Review of Özdemir, Assyrian Identity and the Great War: Nestorian, Chaldean and Syrian Christians in the 20th Century, trans. L. M. A. Gough (Dunbeath: Whittles Publishing, 2013) (original) (raw)
“Assyrian Christians,” in Eckart Frahm (ed.), Companion to Assyria (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2017). 599-612.
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.
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.
In the course of a long and hugely successful archaeological career, Paolo Matthiae has linked his name to discoveries which revolutionized previous scholarly knowledge and / or longstanding beliefs on ancient Syria. Obviously, the earliest of such achievements concerned the art-historical sphere: thus, the Ebla reliefs and inlays came to fully confirm the seminal perspective that he had suggested in his 1962 Dissertation on Ars Syra. However, they also touched upon the textual domain, due to his retrieval of the Ebla archives but also to the subsequent promotion of an internationally-based program for their publication. At present, after some 30 years of research, the copious linguistic and philological data from Ebla have transformed the classificatory grids of most ancient Semitics and Assyriology, while at the same time populating the previously sparse historical landscape of 3 rd -millennium Syria with new protagonists and institutional realities. For this remarkable capacity of his in fostering "paradigm shifts", I thus hope that Paolo will enjoy the following essay in his honor, meant to illustrate how a recent archaeological discovery has crucially altered the outlook on a famous Neo-Assyrian text. 1
A Bibliography of Neo-Assyrian Studies (1998–2006)
In a way, this bibliography is a continuation of the previous bibliographies compiled by The difference between Hämeen-Anttila's bibliography and the present one, however, is that we have tried to provide both the professional Assyriologist and the student of Assyriology with a considerable selection of secondary literature too. Therefore, this bibliography does not only list Neo-Assyrian text editions or studies that almost exclusively deal with the various linguistic aspects of Neo-Assyrian. One of the main reasons for this decision is simply the fact that during the last ten-twenty years the Neo-Assyrian data have often been approached in an interdisciplinary way. Hence, without listing titles belonging to relevant secondary literature, the viewpoint on Neo-Assyrian studies would remain unsatisfactory. Moreover, one could even maintain that during the last ten years, at the latest, the focus of Neo-Assyrian studies has somewhat shifted from its traditional philological roots to more interdisciplinary studies, at least quantitatively. Doubtless, this shift has affected the applied methods and methodologies in an unprecedented way. Nevertheless, many readers may still be puzzled when seeing titles listed here that refer to biblical, Aramaic, Greek, Median, Neo-Babylonian, Neo-Elamite, Phoenician and Urar\ian topics, but do not mention Neo-Assyrian at all. This results from an attempt to see Neo-Assyrian studies as part of a bigger picture.