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nomadic tribe of Arabia
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The Qedarites (Ancient North Arabian: 𐪄𐪕𐪇, romanized: qdr) were an ancient Arab tribal confederation centred in their capital Dumat al-Jandal in the present-day Saudi Arabian province of Al-Jawf. Attested from the 9th century BCE, the Qedarites formed a powerful polity which expanded its territory throughout the 9th to 7th centuries BCE 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 consolidating into a kingdom that stretched from the eastern limits of the Nile Delta in the west till Transjordan in the east and covered much of southern Judea (then known as Idumea), the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula.
The Qedarites played an important role in the history of the Levant and 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 Achaemenid Empire. Closely associated with the Nabataeans, who may have eventually assimilated the Qedarites at the end of the Hellenistic period.
The Qedarites also feature within the scriptures of Abrahamic religions, where they appear in the Hebrew and Christian Bible as the eponymous descendants of Qaydar, the second son of Isma'il, himself the son of Ibrahim. Within Islamic tradition, some scholars claim that the Islamic prophet Muhammad was descended from Isma'il through Qaydar.
The name of the Qedarites is recorded in Old Arabic inscriptions written using the Ancient North Arabian script as 𐪄𐪕𐪇 (qdr), and in Classical Arabic as قيدر (Qaydar) and قيدار (Qaydār).
The name of the Qedarites is recorded in Aramaic as 𐡒𐡃𐡓𐡉𐡍 (qdryn) 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 Qidri, Qīdri, Qidrāya, Qidari, Qadari, Qādri, Qidarāya, and Qudari. In one Neo-Assyrian letter, the Qedarites are referred to as Gidrāya, reflecting the use of a voiced qāf, similarly to the one used in the present-day Hejazī dialect of Arabic.
In the Hebrew Bible, the Qedarites are referred to in Hebrew as קֵדָר (Qēḏār; Ancient Greek: Κηδάρ, romanized: Kēdár).
The Qedarites were also mentioned in Old South Arabian inscriptions as the 𐩤𐩵𐩧𐩬 qdrn (Qadirān or Qadrān).
Latin sources mention the Qedarites as the Cedrei.
During the second half of the 9th century BCE, the Qedarites were living to the east of Transjordan and to the south-east of Damascus, within the southwestern Syrian Desert in the region of the Wadi Sirhan, more specifically in the Jauf depression in its eastern part, where was located the Qedarites' main centre of Dūmat or ad-Dūmat (Ancient North Arabian: 𐪕𐪃𐪉, romanized: dmt; recorded in Akkadian as Adummatu). Dūmat's location halfway between Syria and Babylonia and halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aqaba, as well as its relative water richness and its orchards made it the most important oasis of all North Arabia and gave it the position of being a main stop on the roads which connected Al-Hirah, Damascus and Yathrib.
At the time of the 7th century BCE, the Qedarites had expanded eastwards so that their kingdom adjoined the western border of Babylonia, In the western Syrian Desert, the Qedarites adjoined the western section of the Fertile Crescent on the eastern border of the Levant, and before the conquest of Syria by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the neighbours of the Qedarite Arabs to the west were the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus and the Canaanite kingdoms of Ammon, Edom, Israel, and Moab. After the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed the Canaanite kingdoms of Ammon, Judah, and Moab, followed by the Persian Achaemenid's annexation of Babylonia, the Qedarites expanded westwards into the eastern and southern Levant until their territory included the northern Sinai and they controlled the desert region which bordered ancient Israel and the eastern border of Egypt and of the Nile Delta.
The Qedarites were an Arab tribal confederation who were closely related to the other ancient Arabian populations of North Arabia and the Syrian Desert. Under the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, Assyrian records referred to the Qedarites as being almost synonymous with the Arabs as a whole.
Although the Assyriologists Friedrich Delitzsch, R.C. Thompson and Julius Lewy had identified the Qedarite tribe of the 𒆳𒋢𒈬𒀭 (ᵏᵘʳŠumuʾilu) with the Biblical Ishmaelites (Biblical Hebrew: יִשְׁמְעֵאלִים, romanized: Yīšməʿēlīm) and considered the Akkadian name Šumuʾilu as derivative of Yīšməʿēlīm, the scholar Israel Ephʿal has criticised this identification on several grounds:
During the 9th century BCE, the Qedarite confederation was centered around the region of the Wadi Sirhan, and it had commercial interests in the trade and border routes of the Syrian Desert. To the west, the borderlands of the Qedarites bordered on the powerful kingdoms of Damascus and Israel in the west, although the Qedarites themselves were independent of Damascene hegemony. The Qedarite king Gindibuʾ during this period enjoyed good relations with the Aramaean kingdom of Zobah, and, the Qedarites being transhumant nomads, they would bring their flocks to the summer pastures of the lower Orontes or the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in Zobah while spending the winter in the regions to the east and south-east of these mountains.
The earliest known activities of the Qedarites date from between 850 and 800 BC, when their king Gindibuʾ allied with his powerful neighbours, the kings Hadadezer of Aram-Damascus and Ahab of Israel, against the rising Neo-Assyrian Empire. Although Gindibuʾ's kingdom was not in danger of being attacked by the Assyrians, the Qedarite rulers participated in the trade which passed through Damascus and Tyre, and Damascus and Israel controlled crucial parts of the trade routes as well as the pastures and water sources which were of vital importance to the nomadic Qedarites, especially in drought periods. This meant that the rise of Assyrian power in the 9th century BCE put the desert and border routes where Gindibuʾ had economic interests under threat of Assyrian disruptions, fearing which Gindibuʾ led 1000 camelry troops at the Battle of Qarqar in 853 BCE on the side of the alliance led by Aram-Damascus and Israel against Shalmaneser III of Assyria.
