On the Road to Damascus
Last time I wrote a whole article about Syria and didn’t mention Damascus, the second oldest city in the world, or third, or something. It recently celebrated its official 5000th anniversary. It is not the top ranked local city in later ancient times, that would have been Antioch, now in Turkey, about 70 miles from Aleppo.
The end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean region spanned a few centuries between 1100 BCE and 800 BCE, more or less. Throughout the area natural disasters occurred and new ethnic groups appeared on the scene. Most of the newcomers came from somewhere in Central Asia, but there were nautical invasions of coastal areas by people previously unknown to the local inhabitants as well. The new people were initially nomads, the settled locals thought of them as ‘barbarians.’ But primitive as they seemed to be when they were marauding, many of them brought a newfangled invention: iron. Iron changed the war calculus; if you are bronze against iron you have a big problem. Most or all of the Mediterranean Bronze Age city cultures collapsed and sheep and goats grazed around the ruins.
Civilized cultures loved their cities, and rebuilt them over time, dug wells, plowed fields, erected buildings and walls, and created bureaucracies to keep track of things. A ‘sleep on the ground barbarian’ grew to appreciate the ‘good things’ of life. Civilization reemerged.
In the 9th century BCE there were established trade routes in the
