Shall This Nation Die
By: Rev. Joseph Naayem
An Historical Essay On The Assyro-Chaldean Christians
By: Rev. Gabriel Oussani
St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, New York
Oct. 1st, 1920
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Ethnographically, the modern Assyro-Chaldeans are the descendants of the Ancient Babylonians, Assyrians and Arameans, who for many millenniums inhabited and ruled over the Tigris - Euphrates valley, Upper Mesopotamia and Syria, and who were the political masters of the Near East for many centuries before the Christian era.
With the downfall of the Kingdoms of Assyria and Babylonia (7th and 6th centuries B. C., respectively) and the political ascendancy of the Medians, Parthians, and Persians (from circa 6th century B. C. to 6th century A. D. especially during the reign of the Sassanide dynasty), they suffered many political and later on religious persecutions, but stood the test heroically.
Incidentally, their very ethnographic identity and their national spirit of independence were completely crushed. They were, so to say, engulfed in the many religious, racial and political whirlpools and currents which swept over their country for more than ten full centuries.
Under the Arab domination (from the 7th to the 13th century A. D.) they once more prospered, and developed the greatest and most extensive Christian Church of the Near East, enjoying vast political and religious privileges, marred at times by occasional and local adversities. From the 13th century on and until our own day, however, this heroic Christian nation suffered such untold misery and persecutions at the hands of the cruel Tartars, Mongols and Mohammedan Turks that at the beginning of the 20th century this once great and fertile country, this glorious and powerful nation, was reduced to less than one-tenth of its former size.
