The Monticellonian., 1918-12-20

W hao5sr sn fFgoP1 cbanse gn,efya Sas AlenhS nddsd
 to the long list of changes that have come to the ancient Hittite city whose existence first was noted in Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian records under the name of khalep.
 Aleppo, or Khalep, was bandied back and forth with the swaying fortunes of those times, until it fell before the world-conquering Alexander and .his Macedonian hosts. Then is when we began to hear of it in authentic his tory, says q writer in the Kansas City Star. Seleueus Nicator. was one of the generals who aided Philip. the fa- ther of Alexander in establishing the Macedonian kingdom. He went with Alexander into Asia in 333 E. C. In 321, when he was twenty-five years old, he was given the government of the Babylonian satrapy, which included Khalep. He gave the city the name of Beroea. and as Beroea CT Khalep-Be- roea, 1t figures historically most of the time for the next 900 years.
 In 64S A. D. 1t disappeared from European records under the Saraeen flood that swept up from the south east. When the wild tribes began to assume Il sort of settled state under Moslem influence, it reappeared as Halep, the gathering place of the great caravans passing from Asia Minor and Syria to Mesopotamia, Bagdad and the Persian and Indian kingdoms.
 Earthquake and Plague.
 In common with most of the towns of northern Syria. Aleppo suffered ire quently from earthquakes. After ter rible shock late in the twelfth century it had to be almost entirely rebuilt But neither earthquake nor the plague, to which it was also peculiarly subject, could divert from Il trade and pros perity, and 1t became one of the com mercial capitals of the eastern world.
 The city passed under various Mos lem dynasties, being at one time the northern capital of the famous Saladin The Tartars held it awhile in the thir teenth century. Then the Mamelukes came up from Egypt and took it, hold ing it under their terrible sway until it's final conquest by the Ottomans in 1517.
 Under the strong hand of it's new rulers, the trade of Aleppo was re- vived. The English had recognized its importance as commercial station and if hppama tha aoStarp outpoet of the British Turkey company as early as the time of Elizabeth. It was con- nected with the western outpost of the East India company at Bagdad by private caravan service. It's name was familiar in the England of that period. Shakespeare refers to it sev- eral times in his plays and it appears frequently in the writings of his con- temporaries.
 Through Aleppo passed the silks of Bambyee (bombazines), the light tex tiles of Mosul (mosulines-muslins) and many other commodities for the wealthy and luxurious. The discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope to India Was the first blow to this trade. The second was the open ing of land route through Egypt to the Red sea and the third and final one was the construction of the Suez canal
 Long before the SueZ canal became reality, however Aleppo had been declining from internal causes. In the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth 1t was constantly the scene of bloody dis sensions between rival religious and secular parties, in which the Ottoman government took part, first on one side then the other, plundering both. Two earthquakes and three yisitations of cholera between 1899 and 1892 left the place wreck with only half its former population. Tumults and mas sacres of Christians occurred in 1850 and in 1862, accompanied by great de-