The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Xenophone Challenge...

The Xenophone Challenge...
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, February 23 2007, 16:36:24 (CET)
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Maggie:

There’s no point in answering the things you say that you don’t provide evidence for. It has nothing to do with not believing you. Scholars, I can see, place all their resources out front, not because other scholars might think they are liars, but because it’s part of the scientific method to provide the tools by which others can verify your results to see what they come up with. Dr Joseph and others scholars, no matter how sure they might be, provide their sources so that other scholars can read them as well and decide for themselves and check to see the methodology was correct.

You’ve passed over any number of points I raised to remain focused on repeating the same accusations over and over again…and now you bring Eden Naby into it, saying you know she didn’t earn her advanced degree but rather her husband got it for her…or made it possible for her to get it…and then you refuse to say how you could possibly know such a thing or give your sources. This is not a fruitful way to proceed…it’s only going to inflame passions more and lead nowhere in the end.

Therefore I’m only going to respond to the things you provide scholarly evidence for…not hearsay, not your word alone and not what “everyone already knows” except me and Dr Joseph. I’m holding you to the standard I’m holding Dr Joseph to, and so far he hasn’t let me down…by which I mean I can at least see, because he provides the sources, how he reaches the conclusions he does.

You continue to call him a liar and incompetent and present yourself as the real and thorough one etc…

There is one very easy way to determine who is telling the truth or mistaken or in error etc., in at least one point in contention. It’s a starting place. I posted the comments Dr Joseph made about Xenophon and how he called that part of Mesopotamia he and his men passed through “Media” and not Assyria…and how he called the people there Medes and not Assyrians. I also copied the footnote which gave other sources…but let’s stick with Xenophon.

On this subject you replied with the following:

“ If Dr. Joseph DOESN'T know there were historians of antiquity, (way before the Chaldean/Nestorian religious issue) that wrote about the Assyrians, explaining "Suraye", "Suroyo", "Syrian", etc. like Xenephon,…”and some others.

You are saying that Xenophon “wrote about the Assyrians”. Dr Joseph specifically stated that the idea that Xenophon spoke of the Assyrians is an error, not only that but Xenophon actually called the people Chaldeans, which occurred well before the much later split in the church you claim gave rise to that term. Dr Joseph further says that Rassam (Hormuzd Rassam, assistant to Layard) tried to “bolster” his theory; that the people Xenophon encountered were Chaldeans, by which he, Xenophon, really meant the people of Urartu etc. I don’t know the truth of any of it…but I’m willing to put it to the test.

Here is the section from the book again….Chapter 1, p. 8

“To bolster his theory that the Nestorians were the descendants of the ancient Chaldeans, Rassam drew upon classical historical sources and asserted that Xenophon had called the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia ‘Chaldeans’. By ‘Chaldeans’ Xenophon meant the inhabitants of Urartu, (the ancient Assyrian name of the country later called Armenia), who are also known as Haldians, Khaldians, and Chaldeans. Interestingly when Xenophon and his ten thousand passed through Assyria just over 200 years after the fall of the Assyrian empire, he found the region sparsely populated and identified the sites of Nimrud and Nineveh as ruined Median cities and referred to their former inhabitants as Medes.”

So, which is it?

1. Did Xenophon use the term Assyrian or Chaldean?
2. Did he mean the people of Urartu when using “Chaldean”?
3. Were the people of Urartu known as Haldians, Khaldians and Chaldeans?
4. Did Xenophon identify the ruined cities of Assyria as being Median cities and the people in them as Medes?

…it should be an easy matter to “prove” something here. Dr Joseph cites the book, the “Anabasis”of Xenophon, as his source and provides other source material as well. You, Maggie, without any source material cited but on your own, said that Xenophon is a classical writer who spoke of “Assyria”, Dr Joseph and his sources say not…it should be very easy to prove who is wrong. I don’t have a copy of the Anabasis here, but you could get one from a library…it should not take much time to find the appropriate section and see for ourselves what Xenophon actually said…then we’ll know who is “lying”, or mistaken.

Depending on what we find, we’ll know if Dr. Joseph is a lying nitwit in the pay of somebody, as you claim…or a man who did his research, thoroughly, and came away with the analysis he gives…or, if we find that your claim is wrong, we’ll know that your source, whatever it was, was wrong…and, if you had no source…that someone other than Dr Joseph is either “lying”, as you call it…or less than thorough.

That strikes me as a fair and balanced and rather simple way to catch someone at their lying game. And, if we find that Dr Joseph is wrong, due to poor scholarship etc., or because of out and out lying, we’ll know what to think of the rest of his claims, his book as well as the man himself…and the same goes for you. Are you willing to do this?

..Let me add here again the footnotes at the bottom of the page where the above appears:

“See Xenophon’s “Anabasis”, II, v and ‘passim’. Throughout his celebrated memoir, Xenophon designates Assyria by the name of Media. See Eduard Meyer, ‘Media’, in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition). See also David Oates, “Studies in the Ancient History of Northern Iraq. London, (Oxford, 1968),p. 60; M. Rostovtzeff, “A History of the Ancient World” (Oxford, 1925), I, 117; J. Friedrich, “Extinct Languages” (new York, 1957), p. 81; A.T.E Olmstead, “History of Assyria” (new York, 1923), pp, 100-111; H.R. Hall, “The Ancient History of the Near East” (London, 1947), pp.458-459.”

..do you accept? Do you see here a wonderful chance to settle some of this, in a friendly way?



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