The Mesopotamian Planetary Gods #5a: Northern and Southern Mesopotamia compared

Disclaimer: in this post, I generalize wildly from the limited evidence that is known to me, and I encourage you take everything with a liberally poured amount of salt. I need this as scaffolding for the sources I am trying to present in this series, but the important part are the sources themselves.

Theodore Abū Qurrah¹ “lived in the late eighth and early ninth centuries a.d. […] he was, for a time, the bishop of Ḥarrān. […] He was one of the first Christians to write in Arabic.”² Theodore had been born in Edessa, in northern Mesopotamia, and his bishopric in Ḥarrān³ was located in the same region (which is now in southeastern Turkey). His Arabic-language treatise, On the Existence of God and the True Religion⁴, more particularly its second part, which contains an overview of all the religions Theodore was aware of, thus provides a view of a very particular region, which we can compare and contrast to what previous posts have taught us about the religious milieu of Southern Mesopotamia.

The religious communities he lists – as live options, as it were – are the following:

• Pagans (Ḥanīfiyyah) – we will come back to them in a moment.
• Magi (i.e. Zoroastrians): probably not a great presence in Theodore’s region in particular, the Zoroastrians were still by far the largest non-Abrahamic group under Muslim rule in the first centuries of Islam, and thus could not be neglected in such a list. The description given in this treatise is interesting for some of its translation choices. Zruwan, “Time”, commonly considered to preexist the good creator Hormuzd and the evil creator Ahriman in the Sasanian period, is called “their great god” and explained as “luck/fortune”. The good creator is also called “Hormuzd, their god”; Ahriman is named as “Shayṭān”, ‘Satan’, without any mention of his Persian name. Unusually (as far as I am aware), Zurvan does not give birth himself, but has a wife who is the creators’ mother. This goddess and Hormuzd also have a child together, namely the Sun. Notably, all these beings (except Ahriman perhaps) are called “gods” – many other Arabic sources reserve that title to either Zruwan or Hormuzd (who may simply be called Allāh) and call the rest angels.
• Samaritans: although a tiny group today, in Theodore’s time, they must still have made up a significant part of the population of northern Palestine (with pockets elsewhere). Their short description differs from contemporaneous Judaism in one major respect: “When we leave this world, there is eternal destruction, and there is no resurrection”. (The same position had been held by the Jewish “philosophical school”, as the historian Josephus calls them in the 1^st century CE, of the Sadduceans.)
• Jews: Jews lived throughout most parts of the Muslim-ruled world, including Northern Mesopotamia. Theodore lets their account follow that of the Samaritans to make them dispute it: “Concerning their claim to be the seed of Abraham and Israel, they are liars in this. Rather they are people from the Magi.” Of course the Biblical claim is rather that northerners are descended from, or mixed with Assyrians, not Magi (Zoroastrians), but memory of the Assyrian empire was vague in 8^th-century Mesopotamia. Theodore’s Jews believe that the true heirs of Abraham, unlike the ancestors of the Samaritans, went through the Babylonian exile, and that there will be a resurrection.
• Christians: the Christians in turn criticize the Jews, but the details aren’t terribly important. What is important is that Theodore uses one term for all Nicaean Christians, thus glossing over several sectarian distinctions between the predecessors of modern Greek Orthodoxy (his own camp), Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East: compared to the next three communities he lists, these differences apparently seemed negligible. An interesting usage of Arabic in the account is the following: “God (Allāh) is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one god (ilāh), three hypostases (wujūh).” In Greek, the distinction between God and god lies only in the presence or absence of the definite article, and Aramaic has only one word, alāhā, for both.
• Manichaeans (“who are called zanādiqa”, Sg. zindiq): whereas Manichaeism had been definitively stamped out in the Western Roman Empire centuries earlier, the religion founded by Lord Mani (Mār Mānī, lived ca. 216–274) continued with its hierarchy intact for centuries. The sources documenting the history of Manichaeism under Muslim rule are collected in Reeves, Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism, 2011. As in earlier sources (both Greek and Latin), the Manichaeans claim to be the “true Christians”, but compared to Latin Manichaeism in North Africa, which uses the word “god” sparingly so as not to offend potential converts from catholic Christianity, Theodore’s account again uses it freely: “before the world was created, there were two different gods in two substances”. As in the account of the Magi, the evil one, Darkness, is called Shayṭān. He is the creator of the body and all harmful things, Light creates the soul and everything that is vivifying. We do not hear anything about the very great number of other good and evil gods that come forth from the two principles.
• Marcionites: like the Manichaeans, the Marcionites also claim to possess the “true gospel” (and thus to be the “true Christians”). Once again, the word “god” is used freely: there is one who is jealous and just, the god of Moses. The second is forgiving and benevolent – this is Christ. The third is unjust and evil, namely Shayṭān, ‘Satan’. The historical Marcion of Sinope, a 2^nd-century CE Christian who taught at Rome, seems to have taught the existence of only two gods (the god of the Hebrew Bible and Christ), but the Eusebius’ Church History attributes the doctrine of three gods already to students of his, Syneros and Luc(i)anus. Like Manichaeism and the followers of Bardesanes, Marcionism (ar. Marqiyūniyya) was popular in Edessa at the time of the great West Syrian polemicist Ephrem the Syriam (306–373), and Theodore shows that they all still existed in the region in the 8^th century. Marcionism also spread further east, to Khorasan, and survived into at least the 11^th century.
• (The followers of) Bar Dayṣān (Bardaiṣān, Bardesanes, also Ibn Dayṣān in Arabic; the group is called Dayṣaniyyah in other Arabic texts): Bar Dayṣan of Edessa (154–222 CE) was one of the first Christian intellectuals to write in Syriac. He was an inquisitive mind who had studied Greek, but also had some familiarity with the indigenous learning of Mesopotamia and an interest in the thought of regions further east. The study of his teachings is beset with problems, so I will simply give Theodore’s representation of the beliefs of his later followers: “the gods are five and they are eternal. For of them are not rational, and the fifth is rational. The rational achieved power over the four due to his reason and overpowered them and created the creatures out of them. The four irrational are to be understood as fire, air, water and dust (earth). The rational is the one who created the natures of the world from them with his wisdom.”
• Muslims: this account does not contain anything surprising.

