Syriacs

The Lake Urmia region in northwest Iran is one often overlooked not only in terms of Syriac studies, but also when it comes to Eastern Christianity and especially art and architecture — not the least because many western scholars have found the area to be inaccessible.

Prior to the First World War this region was an Assyrian Christian cultural centre and, especially from the 1830s onwards, it witnessed an unprecedented renaissance in terms of original cultural and literary output. Indeed, the Urmia region stands out as one where the Assyrians were sufficiently numerous and well off enough to develop excellent skills as stonecutters, copyists, and builders — especially from the sixteenth century onwards.

A common generalisation has been that the Assyrians of Urmia, being for the most part rural agriculturalists and members of the largely aniconic Church of the East, were thus devoid of any serious kind of artistic expression. Despite this misconception, evidence does exist in the form of tombstone art, manuscript miniatures and architecture, whether religious or domestic, all of which may be seen as forms of visual expression comparable to that of their neighbours. Although much of the older material has not survived due to constant wars, pogroms and conflict in the area, enough still remains to warrant serious study. This is important in reconstructing a yet poorly documented and little-studied part of Middle Eastern art history.

The objective of the present article is to give a brief, introductory description of some Neo-Aramaic manuscripts belonging to a private collection authored and compiled by Khivron ‘Azīzī (Urmia) that has remained completely unknown to scholars. This collection consists now of 12 manuscripts in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, which are housed together in my own library in Melbourne, Australia. Furthermore, I hope that this description will draw the attention of scholars to the collection, especially for the contents of the manuscripts. More important, maybe, is that this collection gives insight into a most unknown and not well studied period in the history of the Assyrians in Iran, namely the mid to late twentieth century. This encompasses the later years of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule as well as the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, and their effects on the Assyrians remaining in Urmia.

The monograph discusses up-to-date issues concerning the acculturation of a Middle Eastern group in a European country. The book is based on research conducted by the Author in 2014 in the Assyrian/Syriac diaspora in Sweden, within the framework of the “Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe” project. Assyrians/Syriacs (Assyrier/Syrianer) began to arrive in Scandinavia in the late 1960s, fleeing the wars and meagre economic prospects in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Today, they constitute an active diaspora which contributes in various ways to the development of its new homeland and numbers around 150 000 people. The Author describes Swedish migration and integration policies, the history of the Assyrian/Syriac community in the Middle East, the phases and forms of institutionalisation in Sweden, internal dynamics as well as the group’s relations with external actors and its transnational links. One of the main findings of the book is that the ethn...

Works concerning astrology and divination comprise one of the least studied Syriac literary genres. The most common of these is that simply titled Spar-Sammané (Book of Medicines). It is a work which arouses strong feelings of mystery in most Assyrians today, with a great number of original manuscripts jealously guarded by their owners from inquisitive eyes. The Spar-Sammané exists in many different recensions and versions, with most manuscripts originating from northern Iraq and southeast Turkey  – largely within an East Syriac milieu. At the present time, an uncritical edition of only one manuscript has ever been published and translated into English – by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge in 1913. The translation of another version into Neo-Aramaic was published in Chicago during the 1990s. Between September and December 2009 this writer has, for the first time, managed to document and digitise eight versions of this book in Classical Syriac and Neo-Aramaic, still kept in private collections which he was given access to in Dohuk (Iraq) and villages of the Khabur region (Syria). The aim of this paper will be to provide an introduction on Syriac literature concerning astrology and divination, an overview of the different versions known to exist in both manuscript and print form, and will briefly touch on some of what is contained in different versions of the Spar-Sammané.

The text and translation of the selected letters presented here (twenty-one in all) forms part of a hitherto unpublished corpus of letters in Syriac, Neo-Aramaic and Arabic written and sent during the 1880’s from Mosul to Berlin by Gabriel Jeremiah Shāmīr to Carl Eduard Sachau. The former was a local Assyrian book-collector and copyist whilst the latter was a renowned Orientalist and prolific scholar who edited and translated many Syriac and Arabic works.

The monograph discusses up-to-date issues concerning the acculturation of a Middle Eastern group in a European country. The book is based on research conducted by the Author in 2014 in the Assyrian/Syriac diaspora in Sweden, within the framework of the “Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe” project. Assyrians/Syriacs (Assyrier/Syrianer) began to arrive in Scandinavia in the late 1960s, fleeing the wars and meagre economic prospects in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Today, they constitute an active diaspora which contributes in various ways to the development of its new homeland and numbers around 150 000 people. The Author describes Swedish migration and integration policies, the history of the Assyrian/Syriac community in the Middle East, the phases and forms of institutionalisation in Sweden, internal dynamics as well as the group’s relations with external actors and its transnational links. One of the main findings of the book is that the ethno-national identity of this community was largely constructed in the Swedish diaspora and is considerably more complex than it had previously been described in research. The identity in question is not a single construct, but rather a few – if not a few dozen – variants, although polarisation resulting from the divide between Assyrians and Arameans/Suryoye/Syriacs is visible.

