The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: some more thoughts on this issue

Re: some more thoughts on this issue
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, April 27 2007, 18:00:24 (CEST)
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Matay wrote:
>Hello Fred,
>
>Now i see it. You continue open eyes! :-)
>
>I have included my other responses to you and dr Joseph beneath:
>
>
>Fred said:
>
>...what happened to the Sumerians then..the Hurrians..the Hittites, the babylonians...how is it that only the Assyrians survived, more or less intact?
>
>> I agree with you. Why only assyrians or arameans
>> ( as Dr Joseph present it) survived? The kurds
>> link their history to the ancient Medes. Many
>> scholars doubt this, but i will not go and refute
>> ( if i were capable, which I am not) this. The
>> babylonians survived, the Phoencians, the
>> Egyptians etc. The Arab speaking population
>> probably have all of these in them. Unfortunately
>> their islamic religion ( or those who abuse this
>> religion to keep the rest deaf and blind) have
>> not opened their hearts for their rich history.


...I think, as Tiglath has pointed out, that Iraqis are all 100% proud of all the ancient civilizations in their country's history. All Muslims say is that today's Christians cannot claim to be direct and lineal and pure descendants of the ancients...and that they cannot set the rules by which they will accept others as being Assyrian...especially when their major criteria is that you have to be Christian. This is clealry fraudulent...they have never accepted that and they will never accept...western politicians patronize us when they agree with our claims....also, as fellow Christians, they support our ditzy claims on principle...but since they also accept the Shroud of Turin and living on cliuds forever...they hardly matter.
I
>> am sure this will happen in the future. There are
>> islamic assyrian in the place were I am born.
>> THey are called Mhalmaye. A few centuries ago
>> they choose to become moslims, but there have
>> been almost no demographic change in this area.
>> They even acknowledge this fact too. And these
>> muslim assyrians are a few hundreds of thousands
>> right now. They refuse to call themselves kurds
>> nor arabs and they hardly speak turkish. They
>> speak arabic, the language of their religion.

...as we speak Aramean...the language of the culture which adopted Christianity.
>
>> I just came back from a lecture on ancient
>> mesopotamia. Organized by Mesa Jajan together
>> with two professors in assyriology in Leiden
>> university. ( see the flyer of the lecture:
>> http://www.assyrie.nl/index.php?id=agenda ) and
>> Prof. Van Soldt explained the audiance how the
>> assyrians continued to live their lives after the
>> fall of nineveh. They just did what they always
>> did. He showed an image of the rebuilt Ashur
>> Temple in the Parthian period in the 2nd century
>> A.D. (!!). He explained how they they, like the
>> rest of the peoples slowly changed their religion
>> into christian and later islam and that the
>> todays syriac christians have all the right to
>> call themselves Assyrians, because they were the
>> same people who lived there when these rebuilded
>> Ashur temples were used to pray to Ashur and
>> Ishtar. They spoke the same language and had the
>> same culture. Some became christian and others
>> followed later and some others became islamic
>> later on.


...according to Dr Joseph and his sources the few survivors were quickly swallowed up by the converging forces of ethnic and religious etc. So long as genetic material was passed down you could say it "survived", in that sense you could say the ancient Assyrians were "lineal" decsendants of Neanderthal Man...or the earliest African cavemen...or Chinese cavemen...but this gets a little silly...or you can say we are lineal descendants of Adam and Eve...even sillier. But genes and DNA don't make a culture or religion...and they don't make for awareness. The consciousness of being Assyrian disappeared...as did the language...and it remained lost and forgotten for 2000 years at least. To say that any Christian has a "right" to call himself an Assyrian doesn't sound very scholarly to me.

...and the fact remains that it was Euros who brought this consciousness to the Nestorians....I have yet to see any sources showing an awareness of their so-called lineal descent...or an explanation as to why we called ourselves Suraye and not Ashuraye all those centuries...as you still call yourselves Suryoyo...although you too recently started this "we are really Assyrian anyway" business...as the so-called Chaldeans, some of then, started calling themselves "Assyrians too". It's so clearly a political ploy by religious sects who know they can claim no territory because of their religion ans so wish to be called a "nation"....but this fools none of the people we would need to fool...and produces a crop of fools in every generation. Let it go.

>> I will show you that image of that temple, he
>> will e mail it to me. Why only arameans survived
>> Fred? I have nothing against them. They live,
>> they still live and they are a part of us too.
>> But, why not the assyrians as well? King
>> Sinacherib/Sanharib was partly aramean. Dr Joseph
>> is partly assyrian too, like King Sinacherib.

