The East Syriac Rite is the worship of a church that built Christendom's first great missionary web. Centred in Persian Mesopotamia, beyond Rome's border, the Church of the East ordered its liturgy from the school traditions of Edessa and Nisibis and carried it astonishing distances: metropolitans in Central Asia, communities in India from at least the early centuries, and a mission in Tang China attested by the Xi'an stele of 781. The rite these travellers carried is sober and scriptural.
The Holy Qurbana proceeds from the liturgy of the word, with its ancient responsorial psalmody, to an anaphora served at a bare altar behind a sanctuary veil; the church building traditionally sets the bema, a raised platform for the readings, in the nave. Besides Addai and Mari the rite keeps two further anaphoras for seasons of the year, ascribed to Theodore of Mopsuestia and to Nestorius, the Antiochene teachers the Church of the East honours where the Roman world condemned, a difference of veneration that hardened the church's isolation and preserved its rite from outside revision. The modern communities of the rite are divided among the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church in communion with Rome since the sixteenth century, and the Syro-Malabar Church of Kerala, together some millions of faithful; war and emigration have scattered the Mesopotamian heartland, and the rite now lives as much in Chicago, Melbourne and Kochi as in the villages of northern Iraq where its Aramaic was a mother tongue.