Who ruled Damascus?

Damascus lies at the foot of Mount Qasioun, on the eastern side of the Anti-Lebanon mountains, where the Barada river spreads out into a green oasis called the Ghouta before fading into the Syrian desert. Water from the mountains made farming possible on the edge of the steppe, and roads from Arabia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mediterranean ports met here. People have lived on the site without a break for several thousand years, and for nearly a century, from 661 to 750, it was the capital of an empire that stretched from Spain to Central Asia.

Farming villages existed around the oasis thousands of years before the city itself, which appears in Egyptian records of the 14th century BCE. In the early first millennium BCE it was the capital of the Aramean kingdom of Aram-Damascus, a rival of ancient Israel, until Assyria conquered it in 732 BCE. Babylonian and Persian rule followed. Alexander the Great's army took the city soon after his victory at Issus in 333 BCE, and Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings then fought over it. In 64 BCE Pompey brought Syria under Roman rule. The Romans laid out a walled grid, including the long colonnaded road known as Straight Street, and built a great temple of Jupiter on the site of an older sanctuary. According to the New Testament, Paul the Apostle was converted on the road to Damascus. Under Byzantine rule the temple became a church dedicated to John the Baptist.

Arab Muslim armies took Damascus in the 630s, and after their victory over Byzantium at the Yarmuk in 636 the city stayed in Muslim hands. Its governor Muawiya founded the Umayyad Caliphate in 661 and made Damascus its capital. Between 705 and 715 Caliph al-Walid I replaced the church with the Great Mosque of the Umayyads, decorated with golden mosaics of trees and buildings and still one of the most important mosques in Islam. When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750 they moved the capital to Iraq, and Damascus became a provincial city ruled in turn by Abbasid governors, the Fatimids of Egypt and Seljuk Turks.

During the Crusades Damascus was the main Muslim power in the inland Levant. A crusader army besieged it in 1148 and failed. Nur ad-Din took the city in 1154 and filled it with colleges and hospitals, and Saladin, who took control in 1174, used it as a base for his campaigns and was buried beside the Umayyad Mosque in 1193. Mongol forces entered it briefly in 1260 before the Mamluks drove them out of Syria, and under Mamluk rule Damascus became a great centre of learning and trade. In 1401 Timur sacked the city, burned the Umayyad Mosque and carried off many of its craftsmen.

The Ottoman sultan Selim I took the city in 1516, and for four centuries it was a provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire and the assembly point of the annual pilgrim caravan to Mecca. In 1860 several thousand Christians were killed in a massacre, while the Algerian exile Abd al-Qadir sheltered many others. In 1918 Arab and British forces entered Damascus, and an Arab kingdom under Faisal was proclaimed there in 1920, only to be crushed by a French army at Maysalun that July. French troops shelled the city during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 to 1927, and it became the capital of independent Syria when the French withdrew in 1946.

The Assad family ruled from Damascus from 1970. During the civil war that began in 2011 the suburbs of the Ghouta were besieged and bombed, and in December 2024 opposition forces entered the city and President Bashar al-Assad fled the country. The old walled city has been a World Heritage Site since 1979, and the urban area has between two and three million inhabitants.