Aleppo is one of the longest-surviving cities of the ancient and Islamic Middle East. Until recently it enjoyed a thriving urban life in particular an active traditional suq, whose origins can be traced across many centuries. Its tangle of streets still follow the Hellenistic grid and above it looms the great Citadel, which contains recently-uncovered remains of a Bronze/Iron Age temple complex, suggesting an even earlier role as a high place in the Canaanite tradition.

In the Arab Middle Ages, Aleppo was a strongpoint of the Islamic resistance to the Crusader presence. Its...

The last five years have brought such extraordinary changes to Germany and Europe as to make the previous forty years of Cold War existence seem deceptively placid and well- ordered by comparison. The collapse of communist rule in East Germany in the midst of massive demonstrations against the Honecker regime in late 1989 were only the beginning. The monumental changes that have taken place since have affected all aspects of German identity, both inside and outside of the now-unified nation.

This book tackles the question of just where the new Federal Republic of Germany stands...

The colonnaded axes define the visitor's experience of many of the great cities of the Roman East. How did this extraordinarily bold tool of urban planning evolve? The street, instead of remaining a mundane passage, a convenient means of passing from one place to another, was in the course of little more than a century transformed in the Eastern provinces into a monumental landscape which could in one sweeping vision encompass the entire city.
The colonnaded axes became the touchstone by which cities competed for status in the Eastern Empire. Though adopted as a sign of cities' prosperity...