The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> back to that big find in Turkey.....

back to that big find in Turkey.....
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, July 14 2013, 23:31:05 (UTC)
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I just don't get the logic....assyrians were thrilled with that discovery because they assumed it proved their claim that Syria always meant Assyria too. But this discovery doesn't prove that at all, except for the Luwian people whose peculiar langauge, 2800 years ago, had them drop the "A" in Assyrian, when writing to the Assyrian King.

How can that explain why Assyrians themselves opted to call themselves by what the Luwians called THEM? Why would they do that? Why would a great empire decide to call itself by what a small blip of a conquered country called them? And why would assyrians continue to call themselves, for 2800 years, by what those long-dead and fairly insignificant people called them?

If the ancient Assyrians had themselves adopted the Luwian word "Syrian" to describe themselves from then on...as EITHER Assyrians or Syrians, then maybe we'd have a case. But they didn't...that was just how Luwians wrote the word "Assyrian".

What if the people of Guam called Americans "Mericans"...what if THEY dropped the initial "A"...would that turn Americans INTO Mericans? Would Americans begin calling themselves both Mericans and Americans, or only Mericans from now on? I think not.

Now, if we had discovered, in that fragment from Turkey, the Luwian people using BOTH "Assyrian" and "Syrian" to mean the Assyrian people...then to the LUWIANS, and only the Luwians, Syria and Assyria would mean the same thing,,,,but there is no evidence of that....all that fragment shows is that these people, the Luwians, and only the Luwians, and only because their language was so constructed, called the Assyrians "Syrians"....but there is no indication anywhere that the Assyrians THEMSELVES began using "Syrian"...or used both to mean Assyrian. This fragment only proves that one set of people, with their own language peculiarities, called the Assyrians "Syrians"...and this does nothing to explain why modern day assyrians NEVER called themselves Assyrians until the modern era and then only for political reasons.



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