If one must designate an original language for the people of Syria and Lebanon, then Aramaic — and Syriac in particular — is that original language. For the inhabitants, broadly speaking, spoke it from about the sixth century before Christ until the beginning of the ninth century after Christ. "Aram" is the name by which northern Syria was known until the Greeks called it "Syria." In the writings of the Old Testament there are numerous references to "Aram of Damascus" and "Aram of the Two Rivers" (Aram-Naharaim), which indicates that the term Aram encompassed northern and hollow Syria together with Mesopotamia. In the ninth century before Christ the Arameans had a great independent kingdom led by Damascus and Hama, which opposed the Assyrians and stood as a barrier against their advance toward the West. Among their most famous kings were Hazael and his son Ben-Hadad. Among the Semitic [sic] languages there is none to rival Aramaic in richness of vocabulary[?], breadth of diffusion, and strength of influence, save its sister Arabic, which succeeded it and took its place in Syria. As for antiquity, the former is the earlier.

The Spread of Aramaic

Aramaic today is all but dead, but for a few scattered groups that still speak it in Tur Abdin (the mountains of Mesopotamia), in the regions north and east of Mosul, in the mountains of Kurdistan, near Lake Urmia, and in Maalula in the district of Damascus. But in ages past it was the everyday language of all the people of the Jazira, Syria, Palestine, part of Asia Minor, Persia, and Egypt. It is the language spoken by the Lord Christ and by the Jews in Syria and Egypt, and these latter used to write it in Hebrew characters. It is established that Aramaic was the language of the common people in the era of the Assyrian kingdom, while Assyrian was the official language. It appears from the description by the writers of the Old Testament of Sennacherib's invasion of the land of Judah that Assyrian officials were expected to be fluent in speaking Aramaic. In Professor Breasted's "Ancient Times" there is a picture of an inscription dating to the eighth century before Christ, depicting an Assyrian commander dictating to his scribes the spoils of one of his campaigns. In the hand of one of the scribes is a clay tablet on which he writes in cuneiform characters. As for the other scribe, in his hand is an ink pen, and with it he writes in Aramaic on papyrus. Among the texts is what confirms [sic] that in the Byzantine era the officials who came to Syria relied on interpreters in order to communicate with the inhabitants, who spoke Aramaic.

When the Babylonian-Assyrian age passed, the Aramaic language took the place of Babylonian in politics and commerce and became the official language of the kings of Persia, Aram, Palmyra, and Petra (which the Arabs called al-Raqim; it lies in Wadi Musa to the northwest of Maan). The monuments and inscriptions show that the official language current among the living nations in the first centuries before the Christian era — from Persia in the east to Syria in the west, and from Assyria in the north to Palestine and Egypt in the south — was none other than Aramaic. Aramaic remains to this day the liturgical language of most of the Christians of the Near East: Nestorians, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholics, Maronites, and Indian Syriacs in Malabar in the region of India. In the Bibliothèque Orientale of the Jesuit Fathers in Beirut there are volumes and religious booklets in the Aramaic language that were used of old in the Antiochene Church. In the treasuries of Europe there are hundreds of these liturgical books belonging to the Melkites. They prove the prevalence of Aramaic-Syriac before Greek in the Syrian Orthodox Church. We doubt the accuracy of what the "Catholic Encyclopedia" recounted, namely that Greek was the prevailing language in the monastery of Mar Maroun [on the Orontes] until the ninth century.

Shortly before the year 1000 BC the Arameans borrowed the letters of the alphabet from their kin the Phoenicians, and ink and paper from the Egyptians, and spread them by means of their merchants from India in the east to the edges of Asia in the west. Aramaic is thus the first spoken language written in alphabetic letters, and it was from it — not directly from Phoenician — that the Indians, Persians, Arabs, and others took their letters. The oldest Aramaic writing found to date belongs to one of the kings of Hama named Zakir, who wrote it in the eighth century before Christ. Other writings were found at Zincirli on the edges of northern Syria, dating likewise to the eighth century.

