Irfan Shahîd - Byzantium and The Arabs in The Sixth Century

BYZANTIUM
AND THE
ARABS IN
THE SIXTH
CENTURY
Volume 1 | Part 2
IRFAN SHAHD
BYZANTIUM AND THE ARABS
IN THE
SIXTH CENTURY
The two Arab martyrs and saints Cosmas and Damian, already crowned, are presented to Christ
by Saints Peter and Paul. Mosaic from the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome
(photo : Alinari/Art Resource, NY).
IN THE
SIXTH CENTURY
IRFAN SHAHID
Volume I
Part 2: Ecclesiastical History
DUMBARTON OAKS RESEARCH LIBRARY AND COLLECTION
Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 by Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congrm Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shahid, Irfan, 1926-
Byzancium and the Arabs in the sixth century I lrfan Shahid.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. l, pc. 1. Political and military history. pc.
2. Ecclesiastical history.
ISBN 0-88402-214-5
1. Arabs-History-To 622. 2. Byzantine Empire-Hiscory-527-1081. 3. Middle
Ease-History-To 622. 4. Ghassan-Relacions-Byzantine Empire. 5. Byzantine
Empire-Relacions-Ghassan . 6. Ghassanids-Hiscory. 7. Monophysices-Middle
Ease-History . 8. Christianity-Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Tide.
DS62.25 .S515 1994
956-dc20 93-33719
CIP
IN MEMORIAM
ALBERT HOURANI
1915-1993
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Contents
PART TWO: ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
IX
The Reign of Anastasius
Within the Empire
Outside the Limes
Appendix: "The Camp of Anasartha": A Cautionary Note
X
The Reign of Justin I
Within the Empire
Outside the Limes
Appendix: The Four Hundred Virgins
XI
The Reign of Justinian
Introduction
A
The First Phase (527-536)
Introduction
Early Ghassanid-Imperial Contacts: Justinian and Theodora
The Ghassanid Episcopate
The Monophysite Confessions of Faith
B
The Second Phase (536-553)
Introduction
Arethas and Ephraim
Arethas and the Consecrations of 542/43: Jacob and Theodore
694
702
712
717
726
732
734
735
736
740
741
744
746
755
Vlll Contents
IV The Trio: Arethas, Jacob, and Theodore 771
V The Last Decade, 543-553 774
VI Appendix: Sergius, Bishop of l:Iirta 775
C
The Third Phase (553-565)
I Introduction 777
II The Fifties 778
III The Sixties 780
IV The Letter of Arethas to Jacob Baradaeus 782
V Bishop Theodore and Patriarch Paul 788
XII
The Reign of Justin II
A
I Introduction 793
II Constantinople and the Monophysites 794
III The Patriarchate of Paul: lnter-Monophysite Dissension 796
IV The Ghassiinids and Tritheism 805
V The Subscriptions of the Archimandrites of Arabia 824
VI The Monastery and the Church of the Arabs 838
VII Antiochus of Arabia 843
VIII Abu Karib and Theodore: Codex Syriacus DLXXXV, Theology, 845
British Museum.
IX Theodore, the Arab Bishop of the Limitrophe, ca. 540-570 850
B
I Introduction: The Accession of Mungir, 569 860
II Mungir: gloriosus, Christophi/os, patricius 862
III The Apostasy of Patriarch Paul, 5 71- 5 7 5 865
IV The Ghassiinid Episcopate 869
V The Schism within the Patriarchate of Antioch: Paulites versus 876
Jacobites, 575-578
VI Appendix: The Episcopate of the Golan 892
XIII
The Reign of Tiberius
I Introduction 894
II The Biennium of 578-580 896
III The Conference of Constantinople: 2 March 580 900
Contents IX
IV The Sequel to the Conference 908
V The Biennium of 580/81: The Anticlimax
910
XIV
The Reign of Maurice
I Introduction 922
II The Chalcedonian Attempt to Convert the Ghassanids 922
III The Role of the Ghassanids in Inter-Monophysite Controversies: 925
Damian of Alexandria and Peter of Callinicum
IV Pope Gregory and the Provincia Arabia: The Ghassanid Profile 935
xv
The Reign of Phocas
I The Return of Mungir from Sicily 939
II Ghassanid Monophysitism during the Reign 939
XVI
The Reign of Heraclius
I Introduction 942
II The Arab Foederati in a Heraclian Victory Bulletin 944
III The Translation of the Relics of St. Anastasius the Persian 945
IV The Ghassanid Defeat in Oriens, Easter Sunday, 634 947
XVII
The Arab Foederati and the Christian Saints
I The Arabs and St. Sergius 949
II Two Arab Saints: Cosmas and Damian 963
III St. Simeon the Younger and St. Julian 965
XVIII
Arab Christianity in Sinai
I The Peninsula 968
II The Twin Cities: Pharao and Ra:ithou 969
III The Pastoralists of Sinai: The Saracens 972
IV Procopius and Eutychius on Mount Sinai 974
V The Ghassanid Profile 981
VI Theodore of Pharao 983
VII The Image 984
VIII The Sinai Peninsula and Archaeology 986
X Contents
EPILOGUE
The Arab and the German Foederati:
Monophysitism and Arianism
I Introduction
II Theodoric and Clovis
III Jabala
IV Conclusion
Addenda et Corrigenda
Ecclesiastical Lists
Bibliography
Maps
Index
990
991
993
994
996
998
1002
1020
1035
PART TWO
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
Introduction
T
he chapters that constitute Part Two on ecclesiastical history present the
role of the Arab foederati in the history of the Byzantine church in Oriens
in the reigns of the emperors of the sixth century and in those of Phocas and
Heraclius in the seventh. This century and a half may be divided into three
periods as far as Arab-Byzantine ecclesiastical relations are concerned.
1. The first period is represented by the reign of Anastasius, especially
the second decade of the century when Anastasius became openly Monophysite
and with him the Ghassiinids. Federate-imperial relations were at their best
since lord and vassal belonged to the same doctrinal confession.
2. The second or middle period opens with the accession of a Chalcedon-
ian emperor, Justin I, in 518 and the beginning of a sharp reversal in imperial
ecclesiastical policy. This middle period is characterized by tensions that
strained the Arab-Byzantine relationship throughout the reign of Justin I,
Justinian, Justin II, and Tiberius, until it led to a bloody encounter with the
central government in 581 and the suspension of the Ghassanid phylarchate
for five years. The loyalty of the Ghassiinids to the Monophysite confession
and their refusal to convert to Dyophysitism lie at the root of these tensions.
3. The third period opens in 587, when the Ghassiinid phylarchate was
restored during the reign of Maurice, the same emperor who had exiled the
Ghassiinid king, MurnJir, to Sicily. A modus vivendi between the two parties
was worked out and endured throughout the reign until the death of Maurice
in 602. It also continued into the last two reigns of the proto-Byzantine
period, those of Phocas and Heraclius, with a definite improvement in rela-
tions, especially during the reign of Heraclius.
This diachronous treatment of Arab-Byzantine ecclesiastical relations is
followed by a number of topical studies that treat some saints with whom the
Arabs had a special relationship, such as Sergius, Cosmas and Damian, and
Julian of Emesa. The last chapter treats Arab Christianity in the Sinai Penin-
sula, while the Epilogue brings together the Arab foederati of the East and the
German foederati of the West as the adherents of non-orthodox Christian con-
fessions, namely, Monophysitism and Arianism. The comparative context in
which these two federate groups are discussed is consonant with one dimen-
692 INTRODUCTION
sion of the history of the Arab federates, their role as the Germans of the East, 1
and the comparison is illuminating .
In addition to recording the history of the Ghassanid involvement in and
contribution to the Monophysite movement, this volume reveals other aspects
of Ghassanid life and history that have been obscure. Among other things,
these protectors of the Monophysite confession emerge as sedentaries and
builders of churches and monasteries . BASIC II will discuss their structures
and other aspects of their cultural life in detail.
1 See the introductions
to BAFOC, 8-11, and BASIC 1.1, xxix; and below, 737.
IX
The Reign of Anastasius (491-518)
T
he early period coincides with the reign of Anastasius, the crucial reign
for the fortunes of Monophysitism and the ecclesiastical history of the
Christian Orient throughout the sixth century, since it witnessed the triumph
of that movement when the emperor himself in the last years of his reign
became openly Monophysite. Brief as that period was, it proved sufficiently
important to set the stage for the tensions 1 and disputes of the entire century
between the Monophysites of the Pars Orientalis and the central Dyophysite
government in Constantinople, after the death of Anastasius in 518.
How the extraordinary happened, and the autokrator was won over to
Monophysitism, has been explained by ecclesiastical historians. That move-
ment was lucky enough to be guided by two powerful and influential theo-
logians. One was Philoxenus, a Persian firebrand, who for the long period of
his episcopate over Hierapolis (485-518) worked fervently and incessantly for
the triumph of the movement . The other was Severus, a Greek from Sozopolis
in Pisidia, ascetic, dedicated, and administratively energetic. The combined
efforts of the two, one working in Constantinople and the other in Syria,
finally prevailed upon Emperor Anastasius to move toward the Monophysite
position. The emperor was already inclined to it, and it was alleged that he
was the son of an Arian mother and the nephew of a Manichaean uncle. So it
was not very hard for the two powerful ecclesiastics to effect his conversion,
and bring about the deposition of the three Chalcedonian patriarchs of Con-
stantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and the appointment of others who were
Monophysites, including Severus himself to the see of Antioch . 2
This was the ecclesiastical scene in the second decade of the sixth cen-
tury, and it is not difficult to see how this ecclesiastical revolution affected the
Arab foederati, especially the Ghassanids in Oriens, who, too, became Mono-
physite and ardent ones at that, during this reign.
This chapter will, therefore, treat the efforts of the Monophysites to
influence the Arabs and draw them into their orbit . It will discuss these
1 Especially during the reigns of Justin II, Tiberius, and Maurice.
2 For this, see W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement
(Cambridge, 1972),
213-20 .
694 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
efforts first within the empire, with the Ghassanids and the Kindites, and
then outside the empire in l:lira and in South Arabia. It is in fact the story of
the Monophysite mission to the Arabs in the reign of Anastasius. ~
I. WITHIN THE EMPIRE
The reign of Anastasius witnessed the influx of new federate blood into
Oriens, represented by the Ghassanids and the Kindites, which thus made the
federate structure in that diocese even more complex. In addition to the old
federates of the fourth and fifth centuries, the Taniikhids and the Sali}:iids
respectively, Oriens now had two new powerful groups that dominated Arab-
Byzantine relations.
The doctrinal persuasion of these various federate groups in Oriens in the
reign of Anastasius as a result of the change of Anastasius' doctrinal stance to
Monophysitism is not clear. The Taniikhids and the Sali}:iids were Orthodox,
but how they were affected by the ecclesiastical policy of Anastasius is not
known. There is absolutely nothing in the sources for the reign which could
help answer this question. As to the two newcomers, Ghassan and Kinda,
certainty about confessional color can be predicated of the former, not of the
latter. But there are at least echoes in the sources which help the process of
reconstructing the religious history of these two federate groups in the reign
of Anastasius.
The Ghassanids
The conversion of Ghassan to Christianity as part of its settlement within
the limes on Roman territory is mentioned by Ya'qubi for the period antedat-
ing 502 when they had not yet toppled the Sali}:iids as the dominant Arab
federate group in the service of Byzantium . 4 The presumption is that they
were then Chalcedonians,5 especially as Anastasius was then in the first decade
of his reign. Although he was personally inclined toward Monophysitism, he
was interested in good relations with Rome and in restoring religious unity,
and had not yet championed the Monophysite cause openly. This was also the
situation after the turn of the century when the foedus of 502 was concluded.
3 It will thus complement other works for other reigns, such as Isrun Engelhardt, Mission
und Politik in Byzanz: Ein Beitrag zur Strukturana/yse byzantinischer Mission zur Zeit Justins und
Justinians (Munich, 1974).
4 See Ya'qubi,
Ttirikh (Beirut , 1960), I, 205. On Ghassanid-SaliJ:iid relations before 502,
see BAFIC, 282-89.
5 If these Ghassanids were related to those of Amorkesos, the adventurous phylarch of the
reign of Leo, chances are that they were Chalcedonians. On the possibility that Amorkesos was
a Ghassanid who was of the same doctrinal persuasion as his master Leo, see BAFIC, 59-113 .
The Reign of Anastasius 695
So the exact doctrinal persuasion of the new foederati could not have been an
issue as long as they were Christian.
The situation changed dramatically around 510, and the conversion of
the Ghassanids to Monophysitism must have occurred in the last decade of the
reign of Anastasius since they are attested as Monophysite early in the reign of
the Chalcedonian Justin I. It was in this period that Anastasius departed from
his neutrality and openly championed the Monophysite cause. How the con-
version of the Ghassanids to Monophysitism was effected is not documented,
but there is little doubt that it took place in this decade under the influence of
the energetic and enthusiastic patriarch, Severus of Antioch, who was pos-
sessed by an ardent desire to convert the world to Monophysitism. Since the
Ghassanids lived within his jurisdiction in Oriens, they probably succumbed
to his overtures.
This conclusion is of course inferential. One can support it by reference
to the mission of Severus to Mungir, the Lakhmid king of I:Iira in 513, trying
to convert him to Monophysitism.
6 It can be argued a fortiori that Severus
would have sent a similar mission to convert those Arabs who were within
Byzantine territory. Although the extant sources are silent on any overtures
made by Severus to the Ghassanids, they mention those m~de by other Mono-
physite ecclesiastics, who worked energetically beside Severus for the spread of
Monophysitism, such as Philoxenus. There is extant a fragment of a letter
addressed by him to John the Arab (Tayaye), in which the bishop of Hiera-
polis expounds Monophysite theology. The addressee has been tentatively
identified as John, the bishop of the Arabs of I:Iuwwarin (Evaria) in Phoenicia
Libanensis, 7 who was a Monophysite prelate during the reign of Anastasius
and was one of the bishops exiled by Justin in 519. These Arabs were cer-
tainly foederati in the service of Byzantium, and it has been argued that they
were most probably the Ghassanids. 8 If so, then this would establish contact
between Philoxenus, the ardent Monophysite missionary, and an Arab federate
group. It is notewoqhy that the addressee, called John, is ethnically an Arab.
If he is the same as John, the bishop of the Arab group at l:luwwarin, the fact
becomes important in understanding the ecclesiastical policy of assigning to
the Arab foederati clerics of the same ethnic background.
Whatever the process that converted the Ghassanids to the Monophysite
confession was, there is no doubt that the pressure of the two powerful eccle-
6 On chis, see below, 706-9 .
7 For the letter and the idencificacion, see Andre de Halleux, Phi/oxine de Mabboug: Sa vie,
IeJ ecrits, sa theo/ogie (Louvain, 1963), 216-17.
8 See below, 719-22.
siastics in whose jurisdiction the Ghassanids lived must have been efficacious. 9
In 519 the Ghassanids appear as definitely Monophysite, and' this could have
happened only in the second decade of the century during the reign of Ana-
stasius.
The Kindites
Byzantium concluded a foedus with Kinda m 502 as it did with the
Ghassanids. The question aris~s as to whether conversion to Christianity was
one of the conditions of the foedus, especially for that part of Kinda that was
settled within the limes. The presumption is that it was converted, if it had
not yet adopted Christianity earlier as a Peninsular power. As to its doctrinal
persuasion, it was probably Chalcedonian, as was Ghassan's around 502.
Whether Kinda adopted Monophysitism as Ghassan was to do later, in the
second decade of the sixth century, is not clear. But those of Kinda who were
settled in Palaestina Prima are likely to have remained Chalcedonian. Just as a
strong Monophysite ecclesiastic, Severus of Antioch, was probably instrumen-
tal in the conversion of the Ghassanids to Monophysitism, so it was such
ecclesiastics as Elias, the staunchly Chalcedonian Arab patriarch of Jerusalem,
and St. Sabas, the celebrated monk of the Desert of Juda, who kept Palaestina
Prima Chalcedonian, or mostly Chalcedonian, even during the reign of Ana-
stasius. The Kindite Arabs who were settled in Palaestina Prima naturally
were influenced by the Chalcedonian Christianity of the province and most
probably remained within that doctrinal fold. 10
The only member of the royal house of Kinda whose Christianity is at-
tested beyond doubt is Hind, the Kindite princess, daughter of the same
Kindite Arethas with whom Anastasius made the foedus of 502. She built a
monastery in l;Ii'ra, the Lakhmid capital, in which was found the most impor-
tant Christian Arab inscription of pre-Islamic times. 11 She had that inscription
carved after the death of her husband, Mungir, the famous Lakhmid king, and
9 Apparently Severus had the "ability to communicate with the native population of his
patriarchate," and this is relevant to his influence on the Ghassiinids; see Frend, Rise, 214. The
immense influence of another pair of Monophysite clerics on the Ghassiinids-Jacob Baradaeus
and Paul the Black-is established and throws light on the influence of the earlier pair for
which there are no extant sources.
10 In the 550s two Arab phylarchs fought with each other: Arethas the Monophysite
Ghassanid and Aswad, most probably a Kindite, either the same who fought with Areobindus
in 503 (below, note 11) or one related to him. The fight took place in Palaestina Prima but for
unknown reasons. If the Kindite Aswad was Chalcedonian, this could throw some light on
(although it would not fully explain) the animosity between the two phylarchs and consequently
the fight; for these two phylarchs, see Kyri/los von Skythopo/is, ed. E. Schwartz, TU 49 (Leipzig,
1939), p. 75 (hereafter Kyri/los).
ll For this inscription, see Rothstein, DLH, 24.
during the reign of her son 'Amr . 12 The inscription raises the question of
when Hind became a Christian, and what her doctrinal persuasion was. It is
certain that she did not adopt Christianity in l:IIra since her husband was a
notorious pagan who reveled in anti-Christian outbursts. Consequently she
must have been converted while still a Kindite princess, and if so her father,
Arethas, must have been Christian too. 13 She is supposed to have been married
to Mungir during a period of eclipse for him brought about by her father, 14
who for some time became the ruler of l:lira and replaced Mungir himself, in
the 520s. 15 She could have brought with her a Chalcedonian form of Chris-
tianity which she probably kept, or even a Monophysite one. The proud
Kindite princess would not have converted to Nestorianism, the tolerated
form of Christianity in Sasanid Persia and its prevailing form in l:IIra. 16
The Ghassanids and Palestine
While the Patriarchate of Antioch finally fell to Severus, a Monophysite
of the deepest dye, who held office from 513 to 518, the Patriarchate of
Jerusalem remained solidly Dyophysite principally owing to the resistance of a
monk and a patriarch, St. Sabas and Elias of Jerusalem, both staunchly
Chalcedonian, except for two years when Anastasius finally dethroned Elias
and banished him to Ayla in 516. In view of this, it is unlikely that the
Ghassanids had any foothold in Palestine, especially since, as pointed out
earlier in this volume, Palaestina Prima was not their province but rather that
of the Kindites. Yet there is that tantalizing toponym that appears in an
Arabic source, namely, Dayr Ghassaneh, "the Monastery of the Ghassanids,"
which unmistakably points to a Ghassanid association. 17 The question arises as
to when it was established.
If the monastery dates to the reign of Anastasi us, as is likely, it most
probably was established in the second decade of his reign. In spite of the
strongly Dyophysite character of Palestine, there were Monophysite pockets in
it, represented by the monastery of Peter t~e Iberian (between Gaza and Mai-
ouma), under whose influence Severus himself came when he was a monk at
that monastery as he was to be also at the monastery of Romanus (near
12 So it may be dated sometime between 554 and 569.
13 This is vouched for in her inscription in which she refers to herself as "the daughter of
the servant of Christ."
14 See G. Olinder, The Kings of Kinda (Lund, 1927), 58, 62.
15 For this see the present writer in "Ghassan and Byzantium," 253-54.
16 In addition to being a fine specimen of Christian Arabic in pre-Islamic times, the
inscription is informative on four generations of Kindites, an important genealogical datum.
She refers to herself as Hind, daughter of }:la.rich, son of 'Amr, son of }:lujr. So this segment of
the genealogical line of royal Kinda is certain beyond doubt .
17 On Dayr Ghassaneh, see Basic 1.1, 654-55 . Dayr 'Amr in Palestine may also have been
a Ghassanid establishment, but it is Jess clearly Ghassanid than Dayr Ghassaneh.
Tekoa). 18 The future patriarch of Antioch thus had strong Palestinian connec-
tions, and he kept his interest in Palestine even after his elevation to the see of
Antioch, trying, with the help of other Monophysite clerics, to convince Ana-
stasius to dethrone Elias, the Dyophysite patriarch of Jerusalem, which finally
took place in 516. As explained in the previous section, the Ghassanids were
won over to the Monophysite position in this decade during the patriarchate
of Severus and under the combined influence of the two powerful Mono-
physites of the patriarchate, Severus and Philoxenus, who kept their interest
in Palestine. The Ghassanids were geographically closer than both ecclesiastics
to Palestine since they surrounded it from the three provinces of Palaestina
Tertia, Arabia, and Palaestina Secunda and protected it against the pastoralists
of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus they must have been also interested in what,
after all, was the Holy Land to them. It is therefore not unnatural to suppose
that they effected a foothold in Palestine exactly in this period when the
emperor, the patriarch of Antioch, and also that of Jerusalem, were all Mono-
physite. 19 Perhaps Dayr Ghassaneh belongs to this period, and if Dayr 'Amr,
"the monastery of 'Amr," is also Ghassanid, it may also belong to this period.
Discussion of the Arab presence in Palestine, that of the Ghassanids and
Kindites, in this ecclesiastical context has led to the discussion of the position
of the patriarch of Jerusalem in this period, Elias, himself a Rhomaic Arab.
The Palestinian ecclesiastical scene thus presents a paradoxical situation where
there was an Arab at the top ecclesiastical echelon in Palestine, while the
powerful federates, the Ghassanids in Oriens, were moving in the orbit of the
Pisidian Severus, sure sign that their Monophysitism was not related to their
ethnic makeup. The Arab patriarch, who was discussed in detail in the pre-
vious volume of this series, 20 wrote an important chapter in the history of
Palestine, the ecclesiastical fortunes of which he guided for some twenty-two
years from 494 to 516. Among his many ecclesiastical establishments was the
laying of the foundation of the New Church of the Mother of God in Jerusa-
lem, later finished by Justinian. His Arab flock, then, did not include the
Ghassanids and was limited to the phylarchs of the Parembole in the Desert of
Juda and most probably to the Kindices of Palaestina Prima. 21
The zeal of the Ghassanids for Monophysicism, which became evident
throughout the sixth century, is startling, and its roots must go back co chis
18 On this, see Frend, Rise, 202. On the two Monophysite monasteries, see P. S. Vailhe,
"Repertoire alphabetique des monasteres de Palestine," ROC 5 (1900), 44-48 .
19 Although the newly enthroned patriarch John (516-524) did not anathematize Chal-
cedon; Rise, 230.
20 On Elias see BAFIC, 192-96, 210-12.
21 Elias was a firm and competent administrator; ibid., 194-95. Yet Severus, his oppo-
nent, judges him "unstable and weak," possibly the expression of patriarchal rivalry and jeal-
ousy; see Frend, Rise, 230 note 3.
reign, that of Anastasius, to the powerful impact that the two strong Mono-
physite ecclesiastics, Severus and Philoxenus, had on them. In vain one cries
to extract from the silent sources data concerning this impact, but two events
in Oriens and the Patriarchate of Antioch could be considered relevant in this
connection.
1. First there was the consecration of the cathedral of Bostra 22 between
September 512 and March 513. The Ghassanid phylarch most probably at-
tended the consecration. The headquarters of the Ghassanids was the Provincia
Arabia, and Bostra was its capital. The phylarch had important relations with
the dux of Arabia who resided in Bostra. Furthermore, the Ghassanids had
some important relations with this provincial capital, as the reign of Mungir
testifies late in the century. It is natural, therefore, to assume that on that
important occasion the phylarch of the province, who was newly converted to
the Monophysite faith, would have been invited, especially as the cathedral
was dedicated to the military saints Bacchus and Sergius, and Leoncius, the
first of whom was the patron saint of the Ghassanids. That the Ghassanid
phylarchs were invited to such events is atteste<;l by the invitation to the
Ghassanid Mungir around 580 to attend the consecration of the church at
}::luwwarin (Evaria), a much less important consecration. 23
2. Then there was the splendid consecration of Severus himself on 16
November 513, at which Philoxenus officiated, 1 when Severus delivered his
cathedral homily in which he denounced Chalcedon and the Tome of Leo.
24
The Ghassanid phylarch must have been invited to attend the enthronement
of the patriarch who, together with Philoxenus, must have been instrumental
in winning over the Ghassanids to the Monophysite cause. Attendance at such
consecrations-that of the cathedral of Bostra and of the patriarch of Antioch
-must have impressed the Ghassanids and enhanced their attachment to
their new confession.
Trilinguis Zabadaea
Almost more than a century ago, E. Sachau discovered, on the lintel of
the west portal of a church in the western part of the ruins of Zabad, the
famous trilingual inscription in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The inscription
commemorates the erection of a martyrion for St. Sergius in 512, and it con-
tains a number of names written in the three languages with whom the erec-
tion of the church is associated. The inscription has been in the hands of a
host of scholars who have tried to establish its text. In spite of the ingenuity
22 For the latest on the "cathedral" of Bostra and the problems related to it, see the various
articles in La Siria Araba da Roma a Bisanzio, ed. R. P. Campanati (Ravenna, 1989).
23 See BASIC I.1, 456-60.
24 See de Halleux, Philoxene de Mabboug, 78.
that has been exercised in the study of the text for many years by the best-
known scholars in the field, the text of the inscription is not crystal clear. The
various names that are mentioned in it are associated with different functions,
the founder(s), the engraver, and the donors. 25
The Trilinguis Zabadaea Inscription (IGLSYR, II {1939), p. 177).
+>-JOn\)t __ .nrc;:,-llr t c/'ro;i,rQor,il'.'=
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The relevant part of the inscription for the history of Arab-Byzantine
relations is the Arab names and the light they t;hrow on cultural matters in
the history of Arab-Byzantine relations in the early part of the sixth century.
According to E. Littmann, the Arabic inscription contains five names: (1)
Sergius, son of Amat/Manaf; (2) Hunai' (or Hannai') , son of Mar'alqais; (3)
Sergius, son of Sa'd; (4) Sier(?); and (5) Sergius. 26 The Arab name 'Azi'z also
appears in the Greek part of the inscription. In what way these Arab names
are associated with the church is not entirely clear.
In spite of these uncertainties, it is possible to make the following obser-
vations on the Arabic names in the inscription.
1. The first question that arises concerns the legal status of these Arabs.
Were they foederati or were they Rhomaic Arabs? There is no way of telling.
The region of Zabad, not far from Hierapolis, is associated with the Arabs,
and it has been argued that the Taniikhids were possibly the foederati of By-
25 The most complete account of the inscription may be found in IGLSYR, II (1939), pp.
176-81, with a facsimile of the inscription on p. 177 and an extensive bibliography on p. 178.
See also Repertoire chrono/ogiq11e d'ipigraphie arabe (Cairo, 1931), I, pp. 2- 3, with some
additional
bibliographical items . Instead of Zebed, I have preferred the more correct orthography, Zabad.
26 See E. Littmann, "Osservazioni sulle iscrizoni di Harran e di Zebed, " Rivista degli st11di
orientali 4 (1911), 196.
zantium m the fourth century that were associated with it. 27 So it is not
altogether impossible that they were federate Arabs who contributed some-
thing to the building of this church. Shara~il, the phylarch of l:farran, is
attested epigraphically as having built a church dedicated to St. John. What
might raise the suspicion that these may have been federate Arabs is the
perfectly Arabian name of Mar' alqais (lmru' al-Qays), a name more associated
with the Arabian Peninsula whence the foederati had hailed 28 than with Rho-
maic Oriens.
2. The church is dedicated to St. Sergius. Zabad is situated in the prov-
ince of Euphratensis where Ru~afa (Sergiopolis), the pilgrimage center, was
located. Sergius was a military saint and one of the patron saints of the Roman
army in Oriens, and of the Ghassanids, and he was equally venerated among
the Arabs. Noteworthy is the fact that, according to Littmann, three of the
Arabs mentioned in the inscription bore the name Sergius.
3. The inscription is important palaeographically, since it is considered
to represent the earliest specimen of the Arabic script in Oriens. lt antedates
the 1:farran inscription and also the one found at Usays. 29 The Namara inscrip-
tion of A.D. 328 is written in the Nabataean script. The trilinguis of Zabad
reflects the triculturalism of Oriens, and the employment of Arabic is striking
in spite of the fact that the two languages of cultural dominance in the region,
Greek and Syriac, are represented in the inscription. This reflects the strong
Arab identity of those Arabs whose names were included in the inscription,
sure sign that they were not completely assimilated into the Greek and Syriac
cultural traditions of the region.
4. These Arabs kept their Arabic names, used patronymics more Arabico,
and apparently insisted on having their names written in the Arabic script.
The last clearly indicates that, although they were living in a multilingual
ambience in which Greek and Syriac were used and were well known, these
Arabs did not think it was superfluous to have their names written in Arabic,
their own language. This is of some relevance to the problem of a simple
Arabic liturgy and a lectionary for the use of the Arabs, especially the foederati
of Oriens. If the Arabs of the Zabad inscription turn out to be not foederati but
Rhomaic Arabs, the fact will be even more significant since it would argue
that even the Rhomaic Arabs, who were subjected to cultural assimilation,
27 See BAFOC, 403-4.
28 The adoption of Christian names by the Christian Arabs does not argue for loss of
identity . In the case of this inscription, the adoption of the name Sergius was natural, since he
was the saint of the region. Cf. the adoption of the name by one of the associates of the
Ghassanid Mungir, below, 959. On Sharii.l_lil's church in I::larran (provincial Arabia), see BASIC
1.1, 326-31.
29 For the Arabic inscription at Usays, see ibid., 117-24.
did not entirely lose their sense of Arab identity. So, in addition to the pa-
laeographic, there is this other important dimension to the inscription.
II. OUTSIDE THE LIMES
The Monophysite mission, or even missionary offensive, outside the frontiers
of the empire was even more impressive and is better documented. It reached
two important areas in the Semitic Orient, one in the middle Euphrates re-
gion in l::Hra, the capital of the Lakhmids, and another in South Arabia.
l:fira
Two attempts were made to establish contact with l::Hra, one in the first
decade of the century and the other in the second. Both were attempts to
reach the ruler as the most efficacious way of converting his people or region.
The first is associated with the name of Philoxenus and the second with that
of Severus.
The First Attempt
Sometime in the first decade of the sixth century, the Monophysite met-
ropolitan of Hierapolis sent a letter to Abu Ya'fur, the Lakhmid ruler of the
Arab city of l:fira on the middle Euphrates, in which he discussed Nestorian-
ism and the Christian faith from the point of view of Monophysitism. The
letter had been under a cloud concerning both its attribution to Philoxenus
and its authenticity, but most of the doubts were laid to rest in 1963 when
Father A. de Halleux published his dissertation on Philoxenus and set on a
firm foundation both the attribution and the authenticity of the letter, with
some reservations on certain parts of it. 30 Recent research on Oriens Chris-
tianus, especially its Arab sector, has confirmed these conclusions 31 beyond
any shred of doubt, and this section upholds these conclusions and enriches
them with new data. The letter of Philoxenus with its precious reference to
Abu Ya'fur, the ruler of l:fira, turns out to be a mine of information for the
history of Arab Christianity in this period.
The most complete recension of the letter is that in the collection of the
John Rylands Library in Manchester,
32 which inter a/ia gives the correct or-
thography of the name of the ruler of }::lira as Abu Ya'fur and mentions him
30 See de Halleux, Philoxene de Mabboug, 203-8,
where the author discusses the manu-
scripts, editions, and literature on the letter.
31 This letter was noted in Martyrs (p. 271 note 3) but very cursorily since it was not the
concern of that volume. The new data could have been at the disposal of ecclesiastical historians
who dealt with this letter and with Philoxenus, if Noldeke and Rothstein, the specialists on the
Lakhmid dynasty almost a century ago, had been aware of it, but they were not.
32 See A. Mingana, "The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East: A
New Document," Bulletin of the john Rylands Library 9 (1925), 297-371; the relevant pan that
deals with Abu Ya'fur and l::lira in its English version is on pp. 352-67 .
some three times. From it the following data may be extracted . (1) Philoxenus
apparently wrote two letters to Abu Ya'fur, one of which has survived. (2)
Philoxenus' letters were in response to letters sent by Abu Ya'fur himself.
(3) The opening paragraph of the letter says something about the virtues of
Abu Ya'fur, of which he enumerates three. (4) Abu Ya'fur is referred to not as
king but as stratelates, the military term, and l:lira is referred to as l:lirat
al-Nu'man , Qerta d'Na'man.
33
The letter represents the earliest extant record of the attempt of the
Monophysites to establish contact with l:lira and its rulers, an attempt that
was repeated many times in the course of the sixth century . That ,there was a
Monophysite problem in Sasanid Persia, including l:lira, at this time is known
from other sources and may be summarized as follows. The Council of Seleucia
in 488 established Nescorianism as the accepted form of Christianity in Persia.
There followed apparently an assertion of Nestorian ascendancy in Persia with
persecution of the Monophysites, involving Bar-~auma, the Nestorian bishop
of Nisibis, the flight of the Monophysites to Byzantine territory, and a letter
from Emperor Anastasius to the Persian king Kawad on this point. 34
This is the background of Philoxenus' letter to Abu Ya'fur. Philoxenus
hailed from Persia, and he must have been familiar with the religious situa-
tion in that region and the role that l:lira could play in the protection of the
Monophysites, his fellow confessionalists. Two centuries before, it protected
the Manichaeans, and since then two of its kings had been associated with
Christianity, Imru' al-Qays and Nu 'man. 3 ) But above all, this was the style of
the metropolitan of Hierapolis-to go to the top of the administrative level
for protection, to the ruler himself in the capital. Although he did not suc-
ceed, since Abu Ya'fur disappeared from the scene shortly after and l:lira
remained a Nestorian stronghold till the very end, the letter does witness to
the energy of Philoxenus in spreading his faith, which aimed at winning the
important center of l:lira for Monophysitism, another instance of his mission-
ary zeal which encompassed such distant centers of the Near East as Constanti-
nople and also Najran in South Arabia.
More important is the light the letter throws on Abu Ya 'fur and the
history of the Lakhmid dynasty in this obscure period and on Christianity in
that Arab center. All that the specialized monographs on l:lira 36 and the
Lakhmids know of Abu Ya'fur is that he was a Lakhmid appointed by Kawad
after the death of King Nu'man from a wound he received before the walls of
33 For these references, see ibid., 352, 358, 367.
34 See P. Charanis, Church and State in the Later Roman Empire (Madison, Wisc., 1939),
29-30 .
35 See BAFOC, 32-34;
BAFIC, 161-66 .
36 See Niildeke, PAS, 169; Rothstein, DLH, 74-75.
Edessa in 503, and that he did not last long, since the famous Mungir III
appears as the king of 1:fira shortly after. Now this bald statement receives
both confirmation and bright illumination from Philoxenus' letter.
1. Abu Ya'fur was a Lakhmid, but he did not belong to the ruling
house, the N~rids or "the sons of N~r." This much had been known about
him before the letter of Philoxenus was published. With this document and
other data from the Arabic sources, Abu Ya'fur appears as the son of another
Lakhmid, 'Alqama, who fathered another son, who had the emphatically
Christian name of 'Abd al-Masi):i. 37 Here then is a clan within the Lakhmids
called Banu 'Alqama, "the sons of 'Alqama," which played an imp?rtant role
in the history of Christianity in 1:fira.
2. The house of 'Alqama thus was already Christian when Abu Ya'fur
appears as the ruler of l;Hra. This is confirmed by the letter itself, as is clear
from the opening paragraph.
38 The question of his Christian confession natu-
rally arises. If his father, 'Alqama, was converted to Christianity, the natural
presumption is that he was baptized into Nestorianism. This is a likely pre-
sumption, and equally likely is that his son Abu Ya'fur was born into or
converted to the same doctrinal persuasion.
3. Yet the letter is startling in suggesting that Abu Ya'~r was not
Nestorian. In the opening paragraph he is described as "one who delivers the
lambs bought with the blood of Christ from the heresy of the Nestorians
which is a second Jezebel, like Obadiah." Yet the implication is that he was a
Christian; so to which Christian confession did he belong? The possibility
must be entertained that he was won over to either the Chalcedonian or the
Monophysite position. This should not be as startling as it sounds. It was in
this period that there was a severe persecution of the Monophysites in Persia,
and so much so that Emperor Anastasius had to intervene and sent representa-
tions to the Persian king, Kawad. It is not impossible that Abu Ya'fur may
have been outraged by these persecutions conducted by the Nestorians, that
he found it revolting and so wrote to the nearest ecclesiastic to him, Philo-
xenus at Hierapolis, for advice. Besides, he may have known that Philoxenus
was a Persian. In support of this is the history of Aspebetos, the pagan Arab
commander who was so outraged by the persecution of the Christians in Persia
during the reign of Yazdgard that he defected to Byzantium and firlally be-
came the phylarch and bishop of the Parembole in Palestine. 39
4. This could have been the background of the letter that Abu Ya'fur
sent to Philoxenus, asking him to inform him about this Christian confession
that had outraged him by its severe persecution of fellow Christians. It should
37 On this see below, note 47.
38 See Mingana, "Christianity in Central Asia," 352.
39 On Aspebetos see BAFIC, 40-49.
be remembered that Kawad himself had requested to be informed about
Christianity and other religions, and so a statement was prepared for him and
translated into Persian. 40 If his overlord did this, the vassal could easily have
done the same. Kawad, as is well known, meandered from one religious fold
to another, Mazdakism included; hence the period during which Abu Ya'fur
flourished serves as appropriate background for his conversion.
5. This raises the question of his choice as successor for Nu'man. It is
possible that the anti-Christian outbursts of the latter 41 may have alienated the
Christian population in }:IIra, as it did one of the chiefs in his army, and this
may have led to some disturbances. So the appointment of the Christian Abu
Ya'fur in }:IIra could have stabilized the situation. On the other hand, Mun-
gir, the son of Nu'man, may still have been a minor, and so Kawad simply
appointed a competent warden from the same tribe of Lakhm until Mungir
reached his majority. It is noteworthy that he is not called king but by the
military term strati/ates of the }:lirta, which too suggests that Kawad did not
appoint him king since kingship belonged to the house of N~r, not to the
'Alqamids. This suggests that his appointment was temporary and contin-
gent. The N~rid prestige is reflected in the name of }:lira which is called }:lira
of Nu'man, the N~rid Lakhmid king. It should also be remembered that the
war with Byzantium was still going on and that the Arabs of }:IIra took an
active part in it. Hence what was needed in }:lira after the death of Nu'man
before the walls of Edessa was a warrior, a soldier who could keep }:lira well in
hand.
6. In the Chronicle of Tabari, so ably edited and interpreted by Noldeke, 42
Abu Ya'fur appears as a name, that of the ruler of }:IIra during this short
interregnum. This opacity that surrounds him is illuminated by the letter,
which provides three dimensions to his personality: 43 he is noble, pure and
God-loving as Abraham; he gives his wealth in alms to the poor as Job did;
and he delivers the Christians from the heresy of the Nestorians. The first
presents him as a monotheist, the second is almost Arab in emphasizing his
generosity; the third reflects his confessional affiliation and efforts against
Nestorianism. If all this is an accurate picture of Abu Ya'fur and not the
wishful thinking of the writer of the letter, then chis document has preserved
40 On this see Histoire Nmorienne, ed. A. Scher, PO 7 (Paris, 1911), 126. In the letter, p.
358, Philoxenus speaks of the second letter of Abu Ya'fur, in which he requests information
from Philoxenus concerning the Akephaloi among the Monophysites. This does not seem a
literary device on the part of Philoxenus, and so it is quite possible that Abu Ya'fur had some
interest in theology or religious sects, not unlike his master Kawad or the Ghassanid Arethas
for whom, see below, 741 note 22 and p. 746-55.
41 On this see BASIC 1.1, 13-17.
42 Noldeke, PAS, 169.
43 Mingana, "Christianity in Central Asia," 352.
a picture of an Arab Lakhmid chief around A.D. 500 not unlike that of As-
pebetos, another army commander whom the persecution of Christians in Per-
sia outraged and forced to emigrate to Byzantine territory.
7. The historian of the Lakhmid dynasty, G. Rothstein, was at a loss to
explain the disappearance of Abu Ya'fur from the scene in l:fira after such a
short interregnum. 44 The letter now provides some satisfactory explanation for
this. Here was a vassal of the Persian king carrying on a correspondence con-
cerning the Christian faith, that of the enemy Byzantium, with a metro-
politan of Hierapolis so close to the Persian frontier. This must have made
him suspect in the eyes of the Persian authorities, and the Nestorians would
have lost no time in denouncing him as a traitor. Kawad dismissed him, and
this may be confirmed by the appointment of Mungir III who celebrates his
reign pointedly by the invasion of the Holy Land, thus emphasizing that a
non-Christian ruler was again in the saddle in l:fira, like his father Nu'man.
