Syriac Sentence Examples

Syriac and Armenian versions were made in the 5th century.

He edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854), and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris.

He early developed a gift for languages, becoming familiar not only with Latin and Greek but also with Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, Turkish and other Eastern tongues.

The Leyden Syriac is supplemented with literal extracts from the latter, and the whole is presented as his work.

The same cause may account for the somewhat slovenly Syriac style.

Syriac is the eastern dialect of the Aramaic language which, during the early centuries of the Christian era, prevailed in Mesopotamia and the adjoining regions.

The Syriac alphabet, which derived its letters from forms ultimately akin to those of the Old Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, has the same twenty-two letters as the Hebrew.

Where the same root exists in Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew, its fundamental consonants are usually the same in all three languages.

In vowel-sounds Syriac is clearly more primitive than Hebrew (as pointed by the Massoretes), less so than Arabic. Thus Ar.

The accent plays much less part in lengthening and altering the vowels in Syriac than in Hebrew, but there are well-marked cases of lengthening from this cause.

This is one of the many respects where Syriac has gained greater flexibility in syntax than Hebrew.

The Syriac verb is remarkable for having entirely lost the original passive forms, such as in Arabic can be formed in every conjugation and in Hebrew are represented by the Pual and Hophal.

For these Syriac has substituted middle or reflexive forms with prefixed eth and a change in the last vowel.

Whereas the Hebrew verb is devoid of real tenses, and only expresses an action as completed or as in process without indicating time past, present or future, Syriac has by the help of an auxiliary verb constructed a set of tenses.

The Manchus and Mongols are chiefly Buddhist, with letters derived from the ancient Syriac. The Manchus are now said to be gradually falling under the influence of Chinese civilization, and to be losing their old nomadic habits, and even their peculiar language.

This Raba., the mother of falsehood and lies, of poisoning and fornication is an anti-Christian parody of the Ruha d'Qudsha (Holy Spirit) of the Syriac Church.

From the age of sixteen to nearly twenty his health was so unsatisfactory that he attended neither school nor college, bilt worked at Chaldee and Syriac, began to read Arabic, and mastered 'S Gravesande's Natural Philosophy, together with various textbooks of logic and metaphysics.

The last survivals of Aramaic are to be sought in certain remote villages of Anti-Lebanon, and in the Syriac known to the clergy.

The earliest Hellenic culture in the East was Syrian, and the Arabs made their first acquaintance with Greek chemistry, as with Greek philosophy, mathematics, medicine, &c., by the intermediary of Syriac translations.

In Berthelot's opinion, the Syriac portions represent a compilation of receipts and processes undertaken in the Syrian school of medicine at Bagdad under the Abbasids in the 9th or 10th century, and to a large extent constituted by the earlier translations made by Sergius of Resaena in the 6th century.

Another Syriac MS., in the library of Cambridge University, contains a translation of a work by Zosimus which is so far unknown in the original Greek.

Among the Christians, especially the Armenians, the Greeks of Smyrna and the Syrians of Beirut, it has long embraced a considerable range of subjects, such as classical Greek, Armenian and Syriac, as well as modern French, Italian and English, modern history, geography and medicine.

His journal and letters show that he had made acquaintance with a large number of languages, including Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, as well as the classical and the principal modern European languages.

The Christian legend, which is no doubt in the main based on the Jewish, is found in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Slavonic and Medieval Latin.

A Syriac version, with an English translation, was published by Wright in 1875.

The legend is found also in Ethiopic, Syriac and Anglo-Saxon.

The Greek and Latin versions of these letters have for the most part disappeared, but they have been preserved in Syriac, and through Syriac they obtained for the time being a place in the Armenian Bible immediately after 2 Corinthians.

From the Syriac Bible they made their way into the Armenian and maintained their place without opposition to the 7th century.

The Coptic version (C. Schmidt, Acta Pauli, pp. 74-82), which is here imperfect, is clearly from a Greek original, while the Latin and Armenian are from the Syriac. (c) The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

There are Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic and Slavonic versions.

These two letters are preserved only in Syriac which is a translation from the Greek.

The second book among the minor prophets in the Bible is entitled The word of Yahweh that came to Joel the son of Pethuel, or, as the Septuagint, Latin, Syriac and other versions read, Bethuel.

For Geber, in Syriac, is a name applied to men, and is sometimes a term of honour, as master or doctor among us.

There was a certain learned mathematician who sent his algebra, written in the Syriac language, to Alexander the Great, and he named it almucabala, that is, the book of dark or mysterious things, which others would rather call the doctrine of algebra.

Brit., which was afterwards published separately under the title of A Short History of Syriac Literature (London, 1894).

Probably (as Duval suggests) the use of Syriac in these regions went hand in hand with the spread of the monophysite doctrine, for the liturgies and formulas of the Jacobite Church were composed in Syriac. Similarly the spread of Nestorian doctrines throughout the western and southwestern regions of the Persian Empire was accompanied by the ecclesiastical use of a form of Syriac which differed very slightly indeed from that employed farther west by the Jacobites.

So far we have spoken only of the Christian use of Syriac. Of the pagan Syriac literature which issued mainly from Harran, a city about one day's journey south of Edessa, not a single example appears to have survived.

A native of the city, Thabit ibn Kurra, in a passage from a Syriac work of his (now lost) quoted by Barhebraeus, 2 speaks of the paganism of IHarran as distinguished by its steadfast resistance to Christian propaganda.

