The Qedarites (Old Arabic: 𐪄𐪕𐪇 QDR) 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.
Name
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 () and ().
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 . In one Neo-Assyrian letter, the Qedarites are referred to as , reflecting the use of a voiced , 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 (; ), meaning "black" and "swarthy," in reference to the colour of their tents.
The Qedarites were also mentioned in Old South Arabian inscriptions as the ( or ).
Latin sources mention the Qedarites as the .
Geography
During the second half of the 9th century BC, 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 Wādī Sirḥān, 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: , romanized: ; recorded in Akkadian as ). Dūmat's location halfway between Syria and Babylonia and halfway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aqaba, as well as its richness in water and its orchards, which 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-Ḥīra, Damascus and Yaṯrib.
At the time of the 7th century BC, 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 Palestine and the eastern border of Egypt and of the Nile Delta.
Identitfication
The Qedarites were an Arab tribal confederation who were closely related to the other ancient Arab 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.