Scribes in the Syrian city of Antioch copied hymns onto animal skins around 120 a.d. while Roman legions fortified outposts along the Euphrates River. Singers gathered in unlit basements and courtyard houses to recite the lyrics. They stood flat on the earth and stretched their arms completely outward.
This physical stance mirrored the shape of a wooden execution rack. Painters in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla captured this exact posture on plaster walls. They depicted human figures with palms turned upward to mimic a man suspended on timber beams. The Syrian writers adopted this specific body geometry to represent the execution of their leader. A human wingspan measuring five to six feet across turned a worshiper into a living model of a Roman cross.
The short hymn explicitly identifies these outstretched arms as a mechanical sign of his death. The singer verbally transforms into an upright timber trunk. The text equates the width of a human chest with the horizontal bar that Roman soldiers used for capital punishment. The anonymous author discards complex rituals to focus entirely on the raw physics of a human body forming a wooden structure.
A human body stretched wide becomes the upright tree of execution.
The lyric abruptly halts after just three short lines. It leaves the singer locked in that rigid horizontal pose. Travelers eventually carried these Syriac verses southward into Egypt. The manuscripts lay buried under 15 feet of dry dirt for 18 centuries before diggers pulled them back to the surface. The physical gesture outlasted the original authors by nearly two millennia.