The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: Assyrian, Syrian, Asori

Re: Assyrian, Syrian, Asori
Posted by Shlama19 (Guest) - Monday, February 4 2008, 9:22:08 (CET)
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AssyrianMuslim wrote:
Although I had written regarding this topic a while back, I feel that it is important to bring it back since some of these nationalists continue to use it as "proof" for their Assyrian descent. Shlama19 cited exactly the same old soucres such as Herodotus. These nationalists like to insist that "Syrian" is derived from "Assyrian", therefore, the modern Suryoye are direct descendants of the ancient Assyrians. These nationalists like us to suddenly believe that "Syrian" was always understood to be "Assyrian" but that is not the case at all. The term "Syria" only came into existense after Assyria ceased to exist and it was used in the ancient Greek for the areas covering parts of western Mesopotamia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. So Syria gave birth to the term "Syros" which was used for the natives of Syria who were the Arameans. The Syriac fathers called themselves Arameans all along while "Assyrian" was only adopted recently. The Mesopotamian area during the early Christian era was called "Bet Aramaye" and it should have been called "Bet Ashuraye" or Bet Aturaye" instead if they were Assyrian all along.


- You're right, in fact Syria was a foreign name brought by the Indo-European Greeks, Assyria is also an Indo-European term for Assur in ancient Akkadian, Ashur in Hebrew, and Athur in Aramaic, while Aram was the home of modern day Syria on the other side of the Euphrates.

Now let's see some Greek terms since they brought us the name Syria:

Syrians - Syrioi
Assyrians - Assyrioi
Arameans - Arimoi

A little common sense here, Syria as a world is closer to what? Assyria or Aramea?

The other thing is when the Greeks used the term Syrian they meant it for the entire region, Syria was not just modern day Syria, if we talk about the Greek Syria we're talking about major parts of modern day Syria, Israel, Lebanon, most of north Iraq, and a major part of southeast Turkey, this is what the Greeks thought of as Syria, and they called it Syria because they named it after the Syrian Empire as Strabo mentioned, when was the last time you heard of an Aramean empire? I challange you to find me a source that speaks of an Aramean empire, you won't find any because Arameans as people were divided kingdoms and were never an empire, but Assyria on the other hand WAS an empire and included all these parts.

It was not until the Romans came that they divided between Assyria and Syria, then we had the province of Aturia in Assyria proper (North Iraq) and Syria was to the west (Where modern day Syria is), it's very simple, you can search up on this and you'll find your answer.

Finally I will agree that the Greeks DID in fact call Arameans Syrians, yes that's true, but you cannot agree to this and dismiss the other, either you agree that both the Arameans and the Assyrians were called Syrians or you disagree with both, you cannot be biased just to pass off your agenda, you have to be fair and treat history as it is, as for me? I will be fair and admit that the Greeks not only called Assyrians by this term, they also called the Arameans, Cappacodians, and even Jews by the term Syrian, that's because they all lived within the region that was once known the Assyrian empire (Or Syrian Empire as Strabo says), fair? I think so.

The other thing is we do have an Aramean blood, not just that but EVEN the ancient Assyrians themselves had it, did you know that? I doubt it. For example did you know that King Essarhadon who was one of the most mightest Assyrian kings was half Aramean? it's true, his mother was known as Queen Naqia and she was the wife of king Senharib, so that makes one of our great kings such as Ashur Banipal 1/4 Aramean.

Aramean was not the only blood that ancient Assyrians had, they also had Akkadian, Amorite, Hurrian, and heck probably even Iranian elements, afterall they did not care about blood, they just cared about their nation which was known as Assyria, and to set the record straight the ancient Assyrians looked at Sargon of Akkad (An Akkadian) as the backbone for their empire, but the very first founder of Assyria was also not an Assyrian, he was an Amorite by the name of Shamshi-Adad the first, go search it up and you'll get your answer.

