Qedar

The Qedarites ( ar, قيدار, Qaydār) were a largely nomadic ancient Arab tribal confederation centred in the Wādī Sirḥān in the Syrian Desert. Attested from the 8th century BC, the Qedarites formed a powerful polity which expanded its territory over the course of the 8th to 5th centuries BC to cover a large area in northern Arabia stretching from the western borders of Babylonia to the eastern borders of Egypt.Stearns and Langer, 2001, p. 41.

The Qedarites played an important role in the history of the Levant and of North Arabia, where they enjoyed close relations with the nearby Canaanite and Aramaean states, and became important participants in the trade of spices and aromatics imported into the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean world from South Arabia. Having engaged in both friendly ties and hostilities with the Mesopotamian powers such as the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, the Qedarites eventually became integrated within the structure of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Closely associated with the Nabataeans, the Qedarites might have eventually been absorbed by them.

The Qedarites also feature within the scriptures of Abrahamic religions, where they appear in the Hebrew and Christian Bible and the Qurʾān as the eponymous descendants of /, the second son of / , himself the son of / . Within Islamic tradition, some scholars claim that the Islamic prophet Muhammad was descended from ʾIsmāʿīl through Qaydār.

Name

Assyrian records have transcribed in Neo-Assyrian Akkadian various variants of the name of the Qedar tribe under the forms of , , , , , , , and . In one Neo-Assyrian letter, the Qedarites are referred to as , reflecting the use of a voiced , similarly to the one used in the present-day Ḥijāzī dialect of Arabic.

The name of the Qedarites is recorded in Aramaic as () in Achaemenid and Hellenistic period ostraca found at Maresha.

In the Hebrew Bible as (; grc, Κηδάρ, translit=Kēdár), meaning "black" and "swarthy."

The Qedarites were also mentioned on Old South Arabian inscriptions as the ( or ).

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder referred to the Qedarites under the name of .

Geography

During the second half of the 9th century BC, the Qedarites were living to the east of Transjordan and to the south-east of Damascus, within the southwestern Syrian Desert in the region of the Wādī Sirḥān, more specifically in the Jauf depression in its eastern part, where was located the Qedarites' main centre of Adummatu. Adummatu's location halfway between Syria and Babylonia, as well as its richness in water and its orchards, which made it the most important oasis of all North Arabia and gave it the position of being a main stop on the roads which connected al-Ḥīra, Damascus and Yaṯrib.

At the time of the 7th century BC, the Qedarites had expanded eastwards so that their kingdom adjoined the western border of Babylonia, In the western Syrian Desert, the Qedarites adjoined the western section of the Fertile Crescent on the eastern border of the Levant, and before the conquest of Syria by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the neighbours of the Qedarite Arabs to the west were the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus and the Canaanite kingdoms of Ammon, Edom, Israel, and Moab. After the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed the Canaanite kingdoms of Ammon, Judah, and Moab, followed by the Persian Achaemenid's annexation of Babylonia, the Qedarites expanded westwards into the eastern and southern Levant until their territory included the northern Sinai and they controlled the desert region which bordered Palestine and the eastern border of Egypt and of the Nile Delta.

Identitfication

The Qedarites were an Arab tribal confederation who were closely related to the other ancient Arab populations of North Arabia and the Syrian Desert. Under the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian kings Aššur-aḫa-iddina and Aššur-bāni-apli, Assyrian records referred to the Qedarites as being almost synonymous with the Arabs as a whole.

Although the Assyriologists Friedrich Delitzsch, R.C. Thompson and Julius Lewy had identified the Qedarite tribe of the Šumuʾilu with the Biblical (Ishmaelites), and considered the Akkadian name as derivative of , the scholar Israel Ephʿal has criticised this identification on several grounds:
* Ephʿal's criticism of the identification on historical grounds rests on three arguments:
** the name only appears in Biblical sources relating to the period before the reign of the reign of the Israelite king David;
** the name "Arabs" starts appearing for the first time in Mesopotamian sources the middle of the 9th century BC;
** neither the Assyrian nor the Biblical sources ever identify or even connect the names "Arabs" and .
* Ephʿal's criticism of the identification on phonetic grounds rests on two arguments:
** the name is already attested in early Akkadian under the forms , and and in later Akkadian under the forms and ;
** likewise, the Hebrew form of Akkadian would have been () or () rather than ().

