Syria

The Akkadian name of the Arameans, Aramu (also Arumu), in the Assyrian and Babylonian records that first document them. From the late twelfth century the Assyrian kings report fighting the Aḫlamû-Aramu, the Aramean nomads pressing across the Euphrates, and over the following centuries the Aramean polities of inland Syria become Assyria’s chief western antagonists and then its provinces.

The Akkadian form anchors the Aram name in the second millennium, earlier than the Hebrew or the Aramaic inscriptions, and from the side of the power that fought the Arameans rather than from the Arameans themselves. It is the eastern attestation of the same endonym, Aramu in cuneiform answering Aram in the Aramaic alphabet, the two scripts recording one people from opposite banks of the Euphrates. The Assyrians named the Arameans as enemies long before the Greeks renamed their land as Syria.

The Hebrew name of Syria, Ărām, both an eponymous ancestor in the table of nations (a son of Shem, Genesis 10) and the collective name of the Aramean states that ringed Israel: Ăram-Dammeśeq, Aram of Damascus; Ăram-Ṣōḇāh; Ăram-Naharáyim, “Aram of the two rivers,” in the northeast. In the historical books the Arameans are Israel’s constant northern neighbors and rivals, and Ărām is the land and people of the wars of David and the Omrides.

Ărām is the Semitic insider’s name for the region, the one its own Aramaic-speaking inhabitants used, against the Greek Syría that the outside world would impose. The two names are not variants of each other but rival designations from opposite directions, and the Hebrew preserves the older, native one. It is the same Aram that the people themselves carved on the Tel Dan and Sefire stelae, the endonym of a region the classical world chose to rename.

The Arameans’ own name for their land and people, Aram, in the Aramaic of their early inscriptions. It stands at the head of the Sefire treaties, the diplomatic texts of an Aramean kingdom of the eighth century, and the kings of Damascus style themselves rulers of Aram on monuments like the Tel Dan stele. These are the same Aramaic forms that the project’s later Aramaic registers continue.

This is the endonym in the strict sense, the name in the very language whose spread across the Near East gave the region its lasting cultural character. While the Greeks would call the land Syría and tie it to Assyria, the Arameans named themselves Aram and asked no one’s leave; and it was their language, not their political independence, that prevailed, becoming the chancellery tongue from Egypt to Persia. The people the world renamed nonetheless gave that world its common speech.

The Greek name of the region, Syría, the term by which the classical and modern world knows the land its own people called Aram. Its origin is one of the celebrated problems of ancient onomastics, and Herodotus states the connection outright: the people “whom the Greeks call Syrians are called Assyrians by the barbarians” (7.63). Syría appears to be a clipped form of Assyría, the name of the Mesopotamian empire loosely thrown by the Greeks over the whole territory it had ruled, then narrowed to the Aramean west when Assyria itself was gone.

The identification, long debated, was put on firm ground by the Çineköy inscription, an eighth-century Luwian-Phoenician bilingual in which the Luwian Sura/i corresponds to Phoenician ʾŠR, Ashur: a single name, Assyria, appearing in a short and a long form side by side. So the name the West settled on for the land is, in the end, the name of its eastern conqueror worn smooth, applied by outsiders who did not distinguish the Arameans from the empire that had swallowed them. The endonym Aram and the exonym Syria are not two versions of one word but two different histories of being named.

The Latin name of the region, Syria, taken from the Greek and made the name of a Roman province after Pompey’s annexation in 64 BCE. For Rome Syria was a great eastern command, its capital Antioch one of the empire’s largest cities, and the administrative name fixed the Greek form permanently in the West.

Through Latin the Greek Syría passed into the European languages as the standard name of the land, the Aramean Aram surviving only in scripture and scholarship. The Roman province also generated the compound that names the region’s southern end, Syria Palaestina, the form in which the Philistine coastal name was widened to the whole country. Syria is thus the conduit by which a worn-down echo of Assyria became the world’s ordinary word for the land of the Arameans.

The Syriac name of the region, Sūryā, and the related Sūryāyā, “Syrian,” the term the Aramaic-speaking Christians of late antiquity adopted for themselves and their land. The form is taken from the Greek Syría, not from the native Aram, and its adoption is itself a small historical irony: a people speaking a direct descendant of Aramaic came to call themselves by the Greek exonym rather than the Semitic endonym of their ancestors.

The choice carried theological freight. Some Syriac writers explained Sūryāyā as distinct from the older Ārāmāyā, “Aramean,” which had taken on the sense of “pagan”; the Greek-derived Sūryā let Christian Aramaic-speakers name themselves without the heathen overtone the native word had acquired. So even the language closest to the region’s own ancient speech reached past Aram for the Syría of the outside world, and the exonym completed its conquest of the endonym from the inside.

The Arabic name of greater Syria, al-Shām, from a root meaning “the left hand” and so “the north”: to an observer in the Hejaz facing the rising sun, Syria lay on the left, as Yemen, al-Yaman, “the right hand,” lay to the south. The name covers the whole Levant from the Taurus to the Sinai, and Damascus, its chief city, is Dimashq al-Shām or simply al-Shām itself.

al-Shām is a third, independent naming of the region, owing nothing to either Aram or Syría: where the Semitic endonym named the people and the Greek exonym borrowed from Assyria, the Arabic names the land by direction, its place on the left hand of the Arabian world. The region thus carries three unrelated names from three eras, an ethnic one from its own people, an imperial one from its eastern neighbor by way of Greece, and a directional one from the desert to its south, none of which agrees with the others on what the place should be called.