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=> "We are Assyrians" A Response by John Joseph

"We are Assyrians" A Response by John Joseph

Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Thursday, November 27 2014, 14:16:59 (UTC) from 173.13.27.45 - 173-13-27-45-Michigan.hfc.comcastbusiness.net Network - Windows NT - Mozilla Website: Website title:

"WE ARE ASSYRIANS" A Response by John Joseph This is a commentary on the article bearing the above-noted title, which appeared in the last issue of Journal of Assyrian acadsemic Studies (JAAS) (Vol. XVI, No.1, pp. 177-95). Written in Syriac by Odisho Malko Gewargis of Baghdad, Iraq, the article was translated to English by Youel A. Baaba. A more literal translation of the Syriac title would be: "WE ARE NOT BUT OF ASSYRIAN ORIGIN." To my surprise, Mr. Gewargis's article turned out to be an attempt to refute two of my articles that appeared in JAAS in 1997 and 1998. He opens his article by referring to my two contributions, beginning it with my name. Mr. Gewargis promises that in his "rebuttal article" he will "identify and quote sources from different historical periods that testify to the existence of Assyrians as a defined ethnic group in their own region, Assyria, from the fall of Nineveh till this day." He confidently speaks of "ancient manuscripts written in Aramaic sources many of which consistently maintain the continuity of national identity of modern Assyrians." Had he been able to deliver in his promise, Mr. Gewargis would be credited with a historical discovery of immense importance; a discovery, in fact, that has eluded countless historians and Assyriologists for the past two centuries. For the convenience of the reader, the various claims made by Mr. Gewargis’ are offered verbatim, preceded by his initials, OMG. My comments follow each claim, preceded by my own initials, JJ. To save time and space I have dispensed with footnotes and documentation, citing in most cases only my Nestorians and Their Muslim Neighbors (Primceton University Press, 1961), or its revision The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East (Brill Academic Publishers, 2000), where details and sources can be located. OMG. "[Joseph] bases his conclusion of denying the Assyrian historical identity on the biased scholarship and opinions of some western scholars who were either inaccurate in their rendition of some texts in the Assyrian (Aramaic) language or were unaware of the existence of such texts. ...These old and modern arguments and claims of historical evidence and opinion spread by a few students of history have been intentionally selected by this Assyrian scholar and compressed into two articles with alleged academic objectives." (pp. 78, 79) JJ. Had Mr. Gewargis read my Nestsorians, he would have found out, as we shall soon see, that those who have made "inaccurate renditions" of historical texts are some of the very Eastern authors on whom he has relied for information. OMG. [According to Joseph] Nestorians "are known also as Assyrians, a name commonly used in reference to them only since the First World War (JAAS vol. XI, no.2, page 41) ... Joseph wants the readers to believe in his claim that western missionaries called the Nestorians of the Church of the East Assyrians only as far back as the latter part of the 19th century implying that they did not carry this appellation prior to that date. Such a claim is inconceivable and indefensible." JJ. Mr. Gewargis distorts my statement by deleting the sentence that immediately follows his quotation above: "The Nestorians," I wrote, "are known also as Assyrians, a name commonly used in reference to them only since the First World War." [Italics in the original ] "The name Assyrian," I continued, "was certainly used prior to the nineteenth century. Thanks to the Old Testament, 'Assyrian' was a well known name throughout the centuries and wherever the Bible was held holy, whether in the East or West." [More on this below.] OMG. "Modern Assyrian writers are eager to establish a link between themselves and the ancient Assyrians ["but they cannot"]..." (p. 78; words within brackets are in the original article in Syriac but left out by the translator. ) JJ. Note how my statement is misquoted: "Modern Assyrian writers, eager to establish a link between themselves and the ancient Assyrians, conclude that such a link is confirmed whenever they come across a reference to the word Assyrians during the early Christian