A State of Mixture by Payne Richard E

Author:Payne, Richard E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520286191
Publisher: University of California Press

A POTENT PAST

The hagiographers of Karka and Arbela created new histories of noble lineage that trace northern Mesopotamian houses from authoritative ancient figures. Their accounts were artifacts of the late Sasanian period that reshaped oral tales circulating in the region concerning ancient kings on the basis of a historiographical tradition common to Christians on both sides of Mesopotamia’s political frontiers. To account for the appearance of Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE) and Esarhaddon (r. 681–669 BCE) in these texts, scholars have argued that orally transmitted, folkloric memories of the Assyrians continued to be associated with particular sites, such as Assur, Nineveh, Arbela, and the shrine of Mar Qardagh at Melqi, more than a millennium after the collapse of the Neo-Assyrian dynasty.93 The Neo-Assyrian kings loomed large in a landscape that had once formed the heart of their empire, long after its collapse.94 Even in the absence of a local historiographical tradition, these kings and their accomplishments were widely known and associated with the region’s tells and ruins. Nevertheless, East Syrian hagiographers introduced new sources for ancient Mesopotamian history into a culture of tale telling already alert to the deeds of ancient kings. In addition to the Hebrew Bible’s account of Nimrod, the History of Karka and the History of Mar Qardagh depend on a text that had become available to Syriac-writing communities just before they were composed: the Chronicle of Eusebius, originally written in Greek but surviving only in Armenian.95 According to the eleventh-century historiographer Elias of Nisibis, a certain Simeon Barqaya made a translation of Eusebius’s Chronicle at Karka during the reign of Husraw II, that is, roughly contemporaneously with the writing of the History of Karka.96 Unlike other Christian works of history in late antiquity, the Chronicle treats the ancient political history of the Near East in detail on the basis of Hellenistic histories in an effort to demonstrate the accuracy of the Hebrew Bible’s historical narratives. The work of Eusebius interested northern Mesopotamian writers as a repository of the kind of ancient historical knowledge that was so important in Iranian political culture. East Syrian and Armenian writers embraced it as a source for the past of their regions and their aristocratic patrons.

The Chronicle of Eusebius enabled hagiographers to refashion the history of northern Mesopotamia in one potent way. The authors of the History of Karka and the History of Mar Qardagh focused on only one of the various narratives of ancient Mesopotamian kings in this work: the account of Nimrod’s relationship to the Assyrians. In keeping with his aim of demonstrating the historicity of biblical figures, Eusebius had presented Nimrod as the founder of the Assyrian royal capital, Nineveh, which Asshur and later Ninus, the son of Belos, restored.97 The History of Karka develops this account into an identification of Nimrod with Ninus, the son of Belos, whom Hellenistic historiographers had considered the founder of the Assyrian dynasty.98 The History of Mar Qardagh, in turn, presents its namesake saint as the descendant of Nimrod and Sennacherib, now both equally Assyrian, in a further evolution of the account of Eusebius.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.