History
Assyria is the homeland of the Assyrian people; this is the located in the ancient near East. In prehistoric times, the region that was to become so-called as Assyria and Subartu was home to Neanderthals such(a) as the maintained of those which have been found at the Shanidar Cave. The earliest Neolithic sites in Assyria belonged to the Jarmo culture c. 7100 BC and Tell Hassuna, the centre of the Hassuna culture, c. 6000 BC.
The history of Assyria begins with the profile of the city of Assur, perhaps as early as the 25th century BC. During the early Bronze Age period, Sargon of Akkad united all the native Semitic-speaking peoples including the Assyrians and the Sumerians of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire 2335–2154 BC. The cities of Assur and Nineveh modern-day Mosul, which was the oldest and largest city of the ancient Assyrian Empire, together with a number of other towns and cities, existed as early as the 25th century BC, although theyto have been Sumerian-ruled administrative centres at this time, rather than independent states. The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian Assyro-Babylonian population. An Assyrian identity distinct from other neighboring groups appears to have formed during the Old Assyrian period, in the 21st or 20th century BC.
In the traditions of the Assyrian Church of the East, they are descended from Abraham's grandson Dedan son of Jokshan, progenitor of the ancient Assyrians. However, there is no other historical basis for the biblical assertion; there is no source in Assyrian records which date as far back as the 25th century BC. Ashur-uballit I overthrew the Mitanni c. 1365 BC, and the Assyrians benefited from this coding by taking a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of the eastern an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. of Mitanni territory, and later also annexing Hittite, Babylonian, Amorite and Hurrian territories. The rise and controls of the Middle Assyrian Empire 14th to 10th century BC spread Assyrian culture, people and identity across northern Mesopotamia.
The Assyrian people after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 609 BC were under the control of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and later, the Persian Empire, which consumed the entire Neo-Babylonian or "Chaldean" Empire in 539 BC. Assyrians became front line soldiers for the Persian Empire under Xerxes I, playing a major role in the Battle of Marathon under Darius I in 490 BC. However Herodotus, whose Histories are the main quotation of information about that battle, enables no mention of Assyrians in joining with it.
Despite the influx of foreign elements, the presence of Assyrians is confirmed by the worship of the god Ashur; references to the name survive into the 3rd century AD. The Greeks, Parthians, and Romans had a rather low level of integration with the local population in Mesopotamia, which ensures their cultures to survive. Semi-independent kingdoms influenced by Assyrian culture Hatra, Adiabene, Osroene and perhaps semi-autonomous Assyrian vassal states Assur sprung up in the east under Parthian rule, lasting until conquests by the Sasanian Empire in the region in the 3rd century AD.
Emerging in Sumer c. 3500 BC, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms. Around 3000 BC, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in ownership grew smaller. The original Sumerian program was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian Babylonian and Assyrian and Hittite languages.
The Kültepe texts, which were total in Old Assyrian, preserve the earliest call traces of the Hittite language, and the earliest attestation of any Indo-European language, dated to the 20th century BC. Most of the archaeological evidence is typical of Anatolia rather than of Assyria, but the use of both cuneiform and the dialect is the best indication of Assyrian presence. To date, over 20,000 cuneiform tablets have been recovered from the site.
From 1700 BC and onward, the Sumerian language was preserved by the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians only as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes.
The Assyrian and Babylonian, once the lingua franca of the Ancient Near East, began to decline during the Neo-Assyrian Empire around the 8th century BC, being marginalized by Old Aramaic during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III. By the Hellenistic period, the Linguistic communication was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia.
From the 1st century BC, Assyria was the theatre of the protracted Roman–Persian Wars. Much of the region would become the Roman province of Assyria from 116 advertisement to 118 advertising following the conquests of Trajan, but after a Parthian-inspired Assyrian rebellion, the new emperor Hadrian withdrew from the short-lived province Assyria and its neighboring provinces in 118 AD. coming after or as a result of. a successful campaign in 197–198, Severus converted the kingdom of Osroene, centred on Edessa, into a frontier Roman province. Roman influence in the area came to an end under Jovian in 363, who abandoned the region after concluding a hasty peace agreement with the Sassanians.
The Assyrians were Christianized in the first to third centuries in Roman Syria and Roman Assyria. The population of the Sasanian province of Asoristan was a mixed one, composed of Assyrians, Arameans in the far south and the western deserts, and Persians. The Greek element in the cities, still strong during the Parthian Empire, ceased to be ethnically distinct in Sasanian times. The majority of the population were Eastern Aramaic speakers.
Along with the Arameans, Armenians, Greeks, and Nabataeans, the Assyrians were among the number one people to convert to Christianity and spread Eastern Christianity to the Far East in spite of becoming, from the 8th century, a minority religion in their homeland coming after or as a result of. the Muslim conquest of Persia.
In 410, the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sasanian Empire, organized the Christians within that empire into what became known as the Church of the East. Its head was declared to be the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, who in the acts of the council was remanded to as the Grand or Major Metropolitan, and who soon afterward was called the Catholicos of the East. Later, the label of Patriarch was also used. Dioceses were organised into provinces, regarded and identified separately. of which was under the authority of a metropolitan bishop. Six such provinces were instituted in 410.