Preliminary conclusion

Of the religions present in Theodore Abū Qurrah’s native Northern Mesopotamia, one (paganism) is entirely native, the others came in at different periods:

• Zoroastrianism and Judaism⁵ already before the conquests of Alexander “the Great” (in the late 4^th century BCE), under the Persian Empire (and earlier).
• “Christianity” in the 1^st century CE, although the groups existing at that time only became Christians in Theodore’s sense, i.e. believers in the Nicaean Creed, through the activities of men like Ephrem the Syrian who championed this articulation of Christianity.
• If we focus on Edessa specifically, we can distinguish (with some artificality) four groups which successively introduced their developed doctrinal systems to the steadily growing group of people who considered themselves “Christians”. Firstly, Marcionism from Rome (mid-2^nd century), proto-Orthodoxy (called Palutianism in Edessa) around the same time but at first with little force, then Dayṣaniyyah emanating from the city itself (late 2^nd century), and later (mid-3^rd century) Manichaeism. The last existed at a greater distance from other Christian groups due to its many idiosyncracies, but still drew on the same pool of potential converts.
• Under Roman rule, and after Constantine’s conversion, Christians in Theodore’s sense became more and more powerful; of the groups that did not lay claim to Christian identity, Jews were, as far as I understand, comparatively the least mistreated.
• Finally, under Muslim rule, the old hierarchies were upset, and for a few centuries all the groups of the list had a relatively stable existence, except that they slowly lost followers to Islam.

What is particularly interesting to me is how freely the word “god” (ilāh) is used, reflecting a Aramaic-speaking culture where alāhā no longer refers primarily to pagan gods, but also has not become hegemonically tied to the Abrahamic monotheistic god. The unusual variety of systems – with powerful or ontologically foundational entities that are rational or irrational, created or uncreated, good or evil, worshiped or demonized – led to a breadth of meaning in words shared between groups. Texts like these could help to decenter Christian perspectives from the historiography of polytheism and of “dualism” (a term which is used to encompass, since early Islamicate times, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Dayṣaniyyah and Marcionism, among others).

Theodore Abū Qurrah’s account of paganism

Like Muhammad and Zardusht for Muslims and Magi, Theodore assigns a prophet to the pagans, too: he is Hermes the Wise. Of course this is not simply the Greek god Hermes, indeed no god at all, but a human prophet. I will discuss his intellectual genealogy in the next post.

