• DOI:10.31826/hug-2011-100112
• Corpus ID: 185250042

The Edessan Milieu and the Birth of Syriac

@article{Healey2011TheEM,
  title={The Edessan Milieu and the Birth of Syriac},
  author={John F. Healey},
  journal={Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies},
  year={2011},
  volume={10},
  pages={101 - 112}
}

• J. Healey
• Published 1 April 2011
• Linguistics
• Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies

This paper reviews the cultural and linguistic environment in which the Syriac dialect of Aramaic emerged as a language of inscriptions, legal documents and, in due course, literature. It is argued that the evidence for the hellenization of the Edessa region in the Greek and early Roman periods is slight. Edessa owed more to its Semitic cultural roots and early Syriac writings do not reflect strong Greek impact. The emergence of the language is to be seen in the context of the varied contemporary Aramaic dialects of Mesopotamia, with the variations also reflected within early Syriac itself. [1] Syriac’s emergence as a literary language was stimulated on the one hand by a multicultural Semitic, Greek and Iranian environment, and on the other by the demands made of the language in the context of the spread of Christianity. In some sense Syriac responded to these demands. Of course, we often talk about languages in a metaphorical way, as if a language were able to decide whether to respond or not! In some sense languages have a life of their own and this partly explains why, in our attempts to describe their processes, we tend to use terms derived from the life sciences, such as the terms “family” and “birth.” 1 This paper was delivered at a plenary session of the fourth North American Syriac Symposium, held at Princeton Theological Seminary, July 9-12, 2003.