According to the Jewish encyclopedia:
“The Chaldeans were a Semitic people and apparently of very pure blood. Their original seat may have been Arabia, whence they migrated at an unknown period into the country of the sea-lands about the head of the Persian gulf.”. [01]
Chaldea, their country.
“In the early period, between the early 9th century and late 7th century BC, (Chaldea) was the name of a small sporadically independent migrant-founded territory under the domination of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC) in southeastern Babylonia, extending to the western shores of the Persian Gulf. [01]
Chaldea is called in Assyrian: ‘mat Kaldi’, that is, ‘land of Chaldea, But there is also used, apparently synonymously, the expression ‘mat Bit Yakin’, It would appear that (Bit Yakin) was the chief or capital city of the land; and the king of Chaldea is also called the king of Bit Yakin, just as the kings of Babylonia are regularly styled simply king of Babylon, the capital city. In the same way, the Persian gulf was sometimes called “the Sea of Bit Yakin, instead of ‘the Sea of the Land of Chaldea’.”. [01] “Sargon II mentions ‘Bit Yakin’ as extending as far as Dilmun or ‘sea-land’ (littoral Eastern Arabia)”. [02]
Evidence
“What is of great importance, is a dedicatory inscription (Fig. 01) carved on a rock face in Al-Hofuf oasis which represents that rare genre of texts variously called Old Arabic, Chaldean or, more commonly, Proto-Arabic, dated to between the 5th and 9th centuries B.C. While the actual dedicatory content of the text is of considerable interest, the mere fact of its existence in northeastern Arabia is of even greater significance, for it was W. F. Albright’s belief that such inscriptions, known also from Ur, Uruk, Abu, Salabikh, Nippur, and Anah on the Middle Euphrates , represented the earliest traces of the Chaldeans. [04]
“Fifteen years before Al-Hofuf inscription was known to the scholarly world, Albright suggested that the last dynasty to rule Babylonia before the Persian conquest, the dynasty which included the illustrious Nebuchadnezzar, had originated in “an undetermined part of east Arabia:’ Does this inscription then provide confirmation for Albright’s thesis?” [04]
Chaldean exiles
According to Encyclopædia Britannica:
“GERRHA (Arab. al-Jar ʽa), an ancient city of Arabia, on the west side of the Persian Gulf, described by Strabo (Bk. xvi.) as inhabited by Chaldean exiles from Babylon, who built their houses of salt and repaired them by the application of salt water. Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi. 32) says it was 5 m. in circumference with towers built of square blocks of salt. Various identifications of the site have been attempted, J. P. B. D’Anville choosing El Katif, C. Niebuhr preferring Kuwet and C. Forster suggesting the ruins at the head of the bay behind the islands of Bahrein”. [05]
Their coast
As mentioned above, the Chaldeans thrived on the Northern and the West-Northern shores of the Gulf. Every part of that long coast, can be called: “The coast of the Chaldeans”.
Banu Khalid
“Beni Khaled,(بنو خالد)a people who occupy the site of the ancient Kalathua & from whom the promontory of Chaldone, placed by Pliny on the coast adjoining. From this locality, their homeland, branches of Beni Kaled,can be traced to Chaldea(بلاد الكلدان)”(Charles Forster,1844).
Chaldone Promontorium
Chaldone Promontorium placed by Pliny (6.28) on the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, near its northern extremity: between a salt river, which once formed one of the mouths of the Euphrates, and his “flumen Achenum.” He describes the sea off this promontory as “voragini similius quam mart per 50 millia passuum orae.” It corresponded in situation with the bay of Koneit or Graen (al. Grane) harbour, where Niebuhr places the modern tribe of the Beni Khaled, a name nearly identical with the Chaldone of Pliny (Forster, Arabia, vol. i. p. 49, 50). It is further determined by modern survey, minutely corroborating the classical notices. “The ‘locus ubi Euphratis ostium fuit,’ is D’Anville’s ancien lit de l’Euphrate; the ‘Flumen Salsum,’ is Core Boobian, a narrow salt-water channel, laid down for the first time in the East India Company’s Chart, and separating a large low island, off the mouth of the old bed of the Euphrates, from [p. 1.602]the main land; the ‘Promontorium Chaldone’ is the great headland, at the entrance of the Bay of Doat al-Kusma from the south, opposite Pheleche island; and the ‘voragini similius quam mari,’ or sea broken into gulfs, of 50 miles, extending to the ‘flumen Achana,’ is that along the coast, between the above-named cape and the river of Khadema, a space of precisely 50 Roman miles. This tract, again, is the ‘Sacer Sinus’ of Ptolemy, terminating at Cape Zoore.” (Ib. vol. ii. p. 213).
[01] — McCurdy, J. Frederic; Rogers, Robert W. (1902), “Chaldea”, in Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.), The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, pp. 661–662
[02] — jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4213
[03] — Raymond Philip Dougherty, The Sealand of Ancient Arabia, Yale University Press, 1932, 66ff.
[04] — Potts, Daniel T. “Northeastern Arabia.” Expedition Magazine 26, no. 3 (March, 1984).
[05] — Encyclopædia Britannica/Gerrha
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