For Eastern Christmas Eve: From the Syrian Tradition

I have already noted some of the Christian traditions of two of the currently beleaguered Christian communities of the Middle East, the Copts and the churches of Iraq. The Syriac or Syrian Christian tradition is particularly threatened today, and deserve a note on Eastern Christmas Eve.

Syrian Christianity in its varying forms embraces most of the Christians of the present states of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and adjacent parts of Turkey and Iraq. The Syriac form of Aramaic is the usual liturgical language. The historical centers are Jerusalem and Antioch; both were among the Pentarchy of early Christian Patriarchates, with Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople. (Only Rome was in the West. Antioch, modern Antakya in Turkey, was a major center fr the spread of Christianity; St. Peter was the first bishop (preceding his move to Rome), and, according to Acts 11:26, "The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."

Today, here are five Patriarchs of Antioch (the Antiochian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Melkite, Syriac Catholic, and Maronite Catholic. There used to be a Latin Catholic as well but three Catholic Patriarchs of Antioch may have been enough, and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem remains.

Not one of the five Patriarchs of Antioch has his seat in Antioch/Antakya today:

1. The Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch (or Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch) is in the Eastern or "Greek" Orthodox tradition linked to Constantinople; Patriarch John X Yazigi took his throne in 2012 and has his seat in Damascus.
2. The Syrian Orthodox (the Church today prefers "Syriac Orthodox" in English) Patriarch of Antioch  represents the  Oriental Orthodox ["Jacobite," "Miaphysite,"  or to other denominations, "Monophysite"] tradition, along with the Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians and Eritreans. Ignatius Zakka Iwas has held the post since 1980; his seat is officially Damascus but he resides in Beirut.
3. The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch, the analogue of the Antiochian Orthodox but in union with Rome, is Gregorios III Laham since 2000; he is based in Damascus.
4. The Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch is the Catholic Uniate analogue of the Syriac Orthodox; he is based in Beirut and since 2009 has been Ignatius Joseph III Younan.
5. The Maronite Catholic Patriarch of Antioch is of course highly influential in Lebanon; his seat is at Bkerke near Beirut. Cardinal Bechara Boutros al-Raï was chosen Patriarch in 2011 and made a cardinal by the Pope in 2012.

From several Syrian traditions: a Syriac Orthodox service in Aleppo  a few years ago (though with "Silent Night" in the processional):


An Antiochian hymn:



A Maronite Hymn Medley:

A Christmas Rerun: Why Do Western Christians So Often Forget Eastern Christianity?

The Middle East Institute will be closed through January 1, but this blog will not. I'll be posting both original posts and a few seasonal reruns from nearly five years of blogging; this month and next will mark my fifth Christmases (Western and Eastern dates) on the blog. Here's a rerun from last year on the tendency of many Western Christians to forget (or never have known) the traditions of the East, though the earliest Christians (including the Jesus, the 12 Apostles, and Paul) came from Palestine, the term "Christian" was first used in Antioch, and even Saint Nicholas was an Anatolian bishop. I have left in dated references to the 2012 elections of the new Coptic Pope and Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch.

In a year [2012] in which both the Coptic Pope and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch have died, it may be useful to repeat a story I know I've told before. I once had a friend, a devout Palestinian Christian, who back in the day would encounter, in various American Christian communities in which he moved, well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who, on learning he was a Christian Arab, would naively ask, "which missionary group converted your people?" He would respond (knowing his sense of timing, I presume after waiting a couple of beats):  "Perhaps you've heard of them: Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles."

Over the next week or so most US news organizations will have at least one clip from a city in the West Bank known as Bethlehem. They will show the Church of the Nativity, interview a few olive-wood souvenir sellers about the decline in the tourist trade due to the stalled peace process, and, because it is almost impossible to show pictures of Bethlehem without it, show how the Israeli Separation Wall cuts along the side of town. It will be the only report from Bethlehem you see until next December. There are fairly good odds it will also be the only picture of the Separation Wall you see until next December.

