Syriac Literature

SYRIAC LITERATURE. The use of Syriac by Christians as a literary medium had its original centre in Edessa (Syr. Crhai, modern Urfa), where, in all probability, the chief Syriac ver sions of the Bible were made. The use of the same dialect ap pears in the earliest Christian literature connected with such Mesopotamian cities as Nisibis, Amid, Mardin, Taghrith and Seleucia-Ctesiphon, as well as west of the Euphrates at such centres as Mabbogh (Hierapolis) and Aleppo, northwards at Mala tiah and Maiperkat and in the districts of Lake Van and Lake Urmia, and to the east and south-east of the Tigris in many places which from the 5th century onwards were centres of Nestorian Christianity within the Sassanian empire. In Palestine and western Syria, the home of pre-Christian Aramaic dialects, the vernacular Semitic speech had under Roman dominion been replaced by Greek for official and literary purposes. Apparently this state of things lasted till after the Mohammedan conquest, for Barhe braeus tells us that it was the caliph Walid I. (A.D. 705-715) who, out of hatred to Christianity, replaced Greek by Arabic as the lan guage of official documents at Damascus.

Syriac literature continued in life from the 3rd to the 14th cen tury A.D., but of ter the Arab conquest it became an increasingly artificial product, for Arabic gradually killed its vernacular use.

Religious Literature.

In the literature as it survives many different branches of writing are represented—homilies in prose and verse, hymns, exposition and commentary, liturgy, apocryphal legends, historical romance, hagiography and martyrology, monas tic history and biography, general history, dogmatics, philosophy and science, ecclesiastial law, etc. But the whole is dominated by the theological and ecclesiastical interest. When we put aside one or two exceptionally fine pieces, like the hymn of the soul in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the highest degree of excellence in style is perhaps attained in straightforward historical narrative— such as the account of the Perso-Roman War at the beginning of the 6th century by the author who passes under the name of Joshua the Stylite, or by romancers like him who wrote the romance of Julian ; by biographers like some of those who have written lives of saints, martyrs and eminent divines; and by some early writers of homilies such as Philoxenus (in prose) and Isaac of Antioch (in verse).

For the general history of culture the work of Syriac writers as translators is, perhaps, as important as any of their original contributions to literature. Beginning with the earliest versions of the Bible, which seem to date from the 2nd century A.D., the series comprises a great mass of translations from Greek originals —theological, philosophical, legendary, historical and scientific.

In a fair number of cases the Syriac version has preserved to us the substance of a lost original text. Often, moreover, the Syriac translation became in turn the parent of a later Arabic version. This was notably the case with some of the Aristotelian writings, so that in this field, as in some others, the Syriac writers handed on the torch of Greek thought to the Arabs, by whom it was in turn transmitted to mediaeval Europe. The early Syriac trans lations are in many cases so literal as to do violence to the idiom of their own language ; but this makes them all the more valuable when we have to depend on them for reconstructing the original texts. The later translators use greater freedom. It was not from Greek only that translations were made into Syriac. Of trans lations from Pahlavi we have such examples as the version of pseudo-Callisthenes' History of Alexander, made in the 7th cen tury from a Pahlavi version of the Greek original—that of Kalilah and Dimnah executed in the 6th century by the perio deutes BOdh—and that of Sindbad, which dates from the 8th century; and in the late period of Syriac literature, books were translated from Arabic into Syriac as well as vice versa.