The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Summary and Review Of Chapter One.

Summary and Review Of Chapter One.

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, March 10 2007, 3:34:00 (CET) from 189.162.98.6 - dsl-189-162-98-6.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Since first reading the book through once I’ve been reading and re-reading the first chapter which, I venture to say, is the most important because everything that follows branches out from this one root. There’s so much information concentrated here and almost all of it presents a new and often disturbing take on what each of us modern Assyrians has always assumed was our gospel truth…so that to dare question any of it, no, never mind questioning it, but just to consider it, to read it even, is to risk damnation before a Grand Inquisition at the hands of avenging furies, who would like nothing better than to return to those good-old Christian days when you could crush someone’s thumbs for daring to think at all or read “unacceptable” books. And to have conceived of and written it places the person who did such a thing either at the head of the class or in the corner. We shall see, The best way to proceed is to take each section, each block, in the order Dr Joseph builds his case. I already posted his introductory comments wherein he states openly that he is conducting a survey of the ideas we have about the names used to define the Christian minority we represent, where they came from, who attached them to us and why, and how we’ve made an identity of them and an ancient ethnicity as well and now want a nation, “please”. That Dr Joseph bothered to come up with this idea at all; that there was something to be gained by closer examination of what all of us have been taught as children were indisputable facts, might indicate that at heart he doesn’t believe it…or rather that he was compelled to see if there was any substance to it so he could believe it, not with the conviction of a modern Assyrian “nationalist”, but with the sort of confidence that is required of an educated and published historian, a professor and real mentor to young minds where the interests of those minds are concerned, and not his own, and whose personal integrity is placed on the line. For my part I can’t imagine anyone NOT wanting to be directly related to those glorious people, Dr Joseph included, I would presume…and if our lineal descent could be proven in any satisfactory way I’d be ever so pleased because I wouldn’t have to wince every time I think of the debate I forced on that college professor in Los Angeles or pass the modern Assyrian monument in San Francisco, that has my name on it…and think I got it terribly wrong. I’m Just as eager, maybe more, to have Dr Joseph proven wrong as anyone else is…and if I can be the one to do it, so much the better. But, I’m not going to shout him down and humiliate myself and us in the process. I’m going to approach him on the merits of his case as best as I can understand them, hoping he’ll correct me if I misrepresent his meaning…because I believe such a thorough examination of his book, by a layman and in public, with this new and infernal internet as a forum, has never taken place and would be most useful for all concerned. I strongly believe, but will not use my strong belief as evidence, that Dr Joseph would find deep satisfaction in being proven wrong, as well, and he and I would gladly eat humble pie before the “world”, if only Ashurbanipal could turn out to be our grandpa after all. Nestorians: As far back as 525 A.D, Cosmas Indicopleustes spoke of “Nestorian” Christians. Medieval Arab authors knew then as “Nasturiyun” . The Nestorian community “continued to refer to itself as Nestorian throughout the nineteenth century. When in 1874 the Evangelical or Protestant section of the community was formally recognized as an organization separate from the mother church, it was referred to as the Reformed Nestorian Church.” Anglican missionaries made them conscious of the stigma and reproach of ‘heresy “…that the term Nestorian was originally intended to convey. The Church was (thereafter, mine) formally known simply as ‘The Old Church of the East.” Chaldeans: Today this term is accepted as referring to the Roman Catholic off-shoot of the Nestorian Church but has been used in the past (by others, mine) as a national name in reference to both parts….”Nineteenth-century European writers, in order to distinguish between the two churches, have referred to them as Nestorian Chaldeans and Catholic Chaldeans. Many writers, missionaries and explorers, such as Henry Layard and Rassam believed that the people had always been Chaldeans and that the term Nestorian was coined during the seventeenth-century split. Writer after writer has expresed the opinion that, for whatever reason…”the many Christian sects in the East, ‘who bear the name of Chaldean or Syrian’… ‘are those whom we call Nestorians.” “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”. Dr Joseph then gives reasons why these people were mistakenly called Chaldeans, before the schism, and