Damascus

The site is the old walled city on the south bank of the Barada, inside the oasis the Arab geographers call the Ghouta. Damascus has never stopped being lived in, and that single fact governs everything below. No one can open a deep stratigraphic trench under an inhabited old city, so the archaeology here is a matter of standing structures, texts written elsewhere, and small rescue soundings rather than a dug sequence. Damascus is regularly called the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Jericho, Byblos, Aleppo and Argos carry the same claim, and the claim turns on what is being counted: a settlement, a city, or occupation with no break in it. For Damascus the written evidence is early and firm. A name usually read Timasqu appears in the topographical list of Thutmose III at Karnak in the fifteenth century BC, and the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC name Dimasqu in the land of Upi. What is missing is a published stratigraphic sequence under the old city, for the reason just given. The honest statement is that Damascus holds one of the strongest claims on the list, resting on second-millennium written references rather than on an excavated sequence. This page prints that and leaves the question open. From Rezon's seizure of the city to 732 BC, Damascus is the capital of the Aramean kingdom the Bible calls Aram and the Greek tradition calls Syria. Assyrian records meet the biblical account at several points. The Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III, dated 853 BC, lists the coalition that met him at Qarqar and names both a king of Damascus and Ahab the Israelite in it. The Bible never mentions Qarqar and the monolith never mentions the wars of 1 Kings 20 and 22. What the two sources share is a Damascus and a Samaria strong enough to field armies of that order in the same decade. The Zakkur stele, found at Tell Afis and published by Henri Pognon early in the twentieth century, has a king of Hamath record that Bar-Hadad son of Hazael, king of Aram, besieged him. That is the succession 2 Kings 13 gives, and the same stele names Hadrach, the place Zechariah 9 sets beside Damascus. The strongest external witness to David was written by a king of Damascus. Basalt fragments inscribed in Aramaic were found in secondary use in a wall at Tel Dan, one in 1993 and two more in 1994, in Avraham Biran's excavation, and Biran and Joseph Naveh published them in the Israel Exploration Journal. The author is an Aramean king, most often identified as Hazael of Damascus, who boasts that he killed a king of Israel and a king of a house written bytdwd. The excavators read those four consonants as the House of David, and most of the field now reads them that way. Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson argued that the letters could be a place name and pressed the absence of a word divider between byt and dwd. André Lemaire and others answered that Aramaic royal inscriptions often omit the divider inside a bound name. The majority reading is the House of David, the objection is real, and this page names both and settles neither. Tiglath-pileser III campaigned against Damascus in 733 and 732 BC. The Assyrian annals for those years survive in fragments and the Damascus section is damaged, but the campaign, the fall of the city and the deportations are on record; the critical edition is Hayim Tadmor's Inscriptions of Tiglath-pileser III, King of Assyria. 2 Kings 16:9 gives the outcome in one sentence. After 732 BC Damascus is an Assyrian provincial centre and never again an independent kingdom in the biblical period. The altar Ahaz saw there is read in two ways. Albert Barnes and the older commentators took it as an Assyrian altar, part of a required recognition of Assyrian gods by a new vassal. Assyriological work of the 1970s pushed back on that: Morton Cogan in Imperialism and Religion and John McKay in Religion in Judah under the Assyrians both argued that Assyria did not impose its own cult on vassal states, which would make Ahaz's altar a voluntary copy of a Damascene design rather than a demand. 2 Chronicles 28:23 gives Ahaz his own stated motive, that the gods of Aram had helped Aram. The page prints both readings and his own words, and settles nothing. Pompey's settlement of Syria in 64 and 63 BC brought the city into the Roman sphere, and the Hellenistic and Roman grid gave the old city a long east-west main street, the decumanus maximus. That is the street Acts 9:11 calls Straight, and its line still runs through the old city above the Roman paving. Two shown sites near it are traditions and are named as such. Bab Kisan, a gate in the southeast wall, carries the local tradition of the spot where Paul was let down, though Acts 9:25 and 2 Corinthians 11:33 say only that it happened through a window in the wall. A small chapel below the modern street level in the eastern quarter is shown as the house of Ananias, and the room itself is a cellar of the right period to have existed in Paul's day. The identification rests on local tradition, with no inscription and no excavated object tying the room to Ananias, and no early dated witness is claimed for it here. Two further things stand behind the city Saul entered. Acts 9:2 assumes synagogues in the plural, and Josephus reports the killing of the Jews of Damascus at the outbreak of the revolt in AD 66, giving two figures himself, 10,500 in the Jewish War book 2 and 18,000 in book 7. The figures disagree and both are his; either way the community was large. Second, the Umayyad Mosque stands inside the rectangular precinct of the Roman temple of Jupiter Damascenus, which in turn stood over the temple of Hadad, the Aramean storm god whose name sits inside the royal names Ben-hadad and Hadadezer, and a Christian church stood on the site between the Roman temple and the mosque. A Second Temple text also names the city: the Damascus Document, recovered by Solomon Schechter from the Cairo Genizah in 1896 and published in 1910, with further copies later found at Qumran, speaks of a covenant made in the land of Damascus. Readers have taken that as the literal city, as a symbolic name for the community's place of exile, or as a cipher for Babylon. It is Second Temple sectarian literature rather than rabbinic literature, and the page names the readings without choosing.