page_title: Aleppo
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Aleppo / Demographics / History
caption_attribution_description: (1): Bedouin from the province of Halep (Aleppo); (2): Bedouin woman from the province of Halep (Aleppo); and (3): married Jewish woman from Halep (Aleppo). Les Costumes Populaires De La Turquie, en 1873.A collection of photographs by the famous photographer Pascal Sebah on the occasion of the universal exposition in Viena in 1873. The album represents the costumes of the different regions, and ethnic and religious groups of the Ottoman Empire.
context_page_description: Aleppo is a city in Syria, which serves as the capital of the Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Syrian governorate. With an official population of 4.6 million in 2010, Aleppo was the largest Syrian city before the Syrian Civil War; however, it is now the second-largest city in Syria, after the capital Damascus.
  Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; it may have been inhabited since the sixth millennium BC. Excavations at Tell as-Sawda and Tell al-Ansari, just south of the old city of Aleppo, show that the area was occupied by Amorites by the latter part of the third millennium BC. That is also the time at which Aleppo is first mentioned in cuneiform tablets unearthed in Ebla and Mesopotamia, which speak of it as part of the Amorite state of Yamhad, and note its commercial and military importance. Such a long history is attributed to its strategic location as a trading center between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia.
  For centuries, Aleppo was the largest city in the Syrian region, and the Ottoman Empire's third-largest after Constantinople and Cairo.
context_section_description: According to the Aleppine historian Sheikh Kamel Al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the population of Aleppo was around 400,000 before the disastrous earthquake of 1822. Followed by cholera and plague attacks in 1823 and 1827 respectively, the population of the city declined to 110,000 by the end of the 19th century. In 1901, the total population of Aleppo was 108,143 of which Muslims were 76,329 (70.58%), Christians – mostly Catholics – 24,508 (22.66%) and Jews 7,306 (6.76%).
  Aleppo's large Christian population swelled with the influx of Armenian and Assyrian Christian refugees during the early 20th-century and after the Armenian and Assyrian genocides of 1915. After the arrival of the first groups of Armenian refugees (1915–1922) the population of Aleppo in 1922 counted 156,748 of which Muslims were 97,600 (62.26%), native Christians -mostly Catholics- 22,117 (14.11%), Jews 6,580 (4.20%), Europeans 2,652 (1.70%), Armenian refugees 20,007 (12.76%) and others 7,792 (4.97%). However, even though a large majority of the Armenians arrived during the period, the city has had an Armenian community since at least the 1100s, when a considerable number of Armenian families and merchants from the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia settled in the city. The oldest Armenian church in the city is from 1491 as well, which indicates that they have been here long before.
  The second period of Armenian flow towards Aleppo marked with the withdrawal of the French troops from Cilicia in 1923. After the arrival of more than 40,000 Armenian refugees between 1923 and 1925, the population of the city reached up to 210,000 by the end of 1925, where Armenians formed more than 25% of it.
  According to the historical data presented by Al-Ghazzi, the vast majority of the Aleppine Christians were Catholics until the latter days of the Ottoman rule. The growth of the Oriental Orthodox Christians is related with the arrival of the Assyrian survivors from Cilicia and Southern Turkey, while on the other hand, large numbers of Eastern Orthodox Christians from the Sanjak of Alexandretta arrived in Aleppo, after the annexation of the Sanjak in 1939 in favour of Turkey.
  In 1944, Aleppo's population was around 325,000, with 112,110 (34.5%) Christians among which Armenians have counted 60,200. Armenians formed more than half of the Christian community in Aleppo until 1947, when many groups of them left for Soviet Armenia within the frames of the Armenian Repatriation Process (1946–1967).
caption: Two Bedouins and a Jewish woman in Aleppo, 1873
exif: {}