Abstract
It is usually said that the West Syriac vowel-signs, based on Greek letters, were invented in the eighth century. On close inspection, however, the evidence for this early date is insubstantial. Dated manuscripts with the vowel-signs first appear in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Almost all of them contain the so-called West Syrian masorah, and can be located in the region around Melitene in Byzantine territory. There are good reasons to think that the masorah itself was first published there and then (and not in the monastery of Qarqafta further east as has often been supposed), and that the vowel-signs themselves were introduced as part of this scholarly project.
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