The religion Theodore attributes to the pagans, and to the teaching of Hermes, is the following: “They thought that one should worship the seven stars, the sun and moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus” – Theodore uses the ordinary Arabic words here (more on this issue, again, in the next post) – “as well as the twelve zodiacal signs, because they are the ones who created this creation and rule it and who confer fortune and happiness in the world, and evil and misfortune. Their prophet in this is Hermes the Wise.”

A short enough statement, yet significant. For one thing, it tells us that, for some pagans at least, the story of the so-called Epic of Creation, the Enuma Elish, which had described the creation of the world by Marduk the god of Babylon (or by Aššur the god of Assyria in the Northern Mesopotamian version) had been entirely forgotten. The original text, in Akkadian language and written in cuneiform, had of course not been availble for about eight centuries by Theodore’s time. Yet it had been the distant origin, or one of the origins, of Plato’s idea of the demiurge, the creator god, and had been connected with this philosophical Greek idea by the great Babylonian Greek-language writer, Berossus (who wrote around 300 BCE). Whereas Greek philosophy tended to combine the idea of the divinity of the planets (one of them called Zeus=Jupiter) with that of a creator (identical to or existing outside the cosmos), also often identified as Zeus, in Mesopotamia, the planetary framework seems to have entirely displaced the creation account. Bel, king of the gods, was definitively the planet Jupiter, and not the creator of all planets. For Theodore’s pagans, at least, such a creator was not needed, or rather, the planets and zodiac signs in concert were the creators.

Comparing Abū Qurrah’s list to the evidence from Southern Mesopotamia

Comparing what we can glean from Theodore from what I wrote about in post #4a (and, if I manage to go back and write them them, in posts #3 and #4b), we can see clearly that Northern Mesopotamia (Assyria), despite what simplistic East/West dichotomies would suggest, had a considerably different religious culture in late antiquity (and into the Islamic period) than the South (Babylonia). First of all, the difference between centuries of Roman rule in the North and first Parthian, then Sasanian rule in the South means that Zoroastrianism had a much more sustained influence in the latter, Christianity in the former. Not that Christianity wasn’t growing in the Sasanian Empire, too (until the Islamic conquests, at least); in fact, the Church of the East, whose centre was in Southern Mesopotamia, expanded massively into Asia in this period (leading, e.g., to the erection of the so-called “Nestorian stele” in China in the 8^th century CE). But from the evidence of the incantation bowls, at least, it seems that the most influential religion in the South was not Christianity or Zoroastrianism, but Judaism. Marcionism and the teaching of Bar Dayṣān, to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, did not have as great an influence as in the North, either. Instead, several new groups which arose in Babylonia, and mostly remained limited to the region, absorbed such influences and turned them to their own ends. The breakaway success, so to speak, among these groups was Manichaeism, which as we saw was an abiding presence in the North as well. Within the South, Mandaeism – which arose some two centuries after Manichaeism – was the most prominent.

More significant than a mere enumeration of groups, however, is the question of dominant discourses. The fact is that a Manichaean who reads and writes Syriac/Aramaic and Persian, like Mani himself, has a very different intellectual horizon than one who has a Greek education, but doesn’t know any Persian, even if they believe the same things.

The possibility of judging these matters is hampered by the nature of the sources, but the figure of Hermes (whom I will discuss in much greater detail in #6) is a first clue. In Ḥarrān, in line with Greco-Roman, originally Egyptian ideas, he is the originator of religious doctrines, particularly concerning celestial matters. In the incantation bowls (see part #4a), he is little more than a name, lost in a sea of decidedly un-Hellenic ideas and words. It seems, therefore, that Hellenization under Seleucid rule (in the Hellenistic period) was either very limited in the South, or was of a nature that did not create lasting institutional memory. It seems that Hellenization under Roman rule was much more effective, and Rome simply did not rule Babylonia. (Okay, Trajan did—for three years.) It’s not that the North was continually under firm Roman control, but the Romanized cities stayed economically and culturally connected in spite of shifting borders.

Accordingly, although the loss of cuneiform literature meant that the traditional intellectual context for Mesopotamian paganism broke away both in Babylonia and in Assyria, pagans in the North could reorient their local traditions around pagan Greek learning, whereas the South seems to have experienced much more rapid change and loss of historical memory. Sasanian Zoroastrianism did not have much room for non-Iranian deities; Manichaeism had its own unique set of divine beings; Judaism was open to new demons to exorcize, but not to new gods; and so on for the other groups.

