Wiktionary
n. (plural of Aramean English)
Wikipedia
The Arameans, or Aramaeans, (,) were an ancient Northwest Semitic Aramaic-speaking tribal confederacy who emerged from the Syrian desert in the Late Bronze Age and occupied the region known as Aram from the 11th-8th centuries BC. They established a patchwork of independent Aramaic kingdoms in the Levant and seized large tracts of Mesopotamia.
The Western Aramaic language of the Arameans has been in steady decline in the face of Arabic since the Arab Islamic conquest of the 7th century AD, and the last vestige in and around Maalula is in danger of extinction, although Aramean personal and family names and identity are still found among the Syriac Christians in The Levant.
The Arameans never had a unified nation; they were divided into small independent kingdoms across parts of the Near East, particularly in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the north western Arabian peninsula and south central Turkey. Their political influence was confined to a number of states such as Aram Damascus and the partly Aramean Syro-Hittite states, which were entirely absorbed into the Neo-Babylonian Empire by the 9th century BC. In the New Babylonian, or Chaldean, empire, Chaldeans, Aramaeans, and Babylonians became largely indistinguishable.
By contrast, Imperial Aramaic came to be the lingua franca of the entire Near East and Asia Minor when introduced as the official language of the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire by Tiglath-pileser III in the mid-8th century BC. This empire stretched from Cyprus and the East Mediterranean in the west to Persia and Elam in the east, and from Armenia and the Caucasus in the north to Egypt and Arabia in the south. This version of Aramaic later developed in Mesopotamia into the literary languages such as Syriac and Mandaic.
Usage examples of "arameans".
The Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty centuries.
This, of course, is entirely wrong, Ear the Canaanites, if we go by linguistic divisions, were as Semitic as the Israelites, the Arameans, the Babylonians, and the Arabs.
From the Arameans, who first settled in the area now known as Syria, came the Aramaic language, in which some passages of the Old Testament are written.
For a time Assyria expanded, but eventually it fell into stagnation and merely defended itself against the nomads from the south, the Arameans.