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Ancient Peoples In The Middle East


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2008 Dec 31, 3:27am   648 views  0 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

If you poke around a bit, you can find that pretty much all of the ancient peoples of the middle east are still there to some degree. Typically, but not always, they are now Orthodox Christians, and their ancient language fossilized as their church language, while they now speak Arabic in everyday life.

This is true of the Copts (ancient Egyptians), Syrians (ancient Assyrians?), Maronites (ancient Phoenicians), and Chaldeans (ancient Babylonians). Other ancient Christianized groups still speak a form of their ancestral tongue in spite centuries of Arab or Turkish domination in the middle ages (Greeks and Armenians). And two groups survived with their ancestral religion rather than Orthodox Christianity: Jews and Persians. The Jews are back in Israel and speaking Hebrew for both religious and secular purposes. Ancient Persian religion survives as a Zoroastrian minority in Iran and India, speaking the majority language in everyday life and using ancient Avestan for religious purposes.

Aside from being mainly Orthodox Christian, the other odd things about all these ancient minorities are that they tend to be better educated and richer than the surrounding majority, and endogamous, marrying only among themselves. Their relative success probably makes them conservative about their culture and religion.

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