The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Modern Assyrians: Fact or Fraud?

Modern Assyrians: Fact or Fraud?
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, May 29 2012, 17:13:08 (UTC)
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...final version of the article.....edited and rearranged


This article relies on one, primary, source first published in 1961 by Princeton University Press, revised and published in 1999 by Brill, titled “The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East, ''Encounters with Western Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers” written by Dr. John Joseph, Louis Audenreid Professor of History, Emeritus, who retired recently after thirty years of teaching Middle Eastern history at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster Pennsylvania. Dr. Joseph graduated with a doctorate in Middle Eastern history from Princeton University, and was recently honored with a new International Studies Building at Franklin and Marshall College being named after him.

What prompted Dr. Joseph's specialized research into the claimed existence of modern Assyrians is his own affiliation with the community of Middle Eastern Christian Nestorians who are primarily responsible for advancing this notion. Dr. Joseph was born in Iraq to a “Chaldean” family and is one of very few who has approached this topic as a scholar, a trained academic, professor, a fully qualified historian and published author.


From the preface to the revised edition, published by Brill, Dr. Joseph writes;

“More than ever before, members of the new Assyrian generation realize that they have to be knowledgeable about the past as well as the present, and that a partisan history of their people, in the words of one Assyrian author, ‘is paid little respect and eventually is undermined by trained historians’.”


Dr. Joseph explains;

“The people who today call themselves Assyrians are, strictly speaking, members of a cultural and religious group, molded together into a minority by ties of a common language and, until the nineteenth century, a common church membership which, until the birth of the modern nation-state in the Middle East, was the strongest tie among people.” p 32

Throughout his book Dr. Joseph calls the modern advocates of these ancient identities by the names they use to refer to themselves, that is; Chaldeans and Assyrians. However, the evidence and thrust of his book shows that they are mistaken; misled at first by Western missionaries beginning in the 16th century, and then by European government agents and explorers in the 19th century who then went on, after World War I, to adopt these ancient names for themselves for political reasons.

This article is not concerned with the ancient Assyrian Empire, as such. Indeed Dr. Joseph is not an Assyriologist and spends no time in his book retelling the history of that magnificent people. His focus, and area of expertise, is the basis for claims by a Christian sect that they, and they alone, are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians. The main questions addressed by Dr. Joseph are; what happened to the ancient Assyrians? Were they indeed wiped out, down to the last living one, or did something else take place? How likely is it that there are any modern descendants who can trace their ancestry back 2500 years to the ancient Assyrians? And, finally, what is their evidence for such a claim.

Dr. Joseph;

“The use of these terms, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Arameans, and Assyrians, in reference to the same Christian minority, depending on the user's preferred term, has continued to cause confusion.” p. 1

The story of what happened to the ancient Assyrians after the fall of their empire in 612 B.C. must take into account the Aramean people of Aram, modern-day Syria, and the pervasive influence of their Aramaic language and its adoption by the Assyrians in place of their own, Akkadian, language.


Arameans:

“From their humble beginnings as wandering tribesmen, the Arameans emerged by the end of the second millennium B.C. as an important factor in the cultural, political and economic life of southwestern Asia. During the early period, Wayne T. Pitard refers to the Arameans as ‘one of the most important ethnic groups in the Near East’. Aramean tribes attained great power in the large areas of both sides of the Syrian desert, eventually succeeding in settling and establishing ruling dynasties there. The most important Aramean kingdom, centered in Damascus, described as ‘the strongest and most influential power in the western fertile crescent’, and one of the ‘most significant states in the whole of the Levant’. (See Benjamin Mazar, ‘Aramean Empire and its relations with Israel’, Biblical Archaeologist , 25 (December, 1962), 101-102, 112-117.). The kingdom enjoyed a central position in the political life of the Near East, dominating the region’s main international trade routes; it used the Aramaic idiom of Damascus as the administrative language in all of its provinces, as well as the language of diplomacy and commerce beyond its borders.” p. 10

“By the end of the 10th century B.C. and the beginning of the 9th, Assyrian inscriptions for the first time inform us of Aramean political units in northern Mesopotamia, while in the southern parts of that country their confederacies remained a chronic menace to the Assyrians until their very downfall…. It was in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. when the Arameans were defeated; in 720 B.C. Sargon II finally brought to an end the Aramean kingdoms of the west; their territories were incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian provincial system, a century and a decade before Assyria itself was overthrown.” pp 10-11.


“Even before its western expansion beyond the Euphrates river, the Assyrian empire had found it necessary to use the Aramaic dialect of geographical Syria as its official language, a move dictated by the wide expanse of Aramaic and the convenience of its alphabet and script.” p. 11.

This process of gradual replacement of Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians, by Aramaic, the language of the Arameans of Syria would prove to have disastrous consequences for Assyrian self-awareness. Joseph writes;

“With a much larger Aramean population now under its rule, far removed from the Assyria homebase, the smaller, ethnically-Assyrian, population could not resist aramization, a process that gradually transformed the cultural face of the empire, ‘leading to the Assyrians being out-lived and absorbed'." p 11

“Before too long Aramaic had displaced Akkadian even as the language of everyday speech within Assyria itself. According to H.W.F Saggs, the cities of Assyria proper had become so cosmopolitan and polyglot, that the people of actual Assyrian descent were possibly a minority within those cities.” pp. 12-13.

