Note on the Modern Assyrians

Teaching in Los Angeles, with a large immigrant community, I get students from all over the world, with especially large contingents from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Among the Middle Eastern students from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey are those who call themselves "Assyrians." This is an interesting and important group of people. They are a remnant of the Aramaic (or Syriac) speaking Christian community of northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, and western Iran, which had meant nearly everyone there in Late Antiquity, but is now a group almost vanished in a sea of Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, and Persian speaking Moslems. Indeed, they have been persecuted in Turkey and in Iraq, both for cooperating during the years of the British Iraqi Mandate (1920-1932) and simply for not fitting in, religiously and linguistically, to modern nationalist identities. The Iraq of Saddam Hussein has regarded them officially as Christian Arabs, not as a national minority. The community in Iran has recently encountered similar difficulties from the Islâmic Revolution there.

Religious Communities in Iraq, 1995
Muslims	19,293,300	97%
Chaldeans	390,300	2.0%
Assyrians	87,700	0.4%
Syriac Catholic	55,500	0.3%
Syriac Orthodox	37,200	0.2%

Another community of Christians in the area is a group that calls themselves "Chaldeans." These are Syriac speaking Christians who have entered into doctrinal communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The term "Chaldean" was recognized in 1445 by Pope Eugenius IV. It seems to have been used earlier with other, interchangeable terms for the Christians of Mesopotamia. The actual "Chaldeans" were Aramaeans (though some now question this) who settled in southern Iraq, forming the basis of the Neo-Babylonian revival of the X (or XI) Dynasty of Babylon. The expression "Ur of the Chaldees" is anachronistic when applied to the original Ur of the Sumerians, who had nothing to do with the Chaldeans and were long gone before the Chaldeans were anywhere near even existing. As descendants of real Aramaeans, the modern Chaldeans are more likely to be related to the real Chaldeans than anyone else, but there is no documentary or historical connection that can be traced after the age of Nebuchadnezzar, when the ethnic Chaldeans had blended into the older Babylonian population, and Aramaic began to be spoken by everyone. The Patriarchs Assyrian and Chaldean Churches (originally the "Patriarchs of the East") are give elsewhere at this site.

The Assyrians and Chaldeans are not the last people speaking descendants of Aramaic. There was an Aramaic speaking Jewish community in Kurdistan, but they now all, apparently, have moved to Israel [cf. Robert D. Hoberman, The Syntax and Semantics of Verb Morphology in Modern Aramaic, A Jewish Dialect of Iraqi Kurdistan, American Oriental Society, New Haven, 1989]. A confusing factor is that the cultural boundary does not follow the linguistic boundary. Speaking dialects closely related to those of the Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Jews (Eastern Aramaic) are other Orthdox Christians who religiously are affiliated with the Western Syriac tradition. Culturally, they were in Roman territory (upper Mesopotamia), and looked to the Patriarchate of Antioch, rather than to the Church of the East, originally on Sassanid territory, whence the Assyrian and Chaldean communities derive. These Christians tend to see themselves as Syrians or Aramaeans. What remains of actual Western dialects of Syriac/Aramaean is only to be found in three villages near Damascus, in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains on the border between Syria and Lebanon. Stories about them turn up occasionally right before Christmas, with the plausible hook that this is the surviving language that would be the closest to the language actually spoken by Jesus -- who used a dialect of Aramaic, not Hebrew, for daily life. There is little hope for the survival of this community of Syriac speakers, however. At the same time, the Western Syriac alphabet sometimes is used to write Arabic by Lebanese Maronite Christians. This used to be characteristic in the Middle Ages:  Whatever language you speak, you write it in the alphabet of your religion. Thus, Moses Maimonides wrote Arabic, Ashkenazic Jews wrote German (Yiddish), and Sephardic Jews wrote Spanish (Ladino), in Hebrew letters. In India, Moslems wrote Hindustani in Arabic letters (becoming Urdu) and Hindus wrote it in the Sanskrit Devanagari letters (becoming Hindi).

