This is my rendition of an Aramean swordsman from the Bronze Age Middle East during the second millennium BC. The Arameans were a branch of the nomadic Ahlamu peoples who roamed the northern Arabian desert between Mesopotamia and the Levant, speaking a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. The Arameans would eventually coalesce into city-states such as Aram-Damascus before the Assyrians would conquer and displace them, distributing their population throughout the region. This resulted in Aramaic becoming the lingua franca of southwestern Asia and developing its own written alphabet which would evolve into the modern Hebrew and Arabic ones. It is likely that Jesus of Nazareth would have spoken Aramaic in his day-to-day life like other Jews of his time.