Assyrian continuity
Encyclopedia
The Assyrian continuity claim deals with the claims made by modern Assyrians that they are the direct descendants of the Akkadian and later Aramaean inhabitants of ancient Assyria
.
These claims have seen considerable support among prominant Assyriologists such as Simo Parpola
, Richard N. Frye and Geoffrey Khan.
It is well known that Assyria existed as a distinct geo-political region named Assyria (Athura, Seleucid Syria, Assuristan etc) under Achaemenid Persian, Seleucid Greek, Parthian
, Roman
and Sassanid Persian rule, only ceasing to exist some time after the Arab Islamic conquest of the second half of the 7th century AD. It is also accepted that modern Assyrians are without doubt of "pre Arab" and "pre Islamic" Mesopotamian stock.
It has also been an important factor in the beginnings of the Assyrian nationalism, warmly endorsed by a number of its leading figures such as Naum Faiq
and Freydun Atturaya
.
, while describing the books and scripture of many people defines the word Ashuriyun
(Arabic for Assyrians) as "a sect of Jesus."
As previously mentioned, the 2nd century writer and theologian Tatian
states clearly that he is an Assyrian, as does the satirist Lucian
. Adam H. Becker of New York University
regards the continuity claims as "hogwash" and writes that the special continuity claims "must be understood as a modern invention worthy of the study of a Benedict Anderson
or an Eric Hobsbawm
rather than an ancient historian."
Michael the Syrian
mentions a 9th century dispute between Jacobite Syrians
with Greek scholars, in which the Jacobites claimed Assyrian continuity.
Assyrian continuity was also supported by a number of 19th century Assyriologists such as Austen Henry Layard
, the ethnic Assyrian archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam
and George Percy Badger
.
This view is supported by many non Assyrian modern Assyriologists, Iranologists, Orientalists and Historians. It is certain that there had been some Assyrian resistance to Persian rule in Achaemenid Assyria
. H. W. F. Saggs
in his The Might That Was Assyria
clearly supports cultural continuity
Doubt on the continuity hypothesis is based on the relative scarcity (but importantly, not a total absence) of Assyrian (East Semitic) personal names in Roman Syria. However, East Semitic Assyrian names are more numerously attested in Sassanid Assyria.
Odisho Gewargis explained the general scarcity of autochthonous personal names as a process taking place only after Christianization The reduction in ethnic naming is of course common in most peoples that adopt a monotheistic religion,and they are generally replaced with biblical or koranic names, an example of this would be the scarcity of traditional English
names such as Wolfstan, Redwald, Aethelred, Offa and Wystan among modern Englishmen, compared to the commonality of non English biblical names such as John, Mark, David, Paul, Thomas and Matthew.
Fred Aprim points out that distinct Assyrian names did indeed continue from ancient times to the present
Sidney Smith rejects the continuity hypothesis to some degree, but also accepts small, poor communities perpetuated some basic Assyrian identity to the present day.
The Assyriologist Simo Parpola
emphatically accepts continuity and has produced evidence showing the continuity of Assyrian identity and culture from the fall of the Assyrian Empire to the present.
J. A. Brinkman is generally agnostic, however he does put the burden of proof on those denying continuity, pointing out that there is no historical evidence or proof to suggest the population of Assyria was wiped out or removed.
Similarly, Robert D. Biggs
accepts genealogical continuity without prejudicing cultural continuity, pointing out that the modern Assyrians are the descendants of their ancient ancestors but became culturally different from them with the advent of Christianity. Regarding cultural continuity, Biggs speaks of a "remnant" of ethnic Assyrian continuity, surviving into the Christian era as a substrate to mainstream Persian and Greco-Roman culture through to the present day.
The noted Iranologist Richard Nelson Frye
also clearly accepts continuity.
Giorgi Tsereteli
points out that the term Assyrian continued to be used to describe the Christian Aramaic speaking people in and around northern Mesopotamia in Georgian
, Armenian
(known as Assouri), Russian
, Arab
and Persian records from the Middle Ages
through to the present day.
strongly supports this.
