General Discussion

Like the Kurds, they have no country of their own, but they have communities spread out over Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc. There are communities of them in North America, too. Not only Philadelphia. I met some in Denver, too. The ones in Denver were surprised to meet an Anglo who knew who they were. Philly has several colleges and universities, so the Assyrians there weren’t quite as surprised to run into someone who knew who they were. I was more surprised than they were!

The husband of my Swedish professor worked in the University Museum, as he was one of the few who could read and translate Sumerian and Babylonian clay cuneiform tablets. To him, the Assyrians were the new kids on the block! Give him the hanging gardens of Babylon over some new-fangled Ziggurat any day He took his wife’s work very seriously, though, and would only speak to me in Swedish, even though his English was nearly perfect.

My Swedish professor was the best language instructor I ever had. Of all the languages I began studying from scratch while in the States, Swedish was the only one that I could comfortably speak with natives after just one year of three times a week classes. The rest (French, Spanish, Russian and German) required longer periods of study—for me, anyway. I learned Catalan, Italian and Dutch on location over here, so it was a different path of learning in each case.