Origin of the Name “Suryoyo” According to Early Syriac and Oriental Literature

Suryoyo is the term by which Syriac-speaking Christians of the Middle East have identified themselves for over fifteen hundred years. Its history is bound up with questions of language, territory, religion, and collective identity that remain unresolved to this day.

The word Suryoyo is not native to Aramaic. It was borrowed from the Greek noun Syros, which meant "a person from Syria," referring to the region that Greeks and Romans called Syria. Syriac speakers adapted this Greek word by adding the gentilic suffix -aya, which in Aramaic indicates belonging or origin. Suryoyo therefore means, at its most literal level, "one who belongs to Syria" or "a Syrian."

The term does not appear in Syriac texts before the fifth century, since the Syriac community were exclusively identifying as Arameans. Among the earliest known occurrences are the Syriac translation of Eusebius' On the Theophany, where "Syriacs" (Suryoye) is used several times, and the church canons of Marutha of Maipherqat, which note that "the Syrians (Suryoye) have the custom of calling one subject by two terms." These fifth-century attestations mark the beginning of a gradual process by which the borrowed Greek label displaced the older indigenous name.

Some Syriac writers were fully aware that this transition had taken place and explained the shift by linking the geographic name to an eponymous ruler. The tenth-century scholar Hasan bar Bahlul explained the name "Syria" as coming from a king named Suros, writing: "At first Syrians were called Arameans; and after Suros began his reign over them they began to be called 'Syrians.'"

This was a recurring argument among later medieval Syriac authors. The twelfth-century bishop Dionysios bar Salibi also made this argument, stating: "As for us Syriacs, we descend from Shem, and our father is Kemuel, son of Aram; from this name, Aram, we are sometimes called in the Books by the name Arameans. We are called Syriacs after Suros, who built Antioch and its district, and the country was named after him, Syria."

His contemporary, the great Syrian historian Michael the Syrian, similarly spoke of "our people, that is Arameans, the descendants of Aram, who were called Syrians." In his genealogy of peoples, Michael wrote: "The sons of Shem are the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Arameans, that is the Suryoye (Syriacs), the Jews, and the Persians." Like his predecessors, Michael the Syrian maintained that Suros was the historical reason why the Arameans were renamed Suryoye.

Greeks were largely unfamiliar with the name "Arameans." Apart from Posidonius (whom Strabo follows) and the Oriental writer Josephus, the name is rarely mentioned by Greek authors. Instead, the Greeks referred to these people as "Syriacs." Long before Syriac speakers adopted the name for themselves, it had been in circulation in the Greek-speaking world for nearly a thousand years as a broad, imprecise label applied from the outside.

Initially, the Greeks used "Syrians" to describe the subjects of the Near East without distinction of nationality. The second-century Greek grammarian Aelius Herodianus later described "Syrian" as "the name common to many peoples." In its widest sense, the term could refer to anyone living in the vast stretch of land from the Mediterranean coast to Mesopotamia where Aramaic was the common tongue. Strabo observed that Syrians typically called themselves Arameans in their own language.

The second-century BCE Greek historian Posidonius, himself a native of Syria, recorded that "the people we Greeks call Syrians were called by the Syrians themselves Arameans, for the people in Syria are Arameans." Over time, the Greeks applied this name specifically to the northwestern Semitic regions, associating it with the predominant nationality in these areas until Σύροι became synonymous with ᾿Αραμαῖοι (Arameans). I have explored this argument in greater detail in an article recently published in Hermes, to which I must refer the reader.

After Rome conquered the Levant in the mid-first century BCE, the label "Syrian" was applied to everyone living west of the Euphrates, regardless of language or ancestry, making Greek settlers and native Aramaic speakers alike "Syrian" subjects. As Rome expanded its provincial system into upper Mesopotamia during the second and third centuries, those populations too were labeled "Syrian." Under this umbrella, even Phoenicians and Palestinians counted as Syrians.

Over time, the Arameans themselves gradually adopted the Greek name "Syriacs." While the dominance of Greek rule and education played a significant role in this shift, an even more powerful factor contributed to it: the change of religion. Quatremère suggested that newly converted Aramaic Christians, feeling ashamed of their pagan compatriots, believed that adopting a new religion also required adopting a new name. As a result, they embraced the term Σύροι, which appears in the New Testament as a substitute for "Aramean."