, the last king of Babylonia was himself from Assyria. From that time, Assyria as a political and named entity was under Persian Achaemenid, Macedonian, Seleucid, Parthian
Arascid
, Roman
and Sassanid rule for seven centuries undergoing Christianization during this time.
Assyria flourished during the Achaemenid period (from 539-323 BC), becoming a major source of manpower for the Achaemenid armies and a breadbasket for the empire, with Assyrians also attested as having important administrative posts within the empire, belieing the Biblical assertion that Assyria was both depopulated and devastated. Assyria was even powerful enough to raise a full scale rebellion against the Achamenids.
The Seleucid empire succeeded that of the Achaemenids in 323 BC, from this point Greek
became the official language of the empire at the expense of Mesopotamian Aramaic. The general populace of Assyria were not Hellenised however, as is attested by the survival of native language and religion long after the destruction of the Seleucid Empire. The province flourished much as it had under the Achaemenids for the next century, however by the late 3rd century BC Assyria became a battleground between the Seleucid Greeks and the Parthians but remained largely in Greek hands until the reign of Mithridates I
when it fell to the Parthians. During the Seleucid period the term Assyria was altered to read Syria, a Meditteranean form of the original name that had been in use since the 8th or 9th century BC among some western Assyrian colonies. The Seleucid Greeks also named Aramea to the west Syria (read Assyria) as it had been an Assyrian colony for centuries. When they lost control of Assyria proper (which is northern Mesopotamia, north east Syria and part of south east Anatolia), they retained the name but applied it only to Aramea (i.e. The Levant). This created a situation where both Assyrians and Arameans to the west were referred to as Syrians by the Greco-Roman civilisations, causing the later Syrian vs. Assyrian naming controversy.
the region was renamed Assuristan during the Parthian era. The Parthians appeared to have exercised only loose control at times, leading to the virtual resurection of Assyria with the native kingdom of Adiabene
15 B.C. to 117 A.D. centered in modern Arbil
. Its rulers were converts from Mesopotamian religion
to Judaism
and later Christianity
, and it retained Mesopotamian Aramaic as its spoken tongue. Adiabene, like the rest of northern Mesopotamia was conquered by Trajan
in 117 AD, and the region was named Assyria
by the Romans
.
Christianity, as well as Gnostic sects such as the Sabians and Manicheanism took hold between the 1st and 3rd Centuries AD. Assyria became the center of the distinct Syriac Christianity
and of Syriac
literature. The Parthians regained control of the region a few years later, and retained the name Assyria (Assuristan). Other small kingdoms had also sprung up in the region, namely Osrhoene and Hatra
, which were Aramaic
/Syriac
speaking and at least partly Assyrian. Assyrian identity appears to have remained strong, with the 2nd century writer and theologian Tatian
stating clearly that he is an Assyrian, as does the satirist Lucian
in the same period. Assur
itself also appears to have been independent or largely autonomous, with temples being dedicated to the national god of the Assyrians (Ashur
) into the second half of the 3rd Century AD, before it was once again destroyed by the invading Sassanids in 256 AD. The Sassanids recognised the land as Assyria, retaining the name Assuristan.
Assyrians still seem to have retained a distinct identity and a degree of local autonomy in the Sassanid period, according to the legend of Mar Behnam, the region around Nineveh
was governed in the 4th century A.D. by a certain local Assyrian king, who was pointedly named Sennacherib
, who established the Mar Behnam monastery
in memory of his son. Assyria remained recognised as such by its inhabitants, Sassanid rulers and neighbouring peoples until after the Arab
Islamic conquest of the second half of the 7th century AD. Even after this event, and under the pressure of Arabization
and Islamification, Assyrian identity remained,a plaque found in northern Mesopotamia dating from the late 7th century AD mentions a man by the name of Otal Bar Sargon. Sargon being a very distinct Assyrian name.
.
One example is the use of the prefixed article k- or other variants of it such as ki- and či- which does not appear in classical Syriac. Evidence of the existence of an earlier language which differs from Classical Syriac can be found in other medieval texts such as an Arabic medical book that was composed by Ibn Baklarish in Spain
. The book lists a number of medical elements in a variety of languages including one designated as al-suryāniyya which would presumably correspond with Syriac. The words listed under it are not Classical Syriac however, but correspond to forms found only in the modern Assyrian dialects spoken to the east of the Tigris
.
