ARAMEANS. - A people that resided in Aram. In a letter from el-Amarna (14th century B.C.) the term aḫlamē occurs, which was understood as designating the Arameans. But since in the prism of Tiglath-Pileser I (1000 B.C.), and in the monolith of Ashurnasirpal II (11th century B.C.) aḫlamē occurs with the qualifier armāja ("Arameans"), aḫlamē cannot mean Arameans, but perhaps means "allies, confederates." Others saw the Arameans in the Eremboi and Arimoi of Homer; but such an identification is not proven.
In the 11th century B.C. the Assyrian documents, narratives of war exploits, give news of the Arameans and of some of their states. They present them as dwelling in three great directions: one that pivoted and had its lever at the mouth of the river Ḥābūr into the Euphrates, one that had in view the territories of Babylonia, one that moved in northern Mesopotamia and in the north of Syria. While the tribes that turned toward Babylonia crossed the border peacefully, adapted to the life of the population and often allowed themselves to be absorbed, although clashes with the Babylonians were not lacking, who intended to keep in order the turbulent or overabundant newcomers, the Arameans of the other two centers had to sustain hard and prolonged struggles against the Assyrians. Here are the principal ones.
Toward the end of the 11th century B.C., the Arameans of the right bank of the Euphrates crossed the river at the confluence of the Ḥābūr and at other points further south, infiltrating into Assyrian territory. Tiglath-Pileser I marched against them in 1112, and drove them back beyond the river, where he occupied six of their centers, situated at the foot of the Bišri mountains; but he concluded nothing definitive, indeed he had to march still 27 times against them, succeeding in defeating them along the Euphrates, on the line that goes from the great bend that the river makes entering the plain as far as the borders of Babylonia. But the Aramean tribes around the beginning of the 10th century B.C. occupied the whole valley of the Talih and also that of the Ḥābūr. In this territory between the middle Tigris and the Euphrates various principalities arose that took their names from the chiefs of the various tribes. The most important of them, Bīt Bahiani, called by the ancient Mitannian name Hanigalbat, on the middle and upper course of the Tigris, exercised over the others a kind of high patronage.
The Aramean tribes of the west occupied a great part of the territory of Karkemīš (Jerablus), that is, from the river Sagura south of the city as far as the limit of the territory of Ḥamāt, and therefore a great part of northern Syria. Their kingdom is called in the Assyrian documents Bīt Adini, with capital Til Barsip; among the Greeks it has the name Syria. From there in the 10th century B.C. they set about rounding out the territory, annexing to it on the west Sam'al (Zenğirli), on the east the territories of the left bank of the Euphrates as far as the tributary Balih, on the north as far as Kummuh. Other small Aramean states, mentioned also in the Bible, arose in the Anti-Lebanon; the most important of them was Damascus.
In contrast with the peoples akin to them, Assyrians or Babylonians, the Arameans did not succeed in founding a great unitary State, nor in organizing it solidly; they created rather a multitude of States, now moderately extensive, now tiny. The latter were not unitary States, but rather like a constellation in which various satellites move around a principal nucleus, which serves as pivot and gives the name to the State. The individual satellites had a certain independence, which allowed treaties to be concluded with the components of the State and with the principal nucleus on conditions of equality. Such a constitution was a cause of weakness in the face of powerful neighbors, to whom it offered good play in their attempt to break up its structure. Add to this that in the various Aramean States the Arameans were far from constituting the majority of the population; thus, for example, among the provinces into which Syria was divided after the conquest by the Assyrians, only Mansuate, Soba and Damascus were predominantly Aramean.
The Assyrian conquest was fatal to the Arameans. Adad-nirari II attacked in 900 B.C. the kingdom of Hanigalbat, defeating one after another several petty princes; his work was continued by Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III, so that in 799 the last of the Mesopotamian small states ceased to exist. Then it was the turn of the States of Syria from Tapsacus downward. These, without help from outside, bordered on the Assyrians, who, aspiring to look out upon the Mediterranean, wanted to subjugate them. The citadels most capable of resistance were Hamât and Damascus; but they succumbed in struggles that lasted about a century and were conducted with alternating fortunes by Shalmaneser III and Adad-nirari III, until Tiglath-Pileser III, after various clashes with Rasunnu (Rezin) of Damascus, in 732 B.C. conquered this last bulwark of the Arameans.
The progressive Assyrian penetration into the territory of Syria can be seen from the provinces that the Assyrians established there: in 740 Arpad and Unqi; in 738 Kullani (Calneh), Hatarikka, Hamât; in 732 Mansuate, Supite (Soba), Damascus, Qarnini, Haurina.
On the relations and clashes between Arameans and Israelites, v. SIRIA.
Bibliography7 works
Giuseppe Messina