This examination of the letter of Philoxenus to Abu Ya'fur has further
confirmed its essential authenticity, or at least that part of it that deals with
Christianity in l:fira and the Land of the Two Rivers. The Syriac source had
confirmed the reliability of the Arab historian Hisham on the Lakhmids, 4 i and
has brightly illuminated the history of l:fira and the Lakhmid dynasty in this
short period in the first decade of the sixth century. A clan within the Lakh-
mids has thus been identified as the Christian clan of Banu 'Alqama, the sons
of 'Alqama, to be added to others in l:fira such as "the house of Ayyub. " 46
Their Christianity is confirmed onomastically and epigraphically. According
to the genealogies, this 'Alqama had two sons (at least); one is Abu Ya'fur,
the other 'Abd al-Masil); the latter had a son called l:fan~ala, who built a
monastery at l:fira in which a Christian Arabic inscription was found, 47 all of
which is relevant to the study of Arabic as one of the languages of Oriens
Christianus in pre-Islamic times.
The Second Attempt
Some ten years after Philoxenus' effort to convert Abu Ya'fur of l:fira to
Monophysitism, another attempt was made, this time in 513 by Severus, the
newly consecrated Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, who according to eccle-
siastical historians sent two bishops to Mungir III of l:fira in order to convert
44 Rothstein, DLH, 75.
45 That is, in the case of Abii Ya'fur, who appears chronologically in the letter exactly
where Hisham placed him.
46 On this house, see BASIC I. 1, 315-18.
47 On Dayr f.lan~ala and its inscriptions, see Bakri, Mu'jam ma Ista'jam, ed. M. al-Saqqa
(Cairo, 1947), II, 577, and Yaqiit, Mu'jam al-Buldan (Beirut, 1956), II, 507. In addition ro
Dayr f.lan~ala, there is also Dayr 'Alqama, named after the father of Abii Ya'fur, for which see
Bakri, op. cit., 590. Both will be discussed in BASIC II.
him. Mungir, however, confounded and embarrassed the two bishops sent by
Severus and remained "orthodox" in faith. The authenticity of this report has
been much discussed, and its latest treatment goes back to the early 1970s. 48
The subject may now be discussed anew in light of recent research, especially
the detailed analysis of the letter of Philoxenus.
1. Of the many authors who report Severus' mission, Theodore Ana-
gnostes (Lector) is the main source from whom all the rest derive. 49 It is
especially important to emphasize this because Theodore was a contemporary,
and so his report may be considered reliable. 50
2. A mission to convert the powerful ruler of l:fira is very much in
consonance with what is known about Severus, the zealous and dedicated
Monophysite patriarch who had just been consecrated to the see of Antioch
and who was anxious to convert the world around him to his confession.
3. A close relationship obtained between Philoxenus and Severus, and in
fact the former was instrumental in elevating Severus to the patriarchate and
took part in his consecration. The two clerics were in communication and
were close to each other geographically. It is natural to suppose that Philo-
xenus informed Severus of his previous efforts to convert Abu Ya'fur, and it is
quite possible that the initiative to renew efforts to convert l:fira and its ruler
may have come from Philoxenus. It is tempting to think that Philoxenus may
himself have been one of the two bishops who went to l:fira to convert Mungir
since he had hailed from Persia and was already familiar with the l::Uran situa-
tion through his correspondence with Abu Ya'fur.
4. Severus' interest in l:fira is attested from other sources, one of his own
letters addressed to two clerics, Jonathan and Samuel, and "all the rest of the
Orthodox who assembled in the church of the city of Anbar and in the church
of l:fira of Nu 'man. " 51
So the Monophysite mission to l:fira in 513 may be accepted as historical
and interpreted as an ambitious attempt on the part of Severus to win over to
48 See the present writer in MartyrJ, 269-72, where the arguments for Muncjir's Chris-
tianity are set forth with light from the new letter of Simeon of Beth-Ar~am, published and
studied there.
49 See TheodoroJ AnagnoJttJ KirchengeJchichte,
ed. G. C. Hansen, GCS 54 (Berlin, 1971),
147. For the other sources on this episode, see Martyn, 269 note 2, to which may be added
Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopulos, HiJtoria EccleJiaJtica, PG 147, Book XVI, col. 193.
5 For those who rejected the account, see Martyn, 269 note 5, to whom may now be
added Hansen in TheodoroJ AnagnoJteJ, 147. The objections he advanced may be answered as
follows: (a) the Arab chief whom Severus wanted to convert was an important person, rightly
called in one of the sources (Victor Tunnunensis, ibid., line 4) Saracenorum rex; but the sources
know of no one with the name of Muncjir in this period other than the Lakhmid king; (b) this
person could not have lived '"im Bereich des ri:imischen Limes," since all the phylarchs of the
Romans were already Christian in this period.
51 See Letten of SeveruJ, PO 12, pp. 216-17.
Monophysitism the powerful ruler of l::lira, the most important Arab center in
the Fertile Crescent.
The report, however, raises questions about Mungir's religion at the time
of this mission. In the early 1970s, and in light of the discovery of a new
letter by Simeon of Beth-Arsham in which there is a reference to Mungir
swearing by the Gospel, it was suggested that Mungir, the pagan and anti-
Christian ruler of l::lira, was at one time in his life a Christian, and it was also
suggested that his Christianity must have been Nestorian. 52 But in view of
that reference to Mungir in the ecclesiastical account as a Chalcedonian, it is
not impossible that Mungir was converted to the Dyophysite position for a
short time in this period and was already such when Severus' two bishops
arrived at his court. Support for this could come from the fact that Mungir
was married to a Christian Kindite princess, Hind, the daughter of the Kind-
ite king, Arethas, with whom Byzantium concluded the foedus of 502. And it
has been argued that Kinda's conversion to Christianity at that time was to
Dyophysite Chrjstianity since it happened before Anastasius became openly
Monophysite in the second decade of this century. 53 So there was a Christian at
Mungir's court, his own wife, and it is possible that she had influenced him
to become Christian for a short time and that this was his persuasion when the
two Monophysite bishops arrived and found him a Dyophysite as the eccle-
siastical historian reports.
This is all that can be said in support of the view expressed by the
ecclesiastical historians who reported the episode, namely, that Mungir was a
Chalcedonian at this time . However, this view encounters a difficulty deriving
from the uncertainty that attends the date of Mungir's marriage to the Kind-
ite princess Hind. As expressed earlier in this volume, it was possibly in the
520s. 54 If so, this would invalidate the argument, but no certainty attaches to
this dating. So chances are equal that Mungir at this time was either Chalce-
donian or Nestorian , and either would do as a background for the statement
in the letter of Simeon that he swore by the Gospel sometime in the second
decade of the sixth century . What matters here is the mission of Severus to
Mungir, which, as has been argued, must be accepted as historical, unsuccess-
ful as it was.
Mungir was no theologian , and his rejection of the overtures of the two
Monophysite bishops was certainly not on theological grounds . He was the
vassal of the Persian king , and the latter would not have tolerated from his
vassal the acceptance of a form of Christianity that in the second decade of the
52 See Martyn, 270-72 .
53 On Kinda's Christianity and on Hind, see above, 696-97, and BASIC II, forthcoming.
54 Ibid.
The Reign of Anascasius 709
sixth century was the official Christianity of the secular enemy, Byzantium.
Chalcedonian Christianity was bad enough from the point of view of the Per-
sian king and the Zoroastrian establishment. 55
Mungir reverted co paganism lace in the decade, and chis reversion may
be attributed to pressure from his overlord Kawad who looked on the
Lakhmid king as a convenient ally for expressing his displeasure with Chris-
tian Byzantium. 56 Booty from the rich Christian shrines of Oriens must have
appealed to the predatory instincts of the Lakhmid king, but rifling Christian
shrines would have been impossible for him as a Christian. His Christianity
was very chin co scare with, and once the Persian king signaled his disapproval
of his client's religious persuasion, it was not difficult for the latter co revere
co paganism.
South Arabia
Although the Monophysice mission to convert the Lakhmids of I:Iira
failed, it was signally successful in South Arabia. This has been treated in
detail for the reign of Anascasius in the previous volume of chis series,
BAFIC,
57 and more will be said on it in BASIC II in the discussion of western
Arabia. But, as the conversion of South Arabia to Monophysitism was the
work of Philoxenus, it is only fitting that it should be briefly treated here,
after his efforts co convert l:Iira which were discussed in the previous section,
in order to indicate the full extent of his activity in the propagation of that
confession. South Arabia represents the farthest limit of this activity in the
Semitic Orient.
1-f.imyar
Knowledge of a Monophysite mission to l:Iimyar in South Arabia is owed
to John Diacrinomenus, the Monophysite writer who said that his own mater-
nal uncle, Silvanus, was dispatched to l:Iimyar in the reign of Anastasius. This
valuable but bald statement has left many questions unanswered concerning
this Silvanus, such as the occasion for his dispatch, the year, and his see. No
definite answer can be given to these questions, and it was suggested that his
55 Of the Monophysite mission to convert Mungir, Frend (Rise, 229 and note 2) says: "In
the South, Severus' emissaries failed miserably to convince some important Arab tribes of the
Syrian frontier that Monophysitism was a satisfactory belief." This must have been a lapsus
calami on the part of the distinguished historian of Monophysitism since the object of the
mission was Mungir the Lakhmid king of I:Iira, on the lower or middle Euphrates and not "Arab
tribes" in the south "on the Syrian frontier."
56 Mungir 's Christianity, if indeed he was a Chalcedonian, must also have become unac-
ceptable to his Persian overlord, in view of the return of Byzantium to the Chalcedonian fold on
the accession of Justin I in 518.
57 See BAFIC, 360-81, 401-4 .
episcopal see was either Mukha or Zafar itself, the capital, or possibly Najran.
Whether Philoxenus was involved in this missionary effort is not stated. But
in view of his interest in the Arab and Arabian area, it is not unlikely that he
was behind the dispatch of Silvanus to South Arabia. 58
1-f.aqramawt
The Monophysite presence in South Arabia is also attested in J:Ia9ramawt
and is associated with another imponant figure in the history of the Mono-
physite church, namely, John of Tella. According to the new letter of Simeon
of Beth-Arsham, one of the martyrs in J:Ia9ramawt around the year 520 was a
presbyter by the name of Elias, who had been a monk at the convent of Beth
Mar-Abraham near Callinicum and who was ordained presbyter by John of
Tella. Another presbyter who was also martyred in J:Ia9ramawt was Thomas
who had been a monk at the monastery of Beth Mar-Antiochina in Edessa. 59
So here are two presbyters assigned to J:Ia9ramawt, who had hailed from the
Monophysite world of Oriens, one of whom, Elias, had been ordained by John
of Tella. Although it is not stated that John of Tella was involved in his
dispatch to, or his presence in, J:Ia9ramawt, the chances are that he was, and
if so, John of Tella may be added to the list of Monophysite ecclesiastics who
were active in the mission to Arabia. 60
Najrdn
More important than the Monophysite presence in J:Iimyar and
J:Ia9ramawt was the Arab city of Najran, situated in the northern part of
South Arabia. A flood of light has been thrown on it for the reign of Ana-
stasius by the new letter of Simeon of Beth-Arsham, which solves the problem
of the inception of its episcopate. This document clearly states that Philoxenus
consecrated two bishops of Najran: Paul I, the first bishop that Najran re-
ceived, and Paul II, consecrated bishop of Najran sometime after Paul I was
martyred in Zafar. 61
This report on the Monophysite presence in Najran calls for the follow-
ing observations.
1. Najran had been converted to Christianity in the first half of the fifth
century by J:Iayyan, one of its merchants, who brought the Christian Gospel
58 Ibid., 376-81, 401-4.
59 On this, see Martyrs, 45 and notes on pp. 68-71.
The ecclesiastics were martyred in
I:Ia<;lramawt ca. 520, but their ministry in I:Ia<;lramawt goes back earlier, to the reign of Ana-
stasius.
60 E. Honigmann,
Eveques et iveches monophysites d'Asie antirieure au Vie siec/e, CSCO, Sub-
sidia 127 (Louvain, 1951), 51-52.
61 See Martyrs, 46.
from l:fira before the birth of the Monophysite movement. But it was in the
reign of Anastasius and through the vision of Philoxenus that Najran acquired
its strong Monophysite character, which determined the confessional stance of
South Arabia for a century till the rise of Islam. 62
2. How this came about is not entirely clear, but it has been suggested
that the Ghassanids in Oriens, who became the zealous Monophysites among
the Arabs, were partly responsible for this shift in doctrinal persuasion in
Najran. The Ghassanids were related to the Arabs of Najran and had close ties
with them, and it is not impossible that they were involved in carrying the
Monophysite flame there. 63
3. The consecration of a bishop for Najran is a clear indication that
Christianity had advanced far enough in that city to require an episcopal pres-
ence. The Monophysite church wanted a center in South Arabia that it could
consider its firm foothold in that region whence Christianity might spread,
and Najran clearly qualified as such since Christianity was introduced to it
relatively early in the first half of the fifth century .
4. The success of Philoxenus' efforts in establishing a strong Mono-
physite presence in Najran is reflected in various ways: in the rise of an orga-
nized hierarchy for the church in Najran whose names have been preserved in
the new letter of Simeon of Beth-Arsham, in the international character of
many of the clerics who formed this hierarchy, 64 and in native Najranites,
acting as missionaries or ministers of the faith in other parts of South Arabia,
such as the presbyter Thomas who died a martyr in J::la9ramawt.
65
The conversion of South Arabia to the Monophysite confession of Chris-
tianity was a major triumph for Monophysitism and for Philoxenus .
66 This was
an event of the first importance in the history of the Arabs and the Arabian
Peninsula. As far as Monophysitism is concerned, it represented a major con-
quest, that of a vast province, a triumph that was to be repeated later in the
century , when Nubia across the Red Sea was won over to Monophysitism in
the reign of Justinian, thus making the whole of the valley of the Nile a
Monophysite valley, after Egypt and Ethiopia had also been won over to the
same doctrinal persuasion.
62 See BAFIC, 373-76 .
63 Ibid ., 373-74 .
64 See Martyrs, 64.
65 Ibid., 45.
66 To whom may be added John of Tella and possibly Simeon of Beth-Ariliam who, in the
reign of Justin, became the spirit behind the scenes, campaigning for avenging the martyrs of
South Arabia. But he had been active before and may have been in touch with Philoxenus since
he was also, like the bishop of Hierapolis, a Persian. It is also tempting to think that the two
bishops who were sent to the Lakhmid Mungir in 513 may have been the two Persians, Philo-
xenus and Simeon.
III. APPENDIX
"The Camp of Anasartha": A Cautionary Note
In one of his letters, 1 the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, Severus (513-518),
addresses the monks of the monastery of Mar-Isaac concerning the consecration of one
of them, Stephen, as bishop of "the camp of Anasartha" in Syria Prima . The men of
the "camp" had submitted a list to him, and he chose Stephen, whom he recommends
strongly. The following three passages are from Severus' letter as translated by E. W .
Brooks.'
1. "But now I am writing to your love of God about a matter which is for the
common benefit, and tends to the advancement of the right faith and the preservation
and extension of the holy churches of God in the East."
2. "The men of the camp of Anasartha by their psephismata proposed various
persons in order that a bishop might be ordained for them; and I for my part deter-
mined that we would ordain the religious father Stephen, who is adorned with charac-
ter and with faith, and, if one may so say, with all the excellencies of virtues, bishop
for the aforesaid camp."
3. "I have chosen the religious father Stephen as being one of those mentioned in
the psephisma by those who came from the aforesaid camp: and for us to introduce
someone else not included in the psephisma is impossible ."
Severus' letter, which in its English version speaks of the "men of the camp of
Anasartha," could easily lead the student of Arab-Byzantine relations into thinking
that these were federate Arabs who had asked Severus to consecrate a bishop for them.
It is quite unlikely that regular Roman soldiers in a camp would have asked Severus
to do this, but Arab federates might very well have. If so, the letter assumes consider-
able importance since it would refer not to the Ghassanids, about whom much is
known in the sixth century, but to other, lesser known Arab federate groups who
were encamped in the northern provinces of Oriens of which Syria Prima was one.
Exciting as it would be if "the men of the camp of Anasartha" turned out to be
Arab federates, it is not quite certain that they in fact were. Severus wrote in Greek,
but his letter has survived only in a Syriac version. The Syriac of this version is clearly
a translation of the phrase in Greek, and it presents problems to the translator, both
the anonymous one who turned the Greek into Syriac and Brooks who turned the
Syriac into English . The only course is to state what can be said for "the camp of
Anasartha" as an Arab federate camp and then to examine an alternative translation of
the Syriac phrase with reference to the Greek original or what the Greek original
might have been.
A
In support of, and in relation to, what Brooks implied by his translation of the
Syriac phrase as "the men of the camp of Anasartha" as Arab federates, the following
observations may be made.
1 See letter 29 in The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus , ed. and trans. E. W. Brooks
(London, 1903), vol. II, part I, pp. 90-92 .
2 For the three passages, see ibid., p. 90, line 23-p . 91, line 11; p. 92, Jines 5- 9.
1. The first question that arises is the identity of these Arab foederati encamped
near Anasartha. The city is associated with the Arabs and the Arab federates, and this
is attested in Greek inscriptions. 3 An Arab federate group encamped outside the walls
of Anasartha is likely to have been the Taniikhids. This was one of their sites in the
fourth century, while the Salil_iids were in the south of Oriens. Also in the south were
the Ghassanids in this period, before the conferment of the supreme phylarchate on
the Ghassanid Arethas around 530.
2. Noteworthy is the fact that the troops in the camp want a bishop of their own
choosing from a list they have voted for. This could be another indication of the Arab
and Taniikhid identity of this group. In the fourth century the federate queen Mavia
insisted that a holy man, Moses, be consecrated as her bishop, 4 and so do those of "the
camp of Anasartha" in the sixth century.
3. This raises the question of the ethnic background of the bishop: was he Arab?
The precedent set by Mavia in the fourth century could suggest that this became the
rule in choosing bishops for the Arab foederati. The election and consecration of the
Arab Theodore/ the bishop of the Ghassanids around 540, who oversaw the entire
Arab area, gives further support for this view.
4. The candidate that Severus chose was a monk of the monastery of Mar-Isaac
named Stephen. 6 It is noteworthy that the convent was in an Arab area, since
Chalcidice was a desert region inhabited by Arabs/Saracens. It does not necessarily
follow that their inmates were Arab, but it could argue that at least some of them
were Arab, and Stephen may have been one of them. Stephen is a non-Arab name, but
this does not necessarily argue against his Arabness, since the Arabs shed their Arabic
names when they became monks or priests . And some Arabs are attested as having
assumed the name Stephen, such as the hegoumenos of the lavra of St. Euthymius in the
Desert of Juda in the fifth century. 7
To the above arguments may be added Severus' attitude toward the choice of
Stephen. Severus was a capable ecclesiastical administrator who, as the first passage
indicates, was anxious to spread the Monophysite faith. As he wanted converts, he
must have thought it perfectly appropriate for winning over the federate Arabs of
Anasartha (who at the time were probably Chalcedonian) to accede to their wishes to
choose one from the list they had submitted; and as has already been argued, they
most probably would have wanted as their bishop an Arab who understood their
language .
The letter is valuable as it reflects the concern of Severus for spreading the
Monophysite faith in Oriens and elsewhere. He speaks of the "advancement of the
3 See BAFOC, 222-38 .
4 Ibid., 152-58.
5 On Theodore see below, 761-68, 850-60.
6 For the convent of St. Isaac of Gabbiila, see W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Man111cript1
in the BritiJh M111eum, part II (London, 1871), p. 756. For the bishopric of Gabbiila in
Chalcidice in Syria Prima, see Devreesse, PA, 165.
7 See BAFIC, 210-12.
Stephen was also the name of the Arab architect of the monastery
of Mount Sinai during the reign of Justinian; he hailed from Arab Ayla; see below, 972 note
18.
right faith and the preservation and extension of the holy churches of God in the
East." In this case, the advancement and extension involve the Arabs, whom he was
able to convert to a large extent. The Ghassanids were won to the Monophysite faith
in this period, and he sent emissaries to Mungir, the Lakhmid king of l:lira, to
attempt to convert him. And so it is within this framework of an active missionary
activity among the powerful Arab foederati in Oriens chat his recommendations for the
consecration of Stephen among the Arab federates of Anasartha has co be viewed. His
insistence on the consecration of Stephen reveals the capable ecclesiastical hierarch
who knew the role that the foederati would play in the support of the Monophysice
church. So in the letter he appears understanding of their desire for a bishop of their
own choice and adamant in seeing their wishes carried out. The sequel justified his
expectation, since the federate Arabs turned out co be the pillars of strength of the
Monophysice movement throughout the sixth century.
B
In spice of the case chat can be made for the Arab federate status of "the men of
the camp of Anasarcha," it is by no means certain chat these were actually Arab
federates. A close look at the Syriac original, itself a translation from the Greek,
suggests an alternative and better translation of the phrase, which in Syriac reads
qaJfrii lfanaJartii. 8
1. The first reaction to the translation of the phrase qaJfrii lfanaJartii by "the
camp of Anasarcha" is chat the translation reflects the genitive relation. But the Syriac
is not couched in any of the three ways in which the genitive relation is expressed in
Syriac: by the employment of the emphatic state with the preposition d; by the em-
ployment of the construct state; and by the employment of both the possessive pro-
nominal suffix and the preposition d. So the translation of the Syriac phrase should
not have been expressed through the genitive relation, "the camp of Anasarcha. " 9
2. Then there is the term "camp." The Syriac original has qaJfra, and this nor-
mally means in Syriac not camp but fortified place; 10 it is a Lacinism in Greek and a
Graecism in Syriac. This raises the question of what the original Greek of Severus was
and what he meant by it. There are two possibilities: he could have used it in the
normal sense of a fortified place or as a Latin term, castra, which indeed means
"camp." Severus knew Latin, since he studied it in Alexandria, and later in Beirut he
studied law, the language of which was Latin. The chances are that he used it not in
the Latin sense of "camp" but in the new sense the term had acquired after its natural-
ization in Byzantine Greek-fortress, fortified place.
3. Further confirmation of this derives from the syntax of the phrase. The Syriac
translator surely must have known the two languages as well. As he did not use one of
the three ways of expressing the genitive relation, the conclusion is inevitable that
8 The vocalization of l;lanasarta is uncertain; its orthography in Arabic is Khun~irat.
9 For the phrase in Syriac, see Select Letters of Severus, ed. Brooks, vol. I, part I (London,
1902), p. 101, line 15.
10 That qas(rii is a Graecism (x.am:Qa) in the letter is noted by Brooks, op. cit., vol. II,
part I, p. 91 note 1, who also noted others, such as psephismata .
"Anasartha," which comes after qasfra, is not the genitive but is simply in apposition
to it, and the phrase should be translated "the qasfra, the fortress Anasartha ," identi-
fying the qasfra with the town.
4. Objections to the identification of qasfra with Anasartha could disappear when
it is realized that Anasartha was on the limes and so was a fortress, a fortified place,
and as a town on the timer, was referred to as such. A passage in Malalas indeed
describes Anasartha as i:o 'AvaoaQ0ov xaoi:QOV.
11
5. Another objection may be the use of the plural or what seems to be plural,
namely, Syriac qasfra (the Greek plural xaoi:Qa) and not singular qasfron (Greek sin-
gular XetITTQOV), the term that describes Anasartha in Malalas. But although it trans-
literates plural XetITTQCl, Syriac qasfra is considered a grammatical singular. Besides,
syntax is decisive. Since what is involved is not the genitive relation but apposition,
qasfra must be construed as singular, the same as the grammatical singular "Ana-
sartha." The notion of apposition also disposes of the possibility, or makes it very
remote, that qasfra transliterates Latin castra, plural in form but singular in meaning,
"camp, " since Anasartha is not a camp (castra) but a fortified city, xaoi:QOV.
6. A final objection may be that Stephen as the bishop of Anasartha does not
appear in the list of Monophysite bishops exiled by Justin in 519. This could argue
that he was not a bishop of the city of Anasartha but of the Arab federate camp,
which was not deemed important enough to be mentioned in the list of exiled
bishops, as was John of Evaria, who was the bishop of the Ghassanids, the dominant
Arab federate group, and who was indeed mentioned. 12
The omission is noteworthy but does not necessarily invalidate the foregoing
reasoning, which rests on the correct transliteration of the language of the crucial
Syriac phrase. Stephen was only recommended for consecration as bishop; he may not
have actually attained the episcopal dignity, or he may have succumbed to the solic-
itations of the Chalcedonians and reconverted to their position; hence his non-inclu-
sion in the list of exiled Monophysite bishops. And there is the possibility that the
list of exiled bishops as preserved in later Syriac sources is not complete .
This attempt to recover the precise Greek phrase that Severus used involving
Anasartha in his letter has yielded a conclusion that does not square well with Brooks'
translation of the Syriac phrase as "the camp of Anasartha," with all that such a
translation implies . Important as it is to recover data on the ecclesiastical history of
the Arab foederati in the sixth century, especially when they are non-Ghassanids, it is
necessary to guard against misapprehension of the phrase in the English version. Thus
one must exclude it as evidence for Arab federate Christianity in the environs
of Anasartha in Syria Prima in the early part of the sixth century . Federate Chris-
tianity may have existed there at that time, but if so, it must rest on other evi-
dence. 13
11 Quoted by Honigmann, in "Studien zur Notitia Antiochena," BZ 25 (1925), 76.
12 For the list and for John of Evaria (l;luwwarin), see below, 717-18.
13 A. Voobus completely misunderstood the phrase and wrote of qaJfrii as if it was parem-
bo/e; see his HiJtory of AJceticiJm in the Syrian Orient, III, CSCO 500, Subsidia 81 (Louvain,
1988), 235.
X
The Reign of Justin I (518-527)
T
he reign of Justin I opens the first phase of the middle period, the long
period of tensions and confrontations that characterized Ghassanid-Byzan-
tine relations, the foundations of which had been laid in the reign of Ana-
stasius when the Ghassanids were won over to Monophysitism. The eccle-
siastical history of the reign will be briefly outlined in order to serve as a
backdrop for the detailed study of the Arab involvement.
The ruling dynasty, that of Justin, returns Byzantium to the Chalcedo-
nian fold and to reunion with Rome. This results in disunity in the Orient
and the disestablishment of the Monophysite church after the short honey-
moon during the last five years of Anastasius' reign. The Orient is convulsed
by a thorough overhauling of the hierarchy on both the patriarchal and episcopal
levels. A second revolution, similar to that effected by Anastasius ca. 510, now
takes place. The three Monophysite patriarchs of Oriens and also of Constantino-
ple are dethroned, and Chalcedonians are consecrated and installed. The Mono-
physite bishops of Oriens are expelled and sent into exile. The emperor issues
edicts against the heretics, at the beginning and the end of his reign, during
which the persecution of the Monophysites goes through various stages. 1
Thus the world of the Monophysites collapses over their heads. The
Ghassanids, staunch supporters of the movement, are adversely affected, as
repercussions of the sharp turn in imperial ecclesiastical policy are felt both
within the empire, by the Ghassanids, and by various other communities
without. The entire Near East is affected by it. These repercussions and the
extraordinary events to which they led have been treated in articles published
in various journals. 2 Hence the present chapter will concentrate on ( 1) bring-
1 The most detailed account of the ecclesiastical policy of the reign of Justin may be found
in two works: A. Vasiliev, ]111tin the Pint (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), and Isnm Engelhardt,
MiIIion und Po/itik in Byzanz (Munich, 1974). Both are excellent works for the reign in general.
This chapter, which concentrates on the Arab involvement, supplements what these two works
say on the religious profile of Justin's reign . Engelhardt also treats the ecclesiastical policy of
Justinian; Chapter XI in the present volume will supplement Mi11ion und Politik for that reign,
too.
2 The present writer has paid special attention to these repercussions and events in articles
collected in Byzantium and the Semitic Orient before the Ri1e of Islam (London, 1988).
The Reign of Justin I 717
ing together what has been separated, in a brief presentation; (2) treating
what has not been previously treated in detail; (3) and including repercussions
outside the empire, in Arabia and the middle Euphrates region.
I. WITHIN THE EMPIRE
The principal problem for investigation is the withdrawal of the strongly
Monophysite Ghassanids from the service of Byzantium. This has been argued
for in detail in Chapter II of this volume, where important new documents
have been laid under contribution. There remains the examination of the
problems relevant to ecclesiastical history, and the first is that of their bishop,
whether or not he was John of Evaria, mentioned in the list of bishops exiled
by Justin.
The Ghassanids: John, Bishop of Evaria
In the list of Monophysite bishops exiled in 519, one year after Justin I
came to power,3 there is reference to a bishop of the Arabs of l:fuwwarin
(Evaria), who was exiled and died in exile in l:farlan in the region of Damas-
cus: "Et Ioannes episcopus Zizae Arabum twv l:fawarin exiit et mortuus est in
exilio Harlan in agro Damasceno. " 4 References to the same bishop occur in the
chronicles of Dionysius of Tell-Mal.ue 5 and of Michael the Syrian. 6 The quota-
tion presents a textual problem concerning the word Zizae as a description of
these Arabs.
J. B. Chabot, in his Latin translation just quoted and in his note on the
same, takes Zizae as an adjective from Ziza which he describes, quoting
Ptolemy, as "Ziza urbs in Arabia Petraea." On this basis he interprets "Zizae
Arabum twv l:fawarin" as "Zizaeorem Arabum qui sunt in Hawarin." E. Ho-
nigmann accepts the derivation from Ziza and adds that these Arabs were
perhaps a detachment that had been previously stationed at Ziza in the pro-
vince of Arabia. 7 These interpretations cannot be accepted. There is no evi-
dence whatsoever that an Arab detachment was stationed at Ziza, and the
3 For the list of the exiled Monophysite bishops in 519, see Honigmann, Eveques, 145-48;
for the expulsion of the Monophysite bishops and the ecclesiastical policy of Justin, see Vasiliev,
Justin, 225-29, 232-53.
4 Chronicon ad Annum Domini 846 pertinem, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3, vol. 4 (2) (Paris,
1903), Chronica Minora, versio 4, ed. J. B. Chabot, p. 172. l::luwwarin rather than Hawarin is
the accepted orthography of the toponym in the Arabic sources.
5 Chronicon Anonymum PseutUJ-Dionysianum
vu/go dictum, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3, vol.
2, textus, ed. J. B. Chabot (Louvain, 1933), p. 18: the chronicle merely says "and John of
Hawarin, and he died in exile."
6 Chronique, ed. J. B. Chabot (Paris, 1901), II, text, p. 267, trans. p. 172: "Jean, eveque
des moines arabes de Hawarin." This bishop, John of Evaria, has been discussed previously in
this volume but not in an ecclesiastical context; see BASIC I. I, 458.
7 Honigmann, Eveques, 98-99,
147.
Notitia Dignitatum which Honigmann refers to has, not the Arabs stationed
there, but, as he himself notes, the "Equites Dalmatae Illyriciani ." Even if an
Arab detachment had been stationed at Ziza, it is impossible that that detach-
ment would have acquired the adjective Zizae to describe itself, and that the
adjective persisted and continued to be applied to it after it had left Ziza and
settled in Hawarin. The Arabs in the Notitia are referred to as Arabes or
Saraceni, sometimes more narrowly defined with reference to their tribal affil-
iations such as Thamudeni and not to the place where they were stationed. 8
Grammatically, too, Zizae should come after Arabum if it were a restrictive
adjective from Ziza, and not before it, as it does in the text . In his French
translation of the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, where the same reference to
this bishop of the Arabs occurs, Chabot translates Zizae as "moines," clearly
after emending Zizae into dayraye. This is transcriptionally probable, but
monasteries were not normally administered by bishops; it is possible, how-
ever, that in this case the monastery was.
A third possibility must be entertained: that these Arabs over whom
John was bishop could have been foederati. The word 7;'ayaye is the regular
word used by Syriac authors, the equivalent of Saraceni/Saracenoi of the Byzan-
tine writers, Latin and Greek, and its employment in the Syriac text indicates
that the Arabs in question were not cives, the Rhomaic Arabes, but the
foederati. The possibility that these Arabs were foederati makes possible a return
to Zizae for an emendation . Since the foederati received a subsidy from Byzan-
tium , it is natural to look for a word that describes them in this capacity and
that is transcriptionally possible. The technical term for the subsidy was an-
nona, but the Syriac writers were not careful and their Graecisms are often
inaccurate. There is a word that expressed the same meaning as annona,
namely diaria, a Latin technical term that passed into Greek too, and was
used in the sense of stipendium in the Novels9 and, what is more, was used by
the Syriac writers 10 who simply transliterated it. The word Zizae of the Syriac
text could thus be diaraye, a plural of an adjective formed from diaria, mean-
ing "those who receive the diaria." The question now arises as to who these
foederati were of whom John was bishop? Were they Ghassanids or some other
Arab group of foederati?
8 See Notitia Dignitatum , ed. 0 . Seeck (Berlin, 1876), 59, 68, 81. Thamudeni appears on
p. 59; sometimes an adjectival form such as Illyriciani appears in the Notitia , but the place from
which they derive is usually well known or important , not like Ziza, which is a small and
relatively insignificant locality.
9 For diaria as a Graecism, see Justinian 's Nove/lae, 126, cap. 16: 'VO tv1.autou c>u:t()La
iJ
'U1tEQ~aL VOUOU.
10 It occurs in Jacob of Edessa and in John of Ephesus but was misunderstood by their
translators; see S. Frankel, ZDMG 53 (1899), 534, where he argues that in both these authors,
Brooks and Cureton read the word as @yraye ("monks"), while it is in fact the Greek c>u'tQLOV .
1. The Arabs whose Monophysite bishop was exiled were naturally
Monophysites, and the Ghassanids immediately come to mind as the most
natural candidates for the identification of this Arab federate group with
them. 11 Surely the Ghassanids had a bishop, and since this is the only bishop
of the federate Arabs mentioned in the list, the natural presumption is that he
was their bishop. Later in the century, the Ghassanids had a bishop by the
same name, the one who came after Theodore. But more important is the fact
that this particular place, }::luwwarin, is associated with the Ghassanids in a
most relevant context. Around 580 the Ghassanid king Mungir, before he was
entrapped and captured, was invited to come to }::luwwarin for the dedication
of a church there. The invitation extended to Mungir by the authorities natu-
rally implies that the Ghassanid king had some special interest in }::luwwarin,
if the invitation extended to him was to seem appropriate and not sound
suspicious. So it is possible that the attractiveness of }::luwwarin for Mungir
derived from the fact that Evaria may have been or become the see of the
Ghassanid bishop and Mungir was invited to attend the dedication of a church
in a town that especially interested him. 12
2. Of the many Notitiae Episcopatuum, that for Antioch, the Notitia Anti-
ochena, is relevant to this discussion. 13 That document, composed about 570,
lists eleven bishoprics of Phoenicia Libanensis under the metropolitan of Da-
mascus, among which it lists the "bishopric of Evaria" and the "bishopric of
the Saracens. " 14 Honigmann has argued cogently that the bishopric of Evaria
has to be distinguished from that of the bishopric of the Saracens, although
his views on Ziza which come in the short account of the exiled bishop, John,
have been rejected. The list of bishoprics for Phoenicia Libanensis thus reveals
that the Arab federates had two bishoprics there: the one explicitly described
as such, and that of Evaria, which, it has been argued, was most probably the
Ghassanid. The Arabs that were described in the list as "Saracens" for the
other bishopric must have been another group of federates, and it has been
suggested 1 ~ that they most probably were the Sali):iids of the fifth century,
whose bishop Eustathius participated in the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
3. That the bishopric of the Ghassanids had its see in Evaria/}::luwwarin
in Phoenicia Libanensis rather than in Arabia may seem surprising. The head-
quarters of the Ghassanids was the Provincia Arabia, but they were already in
this period in Palaestina Secunda, since Jabala was found at Jabiya by Simeon
11 Much more than the Taniikhids and the SaliJ::iids of the two previous centuries, who
presumably were Chakedonians, and who were hardly visible in the 6th century, having been
overshadowed by the Monophysite Ghassanids.
12 On all this, see BASIC 1.1, 456-61.
13 See E. Honigmann, "Studien zur Notitia Antiochena," BZ 25 (1925), 60-88.
14 Honigmann,
Eveques, 98-100.
15 See BAFIC, 219-22, on Eustathius.
of Bech-Arsham around 520, and so it is possible chat their phylarchal and
federate presence also extended co the neighboring province, Phoenicia Li-
banensis, even before their power was extended around 5 30 over the whole
limitrophe up to the Euphrates. Little has survived in the sources on their
exact whereabouts in this period, and so a Ghassanid bishopric in Evaria, in
neighboring Phoenicia Libanensis, should not be cause for surprise. Their
power might very well have extended to this . province in which apparently
there was room for more than one phylarchal presence. Perhaps this Evaria was
where the Ghassanid bishop moved 16 in 518/19, when the course of events for
the Monophysites received so much acceleration and confusion with the advent
of the Chalcedonian house of Justin . The town must have had a special attrac-
tion for the Ghassanid Arabs since it remained associated with them around
580 when Mungir was invited to attend a dedication ceremony there, and in
early Islamic times it was associated with the Arab dynasty of the Umayyads
who occupied many of the Ghassanid sites of the pre-Islamic period. 17
4. The Ghassanids certainly had a bishop of their own, and this is conso-
nant with the history of Arab federate groups such as those of Mavia in the
fourth century and of Amorkesos of the fifth. If John turns out to be their
bishop, which is more than likely, then the list of exiled bishops would pro-
vide the student of Ghassanid history with his name, John.
Another question arises concerning this bishop: was he ethnically an
Arab? Again in conformity with past federate history, chances are that he was
not only a bishop for the Arabs but also an Arab himself. His Arabness would
be proven if he turned out to be the addressee of the letter written by Philo-
xenus, since the letter is addressed to "John, the Arab. " 18 Another question
arises as to the name of the bishop-John. The Ghassanids and the Arab
federates were aware of their Arabness and had a strong sense of Arab identity,
reflected inter alia in their assumption of strictly Arab names. But John was
not a soldier; he was an ecclesiastic who naturally assumed on his consecration
the biblical and Christian name John. 19
The short notice on John in the list of exiled bishops is also informative
on his last days. According to the list, he died in I:Iarlan, 20 in the same
16 As reflected in the novel on Phoenicia with its references to phylarchs in the plural; see
BASIC 1.1, 198-99.
17 It was one of the favorite resorts of the Umayyad caliph Yazid; see }::luwwarin, El2, III,
645.
18 See above, 702-6 .
19 Cf. what was said of one of Mungir's entourage around 580, who assumed the name
Sergius, in BASIC l.1, 539-40.
20 }::larlan was an episcopal see; cf. Honigmann, Eveques,
98-100 . For its localization in
Phoenicia Libanensis, see the discussion in Dussaud, Topographie, 302-3, which states that it
was one of the haunts of the Umayyads in Islamic times; so }::larlan becomes another locality in
province in which his episcopal see was located, in the region of Damascus.
Apparently he moved from Evaria to l:Iarlan, stripped of his bishopric, 21 and
evidently he died during the reign of Justin before Justinian, early in his
reign, allowed the exiles to return.
Although in the sixth century the Ghassanids were the protectors and
promoters of Monophysitism in Oriens, little is known about the history of
their ecclesia and its organization. Around 540, when Theodore was appointed
their bishop, more becomes known about them. But in this early period, the
sources are silent, hence this reference to John, as bishop of the Arabs in
Evaria, is of considerable importance. Although it is not absolutely certain
that he was the bishop of the Ghassanids, there is a high degree of probability
that he was. If so, the assignment of the Ghassanid bishop to a town such as
Evaria is a matter of some importance in the journey of the Ghassanids as an
integrated group in the Byzantine system, which contrasts with the status of
previous foederati.
In the conciliar lists of Chalcedon and in the Letter of Leo, Eustathius
the Arab bishop is not assigned to any particular see, 22 but the Ghassanid
bishop John is assigned to Evaria. This argues that there was a development in
Arab ecclesiastical organization. Evaria was one of the eleven episcopal sees
under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan of Damascus in Phoenicia Liba-
nensis. It is known to have had a bishop named Thomas who was a contempo-
rary of Eustathius and signed both the Chalcedonian definition and the Letter
of Leo. 23 After 458 there is no mention of Evaria in the ecclesiastical history of
the Orient as the see of a bishop until 519 when it is assigned or is described
as the see of the Arab bishop John . As it is impossible to have two bishops in
the same city, especially a small place like Evaria, and as no one else is men-
tioned as the bishop of Evaria in the sixth century, it is reasonable to conclude
that Evaria became the episcopal see of the Arab Ghassanid bishop in the
Orient. This represents an advance in the ecclesiastical history of the Arab
foederati in the Orient: while in the fifth century the bishop of Salil~, Eusta-
thius, had no fixed see assigned to him, the Ghassanid bishop in the sixth
century had Evaria assigned to him during the reign of Anastasius, until at
least 519. An echo of a Ghassanid connection with Evaria may be detected in
the meeting between Mungir, the Ghassanid king, and Magnus late in the
which to seek the Ghassanid-Umayyad relationship. For this theme, see the present writer in
"Ghassanid and Umayyad Structures: A Case of Byz:ance aprei Byz:ance," in La Syrie de Byz:ance
a
/'Islam, Institut Frarn;ais de Damas (Damascus, 1992), 299-307.
