Countries and Their Cultures: Syriacs

Syriac is a branch of the Aramaic family of languages and was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. It is also spoken extensively in the regions farther east. It became the language of liturgies and patristic literature after serving for over a millennium as the vernacular at Edessa (present-day Urfa, in southern Turkey) with very slight variation from the Aramaic or "Chaldee," as it was once called. Syriac eventually gave way vernacularly and, to some extent, liturgically, to Arabic, following the absorption of these communities into the Arabo-Islamic Empire from the eighth century onward.