Where is biblical assyria today

The Assyrian civilian population of upper Mesopotamia was coercively relocated and decimated by the Ottoman Turkish army, together with other allied Muslim peoples, between and , with additional attacks on defenseless migrating civilians enacted by local Arab militias.

The Assyrian genocide took place in the same circumstances as the Armenian and Greek genocides. Since the Assyrian genocide occurred within the setting of the much more extensive Armenian genocide, research discussing it as a distinguished matter is uncommon.

Pictured above is a Memorial for the Assyrian Genocide from Wikipedia. The majority of Assyrians residing in what is today modern Turkey were compelled to flee to either Syria or Iraq after the Turkish victory of the Turkish War of Independence.

In , Assyrians declined to become part of the newly established state of Iraq and rather demanded their recognition as a separate nation.

Since the Iraq War social turmoil and disorder have produced the unprovoked infliction of Assyrians in Iraq, mostly by Islamic extremists, and Kurdish nationalists.

In areas such as Dora, a community in southwestern Baghdad, the majority of its Assyrian population has either fled abroad or to northern Iraq or have been murdered.

Since the beginning of the Iraq war, at least 46 churches and monasteries have been bombed. Assyrian culture is broadly inspired by Christianity. Common festivals occur during religious holidays such as Easter and Christmas.

Others are greeted with a handshake with the right hand only; as according to Middle Eastern traditions, the left hand is affiliated with evil. There are many Assyrian traditions that are prevalent in other Middle Eastern cultures.

For instance, a parent will often place an eye pendant on their baby to prevent "an evil eye being cast upon it". Assyrians are endogamous, meaning they ordinarily marry within their own ethnic community, although exogamous marriages are not regarded as a taboo, unless the foreigner is of a different religion , particularly a Muslim.

Assyrian music is a blend of traditional folk music and western modern music genres, namely pop, but also rap and recently, EDM. Instruments traditionally used by Assyrians include the zurna and davula, but has grown to include guitars, pianos, violins, synthesizers keyboards and electronic drums , and other instruments. Assyrians have various traditional dances which are performed mostly for special events such as weddings. Assyrian dance is a mixture of both ancient indigenous and common near eastern elements.

Assyrian folk dances are largely made up of circle dances that are performed in a line. The most common form of Assyrian folk dance is "khigga," which is commonly danced as the bride and groom are greeted into the wedding reception. Assyrians belong to several Christian denominations such as the Assyrian Church of the East , with an estimated , members, the Chaldean Catholic Church , with about , members, the Syriac Orthodox Church , which has between 1,, and 4,, members globally only some of whom are Assyrians , and the Ancient Church of the East with some , members.

A modest minority of Assyrians affirmed the Protestant Reformation in the 20th century, possibly due to British influences, and are now organized in the Assyrian Evangelical Church, the Assyrian Pentecostal Church, and other Protestant Assyrian groups.

The code of Khammu-rabi Code of Hammurabi or AMRAPHEL which see underlay it, and the same system of judicial procedure, with pleading before judges, the hearing of witnesses, and an appeal to the king, prevailed in both countries.

Unlike Babylonia, Assyria abounded in stone; the brick buildings of Babylonia, accordingly, were replaced by stone, and the painted or tiled walls by sculptured slabs.

In the bas-reliefs discovered at Nineveh three periods of artistic progress may be traced. Under Assur-nazir-pal the sculpture is bold and vigorous, but the work is immature and the perspective faulty.

From the beginning of the Second Empire to the reign of Esar-haddon the bas-reliefs often remind us of embroidery in stone. Attempts are made to imitate the rich detail and delicate finish of the ivory carvings; the background is filled in with a profusion of subjects, and there is a marked realism in the delineation of them. The third period is that of Assur-bani-pal, when the overcrowding is avoided by once more leaving the background bare, while the animal and vegetable forms are distinguished by a certain softness, if not effeminacy of tone.

