Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria's Great Merchant City by Philip Mansel

Today, Aleppo lies in ruins. Its streets are plunged in darkness; most of its population has fled. Google Earth shows no lights at night. But Aleppo was once a vibrant world city, a trade and cultural hub at the end of the Silk Road, famous for its food and music, and a place where Muslims, Christians, Jews, and visitors from around the world lived and traded together in peace. In this heartbreaking and powerful history of one of the world’s oldest, continuously-inhabited cities, author Philip Mansel chronicles the many lives of Aleppo, successively ruled by the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French empires. In Part I of the book, Mansel details the city’s lives over the centuries, including her rise under the Ottomans, when Aleppo became that empire's third largest city, after Constantinople and Cairo. In Part II, Mansel has assembled 15 historical accounts of Aleppo, many of them never published before, ranging from the early 1600s to 1920. Written by British an