|
Gan Dunias
 Ancient
Syria was much larger than
its modern counterpart, being bordered by the Taurus Mountains in the north,
the Upper Euphrates to the north-east, and the Syrian Desert to the
south-east. The name is Greek, which they used to describe various
Assyrian peoples.
Amorites began to
arrive in the territory to the west of the Euphrates, within modern
Syria, from around
2500 BC. The Akkadians called them Amurru, and groups of them drifted
down into Sumer where
they eventually replaced the Sumerians as rulers in
Mesopotamia. By
the first part of the second millennium BC, most of the Syrian peoples
spoke Semitic dialects, but in the northern areas of Syria there is also
evidence of non-Semitic
Hurrian, a fairly obscure
population group.
In first millennium BC Syria, following its recovery, two-or-so centuries
after the collapse of the international system and the
Hittite
empire which dominated much of Syria, there existed a great many cities and
large towns of all sizes. Not all of them are well recorded, with some being
little more than footnotes on lists of conquests. Today there exist a great
many tells, or mounds, which contain the archaeological remnants of those
cities and towns. Many of these locations were never home to any kingship,
while others may have flourished under such rule for only a brief period
of time, and with even briefer mentions of the names and details of their
rulers.
Gan Dunias (or Kar-Dunias) is just such a city. Apparently a short-lived
state it flourished in the ninth century BC, being conquered by the
Assyrians
in the middle of the century. At present the name cannot be matched up
to a specific tell, although there is the possibility that it has closer
links to
Babylonia
than it does to Syria. It was probably either
Akkadian or
Aramaean, although the
confused ethnic make-up of Babylonia at this time could add Kassite,
Chaldaean, or Arab influences into this mix. If it is not to be equated
with Babylonia itself then it may be of many still-unlocated cities in
modern Syria.
(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from the
Columbia Encyclopaedia, Sixth Edition (2010), from the
Britannica Concise Encyclopaedia (2010), from Historical Atlas
of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Haywood (Barnes &
Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie
Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Volumes I & II), from The Penguin Atlas
of Ancient History, Colon McEvedy (Penguin Books, 1967, revised
2002), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near
East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia:
Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1),
Enrico Ascalone (University of California Press, 2007), from The
Cambridge Ancient History, Iorwerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards
(Cambridge University Press, 1973), from A History of the Ancient
Near East c.3000-323 BC, Marc van der Mieroop (Blackwell Publishing,
2004, 2007), from Ancient Assyria, C H W Johns (Cambridge
University Press, 2012), and from Prophets and Prophecy in the
Ancient Near East, Martti Nissinen, Robert Kriech Ritner, &
Choon Leong Seow (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).) |
