The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Syrian, Assyrian and Aramean

Syrian, Assyrian and Aramean
Posted by PANCHO (Guest) - Sunday, October 28 2007, 21:32:10 (CET)
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In this quote from Warda he gives us his own explanation, with no references, for a rather rash statement claiming that Syrian really meant Assyrian…it did not.

"Those who question the identity of the contemporary Assyrians justify it by saying "they have been known primarily as Syrians and Surai during most of the christian Era." They seem not to realize that the region west of Euphrates was Called Syria becuase it did not have a known national identity and was part of the Assyrian empire."


Much of the evidence that claims Suraye always meant Asuraye, in other words, Syrian was the same as Assyrian, is muddled and none of it is conclusive. It’s a fascinating muddle though and well worth exploring…unless you’re a christo-nationalist and want to burn people at the stake for merely asking unorthodox questions.

I’ll be citing Dr Joseph’s book, The Modern Assyrians of The Middle East”, chapter one.

He claims that his research shows that Syria and Assyria were always distinguished as two separate geographical locales with separate ethnicities. Syria was the land of the Arameans while Assyria was the land of the Assyrians. Dr Joseph states, on page nine: “Syrians (Suraye/Suryoyo) was the name by which the ‘Nestorians’ and ‘Jacobites’ called themselves until the post-World War I period; thereafter, Suraye was gradually replaced among the ‘Nestorians’ by Aturaye, the name of the ancient Assyrians in Syriac. The ‘Jacobites’ continue to call themselves Suryoyo.”

Here Dr Joseph includes a footnote:

“An encyclical presented to the faithful in 1981 by their Patriarch, Ignatius Zakka Iwas, covered, among other matters, ‘the issue of the true name’ of the Church. That name, the encyclical confirmed, is the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch (‘idto suryoto orthodoxoyto dantiokh) , and its language is known as the Syriac language; (leshono suryoyo), and its people by the Syrian people (‘amo suryoyo). Any other name ‘is not only alien and foreign, but also a distortion, falsification and forgery of the historical truth’. For the text of the Encyclical in the Arabic language, see ‘Al-Majallah al-Batriyarkiyah’ (1981), pp 386-389”…its translation appears on the Internet, where the document is maintained by the Editorial Board of the Syrian Orthodox Resources, last updated on December 14, 1997.

Dr Joseph further states on pp 9-10:

“During the 3rd century B.C., when the Hebrew Bible was translated by Jewish scholars into the Greek Septuagint for the use of the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria, the terms ‘Aramean’ and ‘Aramaic’ in the Hebrew Bible, were translated into ‘Syrian’ and ‘the Syrian tongue’ respectively.”

And

“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 B.C. 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 ends in a footnote with further references:

“See J.G. Kidd, ‘Posidonius(Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 1988), vol. 2, pt 2, pp 955-956. Consult also Arthur J. Maclean, ‘Syrian Christians’, ‘Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics; Frederic Macler, ‘Syrians (or Arameans)’ in ibid, where the two terms are ‘taken for granted’ to have been originally synonymous. Consult also Sebastian Brock, ‘Eusebius and Syriac Christianity’, in Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata, eds., ‘Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (Leiden, 1992), p. 226. See also T. Noldeke, ‘Assyrios, Syriois, Syros’, in ‘Hermes’, 1871, p. 461 and Heinrichs, pp. 103-105.”


It is critical to the position of our christo-nationalists that they do away with any notion that Suraye (Syrians) really refers to Arameans but rather is the “same” as Aturaye (Assyrians). They must do this in order to maintain the claim that we, “always knew we meant Assyrian”, when we said Syrian. To discover that we were really saying Aramean all that time would end the career of many a bingo dealing priest.

The “lost A” explanation, in which it is claimed that the initial “A” was always present in front of (A)suraye, but was inexplicably “lost” is one that Warda, thankfully, doesn’t bother with. Dr Joseph states in chapter one, p. 20:

“…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.

The quote below from Warda seems to be in error in ascribing the word the Armenians themselves used for Syrian i.e. Assori, for Assyrian. Assori means, in Armenian, Syrian, not Assyrian.

“The Armenians who have lived side by side with the Assyrians have always called them Assori, i.e Assyrian as have other nationalities. Following is an early century Armenian document "perhaps the earliest original writing in Classical Armenian. This reading is taken from Books V and VI." which describes how an Assyrian bishop was instrumental in inventing the Armenian alphabet in 420 AD.”

This is clearly an error on Warda’s part. The Armenian “Assori” does not refer to Assyrian at all, but to Syrian. The Armenians use “Asorestants’i for Assyrian, as Dr Joseph shows and as was confirmed for him by Armenian professors who ought to know their own language.

Though they sound similar, as they do in English (Syria/Assyria), the Armenian language makes a clear distinction between the two…as do we Christians, Suraye/Assuraye. They sound similar…but that’s no reason to assume Syrian is “the same as” Assyrian or even derived from it….it is clearly very different since Syrian is the word for Arameans…as the entire ancient world recognized. What our christo-nationalists have done is taken the similar sounding words and explained away the meaning of Syrian=Aramean to make it Syrian=Assyrian.

Dr Joseph includes a footnote to the above:

“Heinrichs, pp 106-7, where he calls the hypothesis ‘simply naïve.’ Armenian name Asori referred to the people of geographical Syria, the Arameans; it was the name of the Arameans wherever they were found. The writer (Dr Joseph himself) 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. Consult also Norayr de Byzance, ‘Dictionaire francaisarmenien’ (Constantinople, 1884), under ‘Assyrien’, ‘Syrien’, and ‘Syriaque’; S. Mulkhasyantch, ‘Armenian Etymological Dictionary’ (Erivan, 1944), I 236; G. Avadkian. K. Surmelian, and M. Avkerian, ‘Dictionary of Armenian Language’ (in Armenian) (Venice, 1836), I, 314. See also M. Falla Castlefranchi, ‘Armenia’, ‘Encyclopedia of the Early Church’, v. 1, p. 79; Frederick C. Conybeare, ‘Armenian Language and Literature’, in eleventh edition of ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’. In late 16th century, Sharaf Khan al-Bidisi referred to the Nestorians of Hakkari as ‘Christian infidels called Ashuri’, a borrowing from the Armenian. See al-Bidisi’s “Sharafnameh (in Persian) (Cairo, n.d.), pp. 130-132.”

The last quote here from al-Bidrisi calls the Christians “Ashuri”…which, as Dr Joseph shows, is a form of Assori (Syrian/Aramean), in the Armenian language and not “Assyrian” (Asorestan’ci, in Armenian), though it sounds very close to our word for “Assyrian”, Ashuraye. It would seem then that the Aemenians knew the difference between Assyrians and Syrian/Arameans and had a different word for each…and that “Ashuri” meant Syrian/Aramean to them…and not “Assyrian” as Warda claims.



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