Development of the citadel from Assyrian times until the early Islamic period

[Picture source: © 2001 Peter Heiske ]

It is not surprising that this prominent location (also in a literal sense) has been settled since the earliest times. From the middle of the third millennium BC, literary sources mention a temple that must have been situated here. Actual proof of the temple was uncovered by a Syrian-German excavation in 1996. The stratigraphy presented by the excavators, shows the temple was constructed in the third millennium, with renovations in the second and first millennium BC. The famous bas-reliefs with depictions of gods, centering on the weather deity Haddad, can be dated to the first millennium BC. The use of the mesa between the construction of the temple until Byzantine times is not yet clear. When the city of Beroia (as Aleppo was called in Roman times) was pillaged under the ruler Khosrau († 579), the population locked itself in the citadel. The siege was lifted only after the bishop of Megas’ entreaties, which saved the inhabitants from dying of thirst[1], as the Byzantine cistern, which is still preserved today, was empty. This shows that, while fortified sufficiently, the citadel’s poor water supply left it vulnerable to siege. The Umayyads also took the city in 638, after a siege of five months. For the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers, Aleppo remained a provincial town.