Self-identified Chaldeans and Aramaeans are frequently called "Assyrians" by Assyrian nationalists. This is deeply resented by many or even most in those communities, who do not want to be identified, wholly or even partially, with the ancient Assyrians, or with modern Assyrian nationalism. This has led to intense dispute, for instance, over census categories in the United States and about statements in the press referring to the ethnic communities in Iraq. Thus, press reports sometimes even say that the Christian community in Iraq speaks "Assyrian," a language that disappeared in ancient times (though many Assyrians do believe they are speaking ancient Assyrian). Some Assyrians even reject their ancient Christianity and wish to revive the worship of Assyrian gods, like Ashur. This would not be tolerated most predominantly Islamic countries.

The Semitic and Other Afroasiatic Languages

Ethnic Nationalist Mythologies --
further Comments on the Modern Assyrians, Strange Claims about the Greeks, and about India, and Note on "Afro-Centric" Egypt

It has not been uncommon for modern nations and ethnic communities to develop inflated ideas of their own importance to a deceptive and, especially when dealing with other communities, sometimes unhelpful level. These ideas may be over relatively trivial issues. In Egypt, people from the Coptic Christian community may claim that the Greek alphabet (which is used to write Coptic) was derived directly from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, ignoring the the fact that the Greek alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians, whose own alphabet had been derived much more indirectly, if at all, from Egyptian [cf. p. 28, Who Are the Copts?, by Rev. Fr. Shenouda Hanna, Cairo, 1967]. Similarly, modern Greeks stoutly and famously maintain that the Modern Greek language, the lone surviving descendant of Classical Greek, is pronounced in exactly the same way as Classical Greek was 2500 years ago [note]. Such a thing is actually impossible (who has the "real" pronunciation of Latin? Italians? Spanish? Portuguese? Romanians? -- actually none); but if challenged, modern Greeks like to say, "We should know." They would know, in fact, if someone among them is more than 2000 years old and can actually remember the ancient pronunciation (there being no audio recordings from back then). Otherwise, they are not exempt from the obvious and natural drift in pronuncation that affects all languages. The proprietary claim, that members of a ethnic, national, or racial group have the right to say whatever they want about themselves, uncontradicted by others, is less paradoxical but morally far nastier [note].

Editorial Note

What followed here was my critique of various claims made by modern Assyrians about themselves, about their language, and about the ancient Assyrians. This critique was hotly disputed and regarded as "anti-Assyrian" by many Assyrians, which it was not. Many people interpreted the criticism as denying that modern Assyrians are descended from ancient Assyrians at all, which it did not do. People also seem to have taken the idea that I thought they should not call themselves "Assyrians." I never thought so or said so. Strong exception was also taken to the language, which morally condemned ethnic mythmaking and made various negative judgments about the practices of the ancient Assyrians. Once e-mail protest letters began to be received by The Proceedings of the Friesian School and by Valley College, complaining about the treatment, that section of this page was withdrawn, without prejudice, for reconsideration, in the hope of defusing the conflict. Now some Assyrians say that the page should have been left up, and they simply want to debate it. However, the charge has been made that page would promote the persecution of the Assyrians. For that reason, it has not been restored. Further details of the ongoing controversy can be found under Correspondence.

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Strange Claims about the Greeks, and about India