period...." [More on this below.] OMG. In the section entitled "Continuous existence of Assyrian civilization" Mr. Gewargis, using Georges Roux's Ancient Iraq as his source, writes that "During the Parthians' rule of Assyria (126 - 227 BC), the Assyrians rebuilt their ancient cities in northern Assyria such as Nuzi, Kakazoo and Shibaniba. Even Ashur was restored and became a great city as in the days of the Assyrian Empire and god Ashur was worshiped reverently by the Assyrians in his temple in his city Ashur. If there were no Assyrians in the days of Parthians, then who were the people that rebuilt the temple of Ashur and worshiped him? (Ancient Iraq, p.419, 1992 edition.) JJ. Here Mr. Gewargis repeats what other Assyrian writers have said, all misquoting what Roux has written; they delete his sentence that immediately follows their citation even though Roux wanted it "emphasized." "But it must be emphasized," he wrote, "that the revived settlements [in ancient Assyria] had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors." On the same page, Roux speaks of how a massive influx of foreign peoples and ideas had "submerged what was left of the Sumero-Akkadian [Assyrian] civilization." ( Also p.419) [ The dates of the Parthian empire given above are meant to be 126 B.C. - 227 A.D. and not 126 - 227 B.C. ] OMG. "We now return to Joseph's significant statement quoted below: 'There was nothing 'Assyrian' left to be read and remembered. The time came when the Akkadian inscriptions on clay were meaningless to the great majority of the population in Mesopotamia.' This claim is not based on truth or a sound academic foundation..." (p.90) JJ. Note how the critical part of the above "significant statement," highlighted below, is conveniently left out: "There was nothing 'Assyrian' left to be read and remembered. The language of the cuneiform documents, Akkadian, had ceased to exist as the carrier of ancient Assyrian culture even before the fall of the Assyrian empire. Aramaic had displaced Akkadian even as the language of everyday speech within Assyria itself. The time came," writes Georges Roux, "when the Akkadian inscriptions on clay were meaningless to the great majority of the population." OMG. "Even the Assyrian cuneiform writing was used there [in Assyria] in those days [under the Parthians.] The last copy of this writing that has survived and is in our hands is dated 74-75 AD." JJ. Deleted from Roux's sentence in the quotation above are the words describing the cuneiform copy of the above quotation; it was "an astronomical almanac." My statement pertaining to the disappearance of cuneiform at a much earlier period noted that the Akkadian language of the cuneiform "ceased to exist as the carrier of ancient Assyrian culture ...." [ See Roux, p.419, 1992 edition; Modern Assyrians, pp.8, seq.] OMG. "Assyrians abandoned the difficult cuneiform writing and forgot reading and writing it after they adopted the alphabetical writing. His [Roux's] purpose was not to express the extinction of Assyrians as a people... It is not plausible to assume that every nation that changes its writing system, language or religion is being wiped out from the face of the earth." JJ. The ancient Assyrians forgot not only how to read and write Akkadian, their mother tongue, but also how to speak it. They adopted not only the Aramaic alphabet but also the spoken language of the Aramean people. Roux's purpose was to express the extinction of Assyrians as a people. They were a nation that had for long forgotten its mother tongue and, wrote he, "History tells us that a nation which forgets its language forgets its past and soon loses its identity." (p.412) This process of Assyrian Aramaization was facilitated when a large Aramean population came under the rule of an over-extended Assyrian empire, far removed from its Assyria homebase. The smaller Akkadian-speaking ethnic Assyrian population could not resist a process that gradually transformed the cultural face of their empire, "leading to the Assyrians being outlived and absorbed"--not "wiped out." According to H.W.F. Saggs, an Assyriologist who looks at this history with great sympathy, the cities of Assyria proper had become so cosmopolitan and polyglot, that people of actual Assyrian descent were possibly a minority within those cities. With Assyrian political and military power gone, Aramean ethnicity, language and script remained and continued to expand, facilitating the absorption process