Aramean people

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

Use of the Western Aramaic language of the Arameans has steadily declined in the face of Arabic since the Arab Islamic conquest of the area in the 7th century AD, and the last vestiges of the spoken tongue in and around Maalula are in danger of extinction, although Aramean personal and family names and identity are still found among the Syriac Christians in the Levant, and many Syriac Christians in the Levant still espouse an Aramean heritage and ancestry, particularly in modern Syria, Lebanon, south central Turkey and Israel to this day (see Arameanism).

The Arameans never formed a unified state; they grouped into small independent kingdoms across parts of the Near East, particularly in present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, the northwestern Arabian peninsula and south-central 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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