The Aramean Merchants

The expansion of Aramean trade and civilization outstripped the political and military expansion of the Arameans, and it endured well beyond the end of the latter. This civilization, which reached its height in the ninth and eighth centuries BC, is not fully appreciated today even in educated circles, and modern Syrians do not feel a connection to their Aramean origin and heritage, even though many Lebanese insist upon their Phoenician descent. The Aramean merchants would send their caravans to every region of the Fertile Crescent, and even as far as the sources of the Tigris in the north. Some of the bronze weights they left behind were discovered in the ruins of Nineveh. They held a monopoly on the inland trade of Syria, just as their cousins and rivals the Canaanites monopolized the maritime trade. Their capital, Damascus, was the port of the desert, just as Byblos and later Tyre were among the ports of the sea. The Arameans traded in purple from Phoenicia; in embroideries, linen, wood, copper, ebony, and ivory from Africa; and in "the harvest of the seas," which was perhaps the pearls for which the Persian Gulf has been renowned through the ages.

The Aramaic Language

It was the Aramean merchants who, from the earliest period of their history, spread their language throughout the various lands. It is a branch of the Northwestern group of the Semitic languages. There has come down to us, from the year 731 BC in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, the earliest depiction of a scribe recording in Aramaic the spoils taken from one of the captured cities. In his hand he holds not a stylus and a tablet of clay for cuneiform writing, but a papyrus scroll and a quill, and it seems he was writing in an alphabetic script. Around the year 500 BC, Aramaic — which had been the commercial language of one of the Syrian communities — became not only the common language of trade, civilization, and government throughout the lands of the Fertile Crescent, but the very language spoken by the inhabitants of those lands. Its triumph over its sister Semitic languages, including Hebrew, was complete. It became the language of Christ and his people, and the second reference to Christians — if not the first — was found written in Aramaic, in distorted Latin letters, on the wall of a dwelling that was perhaps a church in Pompeii, which places its date before the year 79 AD. There is an Aramaic prayer called "Qaddish" (the Holy), resembling in some of its phrases the Christian prayer known as the Lord's Prayer, and older than it, beginning with the phrase "Magnified and sanctified be His great name." The widely circulated legend of Ahiqar contains some Assyrian or Babylonian wisdom, but in Aramaic, and it was written in the seventh century or later. The spread of Aramaic was not confined to the Semitic regions: in the reign of Darius the Great (521–486 BC), Aramaic was made the official language among the provinces of the Persian Empire, and thus, until the conquests of Alexander, it became the language current in an empire stretching "from India to Ethiopia." Such a triumph, achieved by a language not backed by any imperial power of its own people, has no parallel in history. With the spread of the Aramaic language spread the Phoenician alphabet, which the Arameans were the first to adopt, and which was used in other languages of the Asian continent. The Hebrews obtained their alphabet from the Arameans between the sixth and fourth centuries, having earlier used the old Phoenician alphabet for a time; and the square letters in which the books of the Hebrew Torah are printed today arose from the Aramaic script. The northern Arabs took their alphabet, in which the Qur'an was written, from the Aramaic used by the Nabataeans; likewise the Armenians, the Persians, and the Indians obtained their alphabets from Aramaic sources. The Pahlavi and Sanskrit letters are of Aramaic origin, and the Buddhist priests carried the Sanskrit alphabet from India into the heart of China and Korea. Thus the Phoenician letters reached the Far East eastward by way of Aramaic, and the Americas westward by way of Greek, encircling the whole world.

