Syrians (Arabic: سوريون; Syriac: ܣܘܪܝܝܢ) are the native inhabitants of Syria, most of whom have Arabic in its Levantine dialect as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of Syria is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians (particularly the Assyrians and Syriac-Arameans) retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.
The national name "Syrian" was originally an Indo-European corruption of Assyrian and applied to Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, however by antiquity it was used to denote the inhabitants of the Levant. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Arab identity gradually became dominant among many Syrians, and the ethnonym "Syrian" was used mainly by Christians in Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia who spoke Syriac. In the 19th century, the name "Syrian" was revived amongst the Arabic speakers of the Levant. Following the establishment of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, the name "Syrian" began to spread amongst its Arabic speaking inhabitants. The term gained more importance during the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, becoming the accepted national name for the Arabic speakers of the Syrian Republic.
Most Arabic-speaking Syrians identify as Arabs and are described as such by virtue of their modern-day language and bonds to Arab culture and history. In terms of genetics, they are a blend of the various Semitic-speaking groups indigenous to the region. There is no contradiction between being an Arab and a Syrian since the Syrian Arab identity is multi-layered and being Syrian complements being Arab. In addition to denoting Syrian Arabs, the term "Syrian" also refers to all Syrian citizens, regardless of their ethnic background. In 2018, Syria had an estimated population of 19.5 million, which includes, aside from the aforementioned majority, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians and others.
Even before the Syrian Civil War, there was a large Syrian diaspora that had emigrated to North America (United States and Canada), European Union member states (including Sweden, France, and Germany), South America (mainly in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile), the West Indies, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Six million refugees of the Syrian Civil War also live outside Syria now, mostly in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Germany as well as Sweden.
Various sources indicate that the name Syria itself is derived from Luwian term "Sura/i", and the derivative ancient Greek name: Σύριοι, Sýrioi, or Σύροι, Sýroi, both of which originally derived from the Akkadian word Aššūrāyu (Assyria) in northern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. However, during the Seleucid Empire, this term was also applied to The Levant, and henceforth the Greeks applied the term without distinction between the Assyrians of north Mesopotamia and Arameans of the Levant.
Applications of the name in antiquity
The Greeks used the terms "Syrian" and "Assyrian" interchangeably to indicate the indigenous Arameans, Assyrians and other inhabitants of the Levant and Mesopotamia, Herodotus considered "Syria" west of the Euphrates. Starting from the 2nd century BC onwards, ancient writers referred to the ruler of the Seleucid Empire as the King of Syria or King of the Syrians. The Seleucids designated the districts of Seleucis and Coele-Syria explicitly as Syria and ruled the Syrians as indigenous populations residing west of the Euphrates (Aramea) in contrast to Assyrians who had their native homeland in Mesopotamia east of the Euphrates. However, the interchangeability between Assyrians and Syrians persisted during the Hellenistic period.
In one instance, the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt applied the term "Syrian Village" as the name of a settlement in Fayoum. The Ptolemies referred to all peoples originating from Modern Syria and Palestine as Syrian.
The term Syrian was imposed upon Arameans of modern Levant by the Romans. Pompey created the province of Syria, which included modern-day Lebanon and Syria west of the Euphrates, framing the province as a regional social category with civic implications. In Roman usage, the term could refer narrowly to people of Aramean descent, but it was also applied more broadly to all inhabitants of the province, among them descendants of Greek and Italian settlers. Authors varied in their descriptions: Plutarch described the indigenous people of this newly created Roman province as "Syrians", so did Strabo, who observed that Syrians resided west of the Euphrates in Roman Syria, and he explicitly mentions that those Syrians are the Arameans, whom he calls Aramaei, indicating an extant ethnicity. Posidonius noted that the people called Syrians by the Greeks refer to themselves as Arameans. Tacitus also portrayed Syrians as a distinct ethnic group or race.
In The Jewish War, Josephus, a Hebrew historian native to the Levant, mentioned the Syrians as the non-Hebrew, non-Greek indigenous inhabitants of Syria.
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.
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.