21 Honigmann (Eveques, 99-100)
thinks that he either took refuge at .l:farlan or was de-
tained there by its bishop, who was a Chakedonian, but this is pure guesswork.
22 See BAFIC, 219-22 .
23 For Thomas, see Devreesse, PA, 205; A. Musil, Pa/myrena (New York, 1928), 37 note
8.
reign of Tiberius, as has already been noted. The Ghassanid bishop at Evaria
presumably had under his jurisdiction all the other Ghassanid ecclesiastics-
priests and deacons who ministered to the Ghassanids in Oriens.
The association of the Ghassanids ecclesiastically with a town such as
Evaria is of some relevance to the question of whether or not towns in Oriens
were assigned to them, a question that will be raised again in relation to
bishop Theodore around 540, and also to their relation as foederati to Bostra
itself, the capital of the Provincia Arabia.
The Lakhmids: Mungir and Christianity
If Jabala and his Ghassanids were not in evidence within Oriens, Mungir
and his Lakhmids were. The latter's raids ranged far and wide along the Ori-
ental limes, but what is relevant for ecclesiastical history is an examination of
his raids on the Christian establishment in Oriens, especially his notorious
abduction of four hundred nuns or virgins from the congregation of the
church of the Apostle Thomas, 24 his massacring them and offering them as a
sacrifice to the pagan goddess al-'Uzza ("the most powerful"), the Arabian
Aphrodite, in 527. He was to repeat this barbarity later in his career when he
captured the son of his Ghassanid adversary, Arethas, in the 540s and sacri-
ficed him to the same goddess. 25 These barbarities have attracted the attention
of anthropologists and historians of religion who were especially interested in
them as evidence for the survival of human sacrifice among the pre-Islamic
Arabs. 26 But Mungir's anti-Christian outbursts are even more important to the
student of Arab-Byzantine relations, both secular and ecclesiastical, and the
two are interrelated. An examination of what was involved in these barbarities
conduces to a better understanding of Byzantine-Lakhmid relations. This has
been lightly touched upon in Chapter I on the reign of Anastasius, 27 but it
deserves a full treatment since it elucidates some important aspects of Arab-
Byzantine relations in the reign of Justin .
Mungir's barbarity and anti-Christian outbursts admit of various inter-
pretations, the complexity of which may be stated as follows.
I. Personal. Mungir was the son of that Nu'man who celebrated his
reign over l:fira by many blasphemies and violations of Christian shrines. So
he was born into a family that had been known for its hostility to Chris-
tianity; the death of his father has been attributed, at least in pious thought,
24 Zacharia, HE, versio, p. 53, lines 11-17.
25 See BASIC 1.1, 238.
26 For instance, J. Henninger, "Menschenopfer bei den Arabern," Anthropo1 (1958), 734-
38. The older works of leading Orientaliscs on Arabian paganism are still valuable, such as J.
Wellhausen, Reste ArabiJchen HeidentumJ (repr. Berlin-Leipzig, 1927), and Noldeke's penetrating
article on the religions of the ancient Arabs in the Encyclopedia of Religion and EthicJ, ed J.
Hastings (New York, 1928), 1, 659-73, especially pp. 665, 669.
27 See above, 708-9.
to a heated altercation he had with a Christian chief in his army, which made
his wound swell and as a result of which he died. 28 Mungir remembered all
this and imbibed hostility toward Christianity from his father.
2. Dynastic. With the exception of Imru' al-Qays and Nu'man, the
Lakhmid kings of the fourth and fifth centuries respectively, the dynasty was
solidly pagan. Paganism among the Lakhmids was somewhat institutional-
ized, and the reign of Mungir became even more so with the various idols in
1:IIra that were associated with the dynasty, such as the two idols called al-
Ghariyyan. 29 Furthermore, as the ruler of 1:IIra, he had under him an army of
Arabs from northeastern Arabia, which in spite of some Christian and Jewish
elements in it, must have been fairly pagan. The Lakhmids must have decided
that they looked stronger as leaders of a pagan army if they shared its paga-
nism than led it as Christian converts.
3. Mungir's style in warfare was that of a Ghazi, a raider of the frontier
or the limes, which offered him spacious opportunities for looting. Christian
places of worship, with their treasures, had great drawing power for the ra-
pacious bird of prey that the Lakhmid king of 1:IIra undoubtedly was. Conver-
sion to Christianity would have terminated his career as raider of the Christian
churches and monasteries.
Perhaps even more important than all these personal and dynastic consid-
erations were ones that pertain to Persia, both its ruling dynasty, the Sasa-
nids, and to its religious class, the Magi.
1. The Magi were the guardians of the official religion of the Persian
state, namely, Zoroastrianism. This was an exclusive, non-proselytizing reli-
gion that looked askance at, and was intolerant of, the claims of Christianity
in Persia since the latter was a religion with universalistic claims and a mis-
sion to convert the oikoumene to its doctrines. Hence the strong opposition of
the Magi to Christianity, and their prestige and power in Persian society were
great, especially with the Sasanid king.
2. The Sasanids. The Persian kings may or may not have been religious
rulers, but Christianity in the fourth century became an especially unaccept-
able faith to be spread in Persia, because after the conversion of Constantine it
became the religion of the secular enemy that had imperialistic claims in the
East and was now supported by a religion that, too, had universalistic claims,
and whose cross had become the Byzantine military emblem. Hence all Chris-
tians in Persia became suspect as a fifth column whose sympathies were with
the enemy, Byzantium.
30 Mungir's paganism was acceptable to Ctesiphon but
not his Christianity.
28 On Nu'man see BASIC 1.1, 17-18.
29 See Rothstein, DLH,
140-41. On the possibility that Mu~arriq was also a Lakhmid
pagan god, see ibid., 142.
30 See A. Christensen, L'Iran sous /es Sassanides
(Copenhagen, 1944), 267-68.
3. The Sasanids were particularly opposed to the conversion of the
Lakhmid dynasts and the takeover of I:Iira by Christianity. l:Iira was within
striking distance of Ctesiphon, and the Arabs of I:Iira could and did play a
decisive role in determining the course of events in Sasanid history. 31 A Chris-
tian king in l:Iira was intolerable .
The Lakhmid principality happened to be located geographically in a
sensitive area, vital for the safety of the empire. It was Persia's western flank
in its struggle with Byzantium. A Christian king in I:Iira would be amenable
to Byzantine influence after Christianity had become Byzantium's state reli-
gion. 32 The conversion of the Lakhmid ruler of I:Iira to Christianity would
have given this "dangerous" religion in Persia the one thing it lacked-official
protection and patronage. 33
Mung.ir must have been aware of this Sasanid attitude toward Chris-
tianity and the manner in which the Sasanid overlord would have viewed his
conversion to that religion. 34
4. Mung.ir's barbarities toward the four hundred nuns/virgins took place
during the reign of Kawad in the 520s. So the understanding of the meaning
of this barbarity-if it had any meaning to it-will have to be related to his
relations with Kawad and the events of that decade. Mung.ir's barbarity is
likely to have been designed .as an expression of loyalty toward Kawad.
It will be remembered that Mung.ir, in the second decade of this century
or during the reign of Anastasius, had dabbled with Christianity. Further-
more, he married a Christian Kindite princess, daughter of the Kindite king,
31 In the 5th century, the succession ofVahram to the throne was secured by the troops of
a Lakhmid king, another Mungir I; see Rothstein, DLH, 68-69; Christensen, L'lran, 274-75.
Nu'man III stood by Chosroes against Vahram, late in the 6th century; Rothstein, DLH, 112.
32 An instructive parallel is Persia's sensitivity to Christianity in Armenia and Arzanene
and the quick measures Yazdgard II cook to solve the problem in a way satisfactory to Persian
political and military interests; see Christensen, L'lran, 284-89 . Persian sensitivity to any
changes in their western provinces which might have political and military implications is
understandable. While the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was far from the Roman-Persian
frontier, the Persian capital, Ctesiphon, was within striking distance of that frontier. The
Persians could threaten Byzantium's eastern provinces, but the Byzantines could threaten the
Persian capital itself. In addition, the province in which one of the three fire-temples, Ad-
hur-Gushnasp, was located was also a western province, Acropatene, which, too, was within
striking distance of the Byzantine forces stationed at the frontier . In negotiating or fighting
with the Persians, the Byzantines probably did not recognize chat Persian sensitivity to its
western frontier was genuine and justified.
33 It was for the same reason that the Persian king was opposed to the conversion of the
kings of the Caucasian region, which also would have meant amenability to Byzantine influ-
ence; cf. the episode of the Lazic king, Tzath , involving Justin I and the latter's correspondence
with Kawad; Malalas, Chronographia (Bonn ed.), 412-14 .
34 The predicament of the Lakhmids in this respect was most explicitly stated by one of
their 5th-century kings, Nu'man; for what he confided co Antiochus, the dux of Phoenicia
Libanensis, see BAFIC, 163 note 4.
Arethas. Finally, Severus, the patriarch in Byzantine Antioch, sent him a
mission to convert him to Monophysitism. 35 All this must have made the
Lakhmid king suspect in the eyes of a suspicious king of kings. As has been
stated before, Mungir's flirtation with Christianity did not last long, and he
reappears in the 520s as the perfect pagan. Hence his barbarity may be partly
construed not so much as anti-Christian as an attempt to prove to Kawad that
he was cured of all Christian sympathies and was providing ample evidence for
his recantation .
This barbarity may also be related to the events of the 520s when Kawad
himself dabbled with Mazdakism, asked Mungir to embrace it, and when the
latter refused, expelled him from l;IIra and installed Arethas the Kindite as its
ruler for a few years, the years of Kinda's interregnum in l;IIra. 36 Immediately
after 527 Mungir was restored. His barbarity may thus be related to his recon-
ciliation with Kawad after the estrangement, and nothing could have better
commended Mungir to Sasanid official favor than a barbarity against the
Christian religion, proof of his loyalty to his overlord.
5. In addition to being opposed to a takeover of l;IIra by Christianity, for
the reasons explored above, Kawad was particularly opposed to the conversion
of Mungir himself, who turned out to be his most valuable ally in the war
with Byzantium. Anything that might affect the efficiency of Mungir's mili-
tary effort in the conflict with Byzantium would be unacceptable, and Chris-
tianity could do just that . The efficient prosecution of the war against the
Byzantines depended, among other things, on a clearly defined system of
opposition between the two states in which the opposition between
Zoroastrianism and Christianity was a part. Anything that blurred the distinc-
tion and the edge of the religious opposition would tend to interfere with the
military quality of the offensive against Byzantium. On two occasions, once
during the reign of Mungir and another during the reign of his father,
Nu'man, Christians in the army of the Lakhmids thwarted or tried to thwart
the military designs of their king when their Christian sentiments were
touched . 37 The Persian kings themselves could remember the part played by
the Christian elements in their armies. 38
In addition to Mungir's relation to his Sasanid overlord, there were fac-
tors that were not related to Persia but operated with Mungir in connection
with his anti-Christian outbursts. Mungir was a contemporary and possibly
35 On this see above, 706-9 .
36 See BASIC 1.1, 39, 41.
37 In 502 before Nu 'man's attack on Edessa and later when the letter of the South Arabian
king arrived during the conference of Ramla.
38 On the experiences of Yazdgard with the Christian element in his army during the
campaign against the Tchols, see Christensen , L'Iran, 289 .
also a witness of the persecutions of the Christians of South Arabia, especially
those of the city of Najran, the great Christian center there. Even during the
conference of Ramla, a letter reached him from the dynast of South Arabia,
the I:Iimyarite king Yusuf, informing him of the massacre of Christians in his
realm and asking him to do likewise. 39 Mungir was shrewd enough not to
comply, but the events in South Arabia are relevant for recreating the atmo-
sphere of anti-Christian sentiments in Arabia at the time in which Mungir
lived. Whether the massacre of the four hundred nuns/virgins was related to
those in South Arabia is not entirely clear.
The inveterate enmity that existed between the Lakhmids and the
Ghassanids is well known, especially between Mungir and his contemporary,
the Ghassanid Arethas. The former was a rabid pagan; the latter a fervent
Christian. The barbarity of Mungir could derive partly from this, especially
his sacrifice of the son of Arethas to al-'Uzza.
40 In so doing, Mungir carried
his enmity toward Arethas to the religious sphere. By sacrificing his adver-
sary's son to the pagan goddess, Mungir could hurt Arethas' religious sensi-
bilities and, what is more, could demonstrate that his own pagan god had
triumphed over the God of his Christian adversary.
II. OUTSIDE THE LIMES
The disestablishment of Monophysitism within the Byzantine Empire and the
subsequent persecutions of its clerics forced the movement to seek refuge out-
side imperial limits. In so doing it scored new victories that offset its losses
within Oriens. Its victories were spectacular in the area of the Red Sea which,
during this reign and that of Justinian, 41 became a Monophysite lake. So
paradoxically, it was Justin's ecclesiastical policy that led to this extraordinary
Monophysite expansion in this Afro-Asian region.
The Arab areas affected by this Monophysite mission outside the limes
were mainly three: (1) 1:Iijaz in western Arabia; (2) I:Ii:ra of the Lakhmids, on
the middle Euphrates; (3) and South Arabia. The first, to which, it has been
argued, the Ghassanids most probably withdrew, has been analyzed in Chap-
ter II. 42 Their presence in 1:Iijaz must have conduced to the spread of Mono-
physitism in that region during the reign of Justin. What needs a slightly
more detailed treatment is the discussion of the other two areas that were
affected: Lakhmid 1:fi:ra and South Arabia.
39 On these events in South Arabia, see Martyrs, passim; on Yiisufs letters to Mungir, see
ibid., 114-22, 128-31.
40 Procopius, History, 11.xxviii.13.
41 When Nubia was Christianized by the Monophysite missionary Julian, thus uniting
Egypt and Ethiopia, already won to the Monophysite cause; see Frend, Rise, 287-303.
42 See BASIC 1.1, 38-39.
I:Iira and Ramla
If the position of the Monophysites was untenable in Byzantium, it was
equally so in Sasanid Persia where, since the Council of Seleucia in 488,
Nestorianism had been established as the acceptable form of Christianity. The
Nestorians and the Monophysites were inveterate enemies. Yet at the confer-
ence of Ramla, ca. 520, the Monophysites were represented. Technically that
conference was held for negotiating the return of two Roman soldiers that
Murnjir had captured in one of his raids against Oriens. The Byzantine ambas-
sador was Abraham, a veteran diplomat whose family had served Byzantium
before in the reign of Anastasius. Among other things, the conference was
remarkable for the number of ecclesiastics that took part in it. 43 What is
relevant here is to follow the fortunes of Monophysitism at this conference.
Simeon of Beth-Arsham, the celebrated Monophysite bishop, obviously
represented the Monophysites in Persia at the conference. From his letter
comes the intelligence that Abraham himself, the ambassador of Justin to
Mungir, was either a Monophysite at heart or a crypto-Monophysite. 44 The
ambassador whom the last Christian king of South Arabia had sent to Mungir,
before his reign was terminated by Yusuf of South Arabia, must also have
been a Monophysite since that was the doctrinal persuasion of that country.
What is most remarkable is that one of the courtiers or friends of Mungir
himself was a Monophysite by the name of 1:Iajjaj, the Angaios of the Mar-
tyrium Arethae. 45
The Chronicle of Sa'ard states that in the theological dispute between
Shilas, the Nestorian Catholicus, and the Monophysites who had fled from
Byzantium, 1:Iajjaj helped the Monophysites. 46 The implication of the descrip-
tion of 1:Iajjaj is that Monophysitism still maintained some presence even at
the Lakhmid court in l:Iira. This ties in well with the efforts of Philoxenus
and Severus, the two Monophysite ecclesiastics during the reign of Anastasius,
to win over the rulers of I:Iira to Monophysitism. 47
43 This conference has been treated in great detail by the present writer in "Byzantino-
arabica: The Conference of Ramla, A.O. 524" JNES 33 (1964), 115-31 (hereafter "Ramla"). For
the resetting of its chronology, see the section on the conference, BASIC 1.1, 40-42 . Ramla,
according to the letter of Simeon of Bech-Arsham, was at a distance of ten days journey south-
east of }::lira; see "Ramla," 121 note 26.
44 Ibid ., 119 note 23.
45 Ibid.,
117-18.
46 Ibid., 117, where it was said that he was either a Monophysite or a Dyophysite; after a
reexamination of the text of the Chronicle, I am now inclined to think he was definitely a
Monoghysite.
7 The presence of a Monophysite at the court of Mungir could also explain why the
Christian king of South Arabia had sent an ambassador to Mungir, possibly concerning the
condition of the Monophysites in }::lira. }::lajjaj may have been known in South Arabia, and
would have helped their cause with Mungir.
That the Monophysites were not altogether unwelcome in }:Iira could
derive support from another statement in the Chronicle of Sa 'ard, that the
Monophysites of Byzantium expelled by Justin found their way to }:Iira where,
however, they did not tarry long. 48 That a Christian group, expelled from
Byzantium, could make its way to a city whose ruler was known for his anti-
Christian outbursts seems surprising, but not when it is recalled that the
Monophysites maintained some presence in Persia, to the point of having a
friend at the court of Mungir himself. 49
More important than the Monophysite presence in }:Iira is what the
Chronicle says on the specific theological cast of these Monophysites who
flocked to }:Iira after being expelled by Justin, namely, that they were fol-
lowers of Julian the Phantasiast.
50 The Chronicle indicates that after their short
stay in }:Iira where they were not accepted, they proceeded to Najran where
they sowed the seeds of Julianism, a matter of some importance to under-
standing the history of Christianity in South Arabia and of the various Chris-
tian confessions that prevailed in that region.
South Arabia
While the Monophysites were being persecuted within the empire in the
reign of Justin, they were also persecuted in South Arabia and, what is more,
literally massacred, as the result of a change in the religious orientation of the
}:Iimyarite kingdom of South Arabia. Simeon of Beth-Arsham heard the news
accidentally while he was at the conference of Ramla, and he spread the word
in the Christian Orient and tried to organize a crusade against South Arabia
for the relief of its Christians. This extraordinary course of events led to a joint
Ethiopian-Byzantine expedition, and the outcome was a complete victory that
returned South Arabia to the Christian fold. 51 The following observations may
be made on the victory scored by Monophysitism in South Arabia. 52
48 See Histoire Nestorienne, 143-44 .
49 In a primary Syriac source, Simeon speaks of his having baptized Af'ii, one of the
l:Iimyarices, in the Church of the Monophysices in l:IIra; The Book of the lfimyarites, ed. and
trans. A. Moberg (Lund, 1924), p. cxv. So there was a Monophysice church in l:IIra ca. 520, to
which may be related Severus' letter mentioned in a previous chapter, above, 706-9 .
50 Histoire Nestorienne, 144.
H Because of their location and their belonging co the world of the southern Semites,
these events chat cook place in South Arabia tend co be forgotten as relevant co Monophysitism
in general and to Byzantine Oriens in particular. le is a pity that The Martyrs of Najran, which
drew attention co these events and placed chem in the mainstream of Near Eastern history and
chat of Oriens Chriscianus, was not available co Frend when he wrote Rise, which appeared
almost simultaneously in 1972. Omission of reference co these events was noted by Father
Michel van Esbroeck in his review of this work; see AB 91 (1973), 443. le should be noted
chat Zacharia, the primary Syriac source for the reign of Justin, is aware of the place of South
Arabia in the history of Monophysicism, since he devotes a very long chapter co it-the letter
of Simeon of Bech-Arsham; see Zacharia, HE, Book VIII, chap. 3, versio, pp. 43-52.
52 The present writer has examined these events in detail in three works: Martyrs,
A
1. Although Justin was a zealous Chalcedonian, he could not but re-
spond positively to the appeal for help and participation in the South Arabian
crusade. A Byzantine fleet transported the Ethiopian expeditionary force, led
by Negus Caleb (Ella-A~be):ta), to South Arabia. 53
2. South Arabia emerged as a new Monophysite power in the Red Sea
area. This was a great gain for the persecuted church within Byzantium since
it could now count South Arabia in addition to Ethiopia as states whose con-
fession was Monophysitism.
3. As a Christian state, South Arabia endured for about fifty years until
the Persian occupation. So for half a century that country remained a bastion
of Monophysitism and a sphere of influence for Chalcedonian Byzantium in
the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea area. The expedition clinched the
Ethiopian-Byzantine friendly relationship which had started with the conver-
sion of Ethiopia to Christianity. Now the two powers, Chalcedonian Byzan-
tium and Monophysite Ethiopia, engaged in a joint crusade, and this put the
seal on their alliance which continued for a long time to come.
4. Ecclesiastically, South Arabia witnessed a resurgence of the faith, with
churches built or rebuilt, a new and developed hierarchy, and an episcopate. 54
It even became a distinguished Monophysite region, the country of Mono-
physite martyrs who died for their faith, a special category of martyrs, since
their martyrdom took place after the Peace of the Church. The Monophysite
church persecuted by the Dyophysites was now a church of Christian martyrs
whom even Dyophysite Byzantium venerated.
5. Finally, and as far as the Arabs are concerned, the victory of Mono-
physitism and the Ethiopian army in South Arabia tipped the scales in the
struggle for Arabia between Judaism and Christianity in favor of the latter. 55
"Ramla," and "Byzantium in South Arabia," DOP 33 (1979), 233-94. The reader is referred to
these works for detailed discussion of the events. The observations in this volume are, therefore,
deliberately brief and are presented in order to complete the picture in this chapter devoted to
the ecclesiastical history of Arab-Byzantine relations during the reign of Justin I. More will be
said on these events in BASIC II.
S3 See "Ramla," 128-30.
54 See "Byzantium in South Arabia," 35-53, 59-60 .
55 The abundance of anti-Semitic sentiments in Byzantine literature in the 6th and 7th
centuries may in part be referred to these events in which Christians were massacred by the
Judaizing king of l:limyar; to these may be added the course of the Persian-Byzantine conflict
which flared up in the reign of every emperor of the 6th century and the early 7th, after a lull
throughout the 5th century. In these wars the Jews sided with the Persians. Finally, the
occupation of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 may be added in view of the massacre, real or
fictitious, that was trumpeted by Strategius, the monk of St. Sabas, who recorded the capture
of Jerusalem by the Persians. For the latest on Byzantine anti-Semitism, see G. Dagron and V.
Deroche, "Juifs et chretiens dans !'Orient du VIie siecle," TM 11 (1991), 17-273, and the
valuable introduction; also V. Deroche, "La polemique anti-judai"que au Vie et au VIie siecle:
Un memento inedit, !es Kephalaia," ibid., 275-311.
For a century before the rise of Islam, Christianity, not Judaism, became the
dominant monotheistic faith in Arabia. Christian South Arabia became the
center of radiation for the Christian faith among the Arabs of pre-Islamic
Arabia. The chief martyrion in Najriin, the Ka'ba of Najriin, became a great
pilgrimage center for the Christians of the Arabian Peninsula for a century,
until the emigration of the Najranites to the Fertile Crescent during the ca-
liphate of Omar. 56
B
The aforementioned gains that resulted from the smashing Monophysite
victory in South Arabia were substantial. But most relevant here is the rela-
tion of that victory to the fortunes of the Arabs within the empire, especially
the Ghassiinids, the foederati of Byzantium in the sixth century. Although they
did not participate in the South Arabian crusade, 57 the martyrdoms in that
region affected them deeply throughout their long relationship with Byzan-
tium.
1. Although the martyrdoms affected many localities in South Arabia, it
was Najriin, the Arab city in the predominantly Sabaean/1:Iimyarite south,
that bore the brunt of the conflict. Najriin had already become the center of
Christianity in South Arabia long before the martyrdoms, and that was con-
firmed during the reign of Anastasius through the inception of its episcopate,
whose first incumbent was consecrated by Philoxenus of Hierapolis. Najran's
privileged place is reflected in the fact that the saint whose feast the universal
church celebrates on 24 October was not a 1:Iimyarite but an Arab from Na-
jran, in fact its sayyid, St. Arethas, al-1:Iarith ibn-Ka'b, and so was the woman
martyr Ruhayma, who is also venerated together with Arethas and the Na-
jranites. 58
2. The Ghassanids were Arabs as the Najranites were; moreover, they
were related to the Najranites in the larger context of descent from South
Arab ancestry, since they had hailed from South Arabia before they finally
settled within the limes and became foederati of Byzantium. A previous chapter
has even indicated that the Ghassanids were probably involved in winning
over the Najranites to the Monophysite confession. Finally, the Ghassiinids
were related to the Najranites not only in the larger context of South Arab
56 See "Byzantium in South Arabia," 69-80.
57 Byzantium naturally thought of the Blemmyes and the Nobadae who were closer to the
South Arabian scene than the Ghassanids; "Ramla," 130; besides, these had withdrawn from
the service of Byzantium and were most probably then seeded in northern l:lijaz.
58 The feast of Sc. Arethas in the Roman marcyrology is 24 October; see DHGE, Ill, s.v.
Arethas, 1 (col. 1650). On Arechas and Ruhayma, see Martyn; these saints may be added to the
shore list of Arab saints which includes Cosmas and Damian, and also Moses of the 4th century.
Ruhayma of Najriin emerges as the first woman Arab saint.
descent, but in the narrower context of belonging to the Azd group. 59 Hence
these martyrs in South Arabia were not only fellow Arabs in a general sense
but also their immediate relatives, their cousins.
3. The Ghassanids, an Arab military aristocracy that had hewn its way
through the Arabian Peninsula, settled within the Roman limes, on Roman
territory, and were christianized. For more than a century they became the
zealous champions of the Monophysite church and even endured misfortunes
and also betrayals on the part of the central government because of their faith.
The phenomenon needs an explanation . The old Arab concepts of wafii' and
walii' only partly explain their staunch support . The full explanation becomes
available when the martyrdoms of their cousins in Najran are recalled. The
Ghassanids are no longer only a military aristocracy attached to the Christian
faith. They are now utterly committed to Christianity and its Monophysite
variation because they are now related to the martyrs who laid down their
lives for the faith, whose sayyid, al-1:farith ibn-Ka'b, appears in the Christian
calendar as St. Arethas, and whose martyrion in Najran had become a great
pilgrimage center. This is the key to understanding the strong Christian com-
mitment of the Ghassanids throughout this century of christological contro-
versies and to explaining their dedication to the Monophysite cause through-
out the sixth century. Although their conversion to Monophysitism during
the reign of Anastasius had laid the foundation for their attachment to the
Monophysite cause, it was the martyrdoms of their relatives in Najran during
the reign of Justin that raised it to a much higher power and that sustained
them throughout the sixth century after the house of Justin returned Byzan-
tium to the Chalcedonian fold.
C
In the course of these convulsions that characterized the reign of Justin,
two figures dominate the scene of the Monophysite struggle for existence:
Simeon of Beth-Arsham, the dedicated Monophysite bishop who stirred
Oriens Christianus and Byzantium for the South Arabian crusade, and Jabala,
the king and phylarch of the Ghassiinidfoederati. The role of the first is clearer
59 The Arabs of Najran belonged in their tribal affiliation co Banii al-J:Iarich ibn-Ka'b
(Ba!J:iarich). See BAFIC, 400-401, where it was argued chat these were Azdices as the
Ghassanids were. In addition co the testimony of Ibn Sa'id, Ibn Khaldiin, and al-Mas'udi for
the Azdice affiliation of BalJ:iarich (BAFIC, 400 note 4), there is the contemporary and decisive
testimony of J:Iassan ibn-Thabic, the poet of the Ghassanids. He was an Azdice from Medina,
and consequently related to the Azdite Ghassanids. In one of his poems he addresses a clan of
BalJ:iarich and refers co the faa that it has the same tribal affiliation as his; see Diwan ff.assan
ibn-Thifbit, ed. W. 'Arafat, Gibb Memorial Series (London, 1971), I, 355.
The Sabaic inscription referred co in BAFIC, 400, presents a problem chat will be dis-
cussed in BASIC II. Bue the Azdice affiliation of BalJ:iarich is established without it.
than that of the second, but both were related to Byzantium: the first through
his journey to the Golan heights to invoke the aid of Jabala and through his
exhortation of clerics within Byzantium to use their influence with Justin for
helping their brethren in South Arabia; the second by showing his loyalty to
Monophysitism and withdrawing from the service of Byzantium. While in
northern }:Iijaz, Jabala also contributed indirectly to the success of the South
Arabian crusade by watching over Jewish settlements there, thus preventing
them from extending assistance to the Judaizing }:Iimyarite ruler of South
Arabia.
III. APPENDIX
The Four Hundred Virgins
The account of the four hundred nuns or virgins abducted by Mungir, discussed above
in the section "Mungir and Christianity," presents some textual problems .
A
It is not quite clear whether these women were nuns or maidens, and arguments
may be given supporting either reading.' In support of their being virgins, it may be
said that the most common term for nuns is dayrata, but the author, Zacharia, uses
batulatha,2 which literally means "virgins" but can also mean "nuns." On the other
hand, a case can be made for their being nuns: ( 1) if Zacharia had in mind only
maidens and not cloistered maidens he might have used the word 'faimta which can
mean only maidens, and indeed John of Ephesus uses this term in connection with an
episode not unlike this one. 3 Furthermore, the large number, four hundred, could
argue in the same direction. It suggests that the place of worship from which Mungir
captured them is likely to have been a convent rather than a church, since if it was the
latter it must have been an exceptionally large one to have contained worshipers of all
ages and both sexes from which Mungir singled out four hundred maidens for his
barbarity. And it would have been perfectly consonant with this barbarity to have
chosen for his sacrifice to al- 'Uzza not merely maidens but the nuns of a convent.
The number four hundred sounds suspiciously large. Perhaps, as has been sug-
gested, it was only forty. 4 But Zacharia goes out of his way to give his authority for
this figure, the anchorite Dada, who had seen the massacre with his own eyes.
B
In the Latin version of Zacharia, the four hundred maidens were captured "de
coetu Thomae apostoli Emesae. "' The translation of the Syriac term d'ams which
1 Vasiliev, for example, (Justin, 277) considered them "maidens."
2 Zacharia, HE, texms, p. 78, line l.
3 John of Ephesus, Historia Ecclesiastica,
CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3, vol. 3 textus, p.
293, line 19.
4 J. Henninger, "Menschenopfer bei den Arabern," Anthropos (1958), 734-38.
5 Zacharia, HE, versio, p. 53, line 14.
comes after "the apostle Thomas" presents a problem. 6 Brooks and Chabot both trans-
lated it "Emesa," the name of the well-known city in Phoenicia. But Emesa in Syriac
is normally spelled quite differently (l;iims), and the author had used this orthography
in referring to Emesa in the same passage that speaks of the four hundred virgins.
Michael the Syrian has dimyiis ' instead of the d'ams of Zacharia, and it is of course
Greek &Jwi;, carnife x publicus, the executioner. This makes sense, and the sentence
would thus be translated : "and the four hundred virgins/nuns who were captured from
the congregation of Thomas the Apostle, the public executioner sacrificed in one day
in honor of al-'Uzza." Demios (6iJwi;) would be a suitable term which expresses the
disgust of the ecclesiastical historian for the butchering of four hundred nuns or vir-
gins.
In spite of the case that can be made for demios as the correct reading, an alterna-
tive emendation is possible, called for by the realization that the name of a city or
locality is expected after the phrase "the congregation of the apostle Thomas" in order
to specify where the abduction took place, although the church may have been so well
known to the local or regional historian and to his readers that no such specification
was necessary. There is an Emisa mentioned in the lists of convents in Syria and
commented upon by Littmann and Honigmann, and it may be what Zacharia had in
mind . 9 A monastery is mentioned in connection with this locality, and geographically
it is located between Antioch and Chalcis, the area into which Mungir had carried his
invasion.
6 Ibid., textus, p. 78, line 2.
7 See Chronique, II, p. 271, middle column, line 16.
8 On its possible application to another figure associated with anti-Christian outbursts and
a contemporary of Mungir's, namely, Yiisuf, the l::limyarite king of South Arabia, see Martyrs,
265.
9 See E. Honigmann, "Nordsyrische Kloster in vorarabischer Zeit ," Zeitschrift fiir Semitistik
1 (Leipzig, 1922), 23 note 25; E. Littmann, "Zur Topographic der Antiochene and Apamene,"
ibid., 174.
XI
The Reign of Justinian (527-565)
INTRODUCTION
T
he reign of Justinian was the longest in the sixth century and witnessed
momentous developments in the history of the Monophysite movement
and of the Ghassanid involvement in it. Before embarking on a discussion of
this complex involvement, some attention should be paid to the attitudes of
the new emperor toward the movement. 1
' The reign may be divided into three phases with regard to imperial
relations with Monophysitism. (1) In the first phase, 527-536, the contro-
versy raged round the Theopaschite formula: "One of the Holy Trinity has
suffered in the flesh." (2) In the second phase, 536-553, the controversy
centered round the "Three Chapters." (3) In the third phase, 553-565, Jus-
tinian tried to enforce the decisions of the Council of Constantinople. The
emperor was a serious "theologian," a strict Chalcedonian who was genuinely
interested in solving the Monophysite problem in the East. His theological
convictions as a Chalcedonian and his imperial designs allied him more with
the West than the East: it was a Roman pope, Leo, not an Alexandrian nor an
Antiochene patriarch, that had formulated the Chakedonian doctrine; impe-
rial designs meant the reconquest of the Roman Occident; and he himself
came from the Balkans, from Dardania in Illyricum. 2 Yet, in spite of this,
Justinian had a soft spot for Monophysitism and tried to solve the problem it
presented throughout his long life. There were special considerations that in-
fluenced him to give this privileged treatment to Monophysitism. When he
came to power, Justinian was in effective territorial control of the Roman
Orient, not the Occident, and this was full of Monophysites. Further, one of
the four patriarchates of the Orient, that of Alexandria, had as its incumbent a
1 For Justinian and the Monophysites in general, see Frend, Rise, 255-95; also the short
account of John Meyendorff in the more recent work with its relevant and challenging title,
Imperial Unity and Christian Division, in the series The Church in History (New York, 1989),
221-30, 235-45.
2 See the Jong argument on his origins and place of birth in Vasiliev,Justin,
43-49.
The Reign of Justinian 735
Monophysite, Timothy (517-535), and Egypt, an important province for By-
zantium, was strongly Monophysite. Finally, his own consort, Theodora, was
a Monophysite and intervened at nearly every turn to protect the interests and
leaders of the movement.
A
I. INTRODUCTION
For a clearer understanding of the Ghassanids' role in the Monophysite move-
ment during this first period, it is best to divide it into two parts . The first 3
extends from 527 to 532. It opens with an edict attacking the heretics and
includes fulminations or anathemas against such figures as Eutyches and Apol-
linaris, but leaves out Severus and the Ghassanids . It also excludes the Arian
Goths in the West who, unlike the Saracen allies, are mentioned expressly by
name. The policy of reconciling the Monophysites reached its climax in 5 31
and in the following years. In 5 31 the emperor halted the persecution of the
Monophysites and issued an edict allowing the Monophysite monks to return
from exile. In 532 he convened a conference in Constantinople which, how-
ever, was unsuccessful in resolving theological differences.
The second period 4 extends from 532 to 535/36, a time of truce with the
Monophysites, during which the emperor, trying to unite the differing reli-
gious factions, issued two decrees on theological matters that came up at the
conference. He emphasized his Theopaschite formula which represented the
ultimate effort of compromise with the Monophysites . The climax of this
period 5 was reached in 535/36 when Monophysitism seemed to score a signal
triumph. Severus, who had refused the invitation to attend the conference of
532, came to Constantinople either in the winter of 534/35 or in September
535, and was received by the emperor. But this great triumph was followed
almost immediately by a resounding defeat for the movement.
With Theodora's help, Monophysites were installed in the patriarchates
of Constantinople and Alexandria . With the death of Timothy of Alexandria,
the see of St. Mark was finally filled, in 535, by Theodosius, who had been a
deacon, and Severus' letters reassured him of his canonicity . With the death of
Epiphanius in Constantinople, Anthimus was consecrated patriarch of that
see, and the two newly elected patriarchs communicated with each other. This
3 Frend, Rise, 255-67 .
4 Ibid., 267-70.
5 Ibid., 270- 71.
was the result of a collaboration between the influential empress, Theodora,
and the chief Monophysite figure, Severus, in the capital itself.
II. EARLY GHASSA.NID-IMPERIAL CONTACTS: JUSTINIAN AND THEODORA
The sources are silent on the ecclesiastical fortunes of the Ghassanids in this
decade or so, unlike their political and military roles, which were well noticed
in the sources. The accidents of survival must be the explanation for this
silence, since a few years after the end of this decade (the first phase), Arethas,
the Ghassanid supreme phylarch, arrived in Constantinople and scored an out-
standing victory-the ordination of the two bishops, Jacob and Theodore,
which changed the course of Monophysite history . Arethas continued to be a
force in the movement until his death in 569. His appearance around 540 in
Constantinople could not possibly have been without a background of involve-
ment in the Monophysite movement in the preceding years, and the same
must be said of his father who served Justinian for some two years before his
death at the battle of Thanniiris in 528. Thus it is important to examine this
decade in order to understand the involvement of the Ghassanids in Mono-
physitiSill and their role in Justinian's scheme of things.
The first and last years of this phase, 527 and 536, witnessed two Justin-
ianic decrees against the heretics . The first did not mention living Mono-
physite "heretics" such as Severus but anathematized Eutyches and others,
while the second, in much stronger terms, fulminated against the Mono-
physites and singled them out, mentioning their leaders by name, especially
Severus. How, then, did Arethas and the Ghassanid royal house thrive in this
period and succeed in keeping their prestige and influence in Constantinople
with the central government? And how did they, shortly after, engineer a coup
in the capital that brought about the ordination of the two bishops, a crucial
development in the history of Monophysitism? The answer to these questions
must be sought in the attitude of the royal couple, Justinian and Theodora.
Something has already been said on this subject in a previous chapter 6 in the
context of political and military history, but it deserves a full treatment here
in this part on ecclesiastical history to which it properly belongs.
Justinian
There were many factors that were operative and that may explain Justin-
ian's tolerance, even friendliness, toward the Ghassanids and Arethas. His
apprenticeship to statecraft and preparation for his future role during the reign
of his uncle Justin, when he was the de facto ruler of the empire, prepared
him for accepting the Ghassanids. During the reign of Justin, two series of
events took place that were relevant to this attitude. The }::limyarite-Ethiopian
6 See BASIC 1.1, 68, 319-20 .
war in South Arabia drew his attention co the importance of Monophysicism
in the Red Sea area and the Arabian Peninsula, at lease western Arabia, and
the Ghassanids were part of that Afro-Arabian world. Byzantium had impor-
tant relations with that region, and the emperor himself initiated an am-
bitious and imaginative Afro-Arabian policy which was reflected in the em-
bassy of Julian around 530. The Ghassanids belonged to that world, and
Justinian understood their relevance.
Closer to home than the events in South Arabia were the raids of Mungir
against Oriens, 7 made possible by the withdrawal of the Ghassiinids from the
service. The exposed Roman limes could be protected effectively against the
tactics of an enemy such as the Lakhmid Mungir only by the Ghassanids.
Justinian witnessed all these events while he waited to succeed to the throne.
When he did become emperor, he did so already prepared co solve the Ghas-
siinid problem since he could not afford to have the most efficient federate
army in Oriens inactive. And it was not difficult for him to reject Mono-
physite theologians and accept Monophysite soldiers. The events in South
Arabia provided precedents. Justin, the Chalcedonian, sent a fleet that trans-
ported the Ethiopian army of the Monophysite Negus, Ella-A~be):ia
8 -a
case
of Monophysite-Dyophysite military cooperation and a precedent that could
easily be repeated in his reign. The Arian Goths in the Roman Occident also
provided him with a parallel to the situation in the Orient. Justinian had
exempted them from his decree of 527, although he damned them as heretics.
And so in this sense also the Ghassanids became the Germans of the East in
this ecclesiastical context .
Justinian's decision to accommodate the Ghassiinids as soon as he as-
cended the throne 9 was strengthened by the outbreak of the Persian war after a
long lull since the peace with Persia during the reign of Anastasius in 506.
For one who had designs to recover the West, Justinian could ill afford a
Persian war in the East without the participation of the powerful federate
army of the Ghassanids. He had a personal acquaintance with the eastern front
since, during his uncle's reign, he was strategos,
10 and it is possible that he met
Jabala or Arethas then or heard about them.
The emperor's decision to come to terms with the Ghassanids was fully
justified by events. The Ghassanids acquitted themselves remarkably well in
the first Persian war, and Justinian sent his ambassador Julian ca. 530 on his
7 Ibid., 79-82.
8 See Martyrs, 203-4,
and "Conference of Ramla," 128-29.
9 Just as his strong anti-Monophysite reaction in 536 was apparently related in part to his
designs on Italy and the capture of Rome, as suspected by Bury, HLRE, 378, and Frend, Rise,
272-75 .
10 See Procopius, History, l.xii .21.
historic mission to the Afro-Arabian world. If Arethas came to Constantinople
for the investiture after he was made basi/eus, Justinian would certainly have
met him. Judging from a well-known passage in John of Ephesus about the
impression Arethas made on Justin II later in the century, n he would have
impressed Justinian even more, since he was younger and more vigorous.
