The fabric called damask takes its name from Damascus silks
Damascus, the Syrian capital known poetically as the City of Jasmine, has been inhabited since the third millennium BC and is described as the oldest capital in the world. It sat at a western end of the Silk Road, and the patterned silks sold there gave English the word damask.
The city's name is older than most languages that use it. It shows up in the 15th century BC in a list of places compiled for the pharaoh Thutmose III, spelled tjmsqw, with no agreed meaning. The Amarna letters of the next century write it in Akkadian as Dimašqa, and Neo-Assyrian scribes called it Ša-imerišu. Aramaic and Hebrew forms, Damašq and Dammeśeq, sometimes pick up an extra r, possibly under the influence of a root for dwelling, and the Syriac Darmsûq has been glossed as well-watered land.
Greek storytellers offered three explanations of their own. One credits a giant called Ascus. Another makes Damaskos a son of Hermes and a nymph, who came from Arcadia and founded a namesake city. The grimmest tells of a man who chopped down the vineyards Dionysus had planted across Syria and was flayed by the god in revenge. Latin and English inherited the Greek form. Arabic uses Dimashq, while Syrians and Turks often simply say aš-Šām, which also names the Levant and literally means the left-hand side, since north lies to the left of someone in the Hijaz facing the sunrise, as Yemen lies to the right.
The city stands on a plateau 680 metres up in the eastern foothills of the Anti-Lebanon range, 80 kilometres from the Mediterranean, and the mountains leave it in a rain shadow with an arid climate. The Barada River runs through it. From 661 to 750 it was the Umayyad capital, until the victorious Abbasids moved power to Baghdad, and it faded before rising again under the Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans. Some regard it as the fourth-holiest city in Islam.
Modern Damascus houses Syria's central government and remains a cultural centre of the Arab world, but war has battered it. During the civil war it ranked last of 140 cities in the Global Liveability Ranking, and in June 2023 it was last of 173. Two new districts, Marota City and Basillia City, were launched in 2017 as symbols of reconstruction.
Source: Damascus
