Arameans

The Arameans were Semitic-speaking tribes of the ancient Near East whose homeland, the land of Aram, lay in what is now Syria. First recorded as a people around 1100 BCE, they founded a cluster of small kingdoms such as Aram-Damascus, fell to Assyria in the eighth century BCE, and yet saw their language, Aramaic, become the everyday and official tongue of empires from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Aramaic still survives today, and some Syriac Christian communities identify as Arameans.

Place names resembling Aram appear in much older texts, at Ebla around 2300 BCE and in records of Naram-Sin of Akkad, but the first undisputed mention of the Arameans as a people is in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I around 1100 BCE, which call them the Ahlamu of the land of Armaya. Scholars place their origins among the pastoral nomads of the Syrian desert and upper Mesopotamia. A drier climate in the Late Bronze Age weakened the old city-states, and during the upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse these mobile tribes gained ground. When the Middle Assyrian kingdom shrank once Ashur-bel-kala died in 1056 BCE, the Arameans took firm control of much of Syria.

Aram was never one state. Its rulers founded local kingdoms whose names often began with Bit, "house of", such as Bit-Adini on the Euphrates and Bit-Bahiani at Tell Halaf, alongside Hamath, Zobah, Sam'al and Damascus. Aram-Damascus was the strongest and reached its height under King Hazael in the later ninth century BCE. The Hebrew Bible records wars between these kingdoms and Israel, and an Aramean royal inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Israel contains what may be the earliest reference outside the Bible to the House of David. Archaeologists find it hard to separate Aramean material culture from that of the neighbouring Luwian states, as the region shared one mixed culture.

From 911 BCE the kings of Assyria campaigned against the Aramean states, and in 732 BCE Tiglath-Pileser III took Damascus. The Assyrians deported very large numbers of Arameans, reportedly hundreds of thousands, to Assyria and Babylonia. This scattering had an unexpected effect: Aramaic spread with the deportees and by the eighth century BCE had become the common language of the Assyrian empire, gradually displacing Akkadian among Assyrians and Babylonians themselves.

Aramean inscriptions and personal names show the worship of Hadad together with Mesopotamian gods such as Sin, Shamash and Nergal and the Canaanite El. Aramean rulers drew freely on their neighbours' art: the kings of Damascus employed sculptors and ivory carvers from Phoenicia, and the ninth-century palace at Tell Halaf blends Mesopotamian, Hittite and Hurrian styles. Aramaic was first written in the Phoenician alphabet before developing its own script.

Under the Neo-Babylonian rulers of Babylonia and then the Achaemenid Empire from 539 BCE, Imperial Aramaic served as the language of government across the Near East. After Alexander the Great, Greek gained ground in the Seleucid Empire, and Greeks increasingly called Arameans "Syrians", a usage adopted in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Aramaic remained the common speech of the region until the Arab conquests of the seventh century CE, after which Arabic slowly replaced it. Its literary form Syriac, which grew from the dialect of Edessa, became the church language of Syriac Christianity.

Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages are still spoken by Assyrians, Mandaeans and Mizrahi Jews in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria and in a wide diaspora, while Western Neo-Aramaic survives only in Maaloula and Jubb'adin near Damascus. An Aramean identity is held by some Syriac Christians, especially in Germany and Sweden, and Israel recognised Arameans as a distinct minority in 2014.

Our maps for 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE draw an approximate Aramean region in Syria and the middle Euphrates, beside Assyria, Babylonia, Urartu and the kingdom of Israel. Since the Arameans are first documented only in the late twelfth century BCE, the 1500 BCE outline predates their recorded history.