ABSTRACT
The picture of the ethno-political conditions of Arabs in Syria and Mesopotamia in the first half of the first century Bc is fairly coherent. We find the Arabs governed by phylarchs along the river Euphrates, but we also find them around Emesa. They were probably also present in Chalcis south-east of Beroea/Aleppo. These latter would have been in close contact with those along the river. There was further a wedge of Arabs and skēnîtai from the central Syrian steppe into the green land on the Emesa plain. The Arabs here were thus very close to the Arabs living in the Antilebanon together with the Ituraeans. The presence of all these Arabs in Syria was the result of the policy of the Seleucid rulers. A similar policy had been followed by Tigranes by settling Arabs in Amanus on the border to Cilicia. The Arabs in Transjordan, implanted there by the Ptolemies, are not mentioned after the time of Alexander Jannaeus. We do not have any certain evidence for the presence of Arabs in Osrhoene near Edessa from this period, although it is likely that they were there already. They will be documented more that half a century after the Roman conquest. Neither do we have any reliable information about the presence of groups designated as Arabs from the rest of Mesopotamia and southern Babylonia during this period.
