The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Syria/Assyria

Syria/Assyria
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, February 24 2008, 22:34:59 (CET)
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I quote below the section from Dr Joseph’s book which deals with this. Let’s remember Dr Joseph’s profession and his standing among scholars who are actually in the SAME field as he is.

“Because the ‘Nestorians’ had always called themselves Syrians (Suraye), strenuous efforts were made by the more educated to prove that Suraye (Syrians) was simply a truncated form of Ashuraye (Assyrian) and that the two terms were synonymous. The initial letter “A” of ‘Assyrian’, it was explained, was ‘lost’ (tliqta in Syriac…it had dropped out); the lost “A” was now retrieved but placed under a cancellation mark, meaning that it was originally there but was not pronounced. Thus Suraya was written (A)suraya, which, pronounced Ashuraya, also means Assyrian…Heinrichs rightly calls the lost-A hypothesis very ingenious, facilitating the claim of the nationalists, but points out that in the Armenian language, the names for Syrian and Assyrian, although similar sounding, both have always retained and pronounced the initial A; Asoric/Asori for Syria/Syrian and Asorestan/Asorestants’i or Asorestanc’i for Assyria/Assyrian.”(pp. 19-20)

Okay, what this whole non-controversy boils down to is; our nationalists must prove that for all those centuries when we called ourselves Suraye (Syrians), what we REALLY meant was Asuraye…Ashuraye or Aturaye, all meaning “Assyrian”. They claim these two terms are a. synonymous, b. that the initial “A” got lost somehow but now is found and c. that in the ancient world these were two words indicating the same people i.e., Assyrians…and, of course, that the word Syrian never indicated a separate people. To bolster their case, luckily for them, it happens that Syria and Assyria look and sound an awful lot alike hence, we’re supposed to believe, they mean the same thing, describe the same people and even that “one derives from the other”…and that all this confusion has been caused simply because of a lost A and a “lot of Jews” who want to keep us from uniting and getting our rights and so forth.

This hypothesis also means that there was no such thing as Syrian people in the ancient world…that they were really Assyrians all along. However, and this is where the Armenian references in Dr Joseph’s above statement show, at least one people well known to the ancient Assyrians, the Armenians, had different words for each…that the Armenians used one word, Asoric, to denote Syria…and another word, Asorestan, to indicate Assyria…so to the ancient Armenians these were indeed two separate words attached to two separate people. And, there was no lost A in Armenian. Here too there is a marked similarity between the two words Asoric and Asorestan, and one could say that one was derived from the other. But clearly, the Armenians meant two different people, not one, and used two different words for them, both retaining the initial “A”.

Elsewhere Dr Joseph shows that “Syria” was substituted for Aram by the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria when they translated their Aramaic bible into Greek….since the Jews of Alexandria presumably didn’t speak Aramaic. He further points out that in 1970 a gaggle of British scholars revised the new biblical texts, replacing the original Aram for “Syria” in the older texts.

In a footnote to his above paragraph, which is not the “opinion” of Dr Joseph, and therefore “as valid” as the opinion of Jumblat or Aprim, but is a statement of fact, to which anyone is welcome to ADD an opinion…he says the following

“Heinrichs, pp. 106-7, where he calls this hypothesis ‘simply naďve’. Armenian name Asori referred to the people of geographical Syria, the Arameans, it was the name of Arameans wherever they were found. The writer is grateful to the late Dr Avedis K. Sanjian, Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, for confirming my reading of these terms in his letter dated October 10, 1994.”

He then goes on to list more sources but I think this one makes the point…what Dr Joseph has written above is NOT his opinion…he is expressing FACT..as confirmed by an Armenian who also happens to be a professor of Armenian studies at UCLA. I know, “he’s paid by Jews”…right?

One more quote:

“In Palestine itself, according to Noldeke, the Jews and later the Christians there, referred to their dialect of Aramaic as Syriac; in Babylon both Greeks and Persians called the Arameans”Syrians”. The second-century BC Greek historian, Posidonius, a native of Syria, noted that, ‘the people we (Greeks) call Syrians were called by the Syrians themselves Arameans…for the people in Syria are Arameans’”.

This tells us that 200 years before Christ, Jews, Christians, Persians and Greeks knew that “Syrian” meant Aramean…not Assyrian..and that the people themselves referred to themselves as Arameans, not Assyrians.

There’s much more but until Jumblat, or any other historian in Assyria, can present an equal number of legitimate sources which say the opposite or anything else…key word is; Legitimate!...then this will suffice.

Anyone in the world can have OPINIONS…even opinions about their identity..as there are some few thousands of people who believe they are Napolean…but an opinion by itself means nothing. You may even have a conviction that you didn’t kill that dead person…but until you produce EVIDENCE people might not believe your opinion that you are innocent.

It’s a mark of the lack of serious intent among these nationalists that they refuse to understand something so simple and basic…and they want a country….handed to them?



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