Assyrians??

Question

well...i dont know any assyrians!! i have no assyriand freinds and i think it would be really cool if i did have assyrian freinds.....is anyone her assyrian? if so from where?

Answer 1

Hey, I'm Assyrian!

My family is from Northern Iraq, but I was born and rasied in the US. Where are you from?

Can I ask why you're interested in us?   :)

Answer 2

assyrians are people from syria and the surrounding countries

Answer 3

The Assyrians (also called Syriacs) are an ethnic group whose origins lie in what is today Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, but many of whom have migrated to the Caucasus, North America and Western Europe during the past century. Hundreds of thousands more live in Assyrian diaspora and Iraqi refugee communities in Europe, the former Soviet Union, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

As a result of persecution in the wake of the First World War, there is now a significant Assyrian diaspora. Major events included the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Simele massacre, and the Assyrian genocide that occurred under Ottoman Turkish rule in the early 1900s. The latest event to hit the Assyrian community is the war in Iraq; of the one million or more Iraqis reported by the United Nations to have fled, forty percent are Assyrian, despite Assyrians comprising only three to five percent of the Iraqi population.

The Assyrian people are descended from the population of the ancient Assyrian Empire, which itself emerged from the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Akkad. Eventually, Assyrian kings conquered Aramaean tribes and assimilated them into the Assyrian empire, and their language, Aramaic, supplanted the native Akkadian language, due in part to the mass relocations enforced by Assyrian kings of the Neo-Assyrian period. The modern Assyrian identity is therefore believed to be a miscegenation, or ethnogenesis, of the the major ethnic groups which inhabited Assyria-proper, which were, for the most part, Assyrian, and to some extent, Aramaean. By the 5th century BC, "Imperial Aramaic" had become lingua franca in the Achaemenid Empire.

The Assyrian people are believed to have descended from the ancient Assyrians of Mesopotamia (Aramaic: Bet-Nahrain, "the land of the rivers"), who, in the 7th century BC, controlled a vast empire which stretched from Egypt and Anatolia, across the land between two rivers, to western Iran. Tradition maintains that the history of the Assyrian people stretches back nearly 7 000 years, to the dawn of Mesopotamian civilization, although contemporary research on the Assyrians suggests otherwise. Culturally and linguistically distinct from, although quite influenced by, their neighbours in the Middle East - the Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Turks, and Armenians - the Assyrians have, throughout their recent history, endured much hardship as a result of religious and ethnic persecution.

Modern Assyrians are believed to have descended from the ancient Assyrians of Mesopotamia, a Semitic people whose civilization flourished between the third and first millenia B.C. The evidence of cultural continuity is strong, although, as in most cases, genetic continuity is a matter in need of scientific study - more ancient graves need to be found and their contents exhumed, examined, carbon-dated and DNA remains compared with contemporary samples. Regardless, DNA analysis that has been conducted "shows that Assyrians have a distinct genetic profile that distinguishes their population from any other population." Genetic analysis of the Assyrians of Persia demonstrated that they were "closed" with little "intermixture" with the Muslim Persian population. Culturally, the language of the modern Assyrians is extraordinarily similar to that of the ancient Assyrians, and the earliest European visitors to northern Mesopotamia in modern times encountered a people called "Assyrians" and men with ancient Assyrian names such as Sargon and Sennacherib. The Assyrians manifested a remarkable degree of linguistic, religious, and cultural continuity from the time of the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Parthians through periods of medieval Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman rule.

Modern Assyrians and their connection to the ancient Assyrians, is disputed. However, a lot speaks in favour for them being the descendants of the ancient Assyrians. Prominent Assyriologists like H.W.F. Saggs, Robert D. Biggs and Simo Parpola don't believe that the ancient Assyrians were wiped out. They believe that the modern Assyrians truly are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians.

Assyrians are divided among several churches. They speak and many can read and write modern Assyrian, a dialect of neo-Aramaic, a Semitic language that is related to ancient Phoenician and was adopted as the principal administrative language of the ancient Assyrian Empire, and which is used in Assyrian religious observances. Historians and linguists use the term "modern Assyrian" to refer to the language spoken by the modern Assyrians.  The original ancient Assyrian language, also known as Akkadian, is now used only in scholarly and historical research.

The question of ethnic identity and self-designation is sometimes connected to the scholarly debate on the etymology of "Syria". The question has a long history of academic controversy, but mainstream opinion currently favours that Syria is indeed ultimately derived from the Assyrian term Aššūrāyu.

Rudolf Macuch points out that the Eastern Neo-Aramaic press initially used the term "Syrian" (suryêta) and only much later, with the rise of nationalism, switched to "Assyrian" (atorêta). According to Tsereteli, however, a Georgian equivalent of "Assyrians" appears in ancient Georgian and Armenian documents.

More recent archaeological findings have added to the debate, attesting to the synonymy between the terms "Assyria" and "Syria". In Çineköy, Turkey, a Hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician bilingual monumental inscription was found, belonging to Urikki, vassal king of Que (i.e. Cilicia), dating to the eighth century BC. In this monumental inscription, Urikki made reference to the relationship between his kingdom and his Assyrian overlords. The Luwian inscription reads "Sura/i" whereas the Phoenician translation reads ’ŠR or "Ashur", which according to Rollinger (2006) "settles the problem once and for all".

In order to assimilate them, the ancient Assyrian empire relocated conquered populations to urban areas all over the empire. Today, Assyrians and other ethnic groups feel pressure to identify as "Arabs".

Today, in certain areas of the Assyrian homeland, identity within a community depends on a person's village of origin or Christian denomination, for instance Chaldean Catholic.

Answer 4

What the h**l do you do with people, like...ummm...collect them or something?  Strange.