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 Suryaya 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. Suryaya 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. Among the earliest known occurrences are the Syriac translation of Eusebius' On the Theophany, where "Syrians" (Suryaye) is used several times, and the church canons of Marutha of Maipherqat, which note that "the Syrians (Suryaye) 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.

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 "Syriacs" to describe the subjects of the Assyrian Empire 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: "Suryaya" 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 Suryaye, they used a different word entirely: Aramaya, meaning "Aramaean." 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 Aramaeans" and "the Aramaean philosopher." He never used the word Suryaya. 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 "Aramaean" was the natural, unremarkable way to describe both the people and the language.

The Aramaeans 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 Aramaeans 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 Aramaean 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 "Aramaean" (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" (Suryaya). 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 Suryaya 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 Aramaeans. 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 "Aramaeans," both because the word had become a synonym for "pagan" in religious usage and because Jews and Aramaeans, despite their close kinship, were two distinct peoples. The Greek-derived term "Syrian," despite its strong association with the word "Aramaean," probably appeared as an acceptable compromise, justified by the authority of the Septuagint, which had long translated "Aram" and "Aramaean" as "Syria" and "Syrian."

The name "Syrian" was gradually adopted by virtually all Christian Aramaeans, 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."

Some Syriac writers were fully aware that the transition had taken place and that the two names referred to the same people. The tenth-century scholar Hasan bar Bahlul explained the name "Syria" as coming from a king named "Syros" and wrote: "At first Syrians were called 'Arameans'; and after Syros began his reign over them they began to be called 'Syrians.'"

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 "Aramaean" as the default name for the language.

The twelfth-century bishop Dionysios bar Salibi, in his polemic work Against Armenians, wrote: "We are descended from Shem, and our father is Kemuel, the son of Aram, and after this Aram we are sometimes called Arameans in the books." His contemporary, the great Syrian historian Michael the Syrian, 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 Syrians, the Jews, and the Persians."

The historian and church figure Dionysios of Tel Mahre (d. 845) put it with particular clarity in his Chronicle: "We figuratively call Syrians those who speak Aramaic to the west and east of the Euphrates, that is, from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Persia. Edessa is the country of the Syro-Aramaic language and its foundation."

The shift from Aramaya to Suryaya was further complicated by the fact that the word "Aramaean" had already acquired a problematic secondary meaning. In Jewish texts of the early centuries BCE and CE, the term "Aramaean" 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 Aramaean converts, calling themselves "Aramaeans" 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, Aramaean," while the variant Armaya was used to denote "gentile, pagan." Out of respect for their Aramaean 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.

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

At the most basic level, Suryaya 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 "Aramaeans" (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 (Suryaya) 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 "Aramaeans" (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 Aramaeans).

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. The twelfth-century patriarch Michael the Syrian drew heavily on Jacob's scholarship when arguing that the ancient Aramaeans (Syrians) spoke Syriac and descended from Aram.

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

This belief drew on Eusebius' Chronicle, which distinguished between the Aramaeans (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," "Aramaeans," and "sons of Aram" interchangeably in reference to Syrian Orthodox Christians. The twelfth-century patriarch Michael the Syrian traced the Aramaean (Syrian) lineage back to 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 Aramaean 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.

The Book of the Cave of Treasures is one of the most important early texts for understanding how Syriac Christians constructed their ethnic identity around the name Suryaye. It was probably composed in Sasanian Mesopotamia (the "land of Nod") sometime between the fifth and seventh centuries. Most manuscripts attribute it to Ephrem the Syrian, though he could not have been the actual author. The real writer chose Ephrem's name deliberately, because Ephrem was the most celebrated and respected Syriac author of all time, recognized by both East and West Syrian communities.

The Cave of Treasures advanced a claim no Syriac writer had made before: that Syriac was the original language of all humanity before the Tower of Babel. Retelling the story from Genesis 11:1-9, the text states:

The author directly challenged the long-standing view that Hebrew was the first language:

He went further, asserting that "all the languages that exist in the world are derived from Syriac, and all the languages in books are mingled with it."

This was a deliberate challenge to a tradition reaching back centuries. The idea that Hebrew was the first language had roots in Jewish writings from the Second Temple period (the Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea Scrolls) and was upheld by many Christian writers (Julius Africanus, Jerome, Augustine, John Chrysostom). Even within the Syriac tradition, Ephrem the Syrian probably held this view, and Jacob of Edessa actively defended it in the seventh century. The author of the Cave of Treasures was in fact the only Syriac writer during late antiquity to claim that Syriac, rather than Hebrew, was the original language of humanity.

