ABSTRACT
People designated as Arabs first appear in sources connected with events in Syria in the first centuries of the first millennium Bc. The main ones are the texts in Akkadian from Assyria: the records of the kings telling about their campaigns to Syria and the Syrian desert from the middle of the ninth century down to the fall of the empire. They are supplemented by some letters from officials. The Assyrian sources are on the whole of good quality. They are often written shortly after the events, and the contents are derived from eye-witnesses and people belonging to the leading class of the Assyrian kingdom with first-hand information. There are propagandistic distortions in them, but the ethnic and political terminology can be assumed to be in accordance with the factual conditions. These distortions have occurred only once, i.e. when the text was conceived, whereas most other, literary sources have often undergone repeated extensive revision by later redactors, apart from corruptions by copyists. Some of the royal Assyrian records do, however, present intricate problems of source criticism which will be commented upon during our presentation. But as we shall see, the Assyrian texts belong to the best and most informative sources we have dealing with our problem, and there are, in fact, few others in antiquity that equal them. 1
