Culture

Assyrians

Peoples

The Assyrians were the people of northern Mesopotamia centered on Ashur, Nineveh and Kalhu, whose empire at its height in the seventh century BCE reached from Iran to Egypt. Their national god Ashur stood at the head of a pantheon largely shared with Babylonia, and their kings framed conquest as his commission. Assyrian libraries, above all the collection gathered at Nineveh, preserved much of the Mesopotamian literary and divinatory tradition that survives today. Modern Assyrian communities are Syriac Christians who carry the name.

Facts

Origins

Origin Region

Northern Mesopotamia, around Ashur, Nineveh and Kalhu on the Tigris, in what is now northern Iraq. 1

Language Family

Akkadian in its Assyrian dialect, East Semitic within Afro-Asiatic. The communities carrying the name today speak Neo-Aramaic, a different branch of the same family. 2

Traditions

Principal Religious Traditions

The state cult of Ashur at the head of a pantheon largely shared with Babylonia, with the king as his chief servant and conquest framed as the god's own work; the people carrying the name today belong to the Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church. 3

Practice

Practice Status

Discontinued as a state religion 3

Learn More

Ashur at the Head of a Borrowed Pantheon

Assyrian religion was Mesopotamian religion with one substitution. The pantheon, the temple economy, the divination and the incantation literature were substantially shared with Babylonia, but at the head of it stood Ashur, who was the city of Ashur before he was a god and who has almost no mythology of his own. Assyrian scribes solved that by rewriting. The Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish was recopied in the north with Ashur in Marduk's place, which is as clear a statement of religious politics as the ancient Near East produced.

The king was the god's steward rather than a god himself, and his campaigns were reported to Ashur in letters deposited in the temple. This is why the royal inscriptions read as they do. Conquest is presented as the extension of the god's order over territory that lay outside it, and the deportation of whole populations is described in the same register.

Divination carried the weight of state decision. The Nineveh libraries preserve extispicy queries, astrological omen series and the dream compendium known as the Assyrian Dream Book, alongside the letters of scholars advising Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal on when to act and when to wait. Nicole Brisch's survey of Mesopotamian deities sets Ashur beside Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela, the two goddesses whose oracles spoke most directly to those kings.

After Nineveh, and the Question of Descent

Nineveh fell in 612 BCE to a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, and the Assyrian state ended within a few years. What did not end was habitation. The northern Mesopotamian heartland around Mosul, the Nineveh plain, Tur Abdin and the Hakkari mountains remained populated, and from the early centuries of the common era that population was substantially Christian, in the Church of the East and later also the Syriac Orthodox Church, using Syriac as its liturgical language.

Christoph Baumer's history traces that church from its Persian base across Asia, along the Silk Road to Tang China and into India, at one point covering a wider geography than any other church of its era, before contraction under the Mongol and Timurid periods left it concentrated again in its homeland.

Whether the modern Assyrians descend from the ancient ones is a question with both a scholarly literature and a political charge, and the atlas does not settle it. The name was taken up as a national designation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the same period that produced the massacres of the First World War and the flight from Hakkari. The community today is largely diasporic, its remaining Iraqi and Syrian populations reduced further by the events following 2003 and by the occupation of the Nineveh plain in 2014.

Connections

Associated With

Assyria

The Assyrians, ancient and modern.

Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East

This source names Assyrians directly: "This is the actual 1994 Common Christological Declaration signed jointly by Pope John Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV, the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, resolving centuries of..."

Source Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the EastJohn Paul II and Mar Dinkha IV

Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State

This source names Assyrians directly: "Paul Zimansky's study reconstructs the political and religious structure of the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu, centered on Lake Van, from excavated fortresses, royal inscriptions and comparison with..."

Source Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian StatePaul Zimansky

Faravahar

This source names Assyrians directly: "The winged disc carrying a robed male figure is the best-known Achaemenid religious image, cut at Persepolis, at Behistun and on the royal tombs from Darius the Great onward."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Flower of Life

This source names Assyrians directly: "The Flower of Life is a grid of overlapping circles of equal radius, each centred where others cross, conventionally shown as nineteen complete circles held inside two bounding rings."

Source The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume 1Drunvalo Melchizedek

Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary

This source names Assyrians directly: "Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary works entry by entry from the excavated iconographic and textual record of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian religion, giving each deity, demon or symbol..."

Source Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated DictionaryJeremy Black and Anthony Green

Haldi

This source names Assyrians directly: "of gold and silver dedications by the Assyrians' own account, is remembered as a serious blow to Urartian royal prestige."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Iskar Zaqiqu (the Assyrian Dream Book)

This source names Assyrians directly: "Iskar Zaqiqu, the Assyrian Dream Book, read here from A."

Source Iskar Zaqiqu (the Assyrian Dream Book)Anonymous (Neo-Assyrian scribal tradition)

Mesopotamian Religion

Sausga

This source names Assyrians directly: "The Hurrian goddess of love, war and healing, better known by her Akkadian and Hittite name Shaushka, and identified across the region with Ishtar of Nineveh, whose great temple was a Hurrian cult..."

Source The HurriansGernot Wilhelm

Sayfo (Wikipedia)

This source names Assyrians directly: "A community-edited reference article on the Sayfo, the mass killing and deportation of Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan..."

Source Divinity Atlas Original Articles, Second Edition

Seed of Life

This source names Assyrians directly: "The Seed of Life is a figure of seven equal circles: one at the centre and six around it, each drawn through the centre of the last, so that all six touch the middle circle."

Source The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume 1Drunvalo Melchizedek

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

This source names Assyrians directly: "E.A. Wallis Budge's 1895 translation of the Papyrus of Ani, the funerary papyrus of the scribe Ani, acquired by the British Museum in 1888 where Budge served as Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian..."

Source The Egyptian Book of the DeadE.A. Wallis Budge (trans.)

The Words of Ahiqar

This source names Assyrians directly: "The Words of Ahiqar is an Aramaic wisdom text framed as the counsel of Ahiqar, a wise royal advisor to the Assyrian kings Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, addressed to his ungrateful nephew Nadin..."

Source Babylonian Wisdom LiteratureW. G. Lambert