In essence, then 6^th-century CE Roman historian Agathias seems to have been quite correct when he wrote⁷ that “[i]n ancient times they” – the Persians and their subjects – “worshipped Zeus and Cronos and all the familiar gods acknowledged by pagans, except that they did not use the same names. They called Zeus Bel, say, and Heracles Sandes, and Aphrodite Anaitis, and the rest by other names, as is somewhere recorded by Berossus the Babylonian and Athenocles and Simacus, who wrote the ancient history of the Assyrians and Medes. But now they resemble in most respects the so-called Manichaeans, insofar as they hold that the first principles are two, one good, the source of all that is best in creation, the other the opposite in both respects. They give them barbarian names in their own language. The good spirit or creator they call Hormisdates, and Arimanes is the name of the bad, destructive one.”

It would make more sense, historically speaking, to say that the Manichaeans resembled the Zoroastrians, but for a Roman audience, the former were much more familiar. Other details are wonky, too: Sandes (also Sandas, Sandan) was an indigenous god of Anatolia (which had once been under the rule of the pre-Hellenistic Persian Achaemenids, but never under that of the post-Hellenistic Persian Sasanians), and Anaitis (Anahit) was precisely a Zoroastrian deity, who is venerated to this day.

Yet in substance, Agathias is correct: paganism in the classical form, which was fundamentally recognizable between Babylonians, Greeks and so man others in spite of a myriad minor and major differences, had disappeared from both empires, Christian Rome and Zoroastrian Persia. Not that all the beliefs and practices had been eradicated. But the civic institutions, shared by entire communities, were a thing of the past, and so, increasingly, was a transregional pagan discourse which related local practices to a wider culture⁸. In part #6, I will discuss the major exception, a town at the edge of the Roman sphere of influence. This was the place where Theodore encountered pagans who claimed Hermes for their prophet: Ḥarrān, also known as Hellenopolis, “city of pagans”.

Footnotes

(1)  Arabic تاوضروس أبو قرة‎ Thawdhūrus Abū Qurrah, Greek Θεόδωρος Ἀβουκάρας Theódо̄ros Aboukáras, Syriac ܬܐܘܕܘܪܘܣ ܐܒܘ ܩܘܪܪܗ Theōdōrōs Abū Qurrah. Quide adequately, only Syriac can accommodate the sounds of both the Greek personal name and the Arabic epithet (which means “Father of Refreshment”).

(2)   John C. Lamoreaux, The Biography of Theodore Abū Qurra Revisited, p. 25.

(3)   ar. حرّان Ḥarrān, gr. Κάρραι Kárrhai, Latin Carrhae, syr. ܚܪܢ, Ḥarran, all from Akkadian Ḫarrānu, ‘road, path’. The ancient name survived as long as the city remained inhabited, that is until the Mongol invasions of Syria in the 13^th century. However, Greek-speaking Christians in late antiquity also called it Ἑλληνόπολις Hellēnópolis, ‘city of pagans’.

(4)   An older German translation has been digitized: Graf, Des Theodor Abu Kurra Traktat über den Schöpfer und die wahre Religion, 1913. An English translation also exists: Lamoreaux, Theodore Abu Qurrah, 2006.

(5)   I use Judaism somewhat anachronistically here. There is, I read (can’t recall where right now, but perhaps somewhere in Zsengellér, Samaria, Samarians, Samaritans. Studies on Bible, History and Linguistics, 2011), no clear evidence of a real split between Judaism and Samaritanism before the 1^st century CE, so that one might speak of “Samaritanism-Judaism” or something like that, except that those who were in Mesopotamia in this time are precisely those claimed as ancestors by Theodore’s Jews, in contradistinction to the Samaritans. It’s complicated.

(6)   “Prophet” translates ar. nabī. The modern use of “prophet” for the founder of a religion – rather than a diviner or temple-priest – seems to derive from this Islamic term, rather than Christianity of classical paganism. In Greco-Roman terms, the closest equivalent is probably nomothete (lawgiver), which is what both pagan and Jewish Greek-language writers called Moses.

(7)   Cited from de Jong, Traditions of the Magi. Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature, 1996, p. 246 – a fantastic book.

(8)   However, the fragments of Damascius’ Life of Isidore are a powerful testament to the existence of such a transregional discourse, carried by networks extending through the empire, into the middle of the 6^th century CE.