The early history of Damascus is shrouded in the mists of a

hoary antiquity. Leave the matters written of in the first

eleven chapters of the Old Testament out, and no recorded

event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in

existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you

will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus. In

the writings of every century for more than four thousand

years, its name has been mentioned and its praises sung. 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. She saw the foundations of Baalbeck, and

Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these villages grow into

mighty cities, and amaze the world with their grandeur--

and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given

over to the owls and the bats. She saw the Israelitish

empire exalted, and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece

rise, and flourish two thousand years, and die. In her old

age she saw Rome built; she saw it overshadow the world

with its power; she saw it perish. The few hundreds of

years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to

grave old Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly

worth remembering.

Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and

still she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a

thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand

more before she dies.

Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right

the Eternal City.

- Mark Twain