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The proximity between Roman Syria and Mesopotamia in the 1st century AD, Alain Manesson Mallet, 1683. As early as the 8th century BC Luwian and Cilician subject rulers referred to their Assyrian overlords as Syrian, a western Indo-European corruption of the original term Assyrian.
Another difference between the two related communities is that the Assyrian identity in Syria (as in Iraq) is usually seen as inseparable from being Christian and even adhering to specific churches. In contrast, the Aramean identity can also encompass Muslim Arameans, as in the case of the Arameans of Jubb'adin and the pre- Syrian civil war ...
The terms "Syriac", "Chaldean" and "Chaldo-Assyrian" can be used to describe ethnic Assyrians by their religious affiliation, and indeed the terms "Syriac" and "Syrian" are much later derivatives of the original "Assyrian", and historically, geographically and ethnically originally meant Assyrian (see Name of Syria).
Since earlier times, ancient Greeks commonly used "Syrian" labels as designations for Arameans and heir lands, but it was during the Hellenistic (Seleucid-Ptolemaic) period that the term "Syria" was finally defined to designate the regions west of the Euphrates, as opposed to the term "Assyria", which designated the regions further east.
In recent works, Assyrian-American historian Sargon Donabed has pointed out that parishes in the US were originally using Assyrian designations in their official English names, also noting that in some cases those designations were later changed to Syrian and then to Syriac, while several other parishes still continue to use Assyrian designations.
In addition, the Syrian Arab Republic is home to many ethnicities, including Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, and Turkmens, and is thus not an exclusively Arab nation. The Syriac Orthodox Church was previously known as the Syrian Orthodox Church until a Holy Synod in 2000 voted to change it to Syriac, thus distinguishing from the Arabs.
Assyrian populations are distributed between the Assyrian homeland and the Assyrian diaspora. There are no official statistics, and estimates vary greatly, between less than one million in the Assyrian homeland, [2] and 3.3 million with the diaspora included, [72] mostly due to the uncertainty of the number of Assyrians in Iraq and Syria.
Historical use of the term Syria can be divided into three periods. The first period, attested from the 8th century BCE, reflects the original Luwian and Cilician use of the term Syria as a clear synonym for Assyria, in reference to the empire of Assyria, rather than modern Syria (the historically Assyrian northeast aside) which was known as Aramea and Eber-Nari at that time, terms never ...