It now comes to my attention, and there is even a website about it, that some Greeks are claiming that the Romans were actually Greeks -- that is, the original Romans at the City of Rome, not the later Mediaeval Romans who were Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Vlach, etc. speakers. They can try to make such a claim because educated Romans often spoke Greek (the Emperor Marcus Aurelius kept his diary in Greek) and because the mythic history for Rome had details such as that the Trojan prince Aeneas settled in Latium. In making such claims, the Greeks seem to overlook, though it is hard to imagine how they could, the prestige and antiquity of Greek culture in relation to Rome. Mediaeval Europeans wrote in Latin, which did not mean that the Irish, English, and Germans were really Romans. They weren't; but their own languages were merely spoken, not written, for some time. As for the story about Aeneas, even if this could be taken seriously as history, which it cannot, they overlook the circumstance that Aeneas was not a Greek himself. The Trojans and their allies were of the autochthonous peoples of Asia Minor, who were not Greeks. Aeneas speaks Greek in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which some regard as evidence, but then everyone speaks Greek in the epics, even Egyptians. Homer was not going to interpose a translator between Achilles and Hector. Why someone like Julius Caesar should be a Greek with a name that is phonetically and morphologically Latin I have never even seen explained. Theories like this, as Raymond Chandler once said about chess, are the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside an advertising agency. But there is an easy solution:  Plutarch (c.46-c.120 AD), who was Greek, wrote a series of biographies, Parallel Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans, where he matched up individuals whose lives he considered similar from Greek and Roman history. Since the Romans were, by this principle, not Greeks, then they are clearly something else, i.e. Romans.

An equally curious, nationalistic claim about India, that is advocated on the Internet, is the idea that speakers of Indo-European languages, rather than being invaders of India, in fact originated there, so that India is itself the homeland of all Indo-European languages. On this view, the Indo-European and Dravidian languages of India actually are closely related and have a common origin in the (unattested) languages of the Indus Valley Civilization, which itself then is the oldest civilization of all and the source of the others, like the Sumerian, that were previously thought to be older.

As with similar claims about the Greeks or Assyrians, this thesis is argued with documentary and archaeological evidence that is sometimes true, sometimes misinterpreted, and sometimes completely false. Thus, an important characteristic of the Indo-European (or Indo-Aryan) invaders of India and the Middle East is that they introduced the horse, which originated in Central Asia (though, as we know now from paleontological evidence, it had evolved millions of year earlier in North America). The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, for instance, had donkeys, and the early Sumerians had an extinct ass, the "onager," but horses don't start turning up in Mesopotamia until around the beginning of the 2nd millennium (i.e. c.2000 BC) and not in Egypt until the Second Intermediate Period (1786-c.1575). Thus, "horse" in late Sumerian was anshe-kur-ra, the "ass from foreign countries." Similarly, the Indus Valley Civlization was at first innocent of horses also, though it survived down into the period (c.1500) by which the arrival of some horses could already be expected. Thus, if archaeological evidence for horse burials could be interpreted as belonging to the earlier period, the argument could be made that horses had always been there, which is precisely the claim I have seen made. The non-specialist on Indus Valley archaeology is then in no position to dispute such presumed evidence.

The most easily disposed fallacy of the thesis about the Indo-Europeans in India, however, is in the linguistic evidence. The oldest Indo-European language of India, Vedic Sanskrit, is not related to the Dravidian languages of India in any conventionally ascertainable way. Vedic Sanskrit, however, is nearly identical to Avestan, the oldest attested form of Persian. There are new theories that Indo-European and Dravidian (and Semitic, etc.) languages may be ultimately related, but this connection would be much more remote than the theory of common origin in India would allow. What is clear, however, is that Vedic Sanskrit has already borrowed some Dravidian vocabulary and some Dravidian phonology. The languages of India become a sprachbund, which means a group of unrelated languages that borrow features from each other because of geographical proximity (as in the Balkans).

All the languages in India have a characteristic set of "retroflex" or "lingual" consonsants, t., t.h, d., d.h, n., and s., corresponding to the ordinary "dentals," t, th, d, dh, n, and s. These do not occur in other Indo-European languages, which is hardly possible if Indo-European languages had originated with those sounds in India. Ockham's Razor requires the simpler theory that, if no Indo-European languages but in India have retroflexes, then Proto-Indo-European did not have retroflexes. By the same token, the contrast between the Indo-European vowels a, e, and o has been lost in all Indo-Aryan languages (which means Iranian as well as Indian languages), which only have a. Linguistically, it is easy enough for the three vowels to simplify to one, but unheard of for one to differentiate into three without being the effect of some phonetic or morphological environment. No theory of such an environment, as far as I know, has been suggested as part of the Indian-origin theory. Instead, e, and o actually did reemerge in Sanskrit from the diphthongs ai, and au, respectively. Much the same process can be seen in modern Arabic, where bêt, "house," develops from Classical Arabic bayt.

