Damascus

The earliest recorded appearance of the name of Damascus anywhere, Ṯmsqw, written in the syllabic group-orthography Egyptian used for foreign names and listed among the towns of Syria-Palestine that Thutmose III claimed to have subdued, in the great topographical list carved at Karnak in the fifteenth century BCE. The spelling renders an early form of the Semitic name, with the consonants that later languages would show as d-m-ś-q; its own deeper etymology is unknown.

Ṯmsqw is the headwater of this page in time, the first of more than three thousand years of writings of one name. That the Egyptians of the New Kingdom, recording a campaign into Syria, set down a form already recognizable as Damascus is a measure of the city’s antiquity: when the pharaoh’s scribes cut these signs, the name was presumably already old. Everything else on this page, from the Amarna cuneiform to the Arabic of today, is in a sense a continuation of what Thutmose’s stonemasons wrote.

The Akkadian name for the city, Dimašqa, written di-maš-qa and current in the diplomatic correspondence of the Late Bronze Age. In the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE the city is governed by Biryawaza, an Egyptian vassal who writes to the pharaoh of affairs in Dimašqa and the surrounding country; the name recurs in the later Assyrian royal inscriptions that record the conquest of the Aramaean kingdom there. The form is plainly the same name as the Egyptian Ṯmsqw a century before and the Hebrew Dammeśeq later.

Dimašqa sits at the center of the page chronologically and geographically, the name in the lingua franca of Bronze Age diplomacy, the Akkadian that scribes from Egypt to Anatolia used in common. Its near-identity with the Egyptian, Aramaic, and Hebrew forms makes Damascus one of the most stable toponyms in this atlas: where most ancient cities offer a tangle of divergent names, here the same four consonants surface, with only minor vowels shifting, in language after language across the whole of recorded antiquity.

A second Akkadian name for the city, Ša-imērišu, written with the logogram for “donkey,” imēru, and meaning something like “the place of its donkeys.” Neo-Assyrian scribes used it beside the ordinary Dimašqa as a by-name for the Aramaean capital, a learned writing that turns the city’s name into a phrase about pack-animals, perhaps a pun on the sound of the Semitic name, perhaps a jibe at a stubborn enemy. It appears in the royal inscriptions of the kings who fought and finally annexed the kingdom of Damascus in the eighth century BCE.

Ša-imērišu is the one entry on this page that breaks the chain, a name that is not a form of d-m-ś-q at all but an Assyrian invention, and so it stands apart from the family that every other form belongs to. It is the scribes’ alternative writing of a city they otherwise called Dimašqa, set down for effect rather than descent. That the Assyrians could turn the name of a great rival into “donkey-town” is a reminder that a name in cuneiform was not only a record but sometimes a weapon, and that even the most stable of toponyms could be bent, by a clever scribe, into mockery.

The usual Hebrew name for the city, Dammeśeq, the great Aramaean capital that looms across the historical and prophetic books as Israel’s powerful northern neighbor and frequent enemy. David garrisons it; the kings of Israel and Judah war with and against it; Isaiah and Amos pronounce oracles on its coming fall; and Elisha visits it. The form preserves the old Semitic name with the ś (śin) that Hebrew shares with the Aramaic and that the Akkadian rendered as š.

Dammeśeq is the name in its plain, original shape, without the intrusive r that its own variant Darmeśeq carries elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Standing in the prophets beside Tyre, Sidon, and the other doomed cities of the oracles, it is among the most frequently named foreign cities in scripture, the near and dangerous power on Israel’s frontier. It is also the form closest to the city’s own Aramaic, a reminder that Hebrew and the language of Damascus were near cousins, and that the prophets and the Aramaeans called the city by almost the same word.

The name of the city in the Aramaic of its own people, Dammaśq, written dmśq in the consonantal script. Damascus was an Aramaean royal city, the seat of the kingdom of Aram-Damascus whose kings, Hadadezer, Hazael, and Ben-Hadad, fought Israel and Assyria in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE; their realm is named in the Old Aramaic inscriptions of the region. This is the form closest to an endonym on the page, the name as the city’s Aramaic-speaking inhabitants said it.

Dammaśq is the still center of the page, the name in the mouth of the city itself. From this Aramaic form the Greeks took their Damaskós, and behind it the long chain of classical and modern names; and it is in the later development of this very Aramaic that the page’s other complication begins, the intrusive r that Qumran Aramaic and then Syriac would insert to make Darmeśeq and Darmsuq. The city’s own language thus stands both at the source of the foreign names and at the fork where the family splits.

