Learn Assyrian › Grammar

12.3 Before 1900: a village language

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

Until the twentieth century almost all of these Assyrians lived in villages on the plain north and south of the town, not in the town itself. Most of those villages were entirely Assyrian, and the villagers were farmers. Before the First World War there were more than two hundred of them.

The proportions are worth sitting with. When the American missionary Justin Perkins first came in the 1830s, he reckoned about 600 Assyrians in the town of Urmi and 30,000 or 40,000 on the surrounding plain.

Nearly all belonged to the Church of the East, under a Patriarch who lived at Qodshanis in the Hakkari mountains of south-eastern Turkey. A small minority were Chaldean — the village of Ardishay south of Urmi, and the Salamas region north of the lake.

Two hundred villages, each with its own slightly different Assyrian. Hold on to that; it explains §12.7.

---