ASSYRIANS
Ancient Assyrians were inhabitants of one the world's earliest civilizations, Mesopotamia, which began to emerge around 3500 B.C. The Mesopotamians invented the world's first written language and the 360-degree circle, established Hammurabi's code of law, and are credited with many other military, artistic, and architectural achievements. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]
For 300 years Assyrians controlled the entire Fertile Crescent, from the Persian Gulf to Egypt. In 612 B.C., however, Assyria's capital, Nineveh, was besieged and destroyed by a coalition of Medes, Scythians, and Chaldeans, decimating the previously powerful Assyrian Empire.[Source: Encyclopedia.com]
Modern Assyrians, also known as Chaldeans, Nestorians and Surayi, claim descent from the inhabitants of the ancient Assyrian Empire, and linguistic evidence seems to support that claim. According to Encyclopedia.com: Different dialects have developed from ancient Aramaic, a language used within the Assyrian Empire. The modern language is sometimes called Assyrian, but some scholars reserve the terms "Assyrian" and "Babylonian" for the cuneiform writing of the ancient empire. The modern language, then, is generally referred to as "neo-Aramaic," "Chaldean," or "Syriac" and is considered to be 75 percent pure (i.e., ancient) Aramaic. The ancient and modern Assyrian languages belong to the Semitic Language Family. The survival of Syriac as a spoken language is an important indication that the Assyrians have been a cohesive, endogamous group for more than two thousand years. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]
Websites on Mesopotamia: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; International Association for Assyriology iaassyriology.com ; Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago isac.uchicago.edu ; University of Chicago Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations nelc.uchicago.edu ; University of Pennsylvania Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (NELC) nelc.sas.upenn.edu; Penn Museum Near East Section penn.museum; Ancient History Encyclopedia ancient.eu.com/Mesopotamia ; British Museum britishmuseum.org ; Louvre louvre.fr/en/explore ; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/toah ; Ancient Near Eastern Art Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org; Iraq Museum theiraqmuseum ABZU etana.org/abzubib; Archaeology Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Live Science livescience.com/
Words Syria and Assyrian
The name “Assyrian” is read differently in different languages. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics it is read as “Iswer”, in ancient Assyrian Aramaic and latter Syriac records, “Athor / Othur”, in Biblical Hebrew and Arabic Assyrian is translated variously as “Ashouri” or “Athouri”, in Greek Assyria becomes “Assyrios” and Assyrians, “Assyrioi”. [Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000]
We may also say that “Suraya / Suroyo” comes from “Ashuraya / Ashuroyo”. As Dr. John A. Brinkman points out, the name Ashur is written the same way, in cuneiform, for different usages and was only prefixed with different syllables signifying city, god, or country (matu — the modern Assyrian mata / motho). Around 1000 B.C., the pronunciation of Ashur changed to Assur, again showing the interchangeability of the letters SH and S. Probably as early as 337 B.C. when Alexander the Great and his men passed through Assyria, they called the “Ashurians” they met “Assurioi” not only because of the new pronunciation of Ashur, but also because they do not have the letter SH in their alphabet and it is also a non-existent sound in the Hellenic language.
What we now know as Syria once consisted of several city-states, which were later incorporated into the Assyrian Empire. The region became known as ‘Abar-Nahra (‘Across the River’) by the Assyrians, Babylonians and later by the Persians. The Greeks and the Romans knew it as Syria, short for Assyria, because it had long remained under Assyrian rule. When, in 64 B.C. the Roman Emperor Pompey annexed the land west of Euphrates and incorporated them into the Roman Empire, the area came to be known as Syria, short for Assyria, as Assyria proper lay within the boundaries of the Persian Empire. As The Encylopedia Americana writes, under the entry Syria, “It is now certain that the name “Syria” is derived from the older “Assyria”
Assyrian Language
Assyrians spoke Akkadian — an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia in Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa, Babylonia and perhaps Dilmun) from the third millennium B.C. until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Assyrians and Babylonians from the 8th century B.C. [Source: Wikipedia]
By the 10th century B.C. , there were two variant dialectic forms of Akkadian — Assyrian and Babylonian, spoken in Assyria and Babylonia respectively. Assyrian and Babylonian were the native language of the Mesopotamian empires (Old Assyrian Empire, Babylonia, Middle Assyrian Empire) and was lingua franca for much of the Ancient Near East in until the Bronze Age collapse around 1150 BC. However, its gradual decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire when in the mid-eighth century BC Tiglath-Pileser III introduced Imperial Aramaic as a lingua franca of the Assyrian empire. By the Greek era the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the A.D. 1st century.
