Syrians
Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic, which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.
The national name "Syrian" was originally an Indo-European corruption of Assyrian and applied to Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, however by antiquity it was used to denote the inhabitants of the Levant. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Arab identity gradually became dominant among many Syrians, and the ethnonym "Syrian" was used mainly by Christians in Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia who spoke Syriac. In the 19th century, the name "Syrian" was revived amongst the Arabic speakers of the Levant. Following the establishment of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, the name "Syrian" began to spread amongst its Arabic speaking inhabitants. The term gained more importance during the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, becoming the accepted national name for the Arabic speakers of the Syrian Republic.
Most Arabic-speaking Syrians identify as Arabs and are described as such by virtue of their modern-day language and bonds to Arab culture and history. But they are, in fact, genetically a blend of the various Semitic-speaking groups indigenous to the region. There is no contradiction between being an Arab and a Syrian since the Syrian Arab identity is multi-layered and being Syrian complements being Arab. In addition to denoting Syrian Arabs, the term "Syrian" also refer to all Syrian citizens, regardless of their ethnic background. In 2018, Syria had an estimated population of 19.5 million, which includes, aside from the aforementioned majority, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians and others.
Even before the Syrian Civil War, there was a large Syrian diaspora that had emigrated to North America, European Union member states, South America, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Six million refugees of the Syrian Civil War also live outside Syria now, mostly in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Germany as well as Sweden.
Etymology
Various sources indicate that the name Syria itself is derived from Luwian term "Sura/i", and the derivative ancient Greek name: Σύριοι, ', or Σύροι, ', both of which originally derived from the Akkadian word Aššūrāyu in northern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. However, during the Seleucid Empire, this term was also applied to The Levant, and henceforth the Greeks applied the term without distinction between the Assyrians of north Mesopotamia and Arameans of the Levant.Applications of the name in antiquity
The Greeks used the terms "Syrian" and "Assyrian" interchangeably to indicate the indigenous Arameans, Assyrians and other inhabitants of the Levant and Mesopotamia, Herodotus considered "Syria" west of the Euphrates. Starting from the 2nd century BC onwards, ancient writers referred to the ruler of the Seleucid Empire as the King of Syria or King of the Syrians. The Seleucids designated the districts of Seleucis and Coele-Syria explicitly as Syria and ruled the Syrians as indigenous populations residing west of the Euphrates in contrast to Assyrians who had their native homeland in Mesopotamia east of the Euphrates. However, the interchangeability between Assyrians and Syrians persisted during the Hellenistic period.In one instance, the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt applied the term "Syrian Village" as the name of a settlement in Fayoum. The Ptolemies referred to all peoples originating from Modern Syria and Palestine as Syrian.
The term Syrian was imposed upon Arameans of modern Levant by the Romans. Pompey created the province of Syria, which included modern-day Lebanon and Syria west of the Euphrates, framing the province as a regional social category with civic implications. In Roman usage, the term could refer narrowly to people of Aramean descent, but it was also applied more broadly to all inhabitants of the province, among them descendants of Greek and Italian settlers. Authors varied in their descriptions: Plutarch described the indigenous people of this newly created Roman province as "Syrians", so did Strabo, who observed that Syrians resided west of the Euphrates in Roman Syria, and he explicitly mentions that those Syrians are the Arameans, whom he calls Aramaei, indicating an extant ethnicity. Posidonius noted that the people called Syrians by the Greeks refer to themselves as Arameans. Tacitus also portrayed Syrians as a distinct ethnic group or race.
In The Jewish War, Josephus, a Hebrew historian native to the Levant, mentioned the Syrians as the non-Hebrew, non-Greek indigenous inhabitants of Syria.