The question of whether the name "Syria" derives from "Assyria" has been debated by scholars for centuries. Herodotus is often cited by modern nationalist writers as having equated the two terms, based on his statement that the people whom the Greeks call Syrians are called Assyrians by others. However, as Randolph Helm's research has demonstrated, Herodotus himself "conscientiously" and "consistently" distinguished between the two names and used them independently. For Herodotus, "Syrians" were the inhabitants of the coastal Levant, including northern Syria, Phoenicia, and Philistia. He never used "Syria" to refer to Mesopotamia; Mesopotamia was always "Assyria" and its inhabitants "Assyrians."

In the Armenian language, both terms have always retained the initial vowel: Asori for "Syrian/Aramean" and Asorestantsi for "Assyrian," with the seventh-century Armenian geographer Ananias Shirakatsi distinguishing clearly between Asorestan ("Assyria") and Asorik ("Syria"). Well-known Semitic scholars have held that "Syrian" and "Assyrian" are of completely different origins, though the matter remains open.

Even in Classical Syriac, the two terms were always differentiated: Suryoyo for Syrian and Athuraya for Assyrian. In Greek, the name Assyria translates the Hebrew (and Akkadian) Ashur, which in the Old Testament refers only to geographic Assyria, without its conquered territories. The biblical name for geographic Syria is Aram, while Athur is the Aramaic name for geographic Assyria.

Before Syriac speakers began calling themselves Suryoye, they used a different word entirely: Aramaya, meaning "Aramean." This was the indigenous name, one that arose from within the community itself rather than being borrowed from outsiders.

The evidence from the fourth century makes this clear. Ephrem the Syrian, the most celebrated Syriac poet, called the Edessene philosopher Bardaisan "the philosopher of the Arameans" and "the Aramean philosopher." He never used the word Suryoyo. Similarly, when one of the earliest Greek-to-Syriac translators worked on a text by Titus of Bostra in the late fourth century and encountered the Greek phrase "the language of Syrians," he rendered it into Syriac as "the Aramaic language" (leshana Aramaya), not "the Syrian language." At that time, the word "Aramean" was the natural, unremarkable way to describe both the people and the language.

The Arameans emerged by the end of the second millennium BCE as one of the most important groups in the cultural, political, and economic life of southwestern Asia. Aramean tribes attained great power across large areas on both sides of the Syrian desert, establishing ruling dynasties and city-states. The most important Aramean kingdom was that of Aram, centered in Damascus, which scholars have described as the strongest and most influential power in the western Fertile Crescent. The kingdom dominated the region's main international trade routes and used the Aramaic dialect of Damascus as its administrative language.

The Arameans were eventually defeated by Assyrian military expansion in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. In 720 BCE, Sargon II brought the Aramean kingdoms of the west to an end, and their territories were incorporated into the Neo-Assyrian provincial system. Yet this military conquest proved to be culturally self-defeating for Assyria. As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed, the Assyrians subdued the Aramean, Phoenician, and Hebrew communities, but this expansion hastened the Aramean "cultural conquest of their military conquerors." Even before its expansion beyond the Euphrates, the Assyrian empire had found it necessary to adopt an Aramaic dialect as its official language, a step driven by the wide reach of Aramaic and the convenience of its alphabet and script. With a much larger Aramean population now under its rule, the smaller Assyrian population could not resist the process that scholars call "Aramaization," which gradually transformed the cultural face of the empire and led, in the words of H.W.F. Saggs, to "the Assyrians being outlived and absorbed." Aramaic displaced Akkadian as the language of everyday speech even within Assyria itself, and the cities of Assyria proper became so cosmopolitan that people of actual Assyrian descent were possibly a minority within them.

After the fall of the Assyrian empire in 612 BCE, Aramaic continued to expand. Under the Achaemenid Persians (539-332 BCE), Aramaic attained official status across all Achaemenian territories, including Egypt and Anatolia, emerging as the lingua franca of Western Asia. The destruction of the Achaemenid empire by Alexander the Great led to Greek replacing Aramaic as the language of diplomacy and learning, and the old standard Aramaic broke up into local dialects. Among these, the most consequential for the history of the name Suryoyo was the dialect of Edessa, which gradually became the literary language of Aramaic-speaking Christians. As the language into which the Bible was translated, it became the venerable tongue of the Aramaic-speaking Christians of Mesopotamia and Persia, much as the Arabic dialect of Mecca later became the classical language of Arabic literature and correspondence.

