I dedicate this web-site to all the Assyrians of the world in general and to The Catholicos Patriarch of The Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of The East, His Holiness Mar Dinkha, in particular.

Sam Razali
Shooma Bet-Malik


Content:

1) Introduction
2) Assyria and Assyrians
3) Aramaic Language: The Linguistic Heritage of Assyrians
4) Assyrians after Assyria
5) Christianity and Assyrians
5a) The Story of Edessa, Abgar and Jesus
5b) The Founding of the First Christian Church
5c) The Spreading of Christianity: Assyrian Missionaries of The Church of The East
5d) Theological Disputes and Divisions in the Church
6) Assyrians Today
7) References



Send your comments to:Shoomatouraya@yahoo.co.uk
or
sam@assyrians-homeland.org
or write to:
Sam Razali
PO Box 18681
London NW3 4NG
United Kingdom


Web-designer:
Frank Peacock
frank@assyrians-homeland.org

WELCOME
TO
ASSYRIAN HOMELAND
(www.assyrians-homeland.org)

The Cradle of Civilization
and
The Birth of Christianity


Please read first the content of this homepage and then the "Introduction" before reading any other article.
And also please introduce this web-site to as many people as you can.
Thank you

Assyrians and the Future

The Church of The East has another Mission to accomplish; in a way, perhaps more formidable task. The time will come that she will have the support, let us hope, of all the Assyrians (numbering nearly 3.5 million). Today they are scattered in so many countries of the world. These inherently cultured and instinctively courageous people will rise up again and become 'One'. This is the Will of God for the Assyrians, who will do once again great works. Christ said,
'The men of Nineveh [Assyrians] shall
rise in judgement with this generation,
and shall condemn it: because they repented
at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater
than Jonas is here.' (Matthew, 12:41)

And let the world know that the language of the Assyrians is Aramaic, Assyriac Aramaic, but not Syriac, a meaningless misnomer; their language is the one spoken by Jesus Christ - Aramaic language. And also the Assyrian Church is The Holy Apostolic Church of The East, the first Christian Church. It is not Nestorian Church. 'Nestorianism' and 'Syriac' are nothing more than 'shambolic misnomers' created by the unjust world and imposed unjustly upon the Assyrians, mainly out of cultural envy and theological bigotry in order not only to undermine the Assyrians' identity but also to deny their existence as they have done so throughout the centuries.

Assyrians must wake up. They must go on proclaiming their identity and declaring their historical greatness.Assyrians must also let the world know of their continued contributions to the civilization and Christianity of the world. By doing so Assyrians can 'prove' to the world that they can, once again, play an important part in transforming this chaotic world that we live in.


The 'Vanished' Assyrians

I don't think I am exaggerating by saying,
No nation or people in the world has contributed to the 'emergence of civilization'as the Assyrians have, and no Church or Denomination has spread Christianity in the World as The Holy Apostolic Church of The East (known as The Assyrian Church of The East) has.

Yet, the Unjust World, including the United Nations, thinks (and has always tried to think) that Assyrians do not exist; they say, Assyrians 'vanished' from the face of the Earth in 612 BC, when their Great Empire fell. But of course a large number of Assyrians survived the aftermath of the decline of Assyria. And in fact, Assyrians after Assyria have contributed to the World even more than when they had their glorious Empire.
It is interesting when we read in the books and encyclopaedias that Assyrians contributed a great deal to the Persian and Greek civilizations. Furthermore, the priceless treasure of the Assyrian Aramaic language and literature for centuries became the 'source' for the enrichment of many other languages. Hebrew and Arabic emerged from Aramaic. Greek, though not from the same linguistic family, stemmed philologically, at least in part, from Aramaic. The Romans, too, benefitted from the culture and civilization of Mesopotamia.
The eminent Assyriologist, Doctor Simo Parpola, of Helsinki University in his well known paper, 'Assyrians after Assyria', says,
' ... we know that the Greeks and Romans from Plato till antiquities kept learning spirituality and science from the Assyrians and Babylonians.'
And elsewhere, Professor Parpola says,
'The essential thing is that the Assyrians still preserve their ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity in spite of their loss of political power and heavy persecutions they have experienced especially in the Christian era.'


I am going to quote a few excerpts from the book,
Triumphant Truth - The Church in The Wilderness by Benjamin Wilkinson

The excerpts are from chapters 23 and 24.It begins with,
'Japan owes much of her civilization to the Church of The East. This may come as a surprise to many. If so, there will be more surprises in store for those who are not informed as to how strong a determining factor Christianity was in the corner of Island Empire.'

And somewhere in the middle of chapter 24 we read,
'The Church of The East in the 5th century left Edessa which was just within the border of the Roman dominion, and moved the institution to Nisibis,a few hundred miles within the Persian Empire. Here, near the Tigris River a great University [The First University in the World] was established, which for a thousand ....'

And in the same chapter under the heading, 'Civilization of the Church of The East', we read,
'It has been noted how in the 9th century the civilizing education system of the Church of The East dominated the golden age of the mighty Arabian Empire so much so that it permeated the literature of China and Japan in the East, and paved the way for the founding of universities in Europe.'