One more thing, don't talk about Syriac fathers and do not mention them for your evidence, why? because when I mentioned Syriac fathers and early church fathers in my post who were hinting and mentioning the Assyrian name what did you say? you said it was some mytholgy fake stories, therefore either you believe in what ALL Syriac fathers said or don't believe at all, ok? that way you won't be a hypocrite in this subject. Again to be fair yes we have church fathers who claim our Aramean blood (Which we are proud of), and we also have church fathers who claim our Assyrian blood, I believe in both because the Aramean element in Assyrians is nothing new.

Finally Beth Aramaye (Which means the House of Arameans) was not given to all of Mesopotamia, it was only given to one region and that region is in modern day southeast Turkey (In the province of Madrin to be exact and also called Padan-Aram in the bible), it was called that because it is believed that the earliest Arameans originated from there, this means nothing, we also have a place in north Iraq called Beth Hindawaya (House of the Indian), it was called that because there was Indian Christians that lived there, does that mean the whole region is Indian? no, so this is the same, Beth Aramaye was in southeast Turkey and Athur was in north Iraq.

AssyrianMuslim wrote:
Another example are the ancient Hebrews who always used Aram for Syria. If anything, the Greeks and Romans often confused Syrians with Assyrians but the the more educated ones knew the difference and knew that those were Arameans whom they were calling Syrians and not the actual ancient Assyrians. Before the birth of Assyrian nationalims in the 19th century, The Neo Syriac speaking Christians of Mesopotamia did not call themselves Assyrians but simply "Suryoye" or "Suraye" which means nothing more than "Christians". This is interestring because the elders continue to refer to Christians whether from Europe or Syriacs as "Suraye" and do not imply it to mean "Assyrian". If one were to be unbiased and if these nationalist were willing to read the writings of travelers who spent time in the region and the Christian missionaries, we see clearly that the Syriac speaking Christians did not call themselves "Aturaye" "Ashuraye" or "Assyrian".


- This still does not explain the background of the term "Suraya" and why it is spelled as "Asuraya" in our language (Which you need to know in order to understand), you're right, a lot of our people confuse "Suraya" with Christian, but guess what, we never go around calling the Brits, Russians, Italians, or whatever other Christian nation in the world "Suraya", why is that? because this term is only applied to us and we only use it on each other, we do not call other non-Assyrian Christians by this term, also Suraya clearly means Syrian, and Syrian (As a term) is clearly from Assyrian, so there you go.

There are modern so-called (So they say) Arabs in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and so on, when you ask them what Iraqi or Syrian mean they tell you it means Arab, well is that true? no it's not, but because Arabism has influenced these regions so much which in return they become known as Arab Muslim countries, same thing with us, we have been influenced by Chritianity so much as a nation that for us it's very common to say "Suraya" = Christian.

AssyrianMuslim wrote:
As for "Asori" in the Armenian language, the word does not mean "Assyrian" but "Syrian". The correct word for "Assyrian" in the Armenian language is "Asorestanti". To make a long story short, the word "Syrian" was properly applied and it belonged to the "Arameans" and not "Assyrians". The Arameans were called ethnically Syrians. Even the church fathers always knew that Syriacs were and are Arameans. Those Syriacs who have started to call themselves "Assyrians" only started to do so with the birth of this "Assyrian Nationalism" which we can observe today despite not having any real knowledge of the ancient Assyrians.

So you are wrong, Assyrian in Armenian IS "Asori"


- You are being very biased and hard headed about this, I urge you to use some logic, Asori means Assyrian, not many links out there that talk about this subject but here's two "Armenian" links to back up my argument:

http://dictionary.hayastan.com/index.php?a=term&d=1&t=878
http://www.armeniangenocide.com/showthread.php?t=1611

Asori is 100% Assyrian and you can ask any Armenian about this, heck if you want me and you can both join any Armenian forum out there (Of your choice) and ask them ourselves, even if it also means Syrian we do not know whether this has any connection with the term Aramean or not, but I know 100% that when they say Asori they are reffering to Assyrian, and if they also reffer to Syrian then heck this proves even more than we want because this will mean that Assyrian = Syrian.

