Chaldean Chronicles

For over 5,000 years, the story of the Chaldean people has endured, with roots reaching back more than seven millennia to the cradle of civilization. In modern times, some assumptions about how the Chaldean name survived have occasionally blurred the distinction between Chaldean and Assyrian identities.

Chaldean Chronicles brings clarity to this history. Weam Namou draws upon rare manuscripts and archival sources to trace the unbroken lineage of a people whose name is among the oldest still in use. This enduring ethnicity did not arise by coincidence or through a sixteenth-century designation by the Catholic Church; historical evidence shows that Chaldean efforts to unite with Rome date as far back as 1304. A number of prominent writers identified themselves as Chaldeans after the fall of the Chaldean Empire. Greek, Persian, and Roman sources-writing before and in the early centuries of Christianity-recorded their interactions with the Chaldeans, describing them as astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers, qualities for which they had been renowned since the dawn of recorded history.

Spanning centuries of faith, resilience, and transformation, this work illuminates how the Chaldeans-descendants of Neo-Babylonians who continue to speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus-carried their identity from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern world.