The Babylonian World (Routledge Worlds)

CHAPTER TWENTY

ARAMEANS

AND CHALDEANS

Environment and society



Frederick Mario Fales

At that time, the road of yore for going to Babylon, the cult-center of (Marduk), the Enlil

of the gods, was not open; and the track was impassable. The country was a desert, where

passage had long since become very arduous. The way was choked and without paths;

where thorns, thistles, and scrub brush had taken over, it was impossible to go through.

Lions and jackals roamed there in packs and frisked about like lambs... In that desert

terrain, Aramean and Suteans – tent-dwellers, fugitives, thieves, and robbers – had come

to dwell and made its road desolate. Long since, the settlements had fallen into ruin; on

their (once) watered land, there were neither irrigation dikes nor furrows, and spiders spun

their webs. Their flourishing meadows had lapsed from cultivation, their (formerly) irrigated

land had been deprived of the sweet harvest song, and grain was cut off.

Royal inscription of Sargon II, first edited by

C. J. Gadd, Iraq 18 [ 1954 ], 192 : vii 45 – 68

INTRODUCTION: THE SOURCES AND THE

GENERAL HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

T

erritorial divisions and their wider implications – i.e. in which areas people live,
what economic resources they have at their disposal, and how their territorial
particularities affect their society and culture in general – still play a fundamental
role in the history of Iraq at present, as may be deduced from the daily chronicles of
war and peace of the last few years. It thus seems particularly fitting, within the
framework of an overall investigation on ancient Babylonia, to draw attention to a
specific case-study in environmental and social history together, such as is repre-
sented by the tribally based Arameans and Chaldeans of the first half of the first
millennium BC.
Historical information on these two population groups, which inhabited adjacent
areas of the alluvial plain between the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, is
available from two specific sets of sources in cuneiform discovered in the Assyrian
capital cities Nineveh and Kalh
̆

u. The first set is represented by official sources of
historiographic scope (chronicles and royal inscriptions). Specifically, the Assyrian
royal inscriptions, which were couched in a literary language with epical overtones,