Jessica R. Eber notes that the communities often linked with the “Church of the East” have been described by outsiders with several names over time, among them Syrian (referring to the liturgical language), Assyrian, Assyro-Chaldean, Old East Syrian Church, and Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East. She explains that Protestant missionaries popularized the label “Nestorian” to distinguish these Christians from the Chaldeans who entered communion with Rome in the fifteenth century. Eber also cautions against equating these communities directly with the Assyrians of the Old Testament, calling that linkage an inaccurate assumption that nevertheless influenced some nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. Today, she observes, the term “Nestorian” is sensitive and often avoided, since many Christians use it pejoratively to denote schism or heresy.

Blincoe writes that in the 19th century Anglican missionaries promoted the name “Assyrian” for members of the Church of the East who did not join the Roman Catholic communion. They saw it as a less pejorative alternative to “Nestorian.” Earlier labels such as “Chaldean” for those in communion with Rome and “Nestorian” for those who were not referred mainly to church affiliation and geography, not to ancient ethnic descent. Blincoe concludes that modern Assyrians and Chaldeans should not be regarded as direct descendants of the ancient Assyrians or Chaldeans.

David G. Lyon, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard, states that among the ancient Semitic peoples of Western Asia (Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Hebrews/Jews, Phoenicians; and in Africa, Ethiopians), the Babylonians and the Assyrians had “vanished long since.” He contrasts this with the modern scholarly recovery of their languages and literary treasures. Notably, Arameans are listed but not said to have vanished, underscoring a distinction Lyon draws between groups that disappeared as historical nations and those that did not.

Leonard Cottrell’s edited volume The Concise Encyclopedia of Archaeology, a collaborative work by 48 contributing scholars specializing in history and languages, explains that Assyrian power ended catastrophically with the sack of Nineveh in 612 BC. From that point, the Assyrians “disappeared as a nation for ever.” The entry adds that their modern image is mediated largely through Old Testament narratives and, more recently, through the decipherment of their own inscriptions, while emphasizing that no Assyrian nation survived beyond the seventh century BC.

Randall Price contrasts biblical prophecies about Babylon’s permanent desolation with Nineveh’s fate. He notes that Scripture does not predict that no one would ever live at Nineveh again; in fact, the site is inhabited today, but not by Assyrians. What was foretold, he stresses, is that the Assyrians themselves would vanish and that the city would never be rebuilt as a functioning capital. Price therefore distinguishes between later settlement on the mounds and the absence of a restored Assyrian people or a revived Nineveh.

H. R. Hall explains Assyria’s collapse as a combination of military exhaustion and institutional fragility. Already under Sennacherib, he notes, the army had to be filled with subject peoples, which degraded its quality. By Ashurbanipal’s later years only a shadow of the old Assyrian fighting force remained. Hall speaks of the “degeneracy and disappearance of the army,” and because “the army was the nation,” the degeneracy and disappearance of the nation followed. When Nineveh fell, he writes, “literally the Assyrian nation was destroyed.” Unlike Babylon and Thebes, which were destroyed but revived their national life, Assyria “never rose again,” because no peace-organization or proper civil system existed to hold the realm together. The successors of Tiglath-pileser IV, in his view, lacked the intelligence to develop a lasting administrative structure; Assyria had become almost purely a military machine, whereas Egypt and Babylonia possessed age-long civil administrations that could outlive foreign rule.

John L. McKenzie’s entry “Assyria” sketches both the empire’s rise and its abrupt extinction. He says the collapse followed the death of Ashurbanipal: after a century of almost continuous warfare Assyria had exhausted its manpower, while new forces gathered on its borders—the Medes and Scythians to the north and Chaldeans in the south. In 612 B.C. Nineveh was stormed and thoroughly destroyed; its cities, he notes, were so completely ruined that they were never rebuilt. A last Assyrian remnant under Ashur-uballit attempted to carry on from Harran with Egyptian help, but the final blow came when the Babylonians and their allies crushed them at Carchemish in 605 B.C., after which, McKenzie concludes, “the Assyrians disappeared from history.”

John P. McKay and coauthors explain that after the joint Median and Babylonian assaults of the late seventh century BCE, Assyrian urban centers were destroyed and imperial power collapsed. With their cities in ruins and political authority gone, the Assyrians “disappeared from history,” surviving mainly as a negative memory in biblical tradition. They add that about two centuries later Xenophon marched past the mounds of Nineveh without recognizing them, illustrating how completely the imperial past had faded from living knowledge until modern rediscovery.

In The New Answers Book 1 (2006), Ken Ham includes a sidebar titled “Does Archaeology Support the Bible?” that lists historical notes related to Assyria. One point claims that as the Assyrians “disappeared from history after the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BC,” the Bible’s retention of specific Assyrian titles (e.g., rabmag, rabshakeh, tiphsar) supports the texts’ authenticity, since such “obsolete” terms would have been preserved by eyewitness writers.

Herbert J. Muller frames the fall of Nineveh as a civilizational rupture. He writes that when the capital was “utterly destroyed” and the Assyrian kingdom “extinguished,” the Assyrians disappeared from history with unusual speed—“more quickly than any other prominent people before or after them.” In his narrative, what follows is a brief Chaldean interlude, but the obliteration of Assyria was so complete that even by Xenophon’s day the ruins passed unrecognized. Muller’s point is not just political collapse; it’s cultural erasure, the Assyrian name and memory slip from the lived historical record, leaving only later rediscoveries to reconstruct what had been the most feared power of the Near East.

Sir Harry Charles Luke uses Mosul’s annual Fast of Nineveh to contrast a living memory with an obliterated past. He writes that apart from this fast and a few earthen mounds, there are no visible links between modern Nineveh and the terror-inspiring city of antiquity. The destruction of Nineveh in 608 BC by the Medes and Babylonians, he says, was so complete that within a single lifetime the Assyrian Empire had not merely fallen but vanished from the face of the earth. Two centuries later, Xenophon marched past its ruins without recognizing that they were the remains of the former imperial capital. Luke adds that, with rare exceptions, the fearsome Assyrian monarchs had been forgotten by the very people who later lived on the site. In his depiction, what survived in Mosul was a religious observance and archaeological remnants, not a continuing Assyrian people.