then concludes that , “Chaldean, therefore, ‘Like Nestorian’, was used long before the seventeenth-century schism and was used in reference to all the East Syrians because of the geographical location of their ‘head church’”. If I can summarize my own summary, because this “error” is at the heart of the confusion over both Chaldean and Assyrian “survival”, it would be to say that people have always assumed those living on the land, in this case on the land once known as Chaldee…or who spoke a dialect of Aramaic identified as ancient Chaldean, again because the people speaking this dialect lived on the land of the Chaldees, assumed that their language was therefore, “necessarily”, to be identified by the geographical name of the land…as were the people themselves and that this, according to Dr Joseph and his sources, was a first instance of the “grand error” which has dogged our footsteps for 200 plus years. The term Nestorian was not coined during the 17th Century schism but is much older and Dr Joseph provides sources for this claim. The people mistakenly called Chaldean were in reality Nestorians all along who came to call themselves Chaldean only when the Roman Catholic Church convinced some Nestorian “heretics” that it was time to come back to the Roman fold. The important point to remember is that this same error will be made later when another set of Europeans, with its own reasons, calls those Nestorians found living on the land of the ancient Assyrians by that name and their Aramaic dialect the same…as was done when “Chaldean” was the game. While there is some evidence to show that at different times Nestorian Patriarchs adopted the name “Chaldean” or “Babylonian” in reference to their religious titles or office, it was only because of the geographical location of the office building. The fact that many references were made to both Chaldeans and Assyrians by many people throughout history, including Xenophon, does not prove that the people so called thought of themselves as related, lineally or in any other way, to the ancients...and indeed, considering the harsh and negative ways they are portrayed in the Bible, which was the only source for information about those ancient people, until the 19th Century, and that this Holy Book was held in great reverence by the Christians of that region, there is precious little reason to believe that anyone being called an Assyrian or a Chaldean would have wanted to be. One of the many absolutely delicious parts of reading this chapter is coming to the uproarious realization of how the nationalists have managed to find their “evidence’…not evidence of their truth, but “truth” in their evidence. It usually happens like this: Odisho P Nationalist will read something like the following…” Xenophon asserts that he ate lunch with people in a café called, “Ye Ancient Assyrian Café”…and bingo…he has his “proof” and cites it as “evidence by classical authors” that the people Xenophon ate with must have been Assyrians. What they leave out, however, is the following sentence which continues…”but Xenophon was a notorious liar and was dead drunk at the time so he could have eaten lunch with Zeus too, and picked up the tab, for all he knew”…the rest of the nationalists, when they read the severed portion of a quote in a “book” by a cousin of theirs, believe they have found the evidence they need to make their national argument and are only too happy to believe uncritically and will shower Fred Aprim with praise as a true historian…”not like those Ivy League dummies”. Needless to say these kinds of antics only reveal the real truth behind the fake truth…that they know better than anyone that without these grand thefts and larcenies, there would be nothing, absolutely nothing to pin their national “hopes” on. The Nestorians of geographical Assyria likewise, when we get to them, will be called by the Europeans who “discovered” them and their “Assyrian heaps” of rubble beneath the land they lived on top of…as the modern, lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians buried, centuries ago, under them…and so they too became Assyrians and their language also came to be called Assyrian…even though up to that time they had known themselves as Suraye, “Syrians” and their (sic) language as Aramaic (Jesus spoke “our” language”)…when Mel Gibson is around. Like most truly elegant things this is so simple it almost appears unremarkable…and yet, when it sinks in, how profound it is…though in this case, profoundly foolish and ridiculously obvious, but who would dare tell us this? So obvious, in fact, that one simply cannot believe it, at first…believe that all this tangled national and ethnic web is made of such flimsy stuff. But what other plausible explanation can there be, when everything else is considered as well… Syrians (Suraye, Suryoyo, Suryani), Arameans. In this section Dr Joseph explains how the name Syrian, and its derivatives came into being. During the 3rd Century BC 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”…(.in 1970 AD the New English Bible reverted to the older Hebrew usage of “Aram” and