farther. [For details see Modern Assyrians, pp. 11-13.] Assyriologist A. T. Olmstead, who is approvingly cited by Mr. Gewargis three times, explains the loss of Assyrian identity in these words: "Assyria was too small a state to bear the heavy burden of imperialism. For the moment, the Assyrian won great glory and much financial return, but he was bled white in the process..." [See Olmstead's History of Assyria (1975), p.654.] OMG. According to Mr. Gewargis, Butrus Nasri--a Chaldean priest who graduated from the Dominican seminary in Mosul and is one of Mr. Gewargis's frequently-cited sources--wrote that "Gregory Bar Hebraeus while discussing the eastern and western Syriac dialects, points out that the pronunciation of the easterners is older and more accurate and he verifies that they are the children of Chaldeans ['or Babylonians and Assyrians.' ]" (p.85) JJ. A careful reading of the renowned thirteenth-century catholicos of the Syrian Orthodox Church [also known as Ibn al-'Ibri, and Gregory Abu al-Faraj ] shows, as I pointed out in my Nestorians years ago, that Barhebraeus used the term 'Chaldean' to be facetious; he certainly was not speaking in praise of the pronunciation and accuracy of the "Nestorian" dialect nor was he saying that these Easterners are the lineal descendants of the ancient Chaldeans. In the Nasri passage cited above, Barhebraeus was discussing the Aramaic language in his book on grammar entitled "M'alta L'gramatiqi." He described the language as split into various dialects, some of them quite unintelligible, such as the dialect of those "wonderful Easterners," "children of the ancient Chaldeans," in whose tongue "there is no difference between pthaha and zqafa [vocalization marks.]" By 'Chaldeans' Barhebraeus simply meant "magicians" and "sorcerers," and surely he was not speaking of Babylonians and Assyrians, two names added by Mr. Gewargis to the Nasri quotation. In one of his better-known books, Barhebraeus actually defines "Kaldayutha"--Chaldeeism--as "astrology and the art of magic." [ M'alta L'gramatiqi (Jerusalem, 1916), pp. vii-viii, 9, 52, manuscript in the library of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Bishopric of Beirut. For details see Nestorians, p.7; Modern Assyrians, pp. 6-7. Consult also Ibn al-'Ibri, The Chronography of Gregory Abu'l Faraj, trans. E.Q.Wallis Budge (London, 1932), pp. 1, 7. For the meaning of 'Chaldean' as magician, see also Ya'qub A. Manna, Margi Pighyanayi d'Marduta d'Aramayi (Mosul, 1901), pp. 4f., a book used elsewhere in the article by Mr. Gewargis, given its French title by Mr.Youel A. Baaba instead of translating the Syriac title into English. ] OMG. Citing Nasri on Herodotus: "The adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East in the past centuries were called, sometimes Arameans, for a period Assyrians, and other times Chaldeans and Nestorians. ... Because the Syriac language is Assyrian (the word suraya without any doubt is derived from Assyrian according to the opinion of Herodot the historian) it was the language of those eastern territories, and it is a known fact that languages give their names to the people." (p.94. ) JJ. The Arabic title of pastor Nasri's book is "History of Eastern and Western Suryaan." [Here again Mr. Baaba, instead of translating the Nasri title into English, uses its French title: Histoire des Eglises Chaldeenne et Syrienne" [sic] ( Mossoul, 1905).] 'Suryaan' in the title does not mean 'Assyrian'; for the word Assyrian, Nasri uses the Arabic name 'Athuriyyun,' judging from Gewargis's own translation into Syriac. Nasri does not refer to the Church of the East as 'Assyrian'; he speaks of a congregation that is "Eastern Syrian"--translated literally by Mr. Gewargis as "Suryaita Madinkhaita." One of my articles in JAAS. which Mr. Gewargis has presumably read, covers in some detail the relationship between the words 'Syrian' and 'Assyrian.' There I have tried to clarify at some length what Herodotus has said on the subject, which is not what Nasri tells us "Herodot" said. Since this "rebuttal" totally ignored my position instead of correcting it, there is no point in repeating it here. Interested readers can read it in JAAS [Vol. XI, No.2], or consult Modern Assyrians, pp. 20-21. OMG. Citing Nasri on Assemani: "Chaldeans are Assyrians and were generally known as Easterners and Nestorians." (p.84n.28: Al-Machriq, 2, no. 3 (Beyrouth, 1899): 97. ) JJ. Mr. Gewargis gives us here Nasri's interpretation