456 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 





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Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams 



GENERAL VIEW OF AEEPPO, SYRIA'S FUTURE METROPOLIS, PROM THE CITADEL 



This city, "the Chicago of the Near East," is the hub of the Afro-Eurasian land-mass 

 and is fated to become one of the greatest trading centers of modern times, as it was centuries 

 ago, when it was the western terminus of the famous Aleppo to Basra caravan route. 

 Aleppo derives its name from the fact that Abraham stopped here to milk his goats while 

 en route to the Promised Land, and Egyptian inscriptions testify to the fact that the city 

 saw a longer history before the birth of Christ than it has since. 



and, although the Christians were a unit 

 when it came to showing how unim- 

 portant Mohammed was, when it came to 

 a history of the Inquisition, several weeks 

 later, this not only gave the Moslem 

 students a chance to develop strange 

 coughing fits, but divided the Christians 

 themselves into factions of Greek, Gre- 

 gorian, Abyssinian, and Protestant, not to 

 mention Copt, Maronite, and infidel. 



The striking fact about that hetero- 

 geneous class was not that they differed 

 on details, but that they agreed on prin- 

 ciples, and no one can say how much 



democracy a son of a Turkish pasha is 

 getting until the son of a poor Armenian 

 widow discusses with him the fall of 

 Abdul Hamid. Beirut is the center of 

 modern Arabic literature and liberalism, 

 and the American college has had a wide- 

 reaching effect on the thought life of 

 Arabic-speaking lands. 



ANOTHER STONE PAGE IN HISTORY^ 

 RECORD BOOK 



The cosmopolitan make-up of the stu- 

 dent body at the Syrian Protestant College 

 only serves to remind one that this part 



