The Quiet Tragedy of Iraq's Assyrians

First of all, everybody who lives in the Middle East is most likely a direct descendant of all the different peoples that build the great civilizations of the past. People have mixed throughout the area´s history. Secondly, the claims of direct cultural continuation between today´s peoples with the peoples of the past is a rather problematic, because of lack of evidence. Yes, we can be pretty sure that the current Assyrians have ancestors who formed the Assyrian state(c.2000 BCE - 609 BCE, the main cities of the Empire fell in 612 BCE, but the remnants of the army were destroyed only three years later), the Kurds are likely descendants from the Medes(the Medean Empire flourished between c.625-550 BCE and later Medea was a kingdom under the Iranian dynasties, often ruled by lesser members of the dynasties), the Armenians are descendants of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Urartu(c.900-c.600 BCE) etc, but what about cultural continuation? Have the people through all this time identified themselves with their now claimed ancestors, or is their more later identity being projected past in the time? For example, the Kurds have existed for 2000 years as an identiable group in the records that survive under various names, but even if they are direct descendants of the Medes, how much of their culture, way of live etc comes from their predecessors?

In the past, the inhabitants of the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni(c.1550-c.1330 BCE) - mainly in what is now Syria - where thought to be descendants of Aryan warriors from somewhere in Iran who would have overrun the area in about 1600 BCE. New findings of seals that contain Hurrian writing in the Syrian-Turkish border have shown that the Hurrians were on the area at least in 2500 BCE. So, they were native to the area, not foreign conquerors, but between 2500 BCE and about 1550 BCE there´s no evidence that they existed. Their culture and language continued, but at least from the areas that have been excavated, they didn´t leave any marks that could be claimed to be distinctly Hurrian. The same problems go with later peoples.

In c. 1330 BCE the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni, which had acted as a kind of buffer state between the big powers of the time, was conquered by no others than the Assyrians. Egyptian and Hittite Empires were at war, plague that had devastated Egypt infected the Hittite troops, the king of the Hittite Empire and his heir died, like large part of their army, and the Assyrians used the weakening of the other major powers to their advantage and attacked and conquered Mitanni.

Anyway, this article has the mistake of identifying Arab presence in Iraq with the coming of Islam. The current Arabs in the Middle East are the assimilated descendants of the peoples that lived in the area before Islam, they are descendants of Arabs who had lived over a thousand years in the area and they are descendants of Arabs that after the birth of Islam moved out from the Arabian peninsula. The first mention of the Arabs in what is now Iraq comes from Babylonian records from about 750 BCE. 34 years later, in 716 BCE, the Assyrian Empire transferred Arabic tribes it had defeated to current Palestine, where it had in 721 BCE defeated - as they called it - the kingdom of Samaria, known better as the kingdom of Israel. And before the Arabs there had been other movements of people out from the Arabian peninsula to Mesopotamia and Syria under different names during the previous centuries. What happened with Islam´s victory during the middle of the 7th century wasn´t hordes of Arabs from the Arabian peninsula overrunning the older populations. The highest percentage of people with Arabic names a century later in the area is to be found from Syria - then an administrative center of the Caliphate - in which they formed about 10% of the populace.