of Assemani (Yusuf Sam'an al-Sam'ani, 1687-1768), the most distinguished graduate of the Maronite seminary at Rome. After the age of eight, he spent the rest of his life in Rome. As director of the Vatican library he expanded its Oriental collection into one of the most outstanding anywhere. In his monumental Bibliotheca Orientalis (4 vols, Rome,1719-28) Assemani explained why the Nestorians were called "Chaldaic" Christians--"Because their principal, or head church, is in ancient Chaldea," apparently referring to the period when the "Nestorian" church flourished at Seleucia-Ctesiphon just outside present-day Baghdad, a city sometimes confused with Babylon/Chaldea in early modern times. Assemani also used the name 'Assyrian' in conjunction with the Nestorians but, again, with no implication of a linkage with the ancients; he cites Pope Paul V (1605-1621), who in a letter to Patriarch Elias explained that "A great part of the East was infected by this heresy [Nestorianism] , especially the Chaldeans, who for this reason have been called Nestorians." (For details see Modern Assyrians, pp. 6, 23) The British historian Edward Gibbon, was aware of all this confusion of names as early as the 18th century. The Nestorians, wrote Gibbon, "Under the name of Chaldeans or Assyrians, are confounded with the most learned or the most powerful nation of Eastern antiquity." (For details, see Nestorians (1961), p.7; Modern Assyrians (2000), p..23.; J.-M. Fiey, "'Assyriens' ou 'Arameen' ?", L`Orient Syrien, 10 (1965), 141-160.). OMG. "In the codex of Cardinal Amolis to the committee of cardinals in the Tredando conference dated February 19, 1562 about Patriarch Odisho BarYokhanan Bet Maron from the city of Jezirah we read: 'Honorable Mar Odisho Patriarch of Assyrians who has been elected by the clergy and approved by their people.' " It is necessary, continues Gewargis "to carefully consider the above statement. Cardinal Amolis in the year 1562 (long before the Westerners had given this name to us in the beginning of the 20th century according to Joseph's claim) says that Mar Odisho was the patriarch of Assyrians and he was elected by the clergy and with the approval of the Assyrian people...."(pp.85-86) JJ. The quotation above, incidentally, says "approved by their people" and not "with the approval of the Assyrian people." Secondly, on the same page (86), Mr. Gewargis makes the vague statement that "Some metropolitans and patriarchs called themselves Assyrians, and the bishop's seat in Nineveh as the Nineveh Episcopacy and Metropolitan of Assyria." What he has unintentionally given us here is the second meaning of the names Atur and Aturaya (Athur, Athuraya.) Any classical Syriac lexicon will show that these names have two different usages: (1) Atur=Assyria; Aturaya=Assyrian, (2) Atur=the Christian diocese of Mosul and its environs--including Nineveh and Jezirah; Aturaya=the Christians of that diocese. A "Metropolitan of Atur" is a Bishop of the diocese of Mosul/Nineveh. "Mar Khammu Aturaya" means Mar Khammu of the diocese of Mosul; it does not mean "Mar Khammu the Assyrian." Were Mar Khammu the Bishop of Urmiyah, he would not be referred to as Mar Khammu Aturaya. What can be said with some certainty about the titles that the patriarchs of the Church of the East used prior to the 16th century schism? At the monastery of Rabban Hurmizd, where "Nestorian" patriarchs once resided, there were tombs of several of them who were buried there long before the sixteenth-century. The titles inscribed on these epitaphs are simply "Catholicos Patriarch of the East," or "Patriarch of the East," and, occasionally, simply "Catholicos." For reproductions of these epitaphs , see Kurkis Hanna 'Awwad, Athar Qadim fi al-'Iraq--Dayr al-Rabban Hurmiz (Mosul, 1934), pp. 35, 37, and Jacques Vosté, "Les Inscriptions de Rabban Hormuzd et de N.