Syriac

Syriac is the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Edessa that became the principal literary and liturgical language of Aramaic-speaking Christianity in Late Antiquity. From the second century CE it carried a vast body of writing, scriptural, theological, historical, and scientific, that made it the third great language of the late antique Near East beside Greek and Latin, and the medium through which much of Greek learning later passed into Arabic. As a form of Aramaic it stands in direct continuity with the older Imperial Aramaic of the Achaemenid chancelleries, and it preserves, in a Christian and Late Antique register, the same Northwest Semitic stock that the project’s Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic entries draw on.

Syriac is written in its own alphabet, descended from the Aramaic script, in three principal hands: the older Estrangela, and the later Eastern (Madnḥaya) and Western (Serṭo) forms that accompanied the division of the Syriac churches. The script is consonantal, with vowels marked by systems of points and, later, small Greek-derived vowel letters. The standard lexica are the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith and its derivatives, and Sokoloff’s English edition of Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum.

@misc{onomastikon-syriac,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Syriac},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/syriac}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}