Dr. Brinkman makes mention of the fact that Assyrian cuneiform did not die out with the empire’s destruction, four Assyrian texts written by Assyrians in the Assyrian dialect and script being found at a site called Dur-Katlimmu (Sheikh Hamed), on the Khabour River in Syria. These are “couched in Assyrian legal formulae” and date to the second and fifth years of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, i.e. from 603-600 B.C., between nine and twelve years after the fall of Nineveh. So Assyrian cuneiform had survived the empire. James Henry Breasted in his book; The Conquest of Civilization, mentions that, “... the remnants of the Assyrian army fled westward and with Egyptian support held together for a short time...”. Professor Saggs also says that, even after the empire’s fall, the Assyrians were “not yet finished”. Those of the Assyrian army that were able to flee Nineveh escaped hundreds of miles westward to Harran, where Ashur-Uballit II of the Assyrian royal family was proclaimed king of Assyria. [Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000]
Dr. Brinkman states that in the 7th century B.C., Aramaic had begun to replace Assyrian in Assyria and the king had to insist that letters from his officials be written in Assyrian and not Aramaic. He also theorises that the Aramaic language took over because of its simple alphabet as opposed to the 600-700 syllables of the Assyro-Babylonian language.
Assyria 3,900 Years Ago
The Kanesh tablets from Turkey have been dated to 1900 B.C. Durrie Bouscaren wrote in Archaeology magazine: At the time the tablets were written, Assur was a minor independent city-state that had little regional influence — though some 1,000 years later it would lie at the heart of the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire. These early Assyrian traders developed extensive commercial routes spanning from central Anatolia to the Zagros Mountains in modern-day Iran and set up trading stations in cities along the way. Cuneiform tablets that they sent home show that they kept up long-distance marriages with Assyrian women who maintained households in Assur.Some trading posts, such as the one in Kanesh, grew into entire commercial districts within foreign cities, where some Assyrian women came to live full-time [Source: Durrie Bouscaren, Archaeology magazine, November/December 2023]
Kanesh was one of the largest settlements in the ancient world during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries B.C. Archaeologists believe it had a population of around 30,000 at its height. The city-state was led by a powerful king and queen who texts suggest jointly ruled the realm. Farmers sowed wheat in the autumn and barley in the spring. The Kanesh tablets show that they followed an agrarian calendar, while the Assyrian merchants operated on a system of weeks and months structured around financial matters. Though archaeologists do not know what these Anatolians called themselves, Assyrian traders called them the Nuwau. They had their own culture and worshipped gods and goddesses distinct from those celebrated in Mesopotamian cities. Centuries later, the Indo-European language they spoke would be known as the “language of Kanesh” throughout the Hittite Empire, which dominated Anatolia from about 1600 to 1200 B.C.
The royal couple of Kanesh ruled a strategic area where nearby mines provided copper that could be smelted with tin imported from the east to make bronze. As traders led caravans of donkeys packed with wares between cities, the king and queen of Kanesh collected taxes and tribute that helped fund the construction and maintenance of a massive citadel within the city walls. Excavations of a lower town outside the walls have revealed that Anatolian shopkeepers and families of workers lived there alongside Assyrian traders, whose settlement in Kanesh served as the center of commerce for the entire region. This is where the vast majority of tablets from Kanesh have been uncovered.