-D. des Semences pres d'Alqos (Iraq)," Le Museon, 43(1930), pp.263-316. Interesting also is a letter from the Nestorian patriarch sent in 1836 to the first American missionary to Urumiyah, Mr. Justin Perkins. The patriarchal title used is also "Patriarch of the East." See The Missionary Herald, 33 (1837), 55 and ibid., 36 (1840), 305. ( For details, see Modern Assyrians, pp.4-5.) OMG. "In response to the almost exclusive dependence of Joseph on western scholars, it is appropriate to cite Bar Soma's comments in this regard [referring to the late learned Syrian Orthodox patriarch Ignatius Ephram I Barsoum]: 'What these western scholars and their institutions and universities think about our history, religion, race, origin, and nationality is not true. This is because many of them are not knowledgeable about our culture, literature and language and they are not honest in the expression of their opinions. Because of this, they have no right to deny what the easterners think of themselves. Easterners too are also learned people and owners of many testaments; they are in their thoughts and diligence about the truth no lesser than those of their profession in the west." (p.91) JJ. Mr. Gewargis would not have made the above remark had he made an effort to read my Nestsorians. But more to the point, what does Barsoum say on the usage of the name Assyrian? In a booklet entitled The Syrian Church of Antioch, Its Name and History, he shows in detail that the terms "Syrians" (Suryoyo) and "Arameans" are synonyms. Ironically, Mr. Gewargis attributes to me words that were written by Barsoum himself; he wrote that "The 'Assyrian' name is an English Protestant invention, bequeathed to the Nestorians soon after World War I." (For details, see Modern Assyrians, pp.9, 32.) OMG. "As to the reason why Assyrians are called Syrians, Rev. Patros Nasri gives many reasons, one of which is: 'Because the Syriac language is Assyrian (the word suraya without any doubt is derived from Assyrian according to the opinion of Herodot the historian) ...' "Thus," concludes Mr. Giwargis, "we can say that the name 'Suryaya' is not a national designation. It is the name of a language that was adopted by some [?!] Assyrians. Just as Chaldean is the name of a profession and an educational characteristic." JJ. As one who claims familiarity with "ancient manuscripts written in Aramaic," Mr Gewargis should know that in Aramaic, the words Suryaye and Aturaye are distinguished from each other; they are not synonyms. Instead of calling upon Nasri one more time, Mr. Gewargis would be well advised if he consults an authoritative lexicon of the Syriac language. He will find out that SURYAYA and ATURAYA describe two very different people--'Suryaya'=Aramean, while 'Aturaya'=Assyrian. Even if the two words were etymologically related, Easterners have for centuries referred to themselves as Suraye/Suryaye and not as Aturaye. And they have called geographical Assyria Bet Aramaye. The aramaic-speaking Easterners who in their own language call themselves 'Aturaye' have done so only for the past few decades and they continue to be a minority among the speakers of the Aramaic tongue. Daniel P.Wolk's recent research--for his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago--shows that even the Urmiyah Christians in America continued until after World War I to refer to themselves as Suryaye in their journals and newspapers. In his reading of some of the major publications from 1907 to 1920, Wolk found out that the first ethno-nationalist organization established in Urmiyah, Khuyada (Unity), was a Suryeta organization. Chicago's newspaper Mashkhiddana Suryaya(Suryaya Herald), first published in 1915,changed to Mashkhiddana Aturaya in 1920, when the nationalist discourse had come of age among the politically conscious. The title in the English language was always 'Assyrian' since 'Syrian' in the United States stood for the more numerous Arab Christians from geographical Syria. (See Wolk's "The Emergence of Assyrian Ethnonationalism...," paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Conference , Chicago, Illinois, December 6, 1998.) OMG. "In this condensed rebuttal article, we shall identify and quote sources from different historical periods that testify to the existence of Assyrians as a well-defined ethnic group in their own region, Assyria, from the fall of Nineveh till this day..." [including] "ancient manuscripts written in Aramaic sources many of which consistently maintain the continuity of national identity of modern Assyrians." JJ. Mr. Gewargis, no matter how hard he has tried or how disingenuous he is in the presentation of his sources, has not produced a single document written by an Easterner who shows any familiarity with the ancient Assyrians prior to the the Christian era. Why? Because there isn't any. Why? Because a period of over 800 years had come and gone from the time when the ancient Assyrians were defeated by their enemies and totally Aramaized and assimilated, and the time when Christianity reached Mesopotamia, its first converts there being the