“Under the Iranians, Aramaic was also used for all aspects of written communication and records, emerging by about the sixth century B.C. as the lingua franca of Western Asia, and by the beginning of the fifth century, as the common dialect of all the peoples of the region. In his article “Aramaic in the Achaemenian Empire”, J.C. Greenfield speaks of ‘ethnic groups of varied cultural backgrounds throughout the vast expanse of the Persian realm’ who used Aramaic language and writing.” pp. 12-13
.
Explaining a crucial difference between the Persian and Assyrian adoption of Aramaic Joseph states;

“Unlike the Assyrians the Persians did not forget their own mother tongue; they maintained their national-linguistic identity, largely because their own Aramaic-speaking subjects did not predominate from within Persia as they did in the core region of Assyria, later known as Bait Aramaye; home of the Arameans. (With the advent of Islam, centuries after the Achaemenids, Sasanian Persians were also able to resist arabization; they liberally borrowed from the Arabic vocabulary and even adopted the Arabic script, but they were able to Persianize what they borrowed. In the case of the Assyrians and other ethnicities aramization was total just as the absorption of the various other peoples would be, centuries later, through aribization.).” p. 13.

After the fall of their empire, the Assyrians survived under far reduced circumstances. The Medes , Babylonians, Greeks , Parthian and Sasanian Persians conquered and controlled the region. Forgetting their own Akkadian language, the remaining Assyrians adopted the language and, with it, the culture of the Arameans, as would many of the peoples of that region. Thus, by the 2nd century A.D., Aramaic had become the language of the people living within the Persian empire including lands, and peoples, which once made up the Assyrian heartland.


The Arameans Become Syrians:

“The designations Syria and Syrian were derived from Greek usage long before Christianity. When the Greeks became better acquainted with the Near East, especially after Alexander the Great overthrew the Achaemenian empire in the 4th century B.C., they restricted the name Syria to the lands west of the Euphrates. During the 3rd century B.C., when the Hebrew Bible was translated by Jewish scholars into the Greek Septuagint for the use of the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria, the terms for ‘Aramean’ and ‘Aramaic’ in the Hebrew Bible, were translated into ‘Syrian’ and ‘the Syrian tongue’ respectively.” p. 9

“Syriac, the major Eastern dialect...was the Aramaic dialect of Edessa; it gradually became the new unofficial koine for all the various Christian sects. Even before the Christian period, the Edessan dialect had become the literary language in and around Edessa, but it attained special prominence there in the 2nd century A.D., when it gradually became the literary language of what Noldeke called ‘Aramean Christendom’. Its importance increased with the expansion of Christianity in Mesopotamia from the beginning of the 3rd century on. As the language into which the Bible was translated, it became the venerable language of the Aramaic-speaking Christians of Mesopotamia and Persia, then both under Parthian rule. As the language of the Church and its liturgy, Syriac also became the language of literature and correspondence, the way Quranic Arabic, a dialect of Mecca, became the ‘classical’ language of Arabic literature and written communication from the seventh century on.” p. 14.



A footnote appears;

“The Authorized Version of the Bible continued to use the same terms that the Septuagint had adopted. In 1970, the New English Bible, published by Oxford and Cambridge University presses, and translated by biblical scholars drawn from various British universities, went back to the original Hebrew terms, using Aram and Arameans for Syria and Syrians respectively.” p. 9

Returning to the text;

"In Palestine itself, according to Noldeke, the Jews and later the Christians there referred to their dialect of Aramaic as Syriac; in Babylon, both Greeks and Persians called the Arameans Syrians.” p. 10

A footnote;

See T. Noldeke, “Semitic Languages”, in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. P. 625). The second-century B.C. Greek historian Posidonius, a native of Syria, noted that ‘the people we [Greeks] call Syrians were called by the Syrians themselves Arameans….for the people in Syria are Arameans’.” (See J.G. Kidd, ‘Posidonius’ (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 1988), vol. 2 , pt. 2, pp. 955-956.)” p.10


Aramean/Syrians Become Christians:

It can never be known with any certainty how or when Christianity began to be adopted by non-Jewish residents of Mesopotamia. At the time of Jesus, six hundred years after the fall of Nineveh, the people living in the lands of the Assyrians, conquerors, migrants, and those of the old stock, had developed new identities centering around an Aramean/Syrian core transmitted by a shared Aramaic/Syriac language.

One, great, appeal of Christianity, which is imbedded in its evangelical core, is the idea that its message is not for a select group, or tribe alone, but for all people everywhere. The various ethnic groups living under foreign domination in the heartland of the Assyrian homeland saw themselves, as Christian converts, to have been transformed into a greater, universal brotherhood whose parts were far less than its whole. Their dominant identity became Christian.

“Evidence shows that Christianity reached these distant regions early. The majority of the very early converts to Christianity in lands east of the Euphrates were Jews(Morony, p. 306). In and around the site of ancient Nineveh was a Jewish community that had been there several centuries before the advent of Christianity.” P. 36.

“Christianity began in an Aramaic environment; Jesus preached his message in an Aramaic dialect. Among the converts to the new faith were Jews and Gentiles of all ethnic backgrounds. The Church and the new religion served as a melting pot; as members of a new dispensation, the converts tended to lay aside former distinctions and prejudices and became in the character of Christians one homogenous people devoted to the Lord, not unlike the Islamic umma of the 7th century A.D. Writing in the third century, Bardesanes, the eminent Edessan known as the founder of Syriac literature, did not feel himself to be the leader of a sect but rather to belong unquestionably to the universal Church. 'What shall we say about ourselves, the new race of Christians whom Christ has caused to be raised in all countries as a consequence of his own coming? We are all Christians by the one name of Christ wherever we may be found'. He then proceeds to speak of the brethren in Gaul, Parthia, India, Persia and Mesopotamia without making any distinction.” pp 30-31

People's core identity became Christian. Conquered or incorporated into larger nation-states and empires people did not adopt new nationalities. The idea of nationality would not be born for many centuries. Instead, people identified with their religion and churches and this identity was expressed and taught in Aramaic/Syriac.


Aramean/Syrian/Christians Become Nestorians:

“Christians were also joined in large numbers by co-religionists from Byzantine territory; they were brought as captives or came as refugees escaping religious persecution. Until Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, all Christians were persecuted; those who escaped to Persian territory were not…at the time…considered politically suspect by the authorities there.” p. 38

“When the Byzantine empire became Christian with the conversion of Constantine, the Persians began to question the loyalty of their Christian subjects…. Relations between Byzantium and Persia deteriorated when Christianity became the state religion of Persia’s enemy.” p. 38.