Another distinguishing grammatical feature of modern Assyrian which differs from Syriac is the infliction of past verbs by a series of suffixes that contain the preposition l-, e.g. grišle 'he pulled' and grišli 'I pilled' compared with the Syriac graš and gerešt respectively. The use of this suffix has been attested to Aramaic documents dating back to the 5th century B.C. This verbal form is originally a passive construction consisting of a passive participle and an agentive phrase. Examples of this passive construcion has been later found in Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic and even in Syriac. All these forms of Aramaic are however far more frequently expressed by the active verbal form graš, and the passive types are likely to be reflections of the contemporary spoken vernacular that have infiltrated the standard literary language.
There is also a number of Akkadian words mostly connected with agriculture that have been preserved in modern Syriac vernaculars. One example is the word miššara 'rice paddy field' which is a direct descendant of the Akkadian mušāru. A number of words in the dialect of Bakhdida
(Qaraqosh) shows the same origin, e.g. baxšimə 'storeroom (for grain)' from Akkadian bīt ḫašīmi 'storehouse' and raxiṣa 'pile of straw' from raḫīṣu 'pile of harvest produce'.
Some grammatical features that are found in the modern Assyrian dialects are typologically more archaic than the corresponding features in classical Syriac. In the dialect of Qaraqosh, for example, the infinitive of all verbal stems does not have an initial m-, by contrast with Syriac infinitives, which have acquired this prefix by analogy with the participles.
Assyria
Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...
.
These claims have seen considerable support among prominant Assyriologists such as Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola is a Finnish archaeologist, currently professor of Assyriology at the University of Helsinki. He specialized in epigraphy of the Akkadian language, and has been working on the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project since 1987...
, Richard N. Frye and Geoffrey Khan.
It is well known that Assyria existed as a distinct geo-political region named Assyria (Athura, Seleucid Syria, Assuristan etc) under Achaemenid Persian, Seleucid Greek, Parthian
Parthian
Parthian may be:A demonym "of Parthia", a region of north-eastern Iran* Parthian language, a now-extinct Middle Iranian language* Parthian shot, an archery skill famously employed by Parthian horsemen...
, Roman
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
and Sassanid Persian rule, only ceasing to exist some time after the Arab Islamic conquest of the second half of the 7th century AD. It is also accepted that modern Assyrians are without doubt of "pre Arab" and "pre Islamic" Mesopotamian stock.
It has also been an important factor in the beginnings of the Assyrian nationalism, warmly endorsed by a number of its leading figures such as Naum Faiq
Naum Faiq
Naum Elias Yaqub Palakh , better known as Naum Faiq was one of the founding fathers of modern Assyrian nationalism during the early 20th century. He was a teacher and writer throughout his life...
and Freydun Atturaya
Freydun Atturaya
Freydun Bet-Abram Atturaya was an Assyrian physician born in the town of Charbash in the district of Urmia in Iran. He was sent by his father to live with an uncle in Tbilisi, then in the Russian Empire, and studied medicine there. He worked as a medical doctor for the Russian Army as soon as he...
.
Scholars' view
Medieval Arab and Syriac historians support continuity also; The 10th-century Arab scholar Ibn al-NadimIbn al-Nadim
Abu'l-Faraj Muhammad bin Is'hāq al-Nadim , whose father was known as al-Warrāq was a Shia Muslim scholar and bibliographer. Some scholars regard him as a Persian, but this is not certain. He is famous as the author of the Kitāb al-Fihrist...
, while describing the books and scripture of many people defines the word Ashuriyun
Ashuriyun
Ashuriyun is an Arab term used to describe the ethnic Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia first coined in Medieval times by the Arab scholar Ibn al-Nadim....
(Arabic for Assyrians) as "a sect of Jesus."
As previously mentioned, the 2nd century writer and theologian Tatian
Tatian
Tatian the Assyrian was an Assyrian early Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century.Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four gospels that became the standard text of the four gospels in the Syriac-speaking churches until the...
states clearly that he is an Assyrian, as does the satirist Lucian
Lucian
Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.His ethnicity is disputed and is attributed as Assyrian according to Frye and Parpola, and Syrian according to Joseph....
