-
Title
-
The Catholicos of the East and His People
-
Creator
-
Arthur John MacLean
-
William Henry Browne
-
Date
-
1892
-
Description
-
Maclean and Browne report that the modern Assyrians habitually call themselves Syriacs or Suryayi (Surayi), and in formal documents “The Church of the East” or simply “The Easterns.” They rarely call themselves “Nestorians,” and resent it when used as a nickname. The authors stress that “Syrian” functions as a religious label shared with the Jacobites, not a racial or national term. They note that in England a fashion had lately arisen to use “Assyrian,” partly to distinguish these Christians from the Jacobites and partly from the supposition that they descend from the ancient subjects of Shalmaneser and Sardanapalus; they judge this usage unsafe and undesirable because the people themselves never used it, their lineage is mixed, and Assyria was only one province within the wider realm of the Church of Seleucia and Ctesiphon. They go further to argue that the modern Assyrians are most likely a mix of races, probably including Kurds, and that the claim of direct descent from the ancient Assyrians is unproven, with writers often confusing the people with the Assyrian Empire itself. They add that none of the territory inhabited by modern Assyrians can properly be called Assyria and that maps sometimes misassign the Kurdish mountains to it.
On “Chaldean,” they write that the name was never given to this people until Latin missionaries came to Mosul; the Latins applied it to distinguish their Roman Catholic converts from the Jacobites, whom they continued to call “Syrians.” In the community’s own old books, “Chaldeans” had meant astrologers, against whom they bore old enmity, so the authors conclude the title properly belongs to the Roman Catholic Uniats of Mosul, not to the modern Assyrians.
They further warn of recurrent confusion in learned and popular writing, citing the tendency for “Nestorians … under the name of Chaldeans or Assyrians” to be confounded with the most learned or the most powerful nation of Eastern antiquity. To avoid ambiguity, the authors themselves prefer “Syrians,” and when a distinction from the Jacobites is needed, “Eastern Syrians.”
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
The Catholicos of the East and His People, Arthur John Maclean and William Henry Browne, 1892, pp. 6–9.
-
books.google.com
-
Subject
-
Church history