Since late antiquity, northern Mesopotamia had been the cradle of two main Christian communities, namely, the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. From the late Middle Ages onwards, however, their newly-created Catholic counterparts, as well as Protestant offshoots in the modern period, have further added to this uneasy and often antagonistic mix. Despite these Churches sharing a common Syriac liturgical language, and their members speaking Neo-Aramaic and sharing a common Assyrian ethnicity and heritage, they have time and again found themselves at loggerheads in the historical record over differences in theology, Christology, allegiance and claims to apostolic succession. With this diversification of creeds and loyalties amongst the Syriac Churches, there also came a need for each community to legitimise, consolidate and renew itself as it saw fit in order to be able to remain in competition with its ‘rivals.’ Part of this process was embodied in the appropriation of churches and monasteries belonging to the ‘others’ and their modification to conform to the ecclesiastical norms of the new owners.

In this study, cases of churches which have largely changed hands between the Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox Church, Chaldean Catholic Church and Syriac Catholic Church will be discussed in an effort to illustrate this un-Christian process of control, appropriation and dispossession, as well as the transferral and imposition of one form of Christian expression on an edifice which previously belonged to another denomination. Examples of church buildings in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran will hence be discussed in an effort to understand the way in which this heritage is appropriated and transferred, as well as the method through which one denomination’s own heritage can be transferred to an existing structure built by an opposing one.

Originating from Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Assyrians/Syriacs started to migrate to Scandinavia in the late 1960s and are presently the largest Middle Eastern Christian ethnic community in Sweden. Despite generally close relations between parents and children, there are significant differences between generations with regards to education, language competences, religious practices, traditions, but also opinions on gender equality as well as attitudes towards other communities. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of these differences. The paper is based on findings from fieldwork (40 semi-structured interviews) conducted in Stockholm and Södertälje, Sweden, during 2014. The paper is part of the “Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe” project.

In the liturgical literature of the Church of East (the so-called Nestorian), the Wardā collection, meant for the liturgical performance at night services on the festival days and Sundays of the whole liturgical year, holds a special place. Strophic hymns – ōnītā (pl. ōnyātā) – contained in the collection are still a part of the liturgy of the East Syrian Church. Altogether, the collection comprises more than 120 hymns, most of which are ascribed to Gīwargīs Wardā (13th century), who is the eponym of this book. According to their content, the hymns can be divided into five categories: exegetic, hagiographic, apocryphal narratives, describing historical events and calamities, dedicated to other subjects. The first part of the book is a detailed study of the textual, poetical and historical peculiarities of the Wardā collection. Ist evolution stages and the main types have been reconstructed. A special chapter focuses on the position of this book in Syriac church literature and defines ist main sources. The second part represents a critical edition of 35 hymns from the Wardā collection according to the existing manuscripts, including English translations. Many of these hymns have been translated for the first time.

Through Nicholas Al-Jeloo's exhibition, the general Fairfield community is able to witness the immense pride of the Assyrian people and the celebration of Persistence & Existence. The Assyrians are a key community in Fairfield. This exhibition showcases how the contemporary life of the Assyrian people is deeply rooted in the past and traditions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

Zerrin Ozlem Biner’s monograph ‘States of Dispossession’ invites the reader to a multidimensional anthropological journey in Turkey’s south-eastern region claimed as historical ‘homeland’ by several ethnic and religious communities including the Kurds, Syriac Christians and Arabs, among others. Biner offers a non-essentialist reading of interethnic relations around the question of (dis)possession in times of violent and peaceful coexistence of communities in the historical city of Mardin and its surrounding towns and villages. In this regard, the reader is often implicitly reminded of historiographical traps of rival nationalistic discourses dealing with this multi-ethnic and multireligious land.
The book tackles vital politico-historical issues of area studies in the Middle East. It challenges the Muslim-dominant readings of the region reproduced – to varying extents – in the discourses of the states, media and academics. The author touches on violence led by the state, community and individuals including genocide, ethnic cleansing, dispossession, reappropriation of land and resources mainly by Muslim subjects (Kurds and Arabs), first of the Ottoman Empire and then of the Turkish Republic that enable them to be new hegemonic dwellers of the historically diverse land.
Biner carries out her analysis of conflict and ethnic relations in a subtle way. Instead of presenting a grand portrait of a post-genocidal nation-building process, she prioritizes daily repercussions of this new setting in the lives of Mardinites. Her original contribution is the successful incorporation of imagined spiritual actor’s (the jinn, the ghosts, etc.) into the analysis of human subjects of the field while they are interacting with the built (cemeteries, monasteries and houses in cement and stone) and natural environment (fields). Throughout the book, we see examples of this multi-layered and multidimensional interaction supported by quotations from the people inhabiting and/or digging into these houses about how they see these properties and how they relate or detach these properties to/from history. Biner makes the reader question the functions of the spiritual beings imagined by the new owners in the process of their internalization of reappropriation of property that once belonged to individuals or communities from different ethnic or religious backgrounds. Therefore, the book projects on microlocality benefiting from certain elements of oral history of superstition, ideas and materiality.