New Language from the Ancient Assyrian Era
An inscribed clay tablet — dated to the 8th century B.C. and measuring 8 x 13 centimeters (3.3 x 5.5 inches) found at Ziyaret Tepe, southeastern Turkey in the early 2010s — revealed a new language. Archaeology magazine reported: “At its height in the seventh century B.C., the Neo-Assyrian Empire stretched west to east from Egypt to Elam, a kingdom in southern Iran, and from Iraq in the south to the northern reaches of the Tigris River. Within this vast territory, more than a dozen languages were used by the conquerers and the conquered. Thanks to the discovery of a clay tablet at the site of the northern Assyrian frontier city of Tu han, a previously unknown language has now been added to the list of those spoken by this powerful empire's multiethnic population. [Source: Archaeology magazine, September-October 2012]
“The tablet, which was found by Dirk Wicke of the University of Mainz in the throne room of the governor's palace, contains at least 60 names. Epigrapher John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge was able to identify these as belonging to women. He did so by recognizing a symbol commonly used by several of the empire's other languages to denote a woman's name.
Written using the same Neo-Assyrian script as other ancient languages, MacGinnis says that "at least 45 of the names, and likely more, clearly do not derive from any of the known languages of the ancient world." MacGinnis thinks the new language was probably spoken by a population deported to Tu han from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. The presence of these women's names on a document found so far from their homeland "not only will add a new component to our knowledge of the world's languages," says MacGinnis, "but also will give researchers information on the population of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that is available in no other way."
Confusion Between Assyrians and Babylonians
Juan Luis Montero Fenollós wrote in National Geographic History: It is, perhaps, little surprise that so much confusion surrounds Babylon when texts by Greek and Roman authors often confused Assyrians with Babylonians. When the first-century B.C. writer Diodorus Siculus describes the walls of Babylon, he actually appears to be describing the walls of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire. He describes a hunting scene that resembles no artwork found on the palaces in Babylon. It does, however, fit descriptions of the hunting reliefs discovered on Assyrian palaces in Nineveh. [Source: Juan Luis Montero Fenollós, National Geographic History, January/February 2017]
This confusion may be due, in part, to the fact that some kings of Assyria, such as Sennacherib (reigned 704-681 B.C.), held the title of king of Babylon. More intriguingly still, a depiction of that Assyrian king found on a bas relief in Nineveh shows leafy gardens watered by an aqueduct. Could it be, then, that the famous gardens were in Nineveh all along?
Greek Sources on Assyria
Herodotus, a well-known Greek historian from the mid-fifth century B.C., clearly indicates that the word “Syrian” is merely a Greek corruption of the word “Assyrian”. He describes the Assyrian infantry in the Persian Army during the rule of King Xerxes (485-465 B.C.) as follows: “The Assyrians went to war with helmets upon their head, made of brass, and plated in strange fashion, which is not easy to describe... These people, whom Greeks call Syrian, are called Assyrian by the barbarians. The Babylonians serve at their rank” The last part of this passage has also been translated as, “The Greeks call these people Syrians, but others know them as Assyrians.” [Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000]
In the first century prior to the dawn of Christianity, the geographer Strabo (64 B.C.-21 AD from Amisos in Pontus) confirms Herodotus’ statement by writing that, “When those who have written histories about the Syrian empire say that the Medes were overthrown by the Persians and the Syrians by the Medes, they mean by the Syrians no other people than those who built the royal palaces in Babylon and Ninus (Nineveh); and of these Syrians, Ninus was the man who founded Ninus, in Aturia (Assyria) and his wife, Semiramis, was the woman who succeeded her husband... Now, the city of Ninus was wiped out immediately after the overthrow of the Syrians. It was much greater than Babylon, and was situated in the plain of Aturia.” Strabo also lists several of the traditional cities (including Nineveh and 'Calachene' [Kalhu]) in the Assyrian heartland, which he calls ‘Aturia’.
