Replacement article for the Assyrian people page under Identity   Assyrian people are not all or may not be  ethnically Assyrian and may be descended of one or more of the following the Assyrians andor the people that they conquered andor of the people that conquered them With the ancient people there really would be no way to prove the lineage unless one was to unearth many ancient graves examine and carbon date the remains compare the DNA of the different graves and then come up with a comparative analisys of the ancient peoples DNA to that of the modernday people With the latter day arrivals of conquerors it is possible that they may have had some influence as well for at first a lot of the anscestors of the modernday Arabs Kurds Mongols Persians and Turks were originally Christian andor converts and the area they ruled remained predominantly Christian with Syriac as the lingua franca up until the Islamic conquests Many may have been assimilated into the Syriac Christian culture The ancient Assyrian empire had a policy of deporting inhabitants from their natural environments and relocating them to urban areas of the empire in order to assimilate them into AssyroBabylonian culture which in turn caused a loss or to the least of that extent a merger of cultures in turn somewhat destroying their own sense of national identity That tactic was borrowed and applied by the Persians and by many empires that followed including the United States with its former policy against Native Americans of relocating them to Reservations Ironically this has been the fate of the modernday people The Baath parties of Iraq Syria and to a lesser extent Syrias influence and interference in Lebanese affairs were adament in replacing all ethnic identities with an Arab Nationalistic identity  That is the replacement I have come up with that  keeps reverting Please moderate