The Aramaeans build a huge fortress at Aleppo, its foundations still intact.

They simplify the Phoenician alphabet and carry their language, Aramaic, to their chief areas of commerce.

Aramaic displaces Hebrew in Greater Syria as the vernacular (Jesus will speak Aramaic), and it will become the language of commerce throughout the Middle East and the official language of the Persian Empire.

Aramaic will continue to be spoken in the Syrian countryside for almost a thousand years, and in the 1980s will remain in daily use in a handful of villages near the Syrian-Lebanese border.

A dialect of Aramaic continues to be the language of worship in the Syrian Orthodox Church.