The Dialect of Edessa That Became a Christian World Language

Classical Syriac began as the local Aramaic dialect of Edessa, a caravan city in upper Mesopotamia, and by the third century it had become the literary language of Aramaic speaking Christianity. Its script, Estrangela, developed from the Aramaic cursive of the region, and the dialect carried an early and influential Bible version, the Peshitta, whose Old Testament was translated from Hebrew and whose New Testament became the standard text of the Syriac churches. The golden age of Syriac writing ran from the fourth century to the seventh.

Ephrem the Syrian, working in Nisibis and then Edessa in the fourth century, composed hundreds of madrashe, stanzaic teaching hymns whose melodies and metres shaped Christian hymnography far beyond the Syriac world. After the christological controversies of the fifth century the tradition divided into a West Syriac branch, centred on Antioch and writing in Serto script, and an East Syriac branch in the Persian empire, each developing its own vowel notation and liturgical use. The Arab conquests slowly displaced Syriac as a spoken language, but its scholars served as the principal translators of Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic, standing at the head of the chain of transmission that eventually returned that learning to Europe.