I also urge you to get ahold of another historian by the name of Sharaf Khan Al-Bedlissi, he's a Kurdish historian and has a book from the 16th century that mentions a group of Christians in Hakkari and calls them "Asuri", this is odd because Kurds call Syrians Suryani, not Asuri, the book is called "Sharafnameh" just in case you are interested.

Therefore I am not wrong about Armenians calling Assyrians "Asori", and I challange you to pick ANY Armenian forum out there to debate this, and I mean ANY Armenian forum, that way we can both settle it properly with no biased opinions.

AssyrianMuslim wrote:
These nationalist like to believe that the modern day Assyrians, Chaldeans and Arameans are all direct descendants of the ancient Assyrians. One has to wonder what happened to the Arameans who were in existense even after the fall of Assyria, with their rich language and culture which influenced the Middle East including the Assyrians and Babylonians? Where did they disappear to while ancient Assyrians are the only ones to have survived? The Syriacs were calling themselves Arameans all along the early Christian centuries and Assyrian only came into existense about a century ago. If these nationalist are honest enough to ackonledge that it was Rome which named the modern Catholic Syriacs as "Chaldeans" why do they turn a blind eye to the British who played the same game with the Nestorians?


- Aramean blood survived in us and part of our Assyrian element just like how it was part of the ancient Assyrians.

The other thing is you don't seem to know some things of our church history which is why I urge you to listen to the culture more before you start quoting everyone and their mother about us, and I also urge you to learn our language to have a better understanding about us, you're simply blowing off thousands of years of our history as if it was created 100 years ago, this is an ignorant thing to do.

The term Nestorian is not used and never was used by us, never have I ever seen any Assyrian call himself Nestorian when talking to another Assyrian, this is non-sense, if you read about the history of the term you will understand that the Church of the East was given this nickname by its enemies because they had followed Nestorius, in fact it's insulting when you or anyone for that matter calls us Nestorians, so before talking about such term learn where it came from before throwing labels that you're not much aware of.

AssyrianMuslim wrote:
The bottom line is that the ancient Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Babylonians etc are all the ancastors of modern day people in Iraq, Syria and others. But what these nationalist are doing is absurd and they know that it was the British who created this modern "Assyrian nationalism". However, even if we would play along for the sake of arguement that "Syrian" is same as "Assyrian", these people knew nothing of the ancients, have no connection to them and all their knowledge comes from foreign discoveries. They did not have any proud "Ashuraye" 200 years ago, there were no Ashur's, Sargon's or Tighlad's. All this "Assyrian Pride" is recent and it was created for political reasons. Nevertheless, the ancients are the ancastors of the modern day Iraqis be it Christian, Muslim or whatever, but it is not the way these nationalist like us to believe and it will not be sufficient to demand "special treatment" or "independence". Last but not least, this was not an attack on anyone nor am I working with the CIA, Mosat or whoever else.


- Assyrian nationalism is indeed a British influenced thing, before that we were not national people, we were simply villagers, religious, and some of us were tribal, but this proves nothing, it just proves that the Brits gave us the sense of nationalism, the fact is the term Assyrian has been used in many sources and even by some of us long before the arrival of the Brits, you're also wrong about the names, I have people in my family tree who are 6+ generations away from me that are named Senharib and Akhiqar which are two clear Assyrian names, maybe we did not use Assyrian names as much as Biblical names but we did use them, go search up Ashur Yousif, he's one of the forefathers of our modern day Assyrian nationalsim born in 1858 (Clearly before the Brits), but his name is Ashur.

You want to talk about a British creation? IRAQ is a British creation, who made up the borders of Iraq? who gave the name to the country? clearly the British, so in reality you are what the Brits named you, this fact is way more true than anything else because at least Assyrians were using the term before the arrival of the Brits, but Iraqis who are so proud of Iraq are the true creation of the British, yup, you're proud of a name that the British gave to you, bravo :)



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