...the Arameans may well all have disappeared as well...I mean that in the sense Dr Joseph...not that they vaporized or melted into the ground...but that they were swallowed up in the next wave...the Arab/Muslim/Arabic tide.

...we all say a person has to DO and believe certain things to be Assyrian...the trouble is, all those things are Christian. There is no consciousness of being aligned to the ancient Assyrians...the same holds true for the Jews, who are hardly the same people they were 3000 years ago....but, because they maintained their original religion, no matter what else has changed about them, we agree to call them the best example of modern Jews we can possibly have....but the same is not true for us.
>
>
>>We should ask ourselves: are the turks, kurds,
>> arabs, germans, swedes,.... all ethnically the ancient peoples ( >mongols-turks, median-kurds,
>>pure-arab nomads, germanic tribes, viking-swedes e.a. ) what
>> they claim to be? or are they for just 10% of
>> what their name indicates?

...The people you just mentioned have modern nations which issue passports...no matter their genetic background, they can show documents proving they are who they say they are...in the case of the Kurds, they can point to maps of the Ottoman Empire to the place where their Kurdistan recently was, not to mention the fact that they have been fighting, I mean the real stuff, for decades now and just recently won back their Kurdistan...every group you mentioned could not "prove" their claims based on DNA and genetics alone...neither can we.....BUT...the others can show legal, offical and recognized documents proving their nationality...not a one of them is expected to show their DNA....since we can do neither...we have no proof...certainly none which will ever be accepted as official, legal or even rational.
>
>>who is
>> laughing at them, these swedes, arabs, kurds, turks, germans e.a.? Nobody! Who >is denying them
>> what they claim? nobody.

...No one is asking them to prove they are lineal descendants of Queen Christina...or Leif Erickson...and none of them make such preposterous claims...they are content with their passports and birth certificates as all the proof they need. They do not "claim" to be Swedes etc...they ARE, and can show all the evidence required. People laugh at us because we have nothing...nothing except the fact that we lived above those ruins...and we weren't the ones to discover them even. They laugh at us because recent history chronicles exactly when and how we became convinced we were modern Chaldeans and Assyrians...this move didn't start with us...it was brought to us by Euros.


Then why would we be
>> laughed at when we claim to be Assyrians, while having lived
>> in Assyria for thousands of years and speaking
>> the language that was spoken by the assyrians.

...The Aramaic language only became the "language" of the Assyrians in the last 110 years of their empire....none of the vast treasures of Assyria were written in Aramaic...Akkadian was their language. You can move to Arizona today from China and have your baby there...and in 3000 years from now your distant realtive, born of Chinese parents from Beijing, could say he was born in the land of the Navajos...but that would not MAKE him a lineal descendant of the Navajo Indians. Living on that land..and remember, Betnahrain was a crossroads of the world back then, not an island nation like Australia...many many people settled there...and many left. All you've done is take the descendants of the many many people who congregated there, singled out the Christians and called them "Assyrians". That's why people laugh...that and the way this business has made clowns of so many.
>
>> This is so silly, man.
>>
>> Who laughs at blue-eyed jews who have no
>> israeli-judean names anymore, who have lived for
>> centuries in Europe, intermarried several times
>> throughout several generations with europeans,
>> but claim israel to be their nation?

...you miss the point. There isn't a government or agency anywhere that asks of people their DNA...all they ask to prove citizenship or nationality is birth certificates....I promis you people would laugh if a Frenchman came forward claiming to be a lineal descendant of the Gauls...or an Englishwoman demanded recognition as a member of the Albion Nation...or a citizen of Camelot.

...you are mixing things together...if you want to talk just about DNA and genes, fine. But no one asks those things to determnine nationhood...which is what you are after...you want some political recognition based on some claim to nationhood, which itself is based on the Christian religion. No one, no one, at any border crossing asks to see your DNA before accepting that you are a Jew...they ask for your legal documents. So, the issue, for practical purposes, is not about anyone's DNA...but about documentation...and blue-eyed European Jews, who didn't have that documentation either...had their original RELIGION...which, no matter what their eye color, was accepted as proof of lineal descent....because their religion remained the same as their CULTURE...it never changed, even when their culture became more European, or Turkish, or Iraqi, or Persian.

..the modern Jews are the exception because they did something exceptional; the KEPT their faith! Even the ancient Assyrians took in and assimilated other ethncities...and in time, if the newcomers accepted Ashur and adapted the dominant culture, they too became "Assyrian"....regardless of where they started from.

