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Damascus (Arabic: دمشق Dimashq IPA:) is the capital and the second-largest city of Syria after Aleppo prior to the civil war. It is now most likely the. End Times Prophecy Bible prophecy Iran,Israel,Damascus Syria,Russia,U.S. And China. The 9 11 jets where a Holograpohic light show = Project Blue beam thats why Norad. The Ba'ath platform is proclaimed succinctly in the party's slogan: 'Unity, freedom, and socialism.' The party is both socialist, advocating state ownership of the. Abu Khalil, a Free Syrian Army commander in Douma, a suburb south of Damascus that saw heavy fighting and is now controlled by the rebels, said the.
Damascus | national capital, Syria. Damascus, Arabic Dimashq, Damascusurf—i. Stock/Thinkstockcity, capital of Syria. Located in the southwestern corner of the country, it has been called the “pearl of the East,” praised for its beauty and lushness; the 1. Maqdisī lauded the city as ranking among the four earthly paradises. Upon visiting the city in 1. Mark Twain wrote.
To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. The city’s Arabic name derives from Dimashka, a word of possibly pre- Semitic etymology, suggesting that the beginnings of Damascus go back to a time before recorded history. The city is commonly called al- Shām, the vernacular name of Syria as a whole, which is said to mean “the left” or “the north,” where the region is situated relative to the Arabian Peninsula.
Owing to associations of Damascus with Aram, the biblical capital of the Aramaeans, some Arabic sources link Damascus and the Iram dhāt al- ʿimād (“Colonnaded Aram”) mentioned in the Qurʾān, an identification that has long been disputed. Also contended has been the association of Damascus with Jilliq, a fertile pre- Islamic site whose name derives from a word of unknown origin in use by the Ghassānids active there in the 6th century (see. Ghassān). The city is still known by its popular epithet al- Fayḥāʾ (“the Fragrant”), earned perhaps for the freshness of its surrounding orchards and gardens. Many scholars believe that, among the ancient cities of the world, Damascus is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited. Over the centuries, Damascus has been conqueror and conquered, wealthy and destitute, and capital of empire and small states. Its fame has been sustained by its continuous prominence as a commercial and intellectual centre.
Its life has been nourished periodically by immigrants from the hinterland and from the Mediterranean Basin and Southwest Asia. Often a focus of contention by powers of East and West, Damascus’s fortunes have frequently been linked to those of distant capitals, most notably Ashur, Antioch, Rome, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul. Now a burgeoning metropolis of the Middle East, it retains, as it has through centuries of triumph and disaster, an indomitable spirit and a considerable charm.
Area city, 1. 7 square miles (4. Pop. (2. 00. 7 est.) municipality, 1,6. Character of the city. Travelers to Damascus have been struck by the sight of aspens and poplars growing along streams, of fruit (particularly apricot) and nut orchards, and of olive groves and vegetable gardens. A popular story about the Prophet Muhammad’s journey to Syria recounts that, upon seeing verdant Damascus, he refused to go in, as man should only enter paradise once.
Upon reaching Damascus in 1. Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, the Arab travel writer from Tangier, said that no words could do justice to the city’s charm; he resorted to quoting his Maghribi predecessor, Ibn Jubayr, who sojourned in Damascus in 1. Damascus had “adorned herself with flowers of sweet scented herbs” and “is encircled by gardens as the moon…by its halo.” In 1. European traveler, Ludolph van Suchem, wrote of the city as “begirt with gardens and orchards and watered in and out by waters, rivers, brooks, and fountains cunningly arranged to minister to men’s luxury.” While the accelerated and often disordered growth of the city since World War II has sharply raised the ratio of buildings to trees and open space, Damascenes still enjoy some of the former splendor of al- Ghūṭah, the fertile belt of irrigated land adjacent to the city. Landscape. City site.
Water and geography have determined the site and role of Damascus. Early settlers were naturally attracted to a place where a river, the Baradā, rising in the Anti- Lebanon Mountains (Al- Jabal al- Sharqī), watered a large and fertile oasis before vanishing into the desert. This tract, al- Ghūṭah, has supported a substantial population for thousands of years. Damascus itself grew on a terrace 2,2. Mount Qāsiyūn and overlooking the Baradā River. The original settlement appears to have been situated in the eastern part of the walled Old City. City and oasis grew together, and over time Damascus came to dominate the lesser rural settlements surrounding it.