Anyhow, it is much to be regretted that no Syriac writing from Harran has survived.3 Syriac literature continued in life from the 3rd to the 14th century A.D., but after the Arab conquest it became an increasingly artificial product, for Arabic gradually killed the vernacular use of Syriac.

Thabit was the author of about 16 Syriac works, of which the majority survived in the 13th century, but all are now lost.

Nevertheless, so late as the 13th century it was still an effective instrument in the hands of the most many-sided of Syriac authors, the eminent Barhebraeus.

For the general history of culture the work of Syriac writers as translators is, perhaps, as important as any of their original contributions to literature.

Beginning with the earliest versions of the Bible, which seem to date from the 2nd century A.D., the series comprises a great mass of translations from Greek originals - theological, philosophical, legendary, historical and scientific. In a fair number of cases the Syriac version has preserved to us the substance of a lost original text.

Often, moreover, the Syriac translation became in turn the parent of a later Arabic version.

This was notably the case with some of the Aristotelian writings, so that in this field, as in some others, the Syriac writers handed on the torch of Greek thought to the Arabs, by whom it was in turn transmitted to medieval Europe.

All our historical sources support the view taken above that Edessa, the capital of the kingdom which the Greeks and Romans called Osrhoene, was the earliest seat of Christianity in Mesopotamia and the cradle of Syriac literature.

The well-known legend of the correspondence of Abgar Ukkama, king of Edessa, with Christ and the mission of Addai to Edessa immediately after the Ascension was accepted as true by the historian Eusebius (f340) on the faith of a Syriac document preserved in the official archives of the city.

An amplified form of the same story is furnished by the Doctrine of Addai, an original Syriac work which survives complete in a St Petersburg MS. of the 6th century, and is also represented by fragments in other MSS.

The received Syriac Bible or Vulgate (called the Peshitta or " simple " version from the 9th century onwards 4) contains all the canonical books of the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and the Apocalypse were originally left out, but Syriac versions were made at a later time.

The Peshitta New Testament - according to the convincing theory which at present holds the field s - is not the oldest form of the Syriac version, at least as regards the Gospels.

From the beginning of the 3rd to the beginning of the 5th century Tatian's Harmony or Diatessaron - whether originally compiled in Syriac, or compiled in Greek and translated into Syriac - was the current form of gospel in the Syriac Church.

Slightly later was made the Old Syriac version of the separate Gospels, which survives in two MSS.

Of the large number of Apocryphal books existing in Syriac8 the majority have been translated from Greek, one or two (such as Bar Sira or Ecclesiasticus) from Hebrew, while some (like the Doctrine of Addai above referred to) are original Syriac documents.

This is the Syriac version of a narrative which has had an extraordinary vogue in the world's literature.

The old Syriac version, which is to be found in a number of MSS., was probably made from an early Aramaic version, if not from the original itself (which must surely have been Semitic).

The Acts of Thomas is now generally recognized to be an original Syriac work (or " novel," as Burkitt calls it), although a Greek version also exists.

The author has incorporated in it the finest poem to be found in all Syriac literature, the famous Hymn of the Soul.

It is plainly Gnostic and may perhaps have been composed by Bardaisan or his son Harmonius.0 Among recent editions of Apocrypha in Syriac may be mentioned those of the Apocalypse of Baruch, the Epistle of Baruch, ' For the later Monophysite versions, none of which attained much popularity, see Wright's Syr.

But the great bulk of the Syriac martyrdoms have their scene farther east, within the Persian dominions.

The life and writings of Bardaisan, " the last of the gnostics," and in some sense the father of Syriac literature and especially of Syriac poetry, have been treated in a separate article.

An early Syriac document, probably of the 2nd or 3rd century, is the Letter of Mara son of Serapion, which was edited by Cureton in his Spicilegium Syriacum.

It is almost the only exception to the rule that all surviving Syriac literature is Christian.

One result of this and later persecutions of the same kind has been to enrich Syriac literature with a long series of Acts of Persian Martyrs, which, although in their existing form intermixed with much legendary matter, nevertheless throw valuable light on the history and geography of western Persia under Sasanian rule.

He is the typical exponent in Syriac of unbending Catholic orthodoxy.

Among these may have been the commentary on St John of which the complete Syriac version was published by Chabot in 1897.

On Isaac of Antioch, "one of the stars of Syriac literature," see the special article.

In spite of his over-diffuseness, he is one of the most readable of Syriac authors.

Among the early Monophysites were two of the best of Syriac writers - Jacob of Serugh and Philoxenus of Mabbogh, who have been treated in special articles.

Among the works which he translated into Syriac and of which his versions survive are treatises of Aristotle, Porphyry and Galen, 3 the Ars grammatica of Dionysius Thrax, the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, and possibly two or three treatises of Plutarch.4 His own original works are less important, but include a " treatise on logic, addressed to Theodore (of Merv), which is unfortunately imperfect, a tract on negation and affirmation; a treatise, likewise addressed to Theodore, On the Causes of the Universe, according to the Views of Aristotle, showing how it is a Circle; a tract On Genus, Species and Individuality; and a third tract addressed to Theodore, On the Action and Influence of the Moon, explanatory and illustrative of Galen's IIEpi rcptaiµwv r t µepwv, bk.

Another translator from Greek was Paul, Monophysite bishop of Callinicus or ar-Rakkah, who, being expelled from his diocese in 519, retired to Edessa and there occupied himself in translating into Syriac the works of Severus, the Monophysite 1 So called " because his dress consisted of a barda`tha, or coarse horse-cloth, which he never changed till it became quite ragged " (Wright).