Starting in the fifth century, Syriac-speaking Christians in the Roman part of the Near East gradually began using Suryaye instead of Aramaye to describe themselves. The process can be tracked through Bible translations with considerable precision.

Consider the story of Naaman, the Aramean general from 2 Kings 5. In the Gospel of Luke (4:27), the Greek text calls him "Syrian." In the oldest Syriac Bible translations, the Old Syriac Gospels and the Peshitta, this word was rendered as "Aramean" (Aramaya), and this was likely also how it appeared in the Syriac version of Tatian's Diatessaron. But in later translations, such as the seventh-century Harklean version, the same Greek word was now translated as "Syrian" (Suryoyo). The same updated terminology also appears in the Syriac translation of the sermons of Severus of Antioch, prepared by Paul of Callinicum in the sixth century and later revised by Jacob of Edessa.

Scholars attribute this shift to the deep influence that Greek culture and the Greek language exercised on Syriac-speaking Christians during the fifth and sixth centuries. As Christianity spread and the institutions of the Roman Empire penetrated deeper into daily life, the Greek manner of naming peoples replaced the indigenous one.

The shift from Aramaya to Suryoyo was not merely a change in fashion. As Arman Akopian has explained, the first Christian communities in Osrhoene (the region around Edessa) were initially composed largely of Jews, for whom, over many centuries, the main Gentiles were the surrounding Arameans. As the two groups united into single Christian communities, the need for a new shared name became pressing. The Jews could not readily call themselves "Arameans," both because the word had become a synonym for "pagan" in religious usage and because Jews and Arameans, despite their close kinship, were two distinct peoples. The Greek-derived term "Syrian," despite its strong association with the word "Aramean," probably appeared as an acceptable compromise, justified by the authority of the Septuagint, which had long translated "Aram" and "Aramean" as "Syria" and "Syrian."

The name "Syrian" was gradually adopted by virtually all Christian Arameans, regardless of where they lived or which Aramaic dialect they used. They extended the new name to their language as well, which came to be known as leshana suryaya, "the Syriac language."

The shift from Aramaya to Suryoyo was further complicated by the fact that the word "Arameans" had already acquired a problematic secondary meaning. In Jewish texts of the early centuries BCE and CE, the term "Arameans" took on a third sense beyond its ethnic and linguistic meanings: it came to mean "non-Jew, Gentile." This usage carried over into early Syriac Christianity. In New Testament passages such as Acts 19:10 and Galatians 2:14, where the Greek text contrasts Ioudaioi (Jews) with Hellenes (Gentiles, with Hellen here carrying the sense of "pagan" rather than "Greek"), the corresponding Syriac translation uses Aramaye for "Gentiles." For the new mixed communities of Jewish and Aramean converts, calling themselves "Arameans" would therefore have carried the unwelcome connotation of "pagans."

To address this problem, a distinction in pronunciation was introduced in both Jewish and Syriac Christian usage: Aramaya was reserved for the original meaning of "Aramaic, Aramean," while the variant Armaya was used to denote "gentile, pagan." Out of respect for their Aramean heritage, the Syrians attempted to maintain this distinction, but a perfectly clear separation between the two forms was never fully achieved, and the two were often treated as interchangeable.

Despite the new name having taken root, the old one did not vanish overnight. The author of the Book of the Cave of Treasures (probably written between the fifth and seventh centuries) still felt the need to clarify for his readers, writing: "the Syrian language, which is Aramaic" (leshana Suryaya d-itaw Aramaya). This formulation suggests that his audience was still more comfortable with "Arameans" as the default name for the language.

A central feature of the name Suryoyo is the way it became linked to the biblical account of human origins. Syriac Christians came to believe that they, as "Syrians" or "Arameans," were descended from Aram, the son of Shem, the son of Noah.

This belief drew on Eusebius' Chronicle, which distinguished between the Arameans (called Syrians, descended from Aram) and the Assyrians (descended from Ashur, whose legendary kings Ninus and Semiramis were famous in Greek literature). The distinction had a lasting impact on Syriac historiography.