. Adam H. Becker of New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
regards the continuity claims as "hogwash" and writes that the special continuity claims "must be understood as a modern invention worthy of the study of a Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983...
or an Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...
rather than an ancient historian."
Michael the Syrian
Michael the Syrian
Michael the Syrian , also known as Michael the Great or Michael Syrus or Michael the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, was a patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 1166 to 1199. He is best known today as the author of the largest medieval Chronicle, which he composed in Syriac...
mentions a 9th century dispute between Jacobite Syrians
Syriac Orthodox Church
The Syriac Orthodox Church; is an autocephalous Oriental Orthodox church based in the Eastern Mediterranean, with members spread throughout the world. The Syriac Orthodox Church claims to derive its origin from one of the first Christian communities, established in Antioch by the Apostle St....
with Greek scholars, in which the Jacobites claimed Assyrian continuity.
Assyrian continuity was also supported by a number of 19th century Assyriologists such as Austen Henry Layard
Austen Henry Layard
Sir Austen Henry Layard GCB, PC was a British traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat, best known as the excavator of Nimrud.-Family:...
, the ethnic Assyrian archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam
Hormuzd Rassam
Hormuzd Rassam , was a native Assyrian Assyriologist, British diplomat and traveller who made a number of important discoveries, including the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest literature...
and George Percy Badger
George Percy Badger
George Percy Badger was an English Anglican missionary, and a scholar of oriental studies. He is mainly known for his doctrinal and historical studies about the Church of the East.-Life:...
.
This view is supported by many non Assyrian modern Assyriologists, Iranologists, Orientalists and Historians. It is certain that there had been some Assyrian resistance to Persian rule in Achaemenid Assyria
Achaemenid Assyria
Athura was a geographical area within the Persian Achaemenid Empire during the period of 539 BC to 330 BC. Although sometimes regarded as a satrapy, Achaemenid royal inscriptions list it as a dahyu, a concept generally interpreted as meaning either a group of people or both a country and its...
. H. W. F. Saggs
H. W. F. Saggs
Henry William Frederick Saggs was an English classicist and orientalist.-Biography:He was born in East Anglia in 1920. He studied theology at King's College London, graduating in 1942 and receiving a major injury in the Second World War. His brother, Arthur Roy Saggs, a sergeant in the RAF, known...
in his The Might That Was Assyria
The Might That Was Assyria
The Might That Was Assyria is written by Assyriologist H. W. F. Saggs. It illustrates the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Saggs spent half of his life, studying the ancient Assyrians, before he wrote this book....
clearly supports cultural continuity
Doubt on the continuity hypothesis is based on the relative scarcity (but importantly, not a total absence) of Assyrian (East Semitic) personal names in Roman Syria. However, East Semitic Assyrian names are more numerously attested in Sassanid Assyria.
Odisho Gewargis explained the general scarcity of autochthonous personal names as a process taking place only after Christianization The reduction in ethnic naming is of course common in most peoples that adopt a monotheistic religion,and they are generally replaced with biblical or koranic names, an example of this would be the scarcity of traditional English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
names such as Wolfstan, Redwald, Aethelred, Offa and Wystan among modern Englishmen, compared to the commonality of non English biblical names such as John, Mark, David, Paul, Thomas and Matthew.
Fred Aprim points out that distinct Assyrian names did indeed continue from ancient times to the present
Sidney Smith rejects the continuity hypothesis to some degree, but also accepts small, poor communities perpetuated some basic Assyrian identity to the present day.
The Assyriologist Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola is a Finnish archaeologist, currently professor of Assyriology at the University of Helsinki. He specialized in epigraphy of the Akkadian language, and has been working on the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project since 1987...
emphatically accepts continuity and has produced evidence showing the continuity of Assyrian identity and culture from the fall of the Assyrian Empire to the present.
J. A. Brinkman is generally agnostic, however he does put the burden of proof on those denying continuity, pointing out that there is no historical evidence or proof to suggest the population of Assyria was wiped out or removed.