But as an example of Syriac prose style it is of the best, and the author at times shows considerable dramatic power.

On John of Asia or Ephesus, the eminent Monophysite bishop and earliest Syriac church historian, see the separate article.

Bodh the periodeutes is credited with a philosophical work which has perished, but is best known as the author of the old Syriac version of the collection of Indian tales called Kalilah and Dimnah.

His translation, which was edited by Bickell with an introduction by Benfey, must be distinguished from the much later Syriac translation made from the secondary Arabic version and edited by Wright in 1884.2 Ilannana of I.Iedhaiyabh, who nearly produced a disruption of the Nestorian Church by his attempt to bridge over the interval which separated the Nestorians from Catholic orthodoxy, was the author of many commentaries and other writings, in some of which he attacked the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia.

The gradual replacement of Syriac by Arabic as the vernacular language of Mesopotamia by degrees transformed the Syriac from a living to a dead language.

In the oldest Roman ferial we already find festivals of Carthaginian martyrs, and similarly, in the Carthaginian calendar, Roman festivals, while Wright's Syriac Martyrology contains numerous traces of this exchange of festivals.

The Syriac text is rendered from a Greek original of unknown age, which from its complete correspondence with the Key of Truth may be judged to have been a Paulician writing.

The Syriac is a translation from the Greek, and the Greek in turn from the Hebrew.

There are Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic (two), and Armenian versions.

These were Christians, whose ecclesiastical language was Syriac, though the language of intercourse was Arabic. A Christian bishop of Hira is known to have attended a synod in 410.

Half a century later began versions from the Greek either direct or through the Syriac. The pieces translated were mostly philosophical; but the Arabs also learned something, however superficially, of ancient history.

Like the Nestorians they were great missionaries, and up to the 7th century, and again in the 12th and 13th, produced the bulk of Syriac literature (q.v.).

It commemorates "the introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta t'sin in the Middle Kingdom," and beneath an incised cross sets out in Chinese and Syriac an abstract of Christian doctrine and the course of a Syrian mission in China beginning with the favourable reception of Olopan, who came from Judaea in 636.

Later he devoted himself to the revision of the Syriac version of the Bible, and with the help of his chorepiscopus Polycarp produced in 598 the so-called Philoxenian version, which was in some sense the received Bible of the Monophysites during the 6th century.

It was an attempt to provide a more accurate rendering of the Greek Bible than had hitherto existed in Syriac, and obtained recognition among the Monophysites until superseded by the still more literal renderings of the Old Testament by Paul of Tella and of the New Testament by Thomas of Harkel (both in 616-617), of which the latter at least was based on the work of Philoxenus.

For some notice of the Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew translations of works professedly by Hippocrates (Ibukrat or Bukrat), the number of which greatly exceeds that of the extant Greek originals, reference may be made to Fliigel's contribution to the article " Hippokrates " in the Encyklopadie of Ersch and Gruber.

Her festival was celebrated on the 8th of October (Wright's Syriac Martyrology).

His reconstruction of the creed of Aphraates is interesting in relation to the other traces of a Syriac creed form existing prior to the 4th century.

Geiger also contributed frequently on Hebrew, Samaritan and Syriac subjects to the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenldndischen Gesellschaft, and from 1862 until his death (on the 23rd of October 1874) he was editor of a periodical entitled Ji dische Zeitschrift fiir Wissenschaft and Leben.

There is more than one meaning of Syriac discussed in the 1911 Encyclopedia.

The language of the people of Mosul is a dialect of Arabic, partly influenced by Kurdish and Syriac. The Moslems call themselves either Arabs or Kurds, but the prevalent type, very different from the true Arabian of Bagdad, proves the Aramaean origin of many of their number.

This other evidence consists partly of letters from Nestorius, preserved among the works of those to whom they were written, some sermons collected in a Latin translation by Marius Mercator, an African merchant who was doing business in Constantinople at the time of the dispute, and,other material gathered from Syriac manuscripts.

This pseudonym served to protect the book against the fate that overtook the writings of heretics, and in a Syriac version it was preserved in the Euphrates valley where the followers of Nestorius settled.

This view is confirmed by the evidence of the Synodicon Orientate (the collection of the canons of Nestorian Councils and Synods), which shows that the Great Syriac Church built up by the adherents of Nestorius and ever memorable for its zeal in carrying the Gospel into Central Asia, China and India cannot, from its inception, be rightly described as other than orthodox.

The natures have, moreover, a 3 Syriac, tegurta, lit."

Nestorian philosophers and medical practitioners became the teachers of the great Arabian natural philosophers of the middle ages, and the latter obtained their knowledge of Greek learning from Syriac translations of the works of Greek thinkers.

The Uighurs employed an alphabet based upon the Syriac and borrowed from the Nestorian missionaries.

At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the Nestorian Christians.

In the view of many authorities this version was first produced at Carthage, but recent writers are inclined to regard Antioch as its birthplace, a view which is supported by the remarkable agreement of its readings with the Lucianic recension and with the early Syriac MSS.

Its value for textual purposes is not great, partly because the underlying text is the same as the; Massoretic, partly because the Syriac text has at different times been harmonized with that of the Septuagint.

This Syriac translation of the Septuagint column of the Hexapla was made by Paul, bishop of Tella, at Alexandria in A.D.

