Assyria and Assyrian Civilization

The Assyrian people are descended from the population of the ancient Assyrian Empire, which itself emerged from the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon of Akkad. Eventually, Assyrian kings conquered Aramaean tribes and assimilated them into the Assyrian empire, and their language, Aramaic, accordingly supplanted the native Akkadian language, due in part to the mass relocations enforced by Assyrian kings of the Neo-Assyrian period. However, the modern neo-Aramaic language spoken by modern Assyrians (i.e., neo-Syriac), is still influenced by the ancient Akkadian language. The modern Assyrian identity is therefore believed to be a miscegenation, or ethnogenesis, of the major ethnic groups which inhabited Assyria-proper, which were, for the most part, Assyrian, and to some extent, Aramaean. By the 5th century BC, "Imperial Aramaic" had become lingua franca in the Achaemenid Empire.
The Assyrian people are believed to have descended from the ancient Assyrians of Mesopotamia (Aramaic: Bet-Nahrain, "the land of the rivers"), who, in the 7th century BC, controlled a vast empire which stretched from Egypt and Anatolia, across the land between two rivers, to western Iran. Tradition maintains that the history of the Assyrian people stretches back over 6,500 years, to the dawn of Mesopotamian civilization. Culturally and linguistically distinct from, although quite influenced by, their neighbours in the Middle East - the Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Turks, and Armenians - the Assyrians have endured much hardship throughout their recent history as a result of religious and ethnic persecution.