A claim that has recently come to my attention is that the writing of the Indus Valley, whose texts are probably too few (3700 inscribed objects, 60% of which are seals, with much duplication), and with no bilingual examples, to ever be deciphered, has now been identified (by S.R. Rao and others) as consisting of alphabetic characters which are recognizably the source of both the later Brahmi script of India and of the alphabet systems -- Phoenican, Canaanite, Hebrew, etc. -- of the Middle East. A very good recent examination of all the work and claims in this area can be found in Lost Languages, The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, by Andrew Robinson [McGraw Hill, 2002, "At the Sign of the Unicorn, the Indus Script," pp. 264-295]. According to Robinson, the good basic recent work in the Indus Valley script has been done by Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan.

I see three problems with the thesis of the derivation of later alphabet from the Indus script:  (1) When every other known writing system in the world begins with pictographic characters and only later evolves phonetic elements, it is improbable to incredible that an alphabetic or syllabic system should leap into maturity in India, without anything like a similar evolution, let alone all the pre-literate stages now known for Sumerian (and, recently, perhaps even Egyptian). (2) The chronological gap between Indus Valley literacy and the later attested writing, i.e. from c.1500 to 800 or 700 BC, is so large as to render unlikely to impossible the survival of the earlier system. And (3) the Middle Eastern alphabets appear in the wrong place to be derived from India, i.e. in Syria and Palestine, which is a place strongly linked in trade and culture to Egypt (whose writing the alphabets resemble), but not to someplace on the other side of the India Ocean. To be sure, related alphabetic writing appears in Yemen, where Indian trade could be postulated, but the derivation of South Arabian writing from Levantine seems uncontroversial to Semiticists.

A very recent (Vol.197, No.6, June 2000) National Geographic story on the Indus Valley civilization ("Indus Civilization, Clues to an Ancient Puzzle," pp.108-129) mentions some key information, for instance that 400 symbols have been identified in the Indus script (p.122). The longest Indus text is only 26 symbols, while "the average is just five -- not much for a decipherer to work with." Indeed. Robinson says there are 425 +/-25 attested characters (p.281), with the uncertainty due to the possiblity of ligatures (combinations) and allomorphs (alternate forms). This is too many to be either an alphabetic or even a syllabic system, but is a bit deficient to be the whole of an ideographic system -- about 1000 characters are known from the similarly fragmentary texts of the Shang Dynasty. Nevertheless, Robinson mentions that only about 500 characters are attested from Hittite hieroglyphics, 600+ from Sumerian, and about 800 (or as few as 500) in Mayan glyphs. So we seem to be a little short, but in the right order of magnitude.

Thus, after almost endless confusion, we must return to the conventional wisdom that the Romans are not Greeks and that the Indo-Aryans invaded India.

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Note on "Afro-Centric" Egypt

One of the strangest forms of this proprietary ethnic mythmaking has been "Afro-Centric" educational programs in the United States that seek to boost the self-esteem of black American students by (1) identifying them with the ancient Egyptians, (2) attributing to the ancient Egyptians most of the accomplishments of civilization, including flight, and (3) accusing Western Civilization, starting with the Greeks, of "stealing" everything from the Egyptians. These claims end up being so bizarre and ahistorical, that one hardly knows where to start in dealing with them, though they are often left unchallenged by people who clearly know better, perhaps out of fear of being called racists (an offense against the sort of proprietary claims to exclusive self-characterization -- i.e. one can say nothing about anyone that contradicts what they say about themselves).

