The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> It Should Come As No Surprise...

It Should Come As No Surprise...

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, October 29 2007, 21:17:28 (CET) from 12.199.144.42 - mail.shpl.org Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla Website: Website title:

.... that Assyria kept its name even though the native Assyrian population dwindled and soon lost self-consciousness. America was named by an Italian (Amerigo Vespuci) and its name wasn’t changed to suit the Spanish, Dutch, French, Germans or Brits who followed. England stands for Angle-Land, the land of the Angles or Anglo tribe…yet they were supplanted many times but their name remained attached to the country. There are countless other examples so that Warda’s claim that the survival of the name Assyria is proof that Assyrians inhabited the land is open to question. There is not a single blood-relative of Caesar’s in Rome today…and the Romans born there are not THE Romans. This hardly takes a “historian” to figure out….a sculptor can do it. As to his evidence that people born or living in the land of Assyria after the Fall, must have been Assyrians…there were many other people settling that region such as Arameans, Greeks, Persians and Arabs. The ruined cities may well have been rebuilt and occupied, but the people doing so were not necessarily native Assyrians. Dr Joseph gives two examples of how christo-nationalists play fast and loose with facts, even to altering or just misreading noted historians. The following quote is taken from Dr Joseph’s book, chapter one, pp28-29. First let me preface by saying in their effort to “disprove” the claim that Assyrians totally disappeared after the Fall, christo-nationalists… “…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. Odisho refers to ‘a few’ historians who ‘talk about the continuation of the (Assyrian) 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’? Warda is one of those who cites these “few historians” and assyriologists. But do they really back him up? To continue: “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’.” Good lord! If anything could prove our present bunch of nationalists ARE Assyrian it’s this observation that they’re given to racial suicide…look at them!!! But, seriously…to continue: “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’. Odisho left out the rest of Tarn’s comments about the surviving Assyrians having a “pathetic” survival, not the “native aristocracy” strong and self-assured he writes about….this last part he made up himself. And Oates’ comment about Assyrians survival under Parthians is confined to an “influence” of Assyrian symbolism…not entire rebuilt Assyrian cities. None of this is surprising. In Rome today there are still “traditional Roman” ruins…as well as Etruscan “influences” in art and architecture. To continue… “Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, in their ‘Hagarism’ note that 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.’ All well and good…but here comes trouble… “Odisho’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) aristocracy peculiar to itself and very conscious of its past and proud of it’. That’s him speaking, not Cook and Crone. But let’s leave Odisho for a moment and go back to page 27… “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 (Dr Joesph) has heard Persians on the streets of Kermanshah begging (ahem, mine) 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 Aramean descent who, assimilated with the Persians, claimed to be of Royal Persian descent…’from 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 B.C .), a genealogy that harks back over a thousand years.” There is a footnote to the above: “…See also ‘Hagarism’ p. 190, n. 71, where, in accordance with their methodology, authors Crone and Cook accept Qardagh’s descendance from Assyrian kings as a believed fact by his contemporaries, making ‘Hagarism’ a favorite source book of the modern Assyrian writers. “ One can see the errors begin…Crone and Cook accept whatever the people around Mar Qardagh want to believe about his claim of descent from Assyrian kings. That’s a far cry from endorsing such a preposterous claim….they’re merely reporting it. If I say I’m Napoleon…and my family agrees with me…it doesn’t mean the author writing about us for the New Yorker Magazine accepts me as Bonaparte…he’s just reporting my, and my crazy family’s, views. To continue…same footnote: “In a letter to the author (Dr Joseph), 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 Surayane, which had no greater connotation of Assyrian in their usage than it did in anyone else’s…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’. Apparently Ms Crone responded to a letter from Dr Joseph, perhaps asking her for a clarification…which she sent him. She makes it clear that neither she nor Cook believe the people SAYING they are Assyrians, are correct…at least she’s pointing out that she and her co-author never said such a thing. This is what Odisho understood from their book..or what he wanted to believe, and this is exactly the problem with our Wardas and Aprims. They NEED to make their point…and they’ll do anything to convince us dummies that they did real research and are being honest and candid. I wonder what authors such as these would think of a letter from Warda…? And, finally: “In their prefatory remarks Crone and Cook, who warn the non-specialist not to expect a ‘guided tour’ but a pioneering expedition through some very rough country, also anticipate ‘the raised eyebrows’ of the specialists” I can second that….I read that entire book and came out cross-eyed at the end. It’s the most dense book I ever read, definitely not for our boys. I got very little out of it and I’ve no doubt that our typical christo-nationalists, if they made it to the end, got little more than I did, especially when you factor in their abysmal English language skills. It would be a very easy book to get completely wrong…I dare anyone to try it. …and: “ For nationalist references to, and MISINTERPRETATION(emphasis mine) of, ‘Hagarism’, see Odisho Bet Ashur (pen name), ‘The Continuity of Assyrian History’, Nineveh, v. 17, no. 3 (1994), pp. 16-17, notes 19, 20, 24; Odisho, ‘Sound Systems’, pp 10, 15-16.” Now to continue with Odisho and his misreadings…although in the present example he’s even more naughty than usual. From pp. 28-29: “To reinforce this hypothesis( that native Assyrian aristocracy rebuilt ruined Assyrian cities, mine), 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 Assur, rebuilt anew, became at least as large a city as it had been in the heyday of the Assyrian empire’. According to Odisho, the resurrection and rebuilding of Assyria were done by the ‘strong native Assyrian aristocracy’ that HE believes (emphasis, mine) flourished under the benign rule of the Parthians.” …but… “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 ODISHOO( hysterical emphasis mine), 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 ‘ossifized’ 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 neither be kept at bay nor assimilated’. Much of this kind of “research” is done by the boys….Aprim in particular. They read history books only to pick out what might serve their “nationalist” interests…which is the reason they hate real scholars and historians. Odisho left out the crucial last sentence of the quote from Roux. He took only what he needed, what he thought would serve his nationalist purpose. Pretty unethical if not plain sneaky. This sort of thing is also a slap in the face to his reading audience, showing great contempt for them… for it betrays a conviction that none of them will read the sources he’s mangled…but will instead, in a burst of “pride”, be content to be stroked, petted and lulled to glory. And then: “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”….sorry, I gotta scream again…FORGETS ITS PAST AND SOON LOSES ITS IDENTITY.” Where have we heard that before? Isn’t that what we’ve been told…all our lives? That if we forget, what we call Assyrian but is really Aramaic…we’ll forget our everything? Well…isn’t it? It’s in THIS sense that Roux and so many others, say that the ancient Assyrians “disappeared”…not physically…but self-consciously. Like the Babylonians Sumerians, Amorites, Kassites, Hurrians and yes…the CHALDEANS…whom we ALL say are a fraud of a MODERN INVENTION!!! Okay…I’m off the ceiling. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: No replies.

Content-length: 12473 Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Accept-encoding: identity,gzip,deflate Cache-control: max-age=259200 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: *hidded* Host: www.insideassyria.com Keep-alive: 300 Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.Jhrv. User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060501 Epiphany/1.6.5 Via: 1.1 localhost:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE13) X-forwarded-for: 127.0.0.1

Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9