As a result of controversies over the nature of Jesus, the first split occurred between Western and Eastern Christianity which would lead to the Christians of the Persian Empire adopting the name “Nestorians” for themselves.

“In the fourth and fifth centuries, questions raised about the humanity and divinity of Jesus were debated and settled in church councils convened by Byzantine emperors themselves. At the Third Ecumenical Council, held in Ephesus (431), convened by the emperor Theodosius II at the request of Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, a theological controversy dealing with the issue of the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity led to the first schism between the East and the West.” p. 40

At question was the nature of Christ: Was he purely divine, of one nature, or was he human and divine; two natures.

“…Diodorus of Tarsus…emphasized the distinction between the divine and human natures of Christ to the point of undermining their unity. The most prominent exponent of these controversial views in the fifth century was Nestorius…The ‘Nestorian’ controversy was condemned as heretical at Ephesus…. After the Council of Ephesus, those who adhered to the teachings of Nestorius organized their own church, establishing themselves first in Edessa. They were driven out of there soon after the Council of Chalcedon, forced to move further east in the direction of Mesopotamia and Persia.” pp. 40-41.

Joseph goes on to write that Nestorius, and others, were convinced that for the Christian communities within the Persian empire to secure confidence in their loyalty to the government of the Shah, it…

“… would be best for the authorities if all the Christians of his realm were made to accept the doctrines opposed by the Western church (J.M. Sauget, Barsauma of Nisibis”, in “Encyclopedia of the Early Church”, I, p. 112.). p. 42

“Mainly for political reasons, the Church of the East convinced itself of the ‘rightness’ of the ‘Nestorian’ position and through centuries repeated its formulas and rhetoric.” p. 42

Thus from about the sixth century on, the Christians within the Persian empire, which included the land and peoples of ancient Assyria, who’d collectively referred to themselves as members of The Church of the East till then, added the name “Nestorian”, as a way of confirming their loyalty to the Persians since their enemies, the Byzantines, were actively persecuting all followers of Nestorius. (There would be another change, also for political reasons, when, in 1976, the word “Assyrian” was added, making it the “Assyrian Church of the East” thereby bolstering the claim of its members to being Assyrians.).

It is clear that religion played the greater part in identity. The Christians living in the Persian Empire did not see themselves, and were not seen by the Persians, as Persian nationals. They were seen as Christians, living within the Persian Empire. It was their Christian faith alone that made them suspect, when that same faith was adopted by the Romans, Persia's arch-enemy. Their best way to prove loyalty to the Shah was to adopt a Roman heresy. They never became “Persian”, but always remained Christians and, as Nestorian Christians, felt more secure.


Aramean/Syrian/Christian/Nestorians Become Catholic and Protestant:

“The ‘evangelical awakening’ of the eighteenth century in Great Britain and the quickening of religious life in Protestant circles in that country and America gave rise in the nineteenth century to the greatest missionary movement in the history of the Christian Church since apostolic times…In the field of ‘foreign gospel conquest’ the Roman Catholic Church had started a few centuries ahead of the Protestant churches...Catholic missionaries were able to encourage a schism within the Nestorian Church as early as the sixteenth century, and they had established contacts with other Eastern Christians three centuries prior to that…There were new territories to conquer and to make up for those lost to the Faith in Europe.” p 65.

Aramean/Syrian/Christian/Nestorian/Catholic/Protestants Become Chaldean:

“The usage and origin of the name Chaldean has also been the subject of much acrimonious debate. While this term is generally accepted today as referring to the Roman Catholic off-shoot of the Nestorian Church, it has in the past been used as a national name in reference to both branches. Nineteenth-century European writers, in order to distinguish between the two churches, have referred to them as Nestorian Chaldeans and Catholic Chaldeans.” p. 3

“In 1840, Ainsworth, one of the first few non-Catholics to visit the Nestorians, reported that these people considered themselves Chaldeans and ‘descendants of the ancient Chaldeans of Assyria, Mesopotamia and Babylon.’ p 4

“Horatio Southgate, who was touring the region in the early 1830s, wrote that the Nestorians ‘call themselves, as they seem always to have done,’ Chaldeans; indeed “Chaldean” was their national name, he stressed.” p 5

“In the late 17th century, French Biblical critic Richard Simon spoke of the many Christian sects of the East ‘who bear the name Chaldean or Syrian’ and mentioned that most of the Chaldeans ‘are those whom we call Nestorians.” (Richard Simon, “Histoire critique de la creance et des coutumes des nations levant”, Frankford, Holland, 1684, p 83.). pp 5-6.

“Pope Paul V (1605-1621) wrote to Patriarch Elias that ‘A great part of the East was infected by this heresy [Nestorianism], especially the Chaldeans, who for this reason have been called Nestorians’. As far back as 1445 the Nestorians of the See of Cyprus were called Chaldeans upon their reconciliation with the Church of Rome.” p 6.

“Assemani, the scholar most probably responsible for the propagation of the term Chaldean, had explained simply, and rightly, that ‘the Nestorians are generally called Chaldaic Christians, because their principal, or head church, is in ancient Chaldea’…it was because of the geographical location of their patriarchate, and not because of their ethnic origin, that the East Syrians (Nestorians) were called Chaldeans.” p. 6


Aramean/Syrian/Christian/Nestorian/Catholic/Protestant/Chaldeans, Become Assyrian:

“It was in 1843 when the French Consular agent at Mosul, Paul Emile Botta, began his diggings at Khorsabad, about 12 miles north of Mosul, and uncovered the ruins of the magnificent palace of Sargon II, King of Assyria (722-705 B.C.). That same year the British excavations, under Austin Henry Layard, discovered the majestic palace of Shalmaneser I (ca. 884-860 B.C.) with its winged bulls, followed later by that of Ashurbanipal (668-ca. 626 B.C.), with his library’s vast collection of cuneiform tablets….Before too long, in one of the greatest triumphs of human ingenuity, the cuneiform writing impressed on clay tablets or chiseled in stone, was deciphered. Assyrian texts, in the Akkadian language, were soon read with the same certainty as Hebrew and Syriac….The Bible-reading public was well familiar with these Assyrian names and events; they had been part of British and American cultural consciousness, wrote the Assyriologist H.W.F. Saggs. The history of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judeh, noted Saggs, ‘was a living thing, as generally known as British history’. To the Jews and the Western Christians of the nineteenth century, the most important thing about the newly-discovered tablets and monuments was that they had proven the Hebrew Bible to be right. The general public in England began to view the Assyrian sources as a weapon to be used primarily against Biblical ‘Higher Criticism’ as then applied to the Old Testament.” p 16.

