Hello all!
I have a question. I am Assyrian, and I speak Aramaic. Yet constantly where I live Assyrians are called and labelled (namely by Arab cultures, like the Lebanese for example) Arabs. I tell them that we are not, but still they go on about how we are, and they make fun of us as we have no country (not cool ): )
I’d really like to know in a much more educated sense how and why we are not Arabs. I have said that we (the Assyrians) had our own state, how we were never “arabised”, how we speak the language of Jesus (I bring this fact up because we’re all Christians), and how our empire was one of the strongest empires that had ever existed. Yet they still mock us about how we have no country, how we are fake by not identifying as Arabs when in fact we are Arabs, and so forth.
Could someone explain to me (so that I may explain to them I guess, or maybe so that I understand the topic better, because honestly it doesn’t seem like what I’m doing is working - maybe if I speak in a more educated manner then they’ll understand? or maybe it’s because I’m 16 and they automatically oust me because solely of my age?) how and why Assyrians are NOT Arabs? Thanks so much! Also sorry for the huge task, I know it’s a lot to ask and I’m terrible sorry. It’s just that the constant berating happens on social media and irl too. I understand that it’s mostly jokes (I think, but some people genuinely believe that we’re Arabs) but being called Arabs, being told that we don’t exist because we don’t have a country really really sucks.
First, I advise you to stop arguing with anyone about this, because they are almost certainly not arguing in good faith and you're wasting your time and energy.
Second, this is a... messy issue. Remember that Aramaic wasn't the language of the ancient Assyrians per se (they spoke a dialect of Akkadian, closely related to Babylonian), it was the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. It is very likely that your ancestry - cultural and genetic - includes all sorts of peoples, given what a melting-pot and frontier region Mesopotamia was.
The main claim to Assyrian heritage lies in successor states in the geographical region of Assyria following the collapse of the Seleucid Empire. The events following that saw the emergence of several independent or semi-independent successor states, some in the general region of Assyria (Adiabene, Osrhoene, etc), their conquest by the Arsacids (Parthians), and the brief rise and fall of the Armenian Empire (which they supported in revolt against their Parthian overlords).
These statelets then spent their time in the unenviable spot of being in the borderlands between Rome and the Iranian empires. Because of the paucity of sources and the fluidity of things like ethnicity, it's not entirely easy to trace out clear lines of continuity before the establishment of the Church of the East. Yazdegerd I, who founded the church, did so for presumably mostly realpolitical reasons - both to reduce the risk of a Christian fifth column, and probably also to make it easier to manage and reduce conflicts between Zoroastrian and Christian elites in his empire. The tricky thing is, the Church of the East was supposed to be the national church of the Sasanian Empire (modulus the troublesome and semi-independent Armenia), which means that it inevitably would have brought non-Assyrians under its umbrella as well. Given how strongly rooted Assyrian identity is in Church history, this further complicates direct lines being drawn to earlier Assyrian polities.
The rest is mostly history. So while it's more complicated than "Assyrians today descend from the Assyrians of the Neo-Assyrian Empire" (this, and associated celebrations and so on, is mainly a modern nationalist construct), it's absolutely absurd to refer to modern-day Assyrians/Aramaic-speaking Christians as Arabs, especially given the taboo of conversion within Islam. Sure, it's likely that some Arabs would have converted to Christianity before Islam and joined the Church of the East, but the continuous presence of Aramaic-speakers in northern Mesopotamia long predates Arabic's emergence as the lingua franca of the region following the Arab conquests. It makes no more sense than asserting that Imaziγen (Berbers) or Copts are actually Arabs, which on reflection I'm sure these people do as well.
For some further reading, I strongly recommend Payne's A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity.
Could you please raise this issue on the ask anthropology subreddit as well? I think it would make for a great discussion.
You may be interested in my old answer this question:
For a similar discussion about the Christian minority in Lebanon, see also: