Many students, within the U.S. and in different places, have decried the racism and "Orientalism" that characterizes a lot Western writing at the center East. Such writings conflate diversified peoples and countries, and pursuits inside such peoples and countries, into unitary and malevolent hordes, uncivilized reservoirs of threat, whereas ignoring or downplaying analogous traits in the direction of conformity or barbarism in different areas, together with the West. Assyrians particularly be afflicted by outdated testomony and pa tradition references to their barbarity and cruelty, which forget about or downplay massacres or torture by way of the Judeans, Greeks, and Romans who're celebrated via background as ancestors of the West. This paintings, via its wealthy depictions of tribal and non secular variety inside Mesopotamia, will help function a corrective to this tendency of latest writing at the heart East and the Assyrians particularly. additionally, Aboona's paintings additionally steps clear of the age-old oversimplified rubric of an "Arab Muslim" center East, and into the cultural mosaic that's extra consultant of the zone. during this booklet, writer Hirmis Aboona provides compelling examine from quite a few basic resources in English, Arabic, and Syriac at the old origins, sleek struggles, and certain tradition of the Assyrian tribes residing in northern Mesopotamia, from the plains of Nineveh north and east to southeastern Anatolia and the Lake Urmia sector. between different findings, this ebook debunks the tendency of recent students to query the continuity of the Assyrian identification to the trendy day through confirming that the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia advised a few of the earliest English and American viewers to the sector that they descended from the traditional Assyrians and that their church buildings and id predated the Arab conquest. It information how the Assyrian tribes of the mountain dioceses of the "Nestorian" Church of the East maintained a stunning measure of independence till the Ottoman governor of Mosul approved Kurdish defense force to assault and subjugate or evict them. Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans is a piece that may be of significant curiosity and use to students of heritage, heart jap reviews, diplomacy, and anthropology.