When rule passed to the Persians after the Assyrians and Babylonians, Aramaic retained its dominance in the provinces of Asia Minor. The governors of those provinces would engrave their coins in the Aramaic language. Writings in Aramaic were found in Egypt, one of them bearing a date that is the fourth year of the reign of Xerxes (482 BC), and much else besides that was written by the Jewish colonists in the southern reaches of Upper Egypt. The kings of Media and Persia would compose their letters in Aramaic, a practice the Sasanian kings after them continued to follow.

Among the books of the Old Testament, part of Daniel, and Ezra and Nehemiah, were originally written in the Aramaic language.

Although the Nabateans and Palmyrenes were of Arab stock and the common language among them was Arabic, their inscriptions and writings came entirely in Aramaic. Nabatean and Palmyrene are but two dialects among the dialects of Aramaic. The inscriptions of Palmyra date for the most part to the first three centuries after Christ. As for the inscriptions of the Nabateans, who extended their authority from the far reaches of the Sinai Peninsula to the outskirts of Damascus, they were written mostly in the first century after Christ, because the Emperor Trajan subdued their country in the year 105 AD and thereby their state fell. What confirms that Arabic was the spoken language is the presence of Arabic words inserted among the Aramaic terms, such as the word "ghayr" ("other than"); apparently the Nabatean scribe did not know its equivalent in Aramaic and so kept it in its original Arabic form.

The Arabs, who mingled with the civilized world through politics and commerce, were compelled to learn the language of statesmen and men of standing, and so they learned the Aramaic language and wrote it in the Aramaic script because of its ease. In the early centuries of Christianity, Aramaic extended to the north of the Arabian Peninsula, as attested by the scattered writings found in those regions — so much so that al-Masudi declares, after mentioning the divisions of the land of the Arabs, "that this whole peninsula … has one tongue, Syriac." And Jacob of Sarug (452–522 AD) used to correspond with the Christian Arabs of Najran in eastern Arabia in the Syriac language.

Someone found at Xi'an-fu in China a huge stone inscribed in Aramaic with the names of seventy-seven Nestorian missionaries who went to China in the late ninth century, and their names were recorded at that time.

In sum, the written remains of the Aramaic language are spread from the far reaches of China in the east to the shores of the Dardanelles in the west, and from the coasts of the Black Sea in the north to the borders of India and the cataracts of the Nile in the south. This is a distinction no other ancient language attained, and perhaps among the modern languages there is none to rival it in this save English. We do not exaggerate if we say that the Aramaic language held sway over the Semitic mind for a period exceeding a thousand years, beginning five centuries before Christ, and that the Semitic mind found in Aramaic, during that period, the finest means of expressing its feelings and its acts.

The Mediation of Aramaic Between Greek and Arabic

Yet the historic mission that the Aramaic language performed is that it came to be the link between the Greek mind and the Semitic mind, and the bridge that Greek philosophy and the sciences crossed before entering the fold of Arabic and Hebrew. Aristotle, for example, the father of philosophers and their peerless one — his works were first translated into Syriac, and from it (in the days of al-Mamun) into Arabic; and through Ibn Rushd (Averroes) of Cordoba (died in the year 1198) Aristotle found, in the Middle Ages, a path to the universities of Europe. Ibn Rushd's commentary on him became the authoritative commentary in the Western world. And such was the lot of others besides Aristotle among the Greek geographers, mathematicians, and physicians.

When the Arabs turned to the sciences and sought to occupy themselves with them during the renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries, it was the Syriac scholars who assisted them in that. They brought out for them the Greek and Syriac compositions and helped them translate them into Arabic. The Syriacs, then (in other terms, the ancient "Syrians"), are the ones who carried the lamp of learning and civilization from Greek hands to Arab hands, and the Arabs are the ones who illumined the minds of the people of Europe on the day when Europe was in murky darkness.

