Who Are Iraqi Christians?

Isaiah 19:25

Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the world of my hands, and Israel my inheritance.

Modern day Iraqi Christians (Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs) are descendants of the two great empires, Assyria and Babylonia. They rose to power and prosperity in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Due to the fall of the Assyrian empire in 612 B.C., the inhabitants of the empire were reduced to a small nation living at the mercy of their overlords in the vastly scattered lands in the Middle East. Assyrian and Babylonian contributions to civilization and innovation throughout history are unparalleled. Some of the major contributions include:

• Revolutionized transportation by inventing the wheel and the chariot (around 3,500 B.C.)
• Divide the circle into 360 degrees
• Developed the writing system
• Founded the first library (Ashurbanipal Library)
• The Pythagorean theorem and the concept of zero
• Revolutionized architecture through the development of the arch, column, and dome
• Very first code of laws were recorded by King Hammurabi

The history of the indigenous Aramaic-speaking descendants of the great empires spans over 6700 years. Ethnically we are not Arabs, we are not Kurdish, and our religion is not Islam. Our faith is grounded in the emergence of Christianity with our unique language shared by our Lord Jesus Christ. Although the empires are not in existence, history is replete with recorded details of the continuous presence of the indigenous Iraqi Christian people until the present time.