provide us with a basic chronological framework on Assyrian conquests from one
ruler to the next (Fales 1999 – 2001 ); and are particularly precious for us – despite a
high degree of rhetorical exaggerations and ideological–propagandistic biases in the
narration – for the indication of peoples and places involved in the kings’ repeated
attempts to subjugate and rule the Babylonian region. The second source group, on
the contrary, was not intended for public presentation and judgement: it is constituted
by ‘everyday’ written materials of the Assyrian court, from administrative or legal
documents to letters sent by the officials to the royal palace, which present casual
and random, but decidedly more trustworthy, information on people and places
marking the Assyrian military and political thrusts in Babylonia (Fales 2001 ). Such
‘everyday’ information finds also copious and useful parallels in the similar documents
that were written down in the Babylonian cities themselves, albeit in the local (Neo-
Babylonian) dialect (Cole 1996 a, b).
The historical origins of the Arameans and Chaldeans on the lower Tigris and
Euphrates alluvium are still relatively unclear (Brinkman 1968 , 1984 ; Lipinski 2000 ).
Aramean tribal groups are most prominently attested from the eleventh century BC
onward as new occupants of strategic areas (and perhaps of pre-existing fortified
settlements) throughout the northern Mesopotamian and Syrian steppe – the so-called
Jezirah – from where they would oppose until c. 850 BCthe Assyrian military thrust
towards the Euphrates fords and thence westward into the Transeuphratene and the
Levant. In parallel, official Babylonian texts indicate that tribal groups variously
labelled as ‘Arameans’ or ‘Suteans’ (a traditional designation for West Semitic nomads)
carried out the looting of Sippar and other cities in the northern alluvial plain in
different moments of the eleventh and tenth centuries. At roughly the same time,
even the Assyrian main cities on the upper and middle Tigris had been menaced by
Aramean marauders; the strong Assyrian armed reaction which ensued during the
late tenth–early ninth centuries could have forced the tribal groups to migrate down-
stream (Lipinski 2000 ), where they occupied land from the Tigris riverbank to the
nearby Euphrates near Sippar, and especially in the vast south-eastern plain between
the Tigris and Elam. There are, however, other theoretical reconstructions of this
scenario, e.g. linking the Aramean takeover of the lower Tigris reaches directly to
the plundering actions of the eleventh century (Brinkman 1968 : 281 – 283 ). And even
long-term connections between these southern Arameans and the middle Euphrates
area cannot be ruled out entirely, as in the case of the H
̆
at.allu tribe, which is mentioned
in the annals of the philo-Babylonian rulers of Suh
̆
u around 770 / 760 BC, and reappears,
with some of its sub-groups, in the long list (Tadmor 1994 : 158 – 161 ) summarizing
the names of the Aramean tribes defeated by Tiglath-pileser III ( 745 – 722 BC).
In any case, for the mid-to-late eighth century, when the Arameans in the lower
Tigris catchment area are most clearly attested as objects of intense Assyrian military
pressure, we may recognize almost 40 distinct names of medium- to small-sized tribal
entities, some of which were further fragmented under the leadership of different
‘sheikhs’ (nasiku). Since the late eighth century also witnessed an unexpected but
short-lived occupation of the Assyrian-ruled territory of the Central Mesopotamia
steppe by camel-raising tribes of ‘Arabs’ (Arubu), as described in anxious terms by
Assyrian officials to king Sargon II in a series of letters (Fales 1989 ), it is not to be
entirely ruled out – following older theories – that some intermingling of these Arabs
with the southern Arameans could have taken place: certainly a few traits in the tribal
— Arameans and Chaldeans —