Justinian must have been convinced that this was his man in Oriens to watch
over the Roman frontier, and this can explain his unwavering support for him
until his death in spite of Arethas' Monophysitism and the calumnies of the
chief historian of the reign.
Finally, a most important factor in Justinian's thinking about Arethas
and the Ghassanids must have been Theodora herself, the bulwark of Mono-
physitism in the capital and at the court, the seat of power. Her support must
have begun even before Justinian's elevation to the throne in 527. While she
continued to support Monophysitism after 527, she must also be considered
one of the factors that were operative in Justinian's attitude even before his
elevation to the throne.
Theodora
The influence of Theodora on Justinian, especially as far as the Mono-
physite movement is concerned, is well known. Therefore, this section will
treat only her possible early contacts and relations with Arethas and the
Ghassanids, which must be the key to her support of the former's extraordin-
ary mission in Constantinople around 540. As the Monophysite empress,
Theodora was well aware of the situation in the Byzantine Orient, which she
had learned of before her marriage to Justinian. She must have been aware of
the Ghassanid presence as a Monophysite army. But personal contacts or inter-
est in the supreme phylarch, Arethas, who came to her around 540 and
through her succeeded in procuring the historic ordinations, must have ex-
isted quite early in his career. She may have met him personally, possibly when
he came for his investiture as king around 530. 12 Alternatively, influential
Monophysites may have drawn her attention to the central and crucial position
of Arethas in reviving and protecting the Monophysite movement.
Theodora and Severus. Charles Diehl suggested that Severus (who preached
especially to women) and Patriarch Timothy exercised a salutary influence on
Theodora while she was still in Egypt and before she met Justinian.
13 This is
II BASIC 1.1, 287, 338.
12 When exactly Arethas came for his investiture as baJi/euJ
is not clear. His appointment
took place in 529 in the middle of the Persian war. It is likely that the journey to Constantino-
ple was postponed until after the end of the war, in which he was heavily involved as the
commander of the foederati. The period 5 3 2- 5 5 5 must have been an appropriate one; there was
the Endless Peace with Persia and the truce with the Monophysites.
13 C. Diehl, Byzantine Emprme.r, trans. H. Bell and T. de Kerpely (London, 1964), 49.
an attractive suggestion, and it may be supported by the letter preserved in
Zacharia concerning Severus' journey to Constantinople in the early 5 30s.
Justinian 's invitation to Severus, "the arch-heretic," who was deposed as soon
as the house of Justin came to power, could only have been at the instance of
Theodora. A strong affirmative statement on her interest in him is contained
in Severus' own letter to the monks and priests of Oriens, after he was de-
nounced and exiled again, where he describes her as the "Christ-worshipping
queen."
14 When he finally came to Constantinople in 535, he again met Theo-
dora, now the empress. As has been indicated earlier, this was the year that
witnessed the triumph of Monophysitism in the capital, during which Sev-
erus, the great administrator, almost arranged the Monophysite takeover of
Oriens with the exception of the see of Antioch. It is consonant with this
achievement that he should have drawn the attention of the empress to the
Ghassanids and to Arethas as pivotal for the further progress of Monophysit-
ism in Oriens; and if Arethas was himself, too, in the capital sometime in the
early 530s, this would have established personal contact between empress and
phylarch in addition to the recommendations of Severus.
Severus and the Ghassanids. Severus was exiled in 518, some ten years
before Arethas appeared on the scene of Arab-Byzantine relations. But he
knew Jabala, his father, during his patriarchate over Antioch from 513 to
518, and he would have known about the Ghassanid withdrawal from the
service during the reign of Justin. News of the extraordinary Basi/eia of Are-
thas around 530 would have reached the Monophysite world in Egypt, where
Severus was living in exile. This must have aroused Severus' interest in the
services of the Ghassanids as protectors of Monophysitism. Monophysite
clerics including Severus and Philoxenus are known to have approached Near
Eastern rulers in order to seek their protection for the Monophysite church.
Philoxenus wrote to Abu Ya'fur of l:IIra, as did Severus himself to the
Lakhmid Mungir. 15 It is only natural that Severus should have thought of the
Ghassanids as protectors of the movement in Oriens, his own patriarchate,
and that he should have conveyed this to Theodora personally when he was in
Constantinople in 5 3 5.
Simeon of Beth-Arm.am and Theodora. The indefatigable Monophysite
bishop of Beth-Arsham in Sasanid Persia must be mentioned in this context .
Even more than Severus, he was involved in ecclesiastical diplomacy and ap-
proaches to the rulers of the Near East in the interest of his confession, such as
14 The Severus-Theodora connection is recorded by Zacharia, HE, lX.19, versio, p. 93,
lines 1- 7. In a touching tribute to Theodora, Severus, in his letters to the monks of Oriens,
speaks of how the empress protected him and how the monks of Oriens had prayed that she
would protect Severus; ibid., versio, p. 95, lines 30-32 .
15 See above, 702-9 .
the Lakhmid king Mungir, Emperor Anastasius, the Persian king Kawad,
Jabala, the Ghassanid king, and the Negus of Ethiopia. He also visited the
Monophysite kingdoms of the Near East in the 5 30s and is therefore likely to
have visited Arethas in Ghassanland in Oriens, as he had visited his father,
Jabala, at Jabiya around 520 when he invoked his aid during the crisis in
South Arabia. 16 His biographer, John of Ephesus, says that his last journey
was to Constantinople, sometime in the 530s, where he established contact
with Theodora. It is not entirely clear exactly when during that decade he
visited Constantinople . If it was in 536 when Anthimus was still patriarch of
Constantinople, he would have added his voice to that of Severus in support of
the latter's interest in the Ghassanids as prospective protectors of the strug-
gling Monophysite church in Oriens. If he visited Constantinople in the sec-
ond half of the decade, he would have done so 17 in the midst of the persecu-
tion unleashed by Justinian against the Monophysites whose instrument m
Oriens was Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch .
Perhaps the foregoing paragraphs have marshaled enough evidence to
explain how a soldier (Arethas) in Oriens suddenly appears around the year
540 in Constantinople and comes back to Oriens after having achieved an
outstanding success in the matter of the ordination of the two bishops Jacob
and Theodore. Theodora gave her unqualified support to a man whom she
must already have learned of, who was recommended to her by the highest
authorities of the Monophysite church-Severus of Antioch and Simeon of
Beth-Arsham .
III. THE GHASSANID EPISCOPATE
The sources are also silent on the Ghassanid ecclesiastical organization in this
first phase, but not for the reign of Justin nor around 540 when bishops of the
Ghassanids or the Arabs are mentioned, namely, John of Evaria and Theodore .
So the question arises as to whether or not they had a bishop in this first phase
after their return to the service in 527.
Their last bishop, it has been argued, was most probably John of Evaria,
18
who was among the bishops exiled in 519. He could not have been their
bishop after their return since the sources say that he died in exile in I:Iarlan.
Presumably the Ghassanids remained without a bishop but were ministered to
by lower ranking clerics, priests, and deacons. Yet in the Monophysite litera-
twe of the period there is the Life of John of Tel/a, written by John of Ephesus, 19
16 See Martyn, 161-64 .
17 In addition to what John of Ephesus says about the motive for the visit, involving the
church in Persia itself.
18 See above, 717-22 .
19 John of Ephesus, Life of John of Tel/a, PO 18 (Paris, 1924), pp. 513-26, especially pp.
515-19 .
in which he discusses the problem of ordinations around 5 30; the complaints
of the faithful about the thinning ranks of the clerics; the reluctance of the
bishops to undertake ordination out of fear; the attitude of Severus himself
0
who made cautious recommendations concerning the ordination of priests and
deacons; and finally how John of Tella won the day and engaged in ordina-
tions to which came candidates from distant places including Phoenicia. 21
The Ghassanids must have been involved in this. Phoenicia was not far
from Arabia, the headquarters of the Ghassanids, and with the extension of
the authority of Arethas, by the conferment of the Basileia in 529, his phy-
larchal jurisdiction must have come closer to Tella and its zealous bishop,
John, who most probably ordained some clerics for the Ghassanids. The mat-
ter is of some importance since the Ghassanid phylarch on whose involvement
in Monophysite theology and ecclesiastical organization the sources are silent,
or at least not explicitly informative, in this phase suddenly appears in the
second phase heavily involved in both . The Ghassanids and their phylarch
must have become involved in this first phase, and thus its elucidation pro-
vides an appropriate background for dealing with the Ghassanid role in the
history of the Monophysite movement in the second phase, which opens in the
year 536 with Justinian's novel against Severus and Monophysitism.
IV. THE MONOPHYSITE CONFESSIONS OF FAITH
If the sources are not explicitly informative on Arethas in this phase, they
most probably contain an implied reference to him, and a most important one
at that. In the Life of Simeon, the Bishop (of Beth-Arsham), John of Ephesus
speaks of Simeon's travels in the Monophysite world in order to refute the
Nestorian contention that their confession was the prevalent one in Christen-
dom;22 after his travels, he returns to Persia with the profession of faith of
various Christian communities and peoples written in their own languages, and
these were certainly not Nestorian confessions. Because of the extreme impor-
tance of this passage in John of Ephesus and the specificity that pervades it, it
is important to quote it in extenso.
The good and merciful God therefore, who does not fail to reward zeal
for his name, on seeing the man's purpose of mind and his zeal, and that
he underwent weariness no less than that of the apostles without shrink-
20 Frend, Riie, 260-61.
21 As explained by the editor and translator of the Life, E. W. Brooks, this was Phoenicia
Maritima; see ibid., 512 note 2.
22 An echo of this rivalry between the Monophysites and the Nestorians at the court of the
Persian king Kawad and the attempt of each to prove that theirs was the true and best faith is
reflected in Hiitoire Neitorienne (p. 126) where, of course, the Nestorians win this confessional
contest and Kawad likes theirs best.
ing, himself also bestowed upon him in no less degree than upon them
his gift that was given to the apostles, of speaking with new tongues.
For, whatever people's country he entered, on the third day that came he
would speak with them in their own tongue, thanking God who had
visited him . And so also he even delivered an exposition in the chancel
(~ija) in the churches of all the peoples to whom he went; and on this
account he would declare and say to us with tears, "In this matter I
recognised clearly that God had visited me and strengthened me, and
that he had not withheld his grace and his mercy from me. " But he
reflected, "What parchments (X,UQ'tl'l;) and what rolls are capable of
going through all this wear of long and protracted journeys through the
countries without being torn to pieces?" And for this reason, and in
order that the certainty of the writing might remain without suspicion of
alteration, he made great linen cloths and medicated them, so that they
might take writing, which also will, I think, be preserved by the be-
lievers in the land of the Persians for ever; and on them he would accord-
ingly write the belief of every people in their own language from their
archbishops, and above the belief he affixed the seals of the king of that
people and of the bishops of the same and of their chief men in lead upon
these cloths, and thus confirmed it, acting thus among all peoples and
all tongues amqng the believers, going about and taking their belief and
the seals of their soverans and of their high-priests. And thus he collected
the belief of many peoples and of many tongues on these cloths. And he
turned back after seven years and went away(?); and, while he was on his
way back, the king in whose days he had started died, and the magnates
who had been umpires, and his son succeeded him; and he proceeded to
stir up war in the territories of the Romans, and his appearance before
the authorities was not carried out . But it became known to all men
living in the country of the Persians that the evil doctrine of Nestorius
flourished there only, while all peoples and tongues abhorred it; and this
glorious old man was yet more emboldened against them . 23
This passage was mentioned briefly in The Martyrs of Najriin, 24 but only
as illustrating the "peregrinations of Simeon," and E. W . Brooks' reservations
on the number of rulers whom Simeon visited was also noted in a chapter that
attempted to make the extraordinary career of this Monophysite bishop more
intelligible . The passage may now be examined for its contribution to the
ecclesiastical history of the Arabs in the sixth century .
Its principal value is its references to the languages of the Monophysite
23 Trans. E.W.
Brooks, PO 17 (Paris, 1923), pp. 155- 57.
24 Martyrs, 163.
Christian Orient in a detailed and specific manner that leaves no doubt about
the fact that these various communities used their vernacular languages for the
expression of their faith. The Monophysite world of the sixth century is fairly
well known. In addition to the Syriac-speaking communities in Persia and
Oriens, there were (a) the Arabs, especially the Ghassiinids, who, as has been
explained in the preceding chapter, were converted to Monophysitism early in
the century; to the Ghassiinids may be added other tribes that moved in their
orbit and who also may have adopted Monophysicism in l:Iijiiz or northern
Arabia; (b) the l:Iimyarite community in South Arabia, now Monophysite
after the Ethiopian expedition in the early 520s; (c) within South Arabia, the
Arab enclave of Najriin, the city of martyrs; (d) the Ethiopians; (e) the Copes;
and (f) the Armenians. 2 )
John of Ephesus does not name any of these communities, presumably
because they were well known to his readers. Neither does he specify which
rulers of these communities Simeon visited, but he does state categorically
that he did visit them and brought back written confessions of their faith.
Who were these Arab rulers, and where did they reside? The natural presump-
tion is that the Ghassiinid ruler was one of them. The Ghassiinids were zealous
Monophysites, and they were Simeon's first port of call on his way westward
from the Land of the Two Rivers through Oriens, Arabia, and the Nile Val-
ley. Above all, there is documentary evidence that he had actually visited
their king, Jabala, in Jiibiya around 520 when he invoked his aid against the
l:Iimyarite persecutors of the Christians in South Arabia, as is clearly stated in
the explicit of the letter he wrote from their camp-town. 26 So the probabilities
are in favor of a visit to the Ghassiinid ruler. The passage in John of Ephesus is
not explicit on the identity of the Ghassiinid king involved, nor is it so on the
two Persian kings. The chances, however, are that it was Arethas whom Sim-
eon visited, and this can be easily concluded from the references to the two
Persian kings, who in this case must have been Kawad, who died in 531, and
Chosroes, his son, who succeeded him. According to John of Ephesus, Simeon
returned to Persia after a journey of seven years to find the Persian king, in
whose days he set out, dead and his son "stirring up war in the territories of
the Romans." The "war" referred to must be the second Persian war, which
broke out in 540, or its antecedent, the Strata dispute in 539. So if Simeon
had an encounter with a Ghassiinid king sometime in the course of these seven
years that ended around 540, it must have been Arethas, who was the
Ghassiinid king during this period, his father Jabala having died in 528 at the
battle of Thannuris.
25 Nubia was to be converted to Monophysitism later in the 540s.
26 See Martyrs, 63.
If Simeon did indeed visit the Ghassanid ruler and brought back with
him a confession of faith in Arabic, this will represent an important gain in
the story of the use of Arabic as one of the languages of the Christian Orient
before the rise of Islam, related to the problem of an Arabic Bible and liturgy,
but distinct from it. It will mean that the Arabic language was in use for the
expression of theological thought, perhaps in a simple, unsophisticated man-
ner. In the fourth century, the Arab queen Mavia fought the Arian emperor
Valens for the faith of Nicaea. It has been suggested that there was an Arabic
version of the Nicene Creed in that century, 27 during which the Arab queen
insisted on the consecration of an Arab bishop for her people and which saw
the composition of Arabic odes in celebration of the Mavian victories against
Valens, vouched for by Sozomen. So already in the fourth century there was an
Arabic confession of faith, the Nicene Creed. In the sixth century, the
Ghassanid rulers discussed theology. The Syriac sources have preserved echoes
of this when Arethas accuses Chalcedonian Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch,
of preaching quaternitas and, later in the 560s, he accuses the two dissident
bishops, Eugenius and Conon, of Tritheism, although he would not have used
Arabic terms in these colloquies. 28
What this Arabic confession of faith would have consisted of may be seen
in those Monophysite confessions of the 530s, preserved by Zacharia of My-
tilene, when Anthimus and Theodosius wrote letters after their consecrations
to state clearly their doctrinal position, which start with adherence to the
Council of Nicaea. 29 The Arabic version of this Monophysite confession would
have been expressed along these lines, written by their Monophysite ecclesias-
tics, one of whom was possibly John, to 'whom Philoxenus of Hierapolis had
written on the Monophysite faith against the Nestorians. 30
B
The Second Phase (5 36-5 5 3)
I. INTRODUCTION
After fighting for Byzantium in the Arabian Peninsula and in the first Persian
war, Arethas suddenly appeared in this phase as a concerned Monophysite,
engaged in theological discussions, and working for the resuscitation of the
Monophysite hierarchy. He continued to act as such and to intervene in the
27 See BAFOC, 440 and note 101. Cf. V. Poggi, "Situaiione linguistica dell'Oriente
bizantino nel secolo V," in Autori c/assici in lingue de/ vicino e medio Oriente, ed. G. Fiaccadori
(Rome, 1990), 120.
28 See below, 746-55, 805-24.
29 See, for example, the letter of Anthimus to Severus after his election to the Patriarchate
of Constantinople in 535; Zacharia, HE, versio, pp. 96-100.
30 See above, 695.
interests of his confession until the end of his reign . In order to understand his
new role and his services to the Monophysite cause, it is necessary to set this
against the background of ecclesiastical history in this period. 31 The two most
relevant elements in this background are: ( 1) the counter-coup staged by the
Chakedonians in 536, which returned the patriarchates of the East to Chal-
cedonian incumbents, and the persecution of the Monophysites that followed
in the latter part of the 530s; and (2) the attempts of Justinian to reconcile the
Monophysites in the 540s, which culminated in the promulgation of the edict
on the Three Chapters, in which he condemned three fifth-century theo-
logians, all of whom were anathema to the Monophysites.
1. Just as the combination of Severus and Theodora was responsible for
the Monophysite triumph, it was the collaboration of two firm Chakedo-
nians-Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, and Pope Agapetus-that brought
about the counter-revolution. The arrival of Agapetus in Constantinople sealed
the fate of Monophysitism in the capital. Chakedonian Anthimus was de-
posed, and Menas was consecrated instead, while Theodosius left Alexandria
and ultimately resided with Anthimus in Constantinople in the palace of
Hormisdas . The patriarchal turnover was followed by a synod (May-June 536)
that condemned Anthimus, and an imperial edict confirmed the synod and
uttered the harshest pronouncement against Severus, who left the city and
died in exile in Egypt in 538. A persecution of Monophysites followed, prin-
cipally undertaken by Ephraim, and Monophysite ecclesiastical writers speak
of martyrdoms. John of Tella was the victim of this persecution. He was
arrested near Singara and died in prison in 538.
2. After disposing of the Origenistic heresies in Palestine in the early
540s, Justinian turned again to reconciling the Monophysites by issuing the
edict on the Three Chapters,
32 in which he condemned Theodore of Mop-
suestia, certain specified works of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa,
all of whom were offensive to the Monophysites. The four patriarchs signed it
under imperial pressure, as did Pope Vigilius, who was summoned to Con-
stantinople and finally gave his ~pproval by issuing his Judicatum in April
548. The sequel of the judicatum was unrest in the Western church which
turned against the pope and the Judicatum; it, in turn, was then revoked by
the pope himself; all of which led to the convocation of the Fifth Ecumenical
Council in 553. Justinian's Edict of Three Chapters and the Judicatum were
Theodora's final triumph; she died soon after in 548.
Against these two elements of the general ecclesiastical history of this
31 For this see the chapter in A. Fliche and V. Martin, Histoire de l'Eglise, IV (Paris,
1945), 457-66; and Frend, Rise, 273-95.
32 The edict has not survived, and its date is uncertain. Fliche and Martin (op. cit., 460)
give no date, nor does Frend in Rise. Stein (HBE, 634) gives the end of 543 or 544; Bury
(HLRE, 384) dates it to 546.
period, may now be set the two accounts of Arethas and his involvement in
the Monophysite movement that have survived in the sources: his encounter
with the patriarch of Antioch, Ephraim; and his journey to Constantinople to
secure the ordination of the two bishops, Jacob and Theodore, in the early
540s.
II. ARETHAS AND EPHRAIM
In a precious passage, Michael the Syrian 33 has preserved a detailed account of
an encounter between Arethas, the Ghassanid supreme phylarch, and
Ephraim, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch. It is remarkable for being a
detailed account; the data included in it reveal for the first time the Ghassanid
phylarch not as a soldier on the battlefield but as a loyal Monophysite arguing
for the correctness of Monophysite theology. It is no doubt taken out of the
Ecclesiastical History of the writer who paid special attention to the Ghassanids
and was one of Michael's sources, namely, John of Ephesus. The passage de-
serves a detailed analysis but before engaging in this, it is necessary to make
two observations.
1. Although this is the first time that a Ghassanid phylarch discusses
theology in the sources, it is unlikely that this was the first time that he did
so. Arethas had been supreme phylarch for some ten years and had witnessed
the tribulations of his church to which, like his father before him, he was
sensitive. It has been argued 34 that he must have been on the horizon of
Severus and Theodora, as a ruler who could play a role in the protection of
Monophysitism. And it is not likely that he was a mere soldier completely
uninformed about the elementary doctrines of his confession. Simeon of Beth-
Arsham may have procured from the Ghassanid clerics a confession of the true
Monophysite faith during the reign of his father, Jabala, 3 ) and Philoxenus may
have written on theological matters to one, John the Arab, who could easily
have been the bishop of the Ghassanids. 36 If so, Arethas was not uninformed
about the theology of Monophysitism. Indeed, toward the end of his reign he
presided over a church council that tried the case of the Tritheists, Eugenius
and Conon. 37 The passage in Michael the Syrian, then, can be set against this
theological background for the Ghassanid interlocutor, and it reveals the non-
military facet of the personality of the supreme phylarch.
2. The date of the encounter is not clear in the Chronicle of Michael
whose dates are sometimes unreliable. He places it after the journey of the
33 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 0 246-48; for the Syriac text, see col. 1, p. 310 co col.
2, p. 311.
34 See above, 739.
35 For this see above, 740.
36 On this see above, 695 .
37 See below, 805-8 .
phylarch to Constantinople to secure the ordination of Jacob and Theodore,
and so suggests a date in the early 540s. This is difficult to accept; the
chances are that this happened in the late 530s, 38 and in support of this, the
following may be adduced.
a. The early 540s were the years of the second Persian war, in which the
empire was heavily engaged in fighting with Persia. It is unlikely that the
emperor who, according to the account, asked the patriarch to meet Arethas,
would have initiated such an attempt to convert Arethas in the midst of the
war, especially as the imperial attitude toward the Monophysites was influ-
enced by political events. With a war on his hands in an East that was full of
Monophysites, of whom the Ghassanid foederati formed an important part, it
is incredible that Justinian would have engaged in such follies.
b. The case for the 530s is thus strong, especially as Ephraim died in
545 and the late 530s would have been the only period during which he could
have attempted the conversion of Arethas. This is confirmed by the fact that it
was in this very period after the Chalcedonian coup of 536 and Justinian's edict
against Severus that the second persecution of the Monophysites was let loose,
and Ephraim himself was its agent. In a well-known chapter,
39 Zacharia of
Mytilene states that Justinian ordered him to traverse Oriens in order to bring
back the Monophysites to the Chalcedonian fold in the fifteenth year of his
reign, that is, 5 36/3 7, which thus must be the year of this encounter between
Arethas and Ephraim. 40 The eastern front was quiet after the conclusion of the
Endless Peace in 532, and so this attempt to convert Arethas could have taken
place at that time. Furthermore, the passage in Michael states that Ephraim
did this at the insistence of the emperor, and the chapter in Zacharia confirms
this when it says that it was the emperor who asked Ephraim to undertake
this missionary campaign . At the end of the chapter, Zacharia describes the
journey of Ephraim to Palestine and thence to Egypt, 41 and this brings him
close to Arethas geographically, since the latter's headquarters were in the
38 A dace in the lace 530s is also suggested by the phrase "avant sa more" with reference
co Ephraim, used by Michael in referring co the time when Ephraim attempted to convert
Arethas. The phrase could suggest a year just before the death of Ephraim in 545, but the
phrase is misleading; see Chronique, I, p. 246, line 18. The Monophysires hated Ephraim who
was a persecutor and did not wish him well; hence the phrase, perhaps unconsciously, expresses
Monophysite hopes for the death of Ephraim and their release from his firm grip.
It is noteworthy that Michael does not introduce the long passage on Ephraim and Arechas
with the customary "en cecce annee" but leaves it undated; hence the attempt to dare it is noc
frustrated by an explicit statement that dares other events in Michael. J. S. Trimingham dares
the encounter to 538, but gives no reasons; see his Christianity among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic
Times (London, 1979), 231.
39 Zacharia, HE, versio, Book X, chap. 1, pp. 118-20 .
40 Ibid., p. 118, lines 19-24 .
41 Ibid., p. 120, lines 1-5.
Provincia Arabia and in the Golan, in Palaestina Secunda, and this provides
the right locale and context for the meeting between the two.
The passage in Michael involving the encounter of the phylarch and the
patriarch may be summarized as follows. Emperor Justinian asks Ephraim, the
patriarch of Antioch, to approach Arethas, in the hope of converting him to
the Chalcedonian position. Arethas refuses and accuses the Chalcedonians of
having perverted the Holy Trinity into a Quaternity. Ephraim asks him
whether it was just to reject what 630 ecclesiastics had decided at Chakedon
and follow the small number of those who dissented . Arethas answers him
through a simile to the effect that as a tiny rat found in a. cauldron full of
meat can infect the whole mass of pure meat, so does the Tome of Leo infect
the entire doctrine of the church. Ephraim then tries to make him accept
communion from him, but Arethas invites the patriarch to a feast at which
only camel meat is served. When Ephraim refuses to eat, Arethas says that
just as Ephraim has refused to eat what he had offered him, so he would refuse
to accept the oblation that Ephraim had offered. In the wealth of details that
it provides, the passage recalls that in Malchus on the fifth-century phylarch
Amorkesos, of the reign of Leo. In the interests of clarity, the long passage,
translated by J. B. Chabot, will be divided into two parts.
1
I:Ieret, fils de Gabala, roi des 'faiyaye chretiens, et ses familiers etaient
fort scandalises du Synode, et ne mangeaient pas meme le pain avec les
Chalcedoniens . Ephrem le Juif, d'Antioche, fut envoye pres d'eux, avant
sa more, par l'empereur. II die a I:Ieret: "Pourquoi etes-vous scandalises a
notre sujet et au sujet de l'Eglise?" I:Ieret repondit: "Nous ne sommes pas
scandalises au sujet de l'Eglise de Dieu, mais par le mal que vous avez
cause a la foi. Nous nous eloignons (de vous) parce que vous introduisez
une quaternite au lieu de la Trinite, et que vous obligez les hommes a
renier la vraie foi." Ephrem ajouta encore: "II te parait done juste, o roi,
qu'une assemblee de 630 personnes, a moins que ce ne soient des come-
diens, soit anathematisee; et, etant donne que tous etaient eveques, com-
ment pourrait-on mepriser tous ceux-ci et accepter le petit nombre de
ceux qui soot heretiques?" I:Ieret lui repondit en disant: "Je suis un bar-
bare et un soldat; je ne sais pas lire les Ecritures, cependant, je te pro-
poserai un exemple: quand je commande a mes serviteurs de preparer un
festin a mes troupes, de remplir les chaudieres de viande pure de mouton
et de boeuf, et de la cuire, s'il se trouve clans les chaudieres un rat nain,
par ta vie, patriarche!, toute cette viande pure est-elle souillee par ce rat,
oui ou non?" Celui-ci repondit: "Oui!" Alors, I:Ieret reprit : "Si une
grande masse de chair est corrompue par un petit rat infect, comment
tOute l'assemblee de ceux qui Ont adhere a cette heresie impure ne serait-
elle pas souillee? Car tous ont donne par ecrit leur adhesion au Tome de
Leon; que est ce rat infect. " 42
1. Arethas is described accurately with his patronymic and the fact of his
kingship over the Christian Arabs. The term "ses familiers," his intimates,
acquaintances, is somewhat strange, since_ one would have expected another
term. 43 These, however, are likely to be his phylarchs, family, or members of
his retinue, who were all Monophysites, as was his army.
2. The "Synod" in Monophysite literature means Chakedon, but the use
of such a term at the beginning of the passage about a council that had taken
place a century before could suggest a synod that is recent and close to 5 3 7,
when the encounter took place. It is possible that Arethas and the Mono-
physites were still "in shock" after the synod of Constantinople in 536 in
which Justinian blasted the Monophysites, especially Severus. But the context
and subsequent references to Chakedon suggest that it is a reference to that
council.
3. Noteworthy is the statement that Ephraim approached Arethas on the
orders of Justinian himself. This is consonant with the coup of 536 in which
the patriarchal sees were turned over to Chalcedonians and, in its wake, the
emperor thought the same might be done in Oriens with the supreme phylar-
chate. In so doing, he may have taken a leaf out of the notebook of Theodora,
who always went to the top, to the rulers and influential figures, in order to
influence the course of events. This also represents the first recorded instance
of attempts to win over the Ghassanid phylarch to the Chakedonian position,
an attempt that was to be fruitlessly repeated later in the century with Are-
thas' grandson Nu'man .
4. Most interesting is Arethas' answer to Ephraim when he broached the
topic with him . Arethas has two objections: that the Chakedonians intro-
duced a Quaternity into the Trinity and that forceful methods were used in
leading men away from the true faith.
Significant is the use of the term Quaternity (quaternitas) by the soldier,
Arethas. This is a technical theological term that became part of the chris-
tological disputes since Chakedon. By speaking of the two natures, the
Chakedonians left themselves open to the charge that they were perverting
42 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 246-47.
43 French "ses familiers" translates Syriac yiidli'ayhfin (Chronique, II, p. 310, first col., line
9 from bottom). The pronominal suffix in the Syriac word is not singular, as translated by
Chabot, but plural, hon. Perhaps Chabot translated it thus because he thought a pluralis maies-
tatis is involved, since the natural reference of the plural suffix is to king Arethas. He is
probably right, although the plural suffix may conceivably be construed with the plural 7; ayJye
that immediately precedes it.
the Trinity into a Quaternity. It was a neat and simple term which could
easily be understood and used by laymen, and so it was by Arethas. 44 The
term had been revived as recently as 536 by Anthimus, the newly elected
Monophysite patriarch of Constantinople, in his letters to the two Mono-
physite patriarchs, Severus and Theodosius, as part of his confession of Mono-
physite faith. 4 l This raises the question of whether Arethas was repeating qua-
ternitas as used by Anthimus, which he might have picked up when he was in
Constantinople recently. There is no way of knowing. It is also possible that
Ghassanid familiarity with Monophysite christology and its anti-Chakedonian
polemics goes back to an earlier period than the 5 30s and that Arethas was
familiar with quaternitas even before Anthimus used it in his two letters to
Severus and Theodosius. In a previous chapter, it has been suggested that
Philoxenus possibly wrote to a Ghassanid bishop when he addressed a theo-
logical communication to a certain John the Arab in the reign of Anastasius; 46
it has also been suggested that Simeon of Beth-Arsham possibly visited Jabala,
the father of Arethas, when he undertook a journey of seven years traveling in
the Monophysite kingdoms of the Near East. His biographer adds that he
brought with him the confessions of the various Monophysite communities .
47
If so, then Jabala would have been conversant with the anti-Chalcedonian
polemic which probably included the term quaternitas with which the Mono-
physites reproached the Chalcedonians. Thus Ghassanid involvement in the
christology of the period could possibly go back to the first decades of the
century, and Arethas could have grown up in an atmosphere in which such a
term as quaternitas was not unknown. 48
44 Aigrain ("Arabie," col. 1207) lauds Arethas for his reply involving quaternitas: "un
doctrinaire du monophysisme n'aurait pas mieux dit. "
45 In his letter to Severus, Anthimus expresses himself against quaternity: "Quare et
rectissime unus e Trinitate sancta et connaturali est ante incarnationem et post incarnationem,
cum numerum Trinitati non addiderit, numerum quaternitatis"; Zacharia, HE, versio, p. 98,
lines 25-27. In his letter to Theodosius, Anthimus says: "Ideoque rectissime unus e Trinitate
sancta et connaturali est, antequam incorporaretur, et postquam incorporatus est, nee Trinitati
numerus quartus additus est"; ibid., p. 113, lines 8-11.
46 See above, 695.
47 See above, 741-44 .
48 For Marcellinus Comes on quaternitas , see Chron. ad annum 512: "in hymnum trinitatis
Deipassianorum quaternitas additur" ; quoted in Frend, Rise, 269 note 1. The term possibly
appears in the third decade of the 6th century in a work attributed to Dioscorus of Alexandria,
A Panegyric on Macarius, trans. D. W. Johnson, CSCO, Scriptores Coptici 42 (Louvain, 1980),
p. 37, line 13. On the question of authenticity and dating , see the introduction , pp. 8-11.
The term appears late in the century in A Panegyric on Apollo, Archimandrite of the Monastery of
Isaac, trans. K. H. Kuhn, CSCO, Scriptores Coptici 40 (Louvain, 1978), p. 12, line 15. For
recent works on Christianity and Monophysite polemics, see D. Johnson, "Anti-Chakedonian
Polemics in Coptic Texts, 451-641, " in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. B. A. Pearson
and J . E. Goehring (Philadelphia, 1986), 216-34; and I. R. Torrance, Christo/ogy after Cha/ce-
don: Severns of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Cambridge, 1988).
The application of force during chis second persecution conducted by
Ephraim in Oriens was noted by Zacharia. 49 This would have especially out-
raged Arethas as it might have violated the Arab concept of jiwar, the right of
refuge for the one who seeks protection. This had a parallel in Arab-Byzantine
ecclesiastical relations in the fourth century during the revolt of Queen Mavia
against Valens. Moses, the Arab bishop (unlike Arethas) turns away from
theological arguments with Lucius, the Arian of Alexandria, and concentrates
on the use of force by the Arians against the Orthodox. 50 Arethas did better
than Moses since he availed himself of a theological argument. H
5. In his reply concerning the Monophysite repudiation of the 630
bishops assembled at Chalcedon, Ephraim addresses Arechas as king. Al-
though this expression does not come in an official document, yet it is signifi-
cant and suggests chat Arethas was addressed as king after the conferment of
the Basi/eia in 529. The passage exudes regal bearing on the part of Arethas,
even when he was addressing a powerful personality in Oriens, Ephraim, the
patriarch of Antioch and a former comes Orientis.
52
6. Arechas' reply to Ephraim's reference to the 630 bishops assembled at
Chalcedon contains many noteworthy elements chat reveal some faces of his
personality not usually documented in the sources which present him as a
soldier. For not replying in theological terms, Arethas excuses himself by
saying, "I am a barbarian and a soldier." The use of the term "barbarian" by
Arethas himself is significant. This suggests that he was not a Roman citizen,
just as his foederati were not. 53 Or he may have used it with a different impli-
cation, namely, that he was not a cultured Hellene, not a man of books and
learning but a soldier and a man of action, and he hastens to add explicitly
that he was such, all of which is preparatory to the illustration he was about
co give in answering Ephraim. Perhaps Arethas' employment of "barbarian"
may even be an expression of a self-image. It is normally used by the Rhomaioi
and applied co those who were not, especially if they did not belong to the
49 Zacharia, HE, versio, Book X, chap. 1, p. 118, lines 21 ff. Mention is made of the
tribune Clementinus who accompanied Ephraim while the latter was traveling in Oriens, forci-
bly converting the Monophysites of the area.
50 On Moses and Lucius as a parallel to Arethas and Ephraim, see BAFIC, 153-55.
51 a. the response of his grandson Nu'man to Maurice in a similar context; BASIC 1.1, 529-32.
52 It is noteworthy that Pseudo-Dionysius conceives of Arethas as one of the rulers of the
earth in company with Chosroes, Justinian, Abraha of South Arabia, and Andoug of Ethiopia;
see Chronicon Anonymum Pseudo-Dionysianum, versio, ed. and trans. R. Hespe!, CSCO,
Scriptores
Syri, vol. 213, II, p. 83, lines 3-6. It is relevant to state that Ephraim does not address him as
"my lord, patrician," as Magnus addresses Arethas' son, Mungir, who, too, was king. This
could argue that Arethas, as has been argued in this volume, was not yet patricius. On Arethas'
Basileia andpatriciatus, see BASIC 1.1, 95-109, 288-97.
53 The Arab foederati were not Roman cives, but it is possible that their supreme phylarchs
may have been endowed with honorary citizenships.
Graeco-Roman establishment ; and so its use by Arethas himself is revelatory
of self-confidence in his own identity as a Ghassanid, which shrugged off the
overtones of the term "barbarian."
Equally imponant is the following sentence, wrongly translated by
Chabot as "je ne sais pas lire les Ecritures ." The Syriac original uses the past
tense and simply says "I did not read." The object of the verb is not what the
French suggests with its capital e, "les Ecritures," but simply "books." The
French could suggest that Arethas was illiterate, which of course he was not. 54
He simply wants to say that he is a man of action and a soldier and cannot
continue to discuss theology as can academics and ecclesiastics. As to the
"books" mentioned in his reply, the natural interpretation of the term is the
relevant one in this context, namely, theological works on christology; but it
may simply mean books in general and so strengthens what he wants to em-
phasize, that he was not a scholar but a soldier and so he is not expected to
answer as scholars do.
The illustration that Arethas gives in reply to Ephraim's question on the
assembly of 630 bishops at Chalcedon is taken from the world of the Arab
kitchen in the Ghassiinid barracks. The reference to mutton and beef suggests
that these were considered choice meats worthy of being served at a feast. The
presumption is that ordinarily the soldiers ate camel meat, mentioned later in
the account, and that on special occasions when a feast was ordered, the meats
would be different.
The reference to the Tome of Leo and its comparison to the small rat that
infects the whole meal if it is found in the meat cauldron are both notewor-
thy. The implication is that the 630 bishops were uncorrupted until they were
influenced by the Tome, so the number cited by Ephraim does not sound
impressive. More important, it testifies to the fact that Arethas was not unin-
formed theologically. He knows of the Tome of Leo and mentions it by name. 55
2
Ephrem ne pouvant faire changer I:Ieret d'avis, commenc;a a le tourmen-
ter pour qu'il participat a la communion que lui, Ephrem, lui donnerait.
Le roi I:Ieret lui dit: "Aujourd 'hui, prends place avec nous au festin." Et
il comrnanda, en langue arabe, a ses gens, de n'apporter a la table que de
la viande de chameau. Quand ils l'eurent apportee, I:Ieret dit a Ephrem :
"Benis notre table." 11 fut trouble et ne la benit pas. I:Ieret mangea selon
sa coutume. Ephrem dit: "Vous avez souille la table, car vous avez ap-
porte devant nous de la viande de chameau." I:Ieret repondit: "Pourquoi
54 The word order in Syriac emphasizes "books," not "read": "books I have not read." This
is further confirmation that illiteracy is not the question but bookishness.
55 The comparison of the rat with the Tome of Leo is also amusing in view of the name of
the pope. In Ghassanid terms, the lion was really a rat!
veux-tu me contraindre de prendre ton oblation, puisque tu te crois
souille par ma nourriture? Sache done que ton oblation est plus mepri-
sable pour nous que ne I' est pour toi cette viande de chameau que nous
mangeons; car en elle se trouvent caches l'apostasie et !'abandon de la foi
orthodoxe." Ephrem rougit et s'en alla, sans avoir pu seduire I:Ieret. 56
1. The turn in the dialogue between Ephraim and Arethas takes place
when Ephraim, instead of continuing his theological argument with Arethas,
attempts to have him participate in the Chalcedonian communion and receive
the sacrament at his hands. This, of course, Arethas would not do, and his
refusal was consonant with the attempt of the Monophysites to have their own
hierarchy in this period, in order to insure continuity of worship and sacra-
ments within the Monophysite church.
2. Arethas gives orders for the feast in Arabic. This raises the question of
what language he spoke with Ephraim. The clear implication of the account is
that he spoke with him not in Arabic but in some other language, either
Greek or Syriac. So Arethas was probably bilingual since no interpreter is
mentioned in the account.
3. His order that they should bring only camel meat to the table could
suggest that the Ghassanids ate not only camel meat 57 but also other kinds of
meat such as the mutton and beef described earlier in the accdunt, while the
reference to a table 58 suggests that they did not eat reclining on the floor. His
request that the patriarch bless the food suggests that this was normal in the
Ghassanid camp.
4. Ephraim's refusal to eat camel meat is noteworthy. This was of course
forbidden in the Old Testament for the Jews (cf. Deut. 14:7). Ephraim was a
Christian but was called "the Jew" by the Monophysites for purely theological
reasons as part of their polemics against him. The appellation "Jew," there-
fore, has nothing to do with his refusal to eat camel meat, unless he was a
conservative who obeyed some Old Testament rules, as certain Christian com-
munities such as the Ethiopians do. Most likely he was simply not used to
eating it and thus refused it. Perhaps it was this kind of food that certain
ecclesiastics considered "bad food" in the Provincia Arabia when they visited
it, and stayed with the Ghassanids for a short time, later in the century. 59
General Conclusions
As already pointed out, the passage in Michael the Syrian is taken from
the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus, the historian of the Ghassanid
dynasty, who must have met Arethas personally in Constantinople, as did his
56 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 247-48 .
