I’ve been looking for a new translation project to kill the torturous months between sending in a book and getting to see it in print. During this adventure, I translated a big chunk of the philosophical works of someone named John Bar Zo’bi before I found out other scholars were working on him already. Live and learn.

In any case, while looking at the various writings of the middle ages, I came across some rare references to the identity or ethnicity of the members of the Church of the East who lived in Mesopotamia and spoke Aramaic, so I thought I’d do a little deep-dive into the issue.

It looks like our people didn’t care so much about ethnicity at some point, and identified themselves either as citizens of an empire (like the Persian one), or members of a religion (so they simply called themselves “Christian”), or, when they wanted to be really precise, members of a particular denomination of a religion. Members of one Church called themselves “Jacobites,” those of another called themselves “Chalcedonians” (meaning the follow the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon in 451), and those of my tradition called themselves either just “Easterners” (that is, members of the Church of the East), or (less accurately) “Nestorians.” Some of this is reflected in Timothy’s 26th Letter, written in the 8th Century. None of these are, strictly speaking, ethnic names, which isn’t surprising because, especially in the case of the Church of the East, there were many members who were all kinds of ethnicities, including Chinese and Mongolian.

But on occasion, some writers do happen to discuss what we would call the “ethnicity” of the Aramaic-speaking members of the Church of the East who lived in Mesopotamia. Some instances of this from the middle ages (a period of time somewhat neglected in scholarship) are worth looking at: two from Michael the Great one from Bar Hebraeus.

Michael the Great (1126-1199 AD)

Here’s the first passage from Michael the Great’s enormous “Chronicon,” which can be found on p. 748 of the manuscript here, with Chabot’s French translation here.

Here’s where I typed it and vocalized it in the script I like better:

And here’s my translation:

Michael appeals to several earlier historians as his sources, as well as the book of Genesis, which gives the legendary genealogy of several races as coming from the sons of Noah. In this case, Michael tells us that Noah’s third son Shem had a number of sons. The three relevant to this post are Ashur, who is the father of the Assyrians, Arpachshad, the father of the Chaldeans, and Aram, the father of the Arameans, whom Michael says are also called “Syrians” because of the influence of Greek writers. He also makes a note that that Assyrians and Arameans, though the sons of different fathers, are all collectively also called “Chaldeans,” which he calls an “ancient name.”

In the passage above, Michael, citing ancient historians such as Josephus, is simply repeating the accepted terminology of his time, and, if we are to read him precisely, seems to be speaking about the pre-Christian period.

Here’s the second passage, from page 750 of the manuscript:

And here’s my re-typing:

And my translation:

Lo, it was seen that, west of the Euphrates there is Syria, and those who speak in our Aramaic language are supposedly called Syrians, in that they are only a portion. The rest dwelt from the Euphrates to the east, that is, from the shores of the Euphrates to Persia, and from the shores of the Euphrates to the East. There were many kings in Athur, such as Bel and Ninos and many after them, and Nebuchadnezzar in Babel, he who spoke with the sorcerers in the Aramaic language, when they were gathered to interpret the dream. In Urhai, also, those of the house of Abgar; in Araba, those of the house of Santados. We spoke of these things to show that, properly speaking, the sons of Syria are west of the Euphrates, and that it [Syria] is the root and foundation of the Urhaian tongue, and that those who think that kings have never arisen from this people are not correct. Rather, it has been shown that those Chaldean and Assyrian kings were of this people that is named Syrian.

Now Michael is no longer talking about ancient times, but is rather speaking in reference to the present usage of his day, connecting the ancient names to people in his own time. He makes the claim that, when we are speaking strictly, the word “Syriac,” or “Syrian,” [suryaye] in the general (“supposed”) usage of the people of his day, really refers to the people west of the Euphrates river (who were mostly people of his own “Jacobite” Church), and that the people east of the Euphrates are not usually called Syriacs, who originate from Aram, but instead are the races that originated from Athur and Arpachshad, that is (in his words), “Chaldean and Assyrian.”

