Asoristan
Asoristan, also known as Suristan, was the name of the Sasanian province of Assyria and Babylonia from 226 to 637.
Name
The Parthian name Asōristān is known from Shapur I's inscription on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht, and from the inscription of Narseh at Paikuli. The region was also called several other names, mostly relating to its indigenous Assyrian inhabitants: Assyria, Athura, Bēṯ Nahren, Bābēl/Bābil, and Ereḫ/Erāq. After the mid-6th century, it was also called Khwārwarān in New Persian. Although it is difficult to determine the true meaning of the renaming of southern Mesopotamia to "Assyria", it is possible that due to the Assyrian kingdom of Adiabene being in the north, it excluded the Assyrians further south and therefore the Persians named it accordingly to include the few million Semitic Mesopotamian people who were descendants of the ancient Assyrians south of Adiabene, contrary to the Greeks renaming Assyrians "Syrians", an Indo-European corruption of "Assyrians". At the very least, names associated with Assyria continued to be used and were not obsolete.The name Asōristān is a compound of Asōr "Assyria" and the Iranian suffix -stan "land of". The name Assyria, in the form Asōristān, was shifted to include what had been ancient Babylonia by the Parthians, and this continued under the Sasanians, the Babylonians being ethnolinguistically the same people as the Assyrians. During the Parthian Empire, much of historical Athura lay to the north of Asoristan in the Assyrian inhabited independent frontier provinces of Upper Mesopotamia : Beth Nuhadra, Beth Garmai, Adiabene, Osroene, Hatra, Tyareh and Assur. when the Sassanid Empire conquered these in the mid-3rd century, they were reincorporated into Asoristan.
History
Names, capital, language
During the Achaemenid and Parthian Empires, Achaemenid Assyria had been known by the Old Persian name Athura. Asōristān, Middle Persian "land of Assyria", was the capital province of the Sasanian Empire and was called Dil-ī Ērānshahr, meaning "Heart of Iran". The city of Ctesiphon served as the capital of both the Parthian and Sasanian Empire, and was for some time the largest city in the world.The main language spoken by the Assyrian people was Eastern Aramaic, which still survives among the Assyrians, with the local Syriac language becoming an important vehicle for Syriac Christianity. The Assyrian Church of the East was founded in Asōristān and it was an important centre of the Syriac Orthodox Church.
Geographical extent
Asōristān was largely identical with ancient Mesopotamia. The northern border is somewhat uncertain but probably went along a line from Anta to Takrīt. Ḥīra was probably the southernmost point, north of Arabia, the border then following the northern part of the swamps of Wasit.Parthian client kingdoms
The Parthians had exercised only loose control at times, allowing for a number of Assyrian kingdoms to flourish in Upper Mesopotamia in the form of independent Osroene, Adiabene, Beth Nuhadra, Beth Garmai and the Arab-Assyrian state of Hatra. Assyriologists such as Georges Roux and Simo Parpola opine that ancient Assur itself may have been independent during this time.The Sasanian Empire conquered Assyria and Mesopotamia from the Parthians during the 220s, and by 260 AD had abolished these independent Assyrian city-states and kingdoms, with the 3000-year-old city of Assur being sacked in 256 AD. Some regions appear to have remained partly autonomous as late as the latter part of the fourth century, with an Assyrian king named Sinharib reputedly ruling a part of Assyria in the 370s AD.
Between 633 and 638, the region was invaded by the Arabs during the Muslim conquest of Persia; together with Meshan, it became the province of al-ʿIrāq. Asōristān was dissolved by 639 AD, bringing an end to over 3000 years of Assyria as a geopolitical entity, although it remained an ecclesiastical province within Syriac Christianity, and Medieval Arabs continued to refer to the indigenous people as Ashuriyun. A century later, the area became the capital province of the Abbasid Caliphate and the center of the Islamic Golden Age for five hundred years, from the 8th to the 13th centuries.
After the Muslim conquest, Asōristān saw a gradual but large influx of Muslim peoples; at first Arabs arriving in the south, but later also including Iranian and Turkic peoples during the mid to late Middle Ages.
The Assyrian people continued to endure, rejecting Arabization, Turkification and Islamization, and continued to form the majority population of the north as late as the 14th century, until the massacres of Timur drastically reduced their numbers and led to the city of Assur being finally abandoned. After this period, the indigenous Assyrians became the ethnic, linguistic and religious minority in their homeland that they are to this day.
Population
The population of Asorestan was a mixed one, however its naming indicates that there was a large population of Assyrians in southern Mesopotamia, in the region that was once Babylonia. The Assyrians lived in the northern half while their ethnically indistinguishable brethren formerly known as Babylonians lived in the south, including the still extant Mandaeans who, like the Assyrians, are indigenous to Mesopotamia. Nabateans and Arameans dwelt in the far southwestern deserts, and minorities of Persians, Armenians and Jews lived throughout Mesopotamia. The small Greek element in the southern cities, still strong in the Parthian period, was absorbed by the Assyrians in Sasanian times. The majority of the population was Assyrian, Jewish, and Mandaean, speaking Akkadian-influenced Eastern Aramaic languages, some of which still survive as Northeastern Neo-Aramaic among the Assyrians and Mandeans. As the breadbasket of the Sasanian Empire, most of the population was engaged in agriculture or worked as soldiers, traders, and merchants. The Persians lived in various parts of the province; Persian garrison soldiers lived along the outer fringe of southern and western Asoristan; Persian noble families lived in the major cities, while some Persian peasants lived in the villages in Lower Mesopotamia. The native Assyrians played a very active role in the province and were found in the administrative class of society as army officers, civil servants, and feudal lords.Language
At least three dialects of Eastern Middle Aramaic were in spoken and liturgical use, many of which are descended from the Imperial Aramaic introduced by Tiglath-Pileser III as the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BC: Classical Syriac, mainly in the north and among Syriac Christians throughout the region; Classical Mandaic by the Mandaeans, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic by the Jews. Other colloquial but unnamed or unrecorded Eastern Middle Aramaic dialects were also spoken. Some Eastern Aramaic languages survive as the NENA languages and Turoyo, with estimates ranging from 577,000 to 1,000,000 fluent speakers, with a far smaller number of speakers of Neo-Mandaic still extant.Aside from the liturgical scriptures of these religions which exist today, archaeological examples of all three of these dialects can be found in the collections of thousands of Aramaic incantation bowls—ceramic artifacts dated to this era—discovered in Iraq, northeast Syria and southeast Turkey. While the Jewish Aramaic script called Ktav Ashuri retained the original "square" or "block" style used to write Imperial Aramaic, the Syriac alphabet and the Mandaic alphabet developed when cursive styles began to appear. The Mandaic alphabet likely evolved from Inscriptional Parthian.