If it had not been for the election of the Coptic Pope, which got some limited coverage, it might be the only Western media coverage all year of Christianity in the region where the faith began.

The Real Saint Nick was Known to slap Heretics: Ho, ho, ho!

If the Gospels are to be believed, the central figure of the Christian faith was born in Bethlehem, spent some time in infancy in Egypt whither his parents had fled (for three years in the Coptic tradition, which provides a detailed if apocryphal itinerary), was raised in Nazareth in Galilee, now northern Israel, and ventured no further afield than across the Jordan, north to Tyre and Sidon, and into what are now the Golan Heights. Saul of Tarsus became Paul after a vision on the road to Damascus. Christian apostles and early missionaries spread the faith further, and Christ's followers were first called "Christians" in Antioch (Antakya, Turkey), while Alexandria, Edessa (Şanlıurfa, Turkey) and other cities of the east were citadels of the early faith. The first ruler to become a Christian may have been in Edessa but the first major Kingdom to officially become Christian was Armenia, which preceded Rome. Within a few centuries the Roman Empire had converted, but so had Ethiopia, and Christian missionaries had reached Xi'an, the capital of the Chinese Empire, and left an inscription there in Syriac. (But they were "Nestorians," and so forgotten by Western Christians.) Of the five ancient patriarchates (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem), only one was in the West.

Saint Nicholas of Myra (shown above) reportedly gave secret gifts to needy Christians, including dowries. He is also said to have slapped Arius, leader of the Arian heresy, at the Council lf Nicaea. (Coal in Arius' stocking? [Rephrased from earlier reference to whipping pagans, That may be untrue, Not taking any chances so close to Christmas.] It's a fair bet he never heard of a reindeer. But he lived in what is now Turkey.

In 400 AD Christianity was not only the dominant faith in the Roman Empire (including southern Europe, North Africa, and the whole Middle East), as well as Armenia and Ethiopia, but had many adherents in the Persian Empire, Central Asia, coastal India and China. There were almost certainly more Christians in Arabia than in England. [Sorry, I meant Britain. No Angles there yet.]

All that changed with the rise of Islam, but Islam was mostly (with massive and tragic exceptional interludes) tolerant of Christianity as a fellow "people of the book." Though tolerated in most of the Islamic world, Christianity was not permitted in Arabia proper, but survived and sometimes flourished elsewhere. (Its disappearance in North Africa while thriving in Islamic Spain and Sicily is a subject for a much longer discussion at a later time.)

Yet many Western Christians still mentally divide the Christian world into Catholic and Protestant. There may be a general understanding that the Eastern Orthodox exist (at least the Greeks and Russians anyway, who are in Europe); some Latin Catholics (but by no means all) may know the Eastern Catholic churches with their different rites and married priests at least exist, but Oriental Orthodox churches like the Copts or Armenians or the separate traditions of the Assyrian Church of the East remain largely unknown. Readers who've read me through previous Christmas seasons will be aware that I try to illuminate the traditions of the Christians who live in the region where Christmas began. I'll be doing so again, through both Western and Eastern holidays.

To Eastern Christian Readers: Palm Sunday Greetings (Belated) and Best Wishes for Great and Holy Week

This year Eastern Christian Easter is more than a month after the Western date: next Sunday. For my Middle Eastern (and other) Christian readers who celebrate on the Eastern date, yesterday was Palm Sunday and Great and Holy Week has now begun.

This is true for the Eastern Orthodox (in our region, the Greek, Antiochian, and Alexandrian churches plus of course, Russia and much of eastern Europe, and the churches of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Sinai), the Oriental Orthodox (the Copts, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian, Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and the Syriac daughter churches in India), and those in the tradition of the Church of the East (the Assyrian Church and its daughter church in India), plus, this year, some Eastern Catholic churches choosing to celebrate on the Eastern date for ecumenical reasons.  Felicitations to you all (especially any I forgot).

 Al-Bawaba  has a slideshow on the difficulties facing Middle Eastern Christians this Palm Sunday.

Who Kidnapped the Syrian Bishops (and Who Freed Them)?

