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Later history

Like much of the region, Syria would pass from empire to empire over the next few centuries, first falling into Baby- lonian  hands, then Persian, until it was conquered by Alexan- der the Great in the 330s B.C. But  because of their earlier con- quest of Babylonia,  the Syrians  left a  powerful legacy  in the form of their language, Aramaic. The Babylonians had  spread it  throughout  the region  until  it  became   the lingua  franca (LING-wuh FRANK-uh), or common language, for much of the known world.

Later in ancient times, Syria would rise to prominence as a central part of the Seleucid Empire that developed in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. The Seleucids founded Antioch (AN-tee-ahk), a  city  in northern  Syria  that  became  a  major commercial area. In the early  years of Christianity,  Antioch also served as a center  for missionaries going into the world to preach Christ’s gospel.

By  that time, the city had  fallen under the control of the Roman Empire, which in its declining  years faced a signif-

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Lingua Franca spoken here

The term lingua franca (LING-wah FRANK-uh), meaning “common language,” is derived from Latin. Latin, like Aramaic before it and English  afterward,  would become a language  that allowed people  of  different  native  tongues  to communicate. In  the  modern world, for instance, if a pilot from Korea  is  landing a plane in Germany, it is likely that he or she will speak to the control tower in English.

In  the   Middle     Ages  ( A . D . c .

500–1500), Latin served a similar function. Learned  men from  England, Germany, Spain, and other  parts of Europe could all communicate in the  language, which by then was no  longer spoken by common people. Even in the twentieth  century,  Latin  is still often used in the High  Mass (church service) of the Catholic  Church. (The term Catholic,  incidentally,  means “universal.”) Likewise Latin terms  are used by doctors and scientists all over the world.

Aramaic became established in the Middle   East long before the rise of the Roman Empire and its Latin  language. Thanks to its adoption by the Babylonians,

Jesus Christ preaching to his disciples.

Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.

Aramaic spread from Palestine to Persia. It offered a useful means of communication in the empires that covered those widely separated lands. Jesus Christ, who brought a universal message of salvation and  who commanded his disciples to “go into  the world and preach the Gospel,” spoke in Aramaic.

icant problem in Syria: the kingdom of Palmyra  (pal-MEER- uh). The latter was actually just a city-state on the edge of the Syrian  desert, but  under Queen  Zenobia  (zeh-NOH-bee-uh) between A.D., 267 and  272 Palmyra began building  an empire at  a time when Rome was  troubled  by a long series of bad emperors. The emperor Aurelian finally captured  Zenobia and partially destroyed the city in 273.

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Syria would remain a part of the Roman and Byzantine empires until its capture  by the  Sassanians of Persia in  611. Less than  25  years later, however, it fell under  a  new force sweeping the Middle East. That force was Islam, and its origins lay to the south, in barren Arabia.

The Arabian  Peninsula

Maps of the Middle East in ancient times show a con- tinuing record  of settlement and  conquest—but not on the Arabian Peninsula (peh-NIN-soo-luh), which remained  uncon- quered.  Few ancient  armies could wage war  in  the  barren desert landscape, nor did  many  conquerors have any real rea- son to want  to control the region. It was a land good neither for raising  crops or flocks, and  indeed one of the few animals  that could live there was the camel. Not many people lived in

Arabia, and the sparse tribes of the interior were nomads.

Nomads travelling through the desert. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

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The only settled areas were at the fringes of Arabia. To the north, in what is now Jordan, was Petra, a stunning city of temples and  tombs carved  out of solid rock. Founded prior to

400 B.C.,  Petra  flourished as an important trading center  for many  centuries. Another area  of settlement was on the coast, particularly in the southwestern corner of the  peninsula. In this area, part of the modern country of Yemen (yeh-MAHN), the  Red Sea  meets the Gulf  of Aden  (AY-den),  making  it an ideal spot for trading between Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa,  and India. For many centuries, the region remained under the con- trol of various Arab kingdoms, and because  of the many spices grown and sold  on the Arabian coast, this part of the peninsula gained the nickname “the incense states.”

As   for the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, however, an event in 24 B.C. says much about conditions there. In that year, the Romans made their one and only bid to gain control of Arabia, and  not surprisingly,  they went for  the relatively wealthy southwestern  corner.  Equally  unsurprising  was  the fact  that they got lost on their way through the desert—their Arab guides led them astray  on purpose—and Rome gave up hopes of adding the Arabian Peninsula to its empire.

