Syriac — The Syriacist

The Syriacist — the Peshitta and the estrangela bookshelf.

The Syriac language desk: the ETCBC Peshitta and the Digital Syriac Corpus, riding beside the biblical hat by design.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these two answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): syc 697.

The desk’s instruments

• The Syriac language desk: the ETCBC Peshitta (Leiden VTS / Codex Ambrosianus, by book node) and the Digital Syriac Corpus — a millennium of Syriac beside the biblical hat.
• Alignment works: ot and psalms carry the Peshitta as the Syriac leg (urn:nabu:peshitta:<siglum>).

Working the syriac desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable syriac               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync syriac                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis syriac          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis syriac                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis syriac   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu align "GEN 1.1"                  # the Peshitta as one leg of the Old Testament hub
nabu align "PSA 22.1"                 # the Peshitta psalter, Masoretic-numbered and remapped
nabu show urn:nabu:peshitta:gn        # a Peshitta book document
nabu cognates ot --langs syriac,hbo   # Syriac against Hebrew, same-root verses

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “ܡܠܟܘܬܐ in the Syriac corpus?” → nabu_search ܡܠܟܘܬܐ (lang: syc) — The Peshitta Mark (“a kingdom divided against itself…”) beside homiletic prose from the Digital Syriac Corpus — vocalized and unvocalized spellings fold together.

Terminal setup

• Syriac (estrangela) is RTL — the same terminal requirement as Hebrew: the iTerm2 ≥ 3.6.0 RTL toggle on (Terminal.app cannot). display.md names no dedicated Syriac font; use a Unicode font with Syriac coverage in the fallback cascade (Noto Sans Mono is the general recommendation).

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.