The Name That Names an Empire

In 1983, three books were published that would reshape how scholars understand the relationship between identity and political power. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism argued that nationalism is not the awakening of dormant nations but a consequence of industrial modernization: the state requires cultural homogeneity to administer an industrial economy, and nationalism is the ideology that delivers it. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities showed that the nation is "imagined" because its members will never know most of their fellow-members, and that this imagination is produced by specific technologies: print capitalism, the newspaper, the census, the map, the museum. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition documented how practices presented as ancient are often recent creations, designed to establish continuity with a suitable historic past and to legitimize present arrangements.

These frameworks were not developed for any one community. They describe the general mechanics by which modern identities are assembled from selected historical materials, standardized through institutional practice, and stabilized through repetition until they acquire the appearance of nature. The appearance is the product. It is telling that all three volumes appeared in the same year. What Gellner attributed to the structural requirements of industrial economies, Anderson attributed to the technologies of imagination, and Hobsbawm attributed to the political utility of manufactured continuity. Each identified a different mechanism for the same outcome: identities experienced as primordial that are, in fact, assembled.

This analysis applies those mechanics to a specific case: the construction of "Assyrian" as an ethnic identity among Syriac Christians of Mesopotamian heritage, and what that construction produces when it encounters the political realities of diaspora, displacement, and competing claims.

The argument is not that the communities are fictional. The suffering is documented. The displacement is ongoing. The language is ancient. What is constructed is the specific form the identity takes: the insistence that these communities constitute a single ethnos whose essence is Assyrian, whose unity is disrupted only by ecclesiastical accident, and whose legitimacy derives from descent from the builders of the first civilization. Each element of this claim was assembled under identifiable historical conditions. Each serves identifiable interests. And each produces consequences that are not always in the interest of the communities the claim purports to represent.

The modern Assyrian identity was not inherited from antiquity. It was assembled in the nineteenth century, under specific conditions, by specific actors. The process has been documented in detail by Adam Becker in Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject.

In the 1830s, American Protestant missionaries arrived in northwestern Persia, primarily in the Urmia region, and established contact with the Church of the East, whose adherents they called "Nestorians." The missionaries built schools, imported printing presses, and produced periodicals in Neo-Aramaic. They taught Protestant piety, Western science, and biblical scholarship. They also taught something else: a way of reading the ancient Near Eastern past through the lens of European archaeology and biblical geography, in which the ruins of Nineveh and the inscriptions of Ashurbanipal were not distant relics but ancestral inheritance.

Becker identifies the process as indirect and unintended (Becker, 2015, ch. 3-5). The missionaries did not tell their students "you are Assyrians." They intended to create Protestants, not nationalists. But the educational infrastructure they built, the literacy they promoted, the print culture they established, and the archaeological vocabulary they introduced supplied local Christian elites with the materials for a different project entirely: the reinterpretation of their communal identity as descent from the ancient Assyrians of Mesopotamia. The millet became a nation. The liturgical community became an ethnic group. The Church of the East became the Assyrian people. Racho Donef’s "From the Millet to the Nation" traces this transition in granular detail, showing how intellectuals like Naum Faiq (1868-1930) actively called for reunification across sectarian lines, using a national vocabulary that had not existed a generation earlier.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) provides the broader frame. Western scholarship did not discover the ancient Near East. It produced it as an object of knowledge, through excavation, classification, and narrative, in ways that served imperial interests. The Mesopotamian past was extracted from the ground by Layard at Nimrud and Botta at Khorsabad and deposited in the British Museum and the Louvre. The populations still living in the region were treated as incidental to the civilizations they were presumed to have succeeded rather than continued (Said, 1978, pp. 1-28). When Syriac Christians adopted the "Assyrian" label, they were, in part, reclaiming what Orientalist scholarship had taken: the right to name their own relationship to the ruins. But they were also accepting the terms of that scholarship, using a category, "Assyrian," that European archaeology had defined and European imperialism had made legible. The identity was assembled from the materials the empire left behind, including the empire’s way of categorizing the past.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 934-609 BC) was a territorial state whose administrative logic was expansion, extraction, and population management. Its subjects spoke Akkadian, Aramaic, Hurrian, and numerous other languages. The empire practiced mass deportation on a scale unparalleled in the ancient world. Bustenay Oded’s foundational study, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (1979), estimates approximately 4.4 million people (plus or minus 900,000) were forcibly resettled over a 250-year period, with 85 percent relocated to the Assyrian heartland. Sargon II’s inscriptions record the deportation of 27,290 people from Samaria alone (Annals of Sargon II, c. 722 BC). Sennacherib resettled populations across the breadth of Mesopotamia. The state supervised these transfers directly, providing deportees with supplies including food, clothing, and oil (Oded, 1979, pp. 19-22). Aramaic became the lingua franca not because the Assyrians were Aramean but because the empire’s own deportation policies distributed Aramaic-speaking populations across its territories. By the late first millennium BC, the language of administration had shifted from Akkadian to Aramaic. The empire absorbed the language of the peoples it conquered.