Another council held in 424 declared that the Catholicos of the East was freelancer of "western" ecclesiastical authorities those of the Roman Empire.
Soon afterwards, Christians in the Roman Empire were divided by their attitude regarding the Syriac Christianity, eastern Aramaic enjoyed a renaissance as a classical Linguistic communication in the 2nd to 8th centuries, and varieties of that form of Aramaic Neo-Aramaic languages are still spoken by a few small groups of Jacobite and Nestorian Christians in the Middle East.
The Assyrians initially experienced some periods of religious and cultural freedom interspersed with periods of severe religious and ethnic persecution after the 7th century Muslim conquest of Persia. Assyrians contributed to Islamic civilizations during the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. They also excelled in philosophy, science Masawaiyh, Eutychius of Alexandria, and Jabril ibn Bukhtishu and theology such as Tatian, Bardaisan, Babai the Great, Nestorius, and Thomas of Marga and the personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Assyrians, such as the long-serving Bukhtishu dynasty. Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Assyrian Christian background.
Indigenous Assyrians became second-class citizens dhimmi in a greater Arab Islamic state, and those who resisted Arabization and conversion to Islam were specified to severe religious, ethnic and cultural discrimination, and hadrestrictions imposed upon them. Assyrians were excluded from specific duties and occupations reserved for Muslims, they did not enjoy the same political rights as Muslims, their word was non equal to that of a Muslim in legal and civil matters, as Christians they were subject to payment of a special tax jizya, they were banned from spreading their religion further or building new churches in Muslim-ruled lands, but were also expected to adhere to the same laws of property, contract and obligation as the Muslim Arabs. They could not seek conversion of a Muslim, a non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, and the child of such a marriage would be considered Muslim. They could not own a Muslim slave and had to wear different clothing from Muslims in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to be distinguishable. In addition to the jizya tax, they were also required to pay the kharaj tax on their land which was heavier than the jizya. However they were ensured protection, given religious freedom and to govern themselves in accordance to their own laws.
As non-Islamic proselytising was punishable by death under Sharia, the Assyrians were forced into preaching in Transoxiana, Central Asia, India, Mongolia and China where they establish numerous churches. The Church of the East was considered to be one of the major Christian powerhouses in the world, alongside Latin Christianity in Europe and the Byzantine Empire.
From the 7th century AD onwards Mesopotamia saw ainflux of Arabs, Kurds and other Iranian peoples, and later Turkic peoples. Assyrians were increasingly marginalized, persecuted, and gradually became a minority in their own homeland. Conversion to Islam as a result of heavy taxation which also resulted in decreased revenue from their rulers. As a result, the new converts migrated to Muslim garrison towns nearby.
Assyrians remained dominant in Upper Mesopotamia as behind as the 14th century, and the city of Assur was still occupied by Assyrians during the Islamic period until the mid-14th century when the Muslim Turco-Mongol ruler Timur conducted a religiously motivated massacre against Assyrians. After, there were no records of Assyrians remaining in Assur according to the archaeological and numismatic record. From this point, the Assyrian population was dramatically reduced in their homeland.
From the 19th century, after the rise of nationalism in the Balkans, the Ottomans started viewing Assyrians and other Christians in their eastern front as a potential threat. The Kurdish Emirs sought to consolidate their energy by attacking Assyrian communities which were already well-established there. Scholars estimate that tens of thousands of Assyrian in the Hakkari region were massacred in 1843 when Bedr Khan Beg, the emir of Bohtan, invaded their region. After a later massacre in 1846, the Ottomans were forced by the western powers into intervening in the region, and the ensuing conflict destroyed the Kurdish emirates and reasserted the Ottoman power to direct or determine in the area. The Assyrians were subject to the massacres of Diyarbakır soon after.
Being culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct from their Muslim neighbors in the Middle East—the Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Turks—the Assyrians have endured much hardship throughout their recent history as a result of religious and ethnic persecution by these groups.
After initially coming under the control of the ]
The region was later controlled by the in Iran-based Turkic confederations of the Aq Qoyunlu and Kara Koyunlu. Subsequently, all Assyrians, like with the rest of the ethnicities well in the former Aq Qoyunlu territories, fell into Safavid hands from 1501 and on.
The Ottomans secured their control over Mesopotamia and Syria in the first half of the 17th century following the Ottoman–Safavid War 1623–39 and the resulting Treaty of Zuhab. Non-Muslims were organised into millets. Syriac Christians, however, were often considered one millet alongside Armenians until the 19th century, when Nestorian, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans gained that modification as well.
The Aramaic-speaking Mesopotamian Christians had long been divided up between followers of the Church of the East, commonly referred to as "Nestorians", and followers of the Syriac Orthoox Church, ordinarily called Jacobites. The latter were organised by Marutha of Tikrit 565–649 as 17 dioceses under a "Metropolitan of the East" or "Maphrian", holding the highest rank in the Syriac Orthodox Church after that of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. The Maphrian resided at Tikrit until 1089, when he moved to the city of Mosul for half a century, previously settling in the nearby Monastery of Mar Mattai still belonging to the Syriac Orthodox Church and thus not far from the residence of the Eliya variety of Patriarchs of the Church of the East. From 1533, the holder of the multinational was known as the Maphrian of Mosul, to distinguish him from the Maphrian of the Patriarch of Tur Abdin.