ARAMAEANSFinally, due account must be taken of the attitudes of Aramaeans
and Arabs towards each other. On their side, the Aramaeans, as rep-
resentatives of a sedentary, orderly, agricultural population, reacted
somewhat unfavorably to what was felt to be an impetuosity or ex-
citability on the part of Arabs. This attitude and the stereotype it
involved is well illustrated in the case of an Arab monk from Hira
named Mar Eliyya who lived at the Nestorian monastery on Mt.
Izla above Nasibin in the late sixth century. The monastic chronicler
who described Rabban Eliyya's energetic response to a crisis in the
community found it necessary to explain that the possessed the "vi-
olent character of the bedouin."56 Such attitudes survived the conquest
and were expressed as a feeling of superiority on the part of the Anbat
over Arabs because of the achievements of the Babylonians, the an-
tiquity and spread of their civilization, the flourishing of agriculture,
and their acceptance of Islam without having a prophet appear amongst
them.^57
For their part, Arabs tended to stereotype Aramaeans as arrogant
people who identified themselves by their place of origin instead of
by a tribal genealogy. Arabs looked down on them as people who had
lost their power and independence first to Persian and then to Arab
rulers. According to Mas'udI, the Anbat were inferior to Arabs be-
cause the latter were granted a prophet and the former were not.^58
However, a better indication of the awareness by seventh-century
Arabs of the difference between themselves and the Aramaeans is the
description of Sa'd ibn AbI Waqqa~ given by 'Amr ibn Ma'dlkarib
to the caliph 'Umar: "In his love of dates, he is an Arab; in his
collection of taxes, he is a NabatI."59
The survival of a more or less intact Aramaean population in Iraq
meant the continuation of pre-Islamic agricultural and irrigation prac-
tices and the transmission of these practices to Muslims through such
people as J:lassan an-NabatI and the grandsons of Saluba. The con-
tinuing Aramaean ethnic vitality is demonstrated by the way in which
both Persians and Arabs who settled on the land tended to be assim-
ilated to them and to be Aramaicized and by the strength of Aramaic
waterwork called Qanat Hassan in the swamps, and a village called Qaryat Hassan at
Wasit.
56 Scher, "Histoire nestorienne," II(2), 446. See also Thomas of Margha, Governors,
I, 29; II, 54.
57 Mas'iidI, Muruj, II, 169-70.
58 Ibid., II, 170-71; Tha'iilibi, Latii'i(, p. 185.
- Baladhuri, Futu~, p. 279.