and disseminated by the merchants and scribes of ancient Lebanon. It was from these Phoenicians, who called themselves Canaanites, that the Greeks derived their letters, in turn passing them on to the Romans and Slavs, and hence to all the peoples of modern Europe. The Aramaeans likewise borrowed these symbols and passed them on to the Arabians, who transmitted them to the Persians and Indians and other peoples of Asia, as well as to the inhabitants of Africa. Had the people of Syria rendered no other service, this would have been enough to mark them out among the greatest benefactors of humanity.
Their contribution, however, did not stop there. In their narrow land more historical and cultural events, colourful and dynamic, occurred than in perhaps any area of comparable size—events that have made the history of Syria a replica in miniature of the history of most of the civilized world. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods some of the leading thinkers of the classical age were sons of this land, including teachers, historians and Stoic and Neo-Platonic philosophers. One of the greatest schools of Roman law flourished in Beirut, capital of modern Lebanon, and certain of its professors had their legal opinions embedded in the Code of Justinian, rightly considered the greatest gift of Rome to later generations.
Shortly after the spread of Islam, the Syrian capital Damascus became the seat of the illustrious Umayyad empire, whose conquests extended westward into Spain and France and eastward into India and Central Asia—an empire greater than that of Rome at its zenith. During the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad, which ensued, the Arab world entered upon a period of intellectual activity, involving translation from Greek, that had hardly a parallel in history. Greek philosophy and thought was the most important legacy that the classical world had bequeathed to the medieval. In this process of transmitting Greek science and philosophy, the Christian Syrians took a leading part;