Jews. When Xenophon and his ten thousand passed through Assyria only over 200 years after the fall of the Assyrian empire, he found the region sparsely populated, and throughout his celebrated memoir (Anabasis), he refers to Assyria as Media. [See Modern Assyrians, pp.8, 30n.103.) While the Easterners, with the exception of the Jews, knew nothing of the ancient Assyrians during the pre-Christian era, they possessed a great deal of information about them and the Babylonians during the Christian period. Why? Because with Christianity came the Bible, a book that spoke extensively about them. Why was the Hebrew Bible so interested in these ancient Mesopotamian empires? Because of their centrality in Jewish history. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, and of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians, had resulted in a national trauma for the Jews. Jewish history, fatally entangled with that of the imperial powers of Mesopotamia, was mourned and reflected upon in the various historical and prophetic works of the Hebrew Bible, which the Christians eventually inherited as their own scripture. The Bible, translated into Syriac, was a veritable library of stories, histories, as well as of proverbs, prayers, lamentations, and poetry. It gave the religious and cultural life of the Aramaic-speaking converts to Christianity a new meaning and a new direction. Biblical legends became the Christians' favorite folktales, the source of their folklore and myths for centuries to come. The Bible also provided the Christians with a new vision of the past, its peoples and empires; among the ancients, Assyrian and Babylonian empires loomed large. It is interesting to know but also very important in order to understand the subject under discussion in this exchange, that until the nineteenth century A.D., when the ancient Assyrian excavations took place, the only common people who had any knowledge of the ancient Assyrians--who knew something about their history, religion, empire and the names of some of their kings--were the Jews and, very long after them, the Christians. The 'Old Testament,' as noted above, introduced its readers everywhere to a mass of information, good and bad, on the ancient Assyrians. For centuries, therefore, Biblical names such as Ashur, Assyrians, Nineveh, Sennacherib, and others, were very well known everywhere to those who read the Bible or listened to it being read or narrated. But these were Biblical names, of peoples and persons known only because the Bible mentioned them; they were not the 'remembered' names of ancestors. Speaking of the British Bible-reading public, Assyriologist Saggs writes in his The Might That Was Assyria that to the British people the history of Israel and Judah was a living thing, "as generally known as British history." [For details see Modern Assyrians pp.22-27.] Moreover, while the name of the ancient Assyrians is usuallly associated with violence in the Old Testament, it is not always so. One of the better-known books of the Bible, the book of Jonah, is devoted entirely to the Assyrians. The book became one of the favorites of the Christians and of the Church Fathers because Jesus referred to the story of Jonah and gave praise to the Ninevites. "The men of Nineveh," Jesus told his listeners, "will appear in court when this generation [of Jews] is on trial, and ensure its condemnation, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and what is here is greater than Jonah."[Matthew 12:40-41; Luke 11:29-30 ] This reference to the Assyrians made the Ninevites a model during the Lenten penance to Christians everywhere, whether in the British Isles or the Holy Roman Empire, in Syria, Palestine, or Mesopotamia. They began to commemorate an event that harked back to the days of the Assyrian empire, some 800 years, as already noted, before Christianity struck roots in Syria and Mesopotamia. The Church Fathers began to institute a special fast to commemorate the event. To this day, the Roman Catholics read the third chapter of the book of Jonah on Wednesday of the first week of Lent, a period of fasting and penitence observed as early as the 4th century. In the Greek Orthodox liturgy, the entire book of Jonah is read during Lent, while Anglicans and Lutherans read portions of it. During the afternoon service on Yom Kippur, Jews read the book of Jonah because of its emphasis on God's forgiveness after genuine repentance. The Eastern Christians followed