Archaeology and Material Culture of Aram and the Arameans

At the end of the second millennium bce, the geographical term “Aram” appears for the first time in the annals of the Middle Assyrian kings and in connection with the ahlammû or ahlammu Arameans (or Aramaeans). At that time, the ahlammu Arameans were considered nomadic tribes who lived in the area between the Khabur and the Middle Euphrates, where they constituted a serious threat to the cultivated land and the Assyrian state. From the ninth century bce on, when the Aramean tribes had already spread to other parts of Syria as far as Mount Lebanon, it was more common to refer to the “Land of Aram” as the geographic designation for a large area that included several different ethnolinguistic population groups. The term is used by the Assyrians and in the Hebrew Bible, but only very rarely in local Aramaic written sources. Therefore, it is important to stress that Aram was mostly a foreign-constructed term that local dynasts adopted only in a few cases for political or territorial self-expression. Despite the fact that the Aramaic language, which includes several subdialects, gradually developed from the ninth to the seventh century bce, there is no reason to assume an Aramean political or cultural identity for this period. This is confirmed by the material culture, which definitely shows no distinction between territories and states dominated by Aramaic-speaking population groups and others, such as the so-called Luwian states. Hence, reviewing the archaeology and material culture of Aram and the Arameans in this article calls for caution about any ethnic ascriptions. In fact, the Aramean states of the first half of the first millennium bce, like Bīt Bahiani/Guzana, Huzirina, Bīt Adīni, Bīt Agusi, Sam’al-Ya’udi, Hamat/Lu’aš, and Damascus-Aram, were individually shaped political units with a strong sense of urban identity. They developed and interacted within the larger Syrian koine that emerged based on common cultural traditions and that continuously transformed its image until it was fully integrated into the Neo-Assyrian state. In this context, it is rather illuminating to investigate the cultural layout of a single state in order to depart from the fallacious idea of a conscious Aramean identity.