The Archaeological Inscriptions

The oldest Aramaic archaeological inscriptions known today were found in northern Syria and date to the beginning of the ninth century. Among them is a short inscription from Tell Halaf (Guzana), followed by an inscription recently discovered on a votive stele some four and a half miles north of Aleppo — which was under the rule of Damascus — dating to about 850 BC. Upon it is written the name of Ben-Hadad I, and the following inscription: "The stele that Bar-Hadad, son of Tab-Ramman, son of Hadian[?], king of Aram, erected to his lord Melqart, and which he dedicated to him because he hearkened to his voice." Accordingly, the famous inscription of Zakkur, king of Hamath and Lu'ash (about 775 BC), which had been considered the oldest Aramaic inscription, became the third oldest. The stele of Zakkur was erected by this Aramean king to commemorate his deliverance from an assault launched against him by seventeen kings, among them the kings of Damascus and Sam'al and a number of the Phoenician cities. Other archaeological inscriptions left by the Arameans came from Zincirli (Sam'al), their principal city in the north. Besides these inscriptions on steles and buildings, there are many weights and documents bearing Aramaic writing ranging between the eighth and fifth centuries BC. The Aramaic papyri written by a Jewish colony in Upper Egypt, discovered at Elephantine (the modern island of Aswan), date to between 500 and 400 BC. In time the Aramaic language branched into two groups: the Eastern group in the valley of the Euphrates, represented by Mandaic and Syriac; and the Western group, represented by Biblical Aramaic, the Targum, and the dialects of Sam'al, Hamath, Palmyra, and the Nabataeans. Mandaic was spoken by a Gnostic sect dwelling near the Euphrates between the seventh and ninth centuries AD. Syriac, the language of Edessa (Urfa), became the language of the churches in Syria, Lebanon, and Mesopotamia, with some local variations. It was used down to the thirteenth century AD, after which Arabic took its place. When the Aramean Christians adopted the dialect of Edessa and made it the language of the church, of literature, and of cultural intercourse, they came to be known as Syrians, and their old name — that is, the Arameans — acquired a pagan connotation that was distasteful in their minds; so they generally avoided it, and in its place came the Greek terms: "Syrian" for the people and "Syriac" for the language. Let us recall that the Greeks used to call the land of Aram "Syria." Frequently the inhabitants of the land are called Syrians and their language Syrian in the Septuagint translation of the Torah, as well as in the common Latin translation; while in modern usage the word "Syriac" is restricted to the dialects of Edessa and the neighboring regions.

Material Civilization

The Arameans adopted the material civilization of the people among whom they dwelt. In northern Syria they became the heirs and continuators of the work of the Hittite-Assyrian civilization, and in central Syria they inherited the Canaanite civilization and carried it on. Their capital Sam'al, in the northwest, took on the appearance of a Hittite city, but its kings for the most part bore Aramean names, and they left archaeological inscriptions in Phoenician letters. This city was among the rare Aramean cities in which archaeological excavations were conducted. One of the kings of Sam'al, named Panammu I, who lived in the first half of the eighth century, erected a massive statue of the god Hadad, nine and a half feet tall, in which the god appeared with a two-horned cap, a rounded, curled beard, eyes set with precious stones, and arms outstretched to bestow a blessing. The inscription beneath the girdle of the statue says that the greatest care of the king was the welfare of his people. It mentions that the land which the beneficent gods had granted him was a land of barley, wheat, and garlic, and that the men labored in tilling its soil and planting its vines.

The figure of the son of Panammu II, named Bar-Rakib, appears carved in bold relief upon a throne magnificently wrought in ebony, ivory, and gold, no less splendid than the throne of his lord the king of Assyria. The throne rests upon cedar cones, and at the four corners of the seat are the heads of bulls; beneath his feet is a footstool with the like of these artistic ornaments. His long, fringed robe and his pointed cap are of the Hittite type, while his beard and the curls of his hair follow the Assyrian style.

