Syria

Syria’s wheat country lies far from its sea. A short Mediterranean coast backs onto a ridge of mountains planted with olives and tobacco, and behind them the Orontes runs north past the wooden waterwheels of Hama into the Ghab valley. The Euphrates, dammed at Tabqa, crosses the north-east, where the Khabur waters the grain plain of the Jazira. The interior is steppe and desert around the oasis of Palmyra, while the basalt plateau of the Hauran rises in the south.

Tablets from Ebla and Ugarit record writing and trade in the Bronze Age, and Ugarit’s scribes used one of the earliest alphabets. Palmyra defied Rome under Queen Zenobia in the third century. In 661 the Umayyad caliphs made Damascus the seat of an empire later stretching from Spain to Central Asia. Crusaders built Krak des Chevaliers, Saladin was buried beside the Umayyad Mosque, and the Ottomans ruled for four centuries from 1516. French mandate rule ended with independence in 1946. A civil war broke out in 2011.

Sunni Muslims form the majority, alongside Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Armenians and Christians, and in the village of Maaloula a dialect of Aramaic survives. Aleppo, which lends its name to a mild red pepper, claims dozens of kinds of kibbeh, and soap boiled from olive and laurel oil has been made there for centuries. The land yields wheat and cotton from the north-east, olives and pistachios from the north and phosphate from the central desert.