The Nestorians and “Chaldeans”, but not Muslims, living in proximity to these discoveries were quickly proclaimed, by the Europeans, to be the remnants of Nineveh and Assyria. Writes Joseph;

“When the Assyrian excavations revealed the remains of Nineveh to the wondering eyes of the world, the Nestorians and their ‘Chaldean’ brethren in the environs of the ancient Assyrian capital and beyond attracted special attention. The hero of these excavations, Austen Henry Layard, hastened to proclaim these historic, linguistic, and religious minorities to be ‘as much the remains of Nineveh and Assyria as the rude heaps and ruined palaces’. In the midst of this excitement, J.P. Fletcher wrote that ‘the Chaldeans and the Nestorians’ are ‘the only surviving human memorial of Assyria and Babylonia’.” p. 17

“While the name Chaldeans was already, as we have seen, appropriated by those Nestorians who had embraced Roman Catholicism, the illustrious twin name of ‘Assyrians’ was eventually adopted by the (remaining) Nestorians as a name for themselves.” p. 17


But not everyone agreed;

“Coakley notes a dispute that Rassam had with Arthur J. Maclean of the Anglican mission in Qochanis in 1889 over the names ‘Syrians’ and ‘Assyrians’ when Maclean argued against the term ‘Assyrians’…’Why should we invent a name when we have such a very convenient one, used for centuries, at our hand’? It was understandable, he agreed, that someone living so close to the ruins of Nineveh, ‘should have a fit of enthusiasm of Old Assyria’, but ‘is it common sense to cast aside the name used by the people themselves [Suraye] and to invent another for them of very doubtful applicability’? Rassam’s position was that ‘Syrian’ was wrong; the correct form was ‘Assyrian,’ but preferred ‘Chaldean’. Layard always referred to the Nestorians as ‘Chaldeans’ or as ‘Nestorian Chaldeans’ in order to distinguish them from those united with Rome.” pp 17-18


“Prior to World War I, the Anglican mission to the Nestorians gave the Assyrian nomenclature a new impetus. Formally known as ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission’, it re-enforced, no matter how unintentionally, the linkage between the Nestorians and the ancient Assyrians. ‘Assyrian Christians’, which originally had only meant ‘The Christians of geographical Assyria’, soon became ‘Christian Assyrians’. p. 18

In a footnote Joseph adds;

“An appeal by Archbishop Tait published in 1870, was entitled ‘Appeal on behalf of the Christians of Assyria, commonly called the Nestorians.’ The text of the appeal spoke of ‘this request from the Assyrians’ and ‘From that moment Assyrian replaced Nestorian in the formal Anglican vocabulary,’ writes Coakley, the historian of that mission.” p 18

Returning to the text;

“Throughout the nineteenth century the Nestorians were also referred to as Syrians by European travelers and writers. Indeed ‘Syrians’ (Suraye, Suroyo) was a name by which the ‘Nestorians’ and ‘Jacobites’ called themselves until the post-World War I period; thereafter Suraye was gradually replaced among the ‘Nestorians’ by Aturaye, the name of the ancient Assyrians in Syriac. The Jacobites continue to call themselves Suryoyo."

“By the late nineteenth century, a few of the educated and politically conscious among the ‘Nestorians’, especially those who had emigrated to America, began using Aturaye [Assyrians] in their writings.” p 18

And in another footnote;

“Daniel P. Wolk’s recent research shows that even the Urmiyah (in Iran, mine) Christians in America, in their own language, continued until after World War I to refer to themselves as Suryaye (Syrians, mine). In his reading of some of their major publications from 1907 to 1920, Wolk found that the first ethno-nationalist organization established in Urmiyah, Khuyada, Unity, was a Suryeta organization. Chicago’s newspaper Mashk-hiddana Suryaya, Suryaya Herald, first published in 1915, changed to Mashkhiddana Aturaya only in 1920, when the nationalist discourse had come of age; the title in English was Assyrian American Herald, most probably because ‘Syrian’ in the United States stood for the more numerous Arab Christians from geographical Syria. See Wolk’s ‘The Emergence of Assyrian Ethnonationalism: Discourse Against the Hachaqogue (Theives of the Cross),’ paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Conference (MESA), Chicago, December 6, 1998. For the growth of Assyrian nationalism quickened during the war years, and the presence of an Assyrian American delegation at the Peace Conference in Paris, see below, pp 156-157." p. 18

Back to the text;

“The assumption that the Nestorians were the descendants of the ancient Assyrians found a great advocate in the Anglican missionary W.A. Wigram, who, in his post-World War I books, The Assyrians and their Neighbors , and Our Smallest Ally , popularized the name ‘Assyrian’ and familiarized the world with the tragedy that had befallen these ‘descendants of Shalmaneser’.” p 19.

