Allepo, in Syria is an ancient metropolis, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the World, noted for its commercial and military proficiency. The city has scarcely been touched by archaeologists, since the modern city occupies its ancient site been inhabited as a city from around 5,000 BC. The city appears in historical records as an important city much earlier than Damascus.
The 1rst written record of Allepo comes from the Ebla tablets, a collection of as many as 1,800 complete clay tablets, 4,700 fragments and many thousand minor chips, found in the palace archives of the ancient city of Ebla, a major trade center. She was responsible for the development of a sophisticated trade network system between city-states in Northern Syria. The system grouped the region into a commercial community. The names of the kings holding power were enlisted, also royal ordinances, edicts, and treaties. The literary texts included hymns and rituals, epics and proverbs.
The archive was kept in orderly fashion in two small rooms off a large audience hall with a raised platform often for dignified occupancy at one end; one repository contained only bureaucratic economic records on characteristic round tablets, the other, larger room held literacy texts, including pedagogical texts for teaching young scribes. Many of the tablets had not previously been baked, but when all were preserved by the fire that destroyed the palace, their storage method served to fire them almost as thoroughly as if in a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produced temperatures sufficient to complete the process involved in the chemical changes. The tablets also were stored upright in partly recessed wooden shelves, rectos facing outward, leaning backwards at an angle so that the first few words of the text, employed as an identified label of each tablet could be seen at a glance, and separated from one another by fragments of baked clay. The burning shelving pancaked -collapsing in place and preserving the order of the tablets.
Two languages appeared on the tablets, a Sumerian and a previously unknown language that used logograms as a phonetic representation of the locally spoken Ebla language. They provided a wealth information on Syria and Canaan, including the 1st known references to the "Canaanites," "Ugarit," and "Lebanon." A main focus appeared to be the economic records, inventories recording Ebla's commercial and political relations with other Levantine cities and logs of the city's import and export activities.
The application of the Ebla texts to specific places and people mentioned in the Scripture confirm the existence of Abraham, David, Sodom and Gomorrah, among other Scriptural references.
Allepo was known as Khalpe, Khalibon, and to the Greeks and Romans as Beroea. During the Crusades the name Alep was used. The original name, Halab, has survived as the current Arabic name of the city. It is of obscure origin. Its meaning is "iron" or "copper" in Amorite language. The area served as a major source of these metals in antiquity. In the Aramaic language the word Halaba, which is the translation of the word Halab, means "white," refering to the color of soil and marble abundant in the area. The modern-day Arabic nickname of the city, Ash-Shahbaa, which means "the white-colored," also derives from the famous white marble of Allepo.
The Allepo Codex or Crown of Allepo is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Scripture that refers to the Law of Redemption from imprisonment in which Israel has fallen. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in Northern Israel. The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased the Codex. During the 1st Crusade, the synagogue was plundered and the Codex was transferred to Egypt, whose Jews paid a high price for its ransom. The Codex was preserved at the synagogue in Old Cairo until one descendant of Maimonides (Sephardic Jewish philosopher) brought it to Allepo, Syria. The Codex remained in Syria for 500 years until rioters enraged by the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine burned down the synagogue where the Codex was kept. It disappeared until news about the surviving Codex surfaced saying that it was smuggled into Israel and presented to the president of the state. It was found that parts of the Codex had been lost. The Allepo Codex, then was entrusted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
When the translation of the Codex was complete, it followed the Tiberian textual tradition in the order of its books, which also matches the later tradition of Sephardi Scriptural manuscripts. The Torah appears in the same order found in most printed Hebrew Scripture, but the order for the books for Ketuvim differs markedly. The Ketuvim is the 3rd and final section of the Hebrew Scripture named Tanakh, after the Instruction (Torah) and Prophets (Nevi'im). In English translations of the Hebrew Scripture, this section is usually entitled "Writings." I and II Chronicles form one book, along with Ezra and Nehemiah which form a single unit entitled "Ezra-Nehemiah."
In the Allepo Codex, the order of the Hebrew Scripture (Ketuvim) is: Books of Chronicles, Psalms, Book of Job, Book of Proverbs, Book of Ruth, Song of Songs 3:11 to the end; all of Ecclesiastes, Book of Lamentations, Book of Esther, Book of Daniel, and Book of Ezra-Nehemiah.
Such a long history is attributed to Allepo because of its strategic location as a trading center midway between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia, now modern Iraq. The city's significance in human history has been its location at one end of the Silk Road, which passed through Central Asia and Mesopotamia.
For centuries, Allepo has been the Syrian region's largest city and the Ottoman's Empire's 3rd largest, after Constantinopla and Cairo. It has also been Syria's largest city and also one of the largest cities in the Levant before the advent of the Syrian Civil War. Since the Battle of Allepo that started in 2012, the city has suffered massive destruction and it is the worst-hit city in the civil conflict.
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