Aramaeans

The Arameans, or Aramaeans (Aramaic: ܐܪ̈ܡܝܐ‎‎, ʼaramáyé), were an ancient Northwest Semitic Aramaic-speaking tribal confederacy who emerged from Syria in the Late Bronze Age the region known as Aram from the 11th-8th centuries BC. They established a patchwork of independent Aramaic kingdoms in the Levant and seized large tracts of Mesopotamia.

The Western Aramaic language of the Arameans has been in steady decline in the face of Arabic since the Arab Islamic conquest of the 7th century AD, and the last vestige in and around Maalula is in danger of extinction, although Aramean personal and family names and identity are still found among the Syriac Christians in The Levant, and an Aramean heritage and ancestry is still espoused by many Syriac Christians in the Levant, particularly modern Syria, Lebanon south central Turkey and Israel to this day (see Arameanism).

The Arameans never had a unified nation; they were divided into small independent kingdoms across parts of the Near East, particularly in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestinian Territories, the northwestern Arabian peninsula and southcentral Turkey. Their political influence was confined to a number of states such as Aram Damascus, Hamath, Palmyra, Aleppo and the partly Aramean Syro-Hittite states, which were entirely absorbed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire by the 9th century BC. In the New Babylonian, or Chaldean, empire, Chaldeans, Aramaeans, Suteans and indigenous Babylonians became largely indistinguishable.

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