Assyrians

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A look at who the Assyrian people are and at the Neo ... In northern Iraq, Assyrians are concentrated in the Ninewa and ... article: Assyrians in Post ...
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Brief History of Assyrians
Details about the Assyrian empire (2400 B.C. to 612 B.C.), which was located mainly between Tigris and Euphrates rivers ... Aramaic that Assyrians spoke was, ...
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Assyria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Assyrians
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Brief history of the semitic Mesopotamians.
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Assyrians Renowned as possessing the most ruthless and efficient military organization of all the ancient Mesopotamian empires, the Assyrians
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The Assyrians (also called Syriacs; see names of Syriac Christians) are an ethnic group whose origins lie in what is today Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, but many of whom have migrated to the Caucasus, North America and Western Europe during the past century. Hundreds of thousands more live in Assyrian diaspora and Refugees of Iraq communities in Europe, the former Soviet Union, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

As a result of Assyrian Genocide in the wake of the First World War, there is now a significant Assyrian diaspora. Major events included the Iranian Revolution,{{cite web|url = http://www.aina.org/articles/dtcitaic.htm|title = Documenting The Crisis In The Assyrian Iranian Community|accessdate =|accessdaymonth =|accessmonthday =|accessyear =|author = Dr. Eden Naby|last =|first =|authorlink =|coauthors =|date =|year =|month =|format =|work =|publisher =|pages =|language =|doi =|archiveurl =|archivedate =|quote =--> the Simele massacre, and the Assyrian genocide that occurred under Ottoman Turkish rule in the early 1900s. The latest event to hit the Assyrian community is the Iraq War; of the one million or more Iraqis reported by the United Nations to have fled, forty percent are Assyrian, despite Assyrians comprising only three to five percent of the Iraqi population.

History The Assyrian people are descended from the population of the ancient Assyrian Empire, which itself emerged from the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Akkad.Early History of Assyria, By Sidney Smith, University of Michigan, 1928http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=AE_Chart Eventually, Assyrian kings conquered Aramaeans tribes and assimilated them into the Assyrian empire,{{cite web|url = http://www.aina.org/articles/assyrianidentity.pdf|title = Assyrian Identity in Ancient Times and Today|author = Simo Parpola|year = 2004|format = PDF|work = Assyriology|language = English|quote = Assyria proper was for centuries subject to a continuous and systematic process of assimilation and integration. Especially the policy of mass deportations introduced by Ashurnasirpal II and continued on a vastly increased scale by Shalmaneser III, TiglathPileser III and the Sargonid dynasty, utterly changed the political, demographic and linguistic map of the Near East. Between 830 and 640 BC, an estimated 4.5 million people from all parts of the Empire were removed from their homes and settled elsewhere, mostly in the Assyrian heartland and the big urban centers there (Oded 1979). These deportations may originally have had purely political and economic goals, but in the long run they ended up having far more extensive linguistic, social and cultural consequences.-->{{cite web|url = http://www.aina.org/articles/assyrianidentity.pdf|title = Assyrian Identity in Ancient Times and Today|author = [Simo Parpola|year = 2004|format = PDF|work = Assyriology|language = English|quote = In the first place, they brought hundreds of thousands of foreign, mostly Aramaic-speaking people into the Assyrian heartland and the eastern provinces of the Empire, thus turning the previously largely monolingual society of Assyria into a multilingual one. Within a relatively short period of time-already by the middle of the eighth century-Aramaic became established as a common language (lingua franca) throughout the Empire (Garelli 1982; Tadmor 1975, 1985; Eph'al 1999, 118-119). Concomitantly with this, the Assyrian administration started using the Aramaic alphabet alongside the cuneiform script.-->see e.g. [Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. Aram. and their language, Aramaic, supplanted the native Akkadian language, due in part to the mass relocations enforced by Assyrian kings of the Assyria. The modern Assyrian identity is therefore believed to be a miscegenation, or ethnogenesis, of the major ethnic groups which inhabited Assyrian homeland, which were, for the most part, Assyrian, and to some extent, Aramaean. By the 5th century BC, "Imperial Aramaic" had become lingua franca in the Achaemenid Empire.

