Aleppo

Excavation on the citadel mound from the late 1990s uncovered a temple of the storm god that had stood there for something like two thousand years, from the early second millennium BCE onward, with basalt reliefs showing the god in his chariot and a procession of figures along the walls. Aleppo, called Halab in texts from Mari and from the Hittite archives, was the seat of a kingdom whose god was invoked in international treaties, and Hittite kings recorded taking oaths by the storm god of Halab. That gives the mound one of the longest documented sequences of continuous worship anywhere in the Near East.

The temple site is now occupied by a small mosque associated with Abraham, and the popular etymology of the city's name from the milking of Abraham's cow belongs to the same layer of tradition, a folk explanation attached to an older sanctuary rather than a historical account.

Below the citadel the Great Mosque was founded under the Umayyads and rebuilt repeatedly, and its free standing minaret of 1090, one of the finest pieces of Seljuk period architecture in Syria, collapsed in the fighting in 2013. The old city also held churches of the Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Maronite and Chaldean communities in the Jdeideh quarter, and a Jewish quarter with several synagogues. Much of that fabric was destroyed between 2012 and 2016, and much of the population that used it has left.

The manuscript the community called the Crown was written in Tiberias in the tenth century, and its vowel points, accents and marginal notes were supplied by Aaron ben Asher, the last of the great masoretic families. It is the most authoritative witness to the consonantal text, the vocalisation and the accentuation of the Hebrew Bible, and Maimonides, working in Egypt, named it as the model he had relied on for the rules of writing a Torah scroll, which settled its standing for every later scribe.

Its route to Aleppo ran through Jerusalem, capture by the crusaders, ransom by the Jews of Cairo, and eventual transfer north, where it was kept in an iron chest in a grotto of the Central Synagogue and shown only rarely. The community held that harm would come to anyone who removed it.

In December 1947, after the United Nations vote on partition, the synagogue was attacked and burned. The codex was believed destroyed. It reappeared, and in 1958 was carried to Israel, where it is now at the Israel Museum. About two fifths of it is missing, including almost the whole Torah, and what became of those leaves has never been established: theories run from destruction in the fire to removal by individuals at some point in the following decade, and an investigative account published in 2012 argued for the latter and named names, which the institutions concerned dispute. The atlas records the loss as unresolved rather than choosing a version.