The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> How We Disappear

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, February 27 2007, 2:47:46 (CET)
from 189.162.5.202 - dsl-189-162-5-202.prod-infinitum.com.mx

Mexico -

Windows XP -

Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

I’m going to paraphrase, mostly, pages 27 to 29. To prove me wrong, or Dr Jospeh wrong, just get the book and read for yourself…if you can prove me wrong, Jeff will refund the price of the book, on receipt of purchase.

Our modern Assyrian writers point to a claim, allegedly made by an Assyriologist in the early 1900s that ancient Assyrians disappeared “immediately” and “vanished” after the fall of Nineveh. And, to prove him wrong they quote another Assyriologist who said for centuries after the Fall, Assyrian “survivors” kept using old Assyrian names on the site of “ancient Ashur”. One of our modern Assyrian writers says that “a few historians talk about the continuation of the Assyrian identity” until Christianity was established in geographical Assyria 800 years after the Fall.

Dr Joseph then goes on to show what these “few historians” actually said. One such historian, cited as the source of the notion that all Assyrians “immediately” disappeared is again quoted as saying that a few poverty-stricken communities kept using the old Assyrian names…but the truth was that the Assyrians were “unduly devoted to practices which can only end in racial suicide.” Another Assyriologist says that in the early 3rd Century A.D. a “little body of people” still worshipped the god Ashur but theirs was “a pathetic survival”. Other Assyriologists claim the temple of Ashur was restored and the city rebuilt into an Assyrian successor-state called Adiabene and had an Assyrian “self-identification” (as do we, as do the modern Chaldeans, mine) and the Assyriologists claim there was even an Assyrian “native aristocracy”.

One modern Assyrian writer of ours says that over 800 years after the fall of the Assyrian empire, “there survived a strong native Assyrian aristocracy peculiar to itself and very conscious of its past and proud of it”. This fellow seeks to strengthen his hypothesis by calling on George Roux, historian of ancient Iraq, who wrote that during the Parthian occupation, geographical “Assyria was literally resurrected,” and many of its cities “inhabited again” and Ashur rebuilt all over again, becoming as big of a city as it ever had been during the glory days of the Assyrian empire…this grand rebuilding was done by the “strong native Assyrian aristocracy”…

This modern Assyrian writer, Odisho, in his eagerness to prove his point, like Fred Aprim, pulled out from Roux only what might seem to justify his wooly beliefs…leaving out the crucial following sentence from the same paragraph by Roux where he goes on to emphatically add that “the revived settlements had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors” and that the old Sumero-Akkadian civilization was “perpetuated by a few priests in a few temples,” and was an “ossified” civilization that couldn’t withstand the profound ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural changes brought there by successive hordes of invaders in northern Mesopotamia..such as the Perisnas, Greeks, Arameans, pre-Islamic Arabs, “who could be neither held at bay nor assimilated”…and that these invasions “had submerged what was left of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization”.

Here now comes the part in Roux that I think fries us but good….it should be remembered how often we too have insisted on the very same thing Roux does..without ever realizing we were signing the very papers that disprove all our “ethnic’ claims.

According to Dr Joseph, Chapter One, p. 29:

“Specifically speaking of the ancient Assyrians, Roux explains in what sense the ancient Assyrians ‘disappeared’: they were a people who had forgotten their Akkadian mother tongue (in which all the cuneiform tablets containing their history were written, mine), and a ‘nation which forgets its language forgets its past and soon loses its identity’”.

How often have we said the very same about our people, the young ones especially…warning that to forget the Aramaic language of the Arameans, which is what we have spoken for centuries, would be to forget their “Assyrian” history and lose their “Assyrian” identity. It has been there, staring us in the face for centuries…the fact that we Nestorians forgot Akkadian, which was the language of the Assyrians for most of their lives, adopting the language of the Arameans a bare 110 years, out of a 2000 year old history, before the Fall…so that our own words, as well as those of Georges Roux and any number of historians and linguists and anthropologists, comes true with a vengeance for we did, indeed, “forget our Akkadian mother tongue”…and, as we have said so many times ourselves…”A nation which forgets its language forgets its past and soon loses its identity”.

Our modern Assyrian reply is that you can lose your original language, lose your original religion, lose your original culture…and then simply claim that none of them were important for being “Assyrian” anyway…merely adding the word “Assyrian” to your new religion, new language and new customs, the way we added the word to our new Nestorian Church in 1976 A.D….becoming the brand, spanking, new and modern, Assyrians.

Like I said, you don’t need anything originally of the Assyrians to claim to be a modern “Assyrian”….except that no Assyrian, at any time, would ever have done such a thing.

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

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Content-length: 5901
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-language: es-mx
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.BEZo.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)