the 19th century, coinciding with increasing contacts with Europeans along with increased expressions nationalism in other Middle Eastern groups, such as the Armenians, Arabs, Kurds and Turks. Through the large-scale adoption and promotion of identities such as ʾĀthorāyā and ʾAsurāyā, Assyrian intellectuals and authors hoped to inspire the unification of the Assyrian nation, transcending long-standing denominational divisions. This effort has been met with both support and opposition in various communities; some denominations have rejected unity and promoted alternate identities, such as "Aramean", "Syriac" and "Chaldean". Though some religious officials and activists have promoted such identities as separate ethnic groups rather than simply religious groups, they are not generally treated as such by international organizations. Assyrians after the Assyrian Empire Early assumption of Assyrian annihilation Ancient Assyria fell in the late 7th century BC through the Medo-Babylonian conquest of the Assyrian Empire, with its major population centers violently sacked and most of its territory incorporated into the Neo-Babylonian Empire. In the millennia following the fall of Assyria, knowledge of the ancient empire chiefly survived in western literary tradition through accounts of Assyria in the Hebrew Bible and works by classical authors, both of which described Assyria's fall as violent and comprehensive destruction. Before the 19th century, the prevalent belief in Biblically-influenced western scholarship was that ancient Assyria and Babylonia had been literally annihilated due to provoking divine wrath. This belief was reinforced through archaeologists in the Middle East initially not finding many remains fitting with the conventional European image of ancient cities, with stone columns and great sculptures, beyond those of ancient Persia; Assyria and other Mesopotamian civilizations left no magnificent ruins above ground—all that remained to see were huge grass-covered mounds in the plains which travellers at times believed to simply be natural features of the landscape. Early European archaeologists in the Middle East were also for the most part more interested in confirming Biblical truth through their excavations than to spend time on new interpretations of the evidence they discovered. Though the Bible and other Hebrew texts describe the destruction of the Assyrian Empire, they do not actually claim that the Assyrian people were destroyed. The 2nd century BC apocryphal Book of Judith states that the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC) "ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh", the Book of Ezra refers to the Persian king Darius I as "king of Assyria", and the