The author also tried to demonstrate Syriac superiority through the direction of its script, claiming that "in the writing of the Syrians the left hand stretches out to the right hand, and all sons of the left side are drawing close to the right hand of God," while Greek, Latin, and Hebrew go in the opposite direction. This argument is factually inaccurate (Hebrew is also written right to left), but it served a symbolic purpose: in Syriac Christian culture, the right side was associated with God and goodness, the left with evil and demons. By framing the comparison this way, the author was painting the speakers of those three languages in a negative, even demonic, light.

A roughly contemporary Greek work called On the Mystery of Letters independently advanced a similar claim, declaring that the "Syrian letters and the Syrian language" existed "before all" and were "the profound language of the Chaldaeans." This indicates the idea was not confined to a single text.

The Cave of Treasures put forward a second, entirely original argument for the moral superiority of the Syrians. Turning to the Gospel of John (19:19-20), where Pilate wrote the inscription on Jesus' cross in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, the author posed a pointed question:

The text identified the three languages on the cross as representing the three guilty parties: "Herod the Greek, Caiaphas the Hebrew, and Pilate the Roman. But the Syrians had no part in his murder."

To support this claim, the author invoked King Abgar of Edessa, "who wanted to go up to Jerusalem and destroy it because the Jews crucified Christ." This connected the innocence of the Syrians to the famous legend of King Abgar's correspondence with Jesus. The figure of Abgar was a central element of Edessene Christian identity, especially celebrated by West Syrian authors such as Jacob of Sarug, who called Abgar "the son of the Aramaeans."

No comparable treatment of the crucifixion inscription exists in any earlier Christian writer. This was the author's own invention, designed to place the Syrians above Jews, Greeks, and Romans in the moral hierarchy of Christian history.

The Cave of Treasures also placed the Syrians at the center of biblical geography. It portrayed the biblical king Nemrud (Nimrod) as the founder of many of the great cities that Syrians came to inhabit: Babel, Nineveh, Resen, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Nisibis, Edessa, and Harran. The descendants of Noah's son Shem were allotted the territory stretching from Persia to the Mediterranean. By connecting the Syrians to both the world's oldest language and the oldest cities, the author presented them as a primordial people at the very origin of civilization.

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 Aramaean 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.

To fully understand the history of the name Suryoyo, it is necessary to consider the other names that have been applied to these communities, and how they have intersected, overlapped, and competed with one another over time. As the historian John Joseph has documented, these Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Middle East have been called Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Arameans, and Assyrians, depending on the preferred term of the user, and this "has continued to cause confusion."

The Church of the East was long called "Nestorian" by outsiders. The name goes back at least to the sixth century: Cosmas Indicopleustes spoke of "Nestorian" Christians as early as 525. Medieval Arab authors referred to them as Nasturiyun. Over time, these Eastern Christians came to accept and use the name themselves. The Nestorian bishop Mar Abd Yeshu of Nisibis in the thirteenth century drew up a creed entitled "The Orthodox Creed of the Nestorians." By the late nineteenth century, however, Western missionaries, especially Anglicans, made members of the community conscious of the stigma of "heresy" that the term was originally intended to convey, and the name gradually fell out of favor.

The name "Chaldean" was initially geographic, referring to the fact that the patriarchal seat of the Church of the East was located in ancient Chaldea. As the eighteenth-century scholar Assemani explained, "the Nestorians are generally called Chaldaic Christians, because their principal, or head church, is in the ancient Chaldea." When a section of the Church of the East united with Rome in the seventeenth century, the new Catholic branch adopted the name "Chaldean" and its primate was styled the Patriarch of Babylon. The Roman Catholic Church used the name to avoid calling the new converts by the "heretical" designation Nestorian. In time, "Chaldean" lost its national connotation and came to refer exclusively to the Catholic branch.

