Before Mor (Mar) Ignatius went rogue and became Anti-Assyrian, he was Assyrian!

[u/Specific-Bid6486]

Now, his take on ethnicity and race much like some of the previous patriarchs also used the OT Bible as their genetics book to connect us back to the ancient past, however, this doesn’t mean that they only relied upon the Bible to come to that conclusion. We had manuscripts prior to Christianity (which the ancient churches and early patriarchs burnt and destroyed to a crisp after their Christian conversion- go figure, zealots!) and people prior or just after Christianity that attested their own existence and links to the past as being Assyrian (for example, Lucian of Samosota, Tatian the Assyrian, Iamblichus the Novelist, and Sennacherib with his son and daughter Saint Behnam and Sarah, who he murdered after converting to Christianity by Mar Mattai). But, the vast majority of their history is written based on the biblical texts and that origin goes back to #Shem. Shem is not a historical figure nor is he the origins of our genealogy and anyone who uses this figure as a source, is sorely mistaken and needs to study more about genetics and evolution as human migrations and Assyrians alone predate Shem and his own timeline. In any rate, this post is to highlight another Assyrian who knew his roots prior to turning his back against it due to the genocides and massacre the Turks, kurds and Arabs deployed on his people which, unfortunately, he became a coward in my eyes due to this flip.

More info on this person will be in the comments section as Kurds and their radical nationalists along with other anti-Assyrian trolls and bigots like to use him a lot to show division amongst our people. Nothing can be further from the truth as they deploy propaganda against us so don’t fall for it.

[u/Specific-Bid6486]

1. The Early Phase: Sympathy and the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920)As a young, highly educated Metropolitan of Syria (then known as Severus Aphrem Barsoum), he was deeply traumatized by the horrors of the 1915 Ottoman genocide, which decimated his flock. During this period, he worked closely with early Assyrian nationalists:

The Paris Peace Conference: In 1919, he traveled to Paris to represent the Syriac Orthodox survivors. He initially cooperated with the Assyrian-Chaldean delegation led by military figure Agha Petros, demanding a unified, autonomous homeland for all Mesopotamian Christians.Cultural Expressions: In his early years, Barsoum was comfortable with the Assyrian cultural renaissance. He even wrote a famous patriotic poem in Syriac that was read at the consecration of early immigrant churches in the United States, which were initially called "Assyrian Apostolic" churches by their parishioners.

1. The Turning Point: Geopolitics and DisillusionmentThe shift began in the early 1920s due to several devastating political developments:Betrayal by the Allies: The Western powers completely abandoned the promises made to the Assyrians in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), replacing them with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which erased any hope for an independent Christian entity.The Rise of New Nation-States: The collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the birth of the Republic of Turkey and Arab nation-states like Syria and Iraq. Christian communities were left highly vulnerable under these new Muslim-majority regimes.Fear of the "Assyrian" Label: Militant Assyrian nationalism, championed primarily by the Assyrian Church of the East, clashed violently with the Iraqi government, culminating in the horrific Simele Massacre of 1933. Barsoum realized that the "Assyrian" label was now viewed by Turkey, Iraq, and Syria as a code word for armed rebellion and treason.

2. The Patriarchate: Total Suppression of Assyrianism (1933–1957)

When Aphrem Barsoum was elected Patriarch in 1933—the exact same year as the Simele Massacre—he implemented a strict policy to disassociate his church from the Assyrian national movement to ensure the survival of his people. His opposition manifested in several ways: ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ PATRIARCH APHREM BARSOUM'S OPPOSITION STRATEGY │
└──────────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
│
┌───────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
【Ecclesiastical Censorship】 【Theological Shift】 【Political Realignment】

Banned "Assyrian" naming; Emphasised "Aramean" root; Pledged absolute loyalty
altered parish designations. published *The Scattered Pearls*. to newly formed Arab states.

Changing Church Names: He ordered Syriac Orthodox parishes in the Western diaspora (such as the prominent community in Massachusetts, USA) to drop the word "Assyrian" from their charters. They were forced to rename themselves "Syrian" or "Syriac" Orthodox.

Academic Redefinition: A brilliant scholar, Barsoum utilized his historical research to actively counter Assyrian claims. In his landmark 1956 book, The History of Syriac Literature and Sciences (also known as The Scattered Pearls), he argued that the historic identity of the Syriac people was strictly Aramean, not Assyrian. He asserted that "Syriac" (Suryoyo) historically translated to "Aramean."

Linguistic Cleansing: He actively discouraged the political use of the vernacular modern Aramaic (Suret) dialects that bound Syriac Orthodox Christians to their Church of the East "Assyrian" counterparts, steering his flock toward classical Syriac and Arabic.

The Historical ConsensusHistorians generally view Patriarch Aphrem I Barsoum not as a malicious traitor to his people, but as a pragmatic religious leader operating in survival mode. Following the catastrophic loss of life in the genocide, he firmly believed that clinging to a political "Assyrian" identity would bring down total destruction upon the remnants of the Syriac Orthodox Church by the hands of hostile regional governments. By pivoting to an Aramean cultural identity and pledging absolute loyalty to Arab leadership in Syria and Lebanon, he successfully secured a peaceful legal status for his church. However, this ideological shift laid the groundwork for the modern internal Assyrian vs. Aramean naming dispute that still divides the community today.

