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Rh the 19th century, first by explorers who went to Mesopotamia to find Assyrian remains. Since then it has been the object of great interest and of many missionary expeditions. Besides the Catholic missions, which have been there for a long time and belong to a different category, the chief of these are the American Presbyterian mission at Urmi and the Anglican mission at Amadia. The Orthodox Russians, too, have a mission here. There are now about 100,000 Nestorians living in Kurdistan and around Lake Urmi on either side of the Turkish-Persian frontier. Their religious (and to a great extent civil) head is the Patriarch and Katholikos, who always takes the name Mâr Shim‘un. Under him are one Metropolitan and ten bishops. The Patriarchal and Episcopal lines are now practically hereditary. They have a hierarchy of the usual Eastern type, but do not now in practice ordain anyone below the rank of deacon. Priests and deacons have no law of celibacy at all. There are a few monks and nuns, no monasteries. Their faith differs from ours in the great point of our Lord's person. They have a kind of iconoclasm, except that they greatly reverence the holy Cross. Naturally they reject the primacy of the Pope; their attitude about the Filioque seems undetermined. They use the old Eastern Syrian rite in classical Syriac. Their divine office is now practically reduced to morning and evening prayer. They have three forms of liturgy, the normal one "of the Holy Apostles," and supplementary anaphoras of Theodore and of Nestorius (this, apparently a version of the old Byzantine rite) used on a few days. The most curious points in their rite are that they begin the liturgy actually by making and baking the bread, their curious superstition about the "holy leaven" which they mix therewith, and, strangest of all, that their normal liturgy does not contain the words of institution.