Yabrud

The city is located in the northern part of the governorate, north of the mountain range of the same name, at an altitude of 1,415 meters above sea ​​level ^[1] .
Yabrud is located at a distance of approximately 57 kilometers northeast (NNE) from Damascus , the provincial capital and administrative capital of the country. The nearest airport is in Damascus ^[1] .

According to the 1981 official census , the population was 17,064 people ^[2] . The dynamics of the population of the city by years:

In Yabrud, there is the Greek Catholic Cathedral of Constantine and Helen, during the construction of which fragments of an ancient temple dedicated to Jupiter were used .
Also in the vicinity of the city is a rocky canopy, which is an archaeological site. The objects found during excavations suggest that people inhabited this area already in the Lower Paleolithic . The tools found here were called Yabrud and were attributed to a separate archaeological culture . According to another version, the tools of the so-called "Yabrud culture" belong to one of the stages of development of the Tabun culture .
Some of the found artifacts were called Preorignac, as they are one of the very first “representatives” of plate culture in the world, which, according to some experts on the history of primitiveness, were the forerunners of the material culture of Aurignac - the Upper Paleolithic industry of Europe. In addition, several objects were discovered that can be called prototypes of the Mousterian implements characteristic of the Middle Paleolithic ^[5] . Observed scraper from the Yabrud II site (Yabroud Rockshelter II), found in the 4th layer (~ 41-32 thousand years ago), judging by chemical analysis, could have been brought from the Komürcü sediments of the Gölü Dag volcano in central Turkey, 700 km from Yabrud ^{[6] [7]} .