Aram (region)

One of the annals of Naram-Sin of Akkad (c. 2250 BCE) mentions that he captured "Dubul, the ensí of A-ra-me" (Arame is seemingly a genitive form), in the course of a campaign against Simurrum in the northern mountains.

In the Assyrian royal inscriptions the term Aḫlamū and the name A-ra-mu are sometimes combined to form a double designation for Arameans.

[13] Early Jewish tradition claims that the name is derived from the biblical Aram, son of Shem, a grandson of Noah in the Bible.

The early history of the Arameans is tied to that of the Aḫlamū and Sutû who were already known in the Late Bronze Age and who seem to have played a role in the period's demise.

There was some synthesis with neo Hittite populations in northern Syria and south central Anatolia, and a number of small so called Syro-Hittite states arose in the region, such as Tabal.

The east Mediterranean coast was largely dominated by Phoenician city states such as Tyre, Sidon, Berytus and Arvad.

The Neo Assyrian Empire was riven by unremitting civil war from 626 BC onward, weakening it severely, and allowing it to be attacked and destroyed by a coalition of its former vassals between 616 and 605 BCE.

The region of Aram was subsequently fought over by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and Egyptians, the latter of whom had belatedly come to the aid of their former Assyrian overlords.

This area, by now called Syria, was fought over by Seleucids and Parthians during the 2nd century BCE, and later still by the Romans and Sassanid Persians.

Palmyra, a powerful Aramean kingdom arose during this period, and for a time it dominated the area and successfully resisted Roman and Persian attempts at conquest.

Christianity began to take hold from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, and the Aramaic language gradually supplanted Canaanite in Phoenecia and Hebrew in Palestine.

However, the native Western Aramaic of the Aramean Christian population of Syria is spoken today by only a few thousand people, the majority having now adopted the Arabic language.

Mesopotamian Eastern Aramaic, which still contains a number of loanwords from the Akkadian, as well as structural similarities, still survives among the majority of ethnically distinct Assyrians, who are mainly based in northern Iraq, north-eastern Syria, south-eastern Turkey and north-western Iran.

Over one hundred dialects of Aramaic were spoken in the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century by Arameans and smaller groups of Jews, Mandeans and Muslims.

The entrance of the palaces of the kings mostly included several steles of winged bulls or lions as a sign of power and dominance.

The fact that the main temple of Sam'al was not located in the capital city but on the rocky hill called Gerçin about seven kilometers north of Zincirli may indicate different solutions in the use of religious spaces.