Ritter says...

Ritter says, “The feeling of alienation and the yearning after a higher revelation are characteristics of the last centuries of the ancient world; this yearning was, in the first place, but an expression of consciousness of the decline of the classical nations and their cultures, the presentiment of the approach of a new era, and it called into life not only Christianity but also before it pagan and Jewish Alexandrianism and other related developments.”[^1] No longer finding Greece a cordial home for philosophy, the philosophers went over to Egypt and Rome, carrying their doctrines with them.

They delivered courses of lectures which were attended with great zeal and enthu­siasm by the populace. But the venture did not succeed so well in Rome as it did in Alexandria. In Rome philosophy could lend its weight to poetry, oratory, jurisprudence, and some topics of conversation, but it was in Alex­andria that it produced men who gave it originality, vigour, and drive.

Alex­andria was not simply a centre of Greek culture and scholarship, but also and more significantly a meeting‑place for Greek and Eastern thought. It took a cosmopolitan character and showed a marked leaning towards Oriental thought. The result of this interpretation of Greek and Semitic cultures was the syn­thetic civilization known as Hellenism in contradistinction to the Hellenic or purely Greek civilization.

Hellenism rose to supremacy not only in Alexandria and Syria but throughout Western Asia. It would be incorrect to identify the present geographical boundaries of Syria with its old ones. In Roman days, at the beginning of the Christian era Syria denoted the country west of the Euphrates and north of the Arabian Desert, including Palestine and Palmyra and extending north to the Taurus. The usual language of Syria was Aramaic, a language akin to Hebrew.

The Hebrew word “Aram” is rendered as “Syria” and originally the words Aramaean and Syrian were synonymous. After the Hellenization of the country, the Greek language was used by the ruling class and the officials with very little influence on the masses who continued using their dialect.

This state of affairs con­tinued till the first/seventh century when after the Muslim conquest Syriac gradually gave way vernacularly and to some extent liturgically to Arabic, though it had great influence on the vocabulary, pronunciation, and even the grammatical forms of Arabic which supplanted it.