57 As mentioned again lacer in the account.
58 Not once but twice.
59 See below, 879-80,
cf. 927-29.
son Mungir. It illustrates the great loss that the history of the dynasty has
experienced by the non-survival of the Ecclesiastical History in its entirety .
Arethas lived a long and active life, and this life must have been full of
episodes such as this solitary one that has survived in the life of a Ghassanid
king who reigned for forty years.
The chief interest of this passage is that it deals with non-military mat-
ters, unlike those in Procopius, which have prejudiced the perception of Are-
thas and his Ghassanids as a military group of rude soldiers. The passage gives
rare glimpses of the private life of the Ghassanids. Among the aspects of .
Ghassanid life it illuminates is the religious, when the supreme phylarch ap-
pears as a "theologian" who talks intelligently about quaternitas and the Tome
of Leo.
The dialogue with Ephraim reveals Arethas as a powerful personality who
dominates the scene even when the dialogue was with no less a figure than the
influential patriarch of Antioch, and a former comes Orientis at that. The power
of his personality is confirmed by the impression he made on Justin II late in
his life in 563. Twenty-five years earlier, when he met Ephraim, he must have
looked even more impressive. In addition to the ease with which he dominates
the scene, there is his intelligence in directing the course of the dialogue with
the patriarch, who asks an extremely embarrassing question. Arethas cleverly
parries the patriarch 's thrust, and when Ephraim offers to give him commu-
nion, he replies by offering an oblation of his own-camel meat! He reminds
one of the Arabs whom Theodoret of Cyrrhus in the preceding century lauded
for their intellectual acuity in argument . 60
Although the Ghassanid foederati were Byzantinized in some ways, yet
they retained a strong sense of their Arab identity, conveyed vividly in the
Arabic sources, especially contemporary poetry. But this passage in Syriac
provides additional materials for their private life and its various elements: (a)
the Arab kitchen in the Ghassanid barracks; (b) the kinds of meat they ate; (c)
cauldrons may be added to their utensils, and tables to the furniture of their
dining room; (d) benediction is said before they break bread.
Arethas' refusal to convert to the Chalcedonian confession invites com-
parison with the case of anotherfoederatus in the same decade. In 534 Gelimer,
the Arian Vandal, adorned the triumph of Belisarius in the Hippodrome after
he was brought as a captive to Constantinople . Although beaten and living as
a prisoner of war in Constantinople, he consistently refused to renounce his
Arian confession.
The bright light shed by this precious passage in Michael the Syrian
makes the historian of the Ghassanid dynasty regret the loss of the original
60 See the present writer in BAFIC, 156-59 .
from which it was excerpted. But even this was not available to Noldeke when
he wrote his classic on the Ghassanids since he had before him not the Syriac
version of the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian but the Armenian version which
omitted this passage. If Noldeke had had this passage before him, he would
have changed his views on how much theology the Ghassanid Arethas knew, 61
and with it his other related views on the dynasty, such as the degree of
sedentarization that they attained.
III. ARETHAS AND THE CONSECRATIONS OF 542/43:
JACOB AND THEODORE
Monophysite historians 62 explicitly credit Arethas with a major role in the
resuscitation of the Monophysite hierarchy in the early 540s and assign this
role to the sixteenth year of Justinian's reign, that is, to 542/43. Modern
historians have recognized this role and emphasized it. 63 But the passages in
the Syriac writers that document it have not been examined in detail, and
they raise important questions which remain to be answered.
The context within which Arethas' decisive intervention took place has
been touched upon briefly earlier in this chapter when Justinian's efforts to
reconcile the Monophysites reached a climax in the promulgation of the edict
on the Three Chapters. 64 The more immediate and relevant background to
Arethas' intervention must, however, be sought in the crisis that the Mono-
physite movement was going through in this period, the latter part of the
530s, which witnessed what Monophysite historians call the second persecu-
tion, unleashed by Patriarch Ephraim of Antioch. The issue was that of the
consecration of bishops for the Monophysite church after their ranks had been
depleted by exile and persecution, 65 a period of tribulation that reached its
climax in the martyrdom of John, bishop of Tella, in 538. Arethas' encounter
with Ephraim was set within this context, and it was a contribution only in
the sense that he kept himself and his Ghassanid Arabs within the Mono-
physite fold. But now he goes further than a passive role into something more
active; he appears in Constantinople and persuades the empress to help toward
the consecration of two bishops for the church, Jacob and Theodore. In so
doing, Arethas was instrumental in reestablishing the Monophysite hierarchy
and preserving it from extinction.
61 Noldeke, GF, p. 21, lines 5-8.
62 In addition to John of Ephesus, who will be discussed at length in this chapter, may be
added Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 245-46, and Bar-Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum,
ed. J . B. Abbeloos and T. J. Lamy (Louvain, 1872), I, 217-19.
63 Honigmann, Eveques, 159-60; Stein, HBE, II, 624-25;
Devreesse, PA, 75; and Frend,
Rise, 284-85.
64 See above, 745.
65 Well analyzed by Frend, Rise, 283-84 .
Michael the Syrian's laconic statement explains Arethas' intervention
simply and clearly: "En cette annee eut lieu !'ordination de deux eveques: les
saints Jacques de Pesilta, pour Edesse, et Theodorus pour J:Iirta de Naman,
dans la ville imperiale meme, par les soins et !es instances de J:Ieret, et par la
sollicitude de l'imperatrice Theodora. Le pape Theodosius les ordonna. " 66
It is, however, John of Ephesus, who was a contemporary and witness of
these events and who knew the personalities involved, that is the primary and
reliable source. The fuller account involving Arethas comes not in the Life of
James Uacob)
67 but in the Life of James and Theodore. 68 It is unfortunate that his
account of this in his Historia Ecc/esiastica has not survived, and so the only
source that goes back directly to him is his Lives of the Eastern Saints, a mine of
information for eastern asceticism. In his Historia he probably provided data
for answering all the questions that will be presently raised. His account in
the Life of James and Theodore reads as follows.
Before these things therefore, in the sixteenth year of the reign of Justin-
ian, after the time of the martyrdom of the blessed combatant (ayoovL-
miJ~) for religion, John bishop of the city of Thella, at the hands of
Ephraim of Antioch, when a lack of priests had consequently arisen in
the countries of the east and of the west, and especially of bishops, then
the glorious J:Iereth Bar Gabala, the great king of the Saracens, with
many others asked the Christ-loving queen Theodora to give orders that
two or three bishops might immediately be instituted by the orthodox
(<'>Q0600~0L) in Syria. And, since the believing queen was desirous of
furthering everything that would assist the opponents of the synod of
Chalcedon, she gave orders and two blessed men, well-tried and divine
persons, whose names were James and Theodore, were chosen and insti-
tuted, one for J:Iirtha of the Saracens, that is Theodore, and James for the
city of Edessa. And, while the blessed Theodore exercised authority in
the southern and western countries, and the whole of the desert and
66 Chronique, II, 245-46. The toponym l::lirta de Nu'man in the passage is an oversight on
the part of Michael, since this is the capital not of the Ghassanids but of the Lakhmids, the
well-known city of l:lira. It is correctly described as l::lir!.ha of the Saracens, the Ghassanid
1:Iirtha, in the Life of James and Theodore, written by John of Ephesus, and there is no doubt
whatsoever that this was the Ghassanid (not Lakhmid) 1:Iirtha. And yet E. W. Brooks seems
uncertain which of the two it was when, in a footnote, he says that it is "probably different
from 1:Iirtha d' Nu'man, the seat of the Persian Arabs"; PO 19 (Paris, 1926); p. 154 note 1.
Honigmann (Eveques, 161 note 2) understood the distinction between the two and indicated the
mistakes of scholars, ancient and modern, who confused them.
67 See the Life of James, PO 18 (Paris, 1924), p. 692.
68 Life of James and Theodore, 153-54 . While the Life of James is an account of Jacob's life
in its entirety, the Life of James and Theodore emphasizes his consecration in 542/43. It begins
with that crucial episode, elaborates on how it came about, and continues co describe the
achievements of Jacob as a bishop; so it is the more important Life in chis respect.
Arabia and Palestine, as far as Jerusalem, the blessed James, having
armed himself with religion, and clothed himself in the zeal of heroism,
extended his course over all the countries not only of Syria and the whole
of Armenia and of Cappadocia, all of which down to the little ones were
especially distinguished and strong in orthodoxy (6e0obosi.a) no less
than Syria, and besides these in the countries also of Cilicia and the
whole of Isauria and of Pamphylia and Lycaonia and Lycia and Phrygia
and Caria and Asia, and in the islands of the sea Cyprus and Rhodes, and
Chios and Mitylene, and as far as the royal city of Constantinople.
69
The passage involves two Arabs: Arethas, the Ghassanid king, and Theodore,
the Arab bishop of the Ghassanids. In the interests of clarity, it is best to treat
them separately.
Arethas
John of Ephesus expressly says that the initiative for the ordination came
from Arethas, whom he describes as "glorious," mshabl/a,
70 which gives him
his rank in the Byzantine system of ranks and titles, and he refers to him as
the "great king of the Saracens," 11 with reference to the extraordinary Basileia
conferred on him by Justinian around 530.
The year in which Arethas took the initiative is said by John of Ephesus
to have been the sixteenth year of Justinian's reign. This, then, must be the
year 542/43. Justinian became co-emperor with Justin on 1 April 527 and
sole emperor on 1 August of the same year on the death of Justin. So if the
sixteenth year of his reign is calculated from August, chances are that the
initiative took place in 543 rather than 542.
John says that "many others" also asked the empress, Theodora, to help
in this matter. Although prominence is given to Arethas, since he is men-
tioned by name and in a flattering manner that indicates he was the spirit and
his was the influence that counted, others are associated with him. Who these
were is not clear, but they were possibly members of the Arab federate estab-
lishment, phylarchs close to Arethas, who bring to mind the familiers 72 men-
tioned by Michael in the passage that described the encounter between Are-
thas and Ephraim, and who were outraged by the synod.
69 Ibid.
70 See BASIC 1.1, 516-17.
71 Noteworthy is the fact that his patronymic, "Son of Jabala," is used after his name.
Although this is normal, it might also reflect the fact that his illustrious father, Jabala, who
had dominated Arab-Byzantine relations for some thirty years, was still alive in the memory of
contemporaries. In 531, when Arethas took part in the campaign in Armenia under Sittas, he
was referred to only by his patronymic, "Son of Jabala"; Z.acharia, HE, IX.vi; above, BASIC 1.1,
142 with note 415. In the Arabic sources his patronymic always appears with his name, Arethas.
72 Above, 749.
The passage suggests that Arethas was a well-known figure to Theodora
and, what is more, influential with her. Earlier 73 it was suggested that as a
leading Monophysite and a celebrated commander in Oriens, he was brought
to the attention of Theodora by the leading Monophysites of the period, espe-
cially Severus, as a personality to be reckoned with and who could be relied on
to further the cause of Monophysitism.
How did it come about that a soldier such as Arethas took the initiative
in this important matter, according to John of Ephesus? A conjunction of
events and circumstances could easily explain this. Arethas, as has been ex-
plained, was not a rude soldier but a zealous Christian and a dyed-in-the-wool
Monophysite, and it must have grieved him to witness the tribulation of his
church in this period of the second persecution, in addition to the disarray of
the ecclesiastical organization with no clerics to insure worship and to admin-
ister sacraments. 74 Moreover, his own foederati had been without a bishop for a
number of years. He was a man of action and must have felt that his church
needed action from him at this juncture. The spectacle of another man of
action, a comes Orientis turned patriarch in the person of Ephraim, and the
activities of that person in the service of Chalcedonianism must have drawn
his attention to what he himself could do. Moreover, the military and politi-
cal situation in Oriens was favorable for action on his part. The Persian war
was in full swing, 75 and he knew that Constantinople would be reluctant to
alienate the commander-in-chief of the most efficient contingent of foederati in
its service for the prosecution of the war. 76 And Justinian's record in dealing
with heretical allies such as the Goths and accommodating them must have
been known to Monophysite Arethas .
The question arises as to whether or not he actually came to Constantino-
ple to approach Theodora and effect the consecrations of the bishops. John of
Ephesus does not explicitly say this, but the visit to Constantinople may be
implied in his narrative, as it is in Michael the Syrian. Other sources explic-
itly affirm it, such as the so-called spurious Life of James and Bar-Hebraeus. 77
73 Above, 738.
74 The non-availability of bishops in Syria was especially serious in Oriens south of the
Euphrates, exactly where Arechas' phylarchace lay. The three places mentioned by John of
Ephesus (PO 18, p. 519) where consecrations could be performed were Marde, Persia, and
Alexandria, which thus excluded Oriens south of the Euphrates . Hence the action taken by
Arechas.
75 See R. Browning, Justinian and Theodora (London, 1987), 143.
76 The very same war also created difficulties for the consecration of Monophysices in
Persia, and chis made even worse the already deplorable situation in Byzantine territory, where
Theodosius in Constantinople was reluctant co consecrate; see Frend, Rise, 284.
77 For the Spurious Life of James, see below, 768-71 ; Bar-Hebraeus , Chronicon Ecc/esiasticum,
I, cols. 217-19 .
Modern scholars are divided on this point . 78 No definite answer can be given
to this question, but the chances are that E. Stein was right when he favored
the possibility of a visit to Constantinople. 79 It would have been very difficult
to execute such a bold plan by correspondence with the empress. The empress
was powerful and influential but so was Arethas, and the presence of both in
the capital must have been deemed necessary to bring about the desired result.
Furthermore, Arethas' visit to Constantinople in 563 may serve as a par-
allel. 80 In that year he came to the capital in order to arrange for the succes-
sion, but he was also engaged on the side with ecclesiastical matters pertain-
ing to the consecration of a patriarch for Antioch, Paul. Arethas would thus
have come to Constantinople officially for matters pertaining to the foederati
and the Persian war, and then would have taken advantage of his presence in
the capital to attend to the question of the consecrations.
His presence in Constantinople raises the question of Justinian's attitude
in this transaction. The consecrations could have been performed without his
knowledge, as negotiations for the consecration of Paul took place in Con-
stantinople itself in 563. Severus himself recommended secrecy in such deli-
cate matters and quoted Scripture in support of his position. 81 Justinian could
not have been enthusiastic about it, since he worked for the unity of the faith,
and so the rise of a new Monophysite hierarchy must have suggested to him
that union of the two confessions would thenceforward be well-nigh impossi-
ble. On the other hand, he may have viewed the consecrations differently and
have turned a blind eye to what was being done by his wife, since he himself
about this time (542) dispatched a Monophysite, John of Ephesus, to do mis-
sionary work in the region of Ephesus and in Asia Minor. So the empress may
have caught him in a receptive mood.
That Arethas acted not only as a Ghassanid concerned for the spiritual
welfare of his foederati but also as a good Monophysite Christian who was
concerned for the church of his doctrinal persuasion in its entirety, is evi-
denced by the fact that he asked Theodora not only for a bishop for his own
78 While Noldeke had his doubts (GF, 20 note 2), Stein did not rule this out and was
inclined to think that he did: "peut-etre vim-ii lui-meme a Constantinople"; HBE, 625 and
note 1. Devreesse (PA, 75) and Honigmann (Eveques, 159) suspend judgment .
79 Although Stein (HBE, 624) seems to have swallowed Procopius' calumnies against
Arethas in connection with the Assyrian campaign of 541. On Procopius and Arethas, see
BASIC 1.1, 297-306.
so On this see ibid., 282-88, and below, 782-88.
81 It could be inferred from Severus' letter to Theodosius in Alexandria that the consecra-
tion of Anthimus as patriarch of Constantinople in 535 was done in secret: "quod hoc clam
factum est"; Zacharia, HE, versio, p. 106, line 30. As late as 1979, Pope John Paul II secretly
created the Chinese archbishop Gong Pinmei a cardinal and announced it openly only in May
1991.
Ghassanids and the federate Arabs in general but also for a bishop who would
have authority and jurisdiction over areas in the Near East other than his own. 82
This resulted in the consecration of Jacob who, although associated with The-
odore, the bishop of the Arabs, on many occasions during their long minis-
tries, was active in areas other than those of Theodore, as is clear from the
long quotation in John of Ephesus. Arethas thus emerges as one concerned for
Monophysitism not only in the restricted Ghassanid area but also in the gen-
eral area of the pars orientalis. His wider sympathies bring him into close
relationship with figures in Monophysitism far removed from his phylarchal
jurisdiction . However, it may be said that the extension of his federate au-
thority by Justinian so as to include practically the whole of Oriens may have
widened his confessional horizons and made them coterminous with Oriens at
least; hence the keen interest he took in Monophysitism wherever it existed.
This role was to be assumed later by his son Mungir, who became even more
involved than his father in inter-Monophysite controversies involving Egypt . 83
Finally, Arethas' request for a bishop specifically assigned to the
Ghassanid federates in Oriens reflects an awareness on the part of the supreme
phylarch that his limitrophe in Oriens, presided over by him as supreme
phylarch and king, needed, perhaps deserved, an ecclesiastic whose rank was
commensurate with this extensive and powerful federate presence. The
Ghassanids had been without a bishop since the exile of the Monophysite
episcopate in 519. But then the Ghassanid phylarchate had been an ordinary
one, and it was only around 530 that Justinian transformed it. Since then, it
had grown in stature after being tested twice in the Arabian wars and in the _
two Persian wars of the reign. So what Justinian started in 530, politically
and militarily , Arethas completed in 542/43 ecclesiastically, when he suc-
ceeded in having a special extraordinary bishop consecrated for his foederati.
The Ghassanid phylarchate now appears complete, as its church and state are
presided over by two eminent personalities, the energetic bishop and the re-
doubtable phylarch. The bishop of the new federate phylarchate derives some
prestige from his being the bishop of the most powerful federate army in
Oriens, and he in turn sheds some prestige on the Ghassanids because of his
privileged position as one of the two bishops consecrated by Patriarch The-
odosius in the royal city itself, and because of his association with Jacob
in ecclesiastical matters. Although these consecrated many new bishops, the
two remained the most prestigious in the Monophysite hierarchy of this
period.
82 The authenticity of John of Ephesus' account that two bishops, Jacob and Theodore,
were consecrated is of eotuse beyond doubt. It is confirmed by their association in Monophysite
docu-
ments which they signed together or which were addressed to them both; see below, 798-801, 807.
83 See below, 896-910 .
Theodore
Theodore was the other bishop who, together with Jacob, was conse-
crated by Theodosius in Constantinople in 542/43. But while much is known
about Jacob and while ecclesiastical historians accord him much attention,
Theodore is hardly noticed. 84 There are good reasons for this neglect. The
chief historian of the consecration, John of Ephesus, paid much attention to
Jacob, to whom he had devoted a special Life and then returned to him in his
Life of Jacob and Theodore, in which, after mentioning Theodore briefly, he
concentrated again on Jacob. John's special interest in Jacob is understand-
able. The two came from the same geographical area 85 and were Syriac-speak-
ing, while Theodore came from Arabia and presumably was Arabic-speaking.
Jacob's ministry was partly in Asia Minor, to which John of Ephesus was also
assigned by Justinian. And Jacob's was the more important ministry, judging
from its geographical extent, while Theodore's was much more restricted.
Hence Jacob's share in the ordination of Monophysite clerics was more impor-
tant for the Monophysite church than Theodore's, and this naturally attracted
the attention of John of Ephesus and historians since then.
Perhaps John did not entirely neglect Theodore. As has been indicated in
a previous chapter, John of Ephesus devoted an entire chapter to the history of
the Ghassiinid dynasty, 86 and he may have discussed the career of Theodore in
that chapter, as also in the parts of his Ecclesiastical History that dealt with the
reign of Justinian, all of which have not survived. Theodore lived co a ripe old
age, since after his consecration he lived for some thirty years, dying at
roughly the same time as Arethas himself around 570. He appears intermit-
tently in Monophysite documents 87 taking part in important ecclesiastical
matters, but these are sporadic. It is difficult to believe that his activities were
limited to these references in the Monophysite documents in view of his long
incumbency of thirty years, of his being associated with such an energetic
ruler and zealous Monophysite as Arethas, and of his consecration at that
crucial juncture in the history of the movement when much was expected
from it, no less than the preservation and propagation of the Monophysite
confession. The record of Jacob in this direction has been preserved but not
that of Theodore, and the reasons have been given for this. He may not have
been as energetic as Jacob, but he must have made an important contribution
84 Honigmann is an exception; see Eveques,
159-64 . Most of his section, however, deals
with identifying his see in Gaulanitis (ibid., pp. 159-63). The last two pages speak of his
activities as reflected in the Monophysite documents which refer to him, but there is no at-
tempt to say more than that.
85 Jacob was born in Tella and John in Amida; and the latter was consecrated bishop by
the former in 557.
86 See BASIC I.1, 540-43, 548-49 .
87 See below, 798-801, 807.
to the spread of Monophysitism and to missionary activity in his Arab area,
which may be distinguished from his contribution to other Monophysite ef-
forts as documented in the sources in these thirty years. 88
Not much is known about Theodore's background, but he was clearly an
Arab from the Provincia who apparently had been living in Constantinople as
a monk, and was known for being "a strenuous man. " 89 He must have been
known to Arethas, who may have met him if he came to Constantinople for
his investiture after being appointed basi/eus by Justinian around 530. His
elevation to this important episcopate at a critical juncture suggests that he
was deemed competent and worthy of the honor. His elevation to this high
position recalls that of another Arab, Elias, to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem
during the reign of Anastasius, and he too came from Arabia. 90 The name
Theodore must have been his episcopal name which he assumed in 542/43 or
had assumed when he became a monk. And it may be a translation of an
Arabic name with the root W-H-B or '-T-Y. 91 Many Arabs assumed Graeco-
Roman or Christian names which obscured their Arab identity. 92 Had it not
been for the historian's remark that he came from the Provincia, his Arab
identity would not have been clear.
The most important question that surrounds the notice of Theodore in
John of Ephesus is his see or the region of his authority and jurisdiction. This
is clearly stated in John of Ephesus in two parts: first there is the see to which
he was assigned; and then there is the geographical region over which his
authority extended; both are clearly defined, and they must be distinguished
from each other.
His see is referred to as "l:lirtha d'Tayaye," that is, the "castra of the
Saracens. " 93 The first to try seriously to identify this 4irtha, the castra of the
Ghassanids, was Noldeke. He thought that Jabiya in the Gaulanitis finally
became their main headquarters. As to the see of Theodore, he was first silent
88 Jacob Baradaeus has been treated in an admirable way by D. D. Bundy in "Jacob
Baradaeus: The Scace of Research, a Review of Sources and a New Approach," Le Museon 91
(1978), 45-86 . This section on Theodore will therefore serve as a complementary one co
Bundy's article as it treats the ocher member of che pair.
89 See Zacharia, HE, versio, p. 130, lines 20-21, where he is described as "Theodorum
monachum, virum scudiosum."
90 On Elias, see BAFIC, 192-95, 210-11.
91 Many Arabic cheophoric names have these roots. Theodore was also the name of the
military saint, not inappropriate for the name of the bishop of the Ghassiinid foederati .
92 John of Ephesus refers co "two pious monks ...
Benjamin and ... Samuel." Had ic
not been for the face chat John mentions chat they were Arabs, chis could not have been inferred
from their names; see HE, versio, p. 239, lines 18-20 .
93 It is a pity chat the account of chis consecration and references co Theodore have been
lose in Zacharia's Ecclesiastical History. What has survived does not help much. He might have
offered some important data on the Ghassiinids and their bishop, as he had done on Arfar
(Jabala) at the battle of Thanniiris and on Arechas in the Armenian campaign .
on it when he briefly mentioned his consecration but later thought that the
see was mobile, following the Ghassanid supreme phylarch wherever he en-
camped.94 Honigmann was the only scholar who, coming after Noldeke, tried
with his usual interest in toponymy to pinpoint the exact place of this kirtha,
the castra that became Theodore's see, and concluded that it was located in the
Gaulanitis not far from Jabiya and Jasim. More precisely, he thought that
Tiira dhe-l;:lartha and Jasim were the sites of the Ghassanid castra and the
administrative centers of the Ghassanid territory. 95
These toponyms mentioned by Honigmann are important Ghassanid cen-
ters, but Jabiya is the one that turned out to be the most important one as
reflected in pre-Islamic poetry and the fact that it was chosen by the Muslim
Arabs during the early Muslim period, both patriarchal and Umayyad, as
their capital. 96 It is, therefore, correct to regard it as the Ghassanid capital or
headquarters, the more or less permanent residence of the supreme phylarch,
except when he would take the field. It is natural to assume that Theodore
resided there.
Perhaps the term kirtha disinclined scholars to identify the kirtha of The-
odore with Jabiya, which was a town. But the Ghassanid federate camps in
Oriens developed into towns in much the same way that Roman castra devel-
oped in Britain into towns that have retained in their names traces of the word
castra. This was the case of Jabiya, but the distinction between town and
camp in it has been obliterated. Jabiya was the town of residence that domi-
nated the region, Gaulanitis, and the region itself had camps (castra), more
than one, where the Ghassanid troops were quartered. The explicit of the
newly discovered letter of Simeon speaks of the bishop's writing his letter
from the camp (kirtha) of Jabala, the Ghassanid king in Jabiya, so that no
distinction between camp and town is made in the literary source. 97 In view of
all this, Jabiya emerges as the see of Theodore, since it was the capital of the
Ghassanids or their principal headquarters. But the Ghassanids were a mobile
field army that would move in Oriens in obedience to military exigencies
94 See Noldeke, GF, 20, 47-49.
95 Honigmann, Eveq11es,
161-62. He rightly observes that reference to these two top-
onyms comes at the beginning of the list of monasteries in Arabia, but the conclusion that he
draws from this observation does not necessarily follow. Monophysite bishops in this period did
not live in the cities where the Chalcedonian ones resided; they lived in villages and in monas-
teries, and Honigmann apparently thought that this also applied to Theodore. But the case of
this bishop was different; he was protected by the military might of the Ghassanids and could
easily have lived without molestation at the main headquarters that Jabiya was.
96 It is also significant that it is Jabiya of all the Ghassanid places that the Greek sources
know. It appears in Nikephoros and Theophanes as Gabitha; see Nikephoros, Patriarch of Con-
stantinople, Short History, ed. and trans. Cyril Mango, DOS 10 (Washington, D.C., 1990), p.
20, line 27, p. 68 and commentary, p. 187; for Jabiya see BASIC II.
97 See Martyrs, p. xxxi, lines 20-23,
and p. 63.
when their presence elsewhere was required. John of Ephesus, who wrote far
from Jabiya and Ghassanland and who viewed them as a military organization,
naturally used an appropriate military term, f?irtha. His use of it was unfortu-
nate since this misled future historians into thinking that these Ghassanids
were a group of nomads who had no settled residence and that such was their
bishop, Theodore. 98 But all that the description of Theodore's incumbency in
John of Ephesus conveys is that he was consecrated bishop of a military group
and that his natural see was their headquarters, which, as has been argued in
this section, was naturally Jabiya. That he moved sometimes with the mobile
Ghassanid army or elsewhere in the extensive area of his authority should not
obscure the fact that his see was at some Ghassanid settlement such as Jabiya, 99
and that he was primarily the bishop not of nomads 100 but of the sedentary
Ghassanids, who were part of the field army of Oriens and thus mobile for
purely military necessities connected with their being functionally, if not
technically, a contingent in the Byzantine exercitus comitatensis.
It is even more important to determine the territorial extent of The-
odore's bishopric than the name of his see, and again it is best to quote John
of Ephesus: " ... the blessed Theodore exercised authority in the southern and
western countries, and the whole of the desert and Arabia and Palestine, as far
as Jerusalem." Thus the territorial jurisdiction of Theodore was clearly exten-
sive and, for the sake of discussion, may be divided into what is precise and
defined and what is not.
1. In the first category are Arabia and Palestine as far as Jerusalem. The
reference to Arabia is clearly not to the Peninsula but to the Provincia, the
power base of the Ghassanid phylarchs, and the province of the chief phylarch,
Arethas himself, when he extended his authority over the Arab federates
throughout Oriens. This is consonant with what has been said about The-
odore's see, that it was also where Arethas was stationed in -the Gaulanitis,
although this technically belonged to Palaestina Secunda. So, although The-
odore had extensive and far-reaching jurisdiction, his most immediate concern
was the Provincia Arabia, the seat of Arethas who was responsible for his
98 When Noldeke wrote (GF, 47-48),
che term *irtha, both the noun and the verb from
which it is derived, had not been discovered in the Sabaic inscriptions . These have since then
revealed *irtha co mean "camp" and not an enclosure for caccle such as used by nomads. Thus
the word cannot argue for the nomadism of the Ghassanids, any more than castra can for chat of
the regular Roman soldiers; on *irtha, see BAFOC, 490-98 .
99 Evaria (l:luwwarin) also comes co mind. As has been said in a previous chapter, ic was
the seat of a bishop of the Arabs, John, who was among the exiles of 519. le has been suggested
chat he could have been the bishop of the Ghassanids. But that was more than twenty years
ago, and since then circumstances had changed.
100 As will be indicated presencly, Theodore's assignment was probably related to mission-
ary work among the Saracens of western Arabia and outside the limes in northern Arabia, which
had its nomads.
consecration. Thus the Provincia now had the two most important function-
aries, the supreme phylarch and his distinguished bishop.
The reference to Palestine is more complex since there were three Pal-
estines and Jerusalem was in Dyophysite Palaestina Prima. Two of the three
Pales tines had a Ghassanid presence. Arethas was in charge of the federate
troops in Palaestina Secunda, and his brother Abu Karib was in Palaestina
Tertia, which comprised Sinai, the Negev, and a part of Trans-Jordania ex-
tending into northern }:Iijaz. So Theodore was still in Ghassanid territory and
moved in this vast area comprising Arabia and the two Palestines, Secunda
and Tertia. The Ghassanid bishopric was coterminous at least with the juris-
diction of the two Ghassanid brothers, an extraordinary bishopric comparable
to the extraordinary phylarchate of Arethas.
Theodore remained associated with Arethas in Monophysite ecclesiastical
matters until his death, and the phylarch's connection with Monophysitism is
well documented. Not so that of his brother Abu Karib, who first appers in
Procopius without his Ghassanid affiliation; it was not until E. Glaser's dis-
covery of the Sabaic Dam inscription of Abraha around 1900 that it became
known that he was a Ghassanid and the brother of Arethas. Not much else is
known about him. Now with the bishopric of Theodore extending to his
province, it may be fairly assumed that bishop and phylarch worked hand in
hand in the propagation of Christianity in those regions. 101 The Syriac manu-
script discovered at Nabk now becomes more intelligible . 102 It contains an
invocation to the believing king Abu Karib, and it is dated to the time of the
two bishops, Jacob and Theodore. Theodore became a well-known bishop in
Palaestina Tertia where Abu Karib was phylarch; he must have been involved
in the affairs of the Christian faith there and elsewhere. And the reference to
Theodore and to Abu Karib in one and the same manuscript clearly indicates
that Abu Karib, about whom nothing else was heard since reference to him in
Procopius around 530, was still alive at least as late as 542/43.
Theodore's "jurisdiction" extended "as far as Jerusalem," which was in
Palaestina Prima, not Ghassanid territory. Furthermore, it was solidly Dy-
ophysite; hence the reference to it calls for an explanation.
Jerusalem, of course, was the Holy City of Christians whatever their
denomination, and the Monophysites had struggled hard in the days of Sev-
erus to win it for their confession. Severus himself spent a long time as a
monk in the Holy Land. So it was not unusual to find in the sources that the
101 For all that pertains to Abii Karib, see BASIC 1.1, 124-31 and below, 845-49.
102 First noted and commented on by Noldeke, GF, 26-27. Noldeke could not identify
the Abii Karib mentioned in the manuscript because he wrote before the discovery of the Sabaic
Dam inscription, which has made certain that the Abii Karib of the manuscript could only have
been the same as the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia and the brother of Arethas; see above, 764 note
9?-
Monophysites desired to have a presence there. They must have been encour-
aged by the fact that the defense of the Holy Land against the pastoralists
from the north, south, and east was partly in the hands of the two Ghassanid
brothers. So probably the reference to Jerusalem belonged to wishful thinking
or nostalgia on the part of the Monophysites, but Theodore may well have
done some missionary work west of the Jordan in Palaestina Prima, which
could be reflected in the following.
Cyril of Scythopolis records a quarrel between two phylarchs in the re-
gion, Arethas the Ghassanid and al-Aswad. The passage was noted by
Noldeke who rightly concluded that a phylarch by the name of Arethas fight-
ing in Palestine in this period could only have been the Ghassanid, while al-
Aswad probably was a Kindite. 103 It is difficult to guess what the bone of
contention was. With possible missionary activity on behalf of Monophysit-
ism, there may have been opposition on the part of the non-Monophysite
phylarch al-Aswad and Arethas may have been involved in an effort to support
the work of his bishop Theodore. 104
Palestinian toponymy presents two names that suggest a Ghassanid pres-
ence in this non-Ghassanid territory: Dayr 'Amr and Dayr Ghassaneh. The
latter is a resoundingly Ghassanid name, while the former could very well be,
since 'Amr is a hallowed Ghassanid name, going back to the famous ancestor
'Amr ibn-'Amir. Although the former may turn out to be non-Ghassanid, the
latter is difficult to explain except by assuming that it represented an effort of
the Ghassanids to gain a foothold in the Holy Land. Perhaps this happened
during the episcopate of Theodore, who himself had been a monk before his
elevation and consecration as bishop. 105
2. The other part of Theodore's jurisdiction, the description of which is
couched in general and sometimes vague terms in John of Ephesus, speaks of
"the southern and western countries and the whole of the desert." These are
very general terms in contrast with the specificity that attends Arabia and
Palestine, and the problem is what to understand by them.
Although the jurisdiction of Theodore is being treated here separately
from that of Jacob, the two were consecrated together and remained active
together. The presumption is that when the territorial divisions were decided
in Constantinople by Theodosius and Arethas for the mission of the two
Monophysite bishops, their spheres of activity were delimited but remained
related. Hence by contrast with Jacob's sphere, that of Theodore becomes
clearer.
103 See GF, 17.
104 Funher on this, see BASIC 1.1, 251-54 . It is notewonhy that the quarrel took place
in the 540s, that is, after Theodore was consecrated as bishop; thus, on chronological grounds,
it is possible to assign a confessional base for the strife between the two phylarchs.
105 On the two dayrs (monasteries), see ibid., 654-55 and BAFIC,
255.
Jacob's see was Edessa, although he never dared to reside there. He was
r~sponsible for the region that comprised Mesopotamia, eastern Anatolia, and
Egypt (he was active in Alexandria). That leaves, for Theodore, Oriens west of
the Euphrates but excluding Syria, which John of Ephesus includes in Jacob's
jurisdiction;
106 and by Syria must be understood the little province in the
north near the Euphrates, not the whole of the region to the south, since
Arabia and Palestine are specifically mentioned as pertaining to Theodore's
jurisdiction . 107 Within this framework, it is possible to arrive at what "the
southern and western countries" of the region mean.
The "southern countries" are clearly in relation to Syria and the region of
Edessa in the north over which Jacob presided, and this is true geographically .
The term "southern" could mean just that, but the language of John suggests
that not those two provinces or not only those are meant, since the Syriac
conjunction w ("and") is clearly used, which proves that the two provinces are
not in apposition to the southern and western countries . So it is possible to
conclude that it included regions south of Arabia and Palestine, that is, }::Iijaz
and western Arabia in general which is indeed to the south, and that is so in
biblical usage, including the description of the Queen of Sheba as "the Queen
of the South. " 108 As to the term "western," it clearly reflects the directional or
geographical view of the world of the two rivers to which John of Ephesus
belonged, 109 and it refers to the area west of the Euphrates, although in regular
Byzantine administrative terminology it was called Oriens, that is, from the
viewpoint of the Roman Occident . That of course includes the provinces of
Arabia and Palestine, and also may include western Arabia itself, even more
westerly from the Mesopotamian point of view than these two provinces.
There remains the term "desert," madbrii in the Syriac original, which in
this context as part of the jurisdiction of Theodore, the bishop of the Saracens,
can only mean some Arab or Arabian desert. This could easily refer to the
limitrophe from the Euphrates to the Gulf of Aqaba or even the region to its
east where lived tribes who belonged to the Outer Shield of Byzantium, 110
such as Kalb, Jugam, and others.
106 The inclusion of Syria in the description of the statement on the jurisdiction of Jacob
in John of Ephesus may sound surprising in view of the fact that it was so close to Theodore's
and that of the Ghassanids. But Syria here should be understood in the restricted sense as the
province, not the whole region, and it was there that the see of the Patriarchate of Antioch was
located. Jacob was the more important of the two bishops, and this, together with the fact that
the region was principally Syriac-, not Arabic-speaking, could account for the assignment of
Syria to Jacob.
107 Perhaps Phoenicia Libanensis with its strong Arab ethnic makeup was left for The-
odore. Evaria, the see of John, the bishop of the Saracens, who was exiled in 519, was located
in that province.
108 See Matt.
12:42; Luke 11:31.
109 As noted also by E. W. Brooks, PO 19, p. 154 note 2.
110 On this term, see BAFIC, 478-79.
Therefore, in addition to his assignment to the two provinces within the
!imeJ, Theodore apparently was assigned to areas outside it in the adjacent
territories in northern Arabia and in l:lijiiz. Thus Theodore emerges from this
analysis as the bishop of the Arabs in Oriens and in the neighboring Arab
region for almost one-third of the sixth century.
The Spurious Life of jameJ
Arethas' involvement in the consecration of the two bishops and other
related matters are described in a third document attributed to John of
Ephesus called The Spurious Life of James. This has been under a cloud for more
than a century since H. G. Kleyn declared it pseudonymous. Others have
concurred with this judgment, and E. W. Brooks thought it was a later work,
composed for the greater glory of the monastery of Phesiltha to which Jacob
had belonged before his ordination . 111 Much could be said for this view. Al-
though conclusions on Arethas and Theodore in this volume rest on the two
authentic Lives just analyzed, some attention should be paid to this Life for the
sake of completing the investigation of all documents pertaining to Arethas
and Theodore.
Noldeke thought the Life ultimately went back to John of Ephesus but
that a later enthusiast had enlarged it. 112 This does not necessarily mean that
the enlargement is entirely unhistorical. The problem of attribution has to be
separated from authenticity and the genuineness of data in the Life. It is
noteworthy that the two authentic Lives of Jacob are rather short and concen-
trate on the question of his consecration and his activities after 542/43. Bue
Jacob died a very old man, and so this Life seems to attempt to offer a com-
prehensive account of his life not restricted to the question of his consecration,
the main concern of the two others. The Arab elements in the Life are three
and may be presented as follows.
1. There is first the visit of Arethas to Constantinople for invoking the
aid of Theodora in 542/43. While this is not explicitly stated in the two Lives
and can only be implied, in this Life it is stated very clearly. m As has been
argued in this chapter, this was most probably true, and so this does not affect
the authenticity of the Life and may enhance it, in that it amplifies what the
other two Lives briefly tell.
2. Then comes the question of Theodore and his see of Bostra. The Life
describes him as "well-tried" (Syriac baf?ira) and gives his see as Bostra. 114
ui For the Life, see PO 19, pp. 228-68; for views on its composition, see E. W. Brooks,
PO 17, p. xiii and Bundy, "Jacob Baradaeus," 72.
112 See Noldeke, GF, 20 note 2.
113 See PO 19, p. 238.
114 Ibid.
This, too, should not be considered a monstrosity 1n true reporting. Jacob
never resided in his see of Edessa, and this has not been a ground for rejecting
the statement that he was appointed its bishop. m He was its titular bishop for
the Monophysite church, just as there was a Chalcedonian residing in Edessa
as its legitimate bishop . The same applies to Theodore. The most important
episcopal see in his jurisdiction was indeed Bostra, and it is quite possible,
even probable, that when the division of the Monophysite world was made for
him and Jacob, those who were responsible for this division in Constantinople
thought of Theodore as the Monophysite bishop of Bostra, although they did
not expect him to reside there. It is not altogether impossible that with the
growth of Arethas' prestige during the thirty years or so after the consecration
of Theodore, his bishop may have had some association with Bostra, with
which city the Ghassanids had close connections. The Monophysites were soon
to have a patriarch consecrated for Antioch itself, in the late 550s, Sergius;
and in the early 560s, Arethas himself would intervene for the appointment of
Paul to the Patriarchate of Antioch, although neither of them resided in that
city. Also, it should be remembered in this connection that the Julianist
faction of the Monophysites did appoint a bishop of their own for Bostra 116
(also titular) , and this suggests that it was in answer to an appointment al-
ready made by their opponents, the Severan Monophysites.
3. Finally, there is that account which tells of the encounter of Arethas
with Jacob while the latter was a monk at the monastery of Phesiltha. The
phylarch crosses the Euphrates to invoke the aid of the saint for curing his
troops who were seized with insanity . The saint who appears as miracleworker
asks him to free a certain holy man, a !Ilonk from Sinai detained in his camp,
which act will cure his troops. Arethas returns to his camp and, finding his
troops already cured, sets the monk free and kills his captor. 117
The account, like all accounts of this description, is equally difficult to
accept or reject. One can only make the following observations on the narra-
tive. Arethas entertained a profound respect for, and loyalty to, Jacob
throughout the latter's long ministry. So he must have had some close contact
with him, and it is possible that this goes back to this early period, although
not necessarily as the Life tells it. The embellishments and the miraculous
elements added to it do not entirely rule out a contact between the two,
which made a deep impression on Arethas.
