Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that emerged in Edessa (modern Urfa, in Southeastern Turkey) in the first century CE. Syriac was first put into writing within the post-Seleucid kingdom of Osrhoene, but later flourished in the Roman and Sasanian empires and along the Silk Road. In addition to an extraordinarily rich epigraphic, numismatic, and figurative record, Syriac produced a vast body of literature, much of which is still in need of systematic academic attention despite its fundamental importance for the study of ancient and medieval history, philosophy, and literature, as well as early Christianity and Islam. The surviving body of Syriac literature is monumental and diverse, and is especially notable for its poetry, its historiography, its hagiography, and its theological writings, but also for a huge corpus of Syriac translations from Greek that made Syriac a fundamental intermediary language in the transmission to the Arabic-speaking world of Greek philosophy and science.

Prof. Alberto Rigolio has published on a number of Syriac translations of Greek texts (Aristotle, Plutarch, Lucian, Themistius), as well as on the origins of Syriac literature and on the historical Syriac sources that are available for the study of the Roman Near East. He is currently working at a history of Syriac rhetoric, and at a monograph on Syriac education and culture in the first six centuries CE that focuses on the intersections of the Syriac civilization with the Graeco-Roman world.

Students in Classics and Ancient History are encouraged to learn about Syriac through the available modules in history and culture (CLAS44430 Edessa: The Athens of the East) as well as language (offered as an Independent Research Topic and THEO2061 Syriac). MA and PhD students with interests pertaining to Syriac studies are able to pursue their research in Durham with the supervision of an academic team that may include Dr Jan Dochhorn (Biblical Studies), Prof. Ted Kaizer (Roman Near East), and Prof. Alberto Rigolio (Syriac literature and history).