Arameans for Syria and Syrians respectively). In the 4th century BC the Greeks restricted the name Syria to the lands west of The Euphrates. Jews and Christians referred to their dialect of Aramaic as “Syriac”…in Babylon, both Greeks and Persians called the Arameans “Syrians”…”The second 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 of Syria are Arameans.” Having followed the history of the origins and evolution of the terms “Syrian” and “Syriac” by way of the Greeks from the Hebrew, “Aramean” and “Aramaic” and back again in 1970s, Dr Joseph shows that the people of Syria, the lands west of the Euphrates knew themselves to be Arameans. He then outlines briefly the history of the Arameans, their many wars with the Assyrians up to their final defeat and absorption into the Assyrian empire. Having extended itself that far west to defeat many people and by now outnumbered ethnically by their subjects, as the Romans would be later, the Assyrians, only a scant century away from total defeat militarily, accelerated their acceptance of the Aramaic language and with it the culture of the Arameans, so that by the time their power was gone, their transformation by the Arameans would soon be complete and in this sense the Assyrians would “disappear”…as had so many other powerful kingdoms in that region. Just as the people adopting the Aramaic language and culture in that entire region would become aramized, so too would the various ethnicities now speaking dialects of Aramaic and by now united under a Christian religion, in their turn be conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century A.D. and in time become Arabized, adopting a “classical” Arab dialect of Mecca as well as the Islamic religion….and yet they too would influence, teach and join with their conquerors to form a new culture and empire. ASSYRIANS: Layard’s discovery of the ruins of Nineveh focused the world’s attention on the Nestorians and their “Chaldean” brethren living in the region. The Bible reading public was well aware of the Assyrian and Chaldean empires and when Layard rushed to proclaim “…these historic, linguistic, religious minorities to be ‘as much the remains of Nineveh, and Assyria, as the rude heaps and ruined palaces’”…the process began and accelerated with each new fevered imagining. Prior to World War I, the Anglican mission to the Nestorians…”gave the Assyrian nomenclature a new impetus. Formally known as ‘The Archbishop of Canterburry’s Assyrian Mission’, it re-enforced, no matter how unintentionally, the linkage between the Nestorians and the ancient Assyrians.” As these mounting assumptions continued to cloud further judgement the Nestorians themselves joined in by changing their name from what it had always been; Syrian or Suraye to Asuraye or Athuraye: and thus the modern Assyrians came into being. Dr Joseph gives samples of names of Nestorian publications in the United States which changed their mastheads, overnight, from Suraye to, in English “Assyrian”…most probably because of the confusion among Americans who thought “Suraye” meant the people were from geographical Syria. Because the Nestorians had always called themselves Syrians (Suraye and Suryoyo) …”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”. There followed the “lost A” theory and many other such gyrations to prove that the Nestorians always knew they were really Assyrians, although the Orthodox kept their name of Suryoyo through it all and do to this day. Others would argue that the language of the ancient Assyrians and that of the modern Nestorians was the same Aramaic. “Layard wrote that the Nestorians spoke ‘the language of their (Assyrian) ancestors’”. Layard’s assistant, Rassam, said, “that the ancient Assyrians ‘Always spoke the Aramaic language’ and ‘they still do’”…but this was yet another error for the ancient Assyrians did not “always” speak Aramaic…as he should have known because he helped uncover their treasures and writings, all in the Akkadian language…but the pressure was so intense to “prove the bible right” that people who should have and would have known better, had they paused to reason, rushed from one mistake to another and the Nestorians went right after them. It would only be years later when the fever died down and scholars began to study the evidence dispassionately and with nothing momentous to prove, that the long chain of errors would be uncovered and a more accurate and thorough reading of the evidence commence…and Dr Joseph is one of the few, and the only one among us, who’ve taken a harder look and come to a similar conclusion…though there are still some who’re yet caught up in the romance of “proving” either the bible correct or attaching Christianity to the ancient Assyrians, by way of the Nestorians. It seems there’s no end to the uses we can be put to by others…while we can’t find much use for each other or ourselves. The Bible Kept Memory of Assyrians Alive The Old Testament kept the names “Assyria” and “Assyrians” well known and before the public long before the excavations were made. 