The religious reach of the Syriac script far exceeded its homeland. It carries the Peshitta, the standard Syriac Bible, and the liturgies, hymns and theology of the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic, the Maronite and the Saint Thomas Christian traditions of India, where Syriac remains a liturgical language on the Malabar coast to this day.
The hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, among the greatest of all Christian poets, were composed and transmitted in these letters. Missionaries of the Church of the East carried the script across Central Asia along the Silk Road, and its most famous distant monument is the Xi'an stele of 781, which records the arrival of the Luminous Religion in Tang China in Chinese with Syriac names and letters down its margins.
Christian gravestones in Syriac script scatter from the Tarim Basin to the shores of lake Issyk Kul, and the Sogdian and Old Uyghur Christian texts of Turfan use adapted Syriac letters, whose distant descendants, through Sogdian and Uyghur, include the Mongolian script itself. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, communities scattered by persecution have carried the script into a worldwide diaspora, where it remains the alphabet of the liturgy and an emblem of Aramaic Christian identity.