The production of Syriac literature, starting in the fourth century AD, covers a timespan of over seventeen centuries. Classical Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language, was the language of the city of Edessa (Urhoy, present-day Urfa in Eastern Turkey). When a substantial part of the city’s population converted to Christianity, a liturgy in Syriac was also created. Spreading from Edessa, the Classical Syriac language gradually became the liturgical and literary language of the Aramaic-speaking communities both in the Roman Empire and in Persia. The Roman/Persian division of the communities, resulted, by the late fifth-late sixth centuries, in the separation of the Syriac-speaking Churches. The Church of the East (vulgo Nestorian Church), with its distinct literature, is the heir to the Persian community, while the Melkite and the Jacobite Churches are the heirs to the Syriac-speaking communities of the Roman Empire. After the so-called Syriac Renaissance of the thirteenth -fourteenth centuries, when Syriac literature flourished, a decline began. Yet, in the sixteenth- seventeenth centuries, Syriac was reborn as a high literary language in the fight of European and West Asian missionaries for the cultural dominance in the Indian communities. Classical Syriac is still a living language in which literature is being produced.
Syriac is taught by Prof. István Perczel.
Image credits: Kottayam, St Joseph’s CMI Monastery Mannanam, Ms Mannanam Syr 7, ff. 1v-3r. Courtesy of Saint Joseph’s Monastery of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, Mannanam, Kottayam District, Kerala, India.
Ms Mannanam Syr 7, containing the poem of Bar ’Ebroyo, "On Things Divine and on Perfection." Bar ’Ebroyo (1226-1286) is the greatest medieval erudite and polyhistor of the Syriac Orthodox (that is, the West Syriac) Church. This poem of his was so popular in the Church of the East (the one of the opposite, so-called Nestorian, confession), that it was complemented and interpolated by a series of East Syriac poets. The first was Khāmīs Bar Qardāḥē (late 13th century), Bar ’Ebroyo’s younger contemporary; the second was Mar Išō'yahb, Metropolitan of Arbel, also called Bar M-qaddam, also belonging to the Church of the East, who made new interpolations in the year 1763 of the Greeks (AD 1452); the third was Mar Joseph II, Chaldean, (that is, Catholic) Patriarch from Tell Kēpē, who made new interpolations in the year 2009 of the Greeks (AD 1698); and the last one was Priest Ṣawmu from the village of Piōz (18th century), also belonging to the Chaldean Church. Thus, this poem, co-authored throughout five centuries by a Syriac Orthodox, two Church of the East, and two Chaldean Catholic authors, testifies to the universality and unity beyond the confessional differences of Syriac culture.
The manuscript, owned by the library of St Joseph’s CMI Monastery, Mannanam, Kottayam, Kerala, was copied in the nineteenth century, before 1857. It was digitized by the SRITE project (https://cems.ceu.edu/digitization-syriac-manuscripts-southern-india) in 2008. Courtesy of Saint Joseph’s Monastery of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, Mannanam, Kottayam District, Kerala, India
Figure 1 (above): ff. 1v-2r: Illustration of the manuscript, and ownership mark: "This book belongs to Mar Yaqōb Abraham, Chaldean Metropolitan - [the year] 1857 of Christ.”
Figure 2 (left): ff. 3v-4r: Introduction to the poem by Mar Išō'yahb of Arbel and beginning of the Introduction by Mar Joseph II.