Interesting to note, these folks were brilliant back then. Steve Jobs’ dad was Syrian.
Syrians and Assyrians are not the same, although both are however Semitic. Ethnically Assyrian people still live in the Middle East.
Note that Syrians of today aren’t the same.
Assyria is in what is now northern Iraq.
What is now Syria, in the Bronze age was a mixture of Urartu, Aram, Canaan speaking a Canaanite language that later split into Hebrew, Phoenicians, Canaanite, Aramaic etc.
Present day “Syrians” are a mix of those ancient people’s plus Romans, Greeks, mAcedonian, Arabs, Persians etc etc.