Aleppo was the capital of the powerful Amorite state of Yamhad in the second millennium BC. The Amorites were originally nomads from the desert of Arabia; toward the end of the third millennium BC they had moved north and settled in many of the cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant.
In the seventeenth century BC, it was the territory of the Hittites. The rise of the Hittites proper to power in the second millennium BC began with immigration of groups of Indo-Europeans from the north into central Anatolia sometime simply identified themselves with the city of Nesha and called their language nasili.
In the mid-ninth century the Assyrian king Shalmanese III extended his empire into Syria. Damascus was captured, as were the Phoenician ports of Tyre and Sidon and Aleppo became a provincial capital.
Then it became the land of the Persian empires, when Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia, for almost a thousand years until the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great captured it.
The Romans were the next owners of this part of the Middle East and after them, Arab and Ottoman masters until the fall of the latter in 1923. After the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in the 11th century Aleppo became increasingly important as a regional capital and under the Zangib and Ayyubid dynasties, the city played a fundamental role as a center for the reconquest of Crusader territories in the Levant.
Under the Mamluks and Ottoman the city became an important center of textile manufacture and trade and Aleppo became one of the cheap textile cotton fabrics as well as luxury silk cloths woven with gold and silver.
Ancient history of Aleppo
