Arab empire circa 1000-700 BC

The Arabs first entered history at that battle of Qarqar in 853 BC. They fought alongside a coalition of powers against the Assyrians. The battle was indecisive.

How can we have an Arab conquest of at least the levant, and Mesopotamia nearly 1600 years early?

This conquest need not last long nor need it a religious foundation just an Arab empire existing contemporaneously with such people's as the Israelites and Judeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Nubian Egypt.

How can we have this happen?
 
I think you may have actually more chances to see an Arab conquest of (Lower, at least) Mesopotamia than Levant in the early to middle Ist millenium BC, especially if northern Arab (Qedarites or Nabatteans) tribes participes to an earlier desintegration of the neo-Assyrian Empire if the anti-Assyrian alliance led by Egypt in the VIIth somehow manages to reach its rough objectives. Levant was a clusterfuck of small polities that held firmly to their independence (which didn't prevented Northern Arabs, IOTL, to increase their presence in the Ist millenium CE, but it's arguably because of the Roman polity that made everyone agree about who was the boss around there), while Lower and Middle Mesopotamia underwent a series of being conquered.

With a neo-Assyrian empire collapsing one century earlier than IOTL, and with a lack of unifying dynamic in Babylonia, you could see Arabs pulling a Kassite in the region. Meaning, eventually, "babylonized" Arabs, so vastly different from medieval Arabs for a series of obvious reasons.

But northern Arab polities were still pretty much unstable at this point (as the struggle between Qedarites and Nabatteans could point), so I'd rather see it as a more or less technically Arab kingdom of Babylonia, rather than an arabization of the region (altough I'm not sure a Persian-like success story could be written off, but I'm not confident).
 
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