Similarly, Robert D. Biggs
Robert D. Biggs
Robert D. Biggs is an Assyriology professor. He received his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. He is an editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.-External links:*...
accepts genealogical continuity without prejudicing cultural continuity, pointing out that the modern Assyrians are the descendants of their ancient ancestors but became culturally different from them with the advent of Christianity. Regarding cultural continuity, Biggs speaks of a "remnant" of ethnic Assyrian continuity, surviving into the Christian era as a substrate to mainstream Persian and Greco-Roman culture through to the present day.
The noted Iranologist Richard Nelson Frye
Richard Nelson Frye
Richard Nelson Frye is an American scholar of Iranic and Central Asian Studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University...
also clearly accepts continuity.
Giorgi Tsereteli
Giorgi Tsereteli
Giorgi V. Tsereteli was a distinguished Georgian scientist and public benefactor, founder of the well-known Georgian scientific school of Oriental Studies and Arabist of world renown, founder of the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the Tbilisi State University , founder and first Director of the...
points out that the term Assyrian continued to be used to describe the Christian Aramaic speaking people in and around northern Mesopotamia in Georgian
Georgian language
Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...
, Armenian
Armenian language
The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
(known as Assouri), Russian
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
and Persian records from the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
through to the present day.
Syria and Assyria
Another argument concerned the controversy between the terms Syrian/Syriac Vs Assyrian. Sceptics pointed out that the prevalence of the term Syrian/Syriac detracted from the idea of Assyrian identity. However the strongly prevailing and majority opinion among scholars today is that the terms Syrian and Syriac are indeed derivatives of Assyrian, and in past times actually meant Assyrian. The 21st Century discovery of the Çineköy inscriptionÇineköy inscription
The Çineköy inscription is a Hieroglyphic Luwian-Phoenician bilingual, uncovered from Çineköy, Adana Province, Turkey , dating to the 8th century BC...
strongly supports this.
Historical continuity
Following the distruction of the Neo Assyrian Empire by 608 BC, the population of the Assyria came under the control of their Babylonian relatives until 539 BC. Ironically NabonidusNabonidus
Nabonidus was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, reigning from 556-539 BCE.-Historiography on Nabonidus:...
, the last king of Babylonia was himself from Assyria. From that time, Assyria as a political and named entity was under Persian Achaemenid, Macedonian, Seleucid, Parthian
Parthian Empire
The Parthian Empire , also known as the Arsacid Empire , was a major Iranian political and cultural power in ancient Persia...
Arascid
Arsacid Dynasty of Armenia
The Arsacid dynasty or Arshakuni dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Armenia from 54 AD to 428 AD. Formerly a branch of the Iranian Parthian Arsacids, they became a distinctly Armenian dynasty. Arsacid Kings reigned intermittently throughout the chaotic years following the fall of the Artaxiad Dynasty...
, Roman
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
and Sassanid rule for seven centuries undergoing Christianization during this time.
Assyria flourished during the Achaemenid period (from 539-323 BC), becoming a major source of manpower for the Achaemenid armies and a breadbasket for the empire, with Assyrians also attested as having important administrative posts within the empire, belieing the Biblical assertion that Assyria was both depopulated and devastated. Assyria was even powerful enough to raise a full scale rebellion against the Achamenids.
The Seleucid empire succeeded that of the Achaemenids in 323 BC, from this point Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
became the official language of the empire at the expense of Mesopotamian Aramaic. The general populace of Assyria were not Hellenised however, as is attested by the survival of native language and religion long after the destruction of the Seleucid Empire. The province flourished much as it had under the Achaemenids for the next century, however by the late 3rd century BC Assyria became a battleground between the Seleucid Greeks and the Parthians but remained largely in Greek hands until the reign of Mithridates I
Mithridates I of Parthia
Mithridates or Mithradates I was the "Great King" of Parthia from ca. 171 BC - 138 BC, succeeding his brother Phraates I. His father was King Phriapatius of Parthia, who died ca. 176 BC). Mithridates I made Parthia into a major political power by expanding the empire to the east, south, and west...
