Syriac, the Aramaic dialect that carried Christianity from Edessa to China
A local Aramaic dialect from the city of Edessa became, alongside Greek and Latin, one of the three great languages of early Christianity. Syriac-speaking churches carried it as far as India's Malabar Coast and eastern China, and it still serves as a sacred liturgical language today.
Syriac emerged in the first century AD in Osroene, a region centred on Edessa, known locally as Urhai. Its speakers called it Urhaya after the city, Nahraya, meaning Mesopotamian, or simply Aramaya. Christianity took hold among the region's largely Assyrian population in the first and second centuries, and by the third and fourth the Edessan tongue had become the vehicle of a distinct Syriac Christian culture. It flourished from the 4th to the 8th century.
Theology split its speakers in the 5th century: the Church of the East, under Persian rule, followed the East Syriac Rite, while the Syriac Orthodox Church, under Byzantine rule, kept the West Syriac Rite. Written in an alphabet derived from Aramaic script, Syriac accounts for roughly 90 percent of all surviving Aramaic literature. It also served as a channel of culture for the Arabs and, less so, for peoples of the Parthian and Sasanian empires, profoundly shaping Arabic, which went on to supplant it in the later Middle Ages.
By the close of the medieval period, Neo-Aramaic languages had taken over everyday speech, leaving Syriac mostly to worship. It remains in liturgical use in both rites, among them the Maronite Catholic Church, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Chaldean Catholic Church. The Syriac Melkites, by contrast, swapped their rite for that of Constantinople between the 9th and 11th centuries and had to retranslate all their liturgical books.
The name itself tells a story. Syria began as an Iron Age derivative of Assyria, and until the Seleucid era it meant historic Assyria, covering what is now northern Iraq, northeast Syria and southeast Turkey. English scholars prefer Syriac to Syrian because Syrian has too many other meanings. West Syriac tradition calls the classical form the book language, while East Syriac tradition calls it the old language.
Source: Syriac language
