Siriaco letterario ed ellenismo tardoantico

The development of Syriac culture in the territory of Edessa cannot be described in terms of contrast and resistance between Greek culture and local languages. Authoritative opposing opinions from distinguished scholars, who addressed this topic with diametrically opposed positions as early as the second half of the 20th century, are revisited here: rather than constituting a contrasting element to Syriac, Hellenism served as the fertile ground in which the Μrst literary works in Syriac took root. Linguistic interaction in the Late Antique Near East was a phenomenon far more complex than could be described in terms of opposition, as evidenced by a group of epigraphic documents that cannot be easily categorized and are here deΜned as “hybrid”.