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”…and here we have the many cases where modern Assyrians have claimed that the “mention” of all these ancient names in connection with any people or manuscripts or churches or writers, geographically associated with the land of those ancients is “proof” that the people were known to have remained and remained aware of their true identity…but this was not the case for as Fiey goes on to show, in fifty pages filled with the names of these early Christian writers, not one has an Assyrian name. These writers were writers…their subject matter included the use of all the above ancient terms…but just as a writer mentioning Mars and Martians remains human all the same, so too did these writers not become “Assyrians” by writing about the ancient empire or make references to that empire as it is mentioned in the Bible. The cultural and religious life of all the people who embraced Christianity was reshaped by the Bibles prayers, lamentations, proverbs and poetry. The Hebrew bible the Nestorians inherited also gave them a vision of the past and its peoples as well as a new and distinct identity….”In time, the only past these Christians knew came from the Old Testament…what Fergus Millar calls ‘the historical inheritance of the Bible’”. Up to the excavations the only “historians” of “Assyria” were the Hebrews who first wrote of the Assyrians. Later it would be the early Eastern Christian writers who would produce new works referring to the ancient peoples and their empires…at no time, up until the 19th century AD excavations did any Nestorians write anything at all to imply or suggest that THEY were the lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians…and why would they want to be? Not until the world’s interest and attention was focused on the ruins and treasures did Nestorians begin referring to themselves as lineal descendants etc. Jesus and the Ancient Assyrians: As a Jew Jesus knew the story of Jonah and his mission to the Ninevites to warn them of god’s displeasure. They repented in time and were saved. Jesus used this story to hurry the Jews to repent as well for if Assyrians could earn mercy surely the Jews could too. The story and its commemoration of Jonah’s mission with a pre-Lenten fast among all Eastern Christians has been misinterpreted or misused by the Assyrian nationalists as a unique fast among the Nestorians, observed as a thanksgiving “for the salvation of their forefathers. “Eager to establish a link between themselves and the ancient Assyrians, nationalists conclude such a link is confirmed whenever they find a reference to the word “Assyrian” during the early Christian period; to them it proves that their Christian ancestors ‘always remembered’ their Assyrian forefathers”. Tatian, whom nationalists claim admitted he was “born in the land of the Assyrians” never claimed he was an Assyrian. For centuries the land then called Syria was known to have been “Assyria” at one time so that anyone saying he was born “in the land of the Assyrians”, as one might romantically say he was born” in the land of the noble Mohicans” (Yonkers), would not mean that person was a red Indian or an Assyrian. Assyrian Survival After the Fall: While the Assyrians did not disappear immediately and totally after the fall of their empire, neither did they rebuild their ancient cities under the direction of a “strong native (Assyrian) aristocracy”. Assyrian names were in use up to the third century but only handfuls of Assyrians worshipped the old gods. The rebuilt villages had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors. The few who identified themselves with the ancients could not survive the wave of new cultures and religions of subsequent invaders such as the Persians, Greeks, Arameans and pre-Islamic Arabs whom they could not resist nor assimilate. And, once their military power was gone the few remaining Assyrians were submerged in these new cultures, the faster because they had forgotten their native Akkadain language and went the way of all those before them, dispersed among the new settlers. The Middle Eastern Millets: Just as the Arabic language and culture had amalgamated various ethnic groups to form the “Arabs”, without much regard to their actual origins, so too did the Aramaic language and culture mould “widely differing ethnic, social, and political elements into a uniform and integrated culture”. Everyone did not “immediately perish”, they merely merged with those coming after them, just as the people preceeding them, the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrians and others had. “About 800 years after the fall of Nineveh, a common religion (Christianity), together with a common language (Aramaic) unified the people 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”. “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”. And, finally, “..just as it was the speakers of the Arabian language who gave most of the converts to Islam in the Middle East and North 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.” --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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