In the  early centuries A.D.,  the  Himyarite  (HIM-yah- rite) kingdom in Yemen accepted Judaism, and the Himyarites often found themselves at odds with the Aksumites across  the Red Sea  in Africa. The Aksumites had  adopted Christianity, so their political and economic conflict with the Himyarite Arabs acquired  religious overtones. For  that  reason, the Byzantine Empire supported the Christian Africans,  while the Sassanids in Persia, who were Zoroastrian, took the side of the opposing force. Aksum  took over the incense states for a time, but by A.D.

575, Persia had assumed political power over the region.

Persia also had a sort of “big brother” relationship with a group of Arabs called the Lakhmids (LAHK-midz) centered in a town called Hira (HEE-rah) in the far northeastern corner of Arabia. They  were united in their opposition to the  Roman Empire, but  like other Arab   groups  of ancient  times, the Lakhmids had little real impact on the course of history.

Tradition holds that the Arab peoples descended from Ishmael (ISH-may-el), the first son of  Abraham in the Bible. The Book  of Genesis records that Ishmael’s mother, the Egypt- ian maidservant Hagar (HAY-gar), received a promise from God

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that  her son  would produce   a  great nation. To the tribes who inhabited the windswept lands  of the Arabian Penin- sula, the promise must  have seemed hard  to believe.

Phoenicia, Syria, and

Arabia  in later times

In the A.D. 500s and early 600s, new powerful forces arose  on the Ara- bian Peninsula. There  were the Ghas- sanids  (GAHS-uh-nidz), who  migrated from Yemen  northward to the area  of modern-day Jordan. They became allies of the Byzantine  Empire,  which  used their help in battling the Persians and Arabs in Hira to the east. At about the same time, a  group called  the Kinda,  loyal to the kings in Yemen, conquered parts   of central   Arabia as   well  as Bahrain  (BAH-rain),  a  small  kingdom on the Persian Gulf to the east.

By  A.D. 600, most of the eastern coast of Arabia, includ- ing Oman  (oh-MAHN), was either controlled  by the Persians, or at least on friendly terms with them. Cities of the western coast either were allied with Yemen or were independent. In the interior of Arabia, it was every tribe for itself, as they waged almost   constant war  with  each  other.  As     with  the  feuds between the Hatfield and McCoy families in the mountains of West  Virginia  during the  nineteenth century,  or  the wars between gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips in large cities during the late twentieth century, the causes of these conflicts were unclear to outsiders.

Into this very unpromising environment was born one of the most extraordinary figures in human  history, Muham- mad  (moo-HAH-med; A.D.  570?–632). A    merchant  from the town of Mecca (MEH-kah) on the western side of the penin- sula, he is said  to have received a  vision from God, or Allah (uh-LAH), which led him to establish a new religion, Islam (IZ- lahm). In 622, a group of his enemies in Mecca tried to murder

Muhammad standing, holding open book. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.

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him, and  he and  his small  group of followers fled  to  a town that  came  to  be  known  as  Medina  (meh-DIE-nah). There  Muhammad founded a government based on the teachings of the Koran (koe-RAHN), Islam’s holy book.

The birth and spread of Islam

Just as  Christians begin their  modern calendar  with the birth of Christ, Muslims (MUZ-limz), or believers in Islam, date their calendar  from Muhammad’s hegira (heh-ZHIE-ruh) or  flight from Mecca  in  622. After  that  date, Islam spread rapidly, and  for more than 600 years, various  dynasties of Ara- bic origin held sway over the area. During  this period, leader- ship moved to the older, more sophisticated cities of the north, particularly Damascus in Syria and Baghdad in Iraq. Because of the Islamic conquests that began in Muhammad’s time, how- ever,  all  of these areas had  adopted the Arabic  language and many aspects of Arab culture.

Thus Arabia, a barren region of forgotten people, came to rule much of the world, establishing a civilization that kept learning alive while much  of Europe was  mired in  darkness and  superstition  during the Middle Ages  (A.D.  c.  500–1500). The age-old prophecy concerning Ishmael had been fulfilled.