And in another footnote;

“Maclean and Browne, p. 6. See also Coakley, p. 147 where he quotes Maclean saying ‘there is really as far as I know no proof that they [‘the Syrian Christians’] had any connection with the Old Assyrians. One of the few Anglicans who did use the term ‘Assyrian’ was the Archbishop of Canterbury Benson, ‘but that is a fad of His Grace, as no one else does’, wrote one of the missionaries quoted by Coakley. See also Fiey (1965), pp 149-151." p. 19

Returning to the text;

“During the interlude between the two world wars, the world heard a great deal about these modern Assyrians through newspapers and from the forum of the League of Nations…. In their own language, the people gradually began, vocally, to call themselves ‘Aturaye’ (Assyrians) during the inter-war years; until then it was as natural for them to speak of themselves as Suraye as it still is for the Syrian Orthodox to call themselves by that name, Suroyo…” p 19


What Happened to the Assyrians After The Fall of Their Empire?

“Modern Assyrian writers usually cite a statement that assyriologist Sidney Smith allegedly made early in the twentieth century, namely, that the ancient Assyrians disappeared ‘immediately’ and ‘vanished’ after the fall of Nineveh in 612 B.C. To ‘disprove’ Smith, they cite another assyriologist, W.W. Tarn, who noted that for centuries after the fall of their empire, Assyrian ‘survivors’ perpetuated old Assyrian names at various places on the site of ancient Ashur. Edward Y. Odishoo (a modern Assyrian nationalist, mine) refers to ‘a few’ historians who ‘talk about the continuation of the (Assyrian) [sic] identity’ until the establishment of Christianity in geographical Assyria, some eight centuries after the fall of the Assyrian empire. What do these few historians and assyriologists really ‘talk about’?” p. 28

“Excavations in northern Iraq, according to Sidney Smith, ‘have it is true, shown that poverty-stricken communities perpetuated the old Assyrian names…but the essential truth,’ he concludes, ‘remains the same’: the Assyrians were ‘unduly devoted to practices which can only end in racial suicide’. W.W Tarn notes that under the Parthians in the early 3rd century A.D. ‘a little body of people’ worshipped the god Ashur; he describes theirs as ‘a pathetic survival’. More recently assyriologist Joan Oates, in a section entitled ‘Assyria after the fall’, points out that on the site of old Ashur, where ‘a large Parthian city’ was excavated, the influence of Assyrian tradition and symbolism can sometimes be seen ‘in architecture and art’. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, in their Hagarism note than under the Parthians ‘The temple of Ashur was restored, the city was rebuilt, and an Assyrian successor state returned in the shape of the client kingdom of Adiabene’, adding that the region had an Assyrian ‘self-identification’ and speak of the survival of ‘a native aristocracy’.” p 28

“Odishoo’s reading of Hagarism leads him to the conclusion that as late as the Parthian period, over 800 years after the fall of the Assyrian empire, ‘there survived a strong native (Assyrian) [sic] aristocracy peculiar to itself and very conscious of its past and proud of it’. To reinforce his hypothesis, Odisho cites historian of ancient Iraq Georges Roux, who notes that during the Parthian period geographical ‘Assyria’ was literally resurrected ‘ and that several of its cities’ were ‘inhabited again, and Ashur, rebuilt anew, became at least as large a city as it had been in the heyday of the Assyrian empire’.” p. 28

“According to Odisho, the resurrection and rebuilding of Assyria were done by the ‘strong native Assyrian aristocracy’ that he believes flourished under the benign rule of the Parthians. A more careful reading of Roux, however, would have shown that there is no mention of any Assyrian involvement in the reoccupation and reconstruction of the ‘towns and villages which had been lying in ruins for hundreds of years’. In the very next sentence following the above quotation, left out by Odisho, Roux writes that it must be emphasized that the ‘revived settlements had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors’; that the old Sumero-Akkadian civilization, which was ‘perpetuated by a few priests in a few temples’, was an ‘ossified’ civilization that simply could not withstand the profound ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural changes that were introduced by successive waves of invaders in northern Mesopotamia…Persians ,Greeks, Arameans, pre-Islamic Arabs…’who could be neither kept at bay nor assimilated’. This massive influx of foreign peoples and ideas ‘had submerged what was left of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization.” pp 28-29


And this brings us to the crux of the matter;

“Speaking specifically of the ancient Assyrians, Roux explains in what sense the ancient Assyrians ‘disappeared’: they were a people who had forgotten their Akkadian mother tongue, and a ‘nation which forgets its language forgets its past and soon loses its identity.” p 29

This last statement strikes a strong chord with this “Assyrian” writer as it must with all those of this community who’ve been raised outside their native homelands. In a losing battle to keep alive our mother-tongue of Aramaic, our parents and priests incessantly repeat that to forget our language would mean that we would soon “forget who you are”, meaning, to them, “Assyrians”. The irony is that they were referring to the Aramaic language we now speak and not the Akkadian of the actual Assyrians, who indeed “forgot who they were” when they forgot their language. What they underscore is the truth of Roux’s statement as regards the ancient Assyrians; They “disappeared” when the language they had written their history and culture in disappeared. Undoubtedly their genetic material remained and mixed and survived…but not their conscious self-awareness of whom they had been. And this is exactly what Aramaic-speaking parents warn their children of…”Do not forget Aramaic or you will forget who you are” and, they might have added, “You will then go the way of the ancient Assyrians”, who forgot all when they forgot their mother-tongue.


One of the challenges for modern Assyrians, claiming to have always known they survived since the fall of the Assyrian empire, was to explain how it was that, for all those centuries, the Nestorians referred to themselves as Syrians (Suryaye/Arameans) and never Assyrians, until the 19th century.


