The Edessan Milieu and the Birth of Syriac

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.