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"Most scholars believe that the language Jesus spoke in day-to-day life was a dialect of Aramaic, which Jesus’s ancestors had learned during the period of the Exile and its aftermath, when large numbers of Judeans lived in Mesopotamia and migrated across the Fertile Crescent. As noted, Abgar spoke Aramaic and was king of what would later become a center of Aramaic literature. We do not know whether or not Jesus could speak and write Greek, which was much more widely spoken in the eastern side of the Roman Empire in Jesus’s day. Because the claim in the Abgar legend is that Jesus wrote to someone in Aramaic rather than Greek, it is sometimes noted in popular discourse that Jesus could have communicated with Abgar directly. "
In a collaboration between Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and the University of Baghdad, an ancient Babylonian hymn dating back over two millennia has been rediscovered and fully deciphered.
The new AI tool “Palaeographicum” is revolutionizing research into the cultures of the Ancient Near East: It identifies individual variations of cuneiform signs—a huge step forward for academia.
The Shamash Gate in ancient Nineveh has revealed rare evidence of two violent chapters separated by more than 2,500 years: the fall of the Assyrian capital in 612 B.C. and the battle to free Mosul from ISIS in 2017.
Swiss-Assyrian artist Shamiran Istifan is receiving widespread acclaim for her latest exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, where her installations explore themes of beauty, migration, identity and censorship through striking visual symbolism.
In a major policy announcement, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi declared that facilitating the return of Assyrians who fled the country during two decades of conflict is now a "national and government priority."
A new academic study offers one of the most extensive multidisciplinary examinations to date of the historical relationship between the designations Assyria, Syria, and Syriac–a question that has occupied historians for centuries.
Michael Huffman