As Syrian Orthodox Christians during the Islamic period increasingly read their past through the Hebrew Bible, the identification of Syrians as Syriac-speakers descended from Aram gained strength. The eighth-century Zuqnin Chronicle uses "Syrians," "Arameans," and "sons of Aram" interchangeably in reference to Syrian Orthodox Christians. The twelfth-century patriarch Michael the Syrian drew heavily on Jacob's scholarship when arguing that the ancient Arameans (Syrians) spoke Syriac and descended from Aram while discussing how Aramaic had been used as the language of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian empires.

Meanwhile, Syriac-writing Christians in the Sasanian Persian Empire (east of the Euphrates) traced their origins to ancient "Assyrian" figures from the Greek tradition and did not necessarily claim Aramean ancestry. This produced a geographic and genealogical division: "Syrians" as descendants of Aram in the west, and "Assyrians" as heirs to a different ancient lineage in the east.

Drawing on Syriac sources from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, scholars have identified three distinct meanings that the word Suryoyo carried simultaneously:

At the most basic level, Suryoyo was a geographic term. It designated someone who came from or lived in the region called "Syria." For most Syriac writers, however, "Syria" did not encompass the entire Near East. It referred to something more specific: the territories west of the Euphrates, roughly along the line from Antioch to Edessa.

The ninth-century historian Dionysius of Tell-Mahre identified "Syria" as the region "to the west of the Euphrates." The ninth-century lexicographer Isho bar Ali defined it as "all of the land from Antioch to Edessa." These definitions correspond to the boundaries of the late Roman provinces of Syria Prima, Syria Secunda, Phoenice Libanensis, Euphratensis, Osroene, and Mesopotamia.

This geographic understanding created a political and cultural division. People west of the Euphrates, living under Roman rule, were "Syrians." People east of it, under Sasanian Persian rule, were more often called "Assyrians." This distinction is reflected in the third-century trilingual inscription of the Persian king Shapur I, which differentiates between the Persian province of Asurestan and the Roman province of Suriya. Even the Babylonian Talmud preserves this split: a Palestinian rabbi calls Aramaic "Syriac" (Sursi), while his Babylonian colleague calls it "Aramaic" (Arami).

People also held layered identities. A person from the city of Amida in northern Mesopotamia could identify himself as "Amidene" (by city), "Syrian" (by region), or "Roman" (by empire), depending on the situation. Jacob of Sarug, writing to Christians in Arabia, spoke in the name of "us, Romans."

Beyond geography, "Syrian" could also indicate a specific language and way of life. An anonymous note in Photius' Bibliotheca about the second-century novelist Iamblichus makes this distinction with particular clarity. It states that Iamblichus was "a Syrian by origin on both his father's and his mother's side, a Syrian not in the sense of the Greeks who have settled in Syria, but of the native ones, familiar with the Syrian language and living by their customs."

In other words, Greek settlers in Syria were "Syrian" only in the geographic sense. The "real" Syrians were those who actually spoke the language and followed the inherited customs. Jerome described the holy man Malchus as "Syrian by origin and tongue." Theodoret of Cyrus described the heresiarch Audaeus as "Syrian, both by origin and by speech." Both ancestry and language mattered.

In Syriac sources, this meaning emerges most clearly in contexts where Syriac culture is being compared with Greek culture. The seventh-century scholar Severus Sebokht, defending Syriac intellectual achievement against Greek pretensions in fields such as astronomy, contrasted Suryaye with Yawnaye (Greeks). He sarcastically referred to himself as "a Syrian and ignoramus," pointing not at his home region but at the supposed cultural inferiority assigned to the Syriac tradition by Greek-dominated intellectual circles.

East Syrian writers also sometimes used Suryaye in this sense, to refer to the Syriac literary and scientific tradition. The scholar Shemon Barqaya (late sixth to early seventh century) mentioned a calendrical date that belonged to "us, Syrians."

As the great theological disputes of the fifth and sixth centuries divided Christians into opposing camps, the word "Syrian" acquired yet another meaning. It came to serve as a marker of religious identity, specifically for the Miaphysite (anti-Chalcedonian) Christians who eventually formed the Syriac Orthodox Church.