suit; those under Persian rule seem always to have been a few steps behind the members of their faith in the Greco-Roman world, the heartland of whose empire in the East extended beyond Asia Minor into what is today's Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and parts of north-western Iraq. There, Greco-Roman rule lasted for almost 1,000 years. The native Christians of these lands, whether Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Jacobites, or Nestorians, also began to observe a pre-Lenten fast remembering the message of Jonah and what Jesus said of the Ninevites. George M. Lamsa and William C Emhardt wrote in the 1920s that members of the Church of the East celebrated the Rogation of the Ninevites [Ba'uta d-Ninwaye] as a unique fast observed by them as a thanksgiving "for the salvation of their forefathers," entirely missing the theological and historical significance of the story of Jonah in both Jewish and Christian tradition. In his "rebuttal article" Mr. Gewargis totally ignores the historical background and perspective above. To him the "hymns of Rogation" that he cites are a proof positive that the monks and patriarchs who wrote those hymns "were Assyrians filled with national pride," cavalierly bridging the gap of eight centuries by what Herodotus, or the prophets Nahum and Isaiah have uttered about the ancient Assyrians. OMG. [Commenting on my citation from the late Dominican Syriac scholar J.-M. Fiey that while Eastern Christian writers wrote extensively about Assyrians, Babylonians, etc., they did not identify with them--and that there was "not a single writer who has an 'Assyrian' name"-- Mr.Gewargis finds the statement "the least defensible argument a researcher can put forth in arguing for or against the ethnic characteristics of a given ethnic identity...."(p.87.) For centuries, he writes, "the children of Sennacherib were taught to pray and damn Babylon and Assyria, how does the researcher expect from people who wholeheartedly accepted the Christian faith to name their children Ashur and Esarhaddon?" JJ. Contradicting himself, Mr. Gewargis notes that centuries ago, monks and ecclesiastics of the Eastern churches had "great praise and exaltation for the Assyrians and their kings, their clergy and their judges and obvious downgrading of the prophets, clergy, kings and the elders of Israel. Thus one can say," he concludes, that Sabhrisho, and monk Yaqqira and patriarch Ishoyabh "were Assyrians filled with national pride." We have here an unusual situation: 1.The Church fathers proudly calling themselves 'Aturaye'; 2. The common people, members of the church, for centuries calling themselves 'Suryaye'; 3. And Mr. Gewargis, an Aramaic-language expert who won't tell us the difference between these two Aramaic words, Aturaye and Suryaye. [See above for the two definition; for details, consult Modern Assyrians, pp.9-15.] A NOTE ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION: As noted above, for titles of works written in Arabic and Syriac, Mr. Baaba uses French and occasionally Latin and German titles, giving the wrong, but perhaps unintended, impression that Mr. Gewargis has consulted a variety of books published in Western languages, giving his commentary the "academic flavor" that the translator speaks of in his initial footnote. Titles in Western languages used to be printed on the title page or cover of the book for the benefit of librarians, and readers unfamiliar with the foreign language of the publication. The translator has, on the whole, done a commendable job of translating a hard-to-read article full of coined words. Unfortunately, in the opinion of some modern Assyrian writers, the more difficult the written word and the more intricate the sentence structure, the more 'leepa' [learned] the writer. It is not surprising that a little over 50% of the 136 footnotes of the original article in Syriac, are devoted by Mr. Gewargis to the explanation of his own vocabulary. The rebirth of modern languages and literatures in the West began when innovative writers of the Renaissance began to write gracefully in the language that the people knew best, their own vernacular. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: "We are Assyrians" A Response by John Joseph Jeffrey - Thursday, November 27 2014, 14:16:59 (UTC) all the proof you need.... pancho - 11/27 16:13 so desperate you lie....or fudge... pancho - 11/27 16:24

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