Most commonly known as Assyrians and other variants of the name (Syriacs, Assyro-Chaldeans, Chaldo-Assyrians), the Assyrian people is a distinct ethnocultural community originated from the ancient Assyrian communities indigenous to the north of Mesopotamia. They are also known as Chaldeans, Nestorians and Arameans. A Christian people, the Assyrians speak today a modern Aramaic language and they are concentrated mostly in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, with a large diaspora (USA, Western Europe, Australia).
Starting modestly at the city of Ashur, the ancient Assyrian state became a regional power with the Old Assyrian Empire from the late 21th century to the mid 18th century BC. Later, Assyria became a huge political entity, which, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-608 BC), reached from the Caucasus (the present-day Armenia) to the Nile (Egypt).
After the fall of this empire in 608 BC, the Assyria came under various foreign rule (Babylonian, Median, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman, Sassanid, Arab) and, finally, became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Under the Ottoman rule, the Christian Assyrians suffered religious persecution and faced ethnic discrimination, which, after a number of massacres throughout the 17th, 18th and 19 centuries, culminated in the large scale Hamidian massacres of 1895-1896.
After centuries of persecutions and discrimination, the Assyrian community was expressing a surprising vitality at the beginning of the 20th century. Concentrated in the northern part of the Mesopotamia and the adjacent regions, the Assyrians represented, accordingly to the population estimates proposed by the Assyrian nationalists at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920), the majority in the sandjaks of Siirt and Hakkari (in present-day Turkey), and an important minority in Urmiyah (Persia/Iran), the sandjak of Mosul (in present-day Irak) and the vilayet of Diyarbakir (the Turkish Kurdistan). Other large Assyrian communities existed in the sandjaks of Zor, Aleppo and Urfa (in today Syria).
Source:
Map of the distribution of Assyrians in 1914:
commons.wikimedia.org
