Jack Tannous: What is Syriac? Explorations in the History of a Name

 Jack Tannous, "What is Syriac? Explorations in the History of a Name," Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 28.1 (2025), 65-153.

 

Abstract

This article looks into various aspects of the history of the name “Syriac,” arguing that this glottonym has had different meanings at different points in history. While scholars today use “Syriac” to refer to the Aramaic dialect of Edessa, historically, it has also been a word that referred more generally to the northwest Semitic language that today is commonly called “Aramaic.” This is true for both “Syriac” as an English word and its various cognates and equivalents in other languages. “Syriac” was a language used by pagans, Jews, Manichees, and a variety of different Christian groups and its association with specific Christian confessions in the Middle East is also a historical development. The article ends by
suggesting possible reasons that Edessene Aramaic—as opposed to some other type of Aramaic—became the linguistic vehicle of choice for many Middle Eastern Christian groups.

  

In addition to being an incredibly useful article about what premodern writers meant when they described someone or something as "Syriac", there is also a lot of information about the much-neglected use of Syriac by Chalcedonian Orthodox communities, such as the following:

"There are more dated Melkite manuscripts from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, than there are dated manuscripts from the Church of the East."

"Many Christians of Maʻlūlā were of course Chalcedonians and one only need point to the history of this church to further show that liturgical language in a Middle Eastern context does not reflect the language of day-to-day life: in this church, usually regarded as the most Arabophile and Hellenophile and least Syriac of all the Christian communities of Greater Syria and the Fertile Crescent, Syriac was still in use liturgically until the seventeenth century. Indeed, Korolevsky suggested that, apart from international centers like Jerusalem, Alexandria, and the Sinai, places which received a constant-influx of Greek speakers from outside the Middle East, all Chalcedonian liturgical manuscripts from the ninth to seventeenth centuries throughout the region were in fact Syriac ones.72 St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai, an institution whose Chalcedonian credentials are impeccable, has one of the most precious collections in existence of Christian Greek manuscripts; it is perhaps less well-known that its collection of Syriac manuscripts is regarded as one of the 'ten most important collections in the language in the world.'"

Download the entire article in open access here.