Assyrian people

Assyrians (ܐܬܘܪܝܐ)

Regions with significant populations
Iraq    3% of population (CIA) Syria    less than 100,000 (est) United States    82,355(2000) Australia    18,667 (2001) Iran    10,000 (est) Canada    6,980 (2001) Lebanon    5,000 (est) Turkey    5,000 (est) Georgia    3,299 (2002) Armenia    3,409 (2001) Greece    2,000 (est) New Zealand    1,176 (2001) other diaspora    150,000 (est) (UNPO)
Languages
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo
Religion
Christianity (various Eastern denominations)
Related ethnic groups
other Semites, Armenians, Greeks

For other uses of the name "Assyrian", see Assyrian

Assyrians are an ethnic group found in what is today Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, who are speakers of various neo-Aramaic languages. Assyrians primarily live in the Middle East, but in the past century about half of its population have migrated to the Caucasus, North America and Western Europe.

Identity of the Assyrian People

The modern Assyrians consider themselves to be the inheritors of the ancient Assyrian civilization and culture. Assyrians as a modern ethnonym has been introduced in the XIXth century by Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman and Persian Empires, first to designate the followers of the "Nestorian" creed led by the feudal patriarcal dynasty of the Mar Shimun at Qochanis, at the time mostly inhabiting the Hakkari moutains and enjoying a relative autonomy within the Empire. This must be replaced in the XIXth century context with e.g. the beginnings of modern archaeology (the modern discovery of Babylonia and Assyria), and of the idea among some missionaries that associating the remnants of these Christian communities with a powerful ancient empire would be useful to instill a religious and national revival.

Some 700 years after the fall of the Assyrian Empire in 620 BC, the term "Assyria" was still used. During the Roman Empire's rule of the area, Assyria was one of the 51 provinces of the empire. 500 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, during the 7th Century, Islam's prophet Mohammed also mentioned the Assyrians, in a fatwa demanding the protection of the Assyrian people of Mesopotamia. [1] The documental fatwa was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire during the 1847, which lead to the massacre of 30,000 Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire.

The term "Assyrian" is disputed by scholars. Rudolf Macuch (Geschichte der spät- und neusyrischen Literatur Berlin, New York:de Gruyter 1976) points out that from the beginning the Eastern Neo-Aramaic press used the term "Syrian" (suryêta) and only much later, with the rise of nationalism, switched to the name "Assyrian" (atorêta). However, according to Tsereteli (Sovremennyj assirijskij jazyk Moscow:Nauka 1964), a Georgian equivalent of "Assyrians" appears in Georgian documents from the 18th century, designating Eastern Aramaeans.

Among linguists, supporters of the term "Assyrian" (such as Edward Odisho The sound system of Modern Assyrian Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz 1988) admit that linguistically the term is misleading, because in linguistics the name "Assyrian" is reserved for the extinct language of ancient Assyrians, while the modern Aramaic dialects belong to a different branch. He further argues that ancient Assyrians could be among the ancestors of modern Arameans in Iraq.

Assyrians are divided among several churches (see below). They read and write various dialects of neo-Aramaic, a Semitic language which in the form of Syriac is used in their religious observances.

Though the modern Assyrians assert their connections with the Assyrian empire that began with Sargon I and which encompassed what is now western Iran, all of Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, the Armenian highlands and which even threatened Egypt in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, direct genetic inheritance and authentic cultural continuity with any modern peoples are tenuous. But see the links below on "Assyrian Identity" and Genetic Differentiation In Iranian Christian Communities.

Languages

The various ethnic groups and religious communities included under the Assyrians umbrella-ethnonym usually speak various Neo-Aramaic languages, including Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (Iraq), which belong to the Eastern Aramaic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. These dialects are the contemporary remnants of the Aramaic language, a Semitic language akin to Hebrew and to Arabic, whose vocabulary includes many words borrowed from Aramaic. The Syriac language, on the other hand is an extinct Semitic language from the same Aramaic group used in the liturgies of the Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac and Maronite churches.

Nowadays, most Assyrians are at least bilingual, many speak also Arabic, Turkish, Persian or Kurdish, or the languages used in the countries where they live.

