INTRODUCTION

Around the turn of the Christian era the Fertile Crescent had witnessed the emergence of a number of local Aramaic dialects in written form: Nabataean (from the second century B.C.), Palmyrene (from mid first century B.C.), an early form of Syriac (Proto-Syriac; from the early first century A.D.), and Hatran (from the first century A.D.). All these dialects are known only from inscriptions (and, in the case of Nabataean and Proto-Syriac, a few documents on papyrus and skin); only in the case of Proto-Syriac is it certain that the dialect was used for literary purposes as well (though the few literary texts from the first to the third century come down to us in the slightly different later form of the language known as Classical Syriac). Some sixty or so short Proto-Syriac inscriptions from Edessa and its vicinity, dating from the first to the third century A.D., have been found, the majority of which are cultic or funerary (the latter often accompanied by mosaic portraits executed in a Parthian style). Of exceptional interest are three Syriac legal documents dating from 240, 242 and 243, the last found at Dura Europos, and the other two associated with a collection of seventeen Greek documents from Mesopotamia dating between 232 and 252.

Since Syriac, the Aramaic dialect of Edessa (modern Urfa), soon became the literary vehicle for Aramaic-speaking Christianity, this dialect (in its Classical form) rapidly spread over a wide area as a literary language, both in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, and over the border into the Parthian (subsequently Sasanian) empire.