Legend & origins
The empire that refused to die
Nineveh fell in 612 BC and the world's first great empire burned. Its farmers stayed on the land, kept their name and waited. Assyrian tradition never stopped calling the plain north of Mosul by its oldest title: the country of Ashur.
The Assyrians were among the first peoples to become Christian. Legend credits the apostle Thomas and his disciples Addai and Mari. They built the Church of the East, which at its height ran missions along the Silk Road as far as India and Tang dynasty China, while the cathedrals of Europe were still young. Its scholars translated Greek philosophy into Syriac and then Arabic, feeding the Islamic golden age and, through it, the European renaissance.
History has split one people into several names. The Chaldeans are the largest branch today, and they entered communion with Rome from 1552. They are centered in Alqosh, Telkaif and Baghdad. The Assyrian Church of the East continues the ancient independent line, and its patriarchate is now back in Erbil. The Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholics of Tur Abdin, Qamishli and Mosul follow a different rite again.
The names divide them, and the divisions are old and sometimes bitter. The Aramaic language and the memory of Nineveh keep them together. Which of those forces is winning depends entirely on who you ask.
What sets them apart
Carriers of the world's longest continuities
There is a chain of customs that makes Assyrians distinctive. The language, the calendar, the monasteries and the name itself, running from the Iron Age straight into the present.
The language of Jesus, at home
Suret and Turoyo are modern forms of Aramaic, and they are still cradle tongues. A child in Alqosh or Södertälje learning them from a grandparent maintains a line that has not broken since the Iron Age. UNESCO lists both as endangered.
Akitu, year 6776
The New Year festival on 1 April comes down from the spring rites of Babylon and Nineveh. The Assyrian calendar counts from 4750 BC, which tradition gives as the founding of Assur.
Cliff monasteries
Rabban Hormizd was carved into the rock above Alqosh in the seventh century, and Mar Mattai sits on its own mountain. They were libraries and refuges at the same time. Their walls are covered in inscriptions written in Estrangela, the oldest of the Syriac scripts.
Sub-groups, one people
Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic. These are confessional names born of church politics, laid over a single Aramaic-speaking people.
1915 — 2014
Sayfo, Simele, and the letter nūn
The modern history of this community reads as one long chain of catastrophes. In 1915 came the Sayfo, which means the Sword. Ottoman forces and allied tribes killed an estimated 250,000 Assyrians, in the same years as the Armenian genocide.
In 1933 the young Iraqi state massacred Assyrian villagers at Simele; counts run from six hundred to three thousand. That crime is what set Raphael LemkinRaphael Lemkin Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). He had cited the Simele massacre in a paper to the League of Nations in 1933.US Holocaust Memorial Museum. View source ↗ on the legal work which produced the word genocide.
In 2014 ISIS took Mosul and painted the Arabic letter nūn on Christian houses. The letter stands for Nazarene, meaning Christian. Over 100,000 Assyrians left the Nineveh Plains overnight, and the bulldozing of the ancient Assyrian city Nimrud followed.
Several Assyrian towns have been partially rebuilt since, yet people keep leaving anyway. The diaspora in Chicago, Detroit, Södertälje and Sydney now far outnumbers the homeland.
We are not guests in Iraq. We are the reason it has a history.A sentiment common in Assyrian advocacy — the indigeneity claim
Geography
Where they live
Based on work by Dr. M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (New York: Columbia Univ, 2006–present) @ gulf2000.columbia.edu/maps.shtml
Through time
Timeline
- c. 2500 BCThe city of Assur rises on the Tigris, giving its name to a people and their god.
- 612 BCFall of Nineveh. The empire ends; the Assyrian population remains on its land under successive rulers.
- 1st–3rd c. ADChristianisation. Mesopotamia becomes a heartland of early Christianity; the Church of the East takes shape outside the Roman world.
- 1552The Chaldean union. Part of the Church of the East enters communion with Rome — the origin of today's largest branch.
- 1915Sayfo — “the Sword.” Ottoman forces and allied tribes kill an estimated 250,000 Assyrians in Anatolia and Persia.
- 1933The Simele massacre. Iraqi forces kill 600–3,000 Assyrian villagers; the crime shapes the very concept of genocide.
- 2014ISIS takes the Nineveh Plains. 100,000+ flee overnight; Nimrud is bulldozed. Partial return follows liberation in 2016–17.
- TodayThe balance tips. Perhaps a tenth of the world's Assyrians remain in the Middle East; the rest sustain the culture from abroad.
A people now mostly elsewhere
Estimated population
Regional figures are post-war estimates from church bodies and minority-rights reporting; Syria's community has fallen steeply since 2011. The worldwide diaspora estimate spans 2–4 million.
What they gave the region
The translators of civilisation
Syriac scholars translated Aristotle and Galen into Arabic for the Abbasid court, which seeded the Islamic golden age that later re-lit Europe. The Church of the East carried writing, medicine and astronomy along the Silk Road as far as China.
Closer to the present, Iraq's printing, hotel and music trades were disproportionately Assyrian, and Baghdad's first newspapers owed a great deal to the community.
The living gift is a daily one. Akitu processions put 6,700 years of claimed continuity on the street every April. Kleicha, the national cookie of Iraq, is baked to Assyrian recipes at every feast. And the liturgical music, chanted in Aramaic modes, is older than Gregorian chant.
Looking forward
A homeland the size of a province
Assyrian politics now concentrates on one achievable goal: a secure and self-administered Nineveh Plains inside federal Iraq. Success would mean the world's oldest Christian heartland survives as more than a museum; failure accelerates the drift already visible: a people whose future is decided in Chicago, Södertälje and Sydney parish halls.
The wild card is the diaspora itself. It is wealthy, well organised, and newly interested in homeland schools, land purchases and Aramaic revival apps. The Assyrians have outlived the empire that gave them their name by twenty-six centuries, which is a good dinner quote, but no guarantee for the next fifty years.
The emblem
The star of Shamash
The four-pointed star with waved rays belonged to Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of the sun and of justice. It blazes at the centre of the modern Assyrian flag. That is a deliberate reach across three thousand years, binding a Christian people to their pre-Christian civilisation.
Sources12
- Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne), 2008.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Church of the East. britannica.com
- David Wilmshurst, The martyred church: a history of the Church of the East (East and West Publishing), 2011.
- John Joseph, The modern Assyrians of the Middle East: encounters with Western Christian missions, archaeology and colonial powers (Brill), 2000.
- UNESCO, World Atlas of Languages – endangered-language listings.
- Geoffrey Khan, The Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi (Brill), 2016.
- David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Gorgias Press), 2006.
- Amnesty International, Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale: the Islamic State's Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq, 2014. amnesty.org
- Sargon Donabed, Reforging a forgotten history: Iraq and the Assyrians in the twentieth century (Edinburgh University Press), 2015.
- Minority Rights Group and Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, Crossroads: the future of Iraq's minorities after ISIS, 2017.
- Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement (Routledge), 1998.
- Minority Rights Group, Assyrians in Iraq – community profile. minorityrights.org