The modern Arab  world

By    the end of  the Middle  Ages,  the Arab  influence spread from Morocco (muh-RAH-koh) in the far west of North Africa to Iraq, and  from northern Syria  to Sudan  (soo-DAN), south of Egypt on the Nile River. It was truly a vast territory,  but it was not united—and Arabs no longer controlled  it. For  nearly a thousand years, beginning in the 1000s A.D. and  not ending until after World  War  I  (1914–1918), Turks held the vast  majority of the  region. First there were the Seljuks (sel- JOOKZ),  who ruled from the 1000s  to the 1300s;  and  later there was the Ottoman (AH-tuh-man) Empire, which did not cease  to exist until 1924.

Between the world wars, much of the region was con- trolled by France and Britain, which had defeated the Ottoman Empire (along with Germany and other countries) in the First World  War.  Syria  and  Lebanon became  French  possessions, while Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq fell under British  rule.

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Liquid gold

Meanwhile, the  Arabian   Peninsula  had   begun  to emerge yet again   as  a  powerful force  in  world  history, thanks  to the discovery  of oil in the 1930s. The desert lands  of Arabia, worthless for agriculture, could hardly have been more  valuable if they  were  covered in  gold dust  instead of sand: with the spread of automobiles, particularly in Europe and   America,  the  world had   an  unquenchable  thirst  for gasoline, and  the once-poor nations  of Arabia became  fabu- lously wealthy.

As   in Muhammad’s time, it was  ironic that  the for- gotten nations   of Arabia  came  to  have enormous  power. Also  ironic was the fact  that most of the powerful countries of ancient times had  little oil, whereas the poorest regions were now rich. Thus  Syria  had  much  less  oil than  Arabia, and  Lebanon less still; likewise  Yemen, the one relatively powerful Arab  nation  in  ancient times, proved to have lit- tle oil.

Photograph of a city street in Beirut, Lebanon in the mid-twentieth century. Archive Photos. Reproduced

by permisison.

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Hussein I (King of Jordan). Archive Photos/Archive France. Reproduced by permission.

Oil   wealth,  along   with   the guidance   of the powerful  Saud   (sah- OOD)  family, led to the independence of Saudi  (SOW-dee)  Arabia, by far the largest  nation  on  the Arabian  Penin- sula. The Sauds were sheikhs (SHAYKZ), or  desert kings, as  were the  rulers of  many   other oil-rich  nations  such   as Bahrain  and  Oman  that  became  inde- pendent in the years  following World War  II  (1939–1945). But     Israel,  too, became an independent  country  in

1948. This  development  led to  great tension with its Arab neighbors.

This  tension was  increased by the rising movement for an independent Arab  state in  Palestine—the same land that Israel claimed for its own. The Pales- tine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader,  Yassir  Arafat (yah-SEER  AIR- uh-fat; 1929– ), were not above using ter- rorism to achieve their aims. Thus at the

1972 Olympics in Munich, a Palestinian group killed eleven Israeli athletes.

The Palestinians in 1978 attacked  Israel from bases in Lebanon.  The   Israelis  responded by  occupying    part   of Lebanese territory  to  establish a  protective buffer zone.  In

1982, Israel launched   a  major   attack against   Palestinian strongholds in  Lebanon, particularly in  the capital city   of Beirut  (bay-ROOT).  Beirut, a favorite tourist spot during  the

1950s and  1960s, became  a war-torn shell of a city. On Octo- ber 25, 1983, a terrorist drove a truck filled with explosives into barracks that  housed U.S. peacekeeping  forces  in Beirut; the resulting explosion killed more than 200 Marines.

The terrorists were allied not with the PLO,  but with another, even more violent, force in the region: Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini. Nor were the Palestinians and the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran the only threat to peace: another was Hafez  al-Assad (hah-FEZ ahl  uh-SAHD;  1928–), who  took power in Syria in 1971. A  fierce enemy of Israel, he supported the PLO and began occupying parts of Lebanon in 1976. Even

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more frightening was  Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who in  1990  invaded the oil-rich sheikhdom of Kuwait.  Like many leaders in the region, Saddam claimed to desire unity among all Arabs, but his  ruthless attack on  his  neighbors to  the south  sent another message.

A   quite different leader—and certainly  no relation  of Saddam’s,  though they had  the same last  name—was  King Hussein  I (hoo-SAYN;  1935–1999) of Jordan.  Hussein, who became  ruler in 1952, initially  supported  the PLO,  but like Anwar Sadat  of Egypt, he came to desire better relations with Israel. From the 1970s onward, he actively supported the cause of peace  in the region. When he died in 1999, people all over the world mourned his passing.