[UPDATE: There are now some denials that the bishops have been released.]

Bishop Ibrahim (left) and Bishop Yazigi

Two Syrian bishops from Aleppo, kidnapped yesterday by unknown forces in northern Syria, have been released today. 

The two, Greek (Antiochian) Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo Boulos Yazigi (Yaziji), and his Syriac Orthodox counterpart, Yohanna Ibtahim, were kidnapped while returning from Turkey to Aleppo on Monday reportedly in the village of Kafr Dael. The Syrian government, through its SANA news agency,  blamed rebels (and some Lebanese reports echoed that), but the Syrian National Coalition and other rebel groups rejected this and called for their immediate release. The new head of the SNC, George Sabra, just elected tor replace Moaz al-Khatib (who resigned), called for the release; Sabra, a leftist and secularist, is himself of Christian (Greek Orthodox) background (also a former Communist), and one of the relatively few Christians supporting the rebels.

A friend of Metropolitan Yazigi, quoted in the Guardian, has suggested that Yazigi has expressed some criticism of the Asad regime and implied that the regime might be behind it.

One point I haven't seen mentioned in most of the Western reporting on this: Bishop Yasigi is the younger brother of the Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch,  John X Yazigi, who was elected late last year.

New Antiochian Orthodox Patriarch Elected

I only just posted about Eastern Christianity when there's major news. Archbishop John Yazigi, Antiochian Orthodox Archbishop of Western and Central Europe, based in Paris, was elected yesterday at the Balamand Seminary in Lebanon as the new Patriarch of Antioch and All the East for the Orthodox churches. He will be known as John X Yazigi.  His predecessor, Ignatius IV Hazim, died recently.

Ignatius was 92 when he died and had been on the Patriarchal throne for 33 years. By contrast, John X is only 57, born in 1955. The Economist offers comments on his election.

The new Patriarch's biography can be found here. Like his predecessor, he is Syrian born, in Latakia,  and on his election pledged that Christianity must survive in Syria. He is surely aware of the challenges: his younger brother Paul is Metropolitan of Aleppo.

Ignatius IV, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Dies at 92

Ignatius IV Hazim, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East (also sometimes translated "and the Levant"), died today in Beirut at the age of 92 after suffering a stroke yesterday. The Syrian-born patriarch held the patriarchal throne for 33 years.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Anrioch has his seat in Damascus in the ancient Street Called Straight. (None of the five patriarchs of Antioch of the various Christian denominations still have their seat in the ancient city of Antioch, today's Antakya, Turkey.) In the Greek Orthodox churches the Patriarch of Antioch traditionally ranks third in ceremonial order after the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria. Jerusalem ranks fourth. The Antiochian Patriarch heads the Orthodox communities of the Middle East except for those in Egypt (Alexandria Patriarchate) and Israel, Palestine, and Jordan (Jerusalem Patriarchate).[Update: Before one of my very picky readers brings this up, Saint Catherine's at Mount Sinai is sometimes considered an autocephalous Orthodox church, but its archbishop is consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.]

The Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch is believed to be the second-largest Christian denomination in the Middle East after Egypt's Copts, with perhaps two million adherents. Over a million are in Syria, where they represent the largest Christian denomination; in Lebanon they are second to the Maronites. The Maronites worldwide, including Western diasporas, may outnumber the Antiochian Orthodox, but no longer do so in the Middle East.

Known for his work among Orthodox youth, Ignatius IV Hazim was a popular leader. He will be buried in Syria.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part II

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy. Part I of this post appeared a week ago.

Other events having intruded, it has been a week since Part I of my discussion of the question of why Aramaic is still a spoken language (in limited islands) while Coptic is merely a liturgical language among the largest body of Middle Eastern Christians. Part I is here. I hope to get more into the meat of the "why" in this second part, and then in a third part early next week, to address a question that is itself controversial: when, exactly, did Coptic cease to be spoken on a daily basis? Even this has answers ranging from the 14th century on down to the 17th or even later.