The natural endowments of an assured water supply and fertile land made Damascus self- sufficient. Successive colonizers from the 2nd millennium bce onward developed an intricate irrigation system that fed the city through a system of branches derived from the river, contributing to a steady expansion of al- Ghūṭah, especially to the east and west. Damascus’s position on the edge of the desert and at the eastern end of the easiest route through the Anti- Lebanon range made it a trade centre where caravan routes originated and terminated.
Since the advent of Islam, the city has also been the starting point of the northern pilgrimage road, the Darb al- Hajj al- Shāmī, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Climate. Some 5. 0 miles (8.
Damascus receives only about 7 inches (1. November through February. The Anti- Lebanon range gets far greater amounts of both rain and winter snow, which annually replenish the water table that is a source of the Baradā River and other, more minor springs watering Damascus. Owing to the city’s elevation, winter is rather cold, with average temperatures of around 4. F (5 to 7 °C). A short blossoming spring in March and April is followed by six to seven months of hot dry summer.
Temperatures average around 8. F (2. 7 °C) in midseason, although they occasionally reach 1.
F (3. 8 °C) or above. Summer evenings tend to be tempered by cooler breezes, with temperatures dropping to 6. F (1. 8 °C). Dust- laden winds blowing in from the desert are somewhat mitigated by small mountain ranges to the east and south of the city. City layout. Damascus: Umayyad Mosque© semultura/Fotolia. Damascus was an active commercial centre in the 2nd millennium bce and developed through different stages of urbanization thereafter, reaching its zenith at the beginning of the 7th century ce when it became the capital of the Umayyad empire. The heart of Damascus’s Old City, which contains most of the city’s historical monuments, is Hellenistic in origin, with significant Roman additions and modifications. It is a rough oblong about 5,0.
Eight gates, seven of which are of Classical derivation, pierce the walls. The long axis of the oblong runs between two gates, Bāb al- Jābiyya (the Roman Jupiter Gate) in the west and Bāb Sharqī (the Roman Sun Gate) in the east. It occupies the former location of the decumanus maximus (main east- west thoroughfare) of the Classical city, which lies some 1. Many secondary streets and some of the most prominent features of the Old City owe their positions to the Roman city planners of the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce.
The city’s orthogonal plan deteriorated during the late Byzantine period in the 6th and 7th centuries. The Umayyads (6. 61–7. Damascus as their capital but did not much change its layout or considerably expand beyond its walls. Although the city was neglected and its population drastically decreased between the 8th and 1.
Damascus had revived and was outgrowing its walls. Two axes of development extra- muros, beyond the city walls, predominated. One linked the city to the northwest with the suburb of Ṣālḥiyyah, which was established in the 1. Jerusalem on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn; the second extended as a long, narrow strip southward along the road leading to the Ḥawrān and Palestine. The Old City was designated a UNESCOWorld Heritage site in 1. The modern city began with the Ottoman Tanzimat (Reorganization) in the late 1.
Buildings in pseudo- European styles were constructed along new, straight streets to the west and north of the walled city or in Al- Mujāhirīn, the new quarter for immigrants on Mount Qāsiyūn. Later developments followed a plan originally devised by the French during the mandate period (1. Its basic elements include wide boulevards radiating from squares spread around the Old City, especially in the west and northwest and, later, in the east. New housing has developed in the form of concrete blocks of flats along these boulevards. Government buildings are concentrated in an area west of the walled city around Marjah Square, along Nasr Street, and in several districts west of Ṣālḥiyyah Street. Stimulated by the appeal of modern housing and amenities, well- to- do families began in the 1. Old City, whose magnificent courtyard houses were left to poorer tenants recently arrived from the countryside, or to light industry.
As the population grew, more and more of the garden and farm area was converted into residential districts, many of them illegal settlements, while mukhalafāt (informal districts, such as upper Al- Muhājirīn and the Kurdish quarter) expanded up the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn. Ancient farming villages close by, such as Al- Mazzah, Barzah, Kafr Sūsah, Al- Qābūn, and Al- Qadam, were incorporated into the city, both administratively and physically. Government efforts to retain green areas and to zone housing and industry have been plagued not only by overwhelming population growth but also by administrative laxity and corruption. The development of affluent residential suburbs in the 1.
People. Damascus: Jupiter, Temple of© Attila JANDI/Shutterstock. Damascus experienced tremendous growth during the second half of the 2. The city’s growth rate is higher than that of the country as a whole, owing mainly to steady migration from rural areas. So heavy has been the influx of young migrants drawn by employment and educational opportunities that the average age of Damascenes has dropped below that of the national level.
Among the religious minorities, the ʿAlawites from the coastal mountain region are notable for their prominence in the army and in the intelligence services (al- mukhābarāt).