The oldest Syriac work of importance is the translation of the Bible known as the "Peshitta," made in the second century after Christ in the city of Edessa (which the Arabs call al-Ruha and the Turks Urfa); it is the first translation of the Bible from its original languages.

Among the translators from Greek into Syriac was Sergius of Reshaina (attributed to Reshaina — Ras al-Ayn in Syria), who translated some of the books of Galen, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the dean of translators, would correct his rendering. Then, under Islam, these books were translated by Musa ibn Khalid. Among them too was George (Jurjis) ibn Bakhtishu the Syriac, head physician of the school and hospital of Gundeshapur, and physician to the Caliph al-Mansur, who translated medical books from Greek into Arabic and composed works on medicine in Syriac. The books that al-Razi (died in the year 930) relied upon in his medical work titled "al-Kitab al-Muluki" (the Royal Book), and that Ibn Sina (Avicenna, died about the year 1037) relied upon in his composition "al-Qanun" (the Canon), were originally Greek books by Hippocrates and Galen, but they had earlier been translated into Syriac.

Among the most famous transmitters of learning in the Abbasid era were the family of Hunayn, from the Christians of al-Hira, chief among them Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and the family of Bakhtishu, and Qusta ibn Luqa of Baalbek. Qusta was a physician proficient in the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic languages.

Worthy of consideration is that the technical scientific terms that entered Arabic from Greek — such as "geography," "dysentery," "iqlim" (clime), and "ether" — entered by way of Syriac, not directly from Greek. And speakers of Arabic to this day still pronounce them as the Syriacs pronounce them, not as the Greeks. Among the Arabized names that the Arabs pronounce as the Syriacs pronounce them, not as the Greeks, are Aflatun (instead of Platon), Suqrat (instead of Socrates), and Yuhanna (instead of Ioannes).

Syriac

After the Arameans embraced the Christian religion, they inclined to take on the name "Syriacs," the name the Greeks had applied to them. They shrank from using the term "Arameans" because of the odor of the ancient paganism that clung in people's minds to that term. In the late fifth century the teachings of Nestorius spread among the Christian Syriacs, who at that time were divided between two authorities, the Roman authority and the Persian authority. So most of the eastern Syriacs, subject to the Persian state, embraced the Nestorian creed, while the western Syriacs, subject to Constantinople, joined the doctrine of the Jacobites, "the Syriac Orthodox," who profess the single nature. In the year 489 the school of Edessa closed its doors in the face of the Nestorians, so they founded a school of their own in Nisibis. Thereby the Arameans split into two halves, and Nisibis began to rival its neighbor Edessa, which was in that age the foremost scholarly and literary center in the Semitic world. And after the difference between the two parties had been religious only, it became with the passing of the years linguistic as well. So the name "Syriac" was applied to the dialect of Edessa and Syria, and "Chaldean" to the eastern Nestorian branch. Yet the difference between the two dialects is superficial, not essential, and is confined to the manner of pronouncing certain letters and vowels and to the form of the script. Chaldean is the language of the Nestorians and the eastern branch of Aramaic, and Syriac is the language of the Jacobites, "the Syriac Orthodox," and the western branch of it. However, in this article of ours we have proceeded to use Syriac and Aramaic as synonyms.

In the seventh century after Christ — the century in which the Arabs began their conquests — Aramaic-Syriac enjoyed its golden age, and the sciences and arts flourished in it. That was thanks to those who distinguished themselves in these two schools — the school of Edessa and the school of Nisibis — among the most famous of whom was the historian and philosopher Jacob of Edessa, founder of the science of Syriac grammar.

The truth is that the Aramaic-Syriac language, at the time of the Islamic conquest, was the one prevailing and dominant on the tongues of the people of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, with no rival contesting it and no opponent opposing it. It had preceded and prevailed over the earlier Semitic dialects such as Hebrew, Phoenician, and Amorite, and it is the language that Arabic contested fiercely until it uprooted it and became rooted in its place — that after a bitter war that lasted generations and centuries.