Who lived in Mesopotamia before Arab people?

there was very little in the way of an "Arab" self-conscious identity before Islam, which is also what pre-Islamic sources sometimes imply: there, terms related to "Arab" have a very long history but they apprear almost exclusively used to define people of central Arabia by outsiders, and often not very proximate ones; this is puzzling, because we have tons of written matierial from Arabia by its inhabitants wihtout any hint at all that they, or a subgroup of them, called themselves "Arabs", while we have a likewise fairly strong and varied array of sources calling them like that. In Late Antiquity, there's a reversal: "Arabs" is rarely if at all used by contemporary non-Arab sources, while it appears very sporadically in sources from the Arabs themselves, who seem to have begun to use the label massively only some decades into the Islamic period

It that explicitly tied to Islam or more to the sudden presence of Arabs as a ruling/military class in the Near East
 
It that explicitly tied to Islam or more to the sudden presence of Arabs as a ruling/military class in the Near East
Well, the answer likely depends on who you are asking to. My personal informed opinion is that Islam plays a role, but my understanding of current scholarship is that there is no consensus on how big it is. The most recent reference I know of is Peter Webb's "Imagining the Arabs", a very interesting work that has the great merit of suggesting a reasonable, albeit radical, exit from the scholarly conundrum. Some of his arguments do not convice me entirely, and others may look a stretch, but I think that his basic concept (Arab identity emerging gradually with Islam, not predating it; references to "Arabia" in earlier external sources to be explained with bureaucratic continuity from an Assyrian root indicating nomadic outsiders, cognate but not directly related to the one the Arabs themselves would adopt for themsleves after Islam, on the basis on the Qur'anic self-definition of its language as "Arabic") is worth exploring. The book is commendable for the originality of the approach and the command of the primary sources, even if it its conclusions may be provisional.
 
Sumerians and Akkadians first. Then Babylonians and Assyrians. Imperial Aramean was lingua franca of the area of Mesopotamia but the people there never considered themselves Arameans and for historians that term is for those of the Levant and Syria. Then you have minorities of Greeks, Jews, and Persians for most of the history up until the Arab conquest. They would have in the north considered themselves to still be Assyrians for the most part and the south and east as Persians. Arab tribes did move en masse to the area and were large enough to contribute significantly to the ethnogenesis of the modern Iraqi Arab population. They aren't just "Arab speaking" Arabs.
 
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