115 For his designation as ecumenical metropolitan as in Bar-Hebraeus, see Bundy, "Jacob
Baradaeus," 79.
116 See Honigmann , Eveques,
160 note 6. Honigmann entertained the account of the epis-
copate of Theodore over Bostra and thought he might have been in fact officially designated as
the bishop or metropolitan of Bostra by the Monophysites, although he did not reside there;
ibid., p. 160.
117 See PO 19, pp. 233-34 .
The reported involvement with saints and holy men is not out of charac-
ter for Arethas. As already noted, he appears as a respectable "theologian" in
his encounter with Ephraim, and not only as a rude soldier. He repeats this
performance when he presides over a church council that condemned Eugenius
and Conon. He appears as a genuinely pious solider when he writes his letter
from Constantinople in 563 in connection with the consecration of Paul to the
see of Antioch. us Soldiers are sometimes susceptible to the influence of holy
men, and Arethas' encounter with Jacob as a miracleworker has a close parallel
in his career to the miracle performed by St. Simeon the Younger, when he
prophesied for him and his troops their victory over his adversary Mungir in
554. u 9 So in the episode with Jacob, the details sound strange, but all that
can be said is that one cannot rule out an encounter between the two in which
some miraculous element was involved. 120
Finally, the reference to the holy man from Sinai must have disinclined
scholars from giving credence to the account, since Sinai must have seemed so
very far from the jurisdiction of Arethas in the Provincia Arabia. This refer-
ence to Sinai was thus deemed unhistorical, just as the suspicion of the mirac-
ulous element in the Life must have seemed justified when Kleyn wrote in
1882 and influenced others who came after him. But around 1900, Glaser
discovered the Sabaic Dam inscription of Abraha, 121 which revealed that Abu
Karib, the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, was none other than the brother of
Arethas, and this Ghassanid influence did extend to Sinai since it was part of
Palaestina Tertia . Consequently the presence of a monk from faraway Sinai in
118 For these two interventions of Arechas in Monophysice affairs, see below, 782-88 .
119 See BASIC 1.1, 244-49.
120 le is possible chat the troops of Arechas were seized noc by insanity buc by che famous
plague of the early 540s, and chis may be supported by che face chat the two were related. In
the account of Procopius, one of the symptoms of the plague was a violent delirium or hallu-
cination: "Bue chose who were seized with delirium suffered from insomnia and were victims of
a distorted imagination; for they suspected chat men were coming upon chem co destroy chem,
and chey would become excited and rush off in flight, crying out ac che cop of their voices";
HiJtory Il.xxii .20-21. The plague of madness is even better described in the Syriac sources
beginning with John of Ephesus, who remembered it vividly when it hit Amida in 542; see
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, AJceticiJm and Society in CriJiJ (Berkeley, 1990), 63-64 and 171 note
44 for che accounts of the plague in the Syriac sources. So even chis pare of the Life, which muse
have sounded incredible before, may, after all, be an authentic record of what befell the
Ghassanid army during the plague. The first year of the plague is sometimes thought co be 541
(see ODB, III, s. v. plague), when Jacob was still a monk; cwo years later he was consecrated as
bishop in Constantinople . So chronologically ic is possible for Arechas co have mec him in 541
while he was still a monk. But difficulties do persist; according co John of Ephesus, Jacob was
then a monk in Constantinople, not in Phesiltha, and had been such for fifteen years before his
consecration. But this, coo, is suspect, as E. W. Brooks suggests (PO 18, p. 691 noce 1), since
the conferences with the Chalcedonians for which Jacob came to Constantinople cook place in
the mid 530s. If so, Arethas may have met Jacob at Phesiltha in the early 530s and the plague
may have been merely a local one, or his troops may have suffered from some other malady.
121 On the Dam inscription, see BASIC II.
the Ghassanid camp of Arethas does not seem so incredible. Again, this is not
to say that there actually was a monk from Sinai in Arethas' camp; it only
speaks for the possibility of it, consonant with what is known about the extent
of the Ghassanid presence in Oriens. 122
IV. THE TRIO: ARETHAS, JACOB, AND THEODORE
Theodore emerges as a major figure in the history of Monophysitism in the
sixth century and the foremost figure in Arab Christianity as he ministers for
three decades in the service of the new Arab church. But it is misleading to
treat him in isolation from the career of Jacob. So before marking the signifi-
cance of Theodore in the history of the Arab church, it is necessary to discuss
the two bishops together and also in relation to Arethas. For thirty years Jacob
and Theodore were inseparably linked to each other, and this is established
not from statements of later historians but from contemporary documents, 123
those precious letters written to them and by them, concerning important
problems that the Monophysite church faced in the sixth century.
The two prelates were united theologically, as is clear from these letters.
But both of them were consecrated primarily in order that they in turn would
revive the decimated Monophysite hierarchy through further ordinations. Can-
onicity of episcopal consecration had troubled Severus and Theodosius before
535 and before 542/43, but after that date the Monophysites had two bishops
consecrated canonically by Patriarch Theodosius in Constantinople. It is not
clear whether or not Theodore helped Jacob in consecrating other bishops, in
the laying on of hands (cheirotonia).
124
Closely connected with the relationship of the two prelates to each other
is the relationship of Arethas to both of them. Arethas appears strongly be-
hind not only his charge, Theodore, but also Jacob whom he supported, as
will be seen, staunchly and loyally for the rest of his life until the very year of
his death in 569. In his final denunciation of the Tritheistic Eugenius and
Conon, Arethas, who presided over the church council that condemned these
two, singles out Jacob for special mention as the exponent of orthodox Mono-
physite theology. 12 l
This raises the question of the basis for this loyalty and support. The
122 Aigrain ("Arabie," col.
1206) summarized the account in the Spurious Life on the
encounter between Arethas and Jacob but erroneously thought that it attributed Arethas' con-
version to Monophysitism to this encounter.
123 See below, 788-92, 798-801, 806-8 .
124 In his Life of James and Theodore,
John of Ephesus speaks in detail of the ordinations
performed by Jacob in various parts, but he does not mention the name of Theodore in this
connection . Instead he speaks of saintly men whom Jacob met in Alexandria, and then he
continues to use verbs in the plural for indicating the process of ordination without saying who
they were that performed the ordinations; see PO 19, pp. 155-58 .
125 See Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 256.
Arab phylarch, as has been said, was not a mere soldier but a pious Christian
and a zealous Monophysite. Support for the two bishops was a natural sequel
to his efforts toward their consecration. Furthermore, the friendship and close
association of the two, his own bishop Theodore and Jacob, must also have
influenced Arethas . It is not altogether unlikely that Arethas was attracted to
Jacob by certain qualities that they had in common: great physical strength,
powers of endurance, and a ubiquitous presence in the pars orientalis perform-
ing their duties seriously. He probably saw in him his counterpart in the
Monophysite ecclesia . 126
Some important consequences follow from this attachment of Arethas to
Jacob. The phylarch appears as much a Christian as an Arab, perhaps more the
former than the latter in his support of Jacob, and, even more important, he
appears not as a soldier possessed of separatist tendencies from the imperium
but as one that was loyal to it, identifying himself with the interests of its
ecc/esia . The Arab component in his makeup recedes almost completely into
the background when the phylarch is called upon to attend to the problem of
the Monophysite church. 121
The sources are informative on the activities of Jacob throughout his
career until his death in 578. But with the exception of the Monophysite
documents, the letters referred to previously, in which Jacob and Theodore are
associated, the sources are silent on the fortunes of Theodore. As noted earlier,
there were reasons for this silence, the fact that what was written about him is
not extant, mainly due to the accidents of survival that involved the work of
his historian, John of Ephesus. One can therefore only grope in the dark to
mark the significance of this major figure who endured as such for some thirty
years.
First and foremost comes the question of his relationship to Arabic, espe-
cially as Theodore's knowledge of that language, although clearly implied, is
not explicitly stated. The description of Jacob's jurisdiction clearly indicates
that to him was assigned the non-Arab area of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and
the islands, the areas of Syriac and Greek. 128 He is further described as conver-
sant with the Syriac and Greek languages, not Arabic, 129 and this statement is
related to the extent of his jurisdiction, the non-Arabic-speaking area in the
East. On the other hand, the description of Theodore's jurisdiction, the Arab
area, and the datum that he hailed from Arabia suggest that the Arabic-
speaking area was assigned to him, not to Jacob, because the latter did not
126 If the encounter with Jacob, related in the Spurious Life, above, 769, has any element
of fact in it, this would be another basis for the loyalty of Arethas to Jacob .
127 See below, 782-88, 804-5, 808-24.
128 See PO 18, p. 695, in the Life of James.
129 Spelled out in the Spurious Life, PO 19, p. 237.
The Reign of Justinian
773
speak Arabic, while the former did. This is. clear from the career of one who
was almost a contemporary of Theodore, who was actually consecrated bishop
by Jacob, Al_iiidemmeh, whose ministry was in Persian Mesopotamia and who
served the Arabs of the region. He could not communicate with the Arabs
before their conversion because of their "difficult language. " 130
Although the sources are silent on the achievement of Theodore within
the /i,ms, in the two provinces of Arabia and Palestine, some inferences may
be drawn on what he must have achieved in that area from the face that he was
ordained especially to do just that. In the fifth century Sozomen speaks of the
many bishops that the inhabitants of the Provincia Arabia had, and the pre-
sumption is that Theodore continued that tradition in the consecration of
bishops in that province and in Palestine. 131 What a Monophysite Arab church
complete with all the ranks of the hierarchy muse have looked like may be
conceived from the parallel of the Monophysite Arab church of Najran in the
520s, which had its bishop, presbyters, archdeacons, deacons, and subdea-
cons, an account of which has survived. 132 Theodore would also have attended
to the problem of organizing monastic life in the two provinces, especially as he
himself had been a monk before he became a bishop. If records for an Arab
church and its hierarchy in the Provincia Arabia have not been preserved, a record
of the monastic life in that province has, in the form of the many signatures of
the monks of the Provincia which appear in a letter they wrote supporting the
position of Jacob and Theodore on the Tritheistic movement. Many of these
monks must have been Arab, and some have recognizable Arab names. 133
Without the limes, his work is even less known and can only be a matter
of inference. The description of his appointment included the desert, the mad-
bra, and the southern and western regions, which have been identified with
the oriental limitrophe and l:lijaz in western Arabia. Christianity had already
spread in those regions, as has been explained in the volumes on the fourth
and fifth centuries, and Theodore must have built on that foundation. 134 Bue
130 Michael the Syrian mentions that Arethas spoke Arabic to his followers (above, 752-
53), the only reference in the Syriac sources to Arabic spoken among the Ghassanidfoederati. In
view of this, it should be mentioned here in connection with the problem of Arabic among the
foederati . On AJ:iiidemmeh and his ministry for the Arabs of Mesopotamia, see BAFOC, 419-
22, especially 420 note 13.
131 See BAFIC, 178-79 .
132 See Martyn,
64.
133 On these signatures, see below, 824-38.
On the missionary activity of Theodore
among the Arabs, the parallel of Moses, Mavia's bishop in the 4th century, is relevant. The
Arab queen Mavia insisted on an Arab bishop for her foederati, and she received one, Moses,
who, like Theodore, had been a monk, even an anchorite. Sozomen specifically says that he
engaged in missionary activity among the Saracens; see BAFOC, 156.
134 For Christianity in western Arabia in these centuries, see BAFOC, 86-106,
and
BAFIC, 332-60 .
this, too, poses the question of determining which Christian traces, if any, are
Theodore's and which are not. 135 South Arabia was already won to Monophy-
sitism, and so by elimination }::lijaz would have been the region for the spread
of the Christian faith in this period.
The Ghassanid phylarchate, which acquired a new identity around 530
when Justinian conferred on Arethas the extraordinary Basi/eia, acquired an-
other dimension for this new identity when Theodosius, the Monophysite
patriarch in Constantinople, ordained Theodore as the bishop of Ghassanland
and the Arabs. Thus around 542/43 it became a diminutive Byzantium, com-
posed of an imperium and an ecc/esia. Ghassanland had now two supreme heads,
Arethas at the head of its imperium and Theodore at the head of its sacerdotium.
This gave the Ghassanid phylarchate a new prestige, especially as Theodore
was associated in the consciousness of Monophysites with Jacob, and Arethas
appeared as the military arm protecting the movement and also presiding over
church councils. This prestige was now spread over all the Monophysite Near
East. Arethas took his place alongside Near Eastern rulers such as Mono-
physite Abraha of South Arabia and Ella-A~bel_la of Ethiopia, all contempor-
aries who belonged to the same confessional fold. Thus a strong, organized
Arab Monophysite church was born in this period. But while the Syrian one
organized by Jacob has survived to the present day, that organized by The-
odore has not. Its Arabs, whether Ghassanids, Kalbites, or Jugamites of the
Outer Shield, either emigrated to Byzantine Anatolia after Yarmiik or finally
adopted Islam.
V. THE LAST DECADE, 543-553
The sources for the ten years or so that elapsed from the consecration of Jacob
and Theodore to the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 are arid as far as Arab
ecclesiastical history is concerned, especially when compared with the preced-
ing period and with the 560s when the Ghassanids and Arethas at their head
appear again on important occasions in the history of the Monophysite move-
ment. Not that Theodore was inactive; he was probably as active as Jacob, but
the sources for the period are naturally concerned with other events, such as
the edict on the Three Chapters, the Judicatum of Pope Vigilius in 548, and
finally the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. One can, therefore, only note
certain events that took place in the sphere of activity of Theodore and Are-
thas, in Oriens, which are of relevance to Arab ecclesiastical history.
In 545 died Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, who was the determined
enemy of the Monophysites in Oriens, roughly his patriarchate, and with
whom Arethas had that encounter in the late 530s. The Monophysites and the
135 On this, more will be said in BASIC II.
Ghassanids must have viewed his death with some relief, since according to
Monophysite historians he was the spirit behind the persecution at that time.
More important is the death of the empress in 548. The services of
Theodora to the Monophysite cause need no underlining, and her relations
with the Ghassanids and their king, Arethas, have been discussed. Fortunately
she died after she had secured the fateful consecration of the two bishops in
542/43 and after she had established some influence for the phylarch in the
capital. Most important is the fact that Justinian's devotion to her, which was
an important factor in the gains and victories scored by the Monophysites,
continued after her death and with it continued her posthumous influence that
served the Monophysite cause. The Ghassanid Arethas could count on her
green memory till the end of the reign, some twenty years after her death.
In the 540s and after the end of the second Persian war, Arethas con-
ducted a private war with his pagan Lakhmid adversary, Mungir, and the war
had some religious overtones. In one of the encounters, Mungir captured one
of the sons of Arethas and sacrificed him to al-'Uzza, the Arabian Aphrodite.
When Arethas won his final victory over Mungir in 554, one of his sons was
killed in battle, and he buried him in a martyrion in Chalcis. 136 These actions
both speak for themselves. Arethas was a zealous Monophysite and conducted
his Lakhmid war along religious lines; he went to war as a Christian soldier.
From 548, the year of the Judicatum, circumstances were pointing to the
necessity of convening an ecumenical council, which finally took place in 553.
Unlike previous councils, this one did not deal with a new heresy but con-
firmed previous decrees, as it condemned the works of the three theologians
mentioned in the edict on the Three Chapters and anathematized their per-
sons. It was a friendly gesture aimed at the Monophysites, whom the emperor
was trying to reconcile. Arethas and his Monophysite Ghassanid foederati were
thus more than tolerated by an emperor who was increasingly veering toward
the christological position of the Monophysites, to whom belonged his re-
cently deceased wife.
VI. APPENDIX
Sergius, Bishop of l:Iirta
The anti-Julianist Syriac documents published, translated, and studied by R. Draguet
give an account of the consecrations performed by Julianist bishops in the sixth cen-
tury. One document speaks of the consecration of four bishops by Eutropius, one of
whom was "Sergius de I:firta. " 1 This particular bishop was mentioned as such without
136 On chis see BASIC 1.1, 243.
1 R. Draguec, "Pieces de polemique ancijulianisce," Le Museon 54 (1941), 84 note
l.
According to Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 263, these consecrations took place shortly after
549.
any further qualification, and this has created some confusion as to where this l:lirta to
which he was assigned is located.
Draguet located it in South Arabia, in spite of the fact that there is no such
toponym in that region. In so doing, he drew on the much more expansive account of
Michael the Syrian, which misled him, although Michael's account is clear: ''L'un
d'eux descendit a l:lirta de Beit Na'man, et dans le pays des Himyarites . 11 s'appelait
Sergius. " 2 Apparently Draguet missed the conjunction et after Na'miin in Michael's
account and so concluded that l:lirta is in the land of the l:limyarites-South Arabia.
Draguet, however, was on the right track when he invoked the aid of Michael's
Chronicle in trying to comment on the see assigned to Sergius, and indeed his account
is valuable for this and other reasons, namely, the journey of Sergius later to the
l:limyarites, of South Arabia, a matter of considerable importance to the religious
complexion of South Arabia in the sixth century and its effects on the neighboring
region. Although he was wrong in assigning l:lirta to South Arabia, he was right in
identifying it with the l:lirta de Beit Na'man, the l:lirta of the house of Na'man.
M. Sartre accepted Draguet's identification of l:lirta of the anti-Julianist docu-
ment with the l:lirta de Beit Na'man of Michael the Syrian but noted Draguet's
mistake in locating it in South Arabia. 3 For his part, he located it in the Jawlan,
Gaulanitis in Palaestina Secunda, but there is no such toponym in that region. This
identification was possibly made because of the existence of similarly sounding to-
ponyms in that region such as Tell al-l:lara, Jabalfl:larith, or l:larith al-Jawlan, all
Ghassanid toponyms.
The l:lirta mentioned in this Syriac document as the see of Sergius can only have
been the l:lira of the Lakhmids, in Iraq, away from Byzantine territory, and their
capital. The term, originally a common Arabic noun, J?ira, transliterated into Syriac
as J?irta, meant simply "camp," and is often applied to the mobile camps of the
Ghassanids. The term was promoted into a proper noun when it acquired denomina-
tive status, applied to the capital of the Lakhmid Arabs in Iraq. When it is used
without any qualification, as in the Syriac document, and as a proper noun, it means
l:lira of the Lakhmids and only that. 4
Michael the Syrian prefaces his statement on Sergius and l:lirta by saying that
Eutropius sent those he consecrated in all directions in order to spread the Julianist
version of Monophysitism. Thus he did not limit their dispatch to Byzantium or to
Byzantine territory in Oriens. This is consonant with the location of l:lira outside
Byzantine territory, as well as with l:limyar.
Michael leaves no doubt whatsoever that it is the capital of the Lakhmids when
he adds a qualification to l:lirta, that it is "de Beit Na'man." This cannot be a
reference to the Ghassanids who are invariably referred to as the house of I:Iarith or
Mungir. But l:lira, the capital of the Lakhmids in Iraq, is referred to exactly by that
description after the two famous kings of the fifth century, each of whom was called
Nu'man/Na'man. And this is confirmed by the Syriac sources of the sixth century,
2 Chronique,
II, 264.
3 For Sartre's views, see Bostra (Paris, 1985), 112.
4 On ~fra/1:lira, see BAFOC, 490-98.
which refer to it as 1:Iirta d'Beth Na'man. Such is the valuable reference to it in the
Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite.)
So when Eutropius consecrated the Julianist bishops, he sent one of them to
1:Iira, the capital of the Lakhmids in Iraq, to spread the good word. This is consonant
with the efforts of the Monophysites to convert 1:Iira and approach its rulers; Julianist
Monophysites thus were in the footsteps of their Severan rivals in targeting 1:Iira.
6
The discussion of the episcopate of this Sergius has led to another misunder-
standing which should be cleared up, also generated by the account of Michael. When
speaking of the activities of Sergius, he says that he introduced many doctrinal errors
into the countries he preached in, and after spending three years in 1:Iimyar, he
established in his place another bishop, Moses. The French version of Michael reads as
follows: "et apres avoit passe trois ans dans le pays des Himyarites, il etablit a sa place
comme eveque un certain Moi:se. " 7
Sartre 8 understood the passage to mean that before he departed for 1:Iimyar,
Sergius consecrated Moses as bishop in 1:Iirta, which to him was in Ghassanid
Gaulanitis. My reading of the text in Michael yields a different conclusion: that the
consecration of Moses took place not in 1:Iirta but in 1:Iimyar after Sergius spent three
years there. According to Sartre's interpretation of the anti-Julianist text and Mi-
chael's Chronicle, the Ghassanids in Gaulanitis had two bishops in this period, one
called Sergius and another called Moses. But a close examination of the two texts has
shown that neither of the two bishops was assigned to the Jawlan of the Ghassanids
who, moreover, were Severan Monophysites and would not have allowed two dissident
bishops of the Julianist persuasion to operate in their region. The two bishops associ-
ated with Arabia whom Eutropius consecrated were Theodosius and after him Ste-
phen, 9 but these could not have been associated with the Ghassanids who belonged to
a different Monophysite persuasion, the Severan. ' 0
C
The Third Phase (553-565)
I. INTRODUCTION
In the third and last phase, Arethas maintained the momentum he had ac-
quired when he succeeded in securing the consecration of Jacob and Theodore
in the previous phase, and continued to serve the Monophysite church until
5 See The Chronicle of Josh11a the Stylite, ed. and trans. W. Wright (Cambridge, 1882), 54.
For the English translation of this passage where J:Iirta of Na'man occurs, see ibid., 45-46. See
also the treatment of this passage by the present writer in "Ghassan and Byzantium : A New
terminus a quo," Der Islam 33 (1958), 242-47 .
6 On this see above, 702-9.
7 Chronique, II, 264.
8 See Bostra, 112.
9 See Draguet, "Pieces," 84.
10 The relevance of this Julianist effort in the Provincia to Arab cultural history will be
discussed in BASIC II.
the death of Justinian and the very last year of his own reign in 569. But
before discussing his contributions, it is well that a brief account of imperial
ecclesiastical policy be given which will serve as a background against which
may be set the activity of the Ghassanid phylarch.
The year 553 has been truly described as an annus mirabilis for Justinian.
1
His armies were victorious in Italy where they won the smashing victory of
Busta Gallorum, and he acquired one-third of Visigothic Spain. In addition to
military victories in the West, he convened the Fifth Ecumenical Council, in
which his imperial theology triumphed, and he succeeded in forcing Pope
Vigilius to submit to the decrees of the council. As far as the Monophysite
profile of the council is concerned, it confirmed Justinian's previous edict on
the Three Chapters and reflected his continuing interest in reconciling the
Monophysites of the Orient. Toward the end of the reign, this imperial atti-
tude was enhanced when the emperor moved closer to the Monophysite posi-
tion by adopting the theology of Julian of Halicarnassus, Aphthartodocetism,
condemned by Severan Monophysitism . He apparently believed in it sincerely
and vehemently and was preparing to take disciplinary action against the
Chalcedonian patriarchs, one of whom, Eutychius of Constantinople, he had
arrested, in January 565, and banished, when death overtook him shortly
after. 2 Although Justinian's ecclesiastical policy failed to unite the East and
brought about schism in the West, from the point of view of Monophysitism,
it was a tolerant policy that enabled zealous Monophysites, such as Arethas
the Ghassanid, to remain unmolested and even accelerate the pace of their
services to that cause. His activities may be divided chronologically into two
phases, the 550s and the 560s.
II. THE FIFTIES
This period in the ecclesiastical history of the Ghassanids extends roughly
from 553, the year of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, to the end of the decade.
The little that has survived of its history in the sources may be presented as
follows.
1. If 553 was an annus mirabilis for Justinian, the year 554 was also such
for Arethas. 3 In June of that year he scored the victory of his life and reign
over his and Byzantium's inveterate enemy for some fifty years, Murnjir, the
Lakhmid king of 1:Ura, who died in a battle fought in the vicinity of Chalcis/
Qinnasrin. The religious undertones of the battle are relevant in this context,
and they reveal Arethas and his Ghassanids as Christian soldiers fighting their
wars as such. Before the battle, St. Simeon the Younger prophesies victory for
1 See Frend, RiJe, 316.
2 On Justinian's ecclesiastical policy in this period, see Fliche and Martin,
HiJtoire de
l'EgliJe, IV, 467-82.
3 On the battle of 5 54 and all that pertains to it, see BASIC I. 1, 240-51.
the Ghassanids; some of them invoke the aid of the saint during the battle,
while others decide to stay with him after it; and in the battle, Arethas' son
Jabala falls, and his father buries him in a martyrion near Chalcis.
2. Two Greek inscriptions dated 558/59 were found engraved on the
lintel of a monastery in Heliorama, which in Islamic times became a Umayyad
palace at Q~r al-1:fayr al-GharbI, southwest of Palmyra. Both involve Arethas
and have been discussed in a previous chapter. 4 Only their relevance to the
ecclesiastical history of the Ghassanids will be marked in this section. As has
been suggested by the editor, the inscription in which Arethas is hailed and
welcomed as a patrician, with invocations for him, most probably commemo-
rates a visit by Arethas to the Monophysite monastery at Heliorama (Q~r
al-1:fayr al-GharbI). The inscriptions then reveal the Ghassanid king Arethas
as a ruler who cared for monastic life, and indeed in that most valuable Arabic
list of }::lamza, on the buildings of the Ghassanids, reference is_ made to their
building monasteries. 5 The spread of monasticism in Arethas' province, Ar-
abia, is reflected in the most adequate and impressive way by the number of
signatories in that letter which the abbots of Monophysite monasteries in
Arabia wrote, late in his reign, on the subject of the Tritheistic Eugenius and
Conon. 6 Perhaps nothing illustrates better the place of the Ghassanid phylarch
in the Monophysite scheme of things than the dating of Monophysite struc-
tures by his phylarchate; in one of these two inscriptions in Q~r al-1:fayr, it is
Arethas' phylarchate that dates the inscription in the Monophysite monastery.
3. After the death of Severus in 538, the Monophysite see of the Patri-
archate of Antioch had been vacant, although apparently nominally filled by
Constantine, the bishop of Laodicaea until 553 when the latter died. Not
until 557 was the post filled when Theodosius, the exiled Monophysite patri-
arch of Alexandria, who lived in exile in Constantinople, consecrated Sergius
of Tella as the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, a position which he filled
until his death three years after. 7
Little is known about this transaction in the sources, and the question
arises whether or not the Ghassanid phylarch had anything to do with it. The
chances are that he did. It is difficult to believe that a zealous Monophysite,
with a record such as his, would not have taken part in the efforts that finally
succeeded in having a Monophysite patriarch, an incumbent of the see that
Severus held. Two considerations commend this view. (1) Arethas was the one
who brought about the consecration of Jacob Baradaeus and Theodore in 542,
with the view of their ordaining and consecrating Monophysite clergy. In a
delicate operation, such as this one that involved Sergius, the prestige and
4 See ibid., 258-61.
5 On Hamza's list, see BASIC II.
7 See Honigmann, Eveques, 192-95.
experience of the supreme Ghassanid phylarch would have been invaluable. (2)
A few years later, Arethas actively engaged in a similar endeavor, the appoint-
ment of Paul as the successor of Sergius in the see of Antioch, and this is
documented in a letter he wrote to Jacob. 8 Thus the chances are that he also
took an active part in the consecration of his predecessor, Sergius.
Mention must be made in the ecclesiastical history of this period of the
consecration of John of Ephesus as bishop by Jacob Baradaeus around 558, in
view of the importance of this bishop and his involvement with the Ghas-
sanids. Jacob's consecration was effected in 542 on the initiative of Arethas,
while John of Ephesus became, after the death of Theodosius, the chief Mono-
physite figure with whom the Ghassanid rulers, such as Arethas and his son
Mungir, communicated when they visited Constantinople. He was, above all,
the historian who recorded the exploi~s of the Ghassanids on the battlefield
and their achievements and efforts on behalf of the Monophysite movement.
This has survived sporadically in his Ecclesiastical History, but especially re-
grettable is the loss of an entire chapter, almost a monograph, which he
devoted to the history of the dynasty. Coming from an ecclesiastical historian,
it is testimony to the importance of this dynasty in the ecclesiastical history of
the sixth century. 9
III. THE SIXTIES
A second phase in the last period of Arethas' activity may be assigned to the
first half of the sixth decade, during which took place his visit to Constantino-
ple in November 563. In that year the phylarch paid a visit to his patron,
Justinian, during which he transacted some important political business, the
most crucial of which was the question of succession to the phylarchate after
his death. During that visit he engaged in non-secular activities pertaining to
the Monophysite church to which allusion has already been made in the chap-
ter that discussed in detail the political dimensions of his visit. These will
now be discussed in detail, and they consist in his efforts to secure a successor
to the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, Sergius, who died in 560; the conse-
cration of the monk Paul, a syncellus of Theodosius in Constantinople, to that
see; the beginning of the quarrel between Bishop Jacob Baradaeus and the new
patriarch, Paul; and the possible contact of Arethas while in Constantinople
with the future emperor Justin II and his wife Sophia.
In November 563 Arethas came to Constantinople to discuss the ques-
tion of succession to the phylarchate after his death . IO He certainly met Justin-
ian during his visit, and this raises the question of whether or not he met the
8 On this see below, 782-880 .
9 On this see above, 761.
10 For chis see BASIC 1.1, 282-88 .
future emperor and successor to Justinian, his nephew Justin II, and his wife,
Sophia. The chances that he met both are good, and in support of this conclu-
sion the following may be adduced.
1. Arethas was av.:are that not only he but also the emperor, who pro-
tected him, was getting old. Since imperial protection during the reign of
Justinian was important to the prosperity of the Ghassanid phylarchate and
the Monophysite movement, the Ghassanid king must have been anxious to
make contacts in the capital to insure that the prospective emperor would not
be an utter stranger to the Ghassanid cause. Although Justin II had not been
designated co-emperor when Arethas made his visit to the capital in 563, the
presumption must have been that he would be the successor, especially as his
wife, Sophia, was none other than the niece 11 of the deceased empress, The-
odora, whom Justinian adored and to whose memory he remained faithful. 12
Monophysitism had been revived by political influence in the capital when
Theodora helped Arethas in his efforts to have Jacob and Theodore ordained
around 540. The phylarch thus understood the value of having a "big friend"
in the corridors of power in Constantinople.
2. Although the couple converted to Dyophysitism in 562, they had
been staunch Monophysites before. Their decision to convert, prompted by
reasons related to the succession to the throne, 13 could not have weaned them
altogether from Monophysite sympathies. Their attitude to Arethas must have
been friendly. The Ghassanid phylarch must have been known to them per-
sonally in view of his role in resuscitating the Monophysite movement, espe-
cially as they might have met earlier in the 540s when Arethas paid a visit to
Constantinople for the consecration of Jacob Baradaeus and Theodore. 14 Their
own daughter was called Arabia, and it has been suggested in a previous
chapter 15 that she was so called in honor of the Ghassanid phylarch of the
Byzantine Provincia, the name of which was Arabia and whose phylarch pro-
fessed the doctrinal persuasion which the imperial couple also professed.
3. Indirect evidence that Justin II met Arethas or saw him is provided by
the well-known passage in John of Ephesus, which speaks of the impression
that Arethas made on the capital by his forceful personality. When Justin II
11 The daughter of either Comito or Anastasia.
12 On all chat pertains co the religious policies of Justin and Sophia, see two articles in
which Averil Cameron has carefully examined the question, including their conversion from
Monophysitism to Dyophysitism: Averil Cameron, "The Empress Sophia," Byzantion 45 (1975),
5-21, and "The Early Religious Policies of Justin II," in The Orthodox Churches and the West, ed.
D. Baker (Oxford, 1976), 51-67.
13 See Cameron, "The Empress Sophia,"' 7.
14 On chis see above, 755-71.
15 See BASIC 1.1, 318-22.
went almost insane in the 570s, his courtiers would calm him down by invok-
ing the name of Arethas. 16
Perhaps these contacts with Justin II and Sophia in the early 560s could
explain why the Ghassanids remained on excellent terms with Justin II for
some five years after the death of Justinian.
17 Their king apparently felt so
secure and sure of the new emperor's good will that he could comfortably
make another journey to Constantinople in connection with the Tritheistic
controversy. And it is striking that Ghassanid-Byzantine relations suddenly
soured almost immediately after the death of Arethas, which suggests at least
partially that these good relations rested on the personal relationship that
obtained between Arethas and Justin, cemented or renewed during his trip to
Constantinople in 563.
IV. THE LETTER OF ARETHAS TO JACOB BARADAEUS
Unmentioned by Theophanes, who reported Arethas' visit to Constantinople
in 563, is the involvement of the Ghassanid king while he was still in Con-
stantinople in the election of Paul as the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch in
564. Evidence for this derives from a letter written by him in 563 to Jacob
Baradaeus and which has survived. This is an important document for Ghas-
sanid ecclesiastical history which has not been noted by some, and when it has
been, it was wrongly dated and consequently misinterpreted.
18
The confusion possibly goes back to a note by Chabot, 19 the editor of the
Monophysite documents of which the letter is part. Commenting on the letter
of Patriarch Theodosius to the Monophysite bishops of the Orient concerning
his choice of Paul to be the successor of the deceased Sergius as the Mono-
physite patriarch of Antioch, Chabot in a footnote dated the death of Ser-
gius to 563 and the consecration of Paul to 566. F. Nau apparently followed
this erroneous chronology and so completely misunderstood the contents of
Arethas' letter, which he thought the Ghassanid king wrote in 566 and in
which, he thought, Arethas discussed the two bishops, Eugenius and Conon,
the proponents of the Tritheistic heresy! 20 It was left to E. W. Brooks 21 to
16 See ibid., 288, 364.
17 But it should also be remembered that Justin II, early in the reign, wanted to reconcile
the Monophysites; he gave a magnificent funeral to their patriarch, Theodosius, and "allowed
an oration which condemned Chalcedon"; Averil Cameron, "Early Religious Policies," 53.
18 Strangely enough, it was missed by Noldeke. Among those who misdated it are Chabot
and Nau, as will be seen in the course of this section.
19 See Documenta ad Origines Monophysitarum,
CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 2, vol. 37, versio,
p. 62 note 2.
20 See F. Nau, Les arabes chretiens
(Paris, 1933), 59-61. Before him, the usually perspica-
cious Aigrain ("Arabie," col. 1208), perhaps misled by Klein, failed to evaluate the letter.
21 See E. W. Brooks, "The Patriarch Paul of Antioch and the Alexandrine Schism of575,"
BZ 30 (1930), 468- 70.
correct these erroneous views, when he related the letter to Arethas' visit in
563, documented by Theophanes with precision to the month of Novem-
ber, and in this he was followed by Honigmann and Frend. 22 Yet although
Arethas' letter was decisive in settling the date of the consecration of Paul,
neither Brooks nor Honigmann studied the letter in detail or extracted from it
data for a better understanding of the role of the Ghassanid dynasty in the
ecclesiastical history of the period. Both had vague conceptions of the histori-
cal role of the dynasty. After noting the letter, and using it for precisely
dating the consecration of Paul, all that Brooks had to say of Arethas was that
he was "an Arab shaikh, Al-Harith, " 23 in spite of the fact that he is described
in the rubric of the letter as patricius and g/oriosissimus, while the contents of
the letter should have suggested to him a historical personage quite different
from what "shaikh" expresses and implies . It is, therefore, imperative to an-
alyze this important document in detail.
The background of the letter may be briefly described. The Monophysite
patriarch Theodosius wrote from Constantinople in 563 to Jacob Baradaeus
and the Oriental bishops 24 recommending his own synce//us, the archimandrite
Paul, for the Patriarchate of Antioch after the see had been vacant for some
three years following the death of the last incumbent, Sergius, in 560. The
efforts of Theodosius to have Paul consecrated coincided with the visit of
Arethas to Constantinople in November of the same year. Arethas, the
staunch Monophysite who had been the spirit behind the consecration of Jacob
Baradaeus and Theodore around 540, naturally cooperated fully with The-
odosius in his efforts. He thus wrote a letter to Jacob Baradaeus on this sub-
ject, the gist of which may be presented as follows.
Before he departed from Constantinople, Arethas was informed of some-
thing, which Jacob had been informed about before. About this same matter,
archimandrite Paul, who had written Jacob three letters formerly, was now
also writing to him another letter . Arethas asks Jacob to come and see him
personally and bring the letters with him so that they may discuss the matter
together . He further adds that if Jacob, for some necessity, could not come
personally to him, he should send the letters to him and choose for carriers
men worthy of transacting such important business. Arethas then refers to
something else: Patriarch Theodosius revealed to him a matter concerning
Paul, superior of the convent, which pleased him greatly. He ends the letter
by asking Jacob to pray for him.
The resume of the letter should explain why scholars were discouraged
from analyzing it. It is obscure in its references, and the obscurity is deliber-
22 See Honigmann, Eveques, 175-76, 196 note 3; also Frend, Rise, 291.
23 See Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 469.
24 Frend, Rise, 291 and note 3.
ate because of the secrecy that characterized the correspondence between mem-
bers of a tolerated "heretical" church such as that of the Monophysites. While
the secrets of the second part of the letter can now be easily unlocked, since it
is a reference to the nomination by Theodosius of Paul to be the patriarch of
Antioch, those of the first part must remain shrouded in their obscurity, and
compared to the second they must be relatively unimportant. In order to
extract as much from the letter as is possible, the text is given in extenso in the
Latin version of Chabot.
EXEMPLAR EPISTULAE GLORIOSISSIMI PATRICH HARETH, SCRIPTAE AD
VENERABILEM MAR IACOBUM.
Noverit sanctitas tua quod postquam complanavit viam Deus, et
sancta Deigenitrix, rebusque meis dispositis, cum in eo essem ut exirem
5 ab hac urbe regia, narratum est mihi negotium de quo vobis locutus est
antea, et propter quod etiam nunc scripsit vobis venerabilis abbas
Paulus, archimandrita magnus. Et dixit mihi ad vos antea tres misisse
epistulas. Optime igitur faciet sanctitas vestra si, personaliter apud me
divertens, adduxerit etiam epistulas et eos quibus competit negotium
10 tractare, sicut ipsi praescripserunt vobis. Si autem id facere non quidem
vobis contingit, urgente necessitate, quae non sinat vos ad me venire,
viros cum epistulis mitre, et spero fore ut Deus secundum beneplacitum
suum disponat negotium. Tales autem viros te decet eligere ad nego-
tium, qui apti sint ad huiusmodi ministerium. Id etiam notum facio
15 sanctitati vestrae, beatum papam Theodosium aequum iudicavisse ut
mihi patefaceret quod spectat ad abbatem Paulum archimandritam mag-
num; et valde gavisus sum, et glorificavi Deum. Locutus sum enim cum
eo facie ad faciem, et multum profecit anima mea, et studeo preces eius
acquirere per ea quae mihi praescripsit. Haec scripsi, venerans vestigia
20 sanctitatis vestrae, et enixe rogo ut memoriam mei faciatis in orationibus
vestris sanctis et Deo acceptis. 2 )
Line 1: Arethas' Byzantine dignity and rank, patricius and gloriosissimus,
are given rather than his Arab or his purely secular ones, such as basileur and
phylarchos. This is appropriate in an ecclesiastical document, and it suggests
that of the many titles he had, these two were the highest and most important
by which he came to be known in ecclesiastical circles. 26
Lines 3- 5: the problems Arethas had gone to Constantinople to discuss
have been solved with the help of God and the Mother of God; inter alia, they
present the problems of when and whence the letter was written. The use of
the demonstrative adjective, hac, applied to Constantinople in line 5 might
25 Docummta, versio, p. 100; for the Syriac version, see textus, pp. 143-44.
26 For his Byzantine tides and ranks, see BASIC 1.1, 288-97 .
suggest that he wrote the letter from the city, but the previous verbs would
suggest that he had already departed from Constantinople when he wrote. If
he wrote it from Constantinople, the date of the letter must be November or
December 563 since Theophanes precisely dates his arrival to November; if
after his departure, it must be dated early in 564 since it would have taken
him at least three months to be back in Oriens. 27
Rebus meis dispositis in line 4 must refer to the matter Theophanes men-
tioned when he recorded Arethas' visit to Constantinople, namely, the choice
of a successor to him after his death. Although it was safely inferred in a
previous chapter that his hopes for his son Mungir as successor were fulfilled, 28
Theophanes is silent on the outcome. The letter states the success of the visit
explicitly, and, what is more, the statement comes from the protagonist him-
self.
Sancta Deigenitrix: the reference to the Virgin Mary in this letter is strik-
ing; together with God, she facilitated Arethas' mission in Constantinople and
crowned it with success. It was in the late sixth century, or perhaps the
second half of it, that the cult of the Virgin Mary grew in Constantinople in
her capacity as intercessor. She protected Constantinople, and many churches
in the city were dedicated to her. Arethas, a pious Christian, must have been
aware of this Marian atmosphere in Constantinople in this period, and he
reflects it in his letter. It was not Christ who helped him but the Mother of
God, the Theotokos, who in this period appears in Constantinople not as
mater dolorosa but as the great intercessor. 29 The term "Theotokos" also fit well
with Monophysite theology that emphasized the divine in Christ which the
term reflected neatly and trenchantly.