A variant Hebrew spelling of the city’s name, Darmeśeq, found only in the late book of Chronicles, where an r has been inserted into the older Dammeśeq. The same intrusion appears in the Aramaic of the Dead Sea Scrolls and becomes standard in Syriac; it is thought to reflect a later Aramaic reshaping of the name, perhaps by association with a root dr meaning “to dwell.” Chronicles, written in the Persian period, gives the form that the surrounding Aramaic was moving toward.

Darmeśeq and Dammeśeq are the same name twice within Hebrew, the doublet that captures the intrusive r in the act of spreading. The older books keep Dammeśeq; the late Chronicler, retelling the same histories, writes Darmeśeq, the form his own Aramaic-speaking age preferred. The difference of a single consonant marks a fork in the family: from the r-less form came the Greek and Latin Damascus of the West, while the r-form lived on in the Syriac Darmsuq of the Christian East, two destinies for one city’s name divided by a letter.

The Greek name for the city, Damaskós, taken from the Aramaic Dammaśq of its inhabitants, without the intrusive r of the later Aramaic forms. Damascus became a Greek city under the successors of Alexander and a center of the Decapolis region; Strabo describes it as the most notable city of the area. For the Christian tradition it is above all the city of Paul’s conversion, struck blind on the road to Damaskós and baptized in the house on the street called Straight.

Damaskós is the form through which the West received the name, the ancestor of the Latin Damascus and so of every European reflex. It captures the r-less branch of the family and fixes it: because the Greeks borrowed the name before, or apart from, the intrusive r, the languages of the West have never had the consonant that Syriac and Jewish Aramaic carry. The city’s name reached Europe in its plainer dress, and through the account of one famous journey on its road, Damascus became one of the best-known city-names in the Christian world.

The Latin name for the city, Damascus, taken directly from the Greek Damaskós. Pliny lists it among the cities of the Decapolis, watered, he notes, by the river that makes its country fertile. Through Roman administration and the Latin Bible the form became the standard Western name, and it is the spelling English uses, lending its name also to damask, the patterned silk, and the damson plum, both named for the city through which they reached Europe.

Damascus is the western terminus of the r-less branch and the form the modern world inherited. It carries, in its everyday survival in English, traces of the city’s old role as an entrepôt of luxury goods: the cloth and the fruit that bear its name remember a time when Damascus meant the far eastern source of fine things. A name first cut by Thutmose’s masons reaches the modern reader unchanged in its consonants, attached now to silk and plums as much as to the oasis itself.

The Syriac name for the city, Darmsuq, carrying the intrusive r that marks the later Aramaic tradition. As a dialect of Aramaic spoken in the same Syrian world as Damascus itself, Syriac inherited the name with the r-form that had developed in Jewish and Christian Aramaic, and it appears thus in the Peshitta account of Paul, whose conversion outside the city and escape from it in a basket lowered over the wall are landmarks of Syriac Christian memory. Damascus lay within the Syriac-speaking heartland, and the name was a living local word.

Darmsuq is the eastern counterpart of the western Damascus, the two forms of the city’s name separated by the single letter r. Where Greek and Latin took the r-less form and gave it to Europe, Syriac kept the r-bearing form that Jewish Aramaic and the Chronicler also show, and passed it on in the Christian Orient. One city, standing on the seam between the Greek and the Aramaic worlds, sent its name west without the r and kept it, at home, with the r.

The Geʿez name for the city, Damasqo, carried into Ethiopic through the Greek of the New Testament. Like the other Christian-scriptural names on this page it comes by way of the account of Paul, whose dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus made the city a fixed point of the Christian story, retold in the Ethiopic Acts. The form follows the Greek Damaskós, keeping the r-less branch, with the Geʿez final vowel.

Damasqo is the southernmost reach of the name, the r-less form carried to the Ethiopian highlands by the Bible rather than by trade or conquest. It rounds out a page on which one city’s name appears in nearly every script and language of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, from Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform to Ge’ez, and almost always recognizably the same. Damascus, the oldest of cities, kept the steadiest of names.

The Arabic name for the city, Dimashq, keeping the old Aramaic form without the intrusive r and standing remarkably close to the Akkadian Dimašqa of nearly two thousand years before. After the Muslim conquest Damascus became, under the Umayyads, the capital of the caliphate and one of the great cities of Islam; it is often called simply al-Shām, the name of the whole Syrian region, of which it is the heart. Yāqūt and the geographers describe it as a paradise of gardens and running water.

Dimashq is the name come round nearly to where it began. The Arabic vocalization, Dimashq, is almost exactly the Akkadian Dimašqa that the Amarna scribes wrote in the fourteenth century BCE, as though the intervening three thousand years and the whole parade of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin forms had left the name essentially untouched. Of all the cities in this atlas, Damascus may be the one whose name has changed least; Dimashq today and Ṯmsqw on Thutmose’s wall are, recognizably, one word.