Introduction

Syria was never, at any time, a state in the familiar sense of statehood or of a unified political entity; rather, it comprised a cluster of small states and peoples brought into being by the geographical position of the region — much as that same position gave rise, in Greece for example, to the city-states. Some of these little states managed to impose themselves upon history, as Israel did in certain of its eras thanks to the legacy it bequeathed to humanity: the Torah, the first of the messages of monotheism delivered through the guides among the prophets and messengers. But Syria of the valleys had another destiny. The Aramaeans dwelt in it from a time we cannot precisely determine. They represent the third of the waves of Semitic migration. They used to roam the reaches of the Jazira valley from the north, moving eastward toward Iraq and westward toward Syria, until they began to settle in central Iraq from the middle of the second millennium BC. There they began to emerge as a cohesive group that took on its own distinctive character of culture and nationhood, even as it was clearly influenced by its immediate neighbors, though it preserved its language — Aramaic. And just as it was fated that the Israelites should impose their religion upon history, so the Aramaeans were able to impose their language upon the world when they sat at its summit in culture, so that their tongue became the language of international correspondence — to the point that the Torah of the Israelites themselves was written in it.

Perhaps the first time we encounter the name of the Aramaeans is by way of cuneiform texts dating to the fourteenth century BC, which indicate that they were spread across the desert lying to the west of Mesopotamia, and that in their early days they were nomadic tribes moving through the wilderness between Najd in the south and the frontiers of Syria in the north, the Euphrates in the east and the Gulf of Aqaba in the west; and that the conditions of the desert sometimes drove them to take refuge in the fertile regions, upon which they would raid, until they were able to form a principality between Babylon and the Arabian Gulf known by the name "Kald" — from which came the word Chaldeans. After the fall of the state of Mitanni in the thirteenth century, they entered the land of Mesopotamia, which came to be known as "Aram Naharaim." They are likewise mentioned in the eleventh century in the texts of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I, where it is noted that their homelands extended from the Middle Euphrates westward to Syria; and perhaps what facilitated their settlement was the turmoil of affairs in Babylon following its invasion by the Hittites, and then the Hittites' destruction of the kingdom of Mitanni a century and a half later. It is likely that the word "Aram" means "the high land," and we encounter it joined to other names, such as "Aram Zobah," "Aram Maacah," "Aram Naharaim [?]" (i.e., the two rivers — the Euphrates and its tributary the Khabur), "Aram Beth-Rehob," "Aram Damascus," and "Paddan Aram" (whose center was Harran) — designations frequently mentioned in the Torah, all of them meaning the elevated land in these regions.

The Babylonians named the land lying between northern Mesopotamia up to the mountains, and westward to Cappadocia, by the name "Subartu," or "Suri" (in another reading) — a name by which Syria of the valleys was known to the classical writers. When Assyria and southern Syria became Aramaean, the application of the name extended to the southern lands, until the two words "Suri" and "Aramaean" became synonymous. Thus Syria of the valleys, the homeland of the Aramaeans who were fated to settle in it, represents the true Syria; and the Aramaeans, accordingly, are as warp and weft in the fabric of the Syrian peoples, occupying the most consequential of the Syrian lands, standing midway between the most ancient civilizations to the east and to the southwest, and coming into direct contact with their northern neighbors — the Hittites — who were likewise influenced by them, as we shall see. For the civilization of the Hittites was the civilization of a people whose historical aspects are less obscure [?], and this region was the stage for its events. For this reason, Cappadocia was the area from which we seek light to be reflected upon one aspect of the Aramaeans' civilization.

The Little States of the Aramaeans

When we first come to know them, the Aramaeans were not a state but rather a collection of tribes known in the Amarna letters and in the cuneiform inscriptions under the name "Akhlamu" (that is, the companions or the friends) — perhaps a designation by which the Amorites knew them. A branch of them was likewise known — as we have noted before — under the name "Kaldu." Between the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC they were able to press upon the Amorites, the Hurrians, and the Hittites, and to seize the best of the sites those peoples occupied in the valley of the Orontes (al-Asi). They were unable to advance westward any farther than that, so the Canaanites and the Phoenicians on the coast were not affected by their incursion. When their strength grew, they were able to stir up disorder among the ranks of the Assyrians until they nearly finished them off; the conflict continued into the ninth century BC in the era of the First Assyrian Empire, and then moved thereafter into Syria, where they had founded their little states — states that suffered from Assyrian pressure to a degree that prevented them from closing their ranks to establish a unified state. Their city-states were spread across the Middle Euphrates and in the valley of the Orontes in Syria of the valleys. The raids of the Aramaeans upon Syria were continuous at the very time when the struggle was raging among the Canaanite statelets, and they managed to reach northern Syria and form their little states between Aleppo and the Taurus mountains — among them the principality of "Sam'al," between Antioch and Marash, its site now Zincirli. In the late eleventh century they were able to seize Damascus (at the time the state of the Israelites appeared), and it was a statelet that extended eastward to the Euphrates and southward to the Yarmuk (at the expense of the Israelites), and also bordered the Assyrians on the northeast. From the beginning of the tenth century it was able to annex to itself all of interior Syria to the east of Lebanon, and all of northern Syria and Hauran, and then came into direct contact with the events that followed one upon another in its neighbor Israel. Indeed, the battles between the two began before Damascus became a state, back when Zobah was the center of Aramaean activity, and when Israel was ruled, in its early days of monarchy, by a king — Saul. And though Israel won the first round in the days of David, it was fated that in the latter part of Solomon's reign it should lose it at the hands of "Rezin," who transferred the center of activity from Zobah to Damascus. The division of the kingdom after Solomon helped enable the Aramaeans to extend their dominion and to impose it even upon the Israelites themselves, until Judah was compelled to pay tribute to "Ben-Hadad," who attacked Israel and annexed Gilead, "the east of the Jordan."

