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 five answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 7 November 2026)
`etcbc-syriac`	texts	nc	wired · manual	31 docs / 18,132 passages
`hmml-reading-room`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	18,892 docs / 11,196 passages
`peshitta`	texts	nc	wired · manual	65 docs / 31,341 passages
`syriac-corpus`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	632 docs / 134,726 passages
`wiktionary-syc`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	3,911 entries

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): syc 12,851 · gez 6,945 · ara-Syrc 2,595 · ara 797 · amh 343.

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 desk 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 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.