Assyrians After the Assyrian Empire
Nicholas Aljeloo of The Assyrian Australian Academic Society wrote: “It is safe to say that the ethnic, national, civic, administrative and other aspects of Assyrian daily life stopped being written and preserved by the Assyrians after the fall of Nineveh in 612 B.C., with the exception of the few periods when the smaller Assyrian kingdoms of Adiabene, Haran and Osrhoene were in power. Thus, Assyrian history entered a national literary vacuum and began to live its long period of foreign manipulation.[Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000 \~]
“The destruction of the Assyrian Empire did not wipe out its population. They were predominantly peasant farmers, and since Assyria contains some of the best wheat land in the Near East, descendants of the Assyrian peasants would, as opportunity permitted, build new villages over the old cities and carried on with agricultural life, remembering traditions of the former cities. After seven or eight centuries and after various vicissitudes, these people became Christians. These Christians, and the Jewish communities scattered amongst them, not only kept alive the memory of their Assyrian predecessors but also combined them with traditions from the Bible. The Bible, indeed, came to be a powerful factor in keeping alive the memory of Assyria and particularly of Nineveh. Nineveh was at the center of one of the most fascinating of the Old Testament legends, the story of the prophet Jonah who attempted in vain to escape the God-given duty of preaching to the great pagan capital. On part of the ruins of Nineveh there was a sacred mound, and this - probably originally an Assyrian temple - Christians and Jews came to identify with the spot where Jonah preached. A church was built on the site. When the Muslims conquered Mesopotamia in the seventh century AD, they adopted the local traditions of the Christians and Jews amongst whom they lived, and Jonah became significant to Muslims no less than to Jews and Christians. A mosque replaced the church but retained - and retains to this day - the association with Jonah.”
Dr. John A. Brinkman states that, “For several centuries people lived in Assyria after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (614-610 B.C.) and followed the Assyrian religion and can be classified as Assyrians.” When asked if there was racial continuity in Assyria after the empire Dr. Brinkman replied, “There is no reason to believe that there would be no racial or cultural continuity in Assyria since there is no evidence that the population of Assyria was removed.”
Herodotus clearly indicates that the word “Syrian” is merely a Greek corruption of the word “Assyrian”. He describes the Assyrian infantry in the Persian Army during the rule of King Xerxes (485-465 B.C.) as follows: “The Assyrians went to war with helmets upon their head, made of brass, and plated in strange fashion, which is not easy to describe... These people, whom Greeks call Syrian, are called Assyrian by the barbarians. The Babylonians serve at their rank” The last part of this passage has also been translated as, “The Greeks call these people Syrians, but others know them as Assyrians.” \~\
Persians and Assyrians
Assyrians in the Greco-Roman Era
A report by Reuters from 1987, states that, “The new evidence shows that rather than dispersing, surviving Assyrians formed small societies some distance away from their main cities.” The new evidence refers to Assyrian Tells (mounds) in Iraq dating to the third century B.C., three centuries after the fall of their empire. Dr. Brinkman also states that in the Assyrian religious capital Assur, Assyrians tried to keep the religion alive by rebuilding two shrines and reusing inscriptions and decorations from the old temples. Rev. W. A. Wigram in his book The Assyrians and Their Neighbours also states that, “At least they [the Assyrians] were there in days of Tiglath-Pileser I, the founder of the Assyrian Empire in the year 1000 B.C., and they were there still in the year 400 B.C., when Xenophon with his Greeks fought his way homeward through their mountains.”[Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000]
In 400 B.C., a Greek general named Xenophon, employed by the Persian king Cyrus son of Darius, wrote his chronicle as he and his 10,000 strong army retreated through Assyria along the river Tigris.He always comments on the plentiful supplies that were available, arguing a considerable production of grain. He writes that Assur, which was now called Kinai, was a prosperous city and that his army bought cheese and wine from the local inhabitants. It seems, from his writings, that many of the buildings and houses had survived the destruction of the city in 614 B.C. He also wrote of many surviving villages in Kalhu, which was now called Larissa, and of a village called Mespila near a large undefended fortification, which may be identified with today’s Mosul.
