Syriac

Syriac is the Christian destiny of the Aramaic script. The city of Edessa in upper Mesopotamia, modern Urfa, wrote an Aramaic dialect in a graceful cursive that is attested in inscriptions from the first centuries CE, and when Edessa became an early centre of Christianity its dialect and letters became the literary vehicle of Aramaic-speaking Christendom. The classical book hand, Estrangela, whose name is usually derived from the Greek for rounded, carries the great early manuscripts.

After the church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox church divided in the fifth-century christological controversies, the script itself divided with them: the western communities developed the compact Serto hand, while the east elaborated its own style, and the two traditions also devised different vowel systems, the west adopting small Greek vowel letters placed above the line, the east a refined system of dots. Syriac scribes were among the great translators of antiquity, carrying Greek philosophy and medicine into Syriac and onward into Arabic, so the script sits at a hinge of intellectual history. Written right to left in twenty-two letters, it remains instantly recognisable across its styles, one alphabet with three liturgical faces.

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.