The Assyrian people are believed to have descended from the ancient Assyrians of Mesopotamia (Aramaic: Bet-Nahrain, "the land of the rivers"), who, in the 7th century BC, controlled a vast empire which stretched from Egypt and Anatolia, across the land between two rivers, to western Iran. Tradition maintains that the history of the Assyrian people stretches back over 6,500 years, to the dawn of Mesopotamian civilization.http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9110693/Mesopotamian-religion Culturally and linguistically distinct from, although quite influenced by, their neighbours in the Middle East - the Arabs, Persian people, Kurdish people, Turkish people, and Armenians - the Assyrians have endured much hardship throughout their recent history as a result of religious and ethnic persecution.{{cite web]|year = 2004|format = PDF|work = [Assyriology|language = English|quote = From the third century AD on, the Assyrians embraced Christianity in increasing numbers, even though the Assyrian religion persisted in places like Harran at least until the tenth, in Mardin even until the 18th century AD (Chwolsohn 1856, 151-156). The single-minded adherence to the Christian faith from late antiquity until the present time has made Christianity an indelible part of Assyrian identity, but it has also subjected the Assyrians to endless persecutions and massacres, first in the hands of the Romans, then in the hands of the Sasanian Persians, and last in the hands of Arabs, Kurds and Turks. These persecutions and massacres have reduced the total number of Assyrians from an estimated 20 million or more in antiquity to well under two million today.-->{{cite web|first=|last=|authorlink=|author=|coauthors=|title=Assyrians|url=http://www.everyculture.com/Africa-Middle-East/Assyrians.html|format=HTML|work=|publisher=World Culture Encyclopedia|id=|pages=|page=|date=|accessdate=|language=English|quote= -->

Demographics and Al-Hamdaniya.Assyrian populations are distributed between the Assyrian homeland and the Assyrian diaspora. There are no official statistics, and estimates of the total number of Syriac Christians vary greatly, between less than one and more than three million, mostly due to the uncertainty of the number of Assyrians Iraq (since the 2003 Iraq war in significant but unknown numbers dislocated to Syria). The diaspora population accounts for roughly 300,000 people, the largest diaspora community in the Near East being in Jordan, and the largest oversea communities found in the United States and in Sweden. The main demographic subdivision is along geographic as well as linguistic and denominational lines, the three main groupsbeing:

the Western Assyrians group of Syria, Iraq, and eastern Anatolia (Syriac Orthodox Church);
the Eastern Assyrians group of northern Iraq, eastern Anatolia, and Iran (Assyrian Church of the East);
the Chaldean Christians group of northern Iraq, Iran, and eastern Anatolia (Chaldean Catholic Church);

In northern Iraq, Assyrians are concentrated in the Ninewa and Dahuk Governorate governorates. Assyrian settlements in northwestern Iran are located in the West Azarbaijan Province, those of northeastern Syria in the Al-Hasakah province. Assyrians of Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Region, Turkey and Eastern Anatolia Region, Turkey have mostly moved to the diaspora.

Identity Assyrians are divided among several churches (see below). They speak and many can read and write modern Assyrian, a dialect of Neo-Aramaic.Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems 23 (1996)

In certain areas of the Assyrian homeland, identity within a community depends on a person's village of origin (see List of Assyrian villages) or Christian denomination, for instance Chaldean Catholic. Note on the Modern Assyrians

Assyrians and other ethnic groups feel pressure to identify as "Arabs", Iraqi Assyrians: A Barometer of Pluralismhttp://www.aina.org/releases/20070416140021.htm and "Kurds".http://www.aina.org/news/20061120133220.htm Assyrians in Syria, are disappearing as an ethnic group, due to assimilation.http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-29952/Syria#404105.hook

