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Updated: June 28, 2025
In my last chapter I have told you of the language of the intelligent Aramaean traders which spread throughout western Asia, as an international means of communication. The language of the Phoenicians was never very popular among their neighbors. Except for a very few words we do not know what sort of tongue it was.
It is in reality the history of civilization among the Mediterranean nations; and, as it passes before us in its successive stages, it presents four great phases of development the history of the Coptic or Egyptian stock dwelling on the southern shore, the history of the Aramaean or Syrian nation which occupied the east coast and extended into the interior of Asia as far as the Euphrates and Tigris, and the histories of the twin-peoples, the Hellenes and Italians, who received as their heritage the countries on the European shore.
The cairn continued to bear a double name, the Aramaean name given to it by Laban, and the Canaanitish name of Galeed, "the heap of witnesses," by which it was called by Jacob. The double name was a sign of the two populations and languages which the cairn separated from one another.
The Libyan or Numidian alphabet, by which we mean that which was and is employed by the Berbers in writing their non-Semitic language one of the innumerable alphabets derived from the primitive Aramaean one certainly appears to be more closely related in several of its forms to the latter than is the Phoenician alphabet; but it by no means follows from this, that the Libyans derived their writing not from Phoenicians but from earlier immigrants, any more than the partially older forms of the Italian alphabets prohibit us from deriving these from the Greek.
A notable victory, won at Karkar on the Middle Orontes over an army which included contingents from most of the south Semitic states one came, for example, from Israel, where Ahab was now king, opened a way towards the Aramaean capital; but it was not till twelve years later that the Great King actually attacked Damascus.
Laban, his father-in-law, robbed at once of his daughters and his household gods, is pursuing him, and has overtaken him on the spurs of Mount Gilead, almost within sight of his goal. There a covenant is made between the Aramaean and the Hebrew, and a cairn of stones is piled up to commemorate the fact.
Two basaltic lions, which the Great King then set up on each side of its Mesopotamian gate and inscribed with commemorative texts, have recently been found near Tell Ahmar, the modern hamlet which has succeeded the royal city. This measure marked Assyria's definite annexation of the lands in Mesopotamia, which had been under Aramaean government for at least a century and a half.
Since the withdrawal of the strong hands of the Hatti from the north and the Egyptians from the south, the disorganized half-vacant land had been attracting to itself successive hordes of half-nomadic Semites from the eastern and southern steppes. By 1000 B.C. these had settled down as a number of Aramaean societies each under its princeling. All were great traders.
The upper scene engraved upon the stele represents Abbâ and his wife in the presence of Osiris, who is attended by Isis and Nephthys; and in the lower panel is the funeral scene, in which all the mourners with one exception are Asiatics. Certain details of the rites that are represented, and mistakes in the hieroglyphic version of the text, prove that the work is Aramaean throughout.
This remarkable nation has often been confounded with its eastern neighbours, the wandering Arabs, but it is more closely related to the Aramaean branch than to the proper children of Ishmael.
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