Let us preserve our history and pass it to next generation

Through various channels, countless documents of Assyrian history of the last 150 years could be found and digitized in recent years.

After securing these documents, the task of transcribing the different languages is now at hand. The next step is the translation into European languages (English, German...).

We distinguish here between the following language/writing formats and the documents/pages available today:

Garshuni-Arabic: The Assyrians from Mardin, Mosul, Syria and partly from Diyarbakir wrote Arabic in the Syriac alphabet. Naum Faiq published about 90 editions of Bethnahrin in Arabic-Garshuni. Essential articles from it have already been transcribed at my instigation and published in my book in 2020 in Arabic.

We have countless documents from various archives in this style of writing.

From the archives of Dayr-ul Zafaran alone, we have about 3000 documents from the period 1850-1915, written mainly in Garshuni Arabic. These documents have not yet been transcribed or translated.

Garshuni Turkish: The writings in Garshuni Turkish (Ottoman Turkish) represent a larger portion. Numerous magazines were written with it, such as:

- Murshid Athuriyun by Ashur Yousef. We have 60 editions from 1909 to 1913 with about 1000 pages. These have not yet been transcribed.

- Kawkab Madenho by Naum Faiq (this has been transcribed in its entirety and is soon to be published in two volumes).

- Bethnahrin by Naum Faiq: We have 144 issues in Turkish. A small part (volume 1923-1924) has been transcribed so far. Here there are still about 1300 pages to be transcribed for the period 1916 to 1933.

- Huyodo by Naum Faiq: We have 38 issues for 1921-1922. Occasional Turkish articles can be found in these. The number is estimated at about 80 pages.

- Intibah by Gabriel Boyaji was published in New York between 1909 and 1915. It also contains numerous articles by Naum Faiq. We have 57 issues. 30 issues have been transcribed so far. There are still 27 issues open with about 250 pages.

- Leshono d Umtho by Abrohom Haqwerdi was published in Beirut between 1927 and 1940. We have 90 issues with a total of about 300 pages (A3 format).

In total, we have at least 3000 pages to transcribe!

Ottoman Turkish in the Arabic alphabet: This was used as the official script until 1928. We now have access to the Ottoman Archive for the period from about 1880 onwards. 15 folders are available, each containing 100 to 150 pages. Three of these folders have been transcribed at our own expense so far. Costs per folder approx. 250 Euro. There are about 1800 pages still to be transcribed.

In addition, there are countless writings from other sources in this form that cannot be quantified at the moment.

Armenian Turkish: The magazine Babylon (see sample issue in the appendix) was published by Assyrian emigrants in the USA (Worcester/Massachusetts) in the years 1919 to 1921. These Assyrians came from Kharput and wrote their texts in Turkish in the Armenian alphabet. Occasionally one finds articles in Garshuni Turkish (in the Syriac alphabet). Today we have a total of 54 issues of this magazine. Until now it was not possible to decipher these texts due to lack of knowledge of the language. The 54 issues amount to about 800 pages!

The magazine Nineveh from 1927-1928 was also published in Armenian-Garshuni. Here we have only four issues with about 70 pages.

Arabic:

We also have documents, writings, and magazines in Arabic in digital format that need to be retyped for further processing. This is the case, for example, for countless articles from the magazine Asiria (Hdonoyutho Suryoyto) by Farid Nuzha.

Our team consists of Hanna Bet-Sawoce, Aydin Be-Naqse Aslan, Yosef Bahdi and Abboud Zeitoune.

With your donation we commission some helpers at home to support us. The translation of countless Ottoman documents into modern Turkish is also costly.

Thank you for every donation!