The various ethnic communities of indigenous pre-Arab, Semitic and often Neo-Aramaic-speaking Christian people of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel, advocate different terms for ethnic self-designation. Syriac Christians from the Middle East are theologically and culturally closely related to, but should not be confused with the Saint Thomas Christians from India, whose cultural and ethnic links were a result of trade links and migration by Assyrian Christians from Mesopotamia and the Middle East mostly around the 9th century.