[29] The Eastern Aramaic speaking Assyrians of northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and parts of Iran have suffered due to ethnic cleansing, religious discrimination, and persecution for many centuries.

[41] In 2014, the population of the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq was scattered to Dohuk, Erbil and Jordan due to ISIS forcing the Assyrian community out of their historical homeland, but since the defeat of the Islamic State in 2017, Christians have slowly began returning.

In Israel, Maronites together with smaller Aramaic-speaking Christian populations of Syriac Orthodox and Greek Catholic adherence, are legally and ethnically classified as either Arameans or Arabs, per their choice.

[47][48][49] According to a 2018 report commissioned by the British government, Christians are “on the verge of extinction in the Middle East”, explaining that “Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity.

Other prominent centres of Christian learning developed in Asia Minor (most remarkably among the Cappadocian Fathers) and the Levantine coast (Gaza, Caesarea and Beirut).

Eusebius[57] credits Mark the Evangelist as the bringer of Christianity to Egypt, and manuscript evidence shows that the faith was firmly established there by the middle of the 2nd century.

However, Christians in the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire (speaking variously Syriac, Armenian or Greek) are often found distancing themselves politically from their Roman co-religionists to appease the shah.

Likewise, in the 4th century, the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, was recognised as leader of the Syriac and Greek-speaking Christians in the Persian empire, assuming the title catholicos, later patriarch.

Evidence from coinage and other historical references point to the early 4th-century conversion of King Ezana of Axum as the establishment of Christianity, whence Nubia and other surrounding areas were evangelized, all under the oversight of the Patriarch of Alexandria.

This argument revolved around claims by Alexandrians over alleged theological extremism by Antiochians, and its battleground was the Roman capital, Constantinople, originating from its bishop's, Nestorius's, teaching on the nature of Christ.

The name Melkite (meaning 'of the king' in Aramaic), originally intended as a slur applied to those who adhered to Chalcedon (it is no longer used to describe them), who continued to be organised into the historic and autocephalous patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.

The Georgian Orthodox and Apostolic Church held to a moderate Antiochian doctrine through these schisms and began aligning itself with Byzantium from the early 7th century, and finally broke off ties with their Armenian non-Chalcedonian neighbours in the 720s.

The conquest came at the end of a particularly gruelling period of the Roman-Persian Wars, from the beginning of the 7th century, in which the Sasanid Shah Khosrau II had captured much of the Syria, Egypt, Anatolia and the Caucasus, and the Byzantines under Heraclius only managed a decisive counter-attack in the 620s.

[58] The factors and processes that led to the progressive Islamization of these regions during this period, as well as the speed at which conversions happened, is a complex subject that is not fully understood by historians.

[59][60] In Egypt, Islamization was likely slower than in other Muslim-controlled regions,[58] with Christians likely constituting a majority of the population until the Fatimid period (10th to 12th centuries), though scholarly estimates on this issue are tentative and vary between authors.

[58][61][62] In the period prior to the establishment of Abbasid rule in AD 750, many pastoral Kurds moved into upper Mesopotamia, taking advantage of an unstable situation.

More recently, the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the Syrian Civil War and the concomitant rise of ISIS have greatly increased violence against Christians in those countries.

[86] [better source needed] A Kurdish chieftain assassinated the patriarch of the church of the East at the negotiation dinner in 1918, and the aftermath led to further decimation of the Christian population.

Some of the most well known Copts include Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations; Sir Magdi Yacoub, the cardiothoracic surgeon; Hani Azer, the civil engineer; billionaire Fayez Sarofim, one of the richest men in the world; and Naguib Sawiris, the CEO of Orascom.

Christianity has a long history in Iraq, with the early conversions of the indigenous Assyrian inhabitants of Assyria (Parthian controlled Assuristan) dating from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD.

This region was the birthplace of Eastern Rite (Assyrian Church of the East) Christianity, a flourishing Syriac literary tradition, and the centre of a missionary expansion that stretched as far as India, Central Asia and China.

[81] Assyrian Christians still made up the majority population in northern Iraq until the massacres conducted by Tamurlane in the 14th century, which also saw their ancient city of Assur finally abandoned after 4,000 years.

[citation needed] The vast majority are Neo-Aramaic speaking ethnic Assyrians (also known as Chaldo-Assyrians), descendant from the ancient Mesopotamians in general and the ancient Assyrians more specifically, who are concentrated in the north, particularly the Nineveh Plains, Dohuk and Sinjar regions, border regions with south east Turkey, north west Iran and northern Syria, and in and around cities such as Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk, and also in Baghdad.

In his studies Zaken outlines three major eruptions that took place between 1843 and 1933 during which the Assyrian Christians lost their land and hegemony in their habitat in the Hakkārī (or Julamerk) region in southeastern Turkey and became refugees in other lands, notably Iran and Iraq, and ultimately in exiled communities in Western countries (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Russia and within many of the 27 EU member states like Sweden, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands).

In recent years, the Christian population in Israel has increased significantly by presence of foreign workers from a number of countries (predominantly the Philippines and Romania).

Christians have established good relations with the royal family and the various Jordanian government officials and they have their own ecclesiastic courts for matters of personal status.

Saint Maron adopted an ascetic, reclusive life on the banks of the Orontes river near Homs–Syria and founded a community of monks who preached the Gospel in the surrounding area.

Antioch was also the place where the followers of Jesus were called "Christians" for the first time in history, as well as being the site of one of the earliest and oldest surviving churches, established by Saint Peter himself.

These include such countries as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, the United States and Venezuela among them.

There are also many Middle Eastern Christians in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, France (due to its historical connections with Lebanon, Egypt, Syria), and to a lesser extent, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, and the Netherlands.