Michael presents the accepted view of his contemporaries in order to argue for a different conclusion. Embarrassed by an apparent accusation that “kings have never arisen” from the Syriac people, Michael argues that, because of the fact that Chaldeans and Assyrians speak Aramaic, they should therefore be counted as Arameans/Syrians, despite their genealogy or ethnicity.

Whatever one might make of Michael’s somewhat confusing argument, it’s clear from the short passages above that he sees no doubt regarding the “Chaldean and Assyrian” ethnicity of the Aramaic-speaking people east of the Euphrates, and has to make a case, against his contemporaries, that the name “Syriac” can also apply to them somehow. Even then, he acknowledges that the precise usage of the term “Syriac” in his day is in reference to the Aramaic-speaking people west of the Euphrates river. Moreover, he does not seem to be aware of any etymological connection between “Syriac” and “Assyrian,” or if he is aware of it, considers it too irrelevant to mention, at least here. He has already made the case that, to him, “Syriac” is a synonym for “Aramean,” the race that traces back to Aram, not Athur or Arpachshad.

More interestingly, he names the Aramaic-speaking people east of the Euphrates both “Chaldeans and Assyrians,” despite the fact that he distinguished the two ethnicities a few pages earlier. Nor does he bother to specify that “Chaldeans” refer to people in the south, or “Assyrians” to people in the north. Both names together are used indiscriminately to name the ethnicity of all the Aramaic-speaking people of Mesopotamia.

Let’s state the obvious. There is nothing here to suggest that “Chaldean” means “astrologer” or “magician” (and indeed, he uses another word entirely to mean “sorcerer,” harrasha). And even more obviously, “Chaldean” certainly does not mean “Catholic Assyrian” (since there were no Catholic members of the Church of the East at the time). For Michael, “Chaldean” is simply a reasonable ethnic name for all the Aramaic-speaking people east of the Euphrates, as is the name “Assyrian.”

Bar Hebraeus (1226-1286 AD)

I ran into this piece by the famous author Bar Hebraeus, who lived from 1226-1286, and was the “Maphrian” or local bishop in charge of Mesopotamia for the Syriac or Jacobite Church. He was arguably one of the most educated and intelligent people of his time, and wrote on theology and philosophy, but is best-known for his books on history. He also wrote on grammar, and knew a lot about the Church of the East, since he lived in Mesopotamia rather than Syria, and was even good friends with the famous Mongolian Patriarch of the Church of the East, Yahballaha III.

Anyway, I found out about this little poem he wrote about the different vowels of the Syriac dialect of Aramaic, and decided to translate it in full, as literally as I could, since it’s referenced in a couple of works but not fully translated anywhere that I could find. The authors who reference it, such as David Wilmshurst[1] and John Joseph,[2] only discuss it in passing, but I think it’s interesting enough to deserve a fuller analysis.

Here’s part of the manuscript:

And here’s my type-out:

And my translation:

The lordly language, which is the Syriac of Edessa, has five vowels all together, as a sum total; this is known, as a rule free from exception. (1) Pthaha, like the ga of gaya, and (2) zqapa, like the yaa in maryaa; (3) rwasa, like the ’i in ’izza, (4) hwasa like the zy in ’azzyza. (5) ‘sasa like the shu in shura, the tu in tura, and the nu in nura.   But the wonderful easterners, the first sons of the Chaldeans, also count the vowels, and have others besides these. Jacob, the capable Edessan, also recalls them: (6) the tu in tura, and the thaw in ythaw, are vocalized among them, and the kaw in malkaw; (7) the naw in nawsa, the non in zaynon, they do not vocalize like we do. (8) the pe in pera they do not make a hwasa in reading, nor a rwasa; although there is no difference in their tongue between a pthaha and a zqapa. Indeed they add and set the syame (plural marks), but in speech do not distinguish them; they fall short of this hope, as in many things truly, such as for ar’a, they say aar’a, and for sab’a, saab’a, tar’ataar’a, tab’ataab’a, and thus zar’azaar’a.