Hadad the Thunderer

The god to whom the Arameans devoted the greatest attention in worship was Hadad, god of storms and thunder, also called Adad or Adu. As god of lightning and thunder, Hadad was beneficent when he sent the rain that made the earth fruitful, and harmful when he sent the floods. Among his epithets was Rimmon (the Thunderer), and Naaman the Syrian used to call the god of his lord the king of Damascus by this epithet. The two names were sometimes used together, so that one said "Hadad-Rimmon." He appears in a relief from Zincirli holding the three-pronged fork and the hammer, symbols of lightning and thunder. At Malatya he appears in a carved figure standing on the back of a bull, this being the symbol of the generative powers. The most important temple of the god Hadad was at Hierapolis (Manbij), but he had temples in many other Syrian cities and in Lebanon. He was especially beloved among the farmers of Syria, and his worship later merged with the worship of the sun, whereupon his head was adorned with rays, as at Baalbek. In general, the Jupiter Heliopolitanus who was worshipped at Baalbek must be regarded as the equivalent of the god Hadad, and in the Roman era his name changed to become the Damascene Jupiter. In the inscription he left on the statue of Hadad, Panammu I commanded his son to recite the following phrase when offering sacrifices: "May the soul of Panammu eat with Hadad, and may his soul drink with Hadad, and may it rejoice in the offering to Hadad." This gives us an interesting idea of the conception the ancient Arameans held of the afterlife. The Arameans were known for the custom of naming their sons "Bar-Hadad," that is, son of Hadad, or son of other gods dear to them. This custom remained common in Syria down to the Christian era, and it sheds useful light on the supposed relationship between the god and his worshipper.

Atargatis

The consort of Hadad, or his wife — a goddess of fertility — was worshipped at Hierapolis and in other Semitic centers under the name Atargatis, and the Greeks and Romans simplified the matter by calling her "the Syrian Goddess." A description of her worship has come to us from the classical era, written by Lucian, a Syrian from Samosata[?], born around 125 AD, who wrote in Greek. The features of her worship as Lucian described them are the features of the Semitic Mother Goddess. On the coins that came from Hierapolis we see her wearing a crown and sometimes accompanied by a lion, and her symbol consists of the crescent with the disc of the sun. She had a temple at Carnion in Gilead, and Ashkelon in Palestine was a center of her worship, where she was often regarded as the equivalent of Aphrodite. The worship of Atargatis spread among the Greeks in the Seleucid era, and through them it reached Rome, where a temple was erected in her name. In the Roman remains she is seen seated upon a throne between two lions. Her priests were generally eunuchs, who used to undertake journeys to Greece and Italy to spread her worship through prophecies and spiritual dancing, and to gather the donations of the pious for her temple at Hierapolis. There is a curious representation of Atargatis on the coins of Hierapolis, in which she appears veiled, and many other images of the veiled Atargatis have been found. Depictions of women veiled with a heavy veil resembling the veil of any conservative Muslim woman today appear on a relief from the temple of Bel at Palmyra, and on a carved slab from Dura-Europos[?]; and certain other remains show us the head veiled. It seems that in the ancient Near East the veil was the symbol of the married woman and her prescribed garb. Assyrian legislation from the middle of the second millennium BC required the wives and daughters of free men to cover their heads when they went out into the street. Besides the divine pair Hadad and Atargatis, the Aramean pantheon included a number of other gods of secondary rank, some local and others borrowed from neighboring nations. It was the gods Hadad, El, Rakib-El, Shamash, and Reshef who gave King Panammu I the scepter in the archaeological inscription he left, and who granted him the things for which he prayed. Rakib, or the driver of chariots, is a god imported into Syria along with the Assyrian sun god; and the Assyrian Shamash is the name of the sun god worshipped throughout the entire Semitic world. Reshef is the Phoenician god Reshef, who was often represented in the form of an armed soldier. In the inscription of Zakkur, king of Hamath, this king raises his hands to Baal-Shamin (Lord of the Heavens) and says: "Whoever effaces the name of Zakkur, king of Hamath and Lu'ash, from this stele, or destroys it before El-Wer, or removes it from its place, or stretches out his hand against it… then Baal-Shamin and El-Wer and Shamash and Sahar and the gods of heaven and the gods of the earth… shall destroy him." It becomes clear that Baal-Shamin is Hadad, but the identity of El-Wer is not yet known. Sahar is the moon god. Harran was the center of the moon god, who was called Sin among the Assyrians. This god is mentioned on the stone of Teima, whose inscription dates to the fifth century BC, under the name Shingala — an imported Assyrian name meaning "Sin the Great." The two other gods mentioned on this stone are Salm (meaning image or statue), often referring to the local Baal, and Ashira[?].

From the book "History of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine" — Dr. Philip Hitti