Our claims cannot be verified in any way...not in any way. We didn't keep the faith...we changed languages, forgot our own...it's instructive that we didn't forget Aramaic, but DID forget Akkadian...which is the language of the ancient Assyrians. We also changed religions...and we go on today forgetting even the Aramaic language. There is, literally, nothing Assyrian about us.
>>
>> Why does everybody accepts a pakistani to be
>> completely british when he has lived for two
>> centuries in England, does not speak pakistani
>> language anymore, totally assimilated in the
>> culture, converted christian, but still bearing
>> the name `Khan` or any other pakistani name.

...they will only accpet him as such if he has a valid British passport and has been naturalized....otherwise, they will not. In fact, if a Britisher's papers get lost, they will not accept HIM as British either.

However,
>> we have been living for thousands of years in
>> Assyria,

..it is not Assyria and hasn't been for centuries. It is no longer Gaul either...it is France.


speaking the language of the assyrians,



...it is the language of the Arameans, not Assyrians.

>> are of the same semitic root and have their
>> culture and claim to be assyrians....

...that would be difficult to prove as well...but even so...so is everyone else back there....Nestorians intermarried all the time...just because the Church casts such people out doesn't change their DNA...right?

but
>> according to Prof. Joseph and other semitic
>> scholars we do not have the same right as the
>> above mentionned peoples to claim what we are.
>> :-)

....the other people have modern countries...and it is on that level that these people assert their claims....they don't go into DNA, voodoo, or such torturous explanations. No one in England could prove, through DNA, that he is related to King Arthur...and no one would be silly enough to suggest such a thing.

...If the Nestorians had managed to get that region called Assyria...then the world would accept them as Assyrians...as they would any Chinese or Italian person bearing a passport from Assyria. But, short of that, no one is going to seriously credit people who use such flimsy "prooves"...this si what I mean when I say that this stuff has made us all crazy...even bright people like you and Dr Joel Elias, break down and go to rambling and making assertions based on wild-eyed speculation...in stark contrast to the intelligent, level-headed ways in which you deal with everything else...except this. This notion has been planted in our heads when we were defenseless children...when our loving and loved parents could have taught us that an apple was an orange and two plus two equalled fifteen...all of which we would have accepted gladly. It is the one error, along with what the church teaches, that we have a difficult time, as adults, in correcting...but as the saying goes..."when I was a child, I accepted many things...but, when I came to the estate of man, I set aside all childish things"..that's a very sloppy rendition of that statement..but the point is there...it was okay to believe these things in childhood...as you well may have believed your parents when they told you, at three years of age, that babies are brought by a stork...or hatched from eggs...but, you'd make a sorry sight in medical school still insisting that what your parents taught you was the truth and "why are people laughing at me and my stork"?
>>
>> The language of the south-african white people is
>> actually a dutch dialect and belongs to the dutch
>> language. But it is called by everyone and also
>> tolerated by scholars to be called `Afrikaans` (
>> i.e. African). Every dutch person understands
>> them completely in holland! But the assyrians of
>> today are not allowed to call their language
>> `assyrian`.

...because there is another name for it. That language was BROUGHT to South Africa by its colonizers..it was not indigenous to it. Plus which this is recent history...not 2500 years old.
>>
>> Why is the language of the people in the
>> Netherlands accepted to be called `Nederlands` (
>> i.e. dutch), when it was called `Diets` a few
>> centuries ago when it was then simply a german (
>> `deutsch-landī) dialect. Simply because there is
>> country that bears this name Netherlands. If we
>> had a state called Assyria, nobody would even
>> think of denying our ethnic assyrian identity or laughing at us calling our language
>> Assyrian.

...whoa...you were talking of language and then sneaked in "ethnic Assyrian identity". You want to stick to one or the other when trying to make your point. I suppose you can learn French today and call it the Assyrian language...because it is spoken by Assyrians. But you should see now why people laugh...because you are twisting and turning and going through all sorts of contortions to prove, by any device you can, something that on the surface of it, especially when you take into consideration the evidence Dr Joseph has presented, can be refuted so easily. Your proof is all a house of cards...very easily blown over with one puff. You are to be commended for not being afraid to present your case...but every "proof" you give is standing on Jello...
>>
>> I find it almost ridiculous.
>>
>> What is your opinion ?
>
>> Matay

...again, the claim to nationhood is settled not by DNA, place of residence, and not even by language...but by documentation. Make up your minds: you are not living 2000 years ago, trying to make arguments that might have worked back then...but, and especially as you are claiming modern nation status, you have to set aside your beloved arguments about ethnicity, DNA, language and geographical location...none of which are used today to determine nationality.

...When all there is to go by is a "claim"...with no hard evidence. then what is ridiculous is making such a claim a "fact". If we could have done what the Kurds just did...no one would be laughing...they might even accept us as the lineal descendants of Shalmanessar...but as we haven't, but instead have consistently lost ground and our heads...we have made ourselves a laughingstock.



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