Syria’s geography is its destiny

West of the Syrian city of Raqqa lies the archaeological site known as Banat Abu Huraira — “the Daughters of Abu Huraira”. It contains ancient funerary remains, the traces of a mosque and minaret, and a collection of burial sites.

Local tradition associates the place with the celebrated Companion of the Prophet, Abu Huraira. Yet, as the Syrian writer Homsi al-Hamada has noted, the name is comparatively recent. It derives from nearby Tel Abu Huraira, one of the most important archaeological sites in the historical record, whose settlement stretches back more than 10,000 years BC.

Popular memory transformed the larger mound into the “mother” and the smaller ones into her “daughters”. History adds another layer. The Battle of Siffin, between the armies of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan in what was the first major Islamic civil war, was fought close to this area in 657 AD. But the battle has nothing to do with the site’s name: Abu Huraira died in Medina and did not take part in it.

Jared Diamond’s landmark book Guns, Germs and Steel gives this landscape an even deeper significance. He notes that the inhabitants of Abu Huraira between roughly 10,000 and 9,000 BC were, in effect, natural-born botanists. Their surroundings gave them access to a diversity of resources unmatched in many other parts of the world. Syria, after all, sat within the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture first took root.

Before the site was submerged beneath the waters created by the Euphrates dam, archaeologists recovered the remains of 157 different plant species gathered by its inhabitants. That extraordinary knowledge of the natural world helped their descendants make one of humanity’s decisive leaps: from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

As climatic conditions became more favourable, people learned to select the best cereals — notably wheat and barley — crops that could be stored easily while producing large amounts of food energy.

The population growth that followed helped trigger another development of enormous consequence: the emergence of some of the world’s earliest state systems.

Agriculture lay at the heart of that transformation. As Lewis Dartnell argues in The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, farming was the fundamental engine of civilisation. Without the food surpluses produced by the grains of the Fertile Crescent, societies could not have supported specialists – craftsmen, proto-chemists, administrators – whose work made organised states possible.

Syria enjoyed another crucial geographical advantage. As Diamond explains, it belonged to the great east-west axis of Eurasia. Regions sharing broadly similar latitudes also tend to share similar day lengths, seasons and disease environments. Crops and agricultural innovations originating in or passing through Syria — wheat and olives among them — could therefore spread comparatively rapidly westwards towards Spain and eastwards across Asia.

The contrast with the Americas is revealing. Maize moving north or south across the two American continents repeatedly had to adapt to radically different climates. The diffusion of agriculture — and with it technologies ranging from writing to the wheel — was consequently far slower than across the Fertile Crescent and Eurasia.

Accumulated knowledge mattered just as much as geography. Dartnell points to the so-called Baghdad Battery, generally associated with the Parthian period around 200 BC: a clay vessel containing an iron rod and copper cylinder capable, under certain conditions, of generating a weak electrical current. Whatever its precise purpose, the object evokes societies stable and sophisticated enough to experiment with technologies remarkable for their time.

Yet the same agricultural abundance that supported dense populations created a political problem. Large communities of strangers cannot resolve disputes as small kinship groups do. Wealthy landowners, military leaders and other powerful figures gradually became rulers and, eventually, the heads of states.

Scholars still debate the relationship between religion and these early political systems. Did organised religion help create political authority, or did political authority use religion to legitimise itself? Either way, power and belief became deeply intertwined.

As Fernand Braudel’s analysis in A History of Civilizations suggests, Syria’s position as a Mediterranean bridge made it a natural zone of exchange — but also of collision. As larger powers emerged around it, the country became a theatre of rivalry. The same broader region that helped generate agriculture and urban civilisation also became a laboratory for weapons, epidemics and technologies that would transform the world.

For Diamond, the fusion of political authority and religion helps explain the strength of the Umayyad state, the first great centralised imperial model based in Syria. Yet that power itself rested upon a much older geographical and agricultural inheritance.

That is one reason Damascus and Aleppo remained centres of power that history could rarely bypass.

The fall of the Assad state and the emergence of a new order in Damascus now reopen some of the oldest questions in Syrian history: about beginnings, geography, religion, political authority and the reasons this country has always mattered far beyond its borders.

The same forces that gave Syria its extraordinary historical importance also made it the setting for enormous struggles between regional and global powers. The regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad combined extraordinary authoritarianism with a profound political and geographical rupture from much of Syria’s surrounding Arab and non-Arab environments. Isolating Syria was their way of surviving the regional and global struggles. The new rulers are attempting the opposite: to reconnect Syria with the Arab world, regional powers and the West, and to restore politics where isolation once prevailed.

Here lies the central paradox of the transition.

A movement that emerged from a hardline Islamist ideological background, and that mobilised a Sunni communal solidarity to break an Alawite-dominated order, may now prove to have been not a historical anomaly but the only bridge available towards a more pragmatic political transformation — one that several Arab states, in very different circumstances, have undertaken before.

But anyone expecting such a transformation to unfold without grave tensions or formidable challenges should return to the story of Abu Huraira and its “daughters”.