The polity was multi-ethnic by design. This is not a modern reinterpretation. It is the explicit logic of the administrative records. Karen Radner’s research on Assyrian resettlement policy confirms that deportations served multiple strategic functions: punishment as an alternative to execution, redistribution of skilled labour, agricultural development of frontier zones, and the deliberate weakening of local identities through population mixing. The empire’s coherence was political, not ethnic. When it collapsed in 609 BC, what survived was not a people called "Assyrian" in the ethnic sense, but populations, institutions, and linguistic practices that continued across the region under successive Persian, Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman rule.

Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) established the principle that ethnic categories are not defined by their cultural content but by the boundaries that separate them from other categories. Boundaries persist even when individuals cross them, even when the cultural practices on either side converge. What maintains the category is not shared substance but the social process of marking difference (Barth, 1969, pp. 9-38). Apply this to the modern case: the relevant boundary is not between ancient Assyrians and their neighbours across twenty-six centuries. It is between present-day communities that speak the same language, practice the same liturgy, and inhabit the same diaspora, yet insist on different labels. The boundary that matters is not the one between the Assyrian Empire and the Babylonian. It is the one between the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, and between both of them and the Syriac Orthodox. Those boundaries are ecclesiastical. They were produced by church politics, not by ethnic divergence. The ethnic label "Assyrian" claims to transcend those boundaries. It has not.

No comparable imperial population makes an equivalent claim in the modern world. Italians do not call themselves Romans. Greeks do not identify as Byzantines in the modern ethnic sense. The citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire called themselves Rhōmaîoi for a thousand years, but as Gill Page (Byzantina Symmeikta, 2017) demonstrates, this was a political and cultural identity tied to a state, not a claim of descent from the founders of the city of Rome. When that state ended, the identity did not persist as a modern ethnic category. Mongol identity exists today, but it names a people with continuous linguistic and territorial presence, not the subjects of the Khans' conquests. Persian identity is tied to language and geography. What distinguishes "Assyrian" is that it asks an imperial administrative category to perform the work of an ethnic one, across a gap of twenty-six centuries, for populations whose actual cultural continuity runs through Aramaic language and Syriac liturgy, not through the administrative apparatus of the Neo-Assyrian state.

The identity assembled by missionaries in Urmia acquired military utility under the British Empire. The sequence, from spiritual instruction to armed service to massacre, is the spine of the modern Assyrian political condition.

During World War I, Assyrian tribal forces under Agha Petros and the authority of Patriarch Mar Shimun XIX fought for the Entente against Ottoman and Kurdish forces in the Hakkari mountains and around Lake Urmia. Victories at Suldouze and Sauj Bulak in 1918 demonstrated significant military capacity (Assyrian Volunteers). The collapse of Russian support after the Bolshevik Revolution left these forces catastrophically exposed. The retreat from Urmia and Hakkari produced losses that scholarship has struggled to quantify precisely. The genocide of 1914-1918, known as Seyfo ("the sword"), killed an estimated 250,000-300,000 Syriac Christians across Ottoman territory and northwestern Persia (Assyrian Policy Institute). Kurdish irregular forces participated alongside Ottoman troops. The trauma was foundational and remains constitutive of modern Assyrian collective memory.

