Who counts as an Assyrian—and who decides? The question is not a new one. It is at least 4,000 years old, according to a recent academic book that unearths the answer from clay tablets and royal inscriptions.
In November, Cambridge University Press published the book *Ancient Assyrians: Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond* by historian Jonathan Valk. The 338-page book asks: What did it mean to be an Assyrian during the second millennium B.C.? The answer varied from one century to the next.
From a Closed City-State to a Growing Kingdom
Valk bases his analysis on tens of thousands of letters and documents—some from an Assyrian merchant diaspora in what is now Turkey, and others from the state administration in Assur, northern Iraq. These sources make it possible to trace how Assyrian identity underwent a fundamental transformation in just a couple of centuries.
During the Early Assyrian period (ca. 2000–1650 B.C.), Assur was a small, tightly knit city-state. Being Assyrian was an exclusive status—people generally married within the group, and the boundary with the outside world was sharply defined.
A couple of centuries later, during the Middle Assyrian period (ca. 1400–1050 B.C.), Assur had instead become the center of an expansionist kingdom that subjugated large parts of Iraq and Syria. Now the definition broadened: “Assyrians” simply came to mean anyone who was a subject of the Assyrian king—a group that grew as the empire conquered new lands.
The same ethnic name, but two completely different ways of understanding what it meant. Valks point is that identity is never static—it is shaped by the society in which it exists, and changes along with it.
The seed of greater assimilation
The pattern Valk describes for the Middle Assyrian period—that Assyrian identity expanded as the empire grew and subjugated new peoples—is, according to other scholars, an early seed of something that would later become significantly larger. During the Neo-Assyrian period, a few centuries after the time frame Valk covers, Assyria conquered several Aramaic kingdoms in Syria and incorporated their populations into the empire.
The fact that these and other conquered peoples eventually came to be regarded—and to regard themselves—as Assyrians is confirmed by other research in Assyriology, particularly by the scholar Simo Parpola, who has shown how an expanding Assyrian identity gradually absorbed Arameans and other ethnic groups within the empire. This also partly explains why today’s Assyrians speak an Aramaic/Syrian dialect rather than the original Akkadian language—even though the Akkadian heritage did not disappear entirely. Modern Assyrian dialects such as Sureth and Surayt still bear many traces of Akkadian words and expressions, a linguistic echo of the language once spoken in Assur.
At the same time, linguistic research points to another, equally important thread of continuity: the name itself. Although the language changed form, the people continued to call themselves by the same name, in their own language, throughout the millennia—Ashuraye, Suraye, Suroye. According to Assyriologist Robert Rollinger, it is no coincidence that these forms resemble one another: he has shown that even the Greek name “Syria” is essentially an abbreviation of “Assyria.” The name, then, did not stray from its origin—it is the same name, borne by the same people, all the way.
About the Author
Jonathan Valk is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and an associate professor of ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Helsinki. He is also co-editor of *Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective* (New York University Press, 2021)
