앗시리아 기록에 나타난 고대 오리엔트 아람인의 초기 역사

Abstract

The Ancient Orient in the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, especially the time span of 1200-900 BCE, used to be called the “Dark Age.” One of major factors related with this Dark Age in the late second millennium BCE is the early Aramaeans. With “sea-peoples,” Aramaeans have been pointed out as the main cause of political collapse in the Near East of the Late Bronze Age, but the origins of the Aramaeans and the nature of their emergence from the Ancient Orient were not argued confidently by scholars. Though they established some of powerful Syro-Hittite kingdoms which included Canaanite, Luwian, Hurrian, Hattian, and Aramaic kingdoms, they failed to form an empire embracing the entire Near East. Aramaic, their language, however, became lingua franca of the Orient. In this paper, I try to find the early stage of their history and the nature of their ‘takeover’ in Syria and upper and lower Mesopotamia in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, through examining the Aramaeans in the early historical texts, mainly the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. Politically and regionally, during the Dark Age, Assyria declined and gave the Aramaeans a chance to take broad regions and to have relatively free political state. They were a prominent hostile protagonist to Assyria, they had many military conflicts with the Assyrians mainly in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, and eventually they could penetrate the heart land of Assyria. Therefore the Aramaeans in its early historical stage possessed vast areas in the Near East and some strong military forces but they seemed not to be well organized in politics and military matters. Economically and ethnically, the Aramaeans seemed not to be economic-oriented people. They would not manage cedar which was one of the major trading goods of that time, and they reacted as raids when they faced famines. Famines during the Dark Age were caused by the decrease of rainfall during roughly 1200 and 900 BCE, and they were reasons for the disastrous nomad invasions in Assyria and Babylonia. However, we can state that the Aramaeans as raiders and/or infiltrators could not accumulate their wealth effectively even after they had possessed fertile areas. Various tribal names – Aramaeans bore several specific and tribal names – also suggest that, from the persistent famines, some of the exploited and impoverished among the sedentists might come to be bandits and to revolt against the ruler(s) cooperating with the Aramaeans. Later, the Aramaeans became a major ethnic group of the Near East, and their language, Aramaic became lingua franca, substituting Akkadian language.