Recognition has been partial and politically fraught. Sweden’s parliament recognized the genocide in March 2010 by a single vote (131-130), explicitly naming Assyrians alongside Armenians and Greeks. The Dutch Parliament followed in 2007, the German Bundestag in 2016, and France’s Senate in 2023. The Seyfo Center (founded 2004) and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (resolution of 2007) have maintained the recognition campaign. Turkey, as successor state to the Ottoman Empire, has not recognized the genocide. A 2019 study in Holocaust and Genocide Studies documents how Aramean, Assyrian, and Chaldean diaspora groups compete over whose name appears in recognition resolutions, an observation that demonstrates how the identity dispute penetrates even the commemoration of shared catastrophe.

After the war, Britain formed the Iraq Levies, a locally recruited force under British officers. Following the 1921 Cairo Conference, the Levies became predominantly Assyrian. They guarded RAF bases at Habbaniya and elsewhere, held northern frontiers, and served as instruments of British control in Mandate Iraq. The arrangement provided Assyrians with arms, pay, and institutional recognition. It also produced a structural problem that scholarship has identified with precision. A Georgetown University study describes the Levies as producing "aliens in uniforms," in a newly independent state that experienced British authority as humiliation. The Assyrians were armed by the same power that Iraqi nationalists were trying to expel. The communal alienation was not incidental to the colonial arrangement. It was produced by it.

The Simele massacre of August 1933 was the consequence of that structural position. Iraqi army forces under General Bakr Sidqi attacked Assyrian villages across the Simele district. Estimates range from 600 to 3,000 killed across dozens of settlements. The massacre was celebrated in Baghdad; Bakr Sidqi received a hero’s welcome. A 2023 study in Middle Eastern Studies documents how the event also ended American missionary sympathy for the Assyrians, severing one of the few remaining external support structures.

The massacre was formative for more than Assyrian collective memory. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who would coin the term "genocide" in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), cited the destruction of ethnic groups including the Assyrians as precedents that shaped his thinking. The word he invented, from Greek genos and Latin -cide, was itself assembled, a new vocabulary for an ancient practice. The community whose massacre contributed to that vocabulary is now losing another one: the language it speaks.

The claim that Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs are "ethnically one people, divided only by church affiliation" treats the ecclesiastical divisions as surface phenomena over a unified ethnic depth. The historical record suggests the opposite: the ecclesiastical structures are the primary institutions through which these populations have organized, governed, and reproduced themselves for five centuries. The "surface" is the structure. Shak Hanish, in a foundational 2008 article in Digest of Middle East Studies, frames this as "an ethnic identity problem" whose resolution remains beyond the capacity of any single label.

The Schism of 1552 split the Church of the East. One faction, under Yohannan Sulaqa, entered communion with Rome, producing what became the Chaldean Catholic Church. The union was contested, intermittent, and did not stabilize until the nineteenth century. The Chaldean Church retains Syriac liturgy and the East Syriac rite while recognizing papal authority. The Assyrian Church of the East remained independent, maintaining its own patriarchate, its own canon law, and its own relationship to the Mesopotamian past.

The Syriac Orthodox Church is a separate body entirely. It is Oriental Orthodox, West Syriac in rite, with a patriarchate tracing to Antioch and to the Christological divisions of the fifth century. It is not a product of the 1552 schism. Its congregations in Turkey and Syria have often identified as Aramean or Süryani, emphasizing Aramaic linguistic continuity rather than Assyrian imperial descent. The World Council of Arameans (Syriacs) promotes this identification explicitly, arguing that Süryani can mean "Syrian, Syriac, or Aramean" rather than "Assyrian."

These are not incidental variations. They are distinct institutional traditions with separate governance, separate liturgical practice, and separate political orientations maintained across half a millennium. The Chaldean Catholic Church answers to Rome. The Assyrian Church of the East does not. The Syriac Orthodox Church answers to neither. Each has produced its own diaspora organizations, its own media, its own political parties. The claim that all three are "really" one ethnos, divided only by the accidents of church history, must explain why those accidents have produced such durable institutional divergence, and why the "unified" ethnos has never produced unified institutions.