The author of the Life of Jacob Baradaeus stated the identification plainly: "The Syrians (Suryaye) [were called] Jacobites (Yaqubaye)." During the medieval period, the Arabic form of the name (al-Suryan) was used mainly by members of the West Syrian (Syriac Orthodox) community.

East Syrian Christians were aware of this confessional narrowing. The seventh-century writer Dadisho Qatraya used "Syrians" as a label for the West Syrian Miaphysites and their "corruption of faith." The eighth-century scholar Theodore bar Koni went further still: in his version of the biblical table of nations, he listed "Arameans" (Aramaye) among the respectable descendants of Shem but placed "Syrians" (Suryaye) among the descendants of Ham, the cursed lineage. This appears to have been a deliberate attempt to use ethnic categories to disparage the West Syrians.

East Syrian Christians, whose patriarchal headquarters was in Seleucia-Ctesiphon and who never considered themselves part of the "Church of Syria" based in Antioch, were generally reluctant to call themselves "Syrians," except when referring to the shared Syriac literary heritage.

Some later writers, however, broadened the term once more. The thirteenth-century scholar Barhebraeus used "Syrians" to refer to all Syriac-speaking Christians, both West and East Syrian, reflecting the more open and cooperative atmosphere of the so-called "Syriac Renaissance" of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Around the year 700 CE, Jacob of Edessa was translating the sermons of Severus of Antioch from Greek into Syriac when he paused to reflect on the practice of Bible translation. He described how certain people had translated Scripture from Greek into "the Syrian (Suryoyo) language" and called those translators "Greeks" (Yawnaye). But he then noted that "other Syrians (Suryaye)" had received and passed on those translations. In this usage, both the Greek-speaking translators and the Syriac-speaking recipients could be called "Syrian," because they all came from the same geographic region.

Later in the same discussion, Jacob narrowed his definition. He stated that people who spoke Syriac could be called either "Arameans" (Aramaye) or "Syrians" (Suryaye), treating these as roughly equivalent. Jacob was therefore working with at least two definitions at once: a broad one (anyone from the Syrian provinces, regardless of language) and a narrow one (specifically Aramaic/Syriac speakers, who are also called Arameans).

Jacob also connected the name to biblical genealogy. In his Commentary on the Octateuch and in his letters, he stated that Noah's son Shem had been given the territory between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. A later commentary building on Jacob's work added that Shem's son Aram had settled the Syrian lands west of the Euphrates.

Whether Syriac speakers possessed a genuine ethnic consciousness as "Syrians" before the Islamic conquests has been debated by scholars. Some, such as Fergus Millar, have pointed to the regional variation of Aramaic dialects and the dominance of Greek language and culture across the region, arguing against any unified "Syrian" ethnicity. Others, including Nathanael Andrade and Philip Wood, have argued that forms of ethnic awareness were taking shape, even if they were expressed through variable cultural markers and biblical genealogies borrowed from Greek-influenced traditions.

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the Syriac-speaking inhabitants of Edessa and surrounding areas in upper Mesopotamia were clearly developing notions of a collective "Syrian" identity. They believed that Syrians descended from the biblical figure Shem or his son Aram, that they spoke Syriac (or Aramaic), and that they lived in cities founded by the biblical Nemrud. Important texts reflecting these ideas include the Teaching of Addai, Euphemia and the Goth, the Julian Romance, and various martyr accounts.

The way contemporaries spoke about Ephrem the Syrian is especially revealing. The Greek-writing bishop Theodoret of Cyrus described Ephrem as a poet who "daily waters the nation of Syrians with streams of grace." His contemporary Sozomen declared that Ephrem surpassed the Greeks in wisdom. Among Syriac writers, Jacob of Sarug (early sixth century) praised Ephrem as "the crown of all the Aramean people" (klila dh-khullah aramayutha) and the great speaker "among the Syrians (Suryaye)." Philoxenus of Mabbug called Ephrem "the teacher of us Suryaye." That such language was used about a fourth-century figure by fifth- and sixth-century writers indicates that by their time, at least some Syriac-speaking Christians understood themselves as belonging to an ethnic group defined by shared language, shared literary heritage, and shared descent from Aram.

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