The “lost A” theory:

“Because the ‘Nestorians’ had always called themselves Syrians (Suraye), strenuous efforts were made by the more educated to prove that Suraye (Syrians) was simply a truncated form of Ashuraye (Assyrian) and that the two terms were synonymous. The initial letter A of ‘Assyrian’ it was explained, was ‘lost’ (tliqta in Syriac…it had dropped out); The lost ‘A’ was now retrieved but placed under a cancellation mark, meaning that it was originally there but was not pronounced. Thus Suraya was written ‘[A]suraya’, which, pronounced Ashuraya, also meant Assyrian.” P 19

“Heinrichs rightly calls the Lost-A hypothesis very ingenuous, facilitating the claim of the nationalists, but points out that in the Armenian language, the names for Syrian and Assyrian, although similar sounding, both have always retained and pronounced the initial A:Asoric/Asori for Syria/Syrian and Asorestan/Asorestans’i or Asorestanc’i for Assyria/Assyrian.” pp 19-20

The Armenians always used two distinct, though similar sounding, words for Syrians and Assyrians. Therefore, even if the Assyrians lost their initial “A”, others, contemporaries and neighbors of theirs, always knew they were not the same.

“Heinrichs, pp. 106-07, where he calls the hypothesis ‘simply naïve’. Armenian name Asori referred to the people of geographical Syria, the Arameans; it was the name of Arameans wherever they were found. The writer is grateful to the late Dr. Avedis K. Sanjian, Nareski Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, for confirming my reading of these terms in a letter dated October 10, 1994…In the late 16th century, Sharaf Khan al-Bidlisi referred to the Nestorians of Hakkari (in Anatolia, mine) as ‘Christian infidels called Ashuri’, a borrowing from the Armenian. See al-Bidlisi’s Sharafnameh (in Persian) (Cairo, n.d.), pp. 130-132.”

Although the name for Syrians in the Armenian language, “Asori”, sounds very like the modern Assyrians' own name for themselves, “Ashuri”, it was not, but rather always referred to Syrians and not Assyrians.

Back to the text;

“Moreover, even if ‘Syrian’ were derived from ‘Assyrian’ it does not mean that the people of and culture of geographical Syria are identical to those of geographical Assyria’.” p 20

“Prior to the lost-A hypothesis, the learned Mar Tuma Odu wrote that the Greeks had changed Atur (meaning Assyria in Aramaic) to Asur which gradually became “Sur” and eventually Syria. While this hypothesis sounds plausible it should be remembered that even in classical Syriac, “Syrian” and “Assyrian” are always differentiated by two distinct terms: “Suryaya” for for Syrian and “Aturaya” for Assyrian. In Greek, the name Assyria is a translation of the Hebrew (and Akkadian) Ashur, which in the Old Testament connotes only geographical Assyria, without its conquered territories; the biblical name for geographical Syria is Aram, while Athur is the Aramaic name for geographical Assyria. P 20

This is further proof that Suryaya (Syrian) is not the same as Aturaya (Assyrian), that there is more to this difference than simply a lost “A” for in classical Syriac the two names are always differentiated with Syrian/Suryaya only being used for the conquered territories to the east (Aram) and not the Assyrian heartland.


It's clear that New York was derived from (olde) York, but that does not make Englishmen out of modern-day New Yorkers. The name is derived from England, just as Syria may be derived from Assyria, but the people and culture are not the same.

A footnote;

“Heinrichs, pp. 102-103, 104, n. 9. Well known Semitic scholars are of the opinion that ‘Syrian’ and ‘Assyrian’ are of completely different origins even though it remains for future scholars to prove the correctness of this theory.” p. 20


Misreading History:

“Herodotus is often erroneously cited by nationalists as having equated ‘Assyria’ with ‘Syria’, referring to his statement that the people whom the Greeks call Syrians are called Assyrians by others.” p 20.

“Herodotus himself, however. Always differentiated between the two terms. Randolph Helm’s researches show that Herodotus ‘conscientiously’ and ‘consistently’ distinguished the names Syria and Assyria and used them independently of each other.” p 21

This would mean that “Syrian” did not also include “Assyrian”, that they were different words for two different entities, hence the fact that Nestorians referred to themselves as Syrians meant they always knew themselves to be Syrians, not “Assyrians. Indeed this writer, also born into an “Assyrian” family, recalls the only word used by us to refer to our community was always Syrian (Suraye), not Assyrian (Aturaye). Later we learned to call ourselves Assyrians, but our own word for ourselves has always been Suraye (Syrians)

“To Herodotus, writes Helm, ‘Syrians were the inhabitants of the coastal Levant, including North Syria, Phoenicia, and Philistia’; he never{emphasis Helm’s} uses the name ‘Syria’ to apply to Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is always called ‘Assyria’…[and it’s] inhabitants ‘Assyrians’. The clear distinction made by Herodotus, comments Helm, was ‘lost upon Classical authors, some of whom interpreted [Herodotus’] Histories VII.63 as a mandate to refer to Phoenicians, Jews, and any other Levantines as ‘Assyrians’.” p 21

A footnote;

“See Helm’s ‘Herodotus Histories VII.63 and the Geographical Connotations of the Toponym ‘Assyria’ in the Achaemenid Period’ (paper presented at the 190th meeting of the American Oriental Society, at San Francisco, April 1980). See also his ‘Greeks’ in the Neo-Assyrian Levant and ‘Assyria’ in Early Greek Writers’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1980), pp 27-41; see also Herodotus’ Histories, I.105 and II.106. The late Arnold J. Toynbee, has also clarified that the Syrioi ‘are the people whom Herodotus includes in his Fifth Taxation District’ which includes ‘ the whole of Phoenicia and the so-called Philistine, Syria, together with Cyprus.’ The Syrioi , emphasizes Toynbee, are ‘not the people of an Assyria which contains Babylon and which is the ninth district in his list.’ p 21

Physical Appearance:

“Some have argued that the physiognomies of the ancient Assyrians and the present-day Nestorians closely resemble each other. Before Wigram advocated his hypothesis that the Nestorians are ‘Assyrian by blood’, Fletcher had observed that ‘Those who have studied with care the sculptural representations of the ancient Assyrians and compared them with the modern inhabitants of the plain of Nineveh, can hardly fail to trace the strong features of affinity which exist between the robed monarchs and priests of early days and the Christian peasants of [the plain of Mosul].’ Before Fletcher, Asahel Grant did not find it difficult to write convincingly that the Nestorians were the descendants of the ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’; he noted that ‘the physiognomy of the Nestorian Christians bears a close resemblance to that of the Jews of the country in which they dwell’.” pp 21-22

They might have added that the Muslim peasants also look as much like the ancient "robed monarchs" as do the Jews, and everyone else in that region.

