The Peshitta Bible, written in the Aramaic variety known as Syriac, is the standard and authoritative text of the Bible for several Christian communities both in the Middle East and the southwest coast of India. These are: The Syriac Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Maronite Church, the Chaldean Church, the Syriac Catholic Church and their Malayalee offshoots of Kerala. The Peshitta for these communities is what the King James Bible is for the English-speaking world. Once, the influence of the Peshitta extended East to China, Tibet, Turkmenistan, and India with a vast geographical area that surpassed that of the church in the West. Throughout their long history of almost two thousand years, these Eastern Christians lived under the shadow of empires and endured a long and turbulent history. Their Bible, the Peshitta, endured with them and survived to preserve for us an ancient Biblical legacy with distinctive Semitic features and unique Aramaic readings that help us better underset the transmission history of the Scriptures. Today, any respected modern Bible in English or any other language frequently cites the Peshitta as an ancient authority.