Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [36]
The answer lies in an unexpected effect of Assyrian military policy.
We have already noted the first hostile contacts between the Aramaean nomads and the Assyrians, at the end of the twelfth century. The Aramaeans, coming in from the wilderness of northern Syria, were able, presumably by force of arms, to settle all over the inhabited parts of that country. They did not limit themselves to the area of Damascus, but spread out north, south and, significantly, to the east. The whole area of the upper reaches of the Euphrates between the rivers Balikh and Khabur became known as Aram Naharaim, ‘Aram of the Rivers’. Their progress southward towards Babylon was steady: they smashed the temple of Shamash in Sippar in the middle of the eleventh century, and by the early tenth century were sufficiently settled around Babylon to cut it off from its suburb Barsippa, and so prevent the proper celebration of New Year Festival, which required the idols of Marduk and Nabu to process to and from Babylon. Meanwhile, in the north, Assyrian resistance proved equally unable to stop their advance, and by the beginning of the ninth century they were on the banks of the Tigris itself.
The first successful resistance came from the Assyrian king Adad-niršri (911-891 BC), who drove the Aramaeans out of the Tigris valley and the Kashiari mountains to the north. Thereafter, the Assyrian kings began a policy of annual campaigns against one or other of their neighbours, a policy of unrestrained aggression which lasted over 150 years, pausing only when the aggression turned inward, during the major civil wars of 827-811 and 754-745. Within a hundred years the whole Fertile Crescent was under their control, together with southern Anatolia as far as Tarsus, and large swathes of Elam in the east. Farther afield, they undertook a punitive expedition deep into Urartu (eastern Anatolia) and even a brief, but unsustainable, invasion of Egypt.
Truly these were glory days for Assyria, but that seems to have been the sole point of these wars: after a victory, a ruinous demand for tribute was imposed on the defeated city or tribe. There is no evidence, in Assyrian business correspondence or the archaeological record, of any subsequent attempt to spread Assyrian culture thereafter, or even to establish the ruling caste on a wider basis. Wealth was transferred one way, and at the point of a sword. From Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727) to Sennacherib (704-681), a new tactic was added: vast numbers of the conquered populations were led off to some other distant part of the empire. Estimates attribute thirty-seven deportations to Tiglath-Pileser III (totalling 368,543 people), thirty-eight to Sargon II (totalling 217,635), twenty to Sennacherib (totalling 408,150). All in all, the Assyrians claimed to have displaced some 4.5 million persons over three centuries.25
A majority of these deportations would have involved Aramaic speakers, although the most famous, carried out by Sargon II against Samaria, capital of Israel, in 721 BC, probably involved speakers of Hebrew:
At the beginning of my rule, I took the town of the Samarians for the god … who let me achieve this triumph. I led away as prisoners 27,290 inhabitants of it and equipped from among them soldiers to man 50 chariots for my royal corps …The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered. I placed an officer of mine as governor over them and imposed upon them tribute as for Assyrian citizens.26
The Hebrew scriptures (2 Kings xvii.6, 24) give more details of where the Israelite exiles were sent (including Aram Naharaim on the Khabur river, and the north-eastern extremity of