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Comment by kwk1 | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially but somewhat interestingly, I was reading the other day that the field of "Assyriology" goes all the way up to the Islamic conquest, about a thousand years after the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire mentioned above.

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Yes, it seems like there was or is a region considered the "Assyrian homeland" [0] of the people for whom the empire was named (Assyria being named for the home city of Assur). Wikipedia's map makes it look the same as the Kurdish territory and when I look up differences between them, Reddit threads describing contemporary accounts are front and center. [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_homeland

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Assyria/comments/u8c324/relationshi...

> Assyria being named for the home city of Assur

Well, sort of. "Assyria" would be a rendering of the Greek idea of the name. The Greeks couldn't pronounce it.

In English the city (and god) is usually called "Ashur"; in Akkadian it's Ashshur. It's never called "Assur".

"Assyriology" is a bit of a misnomer and really means the study of cultures that used cuneiform. So it includes the Sumerians and their prehistory, which preceded the Assyrians by thousands of years. Taking it up to the Islamic conquest is stretching it a bit, but I suppose there was a lot of continuity between that period and the thousands of years of cuneiform use in the region. E.g. the latest cuneiform tablet known is from 79AD from the city of Uruk, which was inhabited from about 5000BC to 700AD

> E.g. the latest cuneiform tablet known is from 79AD from the city of Uruk, which was inhabited from about 5000BC to 700AD

Very interesting, thanks for expanding on that!

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