ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the area settled by the Apostolic Church of the East had been reduced essentially to the rough, mountainous land of Hakkari along the present-day border between Turkey and Iraq. Besides this mountain region, Urmiyah and Van were the only areas with significant numbers of East Syriac Christians. The church which had once embraced all of East Syriac Christianity had, through the unions with Rome and the missions of the Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Russian Orthodox, as well as the attacks of the Kurds, become a tribal church, its members numbering about 150,000 at the beginning of the century. The church was made up of more than a dozen Christian tribes, of which the largest were the Baz, Djilu, Tiari, Tjuma, Diz, and Barwar. Western travelers, scholars, and missionaries gave them the name “Mountain Nestorians,” while they simply called themselves “Christians” (mshihaye). In the second half of the nineteenth century the missionaries of the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury introduced the term “Assyrian,” which they eventually adopted to describe themselves.