Rogers Brubaker’s Ethnicity Without Groups (Harvard University Press, 2004) provides the analytical vocabulary for understanding this discrepancy. Brubaker identifies what he calls "groupism": the tendency to treat ethnic, racial, and national categories as if they were bounded, internally homogeneous entities that act as collective agents (Brubaker, 2004, pp. 7-27). The reality, he argues, is that ethnicity operates not as a thing people have but as a way of seeing, a cognitive framework through which events are interpreted and actions are organized. The question is not "what is the Assyrian group?" but "who performs the group-making, and what does the performance produce?"

The performance, in this case, produces a vocabulary of unity that coexists with the institutional reality of division. Assyrian nationalists in the diaspora assert ethnic oneness. Chaldean organizations in Detroit, where the largest Chaldean community outside Iraq is concentrated in Sterling Heights and surrounding suburbs, often referred to as "Little Nineveh," resist the Assyrian label (Hanoosh, 2019). Syriac communities in Sweden, where approximately 150,000 people of Syriac Christian heritage constitute one of the largest diaspora concentrations in Europe, with Södertälje as its informal capital (Woźniak-Bobińska, 2021), have split their organizational life down the middle. In Södertälje, the identity dispute has its own football clubs.

Identity disputes do not operate in isolation. They are resources for actors with interests in a divided minority. The political instrumentalization of the Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac fragmentation is documented across multiple jurisdictions and institutional layers.

In February 2024, Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court declared the Kurdistan Region’s eleven reserved minority quota seats unconstitutional. Christian candidates, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac, were forced to compete directly with dominant Kurdish parties. Six Christian parties accused the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of having "exploited and seized" those seats over years. The quota system had been a mechanism, however imperfect, for guaranteed minimal representation. Its elimination transferred that representation to a political landscape where Kurdish parties held structural advantages in every dimension: funding, media, administrative control, and the apparatus of the Kurdistan Regional Government itself.

The pattern is broader than any single ruling. Geopolitical commentary and independent field reports document that Kurdish nationalist politics have systematically marginalized Assyrian communities in Iraqi Kurdistan: property appropriation in the Nineveh Plains, employment inequality, weakened political representation, jurisdictional ambiguity in areas contested between Baghdad and Erbil. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (2023 Country Update) documents protection gaps, governance vacuums, and militia-dominated security arrangements affecting Christians and other minorities in KRG-administered areas. A Springer study by Pamjav et al. on Chaldo-Assyrian identity in Iraqi Kurdistan describes the "interface" between ethnic and religious factors as shaped by decades of competing Kurdish and Assyrian nationalist claims.

Iraq’s 2005 Constitution, Article 125, guarantees the administrative, political, cultural, and educational rights of "various nationalities, such as Turkmen, Chaldo-Assyrians and all other constituents." The hyphenated label was itself a political compromise, documented by the Institute for International Law and Human Rights as satisfying neither those who insisted on "Assyrian" alone nor those who insisted on "Chaldean." It has not produced the autonomous administrative arrangements it was intended to enable. The Nineveh Plains, the historical concentration of Aramaic-speaking Christian communities and the focal area for autonomy proposals (ATINER, 2012), suffered mass displacement under ISIS in 2014 and remains contested between Iraqi federal forces, KRG peshmerga, and various militia groups. The constitutional guarantee is written. The institutional reality is absence.

The structural point is this: a fractured minority is easier to manage than a cohesive one. When three communities compete over a single label, the competition consumes organizational energy that might otherwise produce political capacity. When diaspora organizations lobby for genocide recognition, they compete over which name, Assyrian, Syriac, Aramean, Chaldo-Assyrian, appears in the resolution. The divisions are not only internal. They are functional. They serve actors who benefit from a minority that cannot organize a unified political front. The identity dispute is not merely a cultural question. It is a structural resource for those who do not share it.

There is a recurring motif in Assyrian diaspora discourse: the appeal to civilizational precedence. We invented writing. We built the first cities. We established the first law codes. We are the oldest civilization.

The historical raw material is available. Cuneiform writing emerged in southern Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. The cities of Sumer and Akkad are among the earliest known urban settlements. The legal traditions of Mesopotamia, from Ur-Nammu (c. 2100-2050 BC) through Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), are foundational to the history of jurisprudence. These are established facts. The question is what work they do in the present, and for whom.

