Ancient history of Aleppo

Aleppo is an ancient town in northern Syria, on the old Silk Road. Aleppo been settled for more than three thousand years.

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.

King Hattsili I extended Hittite power well into Syria and under his grandson Mursili, the Hittite took Aleppo and even sacked Babylon in 1595 BC thus bringing the dynasty of Hammurabi to an end.

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.

Around the year 1100, the city came under siege from the Crusaders on two occasions by they failed to capture it.

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

Hatay Province, Turkey

Hatay is the modern name for the historic Sanjak of Alexandretta, at the eastern end of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.  A nation call Hatay only existed for a short period of time in the 1930s, in the coastal border region between Turkey and Syria.

The city of Alexandretta was founded by Alexander the Great around 330 BC. Just under a thousand years later the Arabs conquered it and translated its name to Iskenderun.

Antakya is a city in south Turkey and the capital of Hatay Province. Founded in 300 BC by Seleucus I, it earned the title ‘queen of the east’. It was taken by Pompey in 64 BC.

Hatay was the subject of an international dispute between Turkey, to which it belonged from 1516 until 1918, and France which occupied it at the end of World War I and later under the terms of the Franklin-Bullion Agreement in 1921, incorporated it into Syria as an autonomic district.

Iskenderun was occupied by the English in 1918, turned over to the French in 1919, and incorporated into French Protectorate of Syria as the Sanjak of Alexandretta. In 1938 Ataturk reclaimed it for the Turkish Republic.
Hatay Province, Turkey