Antioch and Alexandretta is under Turkish rule. Due account will be taken of all these territories, but the principal focus of this short volume will be the land of Syria in its current narrow political sense. Excellent accounts of Palestine exist, while Lebanon deserves separate attention such as the present author has accorded it in Lebanon in History; both will therefore be treated here primarily as they participate in the general history of Syria as a whole.
The ruling feature of Syrian topography is an alternation of lowland and highland zones running roughly parallel to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in a generally north-south alignment. Five such longitudinal strips may be delineated.
On the west the first of these strips is the maritime plain stretching along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Sinai peninsula. Twenty miles wide in Palestine, the plain dwindles at the foot of Mount Lebanon to a mere ribbon less than four miles across. At the mouth of the Dog River (Nahr al-Kalb), north of Beirut, the mountain cliffs plunge straight into the sea, providing a strategic situation for ambushing invading armies. Again at Mount Carmel the promontory juts across the plain, leaving a passage barely a furlong wide. This obstacle deflected inland the great international highway of ancient times, which had its start in Egypt and followed the coast northward.
Most of the maritime plain originated in an uplifting of the old sea floor in the remote past. Its chalk deposits were later overlaid in places by alluvium dragged and spread by the running water from the mountainsides. Around Beirut an overlying sand deposit has been left by the waves of the Mediterranean, which in turn received it from the Nile. Thus formed of beaches and sea-beds and enriched by soil—as well as water—from the adjoining highlands, the plain is everywhere remarkably fertile. In the north it comprises the Nusayri littoral, in the middle the Sahil of Lebanon,