when it fell to the Parthians. During the Seleucid period the term Assyria was altered to read Syria, a Meditteranean form of the original name that had been in use since the 8th or 9th century BC among some western Assyrian colonies. The Seleucid Greeks also named Aramea to the west Syria (read Assyria) as it had been an Assyrian colony for centuries. When they lost control of Assyria proper (which is northern Mesopotamia, north east Syria and part of south east Anatolia), they retained the name but applied it only to Aramea (i.e. The Levant). This created a situation where both Assyrians and Arameans to the west were referred to as Syrians by the Greco-Roman civilisations, causing the later Syrian vs. Assyrian naming controversy.
the region was renamed Assuristan during the Parthian era. The Parthians appeared to have exercised only loose control at times, leading to the virtual resurection of Assyria with the native kingdom of Adiabene
Adiabene
Adiabene was an ancient Assyrian independent kingdom in Mesopotamia, with its capital at Arbela...
15 B.C. to 117 A.D. centered in modern Arbil
Arbil
Arbil / Hewlêr is the fourth largest city in Iraq after Baghdad, Basra and Mosul...
. Its rulers were converts from Mesopotamian religion
Mesopotamian religion
Mesopotamian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples living in Mesopotamia that dominated the region for a period of 4200 years from the fourth millennium BC to approximately the 3rd century AD...
to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
and later Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, and it retained Mesopotamian Aramaic as its spoken tongue. Adiabene, like the rest of northern Mesopotamia was conquered by Trajan
Trajan
Trajan , was Roman Emperor from 98 to 117 AD. Born into a non-patrician family in the province of Hispania Baetica, in Spain Trajan rose to prominence during the reign of emperor Domitian. Serving as a legatus legionis in Hispania Tarraconensis, in Spain, in 89 Trajan supported the emperor against...
in 117 AD, and the region was named Assyria
Assyria
Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...
by the Romans
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
.
Christianity, as well as Gnostic sects such as the Sabians and Manicheanism took hold between the 1st and 3rd Centuries AD. Assyria became the center of the distinct Syriac Christianity
Syriac Christianity
Syriac or Syrian Christianity , the Syriac-speaking Christians of Mesopotamia, comprises multiple Christian traditions of Eastern Christianity. With a history going back to the 1st Century AD, in modern times it is represented by denominations primarily in the Middle East and in Kerala, India....
and of Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
literature. The Parthians regained control of the region a few years later, and retained the name Assyria (Assuristan). Other small kingdoms had also sprung up in the region, namely Osrhoene and Hatra
Hatra
Hatra is an ancient city in the Ninawa Governorate and al-Jazira region of Iraq. It is currently known as al-Hadr, a name which appears once in ancient inscriptions, and it was in the ancient Iranian province of Khvarvaran. The city lies northwest of Baghdad and southwest of Mosul.-History:Hatra...
, which were Aramaic
Aramaic language
Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...
/Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
speaking and at least partly Assyrian. Assyrian identity appears to have remained strong, with the 2nd century writer and theologian Tatian
Tatian
Tatian the Assyrian was an Assyrian early Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century.Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four gospels that became the standard text of the four gospels in the Syriac-speaking churches until the...
stating clearly that he is an Assyrian, as does the satirist Lucian
Lucian
Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.His ethnicity is disputed and is attributed as Assyrian according to Frye and Parpola, and Syrian according to Joseph....
in the same period. Assur
Assur
Assur , was one of the capitals of ancient Assyria. The remains of the city are situated on the western bank of river Tigris, north of the confluence with the tributary Little Zab river, in modern day Iraq, more precisely in the Al-Shirqat District .Assur is also...
itself also appears to have been independent or largely autonomous, with temples being dedicated to the national god of the Assyrians (Ashur
Ashur
Ashur |Shin]]) in the Masoretic text, which doubles the 'ש'), was the second son of Shem, the son of Noah. Ashur's brothers were Elam, Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram....
) into the second half of the 3rd Century AD, before it was once again destroyed by the invading Sassanids in 256 AD. The Sassanids recognised the land as Assyria, retaining the name Assuristan.
