Syria holds some of the earliest evidence of settled life anywhere: caves used across the Palaeolithic, and Neolithic villages where farming, herding and mudbrick building were first combined.

Ebla, at Tell Mardikh in Idlib governorate, was a Bronze Age kingdom whose palace archives — thousands of clay tablets — transformed understanding of early Syrian statecraft.

Mari (Tell Hariri) on the middle Euphrates was a planned city and river power whose royal archives document the politics of the whole Bronze Age Near East.

Ugarit, near modern Latakia, was a coastal kingdom whose tablets preserve an early alphabetic script and a rich mythological literature.

After the Bronze Age collapse, Aramaean kingdoms formed across inland Syria. Their language, Aramaic, became the everyday tongue of the Near East for centuries.

Assyrian armies and administrators absorbed the Syrian interior into an empire ruled from northern Mesopotamia.

After Alexander, the Seleucids founded and refounded cities across Syria on a grid plan, mixing Greek civic life with local traditions.

Roman Syria was one of the empire's wealthiest provinces: caravan cities, aqueducts, theatres and roads that still shape the landscape.

Christian Syria built basilicas, monasteries and hundreds of limestone villages in the north — the Dead Cities, abandoned largely intact.

The first Islamic caliphate absorbed Syria within a generation, largely preserving existing cities and administration.

With Damascus as its capital, the Umayyad caliphate produced some of the defining monuments of early Islamic art, above all the Great Mosque of Damascus.

Power moved east to Baghdad, but Syrian cities remained major religious, commercial and military centres.

The Ayyubid era rebuilt Syria's citadels into some of the finest military architecture in the world, in a landscape shared with Crusader states.

Mamluk Syria rebuilt markets, madrasas and mosques in banded stone, shaping the old cities visitors still walk today.

Four Ottoman centuries left Syria's khans, hammams, courtyard houses and pilgrimage roads, and the layout of its great covered markets.

Modern Syria layers contemporary city life, museums and cultural institutions over everything that came before.