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Damascus's 2024 population is now estimated at 2,685,361. In 1950, the population of Damascus was 414,409. Damascus has grown by 100,590 in the last year, which represents a 3.89% annual change. These population estimates and projections come from the latest revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects.
- Overview
- Character of the city
- City site
- Climate
- City layout
Damascus, city, capital of Syria. Located in the southwestern corner of the country, it has been called the “pearl of the East,” praised for its beauty and lushness; the 10th-century traveler and geographer al-Maqdisī lauded the city as ranking among the four earthly paradises. Upon visiting the city in 1867, Mark Twain wrote
To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality.
The city’s Arabic name derives from Dimashka, a word of possibly pre-Semitic etymology, suggesting that the beginnings of Damascus go back to a time before recorded history. The city is commonly called al-Shām, the vernacular name of Syria as a whole, which is said to mean “the left” or “the north,” where the region is situated relative to the Arabian Peninsula. Owing to associations of Damascus with Aram, the biblical capital of the Aramaeans, some Arabic sources link Damascus and the Iram dhāt al-ʿimād (“Colonnaded Aram”) mentioned in the Qurʾān, an identification that has long been disputed. Also contended has been the association of Damascus with Jilliq, a fertile pre-Islamic site whose name derives from a word of unknown origin in use by the Ghassānids active there in the 6th century (see Ghassān). The city is still known by its popular epithet al-Fayḥāʾ (“the Fragrant”), earned perhaps for the freshness of its surrounding orchards and gardens. Many scholars believe that, among the ancient cities of the world, Damascus is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited.
Over the centuries, Damascus has been conqueror and conquered, wealthy and destitute, and capital of empire and small states. Its fame has been sustained by its continuous prominence as a commercial and intellectual centre. Its life has been nourished periodically by immigrants from the hinterland and from the Mediterranean Basin and Southwest Asia. Often a focus of contention by powers of East and West, Damascus’s fortunes have frequently been linked to those of distant capitals, most notably Ashur, Antioch, Rome, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul. Now a burgeoning metropolis of the Middle East, it retains, as it has through centuries of triumph and disaster, an indomitable spirit and a considerable charm.
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Travelers to Damascus have been struck by the sight of aspens and poplars growing along streams, of fruit (particularly apricot) and nut orchards, and of olive groves and vegetable gardens. A popular story about the Prophet Muhammad’s journey to Syria recounts that, upon seeing verdant Damascus, he refused to go in, as man should only enter paradise once. Upon reaching Damascus in 1326, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, the Arab travel writer from Tangier, said that no words could do justice to the city’s charm; he resorted to quoting his Maghribi predecessor, Ibn Jubayr, who sojourned in Damascus in 1184 and wrote that Damascus had “adorned herself with flowers of sweet scented herbs” and “is encircled by gardens as the moon…by its halo.” In 1350 a European traveler, Ludolph van Suchem, wrote of the city as “begirt with gardens and orchards and watered in and out by waters, rivers, brooks, and fountains cunningly arranged to minister to men’s luxury.” While the accelerated and often disordered growth of the city since World War II has sharply raised the ratio of buildings to trees and open space, Damascenes still enjoy some of the former splendor of al-Ghūṭah, the fertile belt of irrigated land adjacent to the city.
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Water and geography have determined the site and role of Damascus. Early settlers were naturally attracted to a place where a river, the Baradā, rising in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains (Al-Jabal al-Sharqī), watered a large and fertile oasis before vanishing into the desert. This tract, al-Ghūṭah, has supported a substantial population for thousands of years. Damascus itself grew on a terrace 2,250 feet (690 metres) above sea level, south of Mount Qāsiyūn and overlooking the Baradā River. The original settlement appears to have been situated in the eastern part of the walled Old City. City and oasis grew together, and over time Damascus came to dominate the lesser rural settlements surrounding it.
The natural endowments of an assured water supply and fertile land made Damascus self-sufficient. Successive colonizers from the 2nd millennium bce onward developed an intricate irrigation system that fed the city through a system of branches derived from the river, contributing to a steady expansion of al-Ghūṭah, especially to the east and west. Damascus’s position on the edge of the desert and at the eastern end of the easiest route through the Anti-Lebanon range made it a trade centre where caravan routes originated and terminated. Since the advent of Islam, the city has also been the starting point of the northern pilgrimage road, the Darb al-Hajj al-Shāmī, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Some 50 miles (80 km) from the sea yet separated from it by two mountain ranges, Damascus receives only about 7 inches (178 mm) of precipitation annually, most of it from November through February. The Anti-Lebanon range gets far greater amounts of both rain and winter snow, which annually replenish the water table that is a source of the Baradā Ri...
Damascus was an active commercial centre in the 2nd millennium bce and developed through different stages of urbanization thereafter, reaching its zenith at the beginning of the 7th century ce when it became the capital of the Umayyad empire. The heart of Damascus’s Old City, which contains most of the city’s historical monuments, is Hellenistic in origin, with significant Roman additions and modifications. It is a rough oblong about 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) long and 3,300 feet (1,000 metres) wide and is defined by historic walls, of which sizeable stretches still stand, especially in the north and west. Eight gates, seven of which are of Classical derivation, pierce the walls. The long axis of the oblong runs between two gates, Bāb al-Jābiyya (the Roman Jupiter Gate) in the west and Bāb Sharqī (the Roman Sun Gate) in the east. It occupies the former location of the decumanus maximus (main east-west thoroughfare) of the Classical city, which lies some 15 feet (5 metres) below the modern street level; no cardo maximus (main north-south thoroughfare) has been positively identified. Many secondary streets and some of the most prominent features of the Old City owe their positions to the Roman city planners of the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce.
The city’s orthogonal plan deteriorated during the late Byzantine period in the 6th and 7th centuries. The Umayyads (661–750) chose Damascus as their capital but did not much change its layout or considerably expand beyond its walls. Although the city was neglected and its population drastically decreased between the 8th and 11th centuries, by the 13th century Damascus had revived and was outgrowing its walls. Two axes of development extra-muros, beyond the city walls, predominated. One linked the city to the northwest with the suburb of Ṣālḥiyyah, which was established in the 12th century by immigrants from Jerusalem on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn; the second extended as a long, narrow strip southward along the road leading to the Ḥawrān and Palestine. The Old City was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979.
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Damascus's population in 2004 was estimated to be 2.7 million people. The estimated population of Damascus in 2011 was 1,711,000. However, in 2022, the city had an estimated population of 2,503,000, which in early 2023 rose to 2,584,771.
- 680 m (2,230 ft)
- Syria
The current metro area population of Damascus in 2024 is 2,685,000, a 3.87% increase from 2023. The metro area population of Damascus in 2023 was 2,585,000 , a 3.28% increase from 2022. The metro area population of Damascus in 2022 was 2,503,000 , a 2.58% increase from 2021.
Population centers as of 2004 6,133,652 Syrians among 17,921,000 total population live in the first 10: (1) Aleppo 2,132,100 (2) Damascus 1,711,000 (3) Homs 652,609 (4) Latakia 383,786 (5) Hama 312,994 (6) Raqqa 220,488 (7) Deir ez-Zor 211,857 (8) Al-Hasakah 188,160 (9) Qamishli 184,231 (10) Sayyidah Zaynab 136,427
Home Geography & Travel Cities & Towns Cities & Towns C-G. People of Damascus. Damascus: Jupiter, Temple of. The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, Damascus. Damascus experienced tremendous growth during the second half of the 20th century, with its population estimated to have increased more than tenfold.
