Chaldea was a country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BC, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into Babylonia. Semitic-speaking, it was located in the marshy land of the far southeastern corner of Mesopotamia and briefly came to rule Babylon.
Mitanni, also called Hanigalbat in Assyrian or Naharin in Egyptian texts, was a Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia from c. 1500 to 1300 BC. Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia.
Aram is a region mentioned in the Bible located in present-day Syria, including where the city of Aleppo now stands. At its height, Aram stretched from the Lebanon mountains eastward across the Euphrates, including parts of the Khabur River valley in northwestern Mesopotamia on the border of Iraq. The region was known as The Land of the Amurru during the Akkadian Empire, Neo-Sumerian Empire and Old Assyrian Empire in reference to its largely Amorite inhabitants. During the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire and Achaemenid Empire Aram was known as Eber-Nari.
Upper Mesopotamia is the name used for the uplands and great outwash plain of northwestern Iraq, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey, in the northern Middle East. After the early Muslim conquests of the mid-7th century, the region has been known by the traditional Arabic name of al-Jazira and the Syriac (Aramaic) variant Gāzartā or Gozarto (ܓܙܪܬܐ). The Euphrates and Tigris rivers transform Mesopotamia into almost an island, as they are joined together at the Shatt al-Arab in the Basra Governorate of Iraq, and their sources in eastern Turkey are in close proximity.
Adad-nirari II is generally considered to be the first King of Assyria in the Neo-Assyrian period.
Beth Nahrain ; "house of (two) rivers" is the name for the region known as Mesopotamia in the Syriac language. Geographically, it refers to the areas between and surrounding the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The Aramaic name loosely describes the area between and around the rivers, not only literally between the rivers. The area is considered by Assyrians as their homeland.
Assyrians in Syria are people of Assyrian descent living in Syria. They constituted 2.0% of the pre-Civil War population of Syria of 23 million and 15-20% of the total number of Christians. Assyrian Christians are either Catholic, Church of the East or Syriac Orthodox. Pre-war scholarly estimates placed the total number of Assyrians belonging to the Assyrian Church of the East living in Syria at around 30,000, with between 15,000 and 20,000 of them living along the section of the Khabur river between Tal Tamer in the northwest portion of the river to the dam southeast of the city. They are distinct from the Syrian Christians of western, southern and central Syria, being Eastern Aramaic speakers rather than Arabic speakers, and being of Mesopotamian/Assyrian rather than Levantine/Aramean origin, and are an ancient pre-Arab indigenous people.
The history of Mesopotamia ranges from the earliest human occupation in the Lower Sumaya period up to the Late antiquity. This history is pieced together from evidence retrieved from archaeological excavations and, after the introduction of writing in the late 4th millennium BC, an increasing amount of historical sources. While in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods only parts of Upper Mesopotamia were occupied, the southern alluvium was settled during the late Neolithic period. Mesopotamia has been home to many of the oldest major civilizations, entering history from the Early Bronze Age, for which reason it is often dubbed the cradle of civilization.
The Assyrian homeland or Assyria refers to a geographic and cultural region situated in Northern Mesopotamia that has been traditionally inhabited by Assyrian people. The areas that form the Assyrian homeland are parts of present-day northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and, more recently, northeastern Syria. Moreover, the area that had the greatest concentration of Assyrians in the world until recently is located in the Assyrian Triangle, a region which comprises the Nineveh plains and Hakkari regions. This is where some Assyrian groups seek to create an independent nation state.
Hakkari was a mountainous Assyrian region lying to the south of Lake Van which encompassed parts of the modern provinces of Hakkâri and Şırnak in southeastern Turkey, and the northern fringes of Iraq, and contained dozens of historical Assyrian villages that were primarily centred in the modern-day towns of Yuksekova, Hakkâri, Çukurca, Semdinli and Uludere. Most of the historical Assyrian tribes were situated in Hakkari, with many Assyrians having lived there prior to 1924, or before Seyfo. The name Hakkâri is derived from the Syriac word ܐܲܟܵܪܹ̈ܐ meaning farmers or cultivators.
The history of the Assyrian people begins with the appearance of Akkadian speaking peoples in Mesopotamia at some point between 3500 and 3000 BC, followed by the formation of Assyria in the 25th century BC. During the early bronze age period Sargon of Akkad united all the native Semitic-speakers and the Sumerians of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire. Assyria essentially existed as part of a unified Akkadian nation for much of the period from the 24th century BC to the 22nd century BC, and a nation state from the mid 21st century BC until its destruction as an independent state between 615–599 BC.
Asōristān was the name of the Sasanian province of Babylonia from 226 to 637.
Athura, also called Assyria, was a geographical area within the Achaemenid Empire in Upper Mesopotamia from 539 to 330 BC as a military protectorate state. Although sometimes regarded as a satrapy, Achaemenid royal inscriptions list it as a dahyu, a concept generally interpreted as meaning either a group of people or both a country and its people, without any administrative implication.
Syriac Christians are an ethnoreligious grouping of various ethnic communities of indigenous pre-Arab Semitic and often Neo-Aramaic-speaking Christian people of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. Syriac Christians advocate different terms for ethnic self-designation. Syriac Christians from the Middle East are theologically and culturally closely related to, but should not be confused with the Saint Thomas Christians from India, whose ties to Syriac Christians were a result of trade links and migration by Assyrian Christians from Mesopotamia and the Middle East mostly around the 9th century.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire was an Iron Age Mesopotamian empire, in existence between 911 and 609 BC, and became the largest empire of the world up until that time. The Assyrians perfected early techniques of imperial rule, many of which became standard in later empires, and was, according to many historians, the first real empire in history. The Assyrians were the first to be armed with iron weapons, and their troops employed advanced, effective military tactics.
Diban is a town in eastern Syria, administratively part of the Deir ez-Zor Governorate, located along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, south of Deir ez-Zor, 17 kilometers south of al-Busayrah and 13 kilometers north of Asharah. Nearby localities include Mayadin to the north and east, al-Hawayij to the northeast, Makhan to the south and al-Tayanah to the southeast According to the Syria Central Bureau of Statistics, Diban had a population of 9,000 in the 2004 census. It is the administrative seat of a nahiyah ("subdistrict") which consists of ten localities with a total population of 65,079 in 2004.
Bit-Ḫalupe, an ancient Aramean state in eastern Syria, located within the triangular area formed by the confluence of the Khabur River with the Euphrates River. It was one of the four Aramean states that bordered Assyria. The others were Bit-Zamani, Bit Bahiani and Laqe. By the ninth century BC all of them were assimilated by Assyria.