By careful examination of the topography described by Xenophon, scholars have determined that the fortification was the city of Nineveh, though under the eponymic name of Ninus. Mespila, on the other hand, as suggested by Hayim Tadmor and Stephen A. Kaufman, is the Aramaic ‘mashplah’ as heard by Xenophon from the local population, meaning "the fallen one". The Assyrians living in Mosul have never forgotten that their city had a glorious past. As E.B. Soane wrote in 1892, “The Mosul people, especially the Christians are very proud of their city and the antiquity of its surroundings. The Christians, regard themselves as “direct descendants of the great rulers of Assyria”
Between the second century B.C. and third century AD, authors Patricia Crone and Michael Cook state in their book Hagarism that,“Assyria… had been left virtually alone by the Achaemenids and Seleucids; condemned to oblivion by the outside world, it could recollect its own glorious past in a certain tranquillity. Consequently when the region came back into the focus of history under the Parthians, it was with an Assyrian, not a Persian let alone Greek, self-identification: the temple of Ashur was restored, the city was rebuilt, and an Assyrian successor state returned in the shape of the client kingdom of Adiabene.”
Assyrians in the Early Christian Era
Mor Michael the Great, Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch and all the East (1166 — 1199), wrote that those who inhabit the land to the west of the Euphrates River were properly called Syrians, and by analogy, all those who speak the same language, which he calls Aramaic (Aramaya / Oromoyo), both east and west of the Euphrates to the borders of Persia, are called Syrians. He continues that the basis of the Syriac language is from Edessa (Sanliurfa, Turkey). Even more interesting is his list of the names of peoples who possessed writing. Among them are “Aturayeh d-hawiyn Suryayeh / Othuroye d-hawiyn Suryoyeh” (“Assyrians”, i.e. “Syrians”), by which presumably he means the ancient Assyrians, whom he identifies with his contemporary speakers of Syriac. [Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000]
This book by a learned native speaker shows the continuous equating of the terms “Syrian” and “Assyrian” for many Eastern Christians. His late Holiness, in his famous history book, also makes mention that, “It has been shown by Assyrian and Chaldean kings that they used the Aramaic language and were familiar with its literature” and that, “They are all, then, usually named; the Chaldeans by their old name and the Ashurayeh / Oshuroyeh, i.e. Athorayeh / Othuroyeh, are called after Ashur who settled Nineveh. This is what Eusebius says.
The Jewish writer Josephus, calls Ashur Assur, as in the Greek language, and makes mention of, Assur, the ancestor of the Assurayeh / Ossuroyeh, who built Nineveh. He mentions that the Chaldeans are those that with the Assyrians (Assurayeh / Ossuroyeh) and Aramaeans form the Syriac (Suryayeh / Suryoyeh) people.” The name Syrian was never used by Arabs to identify themselves with until the creation of the Syrian Arab Republic. Even then, they do not call themselves Syriani / Suryani (the name of the Christian “Syrians”) but Suri.