Let's begin approximately where we left off. "Coptic" properly refers to that late version of the Egyptian language written in a variant of the Greek alphabet with some letters added from Demotic Egyptian. It emerged in the wake of the Roman conquest of Egypt and, over the next couple of centuries, became transformed in content by Egypt's transformation under Hellenistic culture, Roman administration, and the Christian religion.

Coptic was the spoken language of everyone in Egypt, other than members of the Helleno-Roman administrative elite, but it is worth noting that it was not the language of administration; that was Greek. (Ironically, it took the Muslim conquest for Coptic to become, for a while, the language of administration.) That would seem to have little to do with its survival as a spoken language, but Aramaic was the language of administration in several places, including places (like Iran) that were not even Semitic-speaking. Still, I'm not sure what this might have to do with its survival: people don't generally speak the language of bureaucracy, and this was the golden age of Coptic as a language of theological and religious discourse.

The role of  Greek was reinforced at the official level by the split with Rome and Constantinople over the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the Christological controversy actually reinforced the role of Coptic since the official imperial church was rejected by the Egyptian populace and the Coptic (non-Chalcedonian) patriarchs, sometimes from underground, represented the popular will.

The Arab conquest of Egypt in 632 AD did not at first have much impact on Coptic; in fact it began to replace  Greek in administration, though that was short-lived. In 706 AD the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration. The administration had been dependent on Coptic clerks and secretaries, and to keep their jobs, many Coptic clerks began to master Arabic. In the following Abbasid period, a series of taxpayer revolts by Coptic populations, especially in the central Delta region of Bashmur, led to deportation of the rebels to Iraq and the settlement of Arab tribesmen in the Delta. Up to this time most Arab/Muslims were located in Fustat or other cities, with some tribal groups settling in Upper Egypt. Arabic settlement in the Delta was an important factor in Islamization of the Delta. Or so I argued in a doctoral dissertation a long time ago.

Another major turning point came in Fatimid times with the rule of the bizarre Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996-1020), sometimes characterized as mad for his persecution of Christians but also his exactions on Muslims. Prior to his mysterious disappearance he banned the use of Coptic in public places and even forbade private conversations in the language. Though Hakim's restrictions were limited to a short period, they certainly deterred the daily use of Coptic. Declining education among the clergy, a problem only truly addressed in the 19th century, certainly contributed to the problem.

An external indication of the decline of Coptic is the increasing use of Arabic, even in works with a religious content. Though saint's lives and religious works continued to appear in Coptic, key works seeking a general audience increasingly had to appear in Arabic. The single most important work on church history (and a critical source for the history of Egypt as a whole), the History of the Patriarchs, a compilation of works by many hands, but with the compiling attributed to Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa (Severus of Ashmunain) in the 10th century, is entirely in Arabic. Even the biographies of early patriarchs which must have originally been written in Coptic, often survive only in Arabic. Another major work, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt by Abu al-Maqarim (wrongly attributed to "Abu Salih the Armenian" and so translated into English), appeared only in Arabic, in the 13th century. Bilingual dictionaries and wordlists became common, implying that increasing numbers of the faithful no longer spoke or even understood Coptic; already in the 12th century Pope Gabriel II had permitted the use of Arabic in the liturgy and for reading the gospels, because of the decline of Coptic. There are complaints (sometimes attributed to saints of an earlier age) about the decline of Coptic, but little doubt about its reality.

But this is the decline of Coptic as a literary language. The spoken tongue certainly died out more gradually, but when? There is considerable dispute. That it was still spoken in many places in the 14th century seems pretty well established though even that has had its doubters; claims are made for the 16th and 17th centuries and even some outliers for the 19th century. When it died may not be as important as that it died (though as we'll see there were 19th century attempts at revival), but the "when" question will be addressed in Part III  early next week.

