Eden Naby

Who is Eden Naby?

Eden Naby is an Assyrian cultural historian of Central Asia and the Middle East. She was born in the once important Assyrian village of Golpashan, located outside Urmia in Iran. Eden Naby has conducted research, taught and published on minority issues in countries from Turkey to Tajikistan. Her work on Afghanistan and on the Assyrians stands out in the field of cultural survival. She is married to Richard Frye and they have one son, Nels Frye.

After attending Temple University in 1964 for her undergraduate degree, she served in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, and after receiving her PhD she taught in Iran. In 1980 she led a CBS 60 Minutes team for the first ever filming of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She was featured in Charlie Wilson's War with Dan Rather.

Naby has devoted her time since 1979 to establishing endowments at United States universities to promote the preservation of Assyrian archives, publishing, and lectures. While limited in principle, these endowments, especially at Harvard University, lay the basis for the preservation of research materials, especially in diaspora.

Among her writings are many articles in the Assyrian Star aimed at the of eliciting knowledge about Assyrian culture from knowledgeable members of the community. She has also mounted three exhibits using Assyrian family photographs and the Harvard archives to illustrate 19th-20th century Assyrian history. As contributing editor on modern Assyrians for the Encyclopædia Iranica, she is responsible for hundreds of entries on the Assyrians.