'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎537] (600/714)

THE NORTH-WEST AND WESTERN PROVINCES 637
estimates), a little over 40,000 persons. The name by which they
are popularly known in Europe, and by which I have called them,
is, however, one which they neither accept nor employ themselves.
It has been given to them as the lineal descendants of the famous
sect which, when Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, was
excommunicated and banished by the Third General Council of the
Church at Ephesus in a.d . 431 for heretical opinions concerning-
the incarnation of Christ (he held the doctrine of two natures and
two persons), espoused his cause ; took refuge in the Persian king
dom, which, at that time hostile to the Roman Empire, extended
to them a ready welcome ; spread their name and tenets throughout
the East; established great religious seminaries at Edessa, Bagh
dad, and Nisibis; sent missionaries to Bactria, Tartary, India, and
China; converted the celebrated but misnamed Prester John;
established twenty-five archiepiscopal sees, stretching from the
Mediterranean to the Pacific; and alike outnumbered and excelled
in influence the Western organisations of Christendom ; until, at
the end of the fourteenth century after Christ, the universal scourge
of Timur, the Great Tartar, fell upon them, and their scattered
and decimated fragments retired in poverty and distress to the
mountain fastnesses north of Mesopotamia, which they have since
occupied, descending, as the peril became less acute, on to the plains
of Mosul on the one side, and those which stretch on the other to
wards the basin of Urumiah. Of Nestorius the modern descendants
of these fugitives know nothing. They claim to be the spiritual
progeny of St. Thomas and St. Jude, and, while they commonly call
themselves Syrians, are styled by the Moslems Naserani or Naza-
renes. The genealogy of this interesting community is a matter
upon which the learned dispute, but which is incapable of exact solu
tion. Dr. Grant, pne of the first missionary labourers amongst them,
insisted that they were the relics of the Ten Tribes of Israel—a
claim which has also been made by themselves—and found con
firmatory evidence in their ceremonial law and ritual. It is not
for me to say whether they were Hebrews—though much suspicion,
in my judgment, attaches to every Lost Tribe argument that I have
ever seen—Syrians, Assyrians, or Chaldaeans, all of which de
nominations are sometimes given to them. Their language is an
ancient Syriac dialect, intermingled with a good many Arabic,
Kurdish, Turkish, and Persian words.
More interesting, or at least more profitable than these specu-