To the historical sketch above I'd like to add some comparisons with Aramaic which I think help address the  "why did one survive and the other is fossilized as a litrugical language?" question:

The Geography: Most of the survivals of Aramaic are found — or were preserved in — mountainous areas; it survived in Tur Abdin in Turkey, in parts of the Kurdish mountains, in the Anti-Lebanon north of Damascus, etc. When it survived in non-mountainous regions it was either a recent introduction (Assyrian refugees from Turkey to Iraqi cities) or there was another geographically isolating factor, such as the Iraqi marshes for the Mandaeans.There are exceptions, but geography was certainly a factor. While there were remote Coptic isolated communities such as the Wadi Natrun or Saint Anthony's in the Eastern Desert, monastic communities obviously cannot reproduce themselves. The Coptic population was located in the Nile Valley and the Fayyum, areas where they were integrated with their Muslim neighbors and the main geographical fact (the River) was a uniting factor.

The lack of speakers beyond the core area, or the broader "installed base". Despite the antiquity of the language and the fact that all Egyptians once spoke it, Egyptian and Coptic were not spoken outside Egypt except by Egyptians abroad, or in a few cases perhaps in  the Nubian kingdoms. Aramaic, by contrast, though initially only the native tongue in the Levant, was the lingua franca of the Iranian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and later Seleucid and other successor states across southwest Asia (and liturgically still among India's Saint Thomas Christians), and had currency as far as India and even (in the case of the "Nestorian stele") China. This greater "installed base" provided more speakers across a broader geography, if not more speakers total.

The broader liturgical base. Coptic is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and has some use in the liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches of Egypt. Aramaic is at least partly the liturgical language of Syrian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Melkite Catholic, Maronite, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Malankara Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar Catholic,  Malankara Syrian Orthodox, Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and perhaps some I've never heard of; in the Judaic realm it is used in some normative Jewish liturgies, by some Kurdish Jews, as well as in the liturgies of Middle Eastern Karaite Jews and Samaritans (who spoke it until recent centuries); and beyond the Judeo-Christian faiths, it is both the liturgical and to some extent the spoken language of the Mandaeans. For most of these faiths it is preserved only in a limited way in the liturgy and is not a spoken language, and none of the Christian groups rivals the Copts in number, but it is a reminder of how widespread Aramaic was.

Part III will appear early next week.

Greetings for Orthodox/Eastern Easter

Greetings this weekend to all Christian readers who celebrate Easter this Sunday instead of last: most of the Eastern Orthodox (Antiochian, Alexandrian, etc.) and Oriental Orthodox Churches (including Copts, Armenians, and Syrian Orthodox), and the Assyrian Church of the East. A Happy Easter.

Aramaic Part 1: Aramaic and Syriac Over the Millennia

I'm on vacation this week. Lest my loyal readers waste away or be driven to watching reality television, I've prepared, ahead of time, a series of rather lengthy posts on historical and cultural subjects unlikely to be overtaken by events, one or more of which will automatically go up daily. Should something really earth-shattering happen (Mubarak's hair turns gray), I may check in live, but otherwise I hope these posts entertain and inform.

If you ask the average educated Westerner today what he/she knows about Aramaic, you might be told by a Christian that it's the language that Jesus spoke; a Jewish respondent might say that it's the language of the Talmud (both the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmuds) and also used in many Jewish prayers and rituals.  An educated secularist might know either, or both. Both statements are absolutely true. If you told them that the illustrations above and at left are bilingual inscriptions in Syriac (late Aramaic) and Chinese, found on a stele at the old Chinese capital at Xian and dating from 781 AD during the Tang Dynasty, you might get a little confusion. (Especially since the Syriac, in its Estrangelo alphabet, has been written top to bottom Chinese style, rather than right to left.) If you then showed them bilingual Akkadian/Aramaic inscriptions from the decline of the Assyrian Empire a millennium earlier, or the official correspondence of the Persian Court of Darius the Great (in Aramaic), or bilingual Egyptian/Aramaic inscriptions in Saqqara, Egypt, you might raise an eyebrow. So then pile on a bilingual Aramaic and Greek inscription erected in Kandahar, Afghanistan, by the Indian Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire, and you'd probably find even a well-informed person will be surprised.

Then introduce them to a native speaker of Aramaic today.

Recently I had a couple of  posts about Syriac,one ancient (the first question mark?) and one modern.

