Aleppo Citadel

I read somewhere that the Citadel of Aleppo, topologically, started as a small rise, and grew to the relative mountain it is today through numerous phases of construction, as succeeding generations and empires constructed their temples and forts upon it, each by breaking down and filling in, or adding upon, the deposits of their predecessors. The Citadel thus represents thousands of years of human history, layer piled upon layer.

Within the walls.

And so, I believe, does each of us, or rather the imprint of culture on each of our minds. Most everything we know and believe and feel comes from the past: ancient, even pre-human, biases and tendencies; the wisdom of prophets, philosophers and scientists, passed down from parent to child, professor to student, priest to acolyte; ideas in various states of preservation, from integral cataloged wholes to mere fragments, the history and genesis long forgotten; ancient thinking persisiting and integrated into new frameworks, innovations on foundational edifices long standing, concepts grafted onto others. How often is it that you read a work from hundreds of years ago, and feel it personally, feel that it expresses thoughts you’ve had or ideas you didn’t know how to express?

This is why it is worth studying history, for it explains not only the origin of peoples, places and things, but of ourselves, the structure and content of our minds, why we think the way we do and how we have come to believe what we believe. For yes there are some absolutes, but much more is a construction accreted over time, many layers of the past supporting even the loftiest towers.