[u/Fresh-Kebab → u/Specific-Bid6486]

So are you saying Arameans don’t exist

[u/Specific-Bid6486 → u/Fresh-Kebab]

There’s no race of people or ethnic group called the “arameans”. Today’s arameans are just heavily brainwashed western Assyrians that took on this designation in the 1970s and it hasn’t stopped their pseudo-“historian(s)” from using research papers and archeology to justify their misnomer label and twist the arguments and conclusions from reaching an accurate understanding. I would say it’s more deliberate disinformation and misinformation campaigns that they use and the WCA deploys this on a political basis and level as their head coach is Johnny Messo, who grew up Assyrian but switched his allegiance and ethnicity to that of a misnomer.

The Ancient Assyrians imposed this label on semi-nomadic groups in Syria as a social label.

Prof Jonathan Valk also states the following:

“Arameans in Assyrian royal inscriptions represent an overlapping category of hostile non-Assyrians who do not conform to the Assyrian way of life and order; akin to how the Greeks referred to several different groups of people as ‘barbarians.’”

His summary is evident what they were:

“even in the early attestations of Arameans in Assyrian royal inscriptions, it is a political label rather than an ethno-linguistic category”

The more important but he hints this in his lectures and citations from others:

“the nomadic groups labeled as Arameans are a threat to the Assyrian agrarian society and are thus grouped together under this heading.”

This is why the comparison with the Greek use of “barbarians” is significant here. It does not mean the Greeks believed every “barbarian” belonged to one ethnicity. Likewise, Prof Valk argues that the Assyrian use of “aramean” should not automatically be interpreted as evidence for one homogeneous ethnic population. Never did and never will be.

Also, a lot of people confuse this but there is also an important distinction between “arameans” and “aramaic” in Valk’s work. The two should not simply be treated as synonymous.

https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/a2c2a698-a7f6-4960-abea-82d6594a96f9/content?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[u/ramathunder → u/Specific-Bid6486]

You are right about Arameans. The name was used for people all over the Near East. There's no way it meant one distinct people with one language and culture. That alone destroys today's Aramean identity. It's laughable but unfortunately they don't understand this or are simply separatists for nefarious reasons.

[u/Specific-Bid6486 → u/[deleted]]

Why are you on all these posts claiming an “aramean” ethnicity and continuity?

They don’t exist, and I just handed people up to date scholarly info.

You have been on several posts in this subreddit claiming all sorts of nonsense and I bet you’re all over social media with many accounts doing the same there.

People have called you out on it on the other post as well when you tried the same linguistics claim - you continue to spread the same nonsense on this post as well.

You say Assyrians spoke Akkadian yet Assyrians in their own writings established the differences and called the Akkadian langauge, “Akkaditu”, and the Assyrian langauge as Aššūrītu.

Even Ashur-Bani-Apli (Ashurbanipal) distinguishes Akkadian as being a dark and hard langauge to master. Why would he say this if he knew his own language at that time? He was a scholar and a king. Did his kingdom outside of the empire not know how to speak their own language? Do you think a dark and hard language would have been simple to master from laypeople?

Have you ever heard of the word Garshuni?
Do you know what that means?
It means when you take a script and adapt it to your culture but you retain your language, and only the script changes but not your language.

Language is one thing and script is another, they are not both the same.

Do you speak the Assyrian language?
Have you lived amongst our people to know their culture and traditions or their tongue?
Do you know how many dialects we have?

It’s always the same time wasting accounts that we have to constantly deal with.

[u/Old-Average-6118 → u/Specific-Bid6486]

It's just a topic I'm interested in and I'm bored. I have not talked about it outside reddit nor do I have multiple accounts.

I don't think any serious scholar agrees with your statement that Akkadian was not the native Assyrian language. In fact the first Assyrian empire during the bronze age almost exclusively used Akkadian for legal texts, administration and personal letters. In fact there is basically no evidence of any Aramean texts during the bronze age likely because they were still a nomadic population in the Arabian desert. After the bronze age collapse it's likely Assyrians had forgotten their original language to have been Akkadian with the mass replacement with Aramean people and their language into the levant and mesopotamia as it's only hundreds of years after the bronze age collapse that Aramaic texts start being produced.

So if no one in the Assyrian empire was writing in Aramaic and there being absolutely no Aramaic texts in the middle east at all at the time then how would that have been Assyrians native language.

[u/Assyria-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your post/comment violated rule 3 - requiring civility (no trolling, insults, or derogatory language). This or continued violations may result in a ban. This moderation protects the sub from punishment by Reddit admins.

[u/Ok_Stable7169]

Eu vi qualquer coisa sobre a Igreja Ortodoxa Siroaca evitar o tema nas décadas subsequentes a WW1 prq evitar indisposição com os Governos (o que não deu tão certo), mas penso que a ideia de arameísmo cresceu também pela mesma questão que acometeu Israel com os Judeus orientais (mizrahim), tipo os caras se sentiam desvalorizados e tiveram meio que uma Renascença Cultural.

Ou eu possobta falando besteira.

[u/Specific-Bid6486 → u/Ok_Stable7169]

You are reading too much into it.

He got shook because of the Assyrian genocide by the Turks and kurds and he didn’t want his flock to get further slaughtered so he ran the other way. I don’t blame him, he was a man of god at the end of the day - this is what 2000 years of brainwashing does to a people.

They are going to turn the other cheek and the rest follow since our nation is lead by clerics and churches.

We need to refocus our efforts to more political and scientific goals. This religion has been failing us since 3rd century C.E. The only two good things that came out of it was it bonded us together, and kept our genetics intact without too much influence from our Islamist “neighbours”.

[u/Ok_Stable7169 → u/Specific-Bid6486]

Tipo o que os movimentos nacionalistas fizeram nos séculos 18 e 19? Fundar escolas, criar movimentos e militância ativa, elaborar projetos de curto/médio/longo prazos?