In the later Assyrian empire the population was largely Aramaic-speaking; but S. Schiffer's theory (Beiheft I. zur _Orientalistischen Litteratur-Zeitung_) finds contemporary evidence of Israelites settled in the neighbourhood of Edessa in the second half of the 7th century B.C. At the fall of Nineveh many towns in Mesopotamia suffered severely at the hands of the Medes. The period remains dark, notwithstanding the obscure light that has been thrown on it lately (Pognon, _Inscriptions_). When Aramaic began to take the place of Assyrian in written documents is not known; but just across the Euphrates the change had occurred as early as the 8th century B.C. (Zengirli, Hamath; see also Pognon). Certain it is that the earliest documents that have survived in Syriac, or Edessene Aramaic, do not represent an experimental stage. Moreover, although the Syriac of the Story of Ahiqar is of a late type, the sources of the story, traces of which are to be found in the Hebrew Tobit (q.v.), go back to the pre-Hellenistic period. _Graeco-Roman Times._--According to a credible tradition found in Eusebius (_Excerpta_, 179), the Syriac Chronicle ascribed to Dionysius of Tell-mahre (Tullberg, 61), and elsewhere, Urhai was renovated, like other Mesopotamian sites, in 304 B.C. by Seleucus I. Nicator, who gave it its Greek name.[12] It would share in the Hellenistic culture of Syria, although the language of the common people would continue to be Aramaic (E.R. Bevan, _House of Seleucus_, i. 227 f. with reff.). With the decay of the Seleucid power, weakened by Rome and Parthia, the old influx from the desert would recommence, and an Arabic element begin to show. Von Gutschmid (_Untersuch._, cf. Duval, ch. iii. end) argues plausibly that it was in 132 B.C., in the reign of Antiochus VII. Sidetes, that Edessa became the seat of a dynasty of some thirty local kings, whose succession has been preserved in native sources. The name of the first king, however, appears in different forms (cf. above), and one (Osroës-Orhai) is so like that of the town that Ed. Meyer suspects the historicity of the first reign, of five years. The names of the other kings--Abgar, Ma'nu, Bekr, &c.--are for the most part Arabic, as the people (in whose inscriptions the same mixture of names occurs) are called by classical authors; but the rulers, among whom an occasional Iranian name betrays the influence of the dominant Parthians,[13] would hardly maintain their distinctness from the Aramaic populace. This state which lasted for three centuries and a half, naturally varied in extent.[14] Bounded on the W. and the N. by the Euphrates, it reached at its widest as far as the Tigris. At such times, therefore, it included such towns as Harran (Carrhae), Nisibis, Sarug, Zeugma-Birejik, Resaena, Singara, Tigranocerta, Samosata, Melitene. Its position "on the dangerous verge of two contending empires," Parthia and Rome, determined its changeful fortunes. Parthian predominance yielded for a