Bar Hebraeus begins by naming Syriac the “master” or “lordly” language, and he specifies that he is referring to the Syriac of Urhai or Edessa, since the word suryaya in reference to a language was generally a synonym for Aramaic, as we saw above in Michael,[3] while in naming people, “Syriac” originally referred only to the Jacobites,[4] but after centuries eventually came to simply mean “Christian.”[5]

The claim that the language is “lordly” might mean a few different things. He might be referring to the widespread belief of the time that Aramaic was the first language of humanity, the one everyone spoke before the fall of the tower of Babylon,[6] and therefore the “main” language from which all others are derived. Alternately (perhaps less likely), the adjective maranaya (“lordly”) is derived from the noun mara (“lord”), which is a common title for Christ, so he might be calling Syriac “the language of the Lord,” that is, the language Jesus spoke. Or he might simply just mean that Syriac is a “masterful” language, or something vague like that.

The rest of the poem is divided into two sections – first he presents the five vowels used among the Syriacs, that is, people of his own tradition. Then he turns to explain the vowels as used by the “Easterners,” that is, members of the Church of the East. This second section is in turn divided into two sections: first, he presents the three extra vowels the “wonderful Easterners” have that his own people do not have, and then (beginning with the word kadh, which means “while” or “although”), critiques them for combining other, distinct, sounds into single vowels. So the Easterners have some vowel distinctions the Jacobites don’t, and vice-versa.

The reason this poem has gotten any attention at all is because he names all the “wonderful” members of the Church of the East collectively “the first sons of the Chaldeans” (bnayya qadhme d-kaldaye). This is, again like the above selections from Michael the Great, certainly centuries before any supposed imposition of the Chaldean name by the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, some writers attempt to seek a different explanation for this use of the name Chaldean, such as saying that Bar Hebraeus is sarcastic when he calls the Easterners “wonderful,” and that calling them “the first sons of the Chaldeans” means that he is accusing them of sorcery (which was, like astrology, at some point an activity associated with the ancient Chaldean people).[8] I see nothing in this text to suggest either sarcasm or magic, and such interpretations appear strained at best, especially in light of the clear usage of the term “Chaldean” as an ethnic name by Michael the Great only a few decades earlier. This poem is about language, not witchcraft, and Bar Hebraeus is not here acting like a polemical enemy of a Church of the East that gave him some of his own friends.

The plainer, more obvious, reading seems to be that because the members of the Church of the East are the “first” sons of the Chaldeans, they retained more of the vowels of the Aramaic language (the language used and spread by the ancient Chaldeans). On the other hand (to defend the dignity of his own tradition), Bar Hebraeus reminds us that the Easterners are inconsistent in their pronunciation, and his own tradition keeps other vocalizations accurate and intact.

Conclusion

I don’t think Patriarch Timothy I, several centuries earlier, would have objected to being called a Chaldean or an Assyrian, or been surprised by either, since he claims that Abraham (of Ur of the Chaldeans) is from his own people, as well as Nimrod who is said to have built Nineveh; neither would the two 19^th Century Patriarchs of the Church of the East, one Catholic and one Nestorian, who were both fighting over the claim that they were the true Chaldean people.[7] It is, at best, a historical accident that some members of this group (and their corresponding Aramaic dialects) are now identified as Assyrian and some as Chaldean. Putting the two names into opposition with each other, much less denying the legitimacy of either name, is the real cause of disunity, not acknowledging the fullness of history. On the other hand, moving forward toward actual unity will take patience, prudence, and love, not bullying, erasure, or apathy.

This short discussion could be part of a larger history project regarding the tumultuous ethnic identity issue of Chaldeans and Assyrians. While I’m very much on record being aggressively pro-unity (to the point of using the older-than-you’d-guess term “AssyroChaldean”[9] in the title of my first prayer book), it might take some time for everyone to get on the same page. In any case, all things (including unity) should be done in the spirit of truth, and the truth is often more complicated than we’d like it to be. In the meantime, let’s always be respectful and friendly to our brothers and sisters. Both “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” are ethnic names traditionally referring to all of us, both have a rich and legitimate history, and both deserve to be respected – especially together.