Hobsbawm’s framework (1983, ch. 1) applies with particular force. The "invention of tradition" does not mean the tradition is fabricated from nothing. It means that a selective relationship to the past is established and maintained for present purposes. Highland kilts, the British coronation ceremony, the rituals of colonial India, all drew on historical materials. What made them "invented" was the specific selection, the deliberate emphasis, and the political function the tradition served. When diaspora organizations circulate the claim that "Assyrians built the first civilization," the historical raw material is available. What is invented is the selection: the emphasis on imperial achievement over linguistic continuity, the framing of a multi-ethnic empire as a single-origin ethnos, and the deployment of civilizational precedence as the primary source of collective status.

The prestige economy operates within the diaspora. It compensates for marginalization. It answers the invisibility that Syriac Christians experience in the West and the persecution they have endured in the Middle East. It provides a narrative of significance for communities that have been displaced, dispersed, and rendered anonymous. The American Historical Association (2018) documents how the indigeneity framework has been deployed by Assyrian advocates to anchor claims to land and recognition, particularly in the wake of ISIS destruction of archaeological sites. The claim to civilizational priority is not without strategic purpose.

But it also produces a specific vulnerability. An identity anchored to "we were first" invites the counter-claim "no, we were first." The Aramean/Assyrian dispute is, in part, a dispute over civilizational precedence. The World Council of Arameans asserts that Arameans are indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia and that the Aramaic language constitutes the thread of continuity, not any imperial label. Precedence is zero-sum. Every claim of priority from one side is experienced as erasure by the other. And the zero-sum logic consumes the organizational energy that shared claims, to language, to liturgy, to survival, would not.

There is a deeper cost that Hobsbawm’s collaborator Terence Ranger identified in the African colonial context (Ranger, 1983, ch. 6): when identity is oriented toward ancient achievement, it can crowd out attention to the practices that actually sustain community in the present. Language. Liturgy. Mutual aid. Political organizing. The prestige of having built Nineveh does not preserve Neo-Aramaic. The status of having invented writing does not protect the Nineveh Plains from militia governance. The glory of the past answers a psychological need. It does not, by itself, address the structural conditions of the present. And when collective attention is finite, as it always is, the allocation toward prestige is an allocation away from preservation.

UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages classifies Assyrian Neo-Aramaic as endangered. Ethnologue reports that intergenerational transmission is weakening: it is "no longer the norm that children learn and use" the language in some communities. The Glottolog database classifies its status as "shifting," indicating endangered evidence at the level of intergenerational transfer. Speaker estimates are uncertain and contested, ranging from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand depending on how dialects are counted and which diaspora communities are included. What is not contested is the direction: decline.

In Detroit, the language of daily life is increasingly English. In Södertälje, it is increasingly Swedish. In Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto. The pattern is the same across every major diaspora concentration. The grandparents speak Suryoyo or Sureth. The parents understand it. The children do not. The liturgy continues in Classical Syriac. The sermons shift to the national language of the host country. The weddings retain Aramaic songs. The conversations at the reception are in English.

This is not an accusation. Language shift in diaspora is nearly universal and well-documented across hundreds of minority communities. It is a structural consequence of the conditions Gellner (1983, ch. 3) described: the industrial and post-industrial state requires linguistic standardization, and the educational and economic institutions of the host country select for the dominant language. What the shift does, however, is place the prestige economy in relief. The communities that claim descent from the inventors of writing are losing their own language. The identity that emphasizes civilizational priority does not, by itself, fund language schools, produce Neo-Aramaic media, or create the institutional conditions for intergenerational transmission. The irony is structural, not incidental.

This is where the analytical frameworks converge in a way that is specific to this case and, as far as the available literature indicates, has not been articulated elsewhere. Anderson’s imagined community (1983) is sustained by print capitalism and institutional infrastructure. If the infrastructure does not operate in the community’s language, the community imagines itself in the language of the host country, and the link to the inherited tradition weakens. Gellner’s nationalism (1983) requires cultural standardization, which in diaspora contexts means standardization into the dominant culture, not preservation of the minority one. Hobsbawm’s invented traditions (1983) are durable only when they are performed through living institutions. A tradition that exists primarily in commemorative rhetoric, in the assertion that "we were the first civilization," without a corresponding institutional practice of language preservation, liturgical vitality, and communal organization, is a tradition that commemorates its own attenuation.