I noted then that I should post about the various modern survivals of Aramaic, small islands surrounded by a sea of Arabic (and Kurdish, Turkish, and Persian). That will be the "Aramaic Part Two" post, my vacation post for tomorrow. But first I need to emphasize how this near-forgotten language once was a lingua franca from Egypt to Afghanistan, and why a stele in China and a pillar erected by an Indian Emperor would use it. For over 1,000 years, this was an international language; for another 500 or so, an important spoken language of the Middle East. Today it is restricted to those small islands, though it is still the language of the liturgies of several Eastern Churches (Antiochian [Eastern] Orthodox, Oriental Syriac Orthodox, several Eastern Catholic rites, Assyrian Church of the East, and Indian Christians of Saint Thomas). It is also of course a necessary language for Talmudic scholars.

Aramaic originated as the language of the Aramaean people, who lived in Syria from Hittite times onward. They have walk-on parts in the Bible and other ancient sources, and the Hebrews seem to have considered them not just kin, but ancestors:  Deuteronomy 26:5 famously says "And you shall declare before the Lord your God, 'My father was a wandering Aramaean ...'" It's referring to Jacob and Joseph, for its says he "went down into Egypt," but by extension to the Patriarchs back to Abraham. The Old Aramaic Language is attested in some small inscriptions as early as he 900s BC (and it was doubtless spoken long before it was written); that Chinese/Aramaic bilingual inscription is from the 8th Century AD, (please substitute BCE and CE if you prefer), and Syriac (which is just late Christian Aramaic) was still a major literary language as late as the time of the Crusades. Since it is still spoken and written, it is sometimes claimed to have 3000 years of attested written evidence. Its prominence for so long can't (quite) challenge Ancient Egyptian or the many stages of Chinese for longevity, but it makes English and French look pretty puny. Its only rival in the region since the demise of Ancient Egyptian would have to be its close cousin, Hebrew.

What took Aramaic from being a local Syrian language, just one other Semitic tongue in a welter of them, was its adoption as the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire, though the Assyrians themselves spoke Akkadian. In the late or "Neo-Assyrian" Empire it was the lingua franca, 

In 2 Kings18: 26-27, the role of Aramaic in the Assyrian Empire is captured during the siege by Sennacherib of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah {when, in Byron's words, "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold/And his cohorts sere gleaming in purple and gold"), this conversation reportedly occurred (and I guess I should say "Language Warning," even though it's Holy Scripture). In the King James version it reads:

26. Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna, and Joah, unto Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian language; for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews' language in the ears of the people that are on the wall.

27. But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

Tough negoiator. Isaiah 36: 11 tells the same story in the same words. what the King James Version translates as "the Syrian Language" is aramit (Aramaic), while "Hebrew" is yehudit (the language of the Jews). A century or two later, the "men which sit upon the wall" would be speaking Aramaic, but at this time, apparently not.

When the Neo-Babylonians or Chaldeans replaced the Assyrians, Aramaic remained the administrative language, and the Judaeans carried off into exile by the "waters of Babylon" soon learned Aramaic. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and sent the Jews home, Aramaic went with them. Though the books of Ezra and Nehemia are mostly in Hebrew, the official correspondence is in Aramaic; from that point on, Aramaic creeps into the late Biblical books, especially Daniel.

Meanwhile, Cyrus the Great's new Achaemenian Empire of the Medes and Persians continued to use, and solidify, Aramaic as its language of bureaucracy and administration. This spread Aramaic as far west as Egypt and deep into Central Asia. Though I simply cannot allow any reference to the Medes and Persians to go by without quoting the immortal S.J. Perelman's "One man's Mede is another man's Persian." (For non-native English speakers: there's a proverb, "One man's meat is another man's poison.")

When Alexander conquered Persia, Aramaic and Persian got a new competitor: Greek. Greek became the administrative language of Syria and points east, and Aramaic lost ground, but it remained the spoken language of Syria and the Levant, including Judea.

