This paper problematizes the question of a collective Syrian memory of the First World War in two ways: first, by counterposing a number of texts (oral and written) created during and after the war—including but not limited to Muhammad Kurd cAli’s Khitat al-Sham; "Remembrance of the cId al-istiqlal al-suri: A Collection of Speeches and Poems Delivered on the Occasion of the cId al-istiqlal"; Gertrude Bell’s dipatches from Syria; T.E. Lawrence’s “The Destruction of the Fourth Army”; cAdil al-Sulh’s Sutur min al-risala: tarikh haraka istiqlaliyya qamat fi al-mashriq al-carabi sana 1877; Hasan al-Qaysi Nasr’s Qabsat min al-turath al-shacbiyya: Macarik wa-qasa)id; Mustafa Tlas’ L’histoire politique de la Syrie contemporaine: 1918-1990; and textbooks used in Syrian secondary schools during the 1990s—I shall trace the differences between contemporaneous accounts and later inscriptions of events that took place during the war. I shall also analyze the shifting focus of and tropes used by those later accounts, counterposing official and unofficial, didactic and folkloric renderings. Then I shall look at the debates about collective memory and historical memory in which historians have engaged since the publication of Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, situating the notion of a Syrian collective memory within that context and exploring the value of collective memory as an investigative category and the possibility of reconstructing a distinctly Syrian collective memory of the war.