Before the ascent of Assyrian hegemony, the Qedarite confederation was a polity of significant importance in the region of the Syrian Desert, and, beginning in the 8th and lasting until the 5th or 4th centuries BCE, the Qedarites were the hegemons among the Syrian Desert nomads, dominating the northwestern section of the Arabian peninsula in alliance with the local rulers of the kingdom of Dadān.
The alliance of Qarqar soon fell apart after Hadadezer of Damascus died and was succeeded by his son Hazael, who declared war on Israel and killed its king Jehoram and the Judahite king Ahaziah near Ramoth-Gilead in 842 BCE; the consequent ascension of Jehu to the throne of Israel did not end the hostilities between Damascus and Israel. Despite this significant change, the Qedarites continued enjoying good relations with Damascus.
Shalmaneser III later campaigned to Damascus and Mount Hauran in 841 BCE, but his inscriptions mentioned neither the Qedarite kingdom nor Gindibuʾ himself or any successor of his. The Qedarites were not mentioned either in the list of rulers, including those of distant places such as Philistia, Edom, and Israel, who paid tribute to Adad-nirari III after the latter's defeat of Bar-Hadad III of Damascus in 796 BCE. This reason for absence the Assyrian records is that the kingdom of Gindibuʾ was far from the campaign routes of the Assyrians during the later 9th century BCE.
Following the rise in the Armenian highlands of a powerful rival of the Neo-Assyrian Empire the form of the kingdom of Urartu, which, just like Assyria, was interested in the rich states of northern Syria, in 743 BCE the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III started a series of campaigns in Syria which would result in this region's absorption into the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the first phase of which was the defeat in that very year of an alliance consisting of Urartu and the Aramaean states of Melid, Gurgum, Kummuḫ, Bit Agusi, and ʿUmqi, after which he besieged Bit Agusi's capital of Arpad, which was Urartu's principal ally, for two years before capturing it. While Tiglath-Pileser III was campaigning against Urartu in 739 BCE, the Levantine states formed a new alliance, headed by the king Azriya'u of Ḥamat, and including various Phoenician cities ranging from Arqa to Ṣumur and multiple Aramaean states from Samʾal in the north to Ḥamat in the south, which was defeated by Tiglath-Pileser III in 738 BCE.
After this triumph of Assyrian hegemony in the western Fertile Crescent, the rulers of Damascus, Tyre and Israel accepted Assyrian overlordship and paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III. Since the Qedarite rulers participated in the trade which passed through Damascus and Tyre, they sought to preserve the Arabian commercial activities and the revenues that they acquired from these, and consequently the Qedarite queen Zabibe joined the kings Rezin of Damascus, Menahem of Israel, Hiram II of Tyre, as well as other various rulers from southern Anatolia, Syria and Phoenicia in acknowledging Assyrian hegemony and paying tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III in 738 BCE. The tribute of Zabibe consisted of camels, but did not include frankincense or perfumes as the Qedarites would later offer the Assyrians because they had not yet become participants in the trade of aromatics produced in South Arabia. Tiglath-Pileser III's inscriptions recording this tribute payment constitutes the first explicit mention of the Qedarites by name.
During the 8th century itself, the North Arabian region acquired increased economic importance, with the northern Hejaz becoming a transit zone for the trade of goods imported from 'Asir and from Africa across the Red Sea. This, in turn, led to increasing interest to control this region by the Assyrians.
Once Tiglath-Pileser III had returned to Assyria, the king Rezin of Damascus organised an anti-Assyrian alliance in Syria which was supported by Pekah of Israel and Hiram II of Tyre, and which started a revolt against Assyrian hegemony by the cities on the coast of the Levant. Tiglath-Pileser III retaliated by campaigning in 734 BCE against the southern Levantine coast until the Brook of Egypt and successfully managed to establish control over the commercial activities between the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Philistines. Among the many rulers in the western Fertile Crescent who pledged allegiance to Tiglath-Pileser III as result of this campaign in Palestine was the Qedarite queen Šamši.
Tiglath-Pileser III's campaign had not only disrupted the interests of Tyre, Damascus, Israel and the Qedarites but also resulted in the formation of a pro-Assyrian alliance consisting of Arwad, Ashkelon and Gaza, soon joined by Judah, Ammon, Moab, and Edom, who became players in Syrian politics with the goal of countering the anti-Assyrian alliance led by Damascus, Israel, Qedar and Tyre. However, the alliance headed by Damascus continued its anti-Assyrian activities, which caused the pro-Assyrian alliance to disintegrate, with Ashkelon and Edom soon defecting to the pro-Assyrian side. And since the Qedarites were still participating in the trade networks passing through Damascus and Israel, who themselves controlled important parts of the Arabian commercial route as well as pasture and water sources on which the Qedarites depended, especially during periods of drought, Šamši followed Rezin, Pekah, and Hiram II in rebelling against Assyrian authority in 733 BCE.
During the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III itself, the Qedarites invaded Moab and killed the inhabitants of its capital city of Qir-Mōʾāb.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Qedarites”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.