Serious question.
I was on /r/arabs the other day on a thread that dealt with a similar question and it made the claim that the entirety of Syria, modern Jordan, the eastern half of Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia excepting Baghdad (Ctesiphon) was occupied mostly by ethnic Arabs who spoke Arabic/North Arabian languages.
This assertion confuses me heavily. I thought that Arab populations would not stretch far from those shown in this political map. I thought that Syria would have been occupied by Syriacs, Aramaic-speakers and Greeks, with Greeks and Aramaic speakers in Palestine/Judea, and then Egyptians in Egypt, with a mostly Persian presence in Mesopotamia. Is this not true? Were there simply Arabs everywhere? Thanks.
Tribes of Arab Bedouins were found in the deserts of Arabia, Iraq and the Levant (Syria and its neighbors) as far back as 1000BC. But except in the desolate deserts, they weren't found anywhere else. That is the time when the ancient Assyrians called them "Arab" meaning "western" (the Arabs and the desert were to the west of Assyria at that time). In fact, Moses marries a daughter of Jethro-- an Arab Bedouin-- in the Sinai desert!
All the settled population in the fertile lowlands were non-Arabs: Arameans, Hebrews and the Assyro-Chaldeans. In the highlands, they were Aryans--Persians, Medes (ancestors of Kurds) and other Europoid peoples in Anatolia.
It is between 100-600 AD that you have a "population explosion" of Arabs coming out of Arabia--and Islam with them. In time, they converted most other people to Islam and Arabicized many many of them who were already Semitic, but none of the Aryans. Genetically, those people are still who they were, but they speak Arabic now and call themselves Arabs (mostly)