The most curious aspect of all this to me, however, is the idea that the ancient Egyptians were "black" in the sense of looking like the sub-Saharan Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves and from whom black Americans are descended. Since modern Egyptians mostly do not look like sub-Saharan Africans, one is left to wonder, "Where did the old Egyptians go?" The inescapable conclusion would be that, since modern Egyptians look like many other Arabs, the Ancient people must have been exterminated or driven out of the country in the Arab conquest of Egypt. This, however, would not be very flattering to Islâm (or the Arabs), to which (and to whom) many black nationalists look as a religion (and a nation) more appropriate and friendly to Africans and African-Americans than Christianity (or America). (This black celebration of Islâm must be particularly galling to Ethiopians, who preserved their Christianity against Islâm, and Arab slavers, for many centuries.) However, there were in fact hardly enough Arabs in the Arab conquest to drive anyone out of Egypt, and it was never the business of Islâm to displace, let alone massacre, the Egyptians. Another notion, however, seems to be that the Egyptians moved south as Semitic immigrants came into the Delta, starting in the Middle Kingdom. Since the Egyptians say nothing about moving south, and the Kushites, in the south, have their own language and are clearly not Egyptians (according to the Egyptians themselves), this is a desperate and unmotivated theory.

In fact, the ancient Egyptians looked pretty much like modern Egyptians, as anyone examining Egyptian painting and sculpture can tell -- just as the same sources clearly distinguish the much darker, indeed black, people who have always lived as close to Egypt as Nubia (the area just south of the modern Aswan) -- as we see portrayed on a cane handle from the tomb of Tutankhamon, at left. A nice example of Egyptian continuity in appearance is a V Dynasty wooden statue (shown at right) of someone named "Ka-aper" that was unearthed in 1860. The statue bore such an uncanny resemblance to the nearby living "chief of the village" (shaykh al-balad) that the Egyptian workers immediately began calling it that. By the same token, those with the best claim to being the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, Coptic Christians, do not look particularly different from other modern Egyptians. The former Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, is himself a Copt. What he looks like is very much a matter of public record. Since Arabs were not legally allowed to convert to Christianity to marry Copts, and since Copts probably did convert to Islâm to marry Arabs, one suspects that the Coptic community contains relatively little Arab blood.

If one objects that the shaykh al-balad has lost its skin color, so, for all we know, Ka-aper could have been very dark, there are many other portraits and sculptures that retain their color, not just from later periods of Egyptian history, but even from the Old Kingdom. A couple of the best preserved and striking are at right, the statues of Rahotep and his wife Nefert from their IV Dynasty tomb at Meidum. Nefert is pale indeed, and it can be claimed that this exaggeration renders the skin colors "symbolic." That, however, Rahotep would want to have a "symbolic" skin color that is brown, if he was actually as dark as Nubians, is not very believable. Nefert is so light in color that either it is an exaggeration or, perhaps, she is wearing powder, something quite familiar from later cosmetics, though I am not aware of any preserved in surviving Egyptian cosmetic cases (of which there are some). But however we wish to take it all, there is no reasonable explaination for these portraits except that the range of skin colors is either naturalistic or just slightly idealized. This is consistent with other portraits and tomb paintings. Why an idealization would want to turn a black skin into a brown one raises curious questions on its own.

The Egyptians frequently portrayed Nubians and Kushites as enemies and prisoners of Egypt, which is what see in a scene from the tomb of Tutankhamon below, where the brown skinned King is slaughtering black enemies (this is on the side of a box whose other side shows the King slaying Asiatic enemies). On the other hand, there was a certifiably black Dynasty of ancient Egypt:  The XXV Dynasty of Napata, in Kush, south of Nubia. Pi'ankhy (751-730 BC) entered Egypt to contest it with the Libyan dynasties that had been ruling for some time (since 945). Later, XXV Dynasty kings had to deal with the Assyrian invasions of Egypt. They did not fare well in that contest, but when Tanuatamun retreated back into the south, it was to found a line that would continue at Napata and Meroë for many centuries, even building pyramids, until overthrown by the Abyssinians in 355 AD. Another matter of note is that the subsequent Egyptian XXVI Dynasty did not acknowledge the Kings at Napata as proper Kings of Egypt. A bit of Egyptian racism there?

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