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12.2 How long they had been there

12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

Assyrian Christians are on record in Urmi and on its plain back into the Middle Ages: a bishop of Urmi is mentioned in 1111, and the town's church of Mat Maryam in 1284. When Aramaic speakers first arrived, nobody knows.

The likeliest story is that they came down from the mountains of eastern Turkey — and the evidence is the language itself, which is more closely related to the Neo-Aramaic of those mountains than to the dialects of Iraq. A second clue sits further back: Urmi Assyrian holds Arabic loanwords that kept their Arabic sounds, so at some point these speakers' ancestors were living alongside Arabic in northern Mesopotamia.

So the language you are learning arrived in Iran. On the family tree of Neo-Aramaic it sits on the far north-eastern edge — the end of the line, not the centre. The centre was Iraq.

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