To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

CHAPTER VII
CHALDEANS

The course of our narrative will take us on into Kurdistan, and among peoples different to those we have met in our journeyings from the Mediterranean and the eastern border of Mesopotamia. We have had occasion to notice various races and peoples in passing, but of all these, those who have by their high antiquity of descent the premier claim to description are the Chaldeans, to whom up to the present we have not given more than casual notice. As we are about to pass out of the land of their ancestors, into the hills and mountains of the semi-independent Kurds, this opportunity for adequate remark upon the interesting Chaldean race cannot be passed.

The traveller of to-day, once he passes Urfa to go east, meets, besides Armenians and Christians of Greek descent, large numbers of the non-Muhammadan population who, in various places, go under a variety of names—Nestorians, Nasara, Kaldani, Jacobites, Catholics, New Chaldeans, Inglisi, Amrikani, and Protestan—the last three in north-west Persia. These varied sects are all branches of the Chaldean and Assyrian race, lineal descendants of the two nations that occupied the Tigris valley as far from the mouth as Jaziri ibn Umar; and the lower Euphrates valley, or Babylonia.

It is now 2500 years since the Assyrian nation broke up, and but a little less since the second Chaldean period was brought to an end by Alexander the Great; and since then, the Assyrians or Chaldeans (for they were the same race) have been in subjection to alien rulers, though the powerful and tenacious nature of the Chaldeans has won for them a premier place in the civil life of all ages, and is to-day the means of furnishing a great part of western Asia with a class of merchants and villagers on a far higher scale of civilisation and culture than the peoples among whom they live.

THE NATIVE CHRISTIAN

Many writers, and many residents in the countries inhabited by “native” Christians have given unrestrained exercise to their pens in describing their disgusting character, their deceit, their petty spirit, their unfaithfulness, and so on. Nor can any deny that this is only too true in many cases. Certainly the Christian who comes in contact with the European is often a very disagreeable character, but it would be but fair to him to mention, if possible, any member of any Oriental race or faith—particularly Semitic—whose moral standard was not debased by intercourse with Europeans, and the usual imitation of European vice, consequent upon a mistaken idea of Western catholicism and progress. It will be readily appreciated that the Christian naturally follows this line of conduct sooner and with more facility than the Muhammadan, the intrinsic aloofness of whose faith holds him off from a ready adoption of Western habits, good or bad, particularly in the case of the Semitic Muhammadan.

Our sources of information upon the origin of the Christian Church in Mesopotamia are unfortunately extremely scanty, and it is only by references to passing events that occur in purely secular works that we are enabled to follow the course of dissemination of the doctrines of Jesus Christ in the Middle East. To adherents of the English Protestant Church the history of the Chaldean or Eastern Church should have a special interest, for the old Chaldeans followed a scheme of tenets more similar to those of the English Church than of any other section of the much-divided Christian religion. Sir H. Layard, who stayed among the Chaldeans of Mosul in 1840, in his work on Nineveh remarks: “To Protestants, the doctrine and rites of a primitive sect of Christians, who have ever remained untainted by the superstitions of Rome[34] must be of high importance.”

We have no ground for any assumption, such as has been made, that Christianity was carried by the old road through Urfa and Nisibis, to Assyria by a follower of SS. Barnabas and Paul to Nineveh, or one other of the cities which still stood upon the sites of old Assyrian capitals. Nevertheless, in A.D. 410, when Yezdijird I. of Persia reigned, Christianity was a recognised part of the social structure of Assyria and Persia. Obviously for such progress to have been made as to render Christianity one of the accepted religions in those regions, points to the fact that preachers and priests must have commenced their itineraries a great while before A.D. 400.

It was the Assyrians, or Chaldeans, who as a nation adopted speedily the tenets of the new faith. Doubtless after the demolition of Assyria, and then of Babylonia, the worship of Bel and Ishtar, the ancient gods, had fallen into abeyance or even total desuetude, and the remnants of the old nation seized upon the new religion to satisfy the spiritual need that every people experiences. Their prelates and dignitaries soon became a very important part of the Christian organisation, and it is interesting to note the sympathy of the Persian Sasanian kings for this new religion, and the success Christian effort met among the Persians. This ancient and highly civilised people, whose character contains a great deal of the speculative, has always been ready to consider the claims of new Deistic theories, and has, in Muhammadan times, found an outlet for its speculative tendency in the adoption of Shiism, which it has made a purely Persian section of Islam. The early Christians looked, perhaps with a warranted hope, upon the field of Persia, for here were no feats of iconoclasm to perform—no Diana, no Jove, no Venus, disputed with Christ the right to men’s adoration.

In Persia they found a tolerance broad as her mighty plains, a dualist theory that provided only for principles of good and evil, as sharply defined as her barren hills, a splendid isolation of thought far above the turmoil of degraded passion that then represented the pantheistic doctrines of the Greeks, Romans, and Assyrians themselves. High ideals, spiritual aims of an altitude unknown to the Western materialists, found themselves in singular harmony with the ascetic idea of early Christianity.