The community that helped produce the vocabulary of genocide is losing the vocabulary of its own daily life. The first irony is historical. The second is structural. And the distance between them is measured in the number of children who can still speak the language their grandparents brought from the Nineveh Plains.

The argument of this analysis is structural, not moral. It does not claim that Assyrian identity is false, or that the communities it names are not real, or that the suffering it commemorates is not legitimate. It claims that the specific form the identity has taken, ethnicity named after an empire, unity asserted over persistent institutional division, status derived from civilizational precedence, produces consequences that can be traced through the evidence presented above.

It produces a category that names an administrative structure where an ethnos should be. The actual markers of communal continuity, Aramaic language, Syriac liturgy, shared geography, shared displacement, are subordinated to a claim about imperial descent that the historical record, from Oded (1979) on deportation demographics to Dogan et al. (2017) on Y-chromosomal heterogeneity, does not straightforwardly support. The category asks a political entity to do the work of a cultural one. The stretch is visible in the scholarship, in the genetic evidence, and in the persistent failure of the "unified" ethnos to produce unified institutions.

It produces a boundary dispute that consumes organizational energy. Brubaker’s groupism (2004) is not an abstraction in this context. It is enacted in football stadiums in Södertälje, in constitutional negotiations in Baghdad, in recognition campaigns across European parliaments, in the allocation of diaspora resources from Detroit to Sydney. The boundary between Assyrian and Syriac and Chaldean and Aramean is not maintained by external pressure. It is maintained by the communities themselves, through the institutional practices that Barth (1969) identified as the mechanism of ethnic differentiation. The unity the label claims is contradicted by the boundaries the label maintains.

It produces a prestige economy that can substitute for solidarity. The claim to civilizational precedence answers a need. But it answers it in a way that orients collective identity toward the past rather than toward the conditions of the present. A community whose primary identity claim is "we built the first cities" is a community that may not allocate sufficient attention to the fact that its language is dying, its homeland is contested, and its political representation is being absorbed by larger actors who benefit from the fragmentation.

And it produces a vulnerability that external actors exploit. The Kurdish parties that absorbed the minority quota seats in 2024 did not create the identity dispute. They benefited from it. The Iraqi state that wrote "Chaldo-Assyrian" into the 2005 Constitution did not resolve the dispute. It froze it in a form that could be administered. The Ottoman millet system that organized these populations by confession rather than ethnicity did not invent the divisions. It codified them. At every level, external institutional frameworks have managed the fragmentation rather than overcome it, and the vocabulary of ethnic unity has not prevented those outcomes. It may have enabled them, by providing a rhetoric of solidarity that obscures the absence of its institutional substance.

The communities are real. The displacement is ongoing. The genocide is documented and recognized, however partially, in the parliaments of Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. The Nineveh Plains are contested. The language is endangered. The liturgy continues. The diaspora grows, and disperses, and forgets.

The question this analysis raises is not whether these communities deserve recognition, protection, or solidarity. They do. The question is whether the vocabulary through which that recognition is sought, the insistence on "Assyrian" as the name for something that the historical, linguistic, and institutional evidence suggests is better described as Syriac, Aramaic, or simply as the lived traditions of Mesopotamian Christian communities, serves the communities or serves the politics that have attached to them.

Hobsbawm (1983, p. 4) observed that the invention of tradition intensifies when community is under threat: the more precarious the present, the more elaborate the relationship to the past. The Assyrian case confirms this with unusual clarity. The identity was assembled under conditions of missionary contact, imperial utility, genocide, and displacement. Each layer added urgency. Each layer also added specificity: a particular way of narrating the relationship between past and present that forecloses other ways. The Aramean reading is foreclosed. The Syriac reading is foreclosed. The reading that says "we are the people who speak this language and practice this liturgy and have survived this displacement, and the name matters less than the survival" is foreclosed. What remains is the imperial name, and the hierarchy of precedence it installs.

The vocabulary does not describe the situation. It manages it. The narrative of ethnic unity obscures the institutional reality of division. The prestige economy of civilizational precedence orients collective attention away from the conditions, language death, territorial loss, political fragmentation, that threaten the community’s actual continuity. And the management serves interests that are not always those of the people doing the speaking.