Lines 5-8 : these mention a correspondence that involved Paul, the archi-
mandrite in Constantinople, and Jacob. The former had sent the latter three
communications and added another while Arethas was still in Constantinople.
There is no way of finding out what this correspondence involved. But evi-
dently it was an important ecclesiastical matter for the Monophysites, in
which clerics in the capital and in Oriens were involved, and important
enough for the Ghassanid king to be asked to participate in the arrangement
described for its execution.
Lines 8-10: Arethas asks Jacob to come and see him personally and to
bring both the letters and those worthy of transacting the business under
discussion in them. The letter makes clear that in these four letters that Jacob
received, he was given instructions to proceed to Arethas to discuss the matter
27 On the duration of the journey, see ibid., 519.
28 See ibid., 283-85 .
29 On all this, see Averil Cameron, "The Theotokos in Sixth-Century Constantinople, "
Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 24.1 (1978), 79-108 .
with him. Arethas' request to Jacob does not specify the locality of the meet-
ing, but the clear implication is that it is well known to Jacob, who visited
the Ghassanid camp quite often since his ordination around 540. Possibly
Jabiya in the Golan is meant. The instructions in the letter reflect the impor-
tance of Arethas for the Monophysites even in ecclesiastical matters; the phy-
larch was a power.
Lines 10-14: Arethas suggests that if for some overriding reason, Jacob
could not come personally to him, he should send the letters with men worthy
of the problem to be discussed and the business to be transacted. The recom-
mendation reflects the seriousness with which Arethas took up his ecclesiasti-
cal assignment and the circumspection with which he tried to execute it.
The secrecy that envelops the contents of these letters, of course, reflects
the plight of the Monophysite church in this period, a persecuted, then toler-
ated church, the clerics of which had to be careful in hiding their intentions.
Arethas was primarily a soldier and a general, but the sources do not have
much to say on the qualities of his generalship. This letter, although it deals
with ecclesiastical matters, gives a glimpse of qualities that are easily transfer-
able to the battlefield, such as secrecy and circumspection in planning.
Lines 14-17: Patriarch Theodosius deemed Arethas worthy of disclosing
to him his plans for Paul, who is described as an archimandrite . Unlike the
contents of the letters mentioned in the first part of the letter, this conversa-
tion with Theodosius can only have had for its object the prospective consecra-
tion of Paul as the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch. There is no doubt that
he is the same Paul mentioned earlier in the letter, since his description in
both passages is identical, "abbas Paulus, archimandrita magnus." The cir-
cumstances that led Theodosius to take this step in 563 are detailed by him in
one of his letters . 30 What is relevant in this context is the Ghassanid involve-
ment in it: Theodosius is not content to send letters to Jacob and the Oriental
bishops, but he involves Arethas in it. He was aware of the importance of
Arethas in the affairs of his church and the fact that the church owed the
resuscitation of its hierarchy to his efforts around 540. Theodosius would have
written to him in Oriens invoking his help, but Arethas' visit to Constantino-
ple in the nick of time brought him personally in touch with Theodosius.
Line 17 reflects the emotional involvement of Arethas in what Theodosius had
told him, and it is certain that on his return to Oriens he participated in the
transactions that led to the consecration of Paul, whom he continued to sup-
port after his consecration, against his enemies and detractors. 31
Lines 17-19: Arethas says that he spoke with "him" face to face, that he
30 Letter to Jacob, Conon, Eugenius, and the Oriental bishops, preserved in Documenta,
versio, pp. 60-62 , esp. p. 60.
was edified by his conversation, and that he was anxious to have his prayers
for accomplishing what he had instructed him to do. It is not clear from this
sentence whether the referent is Paul or Theodosius and arguments could be
advanced for either, but the fact that at the end he speaks of "his instructions"
(praescripsit) suggests the authority of Theodosius, the patriarch. 32
Lines 19-21: the letter ends with the expression of pious sentiments
toward Jacob, not insignificant for an evaluation of Arethas' Christianity.
This rare document, which has survived accidentally, is a measure of
what has been lost and which could document the role of the Ghassanid dy-
nasty in ecclesiastical history. The Ghassanid king spent all his long reign in
support of the Monophysite movement, and his achievements must have been
considerable and recorded by Monophysite writers. The foregoing paragraphs
in which the letter has been analyzed have brought out some important as-
pects of the personality of Arethas. The letter reflects the central importance
of Arethas in the affairs of the Monophysite church, an importance recognized
by the two hierarchs, Theodosius and Paul in Constantinople . He is, there-
fore, entrusted with delicate and important assignments, one of which was
working toward the election and consecration of the prospective Monophysite
patriarch of Antioch.
The letter also reflects unmistakably the genuine piety of the Ghassanid
king. It opens with gratitude to God and the Theotokos for bringing his
efforts to a successful conclusion . In the eventuality that Jacob could not come
personally to him, he hopes that, nonetheless, God will prosper his endeavors
in dealing with the matter in question. After speaking with Theodosius, he
says how edified he was by his conversation and hopes to have the benefit of
his prayers. Finally, in addressing Jacob, he expresses the most profound sen-
timents of respect toward the Jacobite saint. Thus the letter adds a new di-
mension to the personality of the Ghassanid king in relation to Monophysi-
tism, namely, his piety, just as the passages in Michael the Syrian reveal
another aspect of his Monophysitism, the "theologian," not in the technical,
professional sense but in the sense of one who had a working knowledge of the
theological issues at stake in the controversies of the sixth century . 33
Finally, the letter makes amply clear that Arethas was a literate federate
phylarch who knew at least two languages, Arabic and Greek, and possibly
three (Syriac). 34 This is clearly implied throughout the letter where he specifi-
32 The word "instructions" also appears in the letters chat Paul wrote co Jacob (mentioned
earlier in chis letter, line 11), but the instructions there are noc for Arechas but for Jacob .
33 On his encounter with Patriarch Ephraim, see above, 746-55; on his participation in
the Tricheiscic controversy, see below, 805-24.
34 This topic has already been broached in the account of Arechas' encounter with
Ephraim; see above, 752-53.
cally says that Paul spoke to him and that he spoke with Theodosius . These
two clerics knew no Arabic; both were Egyptians who could have spoken
Coptic and also Greek. Since Coptic was out of the question for Arethas, the
latter must have spoken Greek with them, the language he must have used
when he also saw the emperor during his visit in Constantinople. Paul, the
Egyptian, must have written to Jacob the three letters mentioned in the letter
of Arethas in a language common to both, which could only have been Greek,
which Jacob knew; so when Arethas asks Jacob co send the letters co him in
case he was unable to come, the clear implication is chat he could read chem.
Finally, the letter itself is evidence of Arethas' literacy in either Syriac or
Greek, since he could communicate with Jacob (who knew no Arabic) only in
one of these two. 3 ) The language of Monophysitism in Oriens was Syriac, the
language of the Oriental Christians, and it is difficult to believe that Arethas,
whose base of operations both as a phylarch and as a Monophysite was Oriens,
would not have known chat language. If so, Arethas must have been a vir
trilinguis, his linguistic expertise encompassing Arabic, Syriac, and Greek,
and the same may be predicated of his son and successor, Mungir, who was
exactly in the same situation as his father.
V. BISHOP THEODORE AND PATRIARCH PAUL
Paul was consecrated in Oriens in 564. He had been sent thither by The-
odosius and was secretly and hastily consecrated "extra muros in exile" as the
Monophysice patriarch of Antioch successor to Sergius. The laying on of hands
was performed by three prominent Monophysite bishops: Jacob Baradaeus,
Eugenius of Seleucia (lsauria), and Eunomius of Amida. 36 The choice of Paul
by Theodosius and his consecration proved disastrous to the fortunes of Mono-
physitism in the second half of the sixth century, but only what is relevant to
this biennium before the death of Justinian and to the Ghassanids will be dis-
cussed here.
As indicated in the preceding section, the Ghassanid king played a role
in the negotiations chat finally resulted in the consecration of Paul. The-
odosius approached him while he was still in Constantinople ; he wrote to
Jacob about it; and there is no doubt chat he did what he could to facilitate
the consecration, which he probably also attended. Bue his own bishop, The-
odore, is conspicuous by his absence both in the negotiations that led co the
consecration and during the consecration itself. When Theodosius decided co
35 F. Nau thought that the letter could have been written in Syriac, but more probably in
Greek. Sebastian Brock, in a personal communication, thinks the same. Thus the letter, as it
has survived, would be a Syriac version of the original Greek. See Nau, ArabeJ chretiem, 59 note
1.
36 Honigmann, EvequeJ, 196.
inform his Monophysite bishops of the choice of his syncel/us Paul for the
patriarchate, he wrote an epistle to the Oriental bishops but designated ex-
plicitly only three as the addressees: Jacob Baradaeus, Conon of Tarsus, and
Eugenius of Seleucia. 37 Theodore is not mentioned by name but possibly sub-
sumed under the "Oriental bishops" to whom the epistle was also addressed.
This is a little strange, because Theodore had been associated with Jacob since
their historic consecrations around 540 in which Arethas was involved and had
continued to be associated with him in ecclesiastical documents. 38 But a letter
sent by Theodore immediately after the consecration of Paul and addressed to
the latter explains the omission. Theodore was not in Oriens at his see (Ja-
biya?), but in Constantinople, as is clear from the rubric of his letter, which
has survived, 39 and the fact must have been known to Theodosius. This also
explains why he took no part in the "laying on of hands" that consecrated Paul
and why his name does not appear among the subscriptions appended to the
letter addressed to Theodosius after the consecration and which informed him
of the event. 40 But if he did not participate in the "laying on of hands," he was
not left out of the deliberations that resulted in the consecration of Paul. This
is clearly stated in the letter he addressed to Paul after the latter's consecra-
tion: "consilii particeps fui in ordinatione vestra legitima. " 41
What was Theodore doing in Constantinople at this juncture? The
sources are silent, but it is natural to suppose that he accompanied Arethas,
whose bishop he was, when the latter visited the capital at this very time in
563. If Theodore did not attend the consecration, his letter on it has survived,
which thus may be paired with the letter of the Ghassanid king on the same
occasion. As a letter from an Arab bishop, it is reproduced here because of the
rarity of documents emanating from Arab ecclesiastics in this period. It is a
short letter in which he salutes the new patriarch, Paul, and his consecration
as the patriarch of Antioch. He lauds his virtues, and since he did not attend
37 See Documenta, versio, 63-65.
38 See ibid., pp. 101, 105, 115-17, 123, 125, 136, 139, 142, 145; see also the section
on Theodore, below, 806-8 .
39 For the rubric of the letter, see Documenta, versio, p. 65, lines 31-33.
40 See Documenta, pp, 63-65. It is noteworthy that those who "laid the hands" on Paul
were not exactly those to whom Theodosius wrote, Eugenius and Eunomius. Conon appears
among the signatories of the letter, not as a consecrator, but as one who approved and gave his
assent to the consecration: see ibid., p. 64, lines 30-38.
41 For this statement of his involvement in the deliberations, see the subscription in his
letter, ibid., p. 66, lines 25-26 , The same phrase, "consilii particeps," is used by Conon of
Tarsus, John of Qinnasrin, and John of Epiropolis, who also did not take part in the "laying on
of hands" but who were consulted : ibid., pp. 64-65; "e Epiropolis" seems to be a corrupt
reading: ibid., p. 65 note 1.
It is relevant to mention that many of the clergy in Oriens were not consulted concerning
the consecration of Paul as patriarch, and they did not like it: see Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 470
and note 2.
the consecration, he hastens to send his acceptance of it. He reioices in the
peace of the church and asks for the prayers of the new patriarch and those of
Theodosius . The Latin version of the letter reads as follows.
EXEMPLAR EPISTULAE QUAE FACTA EST CONSTANTIN0P0LI A VEN-
ERABILI MAR THEODORO, quia non adfuit, nee subscripsit epistulae
communi venerabilium episcoporum.
Domino meo sanctissimo et beato patri spiritali et doctori, archie-
piscopo et patriarchae Paulo, Theodorus.
Laudabilis omnino est qui omnem sollicitudinem adhibet ut liberet
animam suam ab omni inquinatione peccati, maxime vero a vana gloria
et inani phantasia et a malis ex his orientibus . Scriptum est enim: "Be-
atus vir qui omnia veretur per modestiam ." Cum itaque haec a se re-
movit sanctitas vestra, et ad solum Deum mentem suam defixit, id ei
datum est ut in angustiis sit cum populo Dei; nam non suorum tantum
sed etiam pluriniorum, ut viverent, sollicita est.
Quia vero his quae facta sunt non aderam, necesse mihi visum est,
ut per hanc meam epistulam miseram ad vos, beati, properarem; nam
ordinationem vestram et manuum impositionem in patriarchatum, se-
cundum Christum , quasi praesens essem et perfecissem, reputavi; et de
stabilitate pacis ecclesiarum Dei sanctarum gaudens, earn accepi. Ut ea
renideatis, ego infimus deprecor, quemadmodum in illa resplendet is qui
cum sanctis est, pater noster et patriarcha et doctor totius orbis, sanctus
Severus. Cuius precibus , et precibus eius qui nunc stat et ecclesiam sane-
tam Dei ubique dirigit , qui, post Deum, dominus noster est et a Deo
servatur, sancti et beati patriarchae Theodosii, precibus etiam vestris,
liberemur ab omni astutia Calumniatoris et malitia humana, et in fide
recta et immaculata, in mutuo amore, vero et fraterno , servemur omnes,
deprecamur.
Exemplar subscriptionis: Theodorus gratia Dei episcopus e dioecesi
orientali, cum sanxi et consilii particeps fui in ordinatione vestra legi-
tima, notum feci et signavi propria manu. 42
The letter contains little that would contribute to a better knowledge of
Arab ecclesiastical history in this period . There are, however, two phrases that
are of some importance: "in fide recta," in the body of the text, and "epi-
scopus e dioecesi orientali, " in the subscription. As each denomination in the
Orient considered itself Orthodox, Theodore, too, considers his own confes-
sion, the Monophysite, "the Orthodox " one, and to the present day the Syriac
church calls itself "Orthodox. " This is a matter of some importance to the
42 Docummta, versio, pp. 65-66 .
problem of the existence of theological vocabulary in Arabic in this period.
Theodore's letter has survived in its Syriac version, but in view of the ethnic
origins of the two-Paul, an Egyptian, and Theodore, an Arab-the lan-
guage of the original letter must have been one that was common to both,
almost certainly Greek. Thus the term recta (Syriac, trifta) translates Greek
OQ0oc; (orthos). Its Arabic equivalent in contemporary Arabic poetry on the
Ghassanids is qawim, a hapax legomenon in what has survived of that poetry,
but a most precious survival. Its attestation in the letter of the Arab bishop of
the Ghassanids is thus welcome to the discussion of this problem. 43
Equally important is Theodore's description of himself as episcopus e di-
oecesi orientali, in Syriac, purnasa madn~ayya. His jurisdiction has been a con-
troversial matter and has been discussed in a previous section. 44 The impor-
tance of this phrase in the letter derives from the fact that this is an official
document written and signed by Theodore himself, while the other descrip-
tions of his jurisdiction come from other sources, the Vitae.
Theodore's reference to himself as a bishop from the Diocese of Oriens is
significant and calls for the following observations. It invites comparison with
the other subscriptions in the letter addressed to Theodosius after the conse-
cration .
45 Three of them are so well known that they do not specify their exact
jurisdiction : Jacob, Eugenius, and Eunomius; three specify Conon of Tarsus,
John of Qinnasrin, and John of Epiropolis(?); two are silent on their jurisdic-
tions: Sergius and John. Thus Theodore, the Arab bishop of the Ghassanids,
is unique in the way he describes his jurisdiction ; it is related to Oriens,
roughly coinciding with the Patriarchate of Antioch over which the newly
consecrated Paul presides.
This could prove the point that Theodore's jurisdiction was a large one
that cut across boundaries: in Ghassanland, the limitrophe, and the Arabian
region, which extended to northern }::lijaz. It is doubtful that Jabiya, the main
headquarters of the Ghassanids, would have been intelligible or well known to
Paul, who was an Egyptian and had spent his last years before his consecration
as a monk in Constantinople. Theodore, therefore, signs in such a way as to
be intelligible to him and also to relate himself to the diocese or the patriarch-
ate of which Paul was now the incumbent.
It is perhaps significant that he refers to himself as bishop from the
Diocese of Oriens , thus using the secular administrative term rather than the
ecclesiastical term, the Patriarchate of Antioch or of Oriens. This could relate
his jurisdiction to that of the Ghassanid Arethas, who was appointed in 529
to the extraordinary Basileia over Oriens (or most of it), the imperial diocese,
43 For chis see BASIC II.
44 See above, 761-68.
45 See Documenta, pp. 64-65.
and not just to one particular province. Thus this self-description of his juris-
diction could confirm its extensiveness, commensurate with that of Arethas in
Oriens.
This interpretation could receive confirmation from the fact that the sec-
ular Diocese of Oriens and the ecclesiastical Patriarchate of Antioch were not
coterminous, since Juvenal of Jerusalem in 449 succeeded in having the Patri-
archate of Jerusalem carved out of that of Antioch; thus the three Palestines
were outside the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Antioch. Now, according to the
Vita, Theodore was also responsible for Palestine, even as far as Jerusalem.
This falls outside the Patriarchate of Antioch but not outside the confines of
secular Oriens . If so, the subscription would definitively clinch the fact of his
extensive jurisdiction and thus confirm the Vita.
The validity of this reasoning depends on whether Syriac purnasa, which
translates diocese, is really the secular term as opposed to patriarchate, Syriac
patriarkuta, the clearly ecclesiastical term. "Oriens" is used in these ecclesiasti-
cal documents either as a noun, madnka, or as an adjective, madnkayya, to
refer to the Monophysite ecclesiastics and monks in the East (the Patriarchate
of Antioch), perhaps as a continuation of its usage before Juvenal separated the
Three Palestines from the patriarchate which then was coterminous with
Oriens, or roughly so. But the term purnasa which Theodore uses is not used
elsewhere in these documents with "Oriens"; only "Oriens" is used to qualify
the ecclesiastics in such phrases as the Oriental bishops or the bishops of
Oriens; 46 Paul is referred to as the patriarch of Antioch. When the archi-
mandrites of the Province of Arabia wrote their well-known letter, confirming
the condemnation of the Tritheistic bishops, Eugenius and Conon, they re-
ferred to themselves as "cuncti provinciae Arabiae humiles abbates orthodoxi."
They did not use the ecclesiastical term "diocese" but provincia, and so it is in
the original Syriac, the transliteration of Greek eparchia (EJ'taQ):La).
47 In so
doing, they may have wanted to reflect their being part of Arethas' phylarchal
jurisdiction in the Provincia. If so, Theodore may have wanted to do the same
by allying himself with Arethas and with Oriens as a secular diocese, the scene
of Arethas' authority and activity, which was also more accurately reflective of
his own extensive jurisdiction, which included Palestine.
46 See Documenta, p. 60, line 2, and p. 62, line 4.
47 Ibid., versio, p. 145, line 26, and cexcus, p. 209, line 17.
XII
The Reign of Justin II (565-578)
INTRODUCTION
J
ustin was the first of the successors of Justinian to initiate new policies that
diverged from those of his predecessor. These new policies ultimately in-
cluded ecclesiastical ones as well. For Byzantinists, the reign falls into two
periods, divided by the co-rulership of Tiberius in 574 when Justin was certi-
fied insane. This division is also valid for Ghassanid-Byzantine relations but
needs to be modified because of the death of Arethas in 569. These relations
experienced a drastic change after the accession of his son Mungir. Hence the
reign may be divided into two phases: (1) from 565 to 569 when Arethas
died; (2) from the accession of Mungir in 569 to the death of Justin II in 578.
A
I. INTRODUCTION
The first phase, 565-569, is dominated by the figure of Arethas. In fact this
period witnessed the climax of Arethas' involvement in ecclesiastical matters,
since his military role was over, with peace reigning on the main fronts where
he had fought-the Persian and the Lakhmid. He thus devotes his energies to
the peace of his church, and his presence is felt everywhere in Monophysite
circles and in inter-Monophysite feuds. Not only the Ghassanid king but also
the Ghassanid bishop, Theodore, play an important role in this period. Not
much had been heard of him (at least in extant sources) in the preceding
twenty years or so, but now in the course of this quadrennium he is in evidence
everywhere.
Thus the Ghassanids in this period dominate the scene of Monophysite
history, and the Ghassanid king and his bishop work hand in hand toward
their common goals. In addition to working for inter-Monophysite amity,
they had to deal with the central government in Constantinople, which in this
period was still well disposed toward the Monophysites and was working ener-
getically to bring about the reconciliation of the Monophysite and Dyophysite
camps. Even so, the ecclesiastical problems they had to deal with were grow-
ing in complexity: the consequences of the election and consecration of Paul as
the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch and inter-Monophysite theological con-
troversies, especially that of Tritheism.
11. CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE MONOPHYSITES
The imperial mood in Constantinople as far as the Monophysites were con-
cerned was, generally speaking, a continuation of that of the previous reign.
The central government continued the work of reconciliation, as may be dis-
cerned from a short description of the key personalities in the capital, with
whom the Ghassiinid phylarch and his bishop had to deal.
Justin JI: the new emperor, a nephew of Justinian, had been a Mono-
physite before he converted to the Chalcedonian position in 562. 1 So he shared
with his uncle a feeling for the Monophysites, in spite of his official position
as the emperor of Chalcedonian Byzantium. But while the uncle in his last
years had gone the length of subscribing to the extreme form of Julianism, in
the form of Aphthartodocetism, the nephew belonged to the moderate wing of
Monophysitism, the Severan, which had by then become the "orthodox" ver-
sion of that confession.
Sophia: the new empress was the niece of Theodora and, like her hus-
band, had been a Monophysite of the Severan persuasion before converting in
the same year. 2 She continued the role of her deceased aunt as a force in
Dyophysite-Monophysite relations in this period and reflected the friendliness
of her husband, even more so than he, to the movement.
Patriarch Theodosius: the death of the Monophysite patriarch Theodosius
in June 566 created a vacuum in the Monophysite ranks, but it was soon filled
by the historian of the movement, John of Ephesus, who had been a trusted
friend and advisor of Justinian's in propagating the Christian faith in pagan
pockets in Anatolia.
Athanasius, the grandson of Empress Theodora: Athanasius was also a second
cousin of Sophia, the niece of the empress. He was thus a relative of the
imperial family, was influential, and had the ear of the imperial couple. He
was a Tritheistic Monophysite who played a very important role in this period
before his sudden death around 570, as will be discussed later. 3
Thus the capital was sympathetic, even more so in this quadrennium than
in the previous reign. The Monophysites had powerful connections in the
capital, which had a large number of Monophysite clerics residing in it. No
1 See John of Ephesus, HE, versio, Book II, chap. 10, pp. 50-51.
In all that pertains to
the early ecclesiastical policy of Justin, see Averil Cameron, "The Early Religious Policies of
Justin II," in The Orthomix Churches and the West, ed. D. Baker (Oxford, 1976), 51-67.
2 See John of Ephesus in the preceding footnote. On Sophia, see Averil Cameron, "The
Empress Sophia," Byzantion 45 (1975), 5-21.
3 See below, 796-803. His death is recorded in John of Ephesus, HE, versio, p. 195, line 23.
The Reign of Justin II 795
wonder that the new emperor went to extremes in his friendly attitude to the
Monophysites, and this was reflected strikingly in three ways. ( 1) After his
accession, he gave Theodosius a royal welcome at court in 565 and a splendid
funeral the following year; the monk Athanasius delivered a funeral eulogy
that amounted to a condemnation of Chalcedon. 4 (2) In 566 the emperor
issued an edict that was nearly a surrender to the Monophysite expectations,
and the exiled Monophysite bishops were recalled.) (3) More important, al-
though Chalcedonian, he became an arbitrator between the warring Mono-
physite groups in the capital. 6 As a former Monophysite, he perhaps genuinely
wanted to unite their ranks, but more probably, as a current Dyophysite, he
wanted them united for the more important task of effecting a final reconcilia-
tion between them and the Chalcedonians, without having the additional dif-
ficulty of dealing with splinter groups.
The efforts of Justin and his wife, Sophia, to bring about a reconciliation
reached their climax when Justin convened the conference of 567, which was
held significantly in the monastery of Mar Zakkai in Callinicum in the heart
of Monophysite territory.
7 It was at this conference that Justin's edict was read
by the patrician John . 8 The assembled bishops almost accepted it 9 but for the
fanatical monks who thus brought the conference to naught. 10 Theodore, the
Arab bishop, accepted it, and when the libel/us (as Michael the Syrian calls it)
was torn to pieces by Cosmas the monk, 11 he, with Jacob and others, suc-
cessfully persuaded the patrician John to make another attempt at reconcilia-
tion. 12 But the second attempt failed, again because of the violent opposition
of the monks. Thus the Ghassanid bishop was on the side of reconciliation,
and so must have been the phylarch behind him.
Although Justin was irritated by his failure at Callinicum, he continued
to work diligently for the union of the two churches and for reconciling the
Monophysites among themselves, but he did not again go as far as he had
when he issued his edict of 566. The second edict, issued in 571, was much
more restrained; and so a golden opportunity was missed in 567. Hence the
5 It is well analyzed by J . Maspero in Histoire des patriarches d'Alexandrie (Paris, 1923),
167-68. In Fliche and Martin, Histoire de /'Eglise, IV, 486, the edict is called "le premier
Henotique ."
6 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 284-85; Fliche and Martin, Histoire de /'Eglise, IV,
485-86.
7 Ibid., 486; see also Cameron, "Justin II," 62-64.
8 Foe the text of the edict, see Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 289-90, first column.
9 The bishops wanted an explicit declaration or statement on the unity of the nature of
Christ.
10 See Michael, Chronique, II, 287-89.
11 Ibid., 287.
12 Ibid., 288.
conference of Callinicum was a fiasco and marked "the completion of the break
between Chalcedonian and Monophysite communities" in Oriens, as has been
observed by church historians of this period. 13 And so it was for the
Ghassanids and for Arab-Byzantine relations, which start to deteriorate around
570, almost immediately after the death of Arethas.
Ill. THE PATRIARCHATE OF PAUL: INTER-MONOPHYSITE DISSENSION
If the conference of Callinicum represented the completion of the break be-
tween the Dyophysites and the Monophysites , the patriarchate of Paul ushered
in the period of tension between the central government and the Ghassanid
phylarchate, and this took place during this period.
The consecration of Paul as the patriarch of Antioch
14 was a disaster for
the Monophysite church and continued to be such until his death some two
decades later. His consecration created tensions within the ranks of the Mono-
physites in Oriens when it was deemed not quite canonical, since many
bishops were not consulted by Theodosius, who proposed him. In Egypt, his
native country, Paul also created dissension within the ranks of the Mono-
physites, already divided into various warring groups, when he appeared in
Alexandria and made no secret of his desire to succeed the deceased The-
odosius as his successor in the see of St. Mark. This in turn developed into a
regional Monophysite quarrel between those in Egypt and those in Oriens,
since the former, having rejected Paul, spoke of the uncanonicity of his conse-
cration by Jacob.
In the 570s Paul caused much hard feeling by his vagabonding on both
sides of the doctrinal frontier, when he accepted the Chalcedonian position,
then recanted, and finally divided Monophysite Oriens into Paulites, who
supported him against the Jacobites, who supported Jacob . Most relevant here
was his quarrel with Athanasius the monk, who had recommended himself for
the Alexandrine see. This quarrel proved disastrous to imperial-federate rela-
tions since it involved the central government and the Ghassanid phylarchate,
a neglected but important dimension of the patriarchate of Paul. 15
A
Athanasius proved to be the catalyst in this delicate imperial-federate
relationship; therefore, it is necessary to say a few words on him, especially as
13 Fliche and Martin , Histoire de l'Eglise, IV, 487; quotation from Frend, Rise, 319.
14 The fundamental article on Paul is still E. W . Brooks, "The Patriarch Paul of Antioch,"
BZ 30 ( 1930), 468- 76, but he shows no interest in or knowledge of the Arab profile of Paul's
career nor of his role in the ultimate deterioration of Arab-Byzantine relations. For Brooks,
Arethas, who was patricius and basileus, was a shaykh; ibid., 469.
1 ~ See the preceding note; what is said of Brooks is also applicable to other ecclesiastical
hisrorians of this period.
he is neglected or treated unceremoniously by modern authors. 16 Athanasius
was a monk who was close to the Monophysite patriarch, Sergius of Antioch
(died ca. 560), his preceptor. He accepted the Tritheistic doctrine of John
Askusnaghes of Apamea and passed his papers on to John Philoponos, the
Aristotelian Christian philosopher of Alexandria, who composed the credo of
Tritheism. At the funeral of Patriarch Theodosius in Constantinople in June
566, he delivered the funeral oration, which condemned Chakedon. So he was
an extreme Monophysite, and an outspoken one at that.
Equally important is that he was both rich and influential in Constan-
tinople and at the imperial court: he was the grandson of Theodora through
her daughter and thus the second cousin of Empress Sophia. As Justin II had
himself been a Monophysite and now, as a Chakedonian emperor, was anxious
to bring about a union of the two doctrinal persuasions, Athanasius was a
pivotal figure in Justin's scheme of things. Michael the Syrian expressly says
that Justin used him to effect a union of the two churches. 11
After the death of Theodosius, Athanasius coveted the see of Alexandria,
and he had the full support of Justin.
18 Although he failed to
become the
patriarch of Alexandria, his presence in Egypt coincided with that of Paul,
who had arrived there in 565 before the death of Theodosius, who had ordered
him to proceed to Egypt in order to ordain Monophysite clergy. The clash
between the two rival claimants to the see of Alexandria resulted in ugly
mutual defamatory statements which the two issued against each other, and
which were made public and further embittered the internal dissension of the
Monophysites, both within Egypt and without. Most relevant here is the
involvement of Justin II and its consequences on Arab-Byzantine relations,
both ecclesiastical and other.
B
As the emperor had hoped that his nominee would be elected to the .
Alexandrian see, he was not thrilled to hear that the patriarch of Antioch,
Paul, had contested this nomination and thus had contributed to its failure.
Besides, Athanasius' report on Paul, composed with the express purpose of
defaming his character and thus declaring him invalid for nomination and
16 With the exception of Maspero in Histoire des patriarches;
see the many references in the
index but especially pp. 199-201 and 218-22. His views, however, on Athanasius' "patriar-
chate" over Alexandria for 566-571 (ibid., 213), deriving from the later historian Eutychius,
are now questionable . The successor of Theodosius was Peter IV, the predecessor of Damian; see
The Coptic Encyclopedia (New York, 1991), s.v. Peter IV. A contemporary and a well-informed
historian, John of Ephesus, gives the patriarchal sequence in Alexandria as Theodosius, Peter,
Damian; see HE, versio, pp. 34-35.
17 See Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 470-71.
incumbency, was laid before Justin in Constantinople, brought by Athanasius
himself. The reaction of Justin to Paul's doings in Egypt is faithfully re-
flected, not in the paraphrases of later historians but in his own words, in the
letter he sent to the military commander of Daras immediately after the con-
ference of Callinicum. It is a precious document that is important for tracing
the roots of the Byzantine-Ghassanid conflict and for the reference to the
Ghassanid bishop, Theodore . As it is neglected or treated obliquely in modern
works, it is well that it be reproduced in extenso, with a brief commentary.
The emperor orders the commandant to see to it that Jacob and Theodore
come to him in Constantinople in order to discuss church matters; he asks
him to assure the Monophysites that his desire for peace is genuine and that
they need not fear any persecution; he makes a scathing condemnation of Paul
and his conduct in Alexandria and orders his name to be erased from the
diptychs; he informs the commandant that he had put in jail the apocrisiarii of
Paul, Stephanus and Longinus, but not because of their faith; and finally he
repeats his desire to have Jacob and Theodore come to him. In Chabot 's trans-
lation, Justin's letter reads as follows.
Ordre de Notre Majeste: a Jacques et a Theodorus , de vemr ici pour
l'affaire de l'Eglise.
Toi, Sergona, commandant en chef de Dara, conseille-leur, autant
que tu le pourras, de faire cela; car nous voulons, Dieu en est temoin,
qu'il n'y ait qu'une Eglise. C'est pourquoi, n'apporte aucune negligence a
cette affaire, pour le salut des ames. Nous ne serons point le persecuteur
des .:itaXQtVOEVOL, et nous voulons que rien de semblable n'ait lieu de
nos jours, mais nous voulons etablir la concorde.
A cause de nos peches quelques hommes mechants se trouverent
prets a s'interposer et empecherent la paix. A propos de Paulus le begue,
apprends ses oeuvres perverses: Des qu'il eut pris les biens de feu le pape
Theodosius, ii s'en alla a Alexandrie et se proclama eveque, mais ii ne fut
pas accepte; ii revint a Antioche, et ne fut pas accepte. Et qui accepterait
ce demon? Car, si tout ce qu'on dit de lui est vrai, ii est l'Antechrist que
le Seigneur doit bientot faire disparaitre . Nous defendons que son nom
soit nomme clans les Eglises, et nous enjoignons a chacun d'effacer son
nom des diptyques.
Nous avons maintenant emprisonne Stephanus et Longinus, qui
soot les apocrisiaires de Paulus ; parce qu'ils l'ont empeche de venir et
qu'il n'est pas venu. A cause de cela, nous nous sommes empare d'eux.
De peur que, selon leur coutume, les partisans de Paulus ne diserit qu'ils
ont ete saisis a cause de la foi, ii etait necessaire de vous faire savoir que
Notre-Seigneur et notre Dieu ne nous permet pas de saisir ou d'em-
prisonner quelqu'un a cause de la foi. Prends done soin d'engager Jacques
et Theodorus a monter pres de nous. Nous ecrivons a Stephanus de leur
donner les frais (du voyage). 19
Striking in this important document are the tone of sincerity that the
letter exudes and Justin's refusal to be discouraged by what the monks had
done to his edict at Callinicum. He knew from the patrician John that the
majority that counted, namely, the bishops, had nearly given their assent.
That the recipient of the letter was the military commandant of the fortress of
Daras in Mesopotamia could raise a question. But Daras had been mentioned
before in Michael the Syrian's account of the negotiations that led to the
conference, held not at Daras but at Callinicum. 20 The ethnic background of
the commandant is not Greek but Semitic, either Aramaic or Arab, probably
the former.
Important for imperial-federate relations is the fact that the bishop of the
Ghassanids was singled out as one of the two bishops with whom Justin
wanted to discuss the reconciliation, a reflection of his importance in the
perception of the imperial court in Constantinople . Justin had been a Mono-
physite and was in Constantinople when Theodore and Jacob were conse-
crated, around 540, by Theodosius; thus he knew that these two were the
senior members of the Monophysite hierarchy in Oriens and had been for at
least a quarter century. He was also aware that Theodore was the bishop of the
influential Ghassiinid phylarch, who as recently as 563 had visited Constan-
tinople where he impressed many in the capital, including Justin himself,
with his powerful presence. To have the Ghassiinid establishment of foederati
on his side must have seemed to Justin a worthy goal for the achievement of
his efforts at reconciliation. Most recently, Justin must have been told by the
patrician John that Theodore was very receptive to Justin's edict. Not only
did he, with Jacob, show his sympathetic understanding of Justin's position,
but he also, together with Jacob, was instrumental in persuading the patrician
to try again after his first failure. And in this he was not disappointed, as the
sequel to his dispatch of the letter shows. When Jacob did not answer the
summons, Theodore did, and went up to see the emperor.
The letter is also remarkable for the virulence of the attack on Paul who,
after all, was consecrated patriarch of the City of God. And yet in the official
letter of the emperor, he appears as Antichrist and a demon! The most impor-
tant conclusion that can be drawn from this portion of the letter concerning
Paul is that it is a reflection of the ardent desire that consumed Justin II to
have Athanasius as his man in Egypt. He had evidently entertained so much
19 Ibid., 289-90.
20 Ibid., 286. In the Syriac original of Michael, the commandant is called stratelates:
Chronique, II, 289 note 2. This confirms what has been suspected of the rank of the commander
at Daras for the period 540-573, that he was no longer dux but magister militium; see ODB, I,
s.v. Dara.
hope in the nomination of Athanasius that the appearance of Paul in Egypt as
a rival candidate, and the failure of Justin's design, sent him into a rage,
which is clearly expressed in this paragraph. He clearly listened to what Ath-
anasius had to say on the latter's return from Egypt to Constantinople, not
having accomplished what he and Justin had hoped. Although Justin ex-
pressed some reservation and caution in accepting Athanasius' report, he
clearly accepted enough of it to make him write this paragraph, replete with
pejoratives.
Interesting is the reference to Paul as the "stammerer" or "stutterer, " a
pejorative worse than "the black," which stuck to him and by which he is
referred to in the literature of the period. Justin also fails to use Paul's eccle-
siastical tide of patriarch, and so he appears in the letter as "Paul, the stam-
merer." Thus the letter, in addition to reflecting imperial displeasure concern-
ing Paul, is informative on his stammer, a handicap for an ecclesiastic who
was expected to preach from the pulpit.
The most significant element in this paragraph on Paul is the last in
which the emperor orders that the name of Paul not be mentioned in the
churches of Oriens and that it should be removed from the diptychs. In so
ordering, Justin was acting in conformity with the glorious traditions of the
house of Justin . His uncle, Justinian, had exercised his Caesaropapism in
various ways, most relevantly when he ordered the erasure of the name of Pope
Vigilius from the diptychs in 553. Furthermore, Justin had sown the seeds of
the future confrontation with the Ghassanids.
The last paragraph in the letter again expresses Justin's anger with Paul
by assuring the reader that his imprisonment of the two apocrisiarii of Paul in
Constantinople, Stephanus and Longinus, was not an expression of ill will
toward their Monophysite confession, since this would be un-Christian behav-
ior. But this declaration of intention serves another purpose, an assurance to
the two bishops, Theodore and Jacob, that they need not fear any violence
against them but that a safe conduct is granted them for coming to the capi-
tal, with the further assurance that the state would pay for their traveling
expenses.
Michael the Syrian notes that the commandant of Daras sent copies of the
letter to various parts of Oriens and adds that while Jacob did not respond
positively to Justin's order, Theodore did and was received with great honor
by the emperor. While Jacob's hands were tied by the monks, Theodore's
evidently were not. He obviously answered only to the redoubtable phylarch
for whom he was bishop and who was instrumental in having him consecrated
some twenty-five years before. Theodore's decision to go to Constantinople
was natural. He had assented to the emperor's edict, or almost did so, and
worked with Jacob in persuading the patrician John to repeat his attempt at
reconciliation . Thus he could only respond in the affirmative to the letter,
replete with such warm and sincere sentiments. Perhaps the fact that Jacob
did not respond positively may have strengthened his determination to go
alone, since his failure to do so would have meant the rejection of the imperial
overture by the entire Monophysite establishment.
Theodore could not have gone to Constantinople without the knowledge
and approval of Arethas. The phylarc;h, as noted earlier, was at this time a
man of peace, not war, and was most anxious to serve the cause of Mono-
physite and Christian unity. He must have received a copy of Justin's letteJ
and must have been impressed by its sincerity. While Arethas might not have
liked the paragraph on Paul, the latter had not yet appeared at his court and
was still iC: Egypt or was on his way to Oriens. So he had no way of judging
the truth of the accusations leveled against Paul in the letter.
As to the great honor with which Theodore was received by the emperor,
this was only natural. Justin was anxious to reestablish contact with the
Monophysite hierarchy in Oriens. Paul was out of the question since he had
just condemned and excommunicated him, while Jacob tarried in Oriens, held
back by the monks. Theodore was consequently the only contact cleric be-
tween the Dyophysite world and that of the Monophysites.
C
The sequel to the "excommunication" of Paul by Justin was Paul's "rein-
statement" by the Ghassanid phylarch! Michael the Syrian supplies the back-
ground in a paragraph in which he explains how, after the exchange of un-
pleasantries between the rival claimants in Alexandria, Athanasius and Paul,
the latter returned after his failure in Egypt to the court of Arethas, who
reinstated him. The paragraph contains some important details such as the
wealth of Theodosius, which Paul inherited and which he used to promote his
candidacy; and how his failure made the Alexandrines also opposed to Jacob
for having consecrated him without the consent of all the provinces. In
Chabot's translation, it reads as follows.
Ensuite ii desira celui d'Alexandrie. Mais les Alexandrins demandaient
Athanasius, fils de la fille de l'imperatrice Theodora. Paulus ecrivit am
Alexandrins des reproches contre Athanasius. Athanasius en ayant eu
connaissance se mit a examiner la conduite de Paulus; ensuite les Alex-
andrins redigerent un acte d'accusations tres odieuses, contre Paulus; et
ils les affirmaient en disant qu'il etait leur concitoyen. Athanasius les
montra lui-meme a l'empereur. Paulus chercha a corrompre les Alex-
andrins par de grands presents, a l'aide des richesses de Theodosius dont
il avait herite. Voyant qu'il n'avarn;ait a rien, ii descendit pres de I:Ieret,
fils de Gabala; et celui-ci ordonna que son nom fut proclame clans les
eglises des ~LaXQtvoevm, c'est-a-dire des Orthodoxes . Or, les Alex-
andrins etaient scandalises non seulement a cause de Paulus, mais aussi a
cause du venerable Mar Jacques qui l'avait ordonne sans le consentement
de routes les provinces. 21
The chronology of these events should be reset in the following manner.