Addendum 7/28/2024:

I thought it would be worthwhile to clarify a few points that were raised by an anonymous author who posted this review of the above article.

First, the author notes that I do not cite any East Syriac sources in my post, which is correct. The post above is not meant to be comprehensive in any sense, and ends with a note that it could someday be part of a full study of the history of the ethnic terms of our people. I noticed these passages in Michael and Bar Hebraeus, and decided to write about them. They are not sources from the Church of the East (the majority of whose authors at the time would have, as I stated, simply called themselves “Christians,” “Nestorians,” or “Easterners”), but they are both highly respected historians writing about the topic of the ethnicity of the members of the Church of the East which is so rarely discussed in any sources at all. The author of the review of my post even notes that Michael is copying from earlier sources like Josephus and Eusebius, which affirms the point I made that his understanding of ethnicity was widely accepted as a fact, not a unique opinion he was positing.

Second, the author notes that Michael and Bar Hebraeus are “incredibly late,” though both were from over 700 years ago and one of them cited other sources almost from the time of Christ. In any case, my response is fairly straightforward: the title of my post is “Chaldeans and Assyrians in the Middle Ages,” because the authors I wrote about lived during that period. As the author of the Review said, the sources for my authors (Michael in particular) were much, much earlier (Josephus from the first century AD and Eusebius from the fourth century AD), which itself answers the point raised by the Review. But again, my post does not pretend to be anything of a comprehensive study. One of the main points (and surprises for me personally) is that the name “Chaldean” was being used as a standard ethnic designation for the Aramaic-speaking people east of the Euphrates centuries before any attempt at a union between the Church of the East and Rome. A point I was even happier about was that “Chaldean” and “Assyrian” were, even at the time of Michael, being used together to name the same people.

It’s worth clarifying that even the ancient sources used by Michael had an even older source, namely the Bible. Here it seems as if the reviewer misunderstood my post. In discussing Michael’s assertions about the sons of Shem and their fathering of the various races, the point I wish to draw is about the usage of names, particularly the names “Chaldean” and “Assyrian.” These names were together used by Michael the Great to name the Aramaic-speaking people east of the Euphrates. Whether Chaldeans and Assyrians actually or literally descended from the sons of Shem is beside the point I am making.

A final point made by the reviewer is about the name “Chaldean” being associated with paganism. Certainly the ancient Chaldeans practiced a pagan religion, as did the ancient Assyrians, and the abstract noun “Chaldeanism” could sometimes refer to pagan practices, but terms are very often used in different senses. Michael the Great, in the passages I quoted above, is without any doubt using the term “Chaldean” as an ethnic term and nothing else, and on that basis, as well as the immediate context of his poem about vowels, I concluded that Bar Hebraeus was using the term “sons of the Chaldeans” in the same way. That does not mean that the term “Chaldean” always and everywhere means the same thing. Certainly taking a proper noun like “Chaldean” and abstracting it to “Chaldeanism” can affect the meaning as well – think about, for example, the noun “race” and the abstract noun “racism,” and how different their connotations are.

The central point of the reviewer is that my post “is misleading and not consistent with the Syriac Christian tradition,” and that “the East Syriac tradition is very clear on where it stands” on the Chaldean name. This is a significant claim about a very broad topic. The reviewer promised to elaborate on this point in his/her notes, but there was only one note in the post, and it contained no citations or evidence of any kind.

In any case, the purpose of my post was to show that “Chaldean” was used as an ethnic term before the Catholic unity movement, as well as to present a beautiful example from centuries ago of “Assyrian” and “Chaldean” being used together to describe our one people, and I believe it accomplished this purpose. This way forward seems, to my eyes, to be the true path to unity which is based on actual history, respects every identity, and doesn’t impose anything on anyone. After all, nobody else gets to tell you who you are.

As both the reviewer and I stated, this is a complex and nuanced issue. It was surprising, then, when the reviewer rejected my attempt at showing some of the nuances and concluded that things were quite simple after all.

To see more of the nuances and look deeper into the history, here are PDFs of some of the scholarly sources discussing this topic, for your further study:

Adam Becker, “The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical East.”

