The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: Dr Joseph.....confirmed.....new book...a REAL one.

Re: Dr Joseph.....confirmed.....new book...a REAL one.
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, August 29 2015, 16:37:15 (UTC)
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"The name 'Assyrian' as used for the contemporary ethnoreligious community of Assyrians is an 'invented tradition', a retrieval of an ancient appellation that had fallen into disuse for over two thousand years."

...the above statement lends credence to the claims of our nationalists that our people had simply "forgotten" their true identity and now, remembered they were in fact Assyrians. That could be true, on the surface of it...but if that is the case then any number of Muslims or Buddhists could make the same claim...our nationalists give away their game when they insist that to be a modern Assyrian you MUST be a Christian...a weird claim especially since the ancients knew nothing of Christianity.

...actually, now that I think of it there seems to be a contradiction in that statement...can an "invented tradition" be the same as " a retrieval"? If you invent something, you make it up out of whole cloth, to use a cliche....whereas if you retrieve something in has to mean that it existed previously and you just got it back, but it was there all along.....the ancient Assyrians were certainly not invented...they actually WERE...so how do you "retrieve" them? How do you bring them back to life? Our Christians INVENTED their link to the ancients, they did not retrieve it...for one because there were no Christians at the time of the ancient Assyrians, whose direct descendants today have "retrieved" that identity...no, they made it up, as it applies to THEM.

I am perfectly willing to accept the existence of people in the modern era identifying with the ancient Assyrians, of claiming descent from them..what I can never accept is that ONLY Christians can be among those descendants...to me that exposes the whole "Assyrian" thing as another cheap maneuver by religion to bolster itself and, in this case, lay claims to territory based on their "nation". That don't fly.



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