The book concerns the process of identity formation among modern Assyrians and Arameans – a Christian minority from the Middle East. Until the beginning of 20th century the community developed strong collective identity, based on the belonging to one of the Oriental Churches and Aramaic language. Currently, the group is undergoing a process of national identity construction. The latter splits into at least two sub-identities – Assyrian and Aramean. The book consists of four parts: theoretical framework, historical background in the Middle East, modern history in the diaspora, as well as sociological analysis of 13 in-depth interviews and results of 796 online surveys. The book advances a thesis that the original ethno-religious identity of Assyrians and Arameans transforms into more ethno-national one in the diaspora.

Bozza di programma del Laboratorio «Testi cristiani antichi (II-VII sec.)» – Università Roma Tre (primo semestre 2021-2022)
The draft program of the Laboratory «Ancient Christian Texts (II-VII sec.)» – Roma Tre University (first Semester 2021-2022)
Per info: mpavan@os.uniroma3.it

Bu makale farklı etnik-dini gruplar arasında kurulmuş sanal akrabalık bağlarının gruplar arası ilişkilere ve toplumsal dayanışmaya katkısını incelemektedir. Sanal akrabalık, evlilik ya da kan bağı yoluyla kurulan akrabalık ilişkilerinin dışında akrabalık terimlerinin kullanıldığı yakın sosyal ilişkilere işaret etmektedir. Bu ilişkiler kişilere resmi akrabalık bağlarından daha fazla manevi ve maddi destek sağlayabilmektedir. Makale, etnografi yöntemi ile toplanmış verilere dayanarak Mardin'deki gruplar arasında süt akrabalığı ve kirvelik ile kurulmuş sanal akrabalık bağlarını analiz etmektedir. Kirvelik sosyo-kültürel uzlaşıya dayalı ve sünnet ritüeli ile yakından bağlantılı bir kurum iken süt akrabalığı dini kurallar ile belirlenmiş bir uygulamadır. Her iki sanal akrabalık toplumsal kabul görmüş; süt akrabalığı daha ziyade Müslümanlar ve Süryaniler arasında, kirvelik ise Müslümanlar ve Ezidiler arasında tesis edilmiştir. Bu bağları incelemek üzere makale önce sanal akrabalık ile ilgili literatürü gözden geçirmektedir. Daha sonra Mardin'de kurulmuş sanal akrabalık örneklerini ve gruplar arası ilişkilere etkilerini incelemektedir. Son olarak makale, bu akrabalık örneklerinde etnik-dini grupların titizlikle uyguladıkları evlilik yasağının önemine işaret etmektedir. Abstract This article analyses the contribution of fictive kinship ties established between different ethno-religious groups to intergroup relations and social solidarity. Fictive kinship refers to close relations between the parties, out of kinship established by marriage or blood tie, and associated to conventional kinship terms. These relations would provide people moral and financial support more than formal ones. Based on ethnographic data, this article analyses fictive kinship ties established by milk kinship and kirvelik between different groups in Mardin. Milk kinship is a practice specified by religious rules; however, kirvelik is an institution based on socio-cultural agreement, and strongly related to circumcision ritual. Both are socially accepted; milk kinship is mostly practiced

Third part of three essays (in Russian) on the Ottoman genocide against indigenous Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman occupied Iran with focus on the East and West Syriacs (vulgo Nestorians and Jacobites, or Assyrians and Arameans)

Hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms are widely used to secure wireless networks. They guarantee good security performance at low processing and energy costs. However, unlike traditional implementations, they are vulnerable to side channel attacks. Particularly, fault attacks have proved their efficiency in cracking hardware implementation of some robust symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms. In this paper, we develop an FPGA version of the attack proposed by Piret and Quisquater in [?] against the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. Through temporal and spatial analyses of the rounds that have been affected by the fault injection process, we adapt the aforementioned attack to our context. The results obtained in this paper can serve to design a more secure FPGA implementation of AES.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4689099