Aaron Michael Butts, “Assyrian Christians.”

Shak Hanish, “The Chaldean Assyrian Syriac People of Iraq: An Ethnic Identity Problem.”

Wolfhart Heinrichs, “The Modern Assyrians – Name and Nation.”

John Joseph, “Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Arameans, Assyrians.”

David Wilmshurst, selections from The Martyred Church.

Also worth looking at is Becker’s magisterial Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism, available here.

---

[1] David Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church (London: East & West Publishing, 2011), 249.

[2] John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East (Boston: Brill, 2000), 6.

[3] This idea is mentioned in Archbishop Thomas Audo’s Introduction to his famous dictionary. Discussed and partially translated by Adam Becker in Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 320-321.

[4] “The Romanists could not call [the Chaldeans] ‘Catholic Syrians,’ or ‘Syrian Catholics,’ for this appellation they had already given to their proselytes from the Jacobites, who also called themselves ‘Syrians.’” G. P. Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals (London: Joseph Masters, 1852), vol. 1, 180. More recently, see Nathanael Andrade, who points out that Michael the Syrian calls the Aramaic-speaking people west of the Euphrates “Syrian” and “Aramean,” and those east of the Euphrates “Assyrians,” “Babylonians,” and “Chaldeans.” See his “Syriac and Syrians in the Later Roman Empire,” in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (New York: Routledge, 2019), 167-168. For a partial and semi-critical history see also Aaron Michael Butts, “Assyrian Christians,” in A Companion to Assyria, ed. Eckart Frahm (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2017): 599-612

[5] According to, among others, a Nestorian patriarch quoted by George Percy Badger: “We call all Christians Meshihaye, Christiane, Sooraye, and Nsara; but we only are Nestoraye.” G. P. Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals (London: Joseph Masters, 1852), vol. 1, 224.

[6] See Nathanael Andrade, “Syriac and Syrians in the Later Roman Empire,” 165.

[7] See John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians, 3-4: “The usage and origin of the name Chaldean has also been the subject of much acrimonious debate. While this term is generally accepted today as referring to the Roman Catholic off-shoot of the Nestorian Church, it has in the past been used as a national name in reference to both branches. Nineteenth-century European writers, in order to distinguish between the two churches, have referred to them as Nestorian Chaldeans and Catholic Chaldeans.” On p. 5, Joseph cites Horatio Southgate, who in the 1830s wrote that the Nestorians “’call themselves, as they seem always to have done: Chaldeans;’ indeed, ‘Chaldean’ was their ‘national name,’ he stressed.” Similarly on p. 8: “’Chaldean,’ therefore, like ‘Nestorian,’ was used long before the seventeenth-century schism and was used in reference to all the East Syrians because of the geographical location of their ‘head church.’… When the terms Chaldean and Nestorian were thus strictly differentiated, members of the mother church (Nestorian), claiming the same relationship to the inhabitants of ancient Babylon as their Catholic brethren, began also to use the name Chaldean. Nestorian patriarchs occasionally used ‘Chaldean’ in formal documents, claiming to be the ‘real Patriarchs’ of the whole ‘Chaldean Church.’”  

[8] See John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians, 7; David Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church, 249.  

[9] Certainly the combined name for which I am arguing goes back at least to 1860, when Fr. Joseph Gabriel discusses the Chaldean nation (umtha) and says other cultures received their sciences “first from the Chaldeans, or Assyrians, which means the same thing.” (Becker, Revival and Awakening, 316). Similarly Hurmizd Rassam, in Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1897), says all the Christians of Mesopotamia have “the same Chaldean or Assyrian origin.” (Becker, Revival and Awakening, 305). The term “ChaldoAssyrian” was promoted and popularized by military leader Agha Putrus (1880-1932) (see Yasmeen Hannosh, “Minority Identities Before and After Iraq: The Making of the Modern Assyrian and Chaldean Appellations,” in The Arab Studies Journal 24.2 (2016), 29). My dad notes that if an empire which recently conquered half the world was founded by “Anglo-Saxons,” we shouldn’t be embarrassed to say “Assyro-Chaldean.”