PEOPLEthe Anbat were the Aramaic speaking peasants and townsmen of Iraqs
and were thereby usually distinguished from Persians, the primary
meaning of this term appears to convey a sendentary way of life rather
than a language group. By a natural extension, it also had agricultural
connotations.^6 Aramaeans were called Anbat because they appear to
have constituted most of the settled, agricultural population in both
the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.
The Aramaic-speaking population was concentrated in the agricul-
tural areas of Iraq, along the rivers and canals in the Sawad and along
the upper Tigris and its tributaries. Aramaeans were also an important
element in many of the larger towns and cities, where they mingled
with Persians and Arabs. Towns such as Kutha and Sura in the heart
of the Sawad were known as Aramaean centers'? The general popu-
lation of Mada'in seems to have been Aramaic-speaking in the Sa-
sanian period,8 and Aramaeans lived in cities such as Takrit and Na-
sibin. Aramaeans tended to be mixed with sedentary Arabs along the
Euphrates. Their population thinned out along the foothills of the
Zagros mountains in the uplands east of the Tigris, with the balance
shifting in favor of Persians and Kurds at the approximate geographical
limits of Iraq. The Aramaean presence east of the Tigris had been
reinforced in the Sasanian period by the settlement of nine thousand
deportees from Beth Zabhde at Dastagird and of ninety families from
Maysan at a village near Kirkuk by Shapiir 11,9
Such transfers tended to increase the ethnic mixture in Sasanian
Iraq, as did the settlement of imported lab or on the land. In the late
Sasanian period, Persian peasants from the plateau, Arabs, and Syrian
and Greek captives were resettled in different parts of Iraq as agri-
culturallabor. In such parts of Iraq, the dialect and even the language
might change from one village to the next. The nature of the ethnic-
religious mixture in the region between Kaskar and Khuzistan is in-
5 Mas'iidi, (Tanbth, p. 36) says that the Arabs called the Suryaniyyiin Nabat. Ibn
an-Nadim describes the Nabati dialect spoken by villagers as an incorrectly pronounced
form of Syriac; see The Fihrist of al-Nadtm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture,
ed. and tr. Bayard Dodge (New York, 1970), I, 22.
6 Nabati was used for Egyptian peasants in a papyrus of 710; see Grohmann, Arabic
Papyri, p. 129.
7 Qazwini, Athar al-bi/ad, Il, 301; Yaqiit, Buldan, Ill, 184; IV, 318.
B When Khalid was at Hira, he had a man from Hira called Murra write a letter to
the Persian notables at Mada'in, while Saliiba had a man named Hazqil write a letter
in Naba~ to the general population of Mada'in (Tabarl, Ta'rzkh, I, 2052-53).
9 Hoffmann, Persischer Miirtyrer, p. 49; P. Peeters, "La passion arabe de S. 'Abd AI-
Masih," AB 44 (1926),280-81.