Christianising Assyria (I) (original) (raw)
2024, Banipal: Issued by General Directorate of Syriac Culture and Arts
Christianity rose to a position of great prominence in the Late Antique Middle East. In Āthōr “Assyria”, on the other hand, pre-Christian traditions may have persisted until the end of the fifth– or early-sixth centuries. The process of Christianisation was not only gradual but may have allowed for the preservation of collective memory and lore among the Āthōrāyē “Assyrians”. In what follows, I shall try to demonstrate how certain elements from Assyria’s pre-Christian past may have been consciously re-purposed not only as a means of bridging the transition from one faith to another but for maintaining devotional practices as well as cultural identity. Such processes not only appear to have asserted Christianity’s triumph over the “old faith” but may have served as building blocks for Christianisation. In this paper, I shall also try to elaborate on how the re-dedication of pre-Christian rituals, feasts, festivals, devotions, monumental structures, as well as sacred spaces and sites such as temples may have been part of a deliberate strategy to appeal to the cultural sensibilities of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. It shall be argued that church complexes and feast days associated with certain Syriac Christian saints— both East Syriac and West Syriac —may have been fixed upon sacred spaces and dates hitherto associated with major ancient Assyrian traditions. This paper will finally attempt to present a brief overview of how the Assyrian cultural identity may have served as a common and meaningful self-designation for Syriac Christians. In my methodology, I rely upon diverse sources that have been meticulously selected to ensure both relevance and reliability. Drawing upon insights from fields such as archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to analysis and contextualise the sources cited in my paper. By synthesizing perspectives from such disciplines, a nuanced understanding of the complexity of culture and memory among native population groups in Late Antique Assyria thus emerges. Through a systematic application of such techniques, my methodology challenges the prevailing narratives that continue to negate the cultural continuity of the Assyrian people post empire by uncovering overlooked voices and shedding further light on marginalised perspectives.
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Banipal: Issued by General Directorate of Syriac Culture and Arts, 2025
Christianity rose to a position of great prominence in the Late Antique Middle East. In Āthōr “Assyria”, on the other hand, pre-Christian traditions may have persisted until the end of the fifth– or early-sixth centuries. The process of Christianisation was not only gradual but may have allowed for the preservation of collective memory and lore among the Āthōrāyē “Assyrians”. In what follows, I shall try to demonstrate how certain elements from Assyria’s pre-Christian past may have been consciously re-purposed not only as a means of bridging the transition from one faith to another but for maintaining devotional practices as well as cultural identity. Such processes not only appear to have asserted Christianity’s triumph over the “old faith” but may have served as building blocks for Christianisation. In this paper, I shall also try to elaborate on how the re-dedication of pre-Christian rituals, feasts, festivals, devotions, monumental structures, as well as sacred spaces and sites such as temples may have been part of a deliberate strategy to appeal to the cultural sensibilities of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. It shall be argued that church complexes and feast days associated with certain Syriac Christian saints— both East Syriac and West Syriac —may have been fixed upon sacred spaces and dates hitherto associated with major ancient Assyrian traditions. This paper will finally attempt to present a brief overview of how the Assyrian cultural identity may have served as a common and meaningful self-designation for Syriac Christians. In my methodology, I rely upon diverse sources that have been meticulously selected to ensure both relevance and reliability. Drawing upon insights from fields such as archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to analysis and contextualise the sources cited in my paper. By synthesizing perspectives from such disciplines, a nuanced understanding of the complexity of culture and memory among native population groups in Late Antique Assyria thus emerges. Through a systematic application of such techniques, my methodology challenges the prevailing narratives that continue to negate the cultural continuity of the Assyrian people post empire by uncovering overlooked voices and shedding further light on marginalised perspectives.
This workshop focuses on the way in which ancient societies understood their past and how they used this knowledge to manipulate their present. The role of memory has been explored in numerous studies that have analyzed the materialization of memory in texts, rituals, monuments, and landscapes, and that have considered its ability to adapt under changing societal conditions, including duration and obliteration. Consequently, we wish to deal with memory as capital (following Bourdieu's definition of the term as all nonmaterial resources of status, prestige, valued knowledge, and privileged relationships), and to explore its application in the study of ancient societies. We will examine how memory was used to create cohesion in the formation of group identities, and how it was used to structure social hierarchy and to replicate it; how it was kept,
These are second proofs, with minor differences to the published version. This essay, delivered as a preliminary paper in Helsinki, was completed while three articles, organized in a specific series on the topic of ethnicity in the Neo-Assyrian empire through the lens of the nisbe, were in course of publication: Fales 2013, Fales 2015, and Fales 2017. It may thus be read as explicitly presenting a bird’s-eye view of the results given in much greater detail therein, although it also offers a number of new additions in the footnotes and the bibliography.
Multiple Resource Sharing Groups as Basis of Multiple Identities - The Assyrian Heritage.pdf
The Assyrian Heritage: Threads of Continuity and Influence, 2012
This chapter examines the causes of identity conflict among Mesopotamian Christian communities. It refers to them as Suryān, which is the Arabic adaptation of the Syriac Suryāyē that has been in use since pre-Islamic times. The chapter contends that the Suryān have been through several phases of identity shift since they abandoned paganism and adopted Christianity during the first and second centuries. The Suryān who converted to Islam eventually identified with the his-tory and culture of the Arabian Peninsula. Their heroes became the Arab figures who transmitted the Islamic scriptures in the formative period of Islam, and the Arab commanders who conquered their lands. However, those who resisted pressure to convert to Islam and survived the subsequent waves of mass murders and the 1915 genocide retained more of their indigenous culture, especially through their liturgical Syriac language and various versions of their Aramaic vernacular. Before the First World War, the majority of those Christians inhabited villages, towns and cities in Mesopotamia, where they lived in self-contained religious communities that were known in the West by their sectarian identities, such as Nestorians, Jacobites and Chaldeans. The paper argues that those sects formed separate resource-sharing groups which in turn generated different identities. In an era of nationalism, their different identities translated into different imagined nations.
2019
This article is identical in content to the one published in 2018, The Composition and structure of the Neo-Assyrian Empire: Ethnicity, Language and Identities, in R. Rollinger (Ed.), Conceptualizing Past, Present and Future, Münster 2018, 443-494 (see below here in academia.edu). It was republished "as is" in SAAS 29 with no formal intimation, request to, or permission by the author --who is perplexed by this circumstance.
Davide Nadali, 2020, How Ancient and Modern Memory Shapes the Past: A Canon of Assyrian Memory
Ancient Near Eastern state agencies that produced monumental art and architecture and crafted rare works out of luxury materials were essentially materializing their own interpretations of reality and thereby producing memories. Because elite memories were rendered into concrete forms and images, they dominated and endured. Thus, ruling bodies curated their particular memories through a range of canonical sites, monuments, and artworks, which they would have viewed as most representative of their power and legitimacy. Modern canons of ancient Near Eastern art and architecture are an indirect legacy of antiquity’s broken and biased record. Modern aesthetic and political agendas have isolated certain archaeological finds and elevated them to canonical status as representatives of a past best suited to modern needs. This essay aims to detangle the ancient and modern canons, and using the Assyrians as a case study, proposes a new memory-based paradigm for canon construction.
“Assyrian Christians,” in Eckart Frahm (ed.), Companion to Assyria (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2017). 599-612.
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in Ö A Cetrez, S Donabed & A Makko (edd.) The Assyrian Heritage. Threads of Continuity and Influence (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studies in Religion and Society 7). Uppsala. , 2012