Syriac

The Syriac are Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia, their literary Syriac from Edessa's Aramaic dialect in early Christian centuries. Ephrem the Syrian and other fathers made it one of early Christianity's three great literary languages, and after Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451 they divided into the east Syriac Church of the East and the west Syriac Orthodox, organized in the sixth century by Jacob Baradaeus.

Under Arab rule from the seventh century they lived as jizya-paying dhimmis while staffing the Abbasid House of Wisdom as translators and physicians, the Bukhtishu family among them, and the Church of the East planted bishoprics to India and China. Arabic spread as vernacular; the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and Timur's late-fourteenth-century massacres broke up the Mesopotamian heartland.

Ottoman rule organized survivors as city millets; a 1552 schism opened Catholic unions, recognized in the 1830 Chaldean patriarchate, and Classical Syriac lived on in liturgy behind Arabic daily life.