The identification of "Chaldean" with the language was reinforced by the European tradition, apparently originating with Jerome, of calling the Aramaic portions of the books of Ezra and Daniel "Chaldee." In essence, as Akopian observes, this amounts to an acknowledgement that Arameans and Chaldeans are the same people.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the name by which both the "Nestorians" and the "Jacobites" called themselves was simply "Syrians": Suraye in East Syriac pronunciation, Suryoyo in the West Syriac dialect of Tur Abdin, and Suryani in Arabic. This was the inherited, traditional self-designation that had been in use for over a thousand years. In his own language, it was as natural for a "Nestorian" to call himself Suraya as it remains for a Syriac Orthodox Christian to call himself Suryoyo.

In 1981, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka Iwas issued an encyclical confirming that the true name of the Church is the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch (idto suryoyto orthodoxoyto dantiokh), its language the Syriac language (leshono suryoyo), and its people the Syrian people (amo suryoyo). The encyclical declared any other name "not only alien and foreign, but also a distortion, falsification and forgery of the historical truth."

The name "Assyrian" as applied to these communities is of relatively recent origin. It gained currency in the second half of the nineteenth century, propelled by the archaeological excavations at Nineveh and other ancient Assyrian sites that captured the imagination of the Western world. When Layard unearthed the remains of Nineveh, he declared that the Nestorians and their Catholic brethren living near the ancient Assyrian capital were "as much the remains of Nineveh, and Assyria, as the rude heaps and ruined palaces."

The Anglican mission to the Nestorians, formally known as "The Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission" (established in 1886), reinforced this linkage. "Assyrian Christians," which originally meant only "the Christians of geographical Assyria," soon became "Christian Assyrians." The missionary W.A. Wigram, in his post-World War I books, popularized the name and familiarized the world with the tragedy that had befallen these "descendants of Shalmaneser."

Within the community itself, the shift from Suraye to Aturaye (Assyrians) was gradual and contested. Daniel Wolk's research shows that even the Urmia Christians in America continued until after World War I to refer to themselves as Suraye. The first ethno-nationalist organization established in Urmia was a Suryeta organization. Chicago's newspaper Mashkhiddana Suryaya ("Suryaya Herald"), first published in 1915, changed to Mashkhiddana Aturaya only in 1920. Even the nationalist journal Kokhva ("Star"), launched in 1906, carried the motto "The newspaper of the Syriac people" (ruznama d-mellat suryayta) in its banner despite its promotion of the "Assyrian idea."

As Akopian notes, the "Assyrian idea" was seen by many nationalist intellectuals as the only opportunity to achieve national consolidation for a people that had been deprived of statehood for 1,500 years, had no well-defined territory, and existed almost exclusively as religious communities. The name provided a non-ecclesiastical, secular history, a claim to unique mythology and material culture, and a geographic attachment to a concrete territory. The logical conclusion of this process was the renaming of the Church of the East as the "Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East" in 1976.

Because the "Nestorians" had always called themselves Syrians (Suraye), efforts were made to demonstrate that Suraye was simply a shortened form of Ashuraye (Assyrian) and that the two terms were synonymous. According to this theory, the initial letter A of "Assyrian" had been "lost" (tliqta in Syriac), and could be restored. Suraya was therefore written as "[A]suraya," which, pronounced Ashuraya, would also mean Assyrian.

The Semitist Wolfhart Heinrichs, while calling this hypothesis "very ingenious," pointed out a critical problem: as noted above, the Armenian language has always retained the initial A in both Asori ("Syrian") and Asorestantsi ("Assyrian"), and Classical Syriac has always distinguished between Suryaya and Athuraya as two separate terms. Moreover, as Heinrichs emphasized, even if "Syrian" were etymologically derived from "Assyrian," this would not mean that the people and culture of geographic Syria are identical to those of geographic Assyria. The "lost A" hypothesis remains a nationalist claim without scholarly consensus.

While the name "Aramaean" had been the original self-designation before the fifth century, it experienced a revival in the modern period as a counter to the "Assyrian idea." Various intellectuals and organizations, particularly among the West Syriac (Syriac Orthodox) community, have promoted "Aramean" as the only authentic ethnic self-designation that predates all the borrowed names. The Lebanon-based Aramean Democratic Organization, for example, considers "Aramean" to be the sole name capable of uniting all the followers of the Syriac Churches, including Jacobites, Syriac Catholics, Maronites, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Melkites, and others.

In the modern period, the question of naming has become deeply political. The two main Syriac church families, the East Syriac (Assyrian Church of the East) and the West Syriac (Syriac Orthodox Church), each split into traditional and Catholic branches (Chaldean and Syriac Catholic). Protestant missions added further diversity. No single label is accepted by everyone.