Sculpture in the round, however, lagged far behind that in relief, and the statuary of Assyria is very inferior to that of Babylonia. It is only the human-headed bulls and winged lions that can be called successful: they were set on either side of a gate to prevent the entrance of evil spirits, and their majestic proportions were calculated to strike the observer with awe compare the description of the four cherubim in Ezekiel 1.

In bronze work the Assyrians excelled, much of the work being cast. But in general it was hammered, and the scenes hammered in relief on the bronze gates discovered by Mr. Rassam at Balawat near Nineveh are among the best examples of ancient oriental metallurgy at present known. Gold and silver were also worked into artistic forms; iron was reserved for more utilitarian purposes. The beautiful ivory carvings found at Nineveh were probably the work of foreign artificers, but gems and seal cylinders were engraved by native artists in imitation of those of Babylonia, and the Babylonian art of painting and glazing tiles was also practiced.

The terra-cotta figures which can be assigned to the Assyrian period are poor. Glass was also manufactured. The Assyrians were skilled in the transport of large blocks of stone, whether sculptured or otherwise. They understood the use of the lever, the pulley and the roller, and they had invented various engines of war for demolishing or undermining the walls of a city or for protecting the assailants. A crystal lens, turned on the lathe, has been found at Kouyunjik: it must have been useful to the scribes, the cuneiform characters inscribed on the tablets being frequently very minute.

Water was raised from the river by means of a shaduf. Furniture, Pottery and Embroidery. The furniture even of the palace was scanty, consisting mainly of couches, chairs, stools, tables, rugs and curtains. The chairs and couches were frequently of an artistic shape, and were provided with feet in the form of the legs of an ox. All kinds of vases, bowls and dishes were made of earthenware, but they were rarely decorated. Clothes, curtains and rugs, on the other hand, were richly dyed and embroidered, and were manufactured from wool and flax, and in the age of the Second Empire from cotton.

The rug, of which the Persian rug is the modern representative, was a Babylonian invention. Language, Literature and Science. The Assyrian language was Semitic, and differed only dialectically from Semitic Babylonian. In course of time, however, differences grew up between the spoken language and the language of literature, which had incorporated many Summerian words, and retained grammatical terminations that the vernacular had lost, though these differences were never very great.

Assyrian literature, moreover, was mainly derived from Babylonia. Assur-bani-pal employed agents to ransack the libraries of Babylonia and send their contents to Nineveh, where his library was filled with scribes who busied themselves in copying and editing ancient texts.

Commentaries were often written upon these, and grammars, vocabularies and interlinear translations were compiled to enable the student to understand the extinct Sumerian, which had long been the Latin of Semitic Babylonia. The writing material was clay, upon which the cuneiform characters were impressed with a stylus while it was still moist: the tablet was afterward baked in the sun or in Assyria in a kiln. The contents of the library of Nineveh were very various; religion, mythology, law, history, geography, zoology, philology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology and the pseudo-science of omens were all represented in it, as well as poetry and legendary romance.

Government and Army. Assyria was a military kingdom which, like the Northern Kingdom of Israel, had established itself by a successful revolt from Babylonia. In contradistinction to Babylonia, which was a theocratic state, the king being subordinate to the priest, the Assyrian king was supreme. Whereas in Babylonia the temple was the chief public building, in Assyria the royal palace dominated everything, the temple being merely a royal chapel attached to the palace.

The king, in fact, was the commander of an army, and this army was the Assyrian people. How far the whole male population was liable to conscription is still uncertain; but the fact that the wars of Assur-bani-pal so exhausted the fighting strength of the nation as to render it unable to resist the invaders from the North shows that the majority of the males must have been soldiers.

Hence the constant wars partly to occupy the army and prevent revolts, partly for the sake of booty with which to pay it. Hence too, the military revolutions, which, as in the kingdom of Israel, resulted in changes of dynasty and the seizure of the throne by successful generals. The turtannu or commander-in-chief, who took the place of the king when the latter was unable or unwilling to lead his forces, ranked next to the sovereign.

