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Updated: May 17, 2025
Both Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser led raid after raid into the northern mountains in the hope of weakening the tribes from whose adhesion that Vannic Kingdom might derive strength. Both kings marched more than once up to the neighbourhood of the Urmia Lake, and Shalmaneser struck at the heart of Urartu itself three or four times; but with inconclusive success.
Now I have taken this one instance of the work of Americans at Urmia to show in some detail the character of the work that they were doing, and the Christian and humanising influence of it.
I will take as an example of the superb heroism of those men and women the diary of an American lady attached to the mission at Urmia, a document that, anonymously, is one of the noblest, least self-conscious records I have ever read. The period of it extends over five months.
Early in January 1915 the Russian troops were withdrawn from Urmia, which lies on the frontier between Turkey and Persia, and simultaneously the Moslem population began to plunder the Christian villages, the inhabitants of which fled for refuge to the missions in the city.
Then comes a break of two months, during which the writer was down with typhoid. She resumes again in June, finding that death has made many changes, and gets back to work again at once. By that time the Russians had entered Urmia, a thanksgiving service was held, the refugees dispersed, and the American Mission went quietly on with its normal work.
Some part of them, under the name Parsua, seems to have settled down as far north as the western shores of Lake Urmia, on the edge of the Ararat kingdom; another part as far south as the borders of Elam. Between these extreme points the immigrants appear to have amalgamated with the settled Scyths, and in virtue of racial superiority to have become predominant partners in the combination.
The shores of neither the Urmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularly occupied by Assyria, and, though Sargon certainly brought into his sphere of influence the kingdom of Urartu, which surrounded the latter lake and controlled the tribes as far as the western shore of the former, it is not proved that his armies ever went round the east and north of the Urmia Lake, and it is fairly clear that they left the northwestern region of mountains between Bitlis and the middle Euphrates to its own tribesmen.
During their brief occupation of Northern Persia they did their best to wipe out the Syriac element in the population the Nestorian Christians of Urmia.
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