| Chapter 1: | The Homeland and Origin of the Independent Assyrian Tribes of Tiyari and Hakkari |
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On this subject, the Assyrians told Dr. Grant,‘[O]ur fathers sought an asylum among our fellow tribes in their mountains. [And] when the country became quiet we gradually returned to our present homes’. The refugees could not have got shelter and asylum in the mountain regions if they had not been among their own people.79 Horatio Southgate, during his first visit to Mesopotamia in the late 1830s, advanced the same theory as Badger; however, during his next visit in 1844, when he more closely examined the conditions, he corrected his opinion and affirmed that the people had been in their homeland since time immemorial:
With the conversion of the Mongols to Islam under Ghazan Mahmud (1295–1304) and his adoption of a policy of general persecution of the Christians in the Ilkhanid Empire, the patriarch of the Church of the East had to flee from Baghdad and become a fugitive running from place to place. He settled for a while successively in Maraghah (
), then Arbil, Karmiles, Mosul, Jezerah Ibn Omar, and Dair Rabban Hormizd near Alqush. Since the vast majority of the former inhabitants of the rolling country returned to their homes after the storm subsided, the surviving bishops also returned to their flocks, who mainly lived there. Among those who did so were the bishop and people of Arbil, as well as the inhabitants of the towns and villages from Urfa to Sulaimaniyah through Mosul, Arbil, and Kirkuk. Evidence of this appears in the continuity of the ethnic and religious settlements there with their established Syriac tradition and culture. People returned to their ancestral towns even though the invaders had devastated many of them. The Yazidis of the Sinjar and Shikhan districts also made their escape to safer places, as their present-day settlement attest.