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The Beginning
Its first appearance in history, is as a city conquered in the 15th
century BC by the Pharaoh Thutmosis III. According to the Old Testament, it was
once the capital of the Aramean
Kingdom in the 11th
Century BC. In the 10th Century BC, it started being attacked and it was in
battle with several other kingdoms including the Hebrews and Assyrians.
Finally, in 732 BC, it was taken over by Tiglath Pileser II ordered by the King
of Judea, Achaz. Some years after the fall of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, the Kingdom
of Damascus
was destroyed by Babylon.
The Greeks Damascus was conquered in
333 BC by Parmenion, one of Alexander's lieutenants, who took it from the
Persians. It later fell to the Seleucids who fell into dispute with a branch of
the empire of the Macedonian conqueror, the Lagides, who ruled Egypt. In 66 BC
it was occupied by Pompey and belonged to the province of Syria.
St.
Paul
It was on the way to Damascus,
that St. Paul,
who was sent to put down the Christians, had the revelation of faith. He was
directed by Jesus (in the vision of light) to the house of Judas. There he met
Ananias and together they preached for Christ.
Byzantium and the Persians
Under the Byzantine Empire, .Damascus was an important base for watching over
the Syrian Desert, But it was fatally
looted by the Sassanid Persians. Damascus
was later besieged by the Muslim faith fighters in 635, and was retaken by
Khaled Ibn al Waleed in 636. This meant a radical change of civilization for
this city as it swung from Byzantium
and Christianity to the Orient and the Semitic world.
Arab Dynasties
Damascus's most glorious time was in the first
decades of Islam, when it became the capital of an empire spreading from the
Atlantic coast to central Asia, the Umayyad
Empire. This golden age ended with the Abbassids who moved the Capital to Baghdad. From then on, it
fell under the power of various Muslim sects and sovereigns, the most important
of which was the Egyptian Fatimids. It later went through another rich period,
when Saladin took it from the Fatimids and started the Ayyubid Dynasty. At the
time it was battling against the Franks (the Crusaders). Numerous monuments
built by Nur al Din and Saladin are still the pride of Damascus.
Mamelukes and Ottomans
In 1260 it was taken over by the Mamelukes of Egypt who pushed the Mongols
back. In 1516, the Ottomans from Turkey
(Anatolia), took over from the Mamelukes and
kept control until World War I. After World War I, a very exhausted Damascus
was liberated in 1918, by an Arab contingent under the command of the British
Army of General Allenby. The Syrian National Congress was formed in 1919 under
the patronage of Emir Faisal who came from Hedjaz.
He was named King of Syria in 1920, and one month later was taken over by the
French in the name of the League of Nations.
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