Neo-Aramaic ("Modern Assyrian"){{cite web],J.G. Browne, ‘‘The Assyrians,’’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 85 (1937) and the earliest European visitors to northern Mesopotamia in modern times encountered a people called "Assyrians" and men with ancient Assyrian names such as Sargon and Sennacherib.George Percy Badger, The Christians of Assyria Commonly Called Nestorians (London: W.H. Bartlett, 1869)J.F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 5, 89, 99, 149, 366–67, 382, 411Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 279 The Assyrians manifested a remarkable degree of linguistic, religious, and cultural continuity from the time of the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Parthians through periods of medieval Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman rule.Fred Aprim, Assyrians: The Continuous Saga (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2004); ‘‘Parthia,’’ in The Cambridge Ancient History: The Roman Republic, 2nd ed., vol. 3, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 597–98; Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 55–60; ‘‘Ashurbanipal and the Fall of Assyria,’’ in The Cambridge Ancient History: The Assyrian Empire, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 130–31; A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 168; Albert Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 99; Aubrey Vine, The Nestorian Churches (London: Independent Press, 1937); Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston (1737), bk. 13, ch. 6, http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/ant-13.htm; Simo Parpola, ‘‘National and Ethnic Identity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Assyrian Identity in the Post-Empire Times,’’ Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 18, 2 (2004): 16–17; Simo Parpola, ‘‘Assyrians after Assyria,’’ Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 12, 2 (2000): 1–13; R.N. Frye, ‘‘A Postscript to My Article and Syria: Synonyms,’’Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 11 (1997): 35–36; R.N. Frye, ‘‘Assyria and Syria: Synonyms,’’ Journal of the Near East Society 51 (1992): 281–85; Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 336, 345; J.G. Browne, ‘‘The Assyrians,’’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 85 (1937)

Assyrian nationalism emphatically connects Modern Assyrians to the population of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This connection is disputed,{{cite web] like H.W.F. Saggs, Robert D. Biggs and Simo Parpola, and Iranistics like Richard Nelson Frye.http://www.aina.org/articles/frye.pdf They believe that the modern Assyrians truly are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians.

The question of ethnic identity and self-designation is sometimes connected to the scholarly debate on the Syria (etymology). The question has a long history of academic controversy, but mainstream opinion currently favours that Syria is indeed ultimately derived from the Assyrian term Aššūrāyu., located in the midst of Assyrian contemporary civilization.Rudolf Macuch points out that the Eastern Neo-Aramaic press initially used the term "Syrian" (suryêta) and only much later, with the rise of nationalism, switched to "Assyrian" (atorêta).Rudolf Macuch, Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur, New York: de Gruyter, 1976. According to Tsereteli, however, a Georgia (country) equivalent of "Assyrians" appears in ancient Georgian and Armenian documents.Tsereteli, Sovremennyj assirijskij jazyk, Moscow: Nauka, 1964.

More recent archaeological findings have added to the debate, attesting to the synonymy between the terms "Assyria" and "Syria", including the Çineköy Inscription.

DNA analysis that has been conducted "shows that have a distinct genetic profile that distinguishes their population from any other population." Genetic analysis of the Assyrians of Persia demonstrated that they were "closed" with little "intermixture" with the Muslim Persian population.M.T. Akbari, Sunder S. Papiha, D.F. Roberts, and Daryoush D. Farhud, ‘‘Genetic Differentiation among Iranian Christian Communities,’’ American Journal of Human Genetics 38 (1986): 84–98

Culture Assyrian culture is dictated by religion. The language is also tied to the church as well for it uses the Syriac language in liturgy. Festivals occur during religious holidays such as Easter and Christmas. There are also secular holidays such as Akitu (the Assyrian New Year). The Assyrian New Year

People often greet and bid relatives farewell with a kiss on each cheek and by saying "Peace be upon you." Others are greeted with a handshake with the right hand only; according to Middle Eastern customs, the left hand is associated with evil. Similarly, shoes may not be left facing up, one may not have their feet facing anyone directly, whistling at night is thought to waken evil spirits, etc.

There are many Assyrian customs that are common in other Middle Eastern cultures. A parent will often place an eye pendant on their baby to prevent "an evil eye being cast upon it". Spitting on anyone or their belongings is seen as a grave insult.

There are Assyrians that are not very religious yet they may be very nationalistic. Assyrians are proud of their heritage, their Christianity, and of speaking the language of Christ. Children are often given Christian or Assyrian names such as Ashur, Sargon, Shamiram, Nineveh, Ninos, Nimrod, etc. Baptism and First Communion are heavily celebrated events similar to how a Bris and a Bar Mitzvah / Bat Mitzvah are in Judaism. When an Assyrian person dies, three days after they are buried they gather to celebrate them rising to heaven (as did Jesus), after seven days they again gather to commomerate their passing. A close family member wears only black clothes for forty days or one year as a sign of respect.

