Syriac

Abstract During late antiquity, Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, belonging to the northwest group of Semitic languages, and originally the language of the Kingdom of Edessa and the Oshroene in Upper Mesopotamia, became the literary language of Aramaic-speaking Christians and developed under the mutual influences of both Greek and Iranian. This section surveys Syriac translations of Byzantine Greek texts, from the Bible and homiletics, to theological and ascetic literature, as well as historiographical, hagiographical, and other narrative texts. It thus highlights Greek authors with important corpora in Syriac (e.g. Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and the Areopagitic corpus), as well as authors and texts no longer extant in Greek (often because of their deviation from Constantinopolitan orthodoxy).