Assyrians, also known as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans, are a Mesopotamian people with a history dating back to the dawn of ancient Assyrian civilization in 2600 BC. Descended from the Akkadians and Sumerians, the Assyrians originally resided in Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria, from which the Assyrian Empire emerged and conquered much of the ancient Levant. The Assyrians retained their culture under Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Parthian, Roman, and Islamic rule, worshipping Ashur into the 3rd century AD, and speaking a language derived from Aramaic, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East after the 8th century BC. The Assyrians of Roman Syria were Christianized from the 1st to 3rd centuries BC; the Assyrians, Arameans, Greeks, and Nabateans were among the first people to convert to Christianity and practiced Nestorian Christianity even after the Muslim conquest of Syria. The Syriac language was kept alive as the liturgical language for Assyrian Eastern Catholicism, the Nestorian Church of the East, and the Oriental Orthodox church, and a series of genocides, such as the 1843 and 1846 massacres of Assyrians by the Kurdish emirs of Hakkari, the 1895 massacres of Diyarbakir, the Assyrian Genocide (concurrent with the Armenian Genocide and the Greek Genocide amid World War I), the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ba'athist repression in Iraq from the 1960s to 2000s, the Iraq War, and the ISIL takeover of northern Iraq and eastern Syria during the Iraqi Civil War and the Syrian Civil War, led to the displacement of most Assyrians from their homeland. By 2023, the Assyrians had a world population of up to 5 million people, of whom up to 600,000 lived in America, 200,000 lived in Iraq, between 200,000 and 877,000 lived in Syria before the civil war, 150,000 in Sweden, 100,000 in Germany, 30,000-150,000 in Jordan, 61,000 in Australia, 50,000 in Lebanon, 35,000 in Holland, 25,000 in Turkey, and 17,000 in Iran.
