Assyria and Wizardly Geography

[Steve]

No: HPFGUIDX 99165

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Liz Muir" <rowen_lm at y...> wrote:

> bboy_mn:
>
> ...substantially edited...
> 
> >So, my vote is for (b.), this is a reference to a cultural region
> > of the middle east, not to a geo-political region.

> Liz:
> 
> Which I completely disagree with, as pointed out in the preceding 
> paragraphs.  There is no comparable precedent, at least that anyone 
> has cared to site, and no reason for Neville to speak in that way in 
> the first place.

bboy_mn:

But, by your own admission, you claim a heritage and cultural
attachment to a place that no longer exist. 

By the way, the bit about Germans in the North speaking a dialet that
was difficult to understand by other Germans. That was told to me
while I was living in Germany (near Luxemburg) and by a native German.
I took her word for it.


> > bboy_mn:
> 
> >I also give some weight to option (d), I don't think wizards and
> >witches recognise the same geo-political boundaries as muggles do.
> >... the wizard world doesn't recognise Republic of Ireland and 
> > Northern Ireland; it's all Ireland to them. The  Republic vs 
> > Northern was founded in religious and political strife that the 
> > wizard world wasn't part of.


> Liz continues:
> 
> This was more of the kind of discussion I was looking for!  I have 
> looked up said posts, but would have appreciated it if you had 
> focused more on this than the many invalid examples above.
> 
> In summary:  I find no similar case for referring to the region as 
> Assyria, but do find the Quidditch World Cup posts interesting.
> 
> Rowen,


bboy_mn:

Perhaps we have a problem with word definitions, what I gave you were
not 'examples' but 'illustrations' (I do that a lot). They illustrate
how cultural and social regions are frequently independant of ever
changing political regions. They also illustrate how people can cling
to cultural identities even when the geo-political place no longer
exist, and this illustration holds true whether modern or ancient. 

Perhaps a better example would have been aboriginal tribes. The Sioux
Nation still exists and they do not define themselves by the political
borders of reservations, states, or political nations. They define
themselves by a culture and ancestral lands which have existed for
thousands of years. 

I think my illustrations, now deleted, and this example all point to
the same thing, that a social and culturally defined region is
independant of political boundaries. 

As far as Neville, he could have been parroting what his uncle told
him, and his uncle could have been referring to having traveled to the
 Assyrian social, historical, and cultural region of a place whose
current political boundaries are defined as Iraq. 

In other words...
Assyrians are the indigenous people of north Iraq - members of the
Assyrian Church of the East (Nestorian), the Chaldean Church of
Babylon, and the Syriac Orthodox Church - who read and write Aramaic,
a Semitic language which is used in their religious observances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian

The political boundaries are long gone, but the people and the place
exist even today.

There are people today who define themselves as Persians, and you can
still go to Persia, even though politically Persia doesn't exits.

There are people today who define themselves as Bavarians, and you can
still go to Bavaria, even though politically it doesn't exist. 

There are people today who define themselves as Assyrians, and you can
still go to Assyria, their ancient ancestral homeland, even though
politically the place doesn't exits.

I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying...

bboy_mn