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The city of Aleppo is not ruined, not entirely, but it has been devastated by the Syrian civil war. We restore them and we display them as a cosmopolitan way of regarding particularities, as an expression of our humane respect for the resourcefulness of the spirit over time. lift the past out of history and into time … They are proof of the astonishing multiplicity of answers to life’s questions that have been created by our tirelessly self-interpreting kind.

Such ruins have a “mute and shattered eloquence” all their own, according to my colleague, Leon Wieseltier: The architecture of a city is itself an archive, even when the buildings are crumbling into ruins. These impressions accumulate, over time, making cities into places of memory, into places where libraries and museums thrive. Theirs is the largest migration in human history, and by a wide margin.Įveryone who lives in a city makes some impression on it, however faint. Hundreds of millions of people have moved into cities during this past century. For thousands of years, the pace of these changes was slow, but in our current era, urbanization has accelerated. We used to roam, then we settled, and condensed into nodes. Recent human history can plausibly be described as a great experiment in urbanism. When scholars debate the site of the world’s first city, they are yearning after our cultural origins. They seduced us with convergence, with hundreds, thousands, even millions of people, all living in one place. Cities tricked us out of this way of life. What is a city, if not a place of convergence? For the bulk of our existence, we humans have been wanderers, lovers of open land and sky. It would later become a hub on the Silk Road, where trade routes from Mesopotamia, China, Europe, and Egypt converged. Alexander the Great conquered Aleppo in the 4th century B.C, and made it an outpost in his empire.

People used to say that Abraham had climbed its highest hill, to survey the surrounding landscape. There are hints that nomads camped out just north of Aleppo, as early as 11,000 B.C. Aleppo, Syria, has as good a claim as any to the title of “world’s oldest city.” It is certainly among the longest to be continuously inhabited.