The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Where's The Beef?

Where's The Beef?
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, January 14 2008, 23:02:52 (CET)
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I received a call from my Arab masters yesterday suggesting it was time I attack Assyria again. It seems they can’t sleep in Arabia until our threat is removed. Being broke, the crafty devils, I was forced to accept.

When I mentioned to someone that it was odd the Assyrians didn’t continue writing about themselves, their history, their past glories, their kings and heroes, poets, queens, battles, losses, triumphs and tragedies all those centuries the Jews maintained an active interest in themselves, the fellow said “they might have but went through hard times so everything got lost”. As with most of the points made in favor of us, this seemed too facile. Who has suffered more uprooting and persecution and confiscations and the destruction of their chief city than the Hebrews, and yet they managed to keep their Torah intact and add commentary to it in all that time. In fact, it’s from their book that the world, including us, knew anything of the ancient Assyrians, not from the Assyrians themselves…at least not until Layard and Rassam told us about ourselves( and even then we weren’t interested…not really).

The bible itself wasn’t written in actual time but centuries later based on an oral tradition….surely the Assyrians could have done the same. I mean the Hebrews kept us in mind when handing down their stories before actually writing them…did we? And then there’s the thing about us being proud to have been secretaries and translators for the Greeks and Arabs, copying down the classics of one to pass on to the other and beyond, thus “saving” the ancient Greeks for the benefit of the modern world. You mean to tell me we saw no purpose to saving “ourselves” as well? Those scribes laboring away on Greek literature couldn’t have spared a few parchments for their own history? Seems awfully lax of them. Did they “hate Assyria” too? Were they also “denying our heritage”?

When the great Hebrew scholars of the Middle Ages, like Maimonides and Moses Mendelson were writing commentaries on the Torah and expounding the dusty old prophets, what were the Assyrians doing? Of the two ancient peoples it seems clear to me the Assyrians had the richer culture and from the excavated library of Ashurbanipal we see so many texts written BY the Assyrians in real time, not centuries later, that we have to conclude, considering the dearth of anything comparable, or even close, among the Hebrews, that the Assyrians had by far the greater literary tradition. Where did it go to? How come they lost all interest in anything Assyrian to fall all over the Hebrew bible and later Greek classics instead?

(And, to push forward a little, how come we kept this indifference to our golden age right up to the present when we’ve managed to get only ONE Assyrian to study our history, since Rassam dug us up…as a scholar and Assyriologist and not as a hobby?).

The same person said next that just because “we forgot” was no reason we “couldn’t remember”. Well, that seems plausible, even forgiveable, except it makes even less sense. If Aramaic, as is suggested, is merely a “dialect” of Akkadian…or, if Akkadian morphed into Aramaic( as we morphed into Christians but remained Assyrians) then we’re faced with the puzzle of why we lost interest in everything except the Hebrew bible, the New Testament and Greek classics? If we had the memory and consciousness of being Assyrian why didn’t we write about it, talk about it, preach about it and, most of all, teach our young about it? The Greeks and Arabs and everybody else benefited from our scholarly labors, except us.

Whether we forgot or misplaced our own history and never bothered to even pass it on orally, we seem to have been monumentally careless and lacking in interest in ourselves. Which leaves one wondering what prompted our interest today…even as lukewarm as it is? When we see so little being done in the modern era to promote our heritage around the world, except for this insane insistence that we must have a territory carved out of Iraq, one can honestly wonder where our interests derive from and what we hope to gain by them.

Wherever we plop down in the world we build churches, bingo halls, catering facilities and stop. 80,000 Assyrians in Chicago had no interest in getting a public monument installed, even though it was already paid for and the city was eager to do us this honor. Does this strike you as “pride”? Yet the same people clamor for a parliament in exile and democracy in Iraq. This penchant we have of calling dissent “treason”, of laughing at”intellectual inquiry” with a knowing I-know-what-you-really-mean, will wreak havoc with any community we try to build in Iraq…look what it’s done here…look what it’s done with our “Christian” institutions…look what it’s done among friends.

There’s something terrible screwy also terribly rotten in this Assyrian business. And if it isn’t rooted out and dealt with the future will be even more bleak than the past has been. You can rely on faith if you want to….but faith couldn’t get a monument up, not even after it was done and paid for and eagerly anticipated by everyone concerned, except us. That’s also a symptom of what is wrong. We want the penthouse without climbing the stairs…we want the penthouse without even laying the foundations for the first floor. We want a country when we haven’t the faintest notion of how civilized people behave…what their priorities should be in order to GET to the penthouse. In short, we want oil. At least our leaders do. You can’t build a viable enterprise with a handful of intellectuals such as yourself. Certainly not if you fancy a democracy…maybe a sublime dictatorship for a while, but nothing more.

I’m talking about the basement first…not the roof. Naturally I become an enemy and traitor to those eager to sell roofing tiles.



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