ABSTRACT
Damascus, the capital of modern-day Syria, is located about 130 miles northeast of Jerusalem and 80 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea. It lies at the foot of Mount Hermon on the western edge of the Syrian desert. It is popular to refer to Damascus as the oldest continuously occupied city in the world. However, there is no archaeological evidence to support such a claim. Most of its history is known only from literary references. In the 1970s it was reported that the name, “Damascus,” had been found in the Ebla tablets which had just been discovered at Tell Mardikh (Ebla) in northern Syria. If this report had been true, the literary evidence for the existence of the city would have been pushed back to at least the twentyfourth century BCE. Unfortunately, this suggestion has not been confirmed by further studies. Thus, until some discovery to the contrary, the oldest known literary reference to Damascus is from the time of Thutmose III, a fourteenth-century BCE Egyptian pharaoh. Furthermore, the origin of the name, Damascus, is also unclear.