“Adducing as peculiar to the ancient Assyrians and the present-day Nestorians features, customs, and practices which are shared by a great number of other Near Easterners, Wigram, or Grant, are indeed trying to prove too much. A number of peoples in the region resemble both the Jews and the Nestorians in their physiognomy, and not all the Nestorians share the same physical features, as both Fletcher and Wigram have themselves observed.” pp 21-22


The Language:

“Yet another ‘proof’ that the Aramaic-speaking Christians are descendants of the ancient Assyrians argues that the language of the two peoples is the same. Layard wrote that the Nestorians spoke ‘the language of their [Assyrian] ancestors’. An opinion expressed by Layard’s Aramaic-speaking assistant, Hormuzd Rassam: that the ancient Assyrians ‘Always spoke the Aramaic language’ and they ‘still do’. We have just seen that the ancient Assyrians did not always speak Aramaic; their mother tongue was Akkadian, the language of the famed cuneiform tablets and monuments that Rassam himself helped excavate.” p 22

This is another critical point because until the discovery of the cuneiform tablets, beginning in the 1840s, the modern Nestorians remembered nothing of the greater part of the history and culture of their supposed Assyrian ancestors; nothing of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ennuma Elish, their own Creation Epic, including the names Napishishtim, the precursor to Noah, as well as Sargon the Great, the basis of the Moses and the reed-boat story, written on those tablets in the actual language of the Assyrians, which was Akkadian. In fact it was only when George Smith, in the 19th century, was able to decipher the cuneiform that the Nestorians, and others, became acquainted with the much larger scope of Assyrian history than what appeared in the Bible .

It is also a curious fact that if the survivors of the fall of Nineveh maintained an Assyrian consciousness, self-awareness and appreciation of who they were, they did not translate their rich, centuries-old, heritage of art, literature, history, science, architecture, engineering, medicine, astronomy etc. into their new Aramaic language...a language which indeed was the “language of Christ”, but not of Shalmannessar or TiglathPilessar. The Nestorians (who would insist they had been Assyrians “all along”), who become rightly famous for translating, preserving and passing on the works of Greek Classical writers as well as the Hebrew Bible, did not bother to translate their own Akkadian-language “Assyrian” heritage into Aramaic to pass on to their children and the world, as they did with the works of others. Instead the Akkadian language was forgotten and with it any traces of Assyrian self-awareness and the artifacts neglected till sand and dirt covered them over.


What “Assyrians” Remembered:

“Thanks to the Old Testament, the names Assyria and Assyrian were well known for centuries, long before the archaeological excavations of the nineteenth century. In the works of the early Eastern Christian writers, notes Fiey, we find all the gamut of references to these ancients, employing indifferently the words Syrians, Athurians [Assyrians], Chaldeans, and Babylonians, but these writers never identified with these ancients. ‘I have made indices of my Christian Assyria ‘, emphasized Fiey, ‘and have had to align some 50 pages of proper names of people; there is not a single writer who has an ‘Assyrian’ name’. In early modern times...the Roman Catholic Church added to the confusion by coining a number of names for the various Christian communities of the East and their patriarchs; These Roman Catholic titles and names, however, tried to identify the geographical location of the churches and patriarchates of the region and not the ethnic origin of the people involved…Also in the 18th century, the British historian Edward Gibbon, aware of the confusion of names, wrote that the Nestorians, ‘Under the name of Chaldeans or Assyrians, are confounded with the most learned or the most powerful nation in Eastern antiquity.” p 23


The Bible kept the memory of the ancient Assyrians alive. However, there was much more written by the ancient Assyrians themselves, but concealed in the ruins, that did not appear in the Bible and was not known to anyone, including Nestorians, until the excavations of the nineteenth century. Certainly the Assyrians and Babylonians were mentioned by early East Christian writers, but in no way did these writers claim to be Assyrians or Babylonians themselves, nor did they mention the existence of either.


“Eager to establish a link between themselves and the ancient Assyrians, the nationalists conclude that such a link is confirmed whenever they find a reference to the word ‘Assyrians’ during the early Christian period; to them it proves that their Christian ancestors always ‘remembered’ their Assyrian forefathers. Nationalist writers often refer to Tatian’s statement that he was ‘born in the land of the Assyrians’, and note that the Acts of Mar Qardagh trace the martyr’s ancestry to Ancient Assyrian kings.” p 26


In a footnote;

“Tatian not only did not claim to be an Assyrian, but scholars point out that he was not even born in the lands east of the Euphrates. Tatian (Greek Tatianos), writes Millar, no more came from geographical Assyria than did that other ‘Assyrian’ with a Latin name, Lucian (Greek Lucianos) of Samasota. Millar explains simply that the terms Assyria and Assyrians were common terms then for geographical Syria and its inhabitants. See his Rome and the East, pp 227, 454-455, 460. Consult also Asmussen, op. cit., p 927; Encyclopedia of the Early Church (New York 1992), under ‘Tatian’; Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism (Cambridge, 1977), p. 197, n. 163.” p 27


Descent From the Ancients:

“It is not surprising that ‘in the land of the Assyrians’ one encounters an occasional legend that traces the ancestry of an individual or group to an ancient hero. This writer has heard Persians on the streets of Kermanshah begging and claiming that they were the lineal descendants of Imam Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who lived over 1,300 years before them. Michael G. Morony speaks of villagers of Aramaic descent who, assimilated with the Persians, claimed to be of Royal Persian descent, ‘form Kisra, son of Qubadh’. The story of Mar Qardagh, himself a semi-legendary figure, is such a legend; it traces the ancestry of his father to the family of Nimrud and that of his mother to the family of Sennacherib (705-681), a geneology that harks back over a thousand years.” p 27


