The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> "MY" article for Wikipedia....done!!!

"MY" article for Wikipedia....done!!!
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, March 25 2012, 22:32:46 (UTC)
from *** - *** Mexico - Windows XP - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

...I say "my" when it's really all Dr. Joseph...but when you yourself are not a scholar and recognized historian, you must NOT write "your" views. "You" sink into the background and let the experts take center-stage...

I haven't done the summary yet and I'm not sure how much, or if, to discuss the real nature of the nationalists, what they want and the lies they use to justify their claims...maybe for another article...maybe at the end of this one to explain why it is that I even bother to expose these insignificant pests...except for one, major reason; as I've said many times, no one cares what these people claim to be...but, by making these demands and spreading the lies about Islam and what Arabs supposedly did to them, they have kissed ass and played into Western aggression against that most blessed cradle of Civilization...and THAT has to be stopped...at least people have to know that this is nationalist bullshit, that at its core is racism and bigotry, a hatred of Arabs simply because Islam conquered Christ...and that these people not only don;t care what their inflammatory statements cost the Christians still in Iraq, but feel that if those Christians won;t "rise up and demand Assyria", they are worthless and might just as well serve some purpose by being "martyred" by Muslims...at least with more murdered Christians these nationalists MIGHT get pity from the West...which they believe will lead to there being a Christian enclave created for them, by the West, where they will be "safe"...right!



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Assyrians In The Modern Era: Myth or Reality.

note" I don;t know why but all italicized portions have been rendered in normal script....so bear with it.


The following article relies on one primary source, first published in 1961 by Princeton University Press, 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, who graduated with a doctorate in Middle Eastern history from Princeton University, was also recently honored with a new International Studies building at Franklin and Marshall College being named after him.

What makes Dr. Joseph especially qualified to publish his 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 raised with all the usual and, as his later studies confirmed, erroneous claims to direct lineal descent from either the ancient Chaldeans or Assyrians.

To sum up Dr Joseph’s analysis of the people who today claim to be lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians;

“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


From the preface to the revised edition, published in 1999 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’.”

Throughout his book Dr. Joseph graciously concedes to call the modern advocates of these ancient identities by the names they use to refer to themselves, that is; Assyrians or Chaldeans. However, the thrust of his book is that they are mistaken; misled at first by European explorers, adventurers, and then by Western missionaries, beginning in the 1840s, who then went on, after World War I, to adopt these ancient names for themselves for political reasons, which will become apparent in the summary.

Before discussing how the term Assyrian and Chaldean recently came to be used in reference to communities of Middle Eastern Christians, it is necessary to explain who these people were before they adopted these names, what they called themselves, and how they were seen by their neighbors. Western missionaries were the first outsiders to live and work among the various Nestorian people of the Middle East and their early accounts shed light on how and when the Nestorian Christians adopted the names "Chaldean" and, later, "Assyrian". Dr Joseph explains;

“Just over a hundred years ago the Anglican missionaries Arther J. Maclean and William H. Browne wrote their well-informed book ‘The Catholikos of the East and His People’ (1892). They subtitled it ‘Some account of the customs of the Eastern Syrian Christians, otherwise variously known as Assyrians, Chaldeans, or Nestorians’.”( p.1)

This introduces four names which need defining, in order; Nestorian, Syrian, Chaldean and, finally, Assyrian.

As it is the Nestorian Christian community that adopted these names we will focus on them and how they came to be known by the name of an individual. Prior to adopting the teachings of Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, the Christians of the Persian empire referred to themselves as members of the Church of the East, as opposed to the Roman or, Church of the West. Speaking of Mesopotamia Dr. Joseph writes;

“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.

Speaking of Christian communities among the Parthians, who’d occupied Mesopotamia, Joseph writes;

“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

But conditions were to change drastically for Christians in the Parthian Empire;

“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 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 one further change when, in 1976, the word “Assyrian” was added, making it the “Assyrian Church of the East". mine).

Having seen why and when the Christians in the Persian empire began referring to themselves as Nestorians, it remains to be seen the circumstances under which they began to refer to themselves also as Syrians or, in their native tongue, Suraye.

Joseph writes;

“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.”

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.”

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.)” pp. 9-10.

The text again;


“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." p 9


At this point the Aramean people and their interaction with the Assyrians enters into the story. Joseph writes that;

“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’." p 10

A footnote;

"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.”

“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.



The language of the Aramean people who inhabited the land of Aram (modern day Syria) was soon to spread and become in time the ‘lingua franca’ of the ancient world written and spoken by Assyrians, Egyptians, Hebrews and others. As noted by Joseph;

“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 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’.

A footnote;

“Consult H. Tadmor’s chapter ‘The Aramization of Assyria: Aspects of Western Impact,’ in H.J. Nissen and J. Renger. eds. “Mesopotamien und Seine Nachbarn, (Berlin, 1987), vol. 2, p. 459. “ p 11
The text again;


“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.

Speaking of the gradual predominance of the Aramaic language and with it the culture of the Arameans Joseph writes;

“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.

Thus by the 2nd century A.D. Aramaic had become the language of the people living within the Persian empire, including lands which once made up the Assyrian heartland. As Joseph goes on to write;

“Syriac, the major Eastern dialect with which we are concerned, 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.


Having explained the origins of the name “Nestorians” and “Syrians” (Arameans), for the Christian communities within the Persian empire, Dr. Joseph next introduces the names, “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” for this same Christian community in the modern era; when they each came into use, by whom and how.

“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. As we have seen the 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.

While Assyrian nationalists assert that those who "mistakenly" call themselves Chaldeans today are really Assyrians, the historical record shows that it was the name "Chaldean" that first appeared among the Nestorians. It is interesting to note that while Assyrian nationalists take great pains to remind Chaldeans that they were an invention of Rome, they cannot accept that their own modern identity as Assyrians was also a gift of the Europeans.

