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 (Aramaeans). 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 (Syriac) 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 (using the
Syriac alphabet to write Arabic) 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 (retaining their Aramean identity), 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.
Revival of the designation "Syrian" The Arabs in Arabia called the
region of Syria region
al-Sham () which became the dominant name of the Levant under the
Rashidun Caliphate and its successors. The geographic designation "Syria" returned in 1864 when
Ottoman Syria was reorganized and the name was used for a vilayet encompassing generally the southern Levant. The use of the national designation "Syrian" however has its origin in the tense relationship between the Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians of the Levant, where Christians wanted to distance themselves from the Muslims. Already in the 1830s, the Lebanese traveler As'ad Khayyat identified with the term Syria, but it took till the 1880s for the name to begin to be widely used by the inhabitants to refer to themselves. Rida did not reject the Arab identity but recognized a Syrian uniqueness and advocated the idea of a Syrian state. In June 1919, the
Syrian National Congress, which included representatives from Palestine and Lebanon, demanded the full independence of Syria, within borders that encompass more or less the Levant; this helped to further strengthen the development of the Syrian national consciousness. Faisal was deposed by the French who established a
mandate in 1920, but the formation of a Syrian consciousness amongst the members of the Syrian Arab national movement solidified and spread amongst the Muslims as well as the Christians. ==Genetics==