Damascus was founded in the 3rd millennium B.C. '709-15' it is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East. In the Middle Ages Damascus was the centre of a flourishing artisan industry (swords and laces). Amongst the 125 monuments from the different periods of its history, the 8th-century Great Mosque of the Umajjades is one of the most spectacular, built on the site of an Assyrian sanctuary. 

The Great Mosque at Damascus was built by the sixth Umayyad caliph al-Walid I between 709 and 715 - he demolished the church and constructed a mosque along the southern wall of the Roman temenos. Using thousands of craftsmen of Coptic, Persian, Indian and Greek origin, the construction took ten years to complete and included a prayer hall, a vast courtyard and hundreds of rooms for visiting pilgrims. The triple ailed prayer hall, roughly 160 meters long, was covered with a tiled wooden roof and supported on reused columns taken from Roman temples in the region as well as the Church of Mary at Antioch (a similar practice yielded columns for the mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia). The entire facing of the courtyard and the arcades surrounding it were embellished with colored marble, glass mosaic and gilding, and, in fact, were the most extensive area of wall mosaic ever created in ancient times. All that remains of this original Islamic ornamentation may be seen on the north outer face of the transept, under the gable; on the arcades and back of the west portico; and on the arches of the vestibule.

The minaret structures of the current mosque compound developed out of the corner towers of the ancient Roman temenos. The existing minarets date from the time of al-Walid with reconstruction and enlargements done around 1340 and 1488. The minaret of the southeastern corner is called the Minaret of Jesus, because of a local tradition that says this is where Jesus will appear on the Day of Judgment. Since the Umayyad period of its construction the mosque has been rebuilt several times in response to disastrous fires of 1069, 1401 and 1893. The entire marble paneling that may be seen in the sanctuary today dates from after the fire of 1893.

Inside the mosque is a small shrine of John the Baptist (Prophet Yahia to the Muslims) where tradition holds that the head of John (and perhaps his entire body) are buried. Adjacent to the prayer hall, along the eastern wall of the courtyard, is the entrance to a finely tiled shrine chamber. According to different traditions this shrine holds the head of Zechariah, the father of St. John the Baptist or the head of Hussein, the son of Imam Ali (the son in law of Muhammad and the forth of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’).