Historically, eastern varieties of Aramaic have been more dominant, mainly due to their political acceptance in the
Neo-Assyrian Empire and
Achaemenid Persian empires. With the later loss of political platforms to
Greek and
Persian, Eastern Aramaic continued to be used by the population of Mesopotamia. During the
Late Middle Aramaic period, spanning from 300 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., Aramaic diverged into its eastern and western branches. In
Edessa, present-day
Urfa in southeast Turkey, the local variety of
Eastern Middle Aramaic known as
Classical Syriac had emerged. Between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, it became a
liturgical language among the
Eastern Rite Syriac Christians throughout the Middle East. It was used in the
Peshitta and by the poet
Ephrem the Syrian, as well as in the schools of
Edessa and
Nisibis. Later, it was adopted by the
Saint Thomas Christians in India. In the region of
Babylonia (modern southern Iraq),
rabbinical schools flourished, producing the
Targumim and
Talmud, making the language a standard of religious
Jewish scholarship. Among the
Mandaean community in the
Khuzestan province of
Iran and
Iraq, another variety of Eastern Aramaic, known as
Mandaic, became the liturgical language of
Mandaeism. These varieties have widely influenced the less prominent
Western Aramaic dialects of the
southern Levant, and the three classical languages outlined above have also influenced numerous vernacular varieties of Eastern Aramaic, some of which are spoken to this day, largely by the Assyrians,
Mizrahi Jews and Mandaeans (see
Neo-Aramaic languages). Since the
Muslim conquest of Persia of the seventh century, most of the population of the Middle East has undergone a gradual but steady
language shift to
Arabic. However there are still between some 550,000 – 1,000,000 fluent Eastern Neo-Aramaic speakers among the indigenous
Assyrians of northern Iraq, northeast Syria, southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, as well as small migrant communities in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Armenia, Georgia, southern Russia and Azerbaijan. Most of these are members of the
Assyrian Church of the East,
Syriac Orthodox Church,
Chaldean Catholic Church,
Ancient Church of the East,
Assyrian Pentecostal Church and
Assyrian Evangelical Church. A further number may have a more sparse understanding of the language, due to pressures in their
homelands to speak
Arabic,
Turkish,
Persian or
Kurdish, and as a result of the
diaspora to the Western World. ==See also==