Beside local Neo-Aramaic vernacular forms, there is a literary language, based primarily on the dialect used in the Urmia district of northwestern Iran. It uses the Syriac alphabet in its Nestorian variety, redesigned by European missionaries in the first half of the 19th century. It is in this alphabet and language, Eastern Neo-Aramaic, that the first newspaper in all of Iran was printed (1849–1918). When American missionaries first arrived in Urmia, among 125,000 Aramaic-speaking inhabitants only 40 men and one woman (sister of the Patriarch) could read and write. By the 1890s, the Assyrians had made such progress in education that most of the dozens of villages in the Urmia area had primary schools, and some had secondary schools as well. Although attempts to create a literary form for Eastern Aramaic probably date back to the 17th century (with the priests of the school of Alqosh), the Americans and their local advisors in Urmia can fairly be credited for laying the foundations of what is now called Neo-Aramaic Koine or Dachsprache.

Ottoman Assyrians

The Ottoman Empire, before it began to decay, had an elaborate system of administering the non-Muslim "People of the Book." That is, they made allowances for accepted monotheists with a scriptural tradition and distinguished them from people they defined as pagans. (Buddhists and Hindus as well as some African groups were the ones with which they came in contact.) As People of the Book (or dhimmi), Jews, Christians and Mandaeans (in some cases Zoroastrians) received second-class treatment but were tolerated.

In the Ottoman Empire, this religious status became systematized as the "millet" administrative pattern. Each religious minority answered to the government through its chief religious representative. This is a system that the Ottomans adopted from previous Muslim empires who in turn had gotten it from the Sassanian Iranians. That is how the Hebrew term "Resh Galuta" (the head of Diaspora) comes to being.

The Christians that the Ottomans conquered gradually but definitively with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 were already divided into many denominations, usually organized into a hierarchy of bishops headed by a patriarch.

The Assyrians under the Ottomans started out under the Armenian patriarchate but petitioned the Sublime Porte for separate status, mainly as western contacts allowed them a voice of their own. Thus the Assyrian Apostolic Church of Antioch and all the East (Jacobite, later changed to Syrian) received recognition as a separate communnity "millet" as did the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syrian Catholic and the Church of th the East. The last was the most remote of the Churches in distance from the Porte (in Istanbul).

The interest of Tsarist Russia and the western powers in the fate of the Christians of the Middle East, especially in the Maronites of Lebanon, gradually brought an elevation in culture during the 19th century, while at the same time causing schisms in denominational affiliation. The economic, educational and professional advancement of the Assyrians aroused the envy of their Muslim neighbors, especially the Kurds. Although not fanatically inclined as some Muslims, the Kurds have used their Islamic status to justify the attack on Assyrians in Tur Abdin, in Iran, in Iraq and in Turkey.

The Assyrians who had converted to Protestantism did not want to pay an annual tribute to the older churches through local bishops who then passed some of it up to the Patriarch who then passed some of it to the Porte in the form of taxes. They wanted to deal directly with the Porte, across ethnic lines (even if through a Muslim administrator), in order to have their own voice and not be subjected to the rule of the Patriarchal system. This general Protestant charter was granted in 1850. (Joseph, Muslim-Christian relations and inter-Christian rivalries in the Middle East: the case of the Jacobites in an age of transition [1983])

At the turn of the 20th century, the Assyrians living in Ottoman territory (all of them except those in Persia and those who had left for the Tsarist Caucasus and Transcaucasus) behaved like separate and competing communities organized along religious lines. The beginnings of national secular identity were beginning to emerge among such intellectual leaders as Dr. Freydun Bit Abram (Atturaya)(Tbilissi), Prof. Ashour Yosep (Harput), Malfono Naum Faiq (Diyarbakir), and John Mooshi (Urmia).

When World War I decimated the Assyrians in both the Ottoman Empire and Iran, the friction among churches was not as strong as the friction between the secular leaders and the patriarchal leadership. (Naby, IJMES, 1977)

Late Ottoman massacres and other issues

Main article: Assyrian Genocide

Turkish nationalists in the Young Turk (or C.U.P.) movement, in control of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, began their systematic elimination of Christian minorities, beginning with the deportation of Greeks from eastern Thrace in January 1914. As early as December 1914, the Assyrians were also being forced from their homes. In northwestern Iran, Kurdish tribes descended on Assyrian villages on the Urmia and Salmas plains when Istanbul entered the war in July 1914. The pillaging, looting, killings and abductions began the series of attacks and counterattacks that culminated in the final Ottoman military subjugation of northwest Iran in 1918. (Werda, Flickering Light of Asia reprinted 1990)

In 1915 Assyrians, like Armenians and Greeks, were massacred by the Turks in the cities and villages of the Ottoman Empire; mainly the Hakkâri region in southeastern Anatolia and the Urmia region in northwestern Iran. To justify its massacres, Turkey wrongly accused the Assyrian Christians of having thrown themselves under the protection of the British, who had forces in the field in Iraq and Syria. Such propaganda, publicized in Istanbul newspapers as confirmation of Christian treachery, contributed to the butchery. Thousands fled into exile. By the middle of 1915 the deportations and killings were in full swing. About 500,000 to 750,000 Assyrians, or about three-fourths of the entire Assyrian population, were killed during the "Year of the Sword" (Shato d´sayfo), bitterly recalled by minorities today.

