew as the lingua franca of the ancient Near East and was spoken by Jesus of Nazareth). The Romans (64 BCE onwards) overlaid the Aramaean street grid with a colonnaded decumanus (the Straight Street) and built the Temple of Jupiter — itself built on a Bronze Age sacred site — whose temenos (sacred precinct wall) still forms the south wall of the U…