The original Syriac list, as we have seen, had neither Epp. Cath.

They have a most peculiar text of a mainly " Western " type, with some special affinities to the Old Syriac and perhaps to the Diatessaron.

It seems to have had many points of agreement with the Old Syriac, but it is impossible to identify the locality to which it belonged.

The Old Syriac. This is only known to us at present through two MSS.

It seems certain that the Old Syriac version also contained the Acts and Pauline epistles, as Aphraates and Ephraem agree in quoting a text which differs from the Peshito, but no MSS.

It seems probable that the Old Syriac version did not contain the Catholic epistles, and as these are found in the Peshito they were presumably added by Rabbula.

Hall's Williams MS. (Baltimore, 1886); in the European editions of the Syriac Bible so far as the minor Catholic epistles are concerned; in Hermathena, vol.

This is not a version, but a Syriac " Massorah " of the New Testament, i.e.

There are now but few, if any, scholars who think that the Peshito is an entirely separate version, and the majority have been convinced by Burkitt and recognize (1) that the Peshito is based on a knowledge of the Old Syriac and the Diatessaron; (2) that it was made by Rabbula with the help of the contemporary Greek text of the Antiochene Church.

Here it is necessary to distinguish between the original text of the Old Syriac and the existing MSS.

S and C. Still, it is improbable that this will explain everything, and it is generally conceded that the original Diatessaron and the original Old Syriac were in some way connected.

The general character of the version is late, but there are many places in which the Old Syriac basis can be recognized, and in the Acts and Epistles, where the Old Syriac is no longer extant, this is sometimes very valuable evidence.

Among these the works of Sanday, Corssen, Wordsworth, White, Burkitt and Harris on the history of the Old Latin and Vulgate, and especially the work of Burkitt on the Old Syriac, have given most light on the subject.

Rendel Harris argued for the influence of Latin, and Chase for that of Syriac. While both threw valuable light on obscure points, it seems probable that they exaggerated the extent to which retranslation can be traced; that they ranked Codex Bezae somewhat too highly as the best witness to the " Western " text; and that some of their work was rendered defective by their failure to recognize quite clearly that the " Western " text is not a unity.

We now know more about the Old Latin, and, thanks to Mrs Lewis' discovery, much more about the Old Syriac. The result is that the authorities on which WH relied for their Western text are seen to bear witness to two texts, not to one.

The Old Syriac, if we take the Sinaitic MS. as the purest form, compared in the same way, has a similar double series of interpolations and omissions, but neither the omissions nor the interpolations are the same in the Old Latin as in the Old Syriac. Such a line of research suggests that instead of being able, as WH thought, to set the Western against the Neutral text (the Alexandrian being merely a development of the latter), we must consider the problem as the comparison of at least three texts, a Western (geographically), an Eastern and the Neutral.

It is difficult to see how texts, geographically so wide apart as the Old Latin and Old Syriac would seem to be, are likely to agree in error, but it is certainly true that some readings found in both texts seem to have little probability.

A more probable suggestion is Burkitt's, who thinks that many readings in our present Old Syriac MSS.

This has not yet been done, but enough has been accomplished to point to the probability that the result will be the establishment of at least three main types of texts, represented by the Old Syriac, the Old Latin and Clement's quotations, while it is doubtful how far Tatian's Diatessaron, the quotations in J ustin and a few other sources may be used to reconstruct the type of Greek text used in Rome in the 2nd century when Rome was still primarily a Greek church.

It includes Dr Andrewes, afterwards bishop of Winchester, who was familiar with Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, Latin and at least ten other languages, while his knowledge of patristic literature was unrivalled; Dr Overall, regius professor of theology and afterwards bishop of Norwich; Bedwell, the greatest Arabic scholar of Europe; Sir Henry Savile, the most learned layman of his time; and, to say nothing of others well known to later generations, nine who were then or afterwards professors of Hebrew or of Greek at Oxford or Cambridge.

Bensly found a complete Syriac text in a MS. recently obtained by the University library at Cambridge.

The name of Nineveh (Syriac Ninwe; Arabic Ninawa, Nunawa) continued, even in the middle ages, to be applied to a site opposite Mosul on the east bank of the Tigris, where huge mounds and the traces of an ancient city wall bore witness of former greatness.

According to the Fihrist, Mani made use of the Persian and Syriac languages; but, like the Oriental Marcionites before him, he invented an alphabet of his own, which the Fihrist has handed down to us.

The alphabet used is the one adapted by Mani himself from the Syriac estrangelo.

The history of the dynasty of the Danishmand is still very obscure, notwithstanding the efforts of Mordtmann, Schlumberger, Karabacek, Sallet and others to fix some chronological details, and it is almost impossible to harmonize the different statements of the Armenian, Syriac, Greek and Western chronicles with those of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

Entrusted with a government mission for the purpose of seeking and purchasing Coptic, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic MSS.

Two Syriac versions were made from the Greek - the first, that of the Peshito; and the second, that of Paul of Tella, the so-called Hexaplaric. The Old Latin was derived from the Greek, as we have remarked above, and Jerome's from the Old Latin, under the control of a Chaldee version.

In addition to his teaching, however, he also applied himself to studies in Oriental literature, and in particular acquired from Cornelius Bertram, one of his brother professors, a knowledge of Syriac. While he resided at Geneva the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572 drove an immense number of Protestant refugees to that city, including several of the most distinguished French men of letters of the time.