For a time, the Syriac Orthodox Church itself used "Assyrian" in its English name ("Assyrian Orthodox Church"), partly to avoid confusion with the Syrian Antiochian (Rum Orthodox) Church. In 1952, the Church officially banned the use of the term "Assyrian." Later, it adopted "Syriac" rather than "Syrian" in English to distinguish itself from the modern nation-state of Syria. In the year 2000, the Church decreed that its official English name should be the "Syriac Orthodox Church," and before the US census of that year, diocesan structures advised parishioners to refer to their ethnicity as "Syriac." Similar terminological developments have taken place in other European languages: in French, "Syriaque" is used for the Christian Arameans, while "Syrien" refers to citizens of Syria.

In Arabic, a clear and long-standing distinction exists between Suri (a citizen of Syria in the geographic sense) and Suryani (an ethnic Syriac Christian), though the term Suryani is often understood by Arabs as a denominational rather than an ethnic designation.

Several varieties of the self-designation remain in active use. Arabic-speaking Jacobites and Syriac Catholics use Suryani. Aramaic-speaking communities from Tur Abdin use Suryoye. And among some Aramaic-speaking East Syrians in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the diaspora, the older form Suraye persists alongside the newer Aturaya.

The spoken language of Syriac Orthodox communities from Tur Abdin, known as Turoyo ("mountainous"), is the closest among modern Aramaic dialects to Classical Syriac. Its speakers also call it suryoyo or surayt ("Syriac"), consciously linking the living vernacular to the inherited identity. Education in both Classical Syriac and the spoken language has been actively pursued in the diaspora, and in the early twenty-first century, a program of Syriac Theology was established at the Catholic Faculty of the University of Salzburg.

In the diaspora communities across Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, and the Americas, cultural organizations and political parties have tried to build a shared secular ethnic identity under different names. The World Council of Arameans (Syriacs), formerly the Syriac Universal Alliance, was created in 1983 and received special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council in 1999. It coordinates the activities of various national associations and federations, treating "Syriac" and "Aramean" as synonymous and interchangeable. Meanwhile, among East Syriac communities, particularly those of Assyrian orientation, a parallel network of organizations promotes the name "Assyrian."

The depth of the naming dispute is perhaps best captured by a memorial postcard from the website bethsuryoyo.com ("House of the Suryoyo"), commemorating the genocide of 1915 (Sayfo), which bears the words: "Assyrian, Syriac, Chaldean, Aramean. United Even in Death. Sayfo 1915." The fact that such a statement needs to be made indicates that unity remains an aspiration rather than a settled reality.

The name "Suryoyo" contains within it nearly two thousand years of identity-making. It began as a Greek word (Syros) that outsiders applied broadly to anyone from the Roman province of Syria. From the fifth century onward, Aramaic-speaking Christians gradually adopted it, replacing their older indigenous name "Aramaean" (Aramaya). The adoption occurred because of the profound influence that Greek language and culture exercised on the Syriac-speaking world during the era of Christianization, and because the borrowed name offered a neutral ground on which formerly distinct groups, Jews and Aramaeans alike, could meet as a single Christian community.

The name carried at least three meanings simultaneously: territorial (belonging to the region of Syria), linguistic-cultural (speaking the Syriac language and participating in its literary tradition), and confessional (identifying with the Miaphysite/West Syrian church). How much weight each meaning carried depended on who was speaking, when, and in what political context.

Writers such as the author of the Cave of Treasures transformed the name into a source of ethnic pride, claiming Syriac as the world's first language and the Syrians as a people innocent of Christ's blood. Others, such as Jacob of Edessa, explored the name's inherent ambiguity, recognizing that both Greek-speakers and Aramaic-speakers from the Syrian provinces could legitimately claim it. Bar Salibi and Michael the Syrian insisted on the Aramaean foundation underlying the "Syrian" label, tracing their lineage to the biblical Aram. In the modern era, the name has fractured into competing labels: Syriac, Assyrian, Aramean, and Chaldean, each carrying distinct political, genealogical, and religious associations. Yet all of them are, at their root, different answers to the same question that Syriac Christians have been working through for over fifteen hundred years: who are the Suryaye, and what holds them together as a people?

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