Has there ever been an Assyrian state after 500 BC? Or have they seriously survived 2500 years without there own state...

So... a lot?

Nothing but the name.

What happened to the Belgae and acient Assyrians then?

They became the modern belgians and modern assyrians?

They were assimilated into different cultures by wave after wave of invaders, their identities were destroyed only to be revived in the modern times by the English for political reasons.

Modern Assyrian identity is mostly religious one, just like Copts in Egypt, the only difference between them and other peoples around them is their religion. Are they direct decedents of the people how lived there 700 BC? Probably, but so are the rest of the population of the region, regardless of religion. Do they have any direct cultural links to the pre-Persian population? No, they don't even speak the language, and I'm pretty sure the ancient Assyrians weren't Christians.

Technically belgians share a lot with the belgae, but so do the dutch

I am part of the modern ethnic group you are referring to. I'll try to answer.

There are a few societies in the period after 500 BC that are considered Assyrian successor states, until around the 1840s, but the most notable one is the Kingdom of Edessa or Osrhoene, located in northwestern Mesopotamia, the land of current west-Assyrian Jacobites (Oriental Orthodoxy). Besides that, the Persian Empire was probably strongly influenced by Assyria and it must've retained some autonomy which may have been the very roots of Kurdistan's current status as an autonomous yet not independent area. I have read something about a Jewish Queen of Assyria well after 500 BC but you may have to check it yourself. Anyway, I should say that the period of Edessa had a strong influence on the culture of modern Assyrians, before the archeology efforts began and until now. It has some sort of role in the current Assyrian Churches' claim of coming from the Apostles (and claims of Assyrian continuity, for that matter), which you can also read about as it's a major part of Christian history.

After that, or after the Church of the East became separate, the nature of the autonomy of the Persian Empires' regions must have changed because of Christians' common wish for a sort of monocultural society. Or maybe that happened when the Arabs arrived. Either way, a mountain theocracy slowly developed, perhaps even with tribes that had been independent since the fall of Assyria, side by side with Kurdish emirates, until Assyrians got massacred around the 1840s. The 'dynasty' of Patriarchs during and for over a century before that time continued until one of them got murdered in 1975. That same Patriarch was addressed as the "Spiritual and Temporal Leader" of Assyrians until at least WWII. They're still affected by this independent legacy since to this day only a large minority of them have had major contact with Muslims.

So that's what I can say about that subject.ALSO:check Hulagu

>so are the rest of the population of the region, regardless of religion

Not true at all. Assyrians are very very distinct genetically. They show up closer related to Lebanese Christians and Mizrahi Jews than they do with Iraqi Arabs. I say this myself as an Iraqi Arab who traces my roots to Arab tribes in Yemen. The meme that we all just assimilated is purely that, a meme. We might carry some native DNA but it's minimal.

The Assyrians still have their own language, its the Maronites and the Copts who lack one. All of the middle eastern Christians are much closer to the ancient populations compared to the Muslims because they always married each other and never married the invading Arabs who even disallowed it.

Which book do I read if I want to learn about Assyria?

Furthermore, now that I've read other replies I should correct some blatant falsehoods. Probably from the same guy who cries in every thread that the subject comes up in.

>Modern Assyrian identity is mostly religious one, just like Copts in Egypt, the only difference between them and other peoples around them is their religion. Are they direct decedents of the people how lived there 700 BC? Probably, but so are the rest of the population of the region, regardless of religion. Do they have any direct cultural links to the pre-Persian population? No, they don't even speak the language, and I'm pretty sure the ancient Assyrians weren't Christians.

They do not use the same language as their neighbors. They speak the language adopted by the Assyrian Empire by the time it fell. It is being neglected due to a lack of institutions and pressure since WWI, but nearly all of them understand it. Linguistic studies have confirmed that their dialects include words from Akkadian that never appeared in literature in the intervening years, thus, the language was never overridden by Western or Babylonian dialects. But you didn't even get the fact that they speak a separate language right in the first place.

But it is true that the central difference is religion. This is not just true of them but of many groups in the region. But it's certainly not the only difference.

This. Ironically the system of Dhimmi basically meant that the Jews & Christians were very distinct genetically from the Muslims. They couldn't own slaves but Muslims could, which is why so many Arabs have Eastern European DNA. I've read studies showing Arab Muslims having more Slavic DNA on average than Russian Jews.

This is why Lebanese Christians cluster closer with Ashkenazic Jews, Sephardic Jews and Druze than they do with Lebanese Muslims, Palestinians, Jordanians, etc. The Christians and Jews living in Canaan currently are direct descendants of the Canaanites, with Lebanese Christians being the outgrowth of Canaanite --> Phoenician --> Lebanese Maronites and Jews being the outgrowth of Canaanite --> Israelite --> Jews.

Most Arab Muslims living in the Levant on the other hand are descendants of recent clans and tribes which migrated from any time stretching from the 7th century to the late 1800's.

Source: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture

Source: journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003316

Thank you for answering
>a mountain theocracy slowly developed, perhaps even with tribes that had been independent since the fall of Assyria, side by side with Kurdish emirates, until Assyrians got massacred around the 1840s
What was the name of this mountain theocracy? And how autonomous was it?

I'm bumping the thread now, I will answer soon.

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