History

Neo-Assyrian period

During the 9th century BC, the Qedarite confederation was centred around the region of the Wādī Sirḥān, and it had commercial interests in the trade and border routes of the Syrian desert. To the west, the borderlands of the Qedarites bordered on the powerful kingdoms of Damascus and Israel in the west, although the Qedarites themselves were independent of Damascene hegemony. The earliest known activities of the Qedarites date from between 850 and 800 BC, when their king Gindibuʾ allied with his powerful neighbours, the kings Hadadezer of Aram-Damascus and ʾAḥʾāb of Israel, against the rising Neo-Assyrian Empire. Although Gindibuʾ's kingdom was not in danger of being attacked by the Assyrians, the Qedarite rulers participated in the trade which passed through Damascus and Tyre, and Damascus and Israel controlled crucial parts of the trade routes as well as the pastures and water sources which were of vital importance to the nomadic Qedarites, especially in drought periods. This meant that the rise of Assyrian power in the 9th century BCE put the desert and border routes where Gindibuʾ had economic interests under threat of Assyrian disruptions, fearing which Gindibuʾ led 1000 camelry troops at the battle of Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE on the side of the alliance led by Aram-Damascus and Israel against Šulmānu-ašarēdu III of Assyria.

Before the ascent of Assyrian hegemony, the Qedarite confederation was a polity of significant importance in the region of the Syrian Desert, and, beginning in the 8th and lasting until the 5th or 4th centuries BCE, the Qedarites were the hegemons among the Syrian Desert nomads, dominating the northwestern section of the Arabian peninsula in alliance with the local rulers of the kingdom of Dedan.

The alliance of Qarqar soon fell apart after Hadadezer of Damascus died and was succeeded by his son Ḥazaʾēl, who declared war on Israel and killed its king Yehōrām and the Judahite king ʾAḥazyāhū near Ramoth-Gilead in 842 BC; the consequent ascension of Yēhūʾ to the Israelite throne did not end the hostilities between Damascus and Israel. Despite this significant change, the Qedarites continued enjoying good relations with Damascus.

Šulmānu-ašarēdu III later campaigned to Damascus and Mount Ḥawrān in 841 BCE, but his inscriptions mentioned neither the Qedarite kingdom nor Gindibuʾ himself or any successor of his. The Qedarites were not mentioned either in the list of rulers, including those of distant places such as Philistia, Edom, and Israel, who paid tribute to Adad-nirari III after the latter's defeat of Bar-Hadad III of Damascus in 796 BCE. This reason for absence the Assyrian records is that the kingdom of Gindibuʾ was far from the campaign routes of the Assyrians during the later 9th century BCE.

Following the rise in the Armenian highlands of the form of the kingdom of Urartu, which, just like Assyria, was interested in the rich states of northern Syria, in 743 BC the Assyrian king Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III started a series of campaigns in Syria which would result in this region's absorption into the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and whose first phase was the defeat in that very year of an alliance consisting of Urartu and the Aramaean states of Melid, Gurgum, Kummuḫ, Bēt-Gūš, and ʿUmqi, after which he besieged Arpad, the capital of Bēt-Gūš, which was Urartu's principal ally, for two years before capturing it. While Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III was campaigning against Urartu in 739 BC, the Levantine states formed a new alliance, headed the king ʿAzriyau of Ḥamat, and including various Phoenician cities ranging from Arqa to Ṣumur and multiple Aramaean states from Śamʾal in the north to Ḥamat in the south, which was defeated by Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III in 738 BC.

After this triumph of Assyrian hegemony in the western Fertile Crescent, the rulers of Damascus, Tyre and Israel accepted Assyrian overlordship and paid tribute to Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III. Since the Qedarite rulers participated in the trade which passed through Damascus and Tyre, they sought to preserve the Arabian commercial activities and the revenues that they acquired from these, and consequently the Qedarite queen Zabibe joined the kings Raḍyān of Damascus, Menaḥēm of Israel, Ḥirōm II of Tyre, as well as other various rulers from southern Anatolia, Syria and Phoenicia in acknowledging Assyrian hegemony and paying tribute to Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III in 738 BC. The tribute of Zabibe consisted of camels, but did not include frankincense or perfumes as the Qedarites would later offer the Assyrians because they had not yet become participants in the trade of aromatics produced in South Arabia. Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III's inscriptions recording this tribute payment constitutes the first explicit mention of the Qedarites by name.

During the 8th century itself, the North Arabian region acquired increased economic importance, with the northern Ḥijāz becoming a transit zone for the trade of goods imported from ʿAsīr and from Africa across the Red Sea. This, in turn, led to increasing interest to control this region by the Assyrians.

Once Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III had returned to Assyria, the king Raḍyān of Damascus organised an anti-Assyrian alliance in Syria which was supported by Peqaḥ of Israel and Ḥirōm II of Tyre, and which started a revolt against Assyrian hegemony by the cities on the coast of the Levant. Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III retaliated by campaigning in 734 BC against the southern Levantine coast until the Brook of Egypt and successfully managed to establish control over the commercial activities between the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Philistines. Among the many rulers in the western Fertile Crescent who pledged allegiance to Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III as result of this campaign in Palestine was the Qedarite queen Šamsi.

Tukultī-apil-Ešarra III's campaign had not only disrupted the interests of Tyre, Damascus, Israel and the Qedarites but also resulted in the formation of a pro-Assyrian alliance consisting of Arwad