As a follow up question to this (if allowed ofc, I don’t mean to hijack your question) would it be right for Syrian Christians to say they’re not ethnically Arab? I know that some certain groups in Syria know their ethnicity quite well, but i’m asking about those that don’t know exactly to which ethnicity they belong to meanwhile maintain they’re not Arab. That’d be me, I don’t identify as Arab, just as a Syrian Christian.

Okay, whereas /u/jezreelite’s post is over a fairly large time window, I’m going to go into a bit more detail about the few centuries immediately prior to the conquest. I will also mention why 'ethnic identity' was not the main identity that people were drawn to during the period, but I appreciate it's a bit outside of the scope of your question, so it's at the end. First, some terms: ethnicity in the online OED is a social group with a “common national or cultural tradition”. Historians such as E. J. Hobsbawm discuss the idea of ‘national tradition’, where ethnicity is like cultural glue for the making of modern states, but obviously that is not useful for the period, but ‘cultural tradition' is more useful. The more general recent assessment among historians is that ethnicity is something self-defined (Jones, 64), so how people identify themselves and others in textual sources is useful, and the texts themselves also represent this idea of 'cultural tradition'. Genetics and common ‘material culture’ (archaeology etc.) are heavily open to interpretation, particularly with a lack of relevant material for this period. The first four chapters to The Archaeology of Ethnicity sums up numerous views on ethnicity and where modern historians stand on the matter.

In the immediate period before the Islamic conquest, most of Syria was under Byzantine/Roman rule, and some was under Sassanid Persian rule. A community that spoke a dialect of Aramaic (Syriac) were the most visible 'ethnic group' in the region, and had a distinct regional culture, language and literary tradition. They are sometimes referred to as Arameans, Syrians and Syriacs, but I will call them Syriac-speakers, as this avoids problems with confusion with the modern Syrian state, and with older groups in the region, who /u/jezreelite refers to. These Syriac-speakers referred to themselves as the suroi in Syriac (Millar 2013, 45), but as an term this is not the most commonly used form of identifier, as religious identity became more important due to religious conflict. These people were often bilingual, knowing the Greek of the Roman/Byzantine Empire as well as Syriac (Millar 2013, 48), and developed a distinctive Syriac literature. Many works were popular and translated into Greek. There were multiple religious groupings within the Syriac-speaking community. The Miaphysites, a grouping of multiple religious factions who were declared heretical and separated from the main strand of Byzantine Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, eventually became the modern Syriac Orthodox Church. Chalcedonians, the aforementioned main strand, are represented by the modern Greek Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and also some Christian groups in modern Syria. Miaphysitism was very prominent in Syria, to such an extent that there are virtually no Chalcedonian texts in Syriac before the conquest. The Christians in the parts of modern Syria then ruled by the Sassanians were mostly the so-called Nestorians, another group declared heretical by the main strand of Byzantine Christianity.

In regards to Arabs, here referring to the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, the Pre-Islamic Arabs were quite peripheral to the Roman Empire, and aren’t discussed in much detail in contemporary Greek and Syriac sources. We know very little about their political groupings, movements and society. ‘Kinda’ and ‘Maadenoi’ are the only two tribal names explicitly mentioned in Greek sources (and then only on three occasions collectively — Millar 2010, 201). Two political groups, the Nasrids (Lakhmids) and Jafnids (Ghassanids) aided the Sasanians and Persians respectively in war, and have important enough roles to be discussed at length in John of Ephesus's Ecclesiastical History (a sixth-century Miaphysite Syriac writer) and Evagrius's Eccclesiastical History (another sixth-century scholar from Syria, but Chalcedonian and writing in Greek). However, both Arab political groups were based in modern Saudi-Arabia near the Jordanian border, which is obviously quite far away from modern Syria, and we don't know much about them. We don't even know what they called themselves – the terms that I used were coined in the past 200 years (Millar 2010, 200). Nevertheless, we do know that these groups raided fairly widely (John of Ephesus mentions Arab raiding in Syria, see pp.240), and there were commercial contacts so it is not impossible that Pre-Islamic Arabs settled or lived as nomads in parts of modern Syria.