His duties there comprehended the teaching, not only of theology, but of the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac and Rabbinical languages.

Hatra resisted the first Persian attack as it 4 The earliest inscription in Syriac yet known dates from A.D.

The language is in most parts Arabic; but Turkish is spoken in Birejik and Urfa, Kurdish and Armenian south of Diarbekr, and some Syriac in Tar `Abdin.

No trustworthy account exists of the evangelization of Armenia, for the legend of King Abgar's correspondence with Christ, even if it contained any historical truth, only relates to Edessa and Syriac Christianity.

That the Armenians appropriated from the Syrians this, as well as the stories of Bartholomew and Thaddeus (the Syriac Addai), was merely an avowal on their part that Edessa was the centre from which the faith radiated over their land.

In the 4th century and later the liturgy was still read in Syriac in parts of Armenia, and the New Testament, the history of Eusebius, the homilies of Aphraates, the works of St Ephraem and many other early books were translated from Syriac, from which tongue most of their ecclesiological terms were derived.

Neither could the Armenians keep on good terms even with the Syriac monophysites.

Similarly in the East, the Syriac version of the Old Testament is largely under the influence of the synagogue, and the homilies of Aphraates are a mine of Rabbinic lore.

Syntipas translated Babrius into Syriac, and Andreopulos put the Syriac back again into Greek.

Furthermore, the fact that the Syriac Sen'ar = Shinar was later used to denote the region about Bagdad (northern Babylonia) does not necessarily prove that Shinar-Shumer meant only northern Babylonia, because, when the term Sen'ar was applied to the Bagdad district the great southern Babylonian civilization had long been forgotten and " Babylonia " really meant only what we now know as northern Babylonia.

The Syriac (Peshitta) version is paraphrastic, but on the whole it follows the Hebrew text.

Margoliouth have supposed that the Hebrew text preserved in the fragments is not original, but a retranslation from the Greek or the Syriac or both.

The Hebrew marginal readings occasionally seem to be translations from the Greek or Syriac, e.g.

More frequently, however, strange readings of the Greek and Syriac are to be explained as, corruptions of our present Hebrew.

The Syriac text, made without doubt from the Hebrew, though often paraphrastic is often suggestive.

These are known in their entirety only in Syriac, and were first published by Wetstein (1752), who held them genuine.

Thus their Syrian origin is manifest, the more so that in the Syriac, MS. they are appended to the New Testament, like the better-known epistles of Clement in the Codex Alexandrinus.

This points to "Clement" as a brief title for the Clementine Periodoi, a title actually found in a Syriac MS. of A.D.

So far we have no sure trace of our Homilies at all, apart from the Syriac version.

One kind of adaptation at least is proved to have existed before the end of the 4th century, namely a selection of certain discourses from the Homilies under special headings, following on Recognitions, i.-iii., as seen in a Syriac MS. of A.D.

It would be interesting to trace Bardesanes and the Syriac Hymn of the Soul in all this.

Lazzaro at Venice published a fragment in Armenian 1 from the beginning of the apology; and in 1889 Dr Rendel Harris found the whole of it in a Syriac version on Mount Sinai.

The discovery of the Syriac version reopened the question of the date of the work.

It is possible that the Apology was read to Hadrian in person when he visited Athens, and that the Syriac inscription was prefixed by a scribe on the analogy of Justin's Apology, a mistake being made in the amplification of Hadrian's name.

A criterion is thus given us for the reconstruction of the Apology, where the Greek which we have has been abbreviated, and we are enabled to claim with certainty some passages of the Syriac which might otherwise be suspected as interpolations.

There was a Syriac-speaking church here as early as the 2nd century, and with the spread of Christianity Syriac asserted itself against Greek.

The Syriac literature which we possess is all Christian.

But where Greek gave place to Syriac, Hellenism was not thereby effaced.

The earliest Syriac work which we possess, the book " On Fate," produced in the circle of the heretic Bardaisan or Bardesanes (end of the 2nd century), largely follows Greek models.

There was an extensive translation of Greek works into Syriac during the next centuries, handbooks of philosophy and science for the most part.

In Egypt, too, the triumph of Christianity brought into being a native Christian literature, and if this was in one way the assertion of the native against Hellenistic predominance, one must remember that Coptic literature, like Syriac, necessarily incorporated those Greek elements which had become an essential part of Christian theology.

The Mahommedan conquerors found a considerable part of it taken over, as we saw, by the Syrian Christians, and Greek philosophical and scientific classics were now translated from Syriac into Arabic. These were the starting-points for the Mahommedan schools in these subjects.

The manuscripts are very numerous, and many of them are of great antiquity, as are the Syriac and other translations.

Then follow sixty-seven names of persons in Syriac characters, most of whom are characterized as priests, and sixty-one names of persons in Chinese, all priests but one.

The Latin, the Peshitta Syriac and the Targum occasionally offer suggestions; the Hexaplar Syriac and the Coptic are of value for the determination of the text of the Septuagint.

For the Syriac see Pinkuss in Zeitschr.

The Authorized Version keeps the Syriac word.

This term, which our growing knowledge, especially of the Syriac and other Eastern versions, is rendering more and more unsatisfactory, stands for a text which used to be connected almost exclusively with the " eccentric " Codex Bezae, and is comparable to a Targum on an Old Testament book.

The like must be said even of the contribution to the problem made by August Pott,' though he has helped to define one condition of success - the classification of the strata in " Western " texts - and has taken some steps in the right direction, in connexion with the complex phenomena of one witness, the Harklean Syriac.