The Language

The language of the Aramaeans is one of the branches of the West Semitic bloc of languages, which spread at the beginning of the second millennium BC across the northwest of Mesopotamia. They continued to preserve it for a very long age, and after the Babylonian captivity it was able to overcome both the Babylonian and Assyrian tongues. After the fall of Nineveh in the year 612 BC, the land of Assyria became Aramaean, and it was common in Babylon for contracts to be written in both Babylonian and Aramaic.

When the Persians conquered Babylon in the year 528 BC, the Aramaic language was current throughout the entire East, even among the ruling class of the Persians, who used it as a language of mutual understanding among the parts of the empire until it became the language of official correspondence. When the conflict arose between the Persians and the Romans, the language of the Aramaeans continued to impose itself upon the other languages, so that it wiped out the Canaanite and Akkadian dialects. Hundreds — indeed thousands — of documents have been found written in various Aramaic dialects; for it was not merely the official language of the Persian Empire, but was an international language — if the expression is apt — which the Persians used in their chanceries, and in which were written papyri found in Egypt, as well as the Babylonian Talmud, and likewise, most probably, certain books of the Torah and the Gospel. It continued to carry the banner of culture for a very long age, until it met the same fate that others met at the hands of time.

The Script

From the Aramaic script the scripts of many writing systems were derived. The Jews replaced their Phoenician letters, between the sixth and fourth centuries BC, with Aramaic letters, and the Hebrew script known as the square script is derived from the Aramaic script. The northern Arabs adopted the Aramaic letters, taking their script from the Nabataean script, one of the forms of the Aramaic script (and it is the script in which the Holy Qur'an was written, and from which modern Arabic script developed). The Armenians, the Persians, and the Indians (the Pahlavi script and the Sanskrit script) took their scripts from Aramaic origins.

The Buddhist priests carried the Sanskrit script (derived from an Aramaic source) from India into the heart of China and Korea. . . . And thus the Phoenician script (the origin of the Aramaic script) came, at the hands of the Aramaeans, to pass into the whole of the eastern half of the world, while the Greeks spread the same script to the western half of the world.

The Religion of the Aramaeans

Perhaps the most important of the deities of the Aramaeans that we are able to identify is "Hadad" (Hadad or Adad), a god the Aramaeans knew from the Amorites and the Canaanites. He was a god of the rains and of the whirlwinds, thunder, and lightning that accompany them. He is beneficial when he sends the water that profits agriculture, and destructive if he sends it in sweeping torrents. Hence came his epithet "Rimmon" or "Ramman," that is, the thunderer, the stirrer of storms. The rise of "Hadad" in this region was a natural rise in a land that seeks the rains so that its crops may live upon them. The image of the god depicts him carrying a three-pronged fork and a hammer. He was also sometimes represented standing on the back of a bull (the symbol of fertility and generative powers). He came to be associated with the Hittite deity "Teshub," who was represented in the classical ages as "Zeus" carrying the thunderbolt and the double Hittite axe. Teshub — as we know — is the deity of the eastern branch of the Hittites. The worship of "Hadad" also mingled with the worship of the sun, so that he took from it the rays that adorn his head. He was known in the Roman era under the name "Jupiter of Damascus." "Hadad" has a wife, "Atargatis," and into the first part of the composition of her name enters the well-known goddess "Ishtar." She represents motherhood and is portrayed wearing a crown, accompanied at times by a lion — as Ishtar does. Her symbol combines the crescent and the disk of the sun, and she appears sometimes veiled. Her priests — like the priests of Ishtar — used to consecrate themselves to her, and so they were for the most part eunuchs. Ashkelon in Palestine was another center of her worship, and she was the equivalent of "Aphrodite." Her worship spread into Europe [?] — as happened in the case of the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis — so that a temple was raised in her name in Rome. The most important centers of her worship and the worship of "Hadad" were present-day Manbij (Hierapolis: the Holy City), though the worship of the two of them spread throughout the regions of Syria. Alongside "Hadad" and "Atargatis" there were other, lesser gods whom the Aramaeans borrowed from the neighboring peoples and acknowledged, among them "Shamash," an Assyrian god; "Reshuf," the Phoenician god represented in the form of a warrior; as well as "Baal Shamin," a deity possessing the attributes of "Hadad"; and "Rakib," or the driver of chariots; and then "Sahar," the moon-god, whose worship centered on Harran.