The Christian gospels are written in Greek, though many think Matthew and perhaps others had an Aramaic original; when they quote Jesus in the original language, a few of the quotes are in Hebrew, but several are in Aramaic. Some could be either; the languages were intermingled by then, and are close to begin with. Aramaic was the language of the eastern varieties of Christianity from teh beginning. Aramaic had always had many dialects, and was always written in many scripts; soon its Jewish religious forms evolved into the somewhat differing vocabularies of the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Iraqi (or Babylonian) Talmud, while the language evolved among Christians into the late Aramaic form known as Syriac, with a distinctive writing system. The Syriac translation of the gospels known as the Peshitta became the accepted scripture not only among Syriac-speaking Christians but among Persian-speakers and even the far-away St. Thomas Christians of India, not to mention the eventual Nestorian colonies in Central Asia and China. Aramaic in its Syriac form, though displaced by Greek as an administrative language, remained the common vernacular in the Middle East east of Egypt and west of Iran (though still in use in both) up to the rise of Islam. Arabic, whose writing system derives from Syriac via Nabatean and whose grammar is not that far removed from Aramaic, eventually supplanted its older cousin, but the languages were close enough kin that the transition in Syria must have been easy. Certainly it would have gone more smoothly than the shift from Coptic to Arabic in Egypt, where the two languages, though both in the "Afro-Asiatic" family, have vast differences.

But Aramaic never died. It did not even go into a period (as Hebrew did) of being only a liturgical and learned language, until revived anew. Many people just kept on speaking it, often for religious or ethnic reasons (though oddly, not always: of the three towns in Syria that still speak it, one is Christian but two are mostly  Muslim, and some say one of the Muslim village's Aramaic is less Arabized than the other two!).

But modern Aramaic will be the subject of Part 2.

For Western Christmas, a Taste of Eastern Christmas

For Western Christmas, having already done Fairuz singing familiar Western carols in English, I thought it might be worth sampling a bit of indigenous Christmas music from the lands where the faith began. This replaces the usual Weekend Historical Videos for this week. Most Roman Catholics and Protestants tend to be pretty ignorant of the Eastern Churches (even, among Catholics, of the Eastern Catholic churches in union with Rome). They may have a vague familiarity with the Orthodox tradition, but know little of the Maronite, Syriac Orthodox, Antiochian Orthdodox, Melkite, Coptic, Armenian, Chaldean or Assyrian traditions.

I think I told the story here once before of an Arab Christian who grew tired of being asked by Western hostesses, on learning he was a Christian, "Which missionary group converted your people?" He always answered, "Jesus Christ and the 12 Apostles." After all, it started there: the New Testament itself says Jesus was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, and was crucified in Jerusalem; that his followers were first called "Christians" in Antioch, and so on. Yet to Western Christians, the Eastern branches of the faith are a mystery. Yet most historians agree that the oldest Christian liturgy still in use today is in the Church of the East (the Assyrian Church).

Oh, the television networks will broadcast a snippet of the Latin Patriarch's Christmas Eve service in Bethlehem, though the majority of Arab Christians will celebrate on the Eastern date in January.

So here are a variety of the varied Middle Eastern traditions, some recorded in the region and some in the diaspora. One or two are reruns from last year, but most are new.

A Coptic hymn to Mary. The Coptic language, now only a liturgical, tongue, is a descendant of Ancient Egyptian:



In the Antiochian Orthodox tradition, a Byzantine Christmas Hymn in Arabic:



A Chaldean Christmas hymn. The Chaldeans are the Eastern Catholic analogue of the Church of the East (Assyrians):



These two from the Lebanese Maronite tradition:





Syriac Orthodox: An entrance prcession for Christmas 2007/8 at a Syriac Orthodox Chruch in Aleppo: amid traditional sounding Eastern music there's also a singing of Silent Night in Syriac as the celebrants enter.



Church of the East (Assyrian):



For an Armenian Christmas I can't resist a repeat from last year, since it combines a Nativity scene with dancing Santas and mixes Eastern and Western music:



And to recall the ancient Armenian Church's more traditional music, this:



And with that, being a fat guy with a white beard, I have a busy evening ahead. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!