Classical Syriac

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.

The Syriac corpus is one of the largest of any ancient Christian language. Beside the Peshitta Bible stand the hymns and verse homilies of Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh and Narsai, extensive biblical commentary, monastic and mystical writing including Isaac of Nineveh, chronicles, saints' lives, and the anaphoras of the Syriac liturgies.

The West Syriac rite celebrates the Liturgy of St James in Syriac, while the East Syriac rite preserves the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, among the oldest eucharistic prayers in continuous use anywhere. Syriac was also a missionary language of remarkable reach. East Syriac Christians carried it along the Silk Road into Central Asia and Tang China, where the Xi'an stele of 781 records the church's presence in both Chinese and Syriac, and to the Malabar coast of India, where the Saint Thomas Christians still use Syriac liturgy.

Today Classical Syriac remains the liturgical language of the Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Assyrian, Chaldean, Maronite and Indian Syriac churches. It is distinct from the Neo-Aramaic dialects some of these communities still speak, which descend from related but not identical Aramaic varieties. Seminaries in the Middle East, India, Europe and the Americas continue to teach it.