Aleppo vies with Damascus for the title of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. Both are mentioned in Eblaite tablets from the third millennium BC, where Aleppo goes by the name Hal-pa-pa, but fine neo-Hittite reliefs recently found in Aleppo’s towering citadel mound may give a slight edge in the antiquity contest to this more northerly of Syria’s two largest cities.

 

Since those earliest times, the long-distance trade in rare exotics and the face-to-face retailing of everyday essentials have been Aleppo’s sustenance. The clamor and calls emanating today from its suqs (markets) are the echoes of the same sounds that rang there four thousand years ago.

 

Today, some 15 kilometers (9 mi) of stall-lined streets, alleys and commercial cul-de-sacs wind off the suq’s 1.5-kilometer (1-mi) main thoroughfare, covered in places with stone and brick vaulting. It follows the route of the Decumanus, the city’s main east-west street that was laid out in Hellenic times, in Aleppo as in other cities of the Mediterranean world.

 

Aleppo in those times was the principal commercial entrepôt between East and West, where the riches of India and Mesopotamia met Mediterranean traders and middlemen who shipped the goods onward to the Greek mainland and, in later years, to Rome. 

Starting up near the citadel, the Decumanus runs downhill through secondary suqs devoted to specific crafts or products, such as the Suq al-Attarine, the Perfumers’ Suq. At the bottom end is the dog-legged Antioch Gate, high enough that camels did not even have to duck as they marched out, bound for the port at Antioch, 80 kilometers (50 mi) to the west.

 

Today, traders new to Aleppo fly in—from Moscow most often—or they come by bus from Turkey. What were once “exotics” have largely given way to global-brand consumer products: The French Nafnaf clothing brand is today as common in the market as no-logo lamp oil once was.

 

Conversations with Aleppo’s salespeople capture both what has changed in less than a lifetime and what never seems to vary from one millennium to the next.

 

The Khan al-Jumruk is the customs caravanserai, where English, French and Dutch merchants stored their goods until they cleared Ottoman customs in the 17th century. It is the suq’s largest khan, its oversized, iron-studded wooden door opening onto an unroofed courtyard, its lower stalls meant for bulk storage and animal stabling, its upper story for merchant lodging. Some 150 stalls today surround the khan’s lower level, all of which belong to merchants of cloth, from fancies to bulk quantities of Syria’s ubiquitous blue school-uniform fabric.

“My grandfather started out in this business with three looms in his house, weaving fabric on demand. As a young man, my father opened a stall here selling fine factory-made textiles. Thirty years ago he started his own factory, weaving floor mats. Now we have mechanical looms and 40 employees making fine brocaded fabrics and silk tassels and braided ropes. I also sell thread wholesale to market manufacturers. Our export orders come from all the Arab countries—Yemen, Libya, Jordan, Iraq.

 

“In the old days, it was easy to start up a factory and buy equipment. Capital costs were low because it was all hand looming. Nowadays you need new machines of industrial quality. I am the first person to go to the bank to ask for a loan. If I cannot grow this business, we will soon shrink back to where my grandfather started. That is how it is selling textiles. You must sell what you yourself produce, and each year you must produce more.”