Once ordained bishop of Edessa, with the connivance of Theodora, James, disguised as a ragged beggar (whence his name Baradaeus, Syriac Burdeana, Arabic alBar adia), traversed these regions preaching, teaching and ordaining new clergy to the number, it is said, of 80,000.

Bochart was a man of profound erudition; he possessed a thorough knowledge of the principal Oriental languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldaic and Arabic; and at an advanced age he wished to learn Ethiopic. He was so absorbed in his favourite study, that he saw Phoenician and nothing but Phoenician in everything, even in Celtic words, and hence the number of chimerical etymologies which swarm in his works.

Most of his works were written in Syriac, but some few in Arabic, which had long before his time supplanted Syriac as a living speech.

His great historical work - the Syriac Chronicle - is made up of three parts.

Of these the four greater patriarchates are those of Alexandria (with two patriarchs, Latin and Coptic); Anticch (with four, Latin, Graeco-Melchite, Maronite and Syriac); Constantinople (Latin) and Jerusalem (Latin).

The Syriac word ethkashshaph, which means literally to "cut oneself," is the regular equivalent of to "make supplication."

In the Syriac churches, even as late as the 4th century, the married state seems to have been regarded as incompatible with the perfection of the initiated.

In the Syriac church as late as 340, such relations prevailed between the "Sons and daughters of the Resurrection."

The Book of Tobit has reached us in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic and Hebrew versions; of these the Hebrew are the latest, and need not be considered.

The Syriac text is said to be based on a Greek version.

In 1692 he succeeded D'Auvergne in the chair of Syriac, in the College de France.

He is perhaps the most influential of all Syriac authors; and his fame as a poet, commentator, preacher and defender of orthodoxy has spread throughout all branches of the Christian Church.

He probably wrote only in Syriac, though he may have possessed some knowledge of Greek and possibly of Hebrew.

With the exception of his commentaries on scripture, nearly all his extant Syriac works are composed in metre.

He is no worse in these respects than the best of the Syriac writers who succeeded him.

Harris 1 has been able to identify a number of Syriac quotations from or references to this commentary in the works of Isho'dadh, Bar-Kepha (Severus), Bar-salibi and Barhebraeus.

Similar or related forms of interpretation and teaching are found in the Talmud, in Hellenistic Judaism, in the New Testament, in early Church Fathers and in Syriac writers.

Gregory also left a life of St Andrew, translated from the Greek, and a history of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, translated from Syriac.

He then became professor of Arabic and Syriac in the college of the Propaganda at Rome.

In 1646 he was appointed professor of Syriac and Arabic at the College de France.

Some Septuagint MSS., and the Syriac and other versions, have the fuller title Lamentations of Jeremiah.

Some anomalies, both of metre and of sense, may be removed by judicious emendation; and many lines become smooth enough, if we assume a crasis of open vowels of the same class, or a diphthongal pronunciation of others, or contraction or silence of certain suffixes as in Syriac. The oldest elegiac utterances are not couched in this metre; e.g.

He was awarded the Pusey and Ellerton scholarship in 1866, the Kennicott scholarship in 1870 (both Hebrew), and the Houghton Syriac prize in 1872.

Gregory says he had the legend from the interpretation of "a certain Syrian"; in point of fact the story is common in Syriac sources.

Another Syriac version is printed in Land's Anecdota, iii.

From the frequency of his quotations, Aphraates is a specially important witness to the form in which the Gospels were read in the Syriac church in his day; Zahn and others have shown that he - mainly at least - used the Diatessaron.

He was born in 1379 or 1380 in the town of Kempen, lying about 15 miles north-west of Dusseldorf, in one of the many patches of territory between 1 See the sketch in Syriac of the history of the church of Malabar printed and translated by Land, Anecd.

Finally, as regards the Syriac Version, the evidence for its existence is not conclusive.

It is based on the fact that a British Museum MS. contains a Syriac fragment entitled "Names of the wives of the Patriarchs according to the Hebrew Book of Jubilees."

Thus it agrees at times with the Samaritan, or Septuagint, or Syriac, or Vulgate, or even with Onkelos against all the rest.

To be more exact, our book represents some form of the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch midway between the forms presupposed by the Septuagint and the Syriac; for it agrees more frequently with the Septuagint, or with combinations into which the Septuagint enters, than with 1 In the Ethiopic Version in xxi.

Next to the Septuagint it agrees most often with the Syriac or with combinations into which the Syriac enters.

On the other hand, its independence of the Septuagint is shown in a large number of passages, where it has the support of the Samaritan and Massoretic, or of these with various combinations of the Syriac Vulgate and Onkelos.

A revised edition of the second book with a continuation down to his own day was published in Latin by St Jerome, and this, together with some fragments of the original Greek, was our only source for a knowledge of the Chronicle until the discovery of an Armenian version of the whole work, which was published by Aucher in 1818 (Latin translation in Schoene's edition), and of two Syriac versions published in Latin translation respectively in 1866 (by Roediger in Schoene's edition) and in 1884 (by Siegfried and Gelzer).

The work exists in a longer and a shorter recension, the former in a Syriac version (published with English translation by Cureton, 1861), the latter in the original Greek attached to the Church History in most MSS.

The Theophania, though we have many fragments of the original Greek, is extant as a whole only in a Syriac version first published by Lee in 1842.

