Draft:Beth Aramaye

<mapframe latitude="32.5" longitude="44.5" zoom="5" text="Beth Aramaye situtated in central Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq." aramaye="" in="" central="" mesopotamia="" width="400" height="300" align="right" />Beth Aramaye (Classical Syriac: ܒܝܬ ܐܪܡܝܐ, Bêṯ Arāmāyē, “Land of the Arameans”) was the name for a historical region and, most notably, the central metropolitan province of the Church of the East. It was situated in Central Mesopotamia, which corresponds to the central and southern parts of present-day Iraq. For centuries, it was the main region of Aramaic-speaking Christianity.

Name

The name Beth Aramaye is the Syriac equivalent of the Aramaic Bīt Aramāyē, meaning "Land of the Aramaeans.” The name shows that Aramean communities and Aramaic speakers made up a significant demographic group in the area. Syriac texts call the people of this region Ārāmāye (Arameans), a term that is carefully set apart from Armāye (pagans). An individual from the region was called an Ārāmāyā. This geographical identifier coexisted with the broader use of the term to describe the Aramaic language and people overall.

In Syriac church usage, Beth Aramaye specifically referred to the Aramaic-speaking heartland of the Sassanid Empire, however, Beth Aramaye would also refer to the core of Assyria. The name appears often in Syriac documents, including synodical acts and martyr accounts. After the Arab Muslim conquest, the name continued to be used in Syriac church contexts but was gradually replaced in civil administration by new divisions like the provinces of Kaskar and Wāsiṭ.

The scholar J.M Fiey argued that the terms ''Assyrian'' and ''Syrian'' were primiarly religious terms meaning ''Christian'' which later became synonyms for ''Aramaean''. Fiey pointed to the fact that the region of Beth Aramaye was later referred to as Suristan or Athorestan (Assyria) as evidence. Fiey further noted that despite these political terminolgical changes, Syriac Christians consistently used ''Beth Aramaye'' for Babylonia and reserved ''Athor'' for classical Assyria.  He saw an important morphological distinction: ’’Beth Aramaye’’ described a region based on its contemporary ethic population (The place of the Aramaeans), while ’’Athor'’ (Assyria) was a historical name referring back to ancient Assur. The absence of a hypothetical ’’Beth Athoraye’’ suggests that ’’Athor’’ did not describe a living ethnic entity in the same way. This explain a long standing confusion of Āsōristān with Assyria, a conflation first attested in Ammanianus Marcellinus and prevelant among scholars until recently.

Geography

Beth Aramaye was situated in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The province contained numerous bishoprics, detailed in ecclesiastical lists like the "Book of Chastity”. The Church of the East set up its territory as the metropolitan province of Béth Aramaye, which relied on the patriarchal see at Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

History

Between the 7th and 14th centuries, the Christian presence in Beth Aramaye encompassing the ecclesiastical provinces of Maishan, Beth Aramaye, and Beth Garmaï drastically diminished. This decline is clearly reflected in the consolidation of church dioceses. The patriarchal province of Beth Aramaye, for instance, shrank from twelve dioceses in the 11th century to just three northern ones by the 14th. Under the patriarchal see of Beth Aramaye were a number of bishoprics, such as Kashkar, Hirta, Beth Dare, Zawabi, Firuz Shapur and potentially Tirana.

The patriarchal province of Beth Aramaye contained twelve dioceses at the start of the eighth century, a number that had dwindled to only three by the 1300s. By the close of the ninth century, the church of the East maintained a significant network of dioceses, with at least twenty-five locked in southern and central Iraq, situated in Beṯ Garmaï, Beṯ Aramāyē and Maishān, and another twenty-nine spreed across southern, central and eastern Persia.

Population

The demographic makeup of the region was predominantly Arameans, who, alongside the Jews, spoke the Eastern dialect of Aramaic.

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