Assyrians still seem to have retained a distinct identity and a degree of local autonomy in the Sassanid period, according to the legend of Mar Behnam, the region around Nineveh
Nineveh
Nineveh was an ancient Assyrian city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River, and capital of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Its ruins are across the river from the modern-day major city of Mosul, in the Ninawa Governorate of Iraq....
was governed in the 4th century A.D. by a certain local Assyrian king, who was pointedly named Sennacherib
Sennacherib
Sennacherib |Sîn]] has replaced brothers for me"; Aramaic: ) was the son of Sargon II, whom he succeeded on the throne of Assyria .-Rise to power:...
, who established the Mar Behnam monastery
Mar Behnam Monastery
Monastery of the Martyrs Saint Behnam and his Sister Sarah , is a Syriac Catholic monastery in northern Iraq close to the town of Bakhdida.The monastery was built in the 4rd century A.D...
in memory of his son. Assyria remained recognised as such by its inhabitants, Sassanid rulers and neighbouring peoples until after the Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
Islamic conquest of the second half of the 7th century AD. Even after this event, and under the pressure of Arabization
Arabization
Arabization or Arabisation describes a growing cultural influence on a non-Arab area that gradually changes into one that speaks Arabic and/or incorporates Arab culture...
and Islamification, Assyrian identity remained,a plaque found in northern Mesopotamia dating from the late 7th century AD mentions a man by the name of Otal Bar Sargon. Sargon being a very distinct Assyrian name.
Linguistic continuity
A number of vocabulary and grammatical features in colloquial modern neo-Aramaic dialects shows similarities with the ancient Akkadian languageAkkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
.
One example is the use of the prefixed article k- or other variants of it such as ki- and či- which does not appear in classical Syriac. Evidence of the existence of an earlier language which differs from Classical Syriac can be found in other medieval texts such as an Arabic medical book that was composed by Ibn Baklarish in Spain
Al-Andalus
Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation and territorial region also commonly referred to as Moorish Iberia. The name describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, although the territorial boundaries...
. The book lists a number of medical elements in a variety of languages including one designated as al-suryāniyya which would presumably correspond with Syriac. The words listed under it are not Classical Syriac however, but correspond to forms found only in the modern Assyrian dialects spoken to the east of the Tigris
Tigris
The Tigris River is the eastern member of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, the other being the Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq.-Geography:...
.
Another distinguishing grammatical feature of modern Assyrian which differs from Syriac is the infliction of past verbs by a series of suffixes that contain the preposition l-, e.g. grišle 'he pulled' and grišli 'I pilled' compared with the Syriac graš and gerešt respectively. The use of this suffix has been attested to Aramaic documents dating back to the 5th century B.C. This verbal form is originally a passive construction consisting of a passive participle and an agentive phrase. Examples of this passive construcion has been later found in Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic and even in Syriac. All these forms of Aramaic are however far more frequently expressed by the active verbal form graš, and the passive types are likely to be reflections of the contemporary spoken vernacular that have infiltrated the standard literary language.
There is also a number of Akkadian words mostly connected with agriculture that have been preserved in modern Syriac vernaculars. One example is the word miššara 'rice paddy field' which is a direct descendant of the Akkadian mušāru. A number of words in the dialect of Bakhdida
Bakhdida
Bakhdida , also known as Baghdeda, Qaraqosh, Karakosh or Al-Hamdaniya, is an Assyrian town in the northern Iraq Ninawa Governorate, located about 32 km southeast of the city of Mosul amid agricultural lands, close to the ruins of the ancient Assyrian cities Nimrud and Nineveh. It is connected...
(Qaraqosh) shows the same origin, e.g. baxšimə 'storeroom (for grain)' from Akkadian bīt ḫašīmi 'storehouse' and raxiṣa 'pile of straw' from raḫīṣu 'pile of harvest produce'.
Some grammatical features that are found in the modern Assyrian dialects are typologically more archaic than the corresponding features in classical Syriac. In the dialect of Qaraqosh, for example, the infinitive of all verbal stems does not have an initial m-, by contrast with Syriac infinitives, which have acquired this prefix by analogy with the participles.
See also
- Nationalism and ancient history
- ProtochronismProtochronismProtochronism is a Romanian term describing the tendency to ascribe, largely relying on questionable data and subjective interpretations, an idealised past to the country as a whole...
- National myth
- The Melammu Project