In a footnote;

“…See also Hagarism , p. 190, n. 71, where, in accordance with their methodology, authors Crone and Cook accept Qardaghs’s descendance from Assyrian kings as a believed fact by his contemporaries, making Hagarism a favorite source book of the modern Assyrian writers. In a letter to the author, dated June 11, 1997, Patricia Crone wrote that she and Cook ‘do not argue that the Nestorians of pre-Islamic Iraq saw themselves as Assyrians or that this is what they called themselves. They called themselves Suryane (Syrians, mine), which had no greater connotation of Assyrian in their usage than it did in anyone elses…We take it for granted that they got the modern Assyrian label from the West and proceeded to reinvent themselves…Of course the Nestorians were Arameans (Syrian/Suryane, mine).” p 27

While the names “Assyrian” and “Chaldean” were certainly used by early Eastern Christian writers there was no claim to kinship with those ancient peoples. The mention of those names was not, as Joseph points out, a case of “remembering our ancestors”, but simply acknowledging their existence in those lands and especially their impact on Biblical Hebrews and others. Modern claims of descent from ancient heroes is a common foible of certain classes of Easterners to this day…as in the United States people claim to have had ancestors who crossed with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower.


Summary;

“The Aramaic language molded widely differing ethnic, social, and political elements into a uniform and integrated culture. Just as the Arabic language later amalgamated various ethnic groups, creating the Arabs, without much regard to their Arabian physical origin, so did Aramaic mold peoples of different identities into Arameans (Syrians, mine). The ancient Assyrians did not ‘vanish’ when they were vanquished in the late 7th century B.C., nor did every one of them immediately ‘perish’. They merely ‘merged with the mass of Near Eastern Arameans’, just as others before and after them, were similarly assimilated, like the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrians, and others. About 800 years after the fall of Nineveh, a common language (Aramaic) unified the peoples of this region, just as Islam and the Arabic tongue would arabize and muslimize most of the Arameans a few centuries later, causing them to ‘disappear’. P 30.

“The lineal origin of the community, like that of most Middle Eastern nationalities, and nationalities the world over, is hidden in the mists of history. The religious and linguistic minority under discussion is naturally a mixture of ethnicities, mainly Aramean, but also Persian, Kurdish, Arab and Jewish, just as present-day Arabs are the result of a similar merging of a variety of nationalities. But, just as it was the speakers of the Arabian language who gave most of the converts to Islam in the Middle East and Africa the name ‘Arab’. So the Arameans gave the various converts to Christianity their mother-tongue, and for the next 1,800 years, bequeathed to them the language of their literature and liturgy as well as the very name by which they have for centuries called themselves…Suraye-Suryaye .” p 32.


Conclusion;

Dr. Joseph has shown how survivors of the Assyrian empire merged with other ethnic groups, eventually adopting Aramaic as a common language for the region, forgetting their own language and identity, and in this sense “disappeared”...as did the other ancient peoples of that region. The coming of Christianity pulled these peoples together under the one banner of the Christian Church with an Aramaic liturgy and literature. The Christians of Mesopotamia identified themselves as Syrian/Suryaye until the 19th century excavations uncovered the glories of Assyria, leading Europeans to dub these Christians the direct, lineal, descendants of the ancient Assyrians. Increasingly, and loudly, the Syrians began referring to themselves as Assyrians and by the end of WW I added their demands for their own “Assyrian nation” to those being made by other groups recently released from Ottoman domination. Since there was no prospect of being given territory as a Christian sect, their only hope was to adopt a “national” identity as the “indigenous people” of an ancient Assyria, “usurped” by Arabs and Ottomans, now called Iraq, who demanded “their” nation returned to them.

The results have been predictably disastrous. Since European and American missionaries first appeared on the scene and especially with the coming of WW I, overtures for support from the Christians of the region, in return for protection and then a “land of their own”, has led to reprisals. What Assyrian nationalists see as working for their “indigenous rights”, even to collaborating with occupying European armies, are, in reality, acts of sedition and, in time of war, treason, which are severely punished by all governments in all countries. No land or territory has ever been granted nor even considered. Further, Assyrian insistence that only Christians can be legitimate Assyrians has verified to their Muslim neighbors and rulers that modern Assyrians are nothing more than religious sects sporting a national front in hopes of gaining a Christian territory or enclave for themselves.

It is difficult enough to be Christian in Iraq these days, seeing as how the country is being attacked by a coalition of mostly Christian nations, without seeking the help of those same nations for a “land of our own”, richly endowed with petroleum, to be carved out of Iraq. The Christians of the Persian Empire, facing the same dilemma; the need not to be seen as potentially disloyal, distanced themselves from their co-religionists in the Byzantine Empire by adopting a Roman heresy purely for personal security. Today, Christians in Iraq must be wary of identifying too closely, or being identified, with the Christian nations attacking that country, of secretly hoping for a defeat as presenting them with a “golden opportunity”, or giving even the slightest impression that they may constitute a fifth column. The modern Assyrian nationalists, all of them safely out of Iraq and settled in the West, by their clamoring for help from these same Christian powers, in getting them a piece of Iraq, are pursuing exactly the opposite course the Christians of Persia did. Had those earlier Christians begged the Romans to come “liberate” them and give them a piece of the Persian Empire, they would have been wiped out to a man, woman and child. Yet this is precisely what modern Assyrian nationalists are risking for the remaining few Christians in Iraq, and the result has been the worst conditions ever for them.

The great historian Arnold J. Toynbee said the national aspirations of such small minorities was “a will-o'-the-wisp enticing them to destruction”. And this has been precisely the experience of the Christian minorities of Iraq, especially. The fact that their self-identification as direct descendants of the ancient Assyrians who “deserve” to have their country back, has no basis in fact only adds to their tragedy.



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