ABSTRACT
Alexander’s conquests were divided under his successors with southern Syria serving as a frontier zone between rival Ptolemaic and Seleucid successors for most of the third century. The city does not seem to have resumed its growth until it was chosen to house a colony of Greek settlers, probably in the mid-second century. Damascus then became a thriving centre of Hellenism with a mixed Aramaean and Greek population base. The Aramaean settlements expanded through a Greek grid-plan extension and the traditional shrine dedicated to the Aramaean Storm God, Hadad, appears to have been assimilated to Zeus in the Greek pantheon. As the Seleucid kingdom disintegrated, Damascus was caught up in the rivalries between pretenders in the early first century BC and became a target for outsiders (Armenians and Nabataeans) taking advantage of the collapse of Greek rule.
