Syria

From Ebla and Ugarit's first alphabet to the Umayyad caliphate and a republic remade in 2024.

Syria is one of the cradles of urban civilisation. In the third and second millennia BCE the city-kingdoms of Ebla, Mari and Ugarit flourished here, and at Ugarit scribes devised one of the world's earliest alphabets. Damascus and Aleppo are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth; the desert caravan city of Palmyra rose under Queen Zenobia, and after the Muslim conquest Damascus became capital of the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), the first great Islamic empire. Conquered in turn by Crusaders, Ayyubids under Saladin, Mamluks and Ottomans, Syria won independence from France on 17 April 1946; after decades of unstable republics, union with Egypt and Ba'athist rule under Hafez and then Bashar al-Assad, a 2011 uprising spiralled into civil war, and the Assad government fell in December 2024.