• For a balanced account of these events, see Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East, a Concise History, (London and New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), pp.135-39.
• For a detalied description of the Assyrian situation during the WWI, see this[2] link.

At the turn of the century and at the post-WWI international conferences where the future map of Western Asia ("Near East") was redrawn among European powers while various "national committees" lobbyed each in favour of one's own "homeland", several Assyro-Chaldean committees were formed to foster the idea of a "Mesopotamian" state, later named "Beth Nahrain", whose claimed territory was included in the revendications of several other similar committes: Arab, Armenian, Kurdish.

Assyrians in Turkey

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, a sequel of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's military and political victories in Anatolia and Rumelia, durably buried all the hopes of the various Ottoman minorities, abandoning all the projects of Armenian, Kurdish or Assyro-Chaldean homelands while in the same time it consecrated the creation of a Turkish homeland, ethnically cleansed of most of its non-Muslim minorities and trying to impose a single Turkish-Muslim identity on the non-Turkish Muslim minorities, such as the Kurds and the Lazs.

Neo-Assyrian revival

Many Assyrians currently have an apocalyptic belief in the future of their nation, based on the following passage from the Bible:

At that time there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will visit Egypt, and the Egyptians will visit Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. At that time Israel will be the third member of the group, along with Egypt and Assyria, and will be a recipient of blessing in the earth. The Lord who leads armies will pronounce a blessing over the earth, saying, "Blessed be my people, Egypt, and the work of my hands, Assyria, and my special possession, Israel!" (Isaiah 19:23-25).

At the same time, recognizing the dire prospects for the survival of any Aramaic-speaking, Christian based community in Iraq, a slow process of ecumenicism on the one hand, to bring together the various church groups, and a political awakening is taking place. Both in the large diaspora and in the Middle East, enhanced communication, especially through the Internet and by e-mail is breaking down the barriers that 20th century nationalism in Iraq, Syria and Turkey in particular, had fostered. While there are still many quarrels, the multi-lingualism of Assyrians and the rise in communications in English, is breaking down some of the antagonisms. To some extent, the quarrels are fed inadvertently by Western scholarship combined with a lack of cultural and historical knowledge among Assyrians themselves. Many continue to link language use with ethnic name: since all Assyrians speak one of two living forms of Aramaic (eastern and western), the assumption is often made that this must also become the ethnic name of the group. Others who want to revive classical Syriac, the revered liturgical language of the community, insist on some term having to do with the word "Syriac" and call themselves Syriacs. Because the indigenous word in both dialects for the people themselves and for the language is "Suryoyo" or "Suryaye," some take the facile route of equating these terms with Syriac or Syrian without realizing that the terms Assyrian and Syrian are the same in origin.

Similar disagreements over language and unity exist among many minorities in the Middle East that have had no state structure. Assyrians have managed to preserve Aramaic for more than two thousand years without any state backing. The cultural heritage and the language may help to preserve the community.

Religious denominations

• Assyrian Church of the East
• Assyrian Church of the East's Holy Synod
• Chaldean Church of Babylon
• Syriac Catholic Church
• Syriac Orthodox Church
• Assyrian Evangelical Church
• Assyrian Pentecostal Church

People who consider themselves as Assyrians are usually followers of one of the aforementioned churches, but not all members of them consider themselves as Assyrians, ethnic and national identities being intertwined with religious ones, a heritage of the millet system.

See also

• Assyrian cuisine
• Assyrian genocide
• Assyrian diaspora
• Assyrians in Iran
• Assyrians in Iraq - Assyro-Chaldeans - Chaldeans
• Assyrians in Syria - Syriacs
• Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic
• Assyrian Independence - Assyrian flag
• List of Assyrian settlements
• List of Assyrians
• Agha Petros - A Must Read

External links

Scientific links

• Dr. Eden Naby's publications

News and reference sites

• Iraq: Country Study & Guide

Activist sites

• Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization: Assyria
• Syriac House (Assyrian)
• Assyrian International News Agency
• Assyrian Aid Society
• Assyrian Voice
• Christians of Iraq
• Assyrian Chat
• Assyrian Democratic Organization
• Assyrian Democratic Movement
• Assyria Liberation Party
• Shuraya Party