The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Arameans and Assyrians

Arameans and Assyrians
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, April 8 2008, 3:53:54 (CEST)
from 71.93.42.32 - 71-93-42-32.static.snlo.ca.charter.com Commercial - Windows XP - Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

Aprim and the rest of our hysterians like to say that it's inconceivable that the mighty Assyrians would have adopted the language or culture of the Arameans. They've been taught by their grandparents and uncles that the Arameans were scattered groups of tribes who couldn't have influenced the great Assyrians...they go even farther and claim that Aramaic was really invented by Assyrians...and other such self-serving fantasies.

Unlike them I don't rely on my grandparents for history lessons. I was glancing through a book titled "The Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations" published by Rainbird Publishing, London. The book contains extensive articles on many ancient groups all written by qualified historians...all of them published and attached to serious universities.

Reading through the section on the Assyrians I came across this....

"The Aramean pressure did not let up and during the final years of the first millennium increased to the point where they had captured all Assyrian holdings in the west and were threatening to overrun Assyria itself"

some tribe. And also...

"At the beginning of the millennium, the Arameans dominated the scene and almost nothing is known of Assyria apart from the name of her kings."

and....

"Ethnically Assyria was undergoing a major change during this period in that the Aramean element in the population was increasing dramatically. This was brought about, not only by the peaceful infiltration of Arameans into the state, but also by the Assyrian practrise of transporting gigantic numbers of conquered foreigners, most of whom were Arameans, to Assyria to work on the enormous building projects of the day. Over many generations this new element, or at least a proportion of it, slowly worked its way up the social and economic scale, so that by the eighth century BC there were Arameans at a very high level in the civil service and army, and the Aramaic language had virtually replaced Assyrian as the everyday language."

In other words, there was no such thing as a pure Assyrian by the time the empire collapsed...between Sumerian blood, Amorite, Babylonian, Chaldean, Hurrian, Aramean and who knows what else, the people of Assyria were a glorious mixture which is precisely the reason they developed such a great and multi-talented culture.

Thank goodness the ancients were nothing like the racist, bigoted and homophobic modern, so-called, Assyrians of today...or else they'd have been the comic mess these people are and we never would have heard of them.



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 2892
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, applicatio...
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-language: en-us
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.2cis.
Ua-cpu: x86
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9