The Indigenous Origins of the Arameans of Upper Mesopotamia
The Indigenous Origins of the Arameans of Upper Mesopotamia
Johny Messo (2005)The ancient Arameans have traditionally been viewed as “camel nomads” who “spread out from the fringes of the Syro-Arabian desert,” whence a segment of “the Aramean tribes invaded northern Mesopotamia, and founded there a series of little states.”
This view, though, emerged from a broader context about the origins of the ‘Semites’. Within this group, the Arameans are generally classified as belonging to the (North)western branch; the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians, for instance, are regarded as East-Semites.
Until fairly recently, these and similar portrayals of the dawn and the nature of the Arameans have dominated mainstream scholarship. Even so, in the past decades a new generation of scholars has renounced this conventional opinion at the expense of an alternative model. Suffice it here to cite some experts who have rejected the outdated theories and confirmed the native Mesopotamian identity of the ancient Arameans, the forbears of the modern ‘Syriacs’.
Obscure toponyms under the name ‘Aram’ as referring to a conjectured Aramean territory do occur in texts dated as early as the third millennium B.C. onwards. Undisputed proof of the appellative ‘Arameans’ derives from the annals of Tiglath-Pileser I (reigned 1114-1076 B.C.).
One scholar, dating this attestation in the year 1111, divided two initial stages in the earliest history of the Arameans, viz. their “Pre-history” (ending in 1111) and their “Proto-History” (1111-912). 912 B.C. was the year in which Adad-nârâri II ascended to the Assyrian throne and started to liquidate the Aramean territorial units in Mesopotamia, which were slowly incorporated into the growing Neo-Assyrian empire.
Obviously, the first reference to a group of people labeled ‘Arameans’ in about 1111 B.C. does not exclude the fact that ‘Arameans’ did exist before this period. Indeed, it is recognized that some tribes who were later defined as ‘Aramean’ in Assyrian texts (e.g., Beth Zamani), were present in the ancient Near East before the 12th century when they emerged as a new political entity. “Just as these predecessors [sc. the Amorites] did,” reasoned the late Dion, “the Aramaeans may have remained in the obscurity of village life and ‘enclosed’ nomadism for several centuries before asserting themselves on the political scene of western Asia.”
With regard to the false description of “camel nomads,” there exists no evidence and perhaps it was projected upon the Arameans with the ancient and modern Arabs (and Bedouins) in mind. “In point of fact,” Schniedewind noted, “the characterization of the early Arameans as ‘nomads’ is dubious. Rather, the early Arameans were semi-nomadic pastoralists.”
The pioneering study of Glenn Schwartz discarded the weak invasion or migration hypothesis, as introduced above, and proposed another framework for the early history of the Arameans. After reviewing the nature of the “evidence for the early Arameans” and their city-states in Syro-Mesopotamia, he criticized the “conventional interpretation of the Aramaean appearance in the neo-Assyrian records” (281), thanks to which “[o]ur views tend to be Assyro-centric” (284). What is more, “the historical and archaeological evidence for the early Aramaeans is biased in several crucial ways” (280). Hence, under the present circumstances any attempt to reconstruct the genesis of the Aramean history will inevitably remain incomplete and partial.
Pitard, too, argued that “the traditional invasion model” is inaccurate and acknowledged that the early (prejudiced) sources about the Arameans “give no clear hint that the Arameans were newcomers into Upper Mesopotamia.” “There is simply no evidence,” he further declared, “that the populations of Upper Mesopotamia and northeast Syria were displaced by large groups of Aramean tribes that had been living previously in the desert.” Thus, the alleged Aramean intrusion into these lands is built upon a faulty assumption and it is far more likely that “they were the West Semitic-speaking peoples who had lived in that area throughout the second millennium [B.C.], some as pastoralists and some in villages, towns, and cities.”
Concerning the area that largely corresponds to modern-day northeast Syria, Sader concluded: “The pastoralist Aramaeans cannot be seen anymore as ‘invaders’ bursting out of the Syro-Arabian ‘desert’, but rather as the pastoral element, an inherent part of Late Bronze Age [circa 1550-1200 B.C.] Syrian society.” McClellan, although disagreeing with Sader on a few minor issues, also concurs that “there is little evidence for [an] outside invasion.”
The Arameans of old, who were ubiquitous in the northern regions of Syro-Mesopotamia, can thus be regarded as the indigenous inhabitants of Upper Mesopotamia and northeast Syria. From north to south, the major Aramean polities in northern Mesopotamia were Beth-Zamani, Beth-Bahiani, Beth-Halupe and Laqu.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no specialist who will deny the Aramean descent of the present-day Aramaic-speaking Christians of these areas. As a matter of fact, in his book on Tur-‘Abdin, the Aramaic name of a Christian enclave in Southeast-Turkey, Palmer rightly deduced from the Neo-Assyrian annals: “Not only are several of the village names still in use, even these types of farming and the same skill in metalwork are characteristic of the ancient Aramaic stock of Christians who are the hereditary inhabitants of the plateau.” “This confirms,” corroborated another scholar, “a certain continuity, if not a direct descent, between the Aramaean world, and the Syriac world, and the Church that would bear that name.”
These past decades have witnessed another reality, namely, that of a state-sponsored policy which intends to Turkify all the antique Aramaic names of the towns and the villages. Consequently, in the near future this process will have obliterated an essential part of the ancient-old Aramean civilization in Upper Mesopotamia and thus end its continuity.
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