Language The ancient Assyrian tongue was referred to as the Akkadian language (also called Assyro-Babylonian),http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9005290/Akkadian-language#62711.hook an East Semitic languages written in cuneiform script. After the Assyrian empire expanded westward, Aramaic language gradually became the dominant tongue. Aramaic was declared an auxiliary language by King Ashur-nirari V in 752 BC and became a lingua franca under Achaemenid Empire. By the 1st century AD, Akkadian was extinct. Modern Syriac, however, shares some of its vocabulary, as both are Semitic languages, Akkadian Words in Modern Assyrian and a result of vocabulary remnants from the Akkadian language still being preserved in the modern Syriac language.

Most Assyrians speak a modern form of Syriac language,The British Survey, By British Society for International Understanding, 1968, page 3 an Aramaic language#Modern Eastern Aramaic whose dialects include Chaldean Neo-Aramaic and Turoyo language as well as Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. All are classified as Neo-Aramaic languages and are written using Syriac alphabet, a derivative of the ancient Aramaic alphabet. Assyrians also may speak one or more languages of their country of residence.

To the native speaker, "Syriac" is usually called Soureth or Suryoyo. A wide variety of dialects exist, including Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, and Turoyo language. Being stateless, Assyrians also learn the language or languages of their adopted country, usually Arabic language, Persian language or Turkish language. In northern Iraq and western Iran, Kurdish language is widely spoken.

Recent archaeological evidence includes a statue from Syria with Akkadian language and Aramaic language inscriptions. A Statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic Inscriptions It is the oldest known Aramaic text.

Religion {| align="right" style="background:transparent; text-align:center;"| | | |}

Assyrians became Christians during the first century AD, though not until during the third century had they all become Christians. Some Assyrians also claim that their ancestors became Christians during the lifetime of Jesus.http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2007/1937124.htm Jesus spoke of "Men of Nineveh", repenting from their old sins; this refers when the prophet Jonah visited the Assyrian capital Nineveh:{{quotation]; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.| Luke 11:32, King James Version-->

Many members of the following churches consider themselves Assyrian. Ethnic and national identities are deeply intertwined with religion, a legacy of the Ottoman Millet (Ottoman Empire). Main Churches

A small minority of Assyrians accepted the Protestant Reformation in the 20th century, possibly due to United Kingdom influences, and is now organized in the Assyrian Evangelical Church, the Assyrian Pentecostal Church and other Protestant Assyrian groups.

Based on the following Bible passage, many Assyrians hold Apocalypse beliefs regarding the future of their nation: Assyria in Prophecy{{quotation|In that day there shall be a way from Egypt to the Assyrians, and the Assyrian shall enter into Egypt, and the Egyptian to the Assyrians, and the Egyptians shall serve the Assyrian. In that day shall Israel be the third to the Egyptian and the Assyrian: a blessing in the midst of the land, Which the Lord of hosts hath blessed, saying: "Blessed be my people of Egypt, the work of my hands Assyria, and Israel my inheritance."| Isaiah 19:23-25-->

Music Assyrian music is divided into three main periods: ancient music written in Ur, Babylon and Nineveh; a middle period of tribal and Folk music; and the modern period.

Art An Assyrian artistic style distinct from that of Babylonian art which was the dominant contemporary art in Mesopotamia, began to emerge c.1500 B.C. and lasted until the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC. The characteristic Assyrian art form was the polychrome carved stone relief that decorated imperial monuments.

Cuisine Assyrian cuisine is very closely related to other Middle Eastern cuisines, predating both Arab cuisine and Turkish cuisine. It is also similar to Armenian cuisine, Persian cuisine, Israeli cuisine and Greek cuisine. It is believed that Assyrians invented baklava in the 8th century BC. History of Baklava, Turkish Culture: Baklava, Baklava War Intesifies, Baklava

Institutions Political parties

Other institutions

Religious divisions

Chaldean Assyrians (Chaldean Catholic Church)
Nestorian Assyrians (Assyrian Church of the East)
Syriac Assyrians (Monophysitism, Syriac Orthodox Church)