From the reign of Tiglath-pileser IV onward, however, the autocracy was tempered by a centralized bureaucracy, and in the provinces a civil governor was appointed by the side of the military commander.

The army consisted of cavalry, infantry, bowmen and slingers, as well as of a corps of charioteers. After the rise of the Second Empire the cavalry were increased at the expense of the chariotry, and were provided with saddles and boots, while the unarmed groom who had run by the side of the horse became a mounted archer.

Sennacherib further clothed the horseman in a coat of mail. The infantry were about ten times as numerous as the calvary, and under Sargon were divided into bowmen and spearmen, the bowmen again being subdivided into heavy-armed and light-armed, the latter being apparently of foreign origin. Sennacherib introduced a corps of slingers, clad in helmet and cuirass, leather drawers and boots. He also deprived the heavy-armed bowmen of the long robes they used to wear, and established a body of pioneers with double-headed axes, helmets and buskins.

Shields were also worn by all classes of soldiers, and the army carried with it standards, tents, battering-rams and baggage-carts. The royal sleeping-tent was accompanied by tents for cooking and dining.

No pains, in fact, were spared to make the army both in equipment and discipline an irresistible engine of war. The terror it excited in western Asia is therefore easily intelligible Isaiah Nahum ; Nahum But it differed from the religion of Babylonia in two important respects: 1 the king, and not the high priest, was supreme, and 2 at the head of it was the national god Asur or Assur, whose high priest and representative was the king.

Asur was originally Asir, "the leader" in war, who is accordingly depicted as a warrior-god armed with a bow and who in the age when solar worship became general in Babylonia was identified with the sun-god. But the similarity of the name caused him to be also identified with the city of Asur, where he was worshipped, at a time when the cities of northern Babylonia came to be deified, probably under Hittite influence.

Later still, the scribes explained his name as a corruption of that of the primeval cosmogonic deity An-sar, the upper firmament, which in the neo-Babylonian age was pronounced Assor.

The combination of the attributes of the warrior-god, who was the peculiar god of the commander of the army, with the deified city to which the army belonged, caused Assur to become the national deity of a military nation in a way of which no Babylonian divinity was capable. The army were "the troops of Assur," the enemies were "the enemies of Assur" who required that they should acknowledge his supremacy or be destroyed.

Assur was not only supreme over the other gods, he was also, in fact, unlike them, without father or wife. Originally, it is true, his feminine counterpart, Asirtu, the ASHERAH which see of the Old Testament, had stood at his side, and later literary pedants endeavored to find a wife for him in Belit, "the Lady," or Ishtar, or some other Babylonian goddess, but the attempts remained purely literary.

When Nineveh took the place of Assur as the capital of the kingdom, Ishtar, around whose sanctuary Nineveh had grown up, began to share with him some of the honor of worship, though her position continued to be secondary to the end. This was also the case with the war-god Nin-ip, called Mas in Assyria, whose cult was specially patronized by the Assyrian kings. Rich, who had first visited Mossul in , examined the mounds opposite in and concluded that they represented the site of Nineveh.

The few antiquities he discovered were contained in a single case in the British Museum, but the results of his researches were not published until In the Frenchman Botta disinterred the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad, 15 miles North of Nineveh, while at Nimrud Calah and Kouyunjik Nineveh Layard brought to light the ruins of the great Assyrian palaces and the library of Assur-bani-pal.

His work was continued by Rassam Nothing more was done until when George Smith resumed excavations on the site of Assur-bani-pal's library; this was followed in by the excavations of Rassam, who discovered among other things the bronze gates of Balawat.

The Assyrians reckoned time by means of limmi, certain officials appointed every New Year's day, after whom their year of office was named. The lists of limmi or "Eponyms" which have come down to us form the basis of Assyrian chronology. Portions of a "synchronous" history of Assyria and Babylonia have also been discovered, as well as fragments of two "Babylonian Chronicles" written from a Babylonian point of view.