In the narrative of Michael, the reinstatement of Paul by Arethas comes in the
chapter that precedes that on Justin with the edict and letter to the comman-
dant of Daras. But surely the paragraph in which the reinstatement of Paul
occurs is posterior in time to that in which Justin excommunicates Paul. 22 As
Paul did not attend the conference of Callinicum in 567, the presumption is
that he was still in Egypt, and so his return must be dated to the end of 567
or the beginning of 568, since shortly after he appears in Constantinople
where he takes part in the Tritheistic controversy in the capital.
The question that inevitably arises concerns the motives of Arethas in
receiving Paul and directly crossing the will of his emperor by reinstating the
one whom the latter had excommunicated . The following may be suggested.
Paul was a cleric not unknown to Arethas who, on his visit to Constantinople
in 563, had met him, had spoken to him, and had heard the late Theodosius'
praise of him. Also, Paul was consecrated by his friend Jacob. So Arethas'
loyalties could only lead him to the extension of support to the beleaguered
cleric. Athanasius and the Egyptians had inter alia raised the question of the
canonicity of Paul's consecration and blamed Jacob for having done it without
adequate consultation with many of the bishops in Oriens. This charge di-
rectly touched Arethas who had approved Theodosius' nomination of Paul and
Jacob's consecration of him, and thus had contributed to the successful con-
clusion of efforts to elevate Paul to the Patriarchate of Antioch . He must have
been especially sensitive to the charge of the Egyptians since it involved
Jacob, the holy man, whom he ardently admired and venerated. The with-
drawal of support from Paul when he was thus attacked would only have been
a betrayal of Jacob, and thus his protection of Paul was heartily extended.
Furthermore, the rejection of Paul would have meant the creation of a
vacancy in the patriarchal see of Antioch and Oriens , which would have
thrown into further disarray the affairs of the Monophysites in this period, a
besieged church with no patriarchs in Alexandria, Constantinople , or Jerusa-
lem. Arethas must have read Paul's denunciation of Athanasius, which would
21 Michael the Syrian, Chronique , II, 285.
22 The two paragraphs of excommunication and reinstatement are clearly related, but they
have not been brought together in discussions of Paul. They are missing in Brooks' article on
the patriarch, and Aigrain ("Arabie," col. 1207) refers only to the reinstatement by Arethas,
which appears there without its background-Justin's excommunication of Paul.
have appealed to him since Athanasius most probably was attacked by Paul on
theological grounds as a Tritheist. Even Paul's desire to acquire the see of
Alexandria may have seemed excusable to Arethas. He was an Egyptian, who
probably did not feel at home in Oriens: he did not speak Arabic, and his race
was even commented upon, as he was regularly described, possibly pe-
joratively, though erroneously, as Paul the Black. 23
Important in this affair is not Arethas' acceptance of Paul and the latter's
residence at his court and camp, 24 but the direct affront to the emperor's order
when he had the name of Paul reinscribed in the diptychs. This is explicable
only by the realization that the phylarch was both a man of deep religious
convictions and of great military prestige in Oriens and Constantinople. His
reinstatement of Paul in the face of possible violent imperial reaction could
only have been a reflection of the combined effect of these two factors. Al-
though Arethas was essentially a soldier, he was not a complete stranger to
theological subtleties and canonical propriety; so he must have been encour-
aged to reinstate Paul also by the realization that Justin's arbitrary act was
completely non-canonical and void, since it needed a duly constituted synod
to excommunicate a patriarch. His own act could not be described in similar
terms. He was only reinstating a patriarch that had been duly consecrated,
and thus his support was in a sense a defense of the canonicity of Paul's
consecration.
Finally, the reinscription of the name of Paul in the diptychs of the
churches raises the question of which churches are meant. It is quite unlikely
that those of Oriens or the Patriarchate of Antioch are meant, since Arethas
had no jurisdiction over these areas. The chances are that what is meant is
Ghassanland, 25 the limitrophe in which the foederati lived and over which The-
odore was made bishop. This, then, becomes a rare reference, as it suggests a
flourishing Christian community in Ghassanland, which had its churches and
its liturgy in which the name of Paul was restored and so was mentioned
during the celebration of the Eucharist. 26
23 On this sobriquet "the Black," see Honigmann,
Eveque.r, 195 note 5.
24 Bar-Hebraeus adds to Michael's account one word, a verb, stating that Arethas "re-
ceived" or "accepted" Paul, and then repeats what Michael had said on the reinstatement; see
Chronicon Ecc/e.riasticum, I, col. 235, line 13, where Syriac qbaleh is translated into Latin as
suscepit eum, in the opposite column.
25 "De son territoire," as perceptively stated by Aigrain in "Arabie," col. 1207.
26 The reference to the diptychs of the Ghassanid churches is the only extant reference-
indirect and implicit as it is-to a Ghassanid liturgy celebrated in their churches. There is an
echo of this in the Arabic sources, but what the language of this liturgy was remains to be seen;
see BASIC II.
The reference to the Christian churches in Ghassanland recalls what was said earlier, in
Part One, while discussing the l:farran inscription (A.D. 568), which commemorated the erec-
tion of a federate Ghassanid church dedicated to St. John the Baptist. The inscription must also
A passage in John of Ephesus supplements what Michael the Syrian re-
lates on Paul's taking refuge at the court of Arethas. Although the passage
comes in the chapter on his son Mungir, it refers to antecedents that go back .
to the residence of Paul at Arethas' court. It speaks of the veneration of the
foederati for Jacob, of Paul's flight co them, his concealment among them
during the lifetime of the old king Arethas, and how they were edified by his
moderation, gravity, and learning : "Cum igitur omnes catervae Tayaye ab
initio beato Jacobo devincti essent, necnon et vivente etiam sene I::Iarith
Paulus illuc ivisset et apud eos celatus esset, et per eum etiam propter mode-
rationem et gravitatem et eius doctrinam aedificati sunt . " 21
The relevant new datum in this context is that Paul's residence at the
court of Arethas was really a concealment. This can easily be related to Jus-
tin's letter to the commandant at Daras in which Paul was denounced and
excommunicated. He was therefore an outlaw, strictly speaking , and he was
clearly aware of the fact, as was the Ghassanid phylarch who gave him refuge
and thus concealed him . The passage that enumerates the virtues of Paul that
endeared him to the foederati and Arethas is relevant and may be added to the
factors already discussed that made the phylarch give Paul his protection.
Just as Arethas must have known of Justin 's excommunication of Paul,
so must Justin have known of Arethas' reinstatement of him, and he must
have been deeply offended. But at the time he was happy to have Arethas'
bishop in Constantinople as the sole liaison cleric between him and the Mono-
physites whom he was so anxious to conciliate . He also knew the power and
prestige of Arethas, both within the imperium and the ecclesia, and so must
have felt that there was nothing he could do about the latter 's reinstatement of
Paul. Furthermore, all this took place in the midst of the Tritheistic contro-
versy which had rocked the Monophysite church and which Justin was as
anxious to settle as Arethas was. But he also knew that Arethas was very old
and that his days were numbered; therefore there was no need to add to the
points of friction with the Monophysites by picking a quarrel with the power-
ful Ghassanid phylarch.
In this contest of wills between the emperor and the phylarch , the latter
apparently won. A year or so after the excommunication of Paul by Justin, the
be mentioned here because of its relevance to ecclesiastical history : it commemorates the erec-
tion of a martyrion and belongs to this quadrennium since it is dated 568. In Part One it was
argued that the Ghassanids must have built many churches during their long residence in the
Jimitrophe and that the martyrion of 568 could not have been an isolated case. Now this
reference to the Ghassanid churches in Michael the Syrian, taken together with the J:Iarran
inscription, makes possible the epigraphic-literary confrontation, desirable for speaking of the
churches that the Ghassanids erected. For their monasteries, see below, 831-35 . For the
l:Iarran inscription, see BASIC 1.1, 325-31.
27 See John of Ephesu_s, HE, versio, p. 162, lines 6-9.
former appeared in Constantinople, evidently pardoned by the emperor, since
otherwise he would not have dared to make the journey to the capital, where
he took part in the Tritheistic controversy. The clear implication of this is
that the emperor relented and gave in 28 to the wish of the phylarch whose
power in Oriens he appreciated and whose prestige he needed in order to close
the ranks of the Monophysites and then to reconcile them with the Chalcedo-
nians. This is what he tried to do around 570 in Constantinople when Are-
thas, too, appeared and presided over the council that tried the two Tritheistic
bishops, Eugenius and Conon. There is no more sensitive measure of the
power and prestige of the Ghassanid phylarch than his victory in this impe-
rial-phylarchal confrontation.
IV. THE GHASSANIDS AND TRITHEISM
The Ghassanids were involved ecclesiastically not only in the theological con-
frontation with Dyophysite Byzantium but also in dissensions within the
Monophysite movement, both doctrinal and other . In the 560s it was the
Tri theistic heresy, and the Ghassanids played an important role in dealing
with it. Their role has not been fully grasped or discussed in detail, and so
this will be attempted here with regard to both Arethas and Theodore.
The fortunes of this heresy center mainly around five figures: Askus-
naghes, the master of a school in Constantinople, who was its father; John
Philoponos, the Grammarian, of Alexandria, who was its theorist; Athanasius,
Theodora's grandson, who was the intermediary that brought Askusnaghes'
papers from Constantinople to Philoponos in Alexandria; and Eugenius and
Conon, the bishops of Seleucia and Tarsus respectively, who, without accept-
ing all the conclusions of the Aristotelian Philoponos, recognized three ousiai
in the Trinity as well as three hypostaseis . Their Tritheism ran contrary to the
official Monophysite view of the Trinity promulgated before his death by
Patriarch Theodosius in his Oratio de Trinitate. 29 Although the heresy appeared
m the late 550s, it was only in the 560s, especially the latter half, that it
28 Presumably after some correspondence between Jabiya and Constantinople. The phy-
larch muse have written co the emperor, whom he had known before the latter became emperor,
and must have convinced him of Paul's innocence of the accusations against him; he may even
have sent him Paul's statement on Athanasius, which the emperor would not have seen before.
Arethas wrote a letter in 563 ro Jacob which has been analyzed in the previous chapter. So
it is possible that he did so on this occasion, too; but if so, the letter has not been preserved.
The survival of the other letter suggests that many documents recording the history of
Arab-Byzantine relations have been lost, since it is unlikely that the letter written in 563, so
late in his reign, was the only one he wrote during his long and eventful career.
29 For Tritheism, see Devreesse, PA, 77-94 ; Honigmann,
Eveque1, 179-88. For Askus-
naghes, see Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 251-54; Bar-Hebraeus, Chronicon Eccle1iasticum,
223-26. The orthography as well as the etymology of "Askusnaghes" is far from certain; see
Honigmann, Eveques, 179 note 3. Seleucia, the see of Bishop Eugenius, was Seleucia in lsauria.
flared up. Against the two firebrands, Eugenius and Conon, were pitted the
two ranking hierarchs of the Monophysite movement, Jacob Baradaeus and
Theodore. The involvement of the bishop of the Ghassanids naturally drew
the Ghassanid phylarch into the theological battle.
Many conferences were convened from 567 to 570 in order to wean away
the two dissenting bishops from their heretical views on the Trinity: (1) in
Egypt and at the Palace of Hormisdas in Constantinople in 567; (2) at the
monastery of Sts. Cyrrhus and Zakkai at Callinicum, also in 567; (3) at the
monastery of Mar Bassus in Bethabo in Cilicia in May 567 and in January
568; (4) at Garbdiso in the winter of 568/69; (5) and finally at the conference
in Constantinople, 569/70, at which the two bishops were excommunicated. 30
Two Syriac sources document the role of the Ghassanids, king and
bishop, in these theological controversies: the primary Monophysite docu-
ments, published by Father Chabot, and the late Chronicle of Michael the
Syrian. In view of the paucity of the sources on the important role of the
Ghassanids in ecclesiastical history, the passages pertaining to them are assem-
bled here and analyzed. They give a much clearer picture of the Ghassanids
than has been available thus far.
Theodore
Theodore's presence or involvement in these conferences and the negotia-
tions with the Tritheists are fully documented in the two sources, which
complement each other. In both, especially in the Documenta Monophysitarum,
31
Theodore and Jacob either write the letters about the controversy or receive
letters concerning it. Theodore's name always comes after that of Jacob. Other
bishops are sometimes included, but they come after the two ranking bishops,
Jacob and Theodore. These letters may be listed as follows.
1. Letter of the Monophysite bishops in Constantinople addressed to
Jacob and Theodore and other bishops in Oriens. 32
2. Letter addressed by Jacob and Theodore alone to the monks of Oriens. 33
3. Letter written by the archimandrites of Oriens in which reference is
3 For these conferences and their dates, see Aigrain, "Arabie,"' col. 1208 and Honigmann,
Eveques, 184-85 . Garbdiso, an unknown locality when Aigrain wrote, has been identified by
Honigmann as 'RBDS, ibid., 185 note 4. It is not clear whether the final conference of Con-
stantinople, at which the two bishops were excommunicated and in which the Ghassanid phy-
larch participated according to Michael the Syrian (Chronique, II, 256), was the same one over
which the patriarch of Constantinople, John Scholasticus, presided as arbitrator (ibid., 258). In
Michael's narrative they appear as two separate conferences, one following the other, and so
apparently they do in John of Ephesus, for which see HE, V. 3.
31 Hereafter Docummta, followed by page and line numbers. The Latin version will be
cited, unless otherwise noted.
32 Ibid., 101.
33 Ibid., 115.
made to the two bishops, Jacob and Theodore, who had written against Tri-
theism .34
4. Letter addressed by the archimandrites of Oriens to Jacob. Although
it is addressed only to Jacob, mention is made of Theodore, in conjunction
with Jacob, toward the end of the letter . ii
5. Letter addressed by Patriarch Paul of Antioch to Jacob and Theodore. 36
6. Letter addressed by Jacob and Theodore to Paul, patriarch of Antioch. 37
In addition to these letters, there are two others that were written after
the final conference that excommunicated Eugenius and Conon.
7. Letter written by various Monophysite bishops to the Monophysites of
the various provinces. At the head of the list of senders are Jacob and The-
odore.38
8. Letter written by various Monophysite bishops to the clerics and the
faithful people of the Provincia Arabia. Again at the head of the list appear
the names of Jacob and Theodore. 39
These last two letters are distinguished from the rest by their length, the
identity of their addressees, and above all by their reference to the Ghassiinid
king, who took an active part in this last conference in Constantinople.
9. Finally, there is the important letter written by the archimandrites of
the Provincia Arabia to the Monophysite bishops in answer to their letter.
And at the head of the list of addressees are the names of Jacob and Theodore. 40
These letters speak for themselves in reflecting the role played by The-
odore in the Tritheistic controversy. It is noteworthy that Jacob and Theodore
take precedence in this over the patriarch of Antioch, Paul, who cuts a very
minor figure in a matter that should have been very much his business, but he
was living under a cloud.
In addition to the evidence from the Documenla Monophysitarum, there is
evidence from the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, which complements the
Documenta in providing many precious details. The preceding section on Are-
thas has treated the role of Theodore in the conference of Callinicum. But
that, too, apparently dealt not only with Dyophysite-Monophysite reconcilia-
tion but also with the Tri theistic controversy. As has been noted by Aigrain, 41
the Documenta Monophysitarum give an account that suggests that Tritheism
34 Ibid., p. 116, lines 29, 33- 34; p. 117, line 8.
35 Ibid., p. 123, line 12.
36 Ibid., p. 123, lines 31, 33.
37 Ibid. , 125.
38 Ibid., p. 136, line 18; p. 139, lines 12-13; p. 142, lines 2-3 .
39 Ibid., p. 142, line 22.
40 Ibid., p. 145, line 25. These three letters will be commenced upon lacer in chis chap-
ter.
41 See "Arabie," col. 1212.
was the main issue of the Monophysite world, while the Chronicle of Michael
the Syrian gives an account, for instance, of the conference of Callinicum
which emphasizes the Dyophysite-Monophysite confrontation. But as he him-
self has suggested, the two works are written from two different perspectives.
Thus the Chronicle of Michael provides important details on Theodore at Cal-
linicum, not to be found in the Documenta.
Equally, if not more important, is the role of Theodore in the final
conference at Constantinople where he appears both as a negotiator and an
excommunicator. While Jacob was dealing with Eugenius at Arabdis, 42 where
he excommunicated the heretical bishop after the latter's refusal to renounce
his heretical views, Theodore negotiated with the other bishop, Conon, in
Constantinople.
43 At the final encounter, he serves him an ultimatum to the
effect that if he did not renounce his heretical views on Tritheism, he would
be excommunicated. Conon refused, and Theodore excommunicated him. The
passage from Michael's Chronicle is worth quoting in Chabot's translation.
Le bienheureux Theodorus compagnon de Jacques, etant monte a la ville
imperiale, Conon se rendit pres de lui avec ses partisans. Theodorus l'in-
terrogea sur cette opinion. Comme Conon ne repondit pas, Theodorus lui
dit: "Si vous n'anathematisez pas quiconque parle d'un nombre de na-
tures et d'essences dans la Trinite, qui n'admet de nombre que dans les
personnes, dans les noms, et dans les proprietes, !'essence et la nature
restant en dehors de tout nombre: vous eces etrangers a l'Eglise." Et ainsi
celui-ci les anathematisa egalement .
Tous les deux furent done destitues du sacerdoce: l'un a 'Arabdis,
l'autre dans la ville imperiale, par les deux pontifes.
44
The role of Theodore in Constantinople is reminiscent of that of another
Arab cleric at the Council of Ephesus in 431. At that ecumenical council, it
was the Arab Aspebetos, phylarch turned bishop, who negotiated with
Nestorius before the latter was excommunicated by the council.~
Arethas
The role of Arethas in the Tritheistic controversy is reflected, as that of
his bishop Theodore was, in the Documenta Monophysitarum and in the Chronicle
of Michael the Syrian, and with remarkable specificity. Two of the letters
contained in the Documenta, included in the list of letters involving Theodore,
record his services to the Monophysite cause in the course of this controversy.
42 Arabdis is in the region of Mar'ash (Germanicia), twenty miles from Doliche and
tweni-eight from Nicopolis; Honigmann, Eveq1m, 185 note 4; see also above, note 30.
3 Further on the conference in Constantinople, see below, 8 14-2 l:
44 Chronique, II, 256-57 .
45 See BAFIC, 183.
The First Letter
The first letter is written by the leading Monophysite bishops who nego-
tiated with Eugenius and Conon, at the head of whom were Jacob and The-
odore.
46 It is addressed to the Monophysites of the various provinces of Oriens,
informing them of the negotiations they had conducted for three years with
the two bishops, the failure of these negotiations, and the fact that they de-
cided to excommunicate them . Within the letter is inserted another, an en-
cyclical, 47 that the bishops sent to Eugenius and Conon, which contained both
an account of the efforts of the bishops to conciliate the two dissenters and an
ultimatum to recant within three days of the receipt of the letter or face
excommunication. Thus the main letter, a primary document of the first or-
der, is a mine of information on this phase in the history of the Tritheistic
heresy, as is the second. Both deserve to be commented on in detail. As the
letter within the letter, the encyclical, is chronologically anterior to the main
letter addressed to the Monophysites of the provinces, it will be treated first.
There are in it four explicit references to Arethas and two implicit ones.
1. After the failure of negotiations both in Constantinople and at Calli-
nicum, Arethas invited Jacob and Theodore and with them Patriarch Paul to
come to Arabia when they jointly wrote a letter to the two dissenting bishops:
"Rursum autem, postquam gloriosus patricius Hareth in Arabiam vocavit nos et
sanctum beatumque patriarcham nostrum Mar Paulum, epistulam communem
fecimus, ego et venerabilis Mar Theodorus, et scripsimus ad fraternitatem
vestram, rogantes ut omnis contentio et inimicitia e medio tolleretur. " 48 The
invitation extended by Arethas to the three ecclesiastics to come to him in
Arabia reflects the genuine concern of the Ghassanid king and his continuing
interest in the welfare of his church even at this. advanced stage in his career;
he died shortly after.
The implication of the invitation to come to Arabia is that Arethas had
not attended the earlier conferences in Constantinople and Callinicum and
that after the disappointing news that these were not successful, he wanted to
supervise the conduct of these negotiations personally at his own headquarters.
Furthermore, a letter written from his headquarters to the two bishops would
be endowed with the prestige of his position as fidei defensor of the Mono-
physite church, a fact well known to Eugenius and Conon. But as it turned
out, the two bishops were not impressed.
Where in Arabia the three ecclesiastics met with Arethas is not stated,
but the rendezvous could have been either Jabiya in Palaestina Secunda or
Darayya in Phoenicia Libanensis. Although, strictly speaking, neither was in
46 See Documenta, 136-41; cexcus, pp. 196-204 .
47 Ibid., versio, p. 138, line 4-p . 140, line 31.
48 Ibid., p. 139, lines 10- 14.
Arabia, yet the sphere of Arethas' immediate influence comprised these neigh-
boring regions, these two provinces contiguous with Arabia, as can easily be
seen from the letter addressed by the archimandrites of Arabia to Jacob and
Theodore, but which includes signatures from these two places and others in
these two provinces.
49 The more famous seat of the Ghassanids was Jabiya, and
the meeting probably took place there.
It is noteworthy that Arethas invited not only Jacob and Theodore but
also Paul, who was dwarfed in the conduct of this controversy by the first
two, in spite of the fact that he was the ranking Monophysite in Oriens, since
he was the head of the Patriarchate of Antioch. This reflects both Arethas'
considerateness and sensitivity .to ecclesiastical decorum and also his loyalty to
the prelate he had supported for consecration and later protected from impe-
rial inclemency when he came back from Egypt, rejected by the Monophysites
of that province.
It is significant and understandable in a document such as this letter that
Arethas should have been referred to not by his Arab titles but by those that
the Christian Roman Empire had conferred on him. The military title, phy-
larch, does not appear, but only that of patricius and also g/oriosus, in Syriac,
!.f2.bi~a.
50
The letter, written at and sent from Arethas' headquarters in Arabia,
brings to mind another, more famous letter, also sent from the Ghassanid
headquarters in Jabiya, sent by another Monophysite cleric, Simeon of Beth-
Arsham, around 520 concerning the martyrs of Najran in South Arabia.)!
2. After the failure of all efforts to bring the two bishops to the straight
path of Monophysite orthodoxy, Jacob and his fellow bishops write their ulti-
matum and ask Arethas to hand it to them in person: "In fine autem omnium,
cum epistulam encyclicam fecissemus, quae aberrationem huius haeresis de-
nudavit, rogavimus eos, per christophilum et gloriosum patricium Hareth et,
qui cum eo erant, viros pios et illustres, ut huic subscriberent. " 52 The scene
now shifts to Constantinople, as will be argued later, 53 whither Arethas had
traveled for the final encounter and showdown with the Tritheists, Eugenius
and Conon, three years after the failure of all negotiations. Noteworthy is the
fact that the final and crucial phase of the negotiations is entrusted to Arethas,
namely, to hand in the ultimatum and persuade the two bishops. His titles
are again the Byzantine titles that ally him to the Christian Roman Empire
rather than to Arabia. To the titles of the first reference to him in the encycli-
cal is now added the appropriately religious title, Christophi/os.
49 For this letter, see below, 821-24 .
50 See Documenta, textus, p. 199, line 29.
51 See Martyrs, 63.
52 Documenta, p. 137, lines 30-33.
53 See below, 814-21.
Also noteworthy is that Arethas was not alone in representing the
Ghassanid Basileia and phylarchate. He was accompanied by others who are
described as "viros pios et illustres. " 54 Most probably these were distinguished
phylarchs, including his son and successor, Mungir, for whose sake he had
made his penultimate journey to Constantinople in 563 for insuring his suc-
cession to the phylarchate after his death. 55 To have had Mungir with him was
consonant with his circumspect plans for the continuation of his policies after
his death. Just as he had insured in 563 the succession of Mungir in the
political and military spheres, he is now concerned chat his successor should
be thoroughly familiar with his future duties as protector of the Monophysice
church, which in fact he became. The Byzantine title applied co these men
around Arethas is appropriately not the same as chat applied co Arethas (glori-
osus) but illustris.
3. The mediation of Arechas and chose with him is again referred co
twice in the letter. The bishops reiterate accounts of their efforts co win over
peacefully the two dissenting bishops by various means, among which was the
personal intervention of Arechas and those close co him : "Ee per episculas et
per personas religiosas et fideles saepius et per ipsum gloriosum patricium
Harech virosque cum eo erant illuscres et honoratos, suasimus, monuimus,
culpavimus. " 56 The passage separates the letters sent to the cwo bishops from the
persons who carried weight, and in the second category is placed Arethas. The
titles applied to Arechas and his party are the same as in the previous passage just
analyzed but with the addition of another one chat describes those with him,
namely, honoratos.
57 This may be a literary locution and not a technical term
reflecting a Byzantine title or rank, unlike the preceding one, which is.
The bishops finally pronounce the excommunication of the two dissent-
ing bishops after all efforts to conciliate them had failed, including the media-
tion and intervention of Arechas and his party: "Neque de intercessione
memorati gloriosi patricii et virorum illustrium qui cum eo erant curam habu-
erunt. "58 The use of the term memoratus, Syriac et'hed, raises a question. The
term can mean "the above-mentioned" or "the commemorated/remembered."
54 The Syriac terms for pius and illustris are riihem aliihii and pe-b'-rabbiithii ; Documenta ,
textus, p. 198, line 2. The tide translated illustris in the Latin version is more accurately Greek
eyai..oitQE3tEcn:m;o;, for which see the present writer in "The Patriciate of Arethas," BZ 52
(1959), 336.
55 On this see BASIC I. 1, 282-88 .
56 Documenta, p. 140, line 34-p. 141, line 1.
57 Syriac myiiqrii, "honorable, honored, venerable"; plural myiiqri; ibid., textus, p. 202,
line 18.
58 Ibid., p. 141, lines 11-12 . The term that describes his party is myaqre in Syriac,
"honorable, " for which the Latin version has illustres. Chabot thus used illustres to translate two
different Syriac terms; besides, illustris is a technical term in the Byzantine hierarchy of ranks
and titles, for which, see the present writer in Byzantium and the Semitic Orient, no. Ill, pp.
326-28.
If the latter,5 9 this could imply that Arethas died shortly after he delivered the
ultimatum, and he did die about this time. The fact, however, that he is not
mentioned by name in this passage could suggest that memoratus is used in the
sense of "the above-mentioned," but this is not consonant with the reverential
tone that pervades reference to him in the letter.
In addition to these explicit references, there are two implicit ones. The
first occurs in the encyclical addressed to the two bishops, and the second in
the letter addressed to the Monophysites of the provinces.
1. After the letter written by Jacob and Theodore from Arabia was sent
to the two dissenting bishops, the encyclical states that these two were en-
treated to restore the peace and unity of the church, especially as this was the
great desire of "our most pious and Christ-loving emperors": "Eo magis quod
piissimis et christophilis imperatoribus nostris in votis et magno desiderio
haec erant. " 60 The use of the term imperatores, Syriac ma/ken, kings in the
plural, is most noteworthy. One of them is certainly known-Arethas, who
desired this reconciliation. He is now referred to as king, which in fact he
was, especially after the Basileia of 529. But who is the other king or kings
referred to? The writers were Monophysites, and so Monophysite kings come
to mind. But there were only three other Monophysite kings-in South Ar-
abia, Ethiopia, and Nubia . These, however, were very distant from the scene
and are unlikely to have been directly involved in the controversy, with the
possible exception of the king of Nubia, 61 the bishop of which, Longinus, was
one of three signatories to this letter. 62 Then there was Abu Karib, Arethas'
brother, who was referred to as king in a Syriac Monophysite document . Al-
though the referent in that document may have been an Abu Karib other than
Arethas' brother, 63 there is the fact that after about 540 there is no extant
source that refers to him, and so he may not have been alive in 5 70 when this
letter was written. Besides, he is never mentioned in these documents . It is
practically certain that Justin II is meant, a former Monophysite himself, who
took a keen interest in the controversy and worked hard to bring the two
) 9 It is so used a few lines before when applied to the Monophysite patriarch, Theodosius,
who had died a few years earlier in 566; see Documenta, textus, p. 202, line 25. If memoratus
cums out to mean "the lace, the commemorated, " it can be related to the fact chat in che letter
of the archimandrites of Arabia to Jacob and Theodore, to be discussed below, there is no
reference to Arethas but to his son Mungir, who succeeded him in 569 or 570 immediately
after his death . Everything depends on how the word is vocalized; only the consonantal skeleton
is given in the Syriac cexc, and this can be vocalized et'hed (memoratus) or et'ahad
(commemoratus).
60 Documenta, p. 139, lines 17-18; textus, p. 200, lines 6-8.
61 For Nubia and its Christianization in this period, see Frend, Rise, 297-303 .
62 Documenta , versio, p. 136, line 19 and note 8.
63 On this see Noldeke, GP, 26-27; but also below, 845-50 .
parties together in Constantinople, 64 as is clear from the testimony of John of
Ephesus himself, who witnessed these events in the capital.
It is also noteworthy that the document refers to Justin and Arethas not
by their titles, such as autokrator for Justin or phylarch for Arethas, but by the
title "king." This was, of course, the convenient term to use since it was
common to both of them, and thus the two rulers could be referred to by one
word. The employment of one and the same term to refer to Arethas and
Justin II thus puts the two on the same level. This was an exaggeration since
the federate king was far less important than the Byzantine Basileus and in fact
was his vassal of some sort, but this is the Monophysite perspective on events.
For the Monophysite bishops, Arethas was their king more than Justin II, and
was also their protector. The use of the word "our" in "our kings" is the
explicit statement on the image of the Ghassanid king in the perception of the
Monophysite church. He was king of the Ghassanid Arabs, the foederati of
Byzantium, but he was also the king of the Monophysite church in the per-
ception of its clerics. 65
Finally, the term Christophi/i is applied to these kings. This is notewor-
thy, especially when contrasted with the term Theophi/i applied to the mem-
bers of the party around Arethas. 66 The two rulers are distinguished from their
subjects, distinguished as these also were, by this title, and this was, of
course, the official title of the emperor, an element in his imperial titulature;
and so itwas apparently applied to Arethas in Monophysite church docu-
ments. Christophi/us may thus be added to the titles of Arethas, coming as it
does in this official ecclesiastical document. 67
2. The second implicit reference confirms this conclusion. In the letter
addressed to the Monophysites of the provinces, these are asked to sever their
relations with the heretical bishops and consider them excommunicated and
outside the orthodox Monophysite church; and they exhort the Monophysites
of the provinces to remain true to the straight path of orthodox Monophysi-
tism. They add that it is the anxious care and the prayers of the kings that
there be a union and that the churches of God be united: "Sollicitudo enim et
oratio misericordium imperatorum nostrorum ad id spectat ut mutuam
64 See above, 794-96.
65 Chabot's translation of the Syriac ma/ken ("kings") as imperatore
is unfortunate, since this
obscures the fact that one of the referents was Arethas, who was certainly not an imperator. The
literal translation of ma/ken by "kings" would have been accurate and not misleading, since
Justin was basi/eus in common parlance, although his official title was autokrator, and not
misleading in excluding Arethas, who was even more involved than Justin in the Tritheistic
heresy.
66 The Syriac for viros pios in the passage quoted above (Documenta,
p. 137, line 33; textus,
p. 198, line 2) is rii~em or rii~mai A/aha, "God-loving, Theophilus," a general term and not a
technical term.
67 On the titles of Arethas, see "Patriciate of Arethas," 321-42.
unionem iniremus et opportunitas detur unioni prefectae omnium ecclesiarum
sanctarum Dei. " 68 The use of the plural in "all the holy churches of God"
clearly suggests the two doctrinal persuasions-the Dyophysites and the
Monophysites. The plural was also used in an earlier passage in the letter,
"unio catholica sanctarum Dei ecclesiarum, " 69 in the same passage that spoke
of "our rulers," "kings," analyzed previously. So the kings referred to in this
passage must have been Justin II and Arethas. 10
The Second Letter
The second letter was written by the same ecclesiastics who wrote the
preceding one, and at the head of the subscriptions are the two names of Jacob
and Theodore. 71 Unlike the first letter, it is addressed not to the various
provinces but to one, Arabia; its message, however, is the same as the first.
Unlike the first, the encyclical is not inserted in it but apparently was at-
tached to it separately. Like the preceding one, this letter is a mine of infor-
mation. Although it says roughly what the first had said, it is differently and
significantly nuanced and brings out even more clearly the role of Arethas in
the Tritheistic controversy. The following passages may be recovered from the
letter as they pertain to the role of the Ghassanid king.
A
1. The letter refers to the efforts of the bishops toward reclaiming the
two rebellious bishops from the path of error to that of orthodoxy. In this
context, the services of Arethas were enlisted as he was entrusted with deliver-
ing this letter with his own hands to the two dissenting bishops: "Quae etiam
missa est glorioso et fideli patricio Hareth, ut ipse propria manu earn eis
traderet. " 72 The statement on Arethas is a valuable addition to what the first
letter says. As is clear from this letter, Arethas was asked twice to hand
communications from the bishops to Eugenius and Conon. This is the first
communication. It is clearly not the encyclical referred to in the preceding
letter since the encyclical is mentioned later on in this letter and is described
by the word apologia ("defense"), Syriac mappaq bruka, while this communica-
tion is described as an epistula, Syriac egarta.
73
On what occasion did Arethas deliver this epistula (egarta) with his own
69 Ibid., p. 139, lines 15-16.
70 It is possible that the plural "kings" included Mungir, Arethas' son and successor. It is
in this very same period, shortly after the excommunication, that Arethas died and was suc-
ceeded by Mungir, who shared his father's views on reconciliation and who, as has been sug-
gested, attended the conference of Constantinople.
71 Documenta, versio, 142-45 ; textus, 204-9.
72 Ibid ., versio, p. 142, lines 34-35; textus, p. 205, lines 13-15.
73 Ibid., versio, p. 142, line 32 for epistula, and p. 143, lines 7, 26, 30, 35 for apologia .
hands? The answer is most probably provided by the preceding letter which
tells how, after the failure of negotiations in Constantinople and Callinicum,
Arethas invited Jacob and Theodore together with Patriarch Paul to come to
him in the Provincia Arabia and discuss the matter there. Thus this letter
amplifies what had been briefly told in the last letter, which omits the fact
that Arethas was asked to deliver the letter in person.
2. The letter then expands on the antecedents of the encyclical referred to
in the last letter: how it was carefully composed by the bishops of Oriens, sent
to those in Constantinople, returned to Oriens, and subscribed to by all ortho-
dox Monophysite bishops. Again it was Arethas who delivers the encyclical to
Eugenius and Conon. He asks the bishops to come to him, those who lived in
Constantinople and also the two dissenters themselves, Eugenius and Conon,
and gives them three days to make up their minds whether or not to subscribe
to the apologia.
Et post haec, praedictus laudatissimus patricius Hareth, vocavit apud se
quosdam patres nostros, ex eis qui habitant urbem regiam. Et non nos
tantum, sed et Cononem et Eugenium; et tradiderunt utrique, id est
Cononi et Eugenio, epistulam ad eos spectantem a nobis episcopis Orien-
talibus illi patricio missam, cum subscriptionibus nostris, in qua prae-
stituti sunt tres dies ut subscriberent vel non subscriberent. 74
Arethas is again referred to as patricius, but instead of d!,bif?a
75 (gloriosus),
he is referred to as saggi qullasa, Syriac for rtaveu<j)rio~ rather than lauda-
tissimus as in the Latin version. The Greek term :n:aveu<j)rio~ is attested in
Greek for the Ghassiinids. 76 Praedictus translates Syriac amir, "the above-men-
tioned," and unlike et'hed (memoratus) in the preceding letter, it can in this
context mean only "the above-mentioned." If memoratus turns out to have the
meaning "the late," then this letter to Arabia must have been written before
the preceding one, and Arethas would have died in the meantime.
The passage raises the question of the venue for this encounter. As has
been observed before, it was possibly in Constantinople itself. In the preced-
ing letter, Arethas invites the parties to meet him in Arabia, which is explic-
itly referred to. No specific locality is mentioned, and this leaves open the
question of whether it was in Constantinople or in Arabia. The clause that
describes the bishops of Constantinople, "qui habitant urbem regiam," is
equally ambiguous. It could imply that the venue was either Constantinople
or Arabia.
3. After the two bishops read the encyclical, handed to them by Arethas,
74 Ibid., versio, p. 143, lines 18-25; textus, p. 206, lines 8-15 .
75 For saggi qullasa as the equivalent of :n:avEll<pl]oi;,
see "Patriciate of Arethas," 335-37.
76 See BASIC 1.1, 496, 518.
the latter asked them about the doctrinal correctness of the apologia. After
they answered in the affirmative and after an altercation ensued, Arethas fi-
nally asked them to subscribe, as the other bishops had done, co the apologia
and remain in communion with them.
Dixit eis christophilus patricius Hareth: "Dicite mihi num recte se
habeat haec apologia?" Cum autem illi dixissent optime se habere, et
postquam multa verba inter eos agitata sunt, comminatoria simul et per-
suasoria, secundum admonitionem apostolicam quae dicit: "Argue, in-
crepa, hortare," in fine dixit eis: "Itaque, sicut ceteri omnes venerabiles
episcopi, et vos subscribite, atque communionem cum illis servate. " 77
The tides of Arethas are patricius, which always appears, but instead of
saggi qullasa of the preceding passage there occurs here Christophilus, which, as
observed before, was an element in the official titulature of the Byzantine king
and probably of Arethas. A few lines before the beginning of the passage
quoted here, there appears another title for Arethas, eius Excellentia,
78 which, it
has been argued elsewhere, 79 is the equivalent of Syriac m yatriitha 80 and is
correctly translated as Excellentia. Like saggi qullasa, in the preceding passage,
it is a hapax legomenon in the extant sources when applied to Arethas.
Again it is the Ghassanid king who delivers the ultimatum to the two
dissenters in the hope that his prestige might persuade them. His words are
quoted as oratio recta and, in their conciseness, reflect the military cast of
mind.
4. The two bishops persisted in their Tritheistic position and asked for a
postponement of five days in addition to the three, during which they would
reflect on the apologia. They were granted this extension by the bishops 81 who
lived in Constantinople, "a nobis, episcopis Constantinopoli degentibus."
When the period of five days elapsed, the two were called, but again they
would not give in to the bishops or to Arethas and his party and refused to
subscribe to the apologia after all these discussions. Consequently they were
excommunicated.
Elapso itaque praestituto tempore quinque dierum a nobis eis concesso,
rursum vocati sum et pluribus admoniti, tum a nobis, tum ab aliis viris
magnis et fidelibus, ut communi apologiae fidei subscriberent, sed nullo
modo consenserunt, spe suae vitae omnino amissa. Cum itaque omni-
mode a nobis et a viris aliis multis, laudabilibus et fidelibus, ut dictum
77 Documenta, p. 143, line 34-p. 144, line 4.
78 Ibid., p. 143, line 28.
79 See "Patriciate cf Arethas," 337.
80 Documenta, textus, p. 206, line 20.
81 Not by Arethas, as is clearly stated in the letter; cf. Aigrain, "Arabie," col. 1208.
est, sanarentur et sanari noluissent .... Et sic itaque ad eorum turpem
depositionem processimus. 82
As Arethas and his group were already mentioned explicitly more than
once in the letter, they are in this paragraph referred to only in general terms,
presumably for stylistic reasons. Bu~ they are clearly the ones referred to in the
phrases "aliis viris magnis et fidelibus" and "viris aliis multis, laudabilibus et
fidelibus," 83 since they are placed in contrast to the ecclesiastics who wrote
this letter. Thus Arethas and his group represent the secular arm of the Mono-
physites who took part in the conference. The double reference to Arethas and
his party indicates that they persisted to the very end in their attempt to
persuade the two bishops to retract their heretical views.
The two phrases are informative on the party of Arethas who, of course,
remains in the background, but they are not mentioned by name. They are
fide/es to Monophysitism, and they are magni and multi ("great and many").
This suggests that Arethas brought with him to the conference some impor-
tant personages among his federate Ghassanids, distinguished phylarchs in-
cluding probably his own son and successor, Mungir.
84 If so, the phrase would
document the fact that not only Arethas felt strongly about ecclesiastical mat-
ters of faith but also the phylarchs under him, a fact already noted when the
I:Iarran inscription of one of the phylarchs was discussed which commemo-
rated the erection of a martyrion dedicated to St. John. 85 It also throws light on
an important statement in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian which provides
import.ant supplemental information on this conference.
B
One of the passages in the Chronicle describes the role of Arethas in the
final phase of these negotiations with the two Tritheistic bishops, Eugenius
and Conon. Quotations from his discourse are cited verbatim, and these sup-
plement what the Documenta Monophysitarum have preserved of what he actu-
ally said in this final phase. The passage reads as follows in the French transla-
tion of Chabot.
I:Ieret, roi de Taiyaye, monta vers l'empereur avec des lettres de Jacques
et