The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Syria/Assyria

Syria/Assyria
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, September 13 2013, 4:27:32 (UTC)
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Okay, so we know the Genome Project wouldn't prove to assyrians that they were descended from Ashurbanipal, though they got all hot and bothered when they heard of it...and we know that all the tablet found in Turkey proved is that in the 9th century a group of people had as a peculiarity of their language, a habit of dropping the initial "A" in words beginning with that letter, including their word for Assyrian which came out as "Syrian"...but there's no evidence that the Assyrians themselves called themselves by that shortened version...it was just a peculiarity of that one people....much like some obscure language of today which also dropped that initial "A" and called us Mericans...it wouldn't mean that's what we ever called ourselves...it was just something peculiar to that language and not a name for us.

So "Syrian" was never a word Assyrians used to refer to themselves, not then and not until those artifacts were dug up and the Euros began calling us "Assyrians". Until then we had no desire or idea of being descended from the ancients...in fact, history shows that the first ancient name our people miss-applied to themselves, and again because of Euros, was "Chaldean"...way before anyone discovered the artifacts that turned some of us into Assyrians.

That still leaves unanswered the problem of how or why we ever came to call ourselves Syrians or Suraye. Dr. Joseph explains that the word "Syrian" was used in place of Aramean by the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria when they translated the Aramaic bible into Greek. Now as to why Syrian would come to mean Aramean, he doesn't say...but the fact that in 1970 the English went back to Aramean in place of "Syrian" shows that the change did take place...but exactly why the word for Arameans should be Syrian, he doesn;t say and I don;t know...but it DID happen so there must be some reason for it...for the Jews choosing Syrian in place of Aramean.

Could it be that by the 9th century AD, 1400 years after the fall of the Assyrian Empire and at least 500 years since Akkadian, the actuallanguage of the Assyrians, had disappeared and been forgotten, while Aramaic became the liturgical language of their new Christian religion, that our people identified themselves and were identified as Arameans? They forgot their own history and probably that of the Arameans as well...Christianity and it's Jewish roots became everything to these people..and so they adopted the name of the people whose language their Lord Jesus spoke? He and his religion and therefore his langusge and that of his church became their everything...their identity, their history and their culture.

And so, identifying themselves as Arameans, when the Greeks changed the name to Syrians, they changed over as well. And since Syrian wasn't Aramean, they didn;t mind identifying with it, since it was a religious and not a national name.

Who really knows...it's a great detective story....all we know for sure is that these assyrians of today have nothing to do with the ancients.....



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