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February 4, 2012
The Dead Cities of Syria
Between the cities of Aleppo and Hama there is a limestone massif and it is here these ancient settlements were built by their once prosperous peoples. The area is about thirty kilometers in width yet is several times longer – extending to almost 140 kilometers in length.... An extensive and fascinating photo essay @ Kuriositas
Posted by gerardvanderleun at February 4, 2012 8:58 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
"These abandoned municipalities scatter the landscape and contain the remains of a confident, vibrant and sophisticated culture – one which effectively disappeared over fifteen hundred years ago."
I wonder what happened 1500 years ago? /sarc
In these captions there is so much amazement that there were so many churches. In my mind there is so much amazement that the obvious history is either (a) shrouded to an utter fool, or (b) that so much PC won't permit the fool to state what actually happened.
Note: The flowering of Islamic thought in science coincided with the conquest and plundering of the Byzantine (Greco-Roman) civilization that was already there.* How much quicker the Renaissance would have been if the Eastern Roman Empire had not been destroyed by the barbarians of the desert? I don't know, but I think it would have been something to see.
*Not forgetting the Persian civilization which wasn't too bad either. It also got a good curb-stomp from the desert before the Mongols showed up.
Give the AD 10 Romans the horseshoe, the stirrup, and the printing press and a lot of things would have been different, I think. But maybe not; they did stagnate a bit.
Posted by: Mikey NTH at February 5, 2012 7:14 PM