Assyrian Homeland

Leo Caesius

Banned
Very little, I'm afraid, unless you presuppose a POD where the Mongols convert to Nestorian Christianity, or you want to give the Assyrians land elsewhere (say a nice little island in the Caribbean, or maybe one in the Pacific). The latter-day Assyrians may be unified by religion and language, but they have never had their own state, and they are too widespread and not numerous enough to establish one.

The Brits and the Americans were the guiding force behind Assyrian nationalism, but they were unfortunately not too knowledgeable about the Near East. When Lady Ethel Stefana Drower suggested to the tarmida Sheikh Abdullah that the (Aramaic-speaking) Mandaeans should agitate for their own independent homeland like the Assyrians, Sheikh Abdullah gave her a look of horror, and politely brushed her off. It's probably not coincidental that the Mandaeans were spared the sort of awful ethnic cleansing that the Armenians and the Assyrians experienced.
 
30,000 Assyrians were killed in Iraq sometime pre-WWII. Perhaps if that doesn't happen, there're enough Assyrians in a compact-enough space in present-day Iraq to have their own little statelet, perhaps like Kurdistan.

Something tells me John will be coming around soon.
 
Assyrian homeland 1991 ?

Could an Assyrian homeland have been formed in Iraq after April 1991, when the north was declared a Safe Haven for the Kurds (neighbours of the Assyrians) and protected by coalition ground and air forces ?
 
How many Chaldeans were left by the time of the Mongol sacking of Baghdad?

In my "A Different Fate for the Templars", I have an Asssyrian Protectorate, a sub-protectorate of the Protectorate of Jerusalem. It is approximately where Iraq is located.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
fortyseven said:
How many Chaldeans were left by the time of the Mongol sacking of Baghdad?

In my "A Different Fate for the Templars", I have an Assyrian Protectorate, a sub-protectorate of the Protectorate of Jerusalem. It is approximately where Iraq is located.
The "Chaldean" identity is a relatively modern one. 450 years ago, the ancestors of today's "Chaldeans" were Nestorian Christians who accepted the authority of the Pope in Rome. Technically, since 1830, they have been Catholics (in full union with the Roman Catholic Church). Some of the Nestorians refused to accept the authority of the Pope - these are today's Assyrians. Unlike the Assyrians, most Chaldeans are urban and few speak Aramaic natively.

Until quite recently, Chaldean was just a synonym for Aramaic, and more specifically for the Aramaic of the Neo-Babylonian empire as recorded in some of the later books of the Bible. Both Chaldean and Assyrian are misnomers of a sort.
 
I don't know where everyone keeps getting this Assyrian ethnic cleansing stuff. Nobody has ever mentioned this until the last few years, and those who advocate it always tie it to getting reparations from Germany for not doing anything about it.

The Assyrians got their own line item in Ottoman censuses, which listed 60,000 of them, and correcting for undercounting (especially of women), there were never more than about 100,000. Their losses were the least of any ethnicity in the war zone, and were what you would expect if a war front moved over your land six or seven times. I've only known one Assyrian personally, and her anger was directed solely at Saddam Hussein - but that was 5 years ago and I'm sure the propaganda machine is busy turning out young Turk-haters as we speak.

In any case, it's ludicrous to take at face value the figure of 1 million killed in the war - that would have made them a bigger minority in the Ottoman Caucasus than the Armenians, and it doesn't seem likely that history could have totally ignored them for all those centuries.

In any case, they have never had a great enough population, either in absolute terms, nor density, nor percentage of population in any area inwhich they lived to form a state.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Their losses were the least of any ethnicity in the war zone, and were what you would expect if a war front moved over your land six or seven times. I've only known one Assyrian personally, and her anger was directed solely at Saddam Hussein - but that was 5 years ago and I'm sure the propaganda machine is busy turning out young Turk-haters as we speak.
The Assyrians (and I've known plenty - I've been mistaken for one at times) reserve a bit of hatred for the Kurds as well. Many hold the belief that the Kurds were more responsible for persecuting them than the Ottoman government. After the partitioning of the Ottoman empire, the Iraqis (Kurds and Arabs) set out to ethnically cleanse them in earnest - with the result that the French and the British worked out several plans to resettle them (most ended up becoming refugees in the West, but quite a few tribes were resettled in the Khabur River Triangle, then under French control).

To this day, Assyrian-Americans become FURIOUS when the New York Times refers to communities of "Kurdish Christians."
 
John,

The massacres I was referring to took place in the 1930s and was done for political purposes (unify them against a perceived "enemy"). This is not a case of "Ottoman-bashing."
 
Matt Quinn said:
John,

The massacres I was referring to took place in the 1930s and was done for political purposes (unify them against a perceived "enemy"). This is not a case of "Ottoman-bashing."

I know - you're not on my list of Ottoman-Bashers. :eek: Just random ranting, mostly based on my frustration at trying to find out more about the Assyrians and mot being able to Google past the innumerable websites claiming that 1,000,000 of them died. Casualty inflation is to me one of the most loathesome forms of propaganda, because if both obscures the truth, and dishonors the memory of those who really did die.
 
"mot being able to Google past the innumerable websites claiming that 1,000,000 of them died."

If Google brings up sites by popularity only (hence "google wars" where people try to make the search "miserable failure" bring up either Carter or Bush II) and thus results in sensationalism, perhaps another search engine would be helpful. www.dogpile.com or perhaps www.excite.com
 
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