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Concept
Qedarites
Summary
The Qedarites were a largely nomadic ancient Arab tribal confederation centred in the Wādī Sirḥān in the Syrian Desert. Attested from the 9th century BC, the Qedarites formed a powerful polity which expanded its territory over the course of the 9th to 7th centuries BC to cover a large area in northern Arabia stretching from Transjordan in the west to the western borders of Babylonia in the east, before later moving westwards during the 6th to 5th centuries BC to consolidate into a kingdom stretching from the eastern limits of the Nile Delta in the west till Transjordan in the east and covering much of southern Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev.
The Qedarites played an important role in the history of the Levant and of North Arabia, where they enjoyed close relations with the nearby Canaanite and Aramaean states, and became important participants in the trade of spices and aromatics imported into the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean world from South Arabia. Having engaged in both friendly ties and hostilities with the Mesopotamian powers such as the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, the Qedarites eventually became integrated within the structure of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Closely associated with the Nabataeans, the Qedarites might have eventually been absorbed by them.
The Qedarites also feature within the scriptures of Abrahamic religions, where they appear in the Hebrew and Christian Bible and the Quran as the eponymous descendants of Qedar, the second son of Ishmael, himself the son of Abraham. Within Islamic tradition, some scholars claim that the Islamic prophet Muḥammad was descended from Ishmael through Qedar.
The name of the Qedarites is recorded in Old Arabic inscriptions written using the Ancient North Arabian script as (), and in Classical Arabic as and قيدر () and قيدار ().
The name of the Qedarites is recorded in Aramaic as () in Achaemenid and Hellenistic period ostraca found at Maresha.
Assyrian records have transcribed in Neo-Assyrian Akkadian various variants of the name of the Qedar tribe under the forms of , , , , , , , and .
Official source
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