Modern Assyrians
Assyrians have come to be called Nestorians, Chaldeans, Jacobites, Syriacs, Syrians, Maronites and Melkites through religious influences and by the governments that now rule over portions of what is their ancestral homeland. “The Political Dictionary of the Modern Middle East" defines Assyrians as, “Remnants of the people of ancient Mesopotamia, succeeding the Sumero-Akkadians and the Babylonians as one continuous civilization. They are among the first nations who accepted Christianity. They belong to one of the four churches: the Chaldean Uniate, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Syrian Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. Due to the ethnic-political conflict in the Middle East, they are better known by these ecclesiastical designations. The Assyrians use classical Syriac in their liturgies while the majority of them speak and write a modern dialect of this language. They constitute the third largest ethnic group in Iraq with their communities in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Russia and Armenia. Today they remain stateless and great numbers of them have left their homeland and settled in Western Europe, the United States and Australia.” The author of this fails to mention the members of the Syriac Maronite Church as Assyrians or to recognise the existence of non-Christian Assyrians. [Source: Nicholas Aljeloo, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society (TAAAS), Sydney, Australia July 2, 2000 \~]
Nicholas Aljeloo of The Assyrian Australian Academic Society wrote: ““The Assyrian homeland encompasses what was once the core of the Assyrian Empire of antiquity and are now the areas of northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria, although there are Assyrian communities all over the Middle East, especially Lebanon. Northern Iraq includes the regions of Mosul, Dohuk, ‘Aqra and Zibar, Mezuriyeh, Gourzan (Gahra), Supna (Amadiya), Zakho and Adiabene (Arbil and Kirkuk). Southeastern Turkey includes the Assyrian regions of Hakkiari (Hakkari), Van, Bohtan (Cizre), Bedlis (Bitlis), ‘Ayn-Sliwa / ‘Ayn-Slibo (Siirt), Amed / Omed (Diyarbakir), Lagga / Lago (Lice), Tur-‘Abdin (Jebel Toor), Mirda / Merdo (Mardin), Siverek, Tella-Shleela (Viransehir), Kharput (Harput), Malatya, Perin (Adiyaman), Palu, Gerger, Shmeishat (Samsat), Urhay / Urhoy (Sanliurfa), and ‘Ayn-Tawa / ‘Ayn-Towo (Gaziantep). Northwestern Iran includes the Assyrian region of Urmia and Salamast and northeastern Syria includes the Khabour region, the Euphrates valley and the villages around Aleppo. Now, though, Assyrians no longer inhabit many of these places as a result of the persecutions that are the topic of today’s seminar. \~\
“The Assyrians, whatever their region of origin, call themselves “Surayeh / Suroyeh” and their language “Surit / Surayt” according to their plentiful dialects. Those of the Nineveh Plains and those of the southern and eastern regions of Hakkiari in southeastern Turkey call themselves “Sorayeh” and their language “Surath”, those of the northern and central regions of Hakkiari and Van in southeast Turkey and Salamast in northwestern Iran call themselves “Su-reh” and their language “Soorit”, those of the Urmian regions of northwestern Iran call themselves “Surayi” or “Suryayi” and their language “Suyrit” or “Suyrayi”, and those of the regions to west of the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, call themselves “Suroyeh” or “Suryoyeh” and their language “Surayt” or “Suryoyo”. To be sure, many opinions have been expressed about this name, but relatively few of them have approached the truth.\~\
“Although uniting the children of one nation through their ancestral language, the term “Syriac-speaking” also allows much space for them to divide themselves into Assyrians, Chaldeans, Aramaeans, Syriacs, Syrians, Maronites, and the list goes on. It does not allow for one national designation for one people. Some may disagree but the people that call themselves any of the above things today are Syriac-Speaking or of a Syriac-Speaking background and heritage and hence are of Assyrian origin. Many issues disputing whether they are Assyrian, apart from the concept of self determination, can be answered by some statements and research made by eminent historians and scholars, purely from a historical and scholarly perspective. In this paper I shall set out to demonstrate first of all about whom we can say are Assyrians, the regions inhabited by Assyrians in the Middle East and what Assyrians have always called themselves. I have gathered and shall be using the opinions of eminent scholars to back up these arguments and using them I shall make apparent the origin of the word Syriac itself, linking to the ancient Assyrians. Although the research has not yet been exhausted, it has been proven without a doubt that all “Syriacs” are Assyrians.” \~\
The Assyrians call themselves and other people of Syriac-speaking heritage Assyrians for a very simple and convincing reason: they are the age-old inhabitants of ancient Assyria. It is their homeland. They have churches there that date as far back as third and fourth century AD and still others, such as St. Mary at Kharput and St. Mary at Urmia, that are of apostolic foundation.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated June 2024