History
Syrians are mainly descended from the various ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of the ancient Near East. The Seleucids ruled the indigenous peoples of the Levant, whom they named "Syrians", as a conquered nation; Syrians were not assimilated into Greek communities, and many local peasants were exploited financially as they had to pay rent for Greek landlords. Outside Greek colonies, the Syrians lived in districts governed by local temples that did not use the Greek civic system of poleis and colonies. The situation changed after the Roman conquest in 64 BC; Semitic-speaking Syrians obtained the citizenship of Greek poleis, and the line separating the Greeks and the natives blurred. The idioms Syrian and Greek were used by Rome to denote civic societies instead of separate ethnic groups.Ancient Syria of the first millennium BC was dominated by the Aramaeans; they originated in the Northern Levant as a continuum of the Bronze Age populations of Syria. The Aramaeans assimilated most of the earlier Levantine populations through their language. With the adoption of a common religion, Christianity, most of the inhabitants turned into Syrians. Islam and the Arabic language had a similar effect where the Aramaeans themselves became Arabs regardless of their ethnic origin following the Muslim conquest of the Levant. The presence of Arabs in Syria is recorded since the 9th century BC, and Roman period historians, such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Ptolemy, reported that Arabs inhabited many parts of Syria, which according to modern historians indicate either an ethnic group or a nomadic way of life. The urheimat of the Arab ethnos is unclear; the traditional 19th century theory locates this in the Arabian Peninsula, while some modern scholars, such as David Frank Graf, note that the epigraphic and archaeological evidence render the traditional theory inadequate to explain the Arabs' appearance in Syria. The Arabs mentioned in Syria by Greco-Roman writers were assimilated into the newly formed "Greco–Aramaean culture" that dominated the region, and the texts they produced were written in Greek and Aramaic. Old Arabic, the precursor of Classical Arabic, was not a literary language; its speakers used Aramaic for writing purposes.
Linguistic Arabization
On the eve of the Rashidun Caliphate conquest of the Levant, 634 AD, Syria's population mainly spoke Aramaic as the Lingua franca, while Greek was the language of administration. Arabization and Islamization of Syria began in the 7th century, and it took several centuries for Islam, the Arab identity, and language to spread; the Arabs of the caliphate did not attempt to spread their language or religion in the early periods of the conquest, and formed an isolated aristocracy. The Arabs of the caliphate accommodated many new tribes in isolated areas to avoid conflict with the locals; caliph Uthman ordered his governor, Muawiyah I, to settle the new tribes away from the original population. Syrians who belonged to Monophysitic denominations welcomed the Muslim Arabs as liberators.The Abbasids in the eighth and ninth centuries sought to integrate the peoples under their authority, and the Arabization of the administration was one of their methods. Arabization gained momentum with the increasing numbers of Muslim converts from Christianity; the ascendancy of Arabic as the formal language of the state prompted the cultural and linguistic assimilation of Syrian converts. Some of those who remained Christian also became Arabized, while others stayed Aramean, it was probably during the Abbasid period in the ninth century that Christians adopted Arabic as their first language; the first translation of the gospels into Arabic took place in this century. Many historians, such as Claude Cahen and Bernard Hamilton, proposed that the Arabization of Christians was completed before the First Crusade. By the thirteenth century, the Arabic language achieved complete dominance in the region, with many of its speakers having become Arabs.Those who retained the Aramaic language are divided among two groups:
- The Eastern Aramaic Syriac-speaking group, followers of the West Syriac Rite of the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Syrian Catholic Church; kept the pre-Islamic Syrian identity throughout the ages, asserting their culture in face of the Arab dominance. Linguists, such as Carl Brockelmann and François Lenormant, suggested that the rise of the Garshuni writing was an attempt by the Syriac Orthodox to assert their identity. Syriac is still the liturgical language for most of the different Syriac churches in Syria. The Syriac Orthodox Church was known as the Syrian Orthodox Church until 2000, when the holy synod decided to rename it to avoid any nationalistic connotations; the Catholic Church still has "Syrian" in its official name.
- The Western Neo-Aramaic-speaking group, that is, the inhabitants of Bakh'a, Jubb'adin and Ma'loula. The residents of Bakh'a and Jubb'adin converted to Islam in the eighteenth century, while in Ma'loula, the majority are Christians, mainly belonging to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, but also to the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, in addition to a Muslim minority, who speaks the same Aramaic dialect of the Christian residents. The people of those villages use Arabic intensively to communicate with each other and the rest of the country; this led to a noticeable Arabic influence on their Aramaic dialect where around 20% of its vocabulary is of Arabic roots. Bakh'a is steadily losing its dialect; by 1971, people aged younger than 40 could no longer use the Aramaic language properly, although they could understand it. The situation of Bakh'a might eventually lead to the extinction of its Aramaic dialect.