Macrobius, a writer of the 5th century and a pagan, wrote a book called Saturnalia which recalled antiquity and themes of Virgil in reaction against the Christian spirit of his day. The discoveries of ancient Assyrian sites and cuneiform records about the rulers of ancient Assyria stimulated interest among local Christians who had only heard about Assyrian kings from the Bible. The Easterners retained historical usage of their own until the modern period. I colonial mandates, when terminology was fixed according to Western usage, changed the old Eastern usage. They are not wrong in this designation, or in claiming descent from the ancient Assyrians, who had adopted the Aramaic, or the Syriac language, as it was later called in Christian times, as their everyday tongue.
Many Iranian languages exhibit the same phenomenon.
3 See Seton Lloyd. Beginning with the reign of Assurnasirpal in the 96 century B.C., and an ever accelerating pace until Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal in the 76 century, more and more people in cities such as Nineveh and Arbela spoke Aramaic. Probably bilingualism was more common as one went up the social ladder, with dialects of the court, the army, etc. Even though the Greeks used the form Syrian, they also knew the form Assyrian, and this must have been confusing, as it was to the Romans as a glance at the Thesaurus linguae latinae 1.940 shows. 9 See J. Bury, ed.