[8] Egeria, in the account of her pilgrimage to Palestine at the end of the 4th century, refers to Syriac,[9] which was probably what is now Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

[10] The term syrica Hierosolymitana was introduced by Johann David Michaelis based on the appearance of the Arabic name of Jerusalem, al-Quds,[b] in the colophon of a Gospel lectionary of 1030 AD (today Vat.

[26] They often transmit rare texts lost in the Greek transmission (e.g. the Transitus Mariae;[27][28][29] the hitherto unknown martyrdom of Patriklos of Caesarea, one of the eleven followers of Pamphilus of Caesarea;[29][30] and a missing quire of Codex Climaci Rescriptus[29][31][32]), or offer valuable readings for the textual criticism of the Septuagint.

[33] Inscriptions have been found in Palestine at ʿEn Suweinit,[34] near ʿAbūd,[35] at ʿUmm er-Rūs,[36] in the Church of Saint Anne in Jerusalem,[37] in the vicinity of Hippos at Uyun el-Umm[38] in Galilee, and at Khirbet Qastra near Haifa.

[39] In the Transjordan, inscriptions have been found on Mount Nebo (ʿAyūn Mūsa), in the vicinity of Amman (Khayyān el-Mushrif)[17] and on tombstones in Khirbet es-Samra.

[41] The parchment manuscript fragments are Biblical (mostly in the form of lectionaries), Patristic, theological (e.g. the catecheses by Cyril of Jerusalem and homilies by John Chrysostom), hagiographic (mostly martyrs' lives) or apocryphal (e.g., the Transitus Mariae).

In comparison with its counterparts, therefore, the CPA corpus represents an older, more intact example of Western Aramaic from when the dialects were still living, spoken languages.