The "Eponym" lists carry back an exact dating of time to the beginning of the 10th century B. Before that period Sennacherib states that Tiglath-pileser I reigned years before himself. Tiglath-pileser, moreover, tells us that Samas-Ramman son of Isme-Dagon had built a temple at Assur years earlier, while Shalmaneser I places Samas-Ramman years before his own reign and Erisu years before Samas-Ramman, though Esar-haddon gives the dates differently.

Apart from the native documents, the only trustworthy sources for the chronology as for the history of Assyria are the Old Testament records. Early Period: Assyrian history begins with the high priests patesis of Assur. The earliest known to us are Auspia and Kikia, who bear Mitannian names. According to Esar-haddon the kingdom was founded by Bel-bani son of Adasi, who first made himself independent; Hadad-nirari, however, ascribes its foundation to Zulili.

Assyrian merchants and soldiers had already made their way as far as Cappadocia, from whence copper and silver were brought to Assyria, and an Assyrian colony was established at Kara Eyuk near Kaisariyeh, where the Assyrian mode of reckoning time by means of limmi was in use. In the age of Tell el-Amarna Letters B. Assur-uballid was king of Assyria. He corresponded with the Egyptian Pharaoh and married his daughter to the Bah king, thereby providing for himself a pretext for interfering in the affairs of Babylonia.

The result was that his son-in-law was murdered, and Assur-uballid sent troops to Babylonia who put the murderers to death and placed the grandson of the Assyrian king on the Babylonian throne.

Babylonia had fallen into decay and been forced to protect herself from the rising power of Assyria by forming an alliance with Mitanni Mesopotamia and Egypt, and subsequently, when Mitanni had been absorbed by the Hittites, by practically becoming dependent on the Hittite king. Shalmaneser I B. Campaign after campaign was undertaken against the Syrian and more eastern provinces of the Hittite empire, Malatiyeh was destroyed, and Carehemish threatened.

Shalmaneser's son and successor Tukulti-Mas entered into the fruits of his father's labors. The Hittites had been rendered powerless by an invasion of the northern barbarians, and the Assyrian king was thus left free to crush Babylonia. As the Assyrians created and expanded their empire, their political reach came to encompass—at its zenith around B.

The earliest known Semitic language, Akkadian comprises both the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects. Hundreds of thousands of inscriptions dating from the 26th century B. Detailed inscriptions and imposing reliefs attest to the strength of their reign across the Middle East. Ashurnasirpal II r. Ashurnasirpal II established the city of Kalhu biblical Calah, modern Nimrud as the capital of his kingdom, lavishly outfitting it with a walled citadel, palace, temples, and gardens paid for through taxes, trade, and tribute from vassal nations.

A close-up of the 6. The 6. The prostrate figure in the bottom panel see image right is thought to be King Jehu, although some scholars have called this identification into question. According to the Bible, the Israelite king Menahem taxed landowners to pay for tributes to the Assyrian Empire. During his campaign in the region around B. Menahem, in turn, taxed every landowner 50 shekels of silver 2 kings — Assyrian king Sargon II r.

After defeating the rebels, King Sargon II turned Israel into the province of Samaria and claimed in the so-called Great Summary Inscription that he took more than 27, Israelites as booty.

The Judahite king also repaired the city walls, built towers, strengthened the Millo , and made sure weapons were in adequate supply 2 Chronicles 5. This small black basalt prism of Esarhaddon records his restoration of the walls and temples in Babylon. There are many similarities between the life of Assyrian king Esarhaddon and the story of Joseph in the Bible.

Like the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis , Esarhaddon was favored by his father over his older brothers and had to flee to a foreign land for safety. After eventually gaining the throne, Esarhaddon pacified the land and expanded the Assyrian Empire southward into Egypt between and B.

Toward the end of the seventh century B. The Babylonians , together with the Medes and Scythians, overtook various Assyrian cities in The Assyrian capital of Nineveh fell in after just three months of battle. Not a subscriber yet? Join today. Assyrian national history, as it has been preserved for us in inscriptions and pictures, consists almost solely of military campaigns and battles.

It is as gory and bloodcurdling a history as we know.