“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.”

A footnote appears;

“Claudius J. Rich, “Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan and on the site of Ancient Nineveh”, London, 1836, II, 275n, 277n. See also Jean B. Piolet, Missions catholiques, francaises au XIX siecle, Paris 1901, I, 223; Ainsworth, II, 198, 223; Mary Sheil, “Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia, London, 1856, p. 349: Joseph Wolff, “Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, London, 1861, pp 223, 457.” p. 4.

From this it would appear that of the two modern usages; Chaldean and Assyrian, the Chaldean name was the first to be resurrected and attached to the Nestorian Syrians.

“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 Christians 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.

Joseph then explains how the Nestorians came to be called Chaldeans;

“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

From this it would seem that the Roman Catholic missionaries, first arriving among the Nestorian/Syrians in the 16th century and having succeeded in luring some of the “heretical” Nestorians back into the Church of Rome, established themselves in what was known to be the ancient land of the Chaldees. For this reason their Catholic missions were given the name “Chaldean”.

The Discovery of modern Assyrians:

Some two centuries after missionaries from Rome arrived among the Nestorians to encourage them to return to the Catholic faith, European adventurers and government agents made the first discoveries of ancient Assyrian artifacts.

“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,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

It apparently never occurred to these Europeans that the Muslim villagers, also living in proximity to these new discoveries, could as easily be a “surviving human memorial” of Assyria. At this point, however, the only ancient name being used, for only the Christian minorities, was “Chaldeans”…Joseph goes on to explain how “Assyrian” was next adopted;

“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

“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’.

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;

“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.

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. Se also Fiey (1965),” pp 149-151.

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

(At this point political considerations, namely an attempt to get a part of Iraq as a new "Assyrian" homeland by the Nestorians, enter into the story, which will be dealt with in the summary)

One of the challenges for modern Assyrian nationalists, claiming to have "always known" they were Assyrians, since the fall of the Assyrian empire, was to explain how it was that, for all those centuries, the Nestorians referred to themselves as only Syrians (Suryaye/Arameans) and never “Assyrians”. Enter 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

This explanation was put forth by Assyrian nationalists to explain how it was that throughout the history of the Nestorian people they had never referred to themselves as Assyrians but rather Syrians which, as Joseph has shown, was itself the Greek version of ‘Arameans’. If anything, by their own usage, the Nestorians were descended from the ancient Arameans, not Chaldeans nor Assyrians.

“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

Therefore, if the initial “A” had gone missing from “Asorestanc’i (the Armenian word for Assyrian), it would not have produced the word Syrian, or “Asori, as that “A” remained part of the word.

A footnote appears here;

“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.”

In this footnote "Ashuri" refers to Asori, the Armenian word for Syrian, not "Assyrian", as is claimed by the nationalists. The Armenian word for Assyrian is Asorestans'i or Asorestanc'i. Hence the Armenians always knew that the Nestorians were 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

Another footnote appears here;

“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.”

In seeking to bolster their case that modern Nestorians “always knew” they were Assyrians, the nationalists misread ancient history as Joseph points out;

“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.

This is a critical blow to their case because it explains that the Nestorians never referred to themselves as Assyrians until after the discoveries of Assyrian ruins and tablets starting in the 1840s. The nationalists claim that Syrians and Assyrians always meant the same thing, citing their own “lost A” theory mentioned earlier. But as Joseph explained this was nothing more than a clever device to facilitate their claims.

“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).

“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

Returning to the text Joseph writes;

“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 robbed 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’.”

“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

One of the main pieces of evidence the nationalists use to prove their descent from the ancient Assyrians is their language, which they claim is the same as that spoken by the ancients. As Joseph observes;

“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 Layrd’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 a critical point because until the discovery of the cuneiform tablets, beginning in the 1840s, the modern Nestorians remembered nothing of the history and culture of their supposed Assyrian ancestors; nothing of Gilgamesh, the Ennuma Elish, their own Creation Epic including the name 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 was able to translate the cuneiform that the Nestorians, and others, learned to read that ancient language and became acquainted with the much larger scope of Assyrian history than what appeared in the Bible . What, then, did the Nestorians actually know of “their” Assyrian ancestors? Joseph explains;

“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, as noted above, 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 Assyrians, 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.

Regarding the modern nationalists’ claims of direct descent from the ancient Assyrians Joseph writes;

“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

The state of Arizona was once, and for many centuries, known as “The Land of the Navajo”. To have been born in that land would not automatically make one an ethnic Navajo. Likewise to be born in the land then commonly known as having been the heartland of the Assyrian Empire would not make one ethnically Assyrian, or Babylonian, or Sumerian for that matter.

To settle the matter Joseph continues;

“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 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 (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 their ancestors”, but simply acknowledging their existence, once, 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 over with the Pilgrims of the Mayflower.

The question of what actually happened to the Assyrians after the fall of their empire is next addressed by Joseph;

“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’?”

“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’.”

“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

“Speaking specifically of the ancient Assyrians, Roux explains in what sense the ancient Assyrians ‘disappeared’: they were a people who had forgotten their Akkadian (Assyrian, mine) 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 writer as it must with all those of this community who’ve been raised outside of their native homelands. In a losing battle to keep alive our new "native” tongue of Aramaic in the West, our parents and priests incessantly repeated that to forget our language would mean that we would soon “forget who you are”, meaning “Assyrians”. The irony is that they were referring to the Aramaic language we now speak and not the Akkadian of the actual Assyrians. What they really revealed, however, was 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 our Aramaic-speaking parents warned 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.

Dr. Joseph concludes by stating;

“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”). 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.



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