Other forms of identity, such as religious or political affiliation, often took precedent. The Syriac-speaking community did not rebel against Roman rule together as an ethnic group, unlike the Isaurians, the Samaritans, and (several centuries earlier) the Judeans (Millar 2013, 45), but there was conflict between religious groups all the way up to the Islamic conquest, which some historians have taken to be ethnic conflict. As mentioned previously, large numbers (perhaps the majority) of Syriac-speakers were Miaphysite, and these groups were persecuted by the Chalcedonian state (a feature of much Syriac literature, see John of Ephesus's Ecclesiastical History, his Lives of the Eastern Saints, and Elias's Life of John of Tella). In the early 20th Century, one or two historians suggested that the Miaphysite Christian movement was actually a Syriac ‘nationalist’ movement, and Millar (2013) offers a strong critique of this. Many of those persecuting Miaphysites were of Syriac origin (such as Abraham bar Kayli, mentioned in Lives of the Eastern Saints). The Syriac population (and indeed much of the Byzantine empire, in some contexts), got very involved in religious conflict. John of Ephesus discusses how religious fracture within the Miaphysites split Syriac villages (pp.282).

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Ethnicity:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethnicity for the OED entry.

Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992). Chapter 2 discusses how nationalism and ethnicity interact in Hobsbawm's ideas on the creation of modern states.

Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity (London, 1997). Summarizes quite a few complex ideas so can be a lot to take in at times, but is brief.

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Late-Antique Syria:

Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History (AD431-594), trans. E Walford (London, 1846). Available at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/evagrius_0_intro.htm.

John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, trans. R. Payne Smith, (Oxford, 1860). Available at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ephesus_0_toc.htm.

John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, trans. E. W. Brooks in Patrologia Orientalis vols. 17-19 (Paris, 1923-6) , available online at https://archive.org/details/patrologiaorient17pariuoft, https://archive.org/details/patrologiaorient18pariuoft, and https://archive.org/details/patrologiaorient19pariuoft.

F. Millar, ‘The Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Islamic Period: From Greek to Syriac?’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 21 (2013), pp. 43–92 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/501624/pdf available with institutional login)

F. Millar, ‘Rome’s ‘Arab’ Allies in Late Antiquity. Conceptions and Representations from within the Frontiers of the Empire’ in H. Börm and J. Wiesenhöfer (eds.), Comuntatio et Contentio: Studies in the Late Roman, Sasanian and Early Islamic Near East, (Düsseldorg, 2010), pp.199-226.

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Late Roman / Early Byzantine Social Conflict:

For a more in-depth analysis of social conflict in the period read P. N. Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management and Mediation (Oxford, 2013).

The short answer is that pre-Islamic Syria was a melting pot of numerous different groups, though the dominant group were various types of Semites. The long answer is that can broadly divide the ethnic groups into four categories:

• Semites
• Akkadians: East Semitic people who conquered the Sumerian city states in the 24th century BCE. The Akkadian Empire declined and collapsed in 2154 BCE.
• Arameans: Northwest Semitic people who spoke Aramaic. One of the dominant groups of the Levant.
• Assyrians: East Semitic people who formed an empire in Mesopotamia after the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. Please note that the line now between Assyrian and Aramean is often blurry.
• Canaanites: An umbrella term for Semitic Levantines, though an in-group one.
• Chaldeans: The Greek term for West Semites who migrated into Mesopotamia in the late 10th or early 9th century BCE.
• Israelites: The ancient ancestors of modern Jews and Samaritans.
• Phoenicians: The Greek term for the inhabitants of the city states of the ancient Levant.
• Indo-Europeans
• Greeks: Founded numerous colonies in ancient times in the Levant, though even more came after Alexander the Great's conquests.
• Hittites: Anatolian people who were active from the 15th to the 13th centuries BCE and conquered some parts of the northern Levant before being conquered themselves by the Assyrians.
• Romans: Conquered the Levant in the 1st century BCE and stayed around for a very long time.
• Turks
• Oghuz: A nomadic people who converted to Islam after the Umayyad and Abbasid conquest of Transoxiana. After the decline of the Abbasid Caliphate, most of the real military power lay in the hands of Turkish warlords.
• The Unknown
• Hurrians: Anatolian people whose language was neither Afro-Asiatic nor Indo-European and migrated into northern Syria during the 18th century BCE.
• Sumerians: Little presence in the Levant proper, but still important to a history of the Near East. The founders of probably the oldest civilization in history, period.
• __Urartian__s: Closely related to the Hurrians, they became the arch-rivals of the Assyrians and their rivalry ended with both of them being conquered by Medes and Persians in the 6th century BCE.

Now, Arab, strictly speaking, is more of a linguistic category more than it is a racial or ethnic one. Genetic testing of Arab populations have shown that, for instance, the Syrians and Lebanese are more closely related to other Levantine populations than they are to the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula. The same is true of Egyptian Arabs: they show more similarities to other North Africans than the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula. The Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates' conquest were largely surface ones that displaced the ruling class and, later, the language and religion, but did not much dramatically alter the ethnic population of much of the lands of they conquered.