The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Importance of The Arameans in Assyrian History

The Importance of The Arameans in Assyrian History

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, February 25 2007, 20:53:01 (CET)
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…that’s in ancient Assyrian history first; I thought it important to specify that.

Something that has always troubled me and for which I’ve never received a satisfactory answer is why we call our language “Aramaic”…which was the language of the Arameans of Aram, in western Syria…when we call ourselves the Assyrians, whose language was Akkadian? How could we have given up or replaced our own language with the language of a people we finally conquered? As we’re the ones who insist that “language is everything” and that to forget our Aramaic language is to cease to be “Assyrian”…and then insist that we ARE the modern Assyrians, even though we forgot our Assyrian or Akkadian language, and replaced it with the language of another people…is a puzzle which Dr Joseph also sheds some much needed light on.

Can a German insist he is German while speaking only French, and then use his French language as the “proof” that he MUST be German?

Before getting into it though I’m reminded that we also insist that to have left or replaced our original religion of the Assyrians, the religion of Ashur, with that of the Jews, made no difference in our being “Assyrian”. I suppose if we can tolerate one bit of silliness we can take a lot more. It seems there’s no end to the number of Assyrian things we can shed while remaining, amazingly, Assyrian. You’d think none of them were ever a necessary part of our identity from the very beginning.

Here are some segments from Dr Joseph’s book on this topic:

“From their humble beginnings as wandering tribesmen, the Arameans emerged by the end of the second millennium B.C. as an important factor in the cultural, political and economic life of southwestern Asia. During this early period, Wayne T. Pitard refers to the Arameans as “one of the most important ethnic groups in the Near East.” Aramean tribes attained great power in the large areas on both sides of the Syrian desert, eventually succeeding in settling and establishing ruling dynasties there. The most important Aramean kingdom was that of Aram, centered in Damascus, described as “the strongest and most influential power in the western fertile crescent,” and one of the “most significant states in the whole of the Levant.” The kingdom enjoyed a central position in the political life of the Near East, dominating the region’s main international trade routes; it used the Aramaic idiom of Damascus as the administrative language in all its provinces, as well as the language of diplomacy and commerce beyond its borders.”

And he goes on:

“By the end of the 10th century B.C. and the beginning of the 9th, Assyrian inscriptions for the first time inform us of Aramean political units in northern Mesopotamia, while in the southern parts of that country their confederacies remained a chronic menace to the Assyrians until their very downfall. The Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1115-1076 B.C.) has recorded that he conducted 28 campaigns against the Arameans; his name-sake, Tiglath-pileser III, some 350 years later, was still engaging Arameans in war. It was in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. when the Arameans were defeated; in 720 B.C. Sargon II finally brought to an end the Aramean kingdoms of the west; their territories were incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian provincial system, a century and a decade before the fall of Assyria.”

A bit more:

“ The expansion of Assyrian rule over lands beyond the Euphrates, however, became a major burden to the Assyrians and proved to be a suicidal act. They subdued all the Aramean, Phoenician and Hebrew communities in what Toynbee (Arnold Toynbee, noted historian, mine) calls, “the homeland of Syriac Civilization.” But this hastened the Aramean “cultural conquest of their military conquerors”, proceeding ‘pari passu with the extension of the Assyrians’ domination over the Syriac world’.”

I think it’s important to point out that this, “cultural conquest” of ones “military conquerors”…the people who beat you but whom you re-educate, has been the story of BetNahrain from the very beginning, right down to the conquering Arabs who were also conquered by the cultures they defeated there.

To continue:

“ Even before its western expansion beyond the Euphrates river, the Assyrian empire had found it necessary to use an Aramaic dialect of geographical Syria as its official language, a move dictated by the wide expanse of Aramaic and the convenience of its alphabet and script.”

…this is all leading to the following:

“With a much larger Aramean population now under its rule, far removed from the Assyria homebase, the smaller, ethnically-Assyrian population could not resist aramization, a process that gradually transformed the cultural face of the empire, “leading to the Assyrians being outlived and absorbed”. Before too long, Aramaic had displaced Akkadian even as the language of everyday speech within Assyria itself. According to H.W.F Saggs, the cities of Assyria proper had become so cosmopolitan and polyglot, that people of actual Assyrian descent were possibly a minority within those cities. The dominance of Aramaic over Akkadian in both speech and writing was so extensive in the 8th century B.C. that Aramaic “script”…not Aramaic language…came to be called in Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew languages as “Assyrian writing”. (something we still persist in doing; that is we call our speech Aramaic, with great pride…but the writing we call “Assyrian”, mine)

Dr Joseph goes on to say that unlike the Assyrians, the Persians did not forget their own mother tongue so that they were able to resist arabization and that even though they borrowed from Arabic vocabulary and used the Arabic script, they Persianized what they borrowed and remain distinct to this day.

…finally:

“In the case of the Assyrians and other ethnicities aramization was total just as absorption of the various other people would be, centuries later, though arabization.”

I don’t know about the rest, but this has given me a lot to think and re-think…commentary later.

And we’ve barely reached page THIRTEEN!...alive.

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