Ancient Chaldean People

Chaldea () was a small country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BCE, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into the indigenous population of Babylonia. Semitic-speaking, it was located in the marshy land of the far southeastern corner of Mesopotamia and briefly came to rule Babylon. The Hebrew Bible, although there is some dispute as to whether ''Kasdim'' in fact means ''Chaldean'' or refers to the south Mesopotamian ''Kaldu''.

During a period of weakness in the East Semitic-speaking kingdom of Babylonia, new tribes of West Semitic between the 11th and 9th centuries BCE. The earliest waves consisted of Suteans and Arameans, followed a century or so later by the Kaldu, a group who became known later as the Chaldeans or the Chaldees. These migrations did not affect the powerful kingdom and empire of Assyria in Upper Mesopotamia, which repelled these incursions.

These nomadic Chaldeans settled in the far southeastern portion of Babylonia, chiefly on the left bank of the Euphrates. Though for a short time the name commonly referred to the whole of southern Mesopotamia in Hebraic literature, this was a geographical and historical misnomer as Chaldea proper was in fact only the plain in the far southeast formed by the deposits of the Euphrates and the Tigris, extending about along the course of these rivers and averaging about in width.
There were several kings of Chaldean origins who ruled Babylonia. From 626 BCE to 539 BCE, a ruling family referred to as the Chaldean dynasty, named after their possible Chaldean origin, ruled the kingdom at its height under the Neo-Babylonian Empire, although the final ruler of this empire, Nabonidus (556–539 BCE) (and his son and regent Belshazzar) was a usurper of Assyrian ancestry.

Name

The name ''Chaldaea'' is a latinization of the Greek ' (), a hellenization of Akkadian ' or '. The name appears in Hebrew in the Bible as ' () and in Aramaic as ' ().

The Hebrew word possibly appears in the Bible (Book of Genesis 22:22) in the name "Kesed"(כשד), the singular form of "Kasdim"(כַּשְׂדִּים), meaning Chaldeans. Kesed is identified as son of Abraham's brother Nahor (and brother of Kemuel the father of Aram), residing in Aram Naharaim. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 – c. 100) also links Arphaxad and Chaldaea, in his Antiquities of the Jews, stating, “Arphaxad named the Arphaxadites, who are now called Chaldeans.”

Land

In the early period, between the early 9th century and late 7th century BCE, ''mat Kaldi'' was the name of a small sporadically independent migrant-founded territory under the domination of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BCE) in southeastern Babylonia, extending to the western shores of the Persian Gulf.

The expression '' mat Bit Yâkin'' is also used, apparently synonymously. ''Bit Yâkin'' was the name of the largest and most powerful of the five tribes of the Chaldeans, or equivalently, their territory.
The original extension of ''Bit Yâkin'' is not known precisely, but it extended from the lower Tigris into the Arabian Peninsula. Sargon II mentions it as extending as far as Dilmun or "sea-land" (littoral Eastern Arabia). "Chaldea" or ''mat Kaldi'' generally referred to the low, marshy, alluvial land around the estuaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, which at the time discharged their waters through separate mouths into the sea.

The tribal capital ''Dur Yâkin'' was the original seat of Marduk-Baladan.

The king of Chaldea was also called the king of Bit Yakin, just as the kings of Babylonia and Assyria were regularly styled simply king of Babylon or Assur, the capital city in each case. In the same way, what is now known as the Persian Gulf was sometimes called "the Sea of Bit Yakin", and sometimes "the Sea of the Land of Chaldea".

"Chaldea" came to be used in a wider sense, of Mesopotamia in general, following the ascendancy of the Chaldeans during 608–557 BCE. This is especially the case in the Hebrew Bible