The history was early put into Syriac (edited by Bedjan, Leipzig, 1897; also by Wright, McLean and Merx, London, 1898), Armenian (edited by Djarian, Venice, 1877), and Latin, and has been translated into many modern languages, the latest English version being that of McGiffert, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume i.

The Theophania was first published by Lee (Syriac version, 1842; English translation, 1843).

He studied theology and philology at Heidelberg and later at Halle under Hermann Hupfeld, who persuaded him to include Arabic, Syriac and Egyptian.

It retained, however, its Syriac liturgy and a non-celibate priesthood.

And yet we find Polychronius, early in the 5th century, stating that this song was not found in the Syriac version.

The whole book was first published in Syriac in 1899, with a Latin translation by Mgr Rahmani, the Uniat Syrian Patriarch of Antioch.

Edessa now became the principal seat of Aramaic-Christian (Syriac) language and literature; the literary dialect of Syriac is the dialect of Edessa.

It would appear from the homilies of Aphraates (c. 340) that in the Syriac church also it was usual to renounce the married relation after baptism.

Dr Nestle has drawn attention to the fact that in the Syriac translation of Eusebius' history the name Tolmai, i.e.

For an account of the Latin and Syriac versions, the Targums, and the later Rabbinic literature connected with this subject, and other questions relating to these additions, see Fritzsche, Exeget.

The later Syriac, curiously enough, has behmoth, - apparently the behemoth of Job transformed into a bird.

In Syriac the verb means "to make firm," and is the direct source of the Gr.

Wigan Harvey (2 vols., Cambridge, 1857), the latter being the only edition which contains the Syriac fragments.

All this time he was no mere book-worm or recluse, but was haunting the salons of Mlle de Scudery and the studios of painters; nor did his scientific researches interfere with his classical studies, for during this time he was discussing with Bochart the origin of certain medals, and was learning Syriac and Arabic under the Jesuit Parvilliers.

Meanwhile the Monophysites had followed in the steps of the Nestorians, multiplying Syriac versions of the logical and medical science of the Greeks.

During the 8th and 9th centuries, rough but generally faithful versions of Aristotle's principal works were made into Syriac, and then from the Syriac into Arabic. The names of some of these translators, such as Johannitius (Hunain ibn-Ishaq), were heard even in the Latin schools.

A "Fifth" book is contained in the Ambrosian Peshitta, but it seems to be merely a Syriac reproduction of the sixth book of Josephus's history of the Jewish War.

None of the books of Maccabees are contained in the Vatican (B); all of them are found in a Syriac recension.

It occurs but rarely in Syriac (Uzroina); e.g.

Certain it is that the earliest documents that have survived in Syriac, or Edessene Aramaic, do not represent an experimental stage.

Moreover, although the Syriac of the Story of Ahigar is of a late type, the sources of the story, traces of which are to be found in the Hebrew Tobit, go back to the pre-Hellenistic period.

To one of the native kings doubtless is to be ascribed the Syriac inscription on one of the pair of pillars, 50 ft.

That the translation did not share the fate of the other non-Christian Syriac writings, which did not survive the 13th century (see Syriac Literature), is due to the fact that it was adopted (after being revised) by the Christians, and thus rescued.

A strong man offered himself in Bardaisan (q.v.; Bardesanes), to whom perhaps we owe the finest Syriac poem extant, the " Hymn of the Soul," though orthodoxy rejected him.

Rabbu1a perhaps owed his elevation to the see of Edessa (411-435), in the year which produced the oldest dated Syriac MS., to his asceticism, and it was to his time that the sojourn there of the " Man of God " (Alexis) was assigned; but he won from the Nestorians the title of the Tyrant of Edessa.

In particular he exerted himself to stamp out the use of the Diatessaron in favour of the four Gospels, the Syriac version of which probably now took the form known as the Peshitta.

Till about this time Syriac influence was strong in Armenia, and some Syriac works have survived only in Armenian translations.

The valuable Syriac Chronicle just referred to probably was compiled in the latter half of this century.

The explanation that he offers is that the Diatessaron of Tatian was widely used and corrupted all extant texts, so that the Old Syriac, the Old Latin, the quotations of Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian and others may be regarded as various combinations of the Tatianic text and I-H-K.

The versions are the two Latin, a Syriac, and an Arabic. The Latin one in the Vulgate belongs to a time prior to Jerome, and is tolerably literal.

The Syriac and Arabic versions, printed in the London Polyglot, are literal.

This apocalypse has survived only in the Syriac version of which Ceriani discovered a 6th century MS. in the Milan library.

The Syriac is translated from the Greek; for Greek words are occasionally transliterated, and passages can be explained only on the hypothesis that the wrong alternative meanings of certain Greek words were followed by the translator.

The Greek in turn is derived from the Hebrew, for unintelligible expressions in the Syriac can be explained and the text restored by retranslation into Hebrew.

The Syriac in these passages is a stock rendering of SucacouvOac, and this in turn of pis.

The book begins like the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch with an account of the removal of the sacredvessels of theTemple before its capture by the Chaldees.

The Old Syriac and the mixed cursives can no longer be treated as authorities for the " Western " text.

He supplies the Syriac evidence that supports the Aramaic retroversion and its meaning.

Also included are Syriac and Aramaic language materials and texts, also studies in comparative Semitics.

In the later years of his life he turned to the study of the earlier phases of the science which he did so much to advance, and students of chemical history are greatly indebted to him for his book on Les Origines de l'alchimie (1885) and his Introduction a l'etude de la chimie des anciens et du moyen age (1889), as well as for publishing translations of various old Greek, Syriac and Arabic treatises on alchemy and chemistry (Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 1887-1888, and La Chimie au moyen age, 1893).

Since he wrote, new authorities have been discovered or rendered accessible; works in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic and other languages, which he was unable to consult, have been published.

In Arabic we have fragments at Paris, of which Renan translated a specimen for the Spicilegium solesmense, and another version of thirty-seven chapters at Leiden, probably the work of a monk at Jerusalem, which Land translated and printed with the Syriac. The Latin MSS.

Aramaic gives to the noun instead an ending a, 1 On the place of Aramaic among the Semitic languages, and of Syriac among the various dialects, see Semitic Languages.

In the older Aramaic dialects this is used exactly as the noun with prefixed article is used in other languages; but in Syriac the emphatic state has lost this special function of making the noun definite, and has become simply the normal state of the noun.

The main grammatical distinction between Syriac and all the west Aramaic dialects is that in Syriac the 3rd person of the imperfect (singular and plural) of the verb begins with n, but in west Aramaic, as in the other Semitic languages, it begins with y.

The Syriac noun has three states - the absolute (used chiefly in adjectival or participial predicates, but also with numerals and negatives, in adverbial phrases, &c.), the construct (which, as in Hebrew, must be immediately followed by a genitive), and the emphatic (see above).

But the most important peculiarity of Syriac verbs is again in the sphere of syntax, and shows the same progress towards flexibility which we found in the nouns.

The same progress towards flexibility in syntax is seen in the copious supply of conjunctions possessed by Syriac. No doubt the tendency towards a more flowing construction of sentences was helped by the influence of Greek, which has also supplied a large stock of words to the Syriac vocabulary.

It is an adaptation of the Syriac writing introduced by the early Nestorian missionaries.

The Oriental point of view for the 13th century appears in Jelaleddin's history of the Ayyubite sultans of Egypt, written towards the end of the 13th century; in Maqrizi's history of Egypt, written in the middle of the 15th century; and in the compendium of the history of the human race by Abulfeda (f1332); while the omniscient Abulfaragius (whom Rey calls the Eastern St Thomas) wrote, in the latter half of the 13th century, a chronicle of universal history in Syriac, which he also issued, in an Arabic recension, as a Compendious History of the Dynasties.

There are indeed 'but few specimens of Syriac verse which exhibit high poetic quality; except for a fairly copious and occasionally skilful use of simile and metaphor, there is little of soaring imagination in Syriac poets.

The early Syriac translations are in many cases so literal as to do violence to the idiom of their own language; but this makes them all the more valuable when we have to depend on them for reconstructing the original texts.

C. Burkitt has shown it to be probable that the preaching of Christianity at Edessa reaches back to the middle of the 2nd century or even to about the year 135.3 The Syriac versions of the Bible are treated elsewhere (see Bible) and may here be dismissed with a brief summary of facts and opinions.

An historical work of somewhat similar character to John's is the compilation in 12 books which is generally known by the name of Zacharias Rhetor, 9 because the anonymous Syriac compiler has incorporated the Syriac version or epitome of a lost 6 See Brooks and Hamilton's translation of the latter, p. 234.

Lastly, acknowledgment must be made of the great value of the Catalogue of Nestorian writers, by `Abadisho' of Nisibis, the latest important writer in Syriac. It was edited by Assemani in the 3rd part of his Bibliotheca orientalis, and has been translated into English by Badger.

As the original work presupposes 2 Enoch and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch and was known to Origen, it was written between A.D.

Dr Perkins found a Syriac MS. of this apocalypse, which he translated into English, and printed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1864, vol.

An earlier use is probably to be found in the title of the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, which = ypaclyi rris &7roKaXinkcos roil l3apOi x viov Tou Nnpivv.

But there is not yet the same degree of consensus as to the relations between the Old Syriac and the Diatessaron.

Perhaps there is most authority in favour of deriving it from the Syriac Tpn, which in the emphatic state becomes rc;pn, so that we have a Semitic correspondence to both the Greek forms Eaanvoi and Eaaaiot.

Beth is probably the Syriac equivalent of the Assyrian Bit as in Bit-Adini (see below, § 3 viii.), as is shown by such names as Beth `Arbaye, "district of Arabians," Beth Armaye, "district of Aramaeans."

By this time Christianity had secured a foothold, perhaps first among the Jews (see Edessa), and we enter upon the earliest period from which documents in the Edessan dialect of Aramaic, known as Syriac, have been preserved.

In the beginning of the 6th century there was another severe struggle in Mesopotamia, which found an anonymous Syriac historian (see Edessa), and in infringement of agreement the Romans strongly fortified Dara against Nisibis.

An inevitable effect of the reign of Islam had been that the kindred language of the Arabs gradually killed the vernacular Syriac of Mesopotamia (see Edessa) as the alien Greek and Persian had shown no tendency to do, and the classical period (4th to 8th centuries) of the only Mesopotamian literature we know, such as it is, useful but uninviting, came to an end (see Syriac Literature).

Bibl., Bible Dict., and Jewish Encyc. The Greek text is best given in Swete iii., and the Syriac will be found in Walton's Polyglot, Lagarde and Neubauer's Tobit.

It was in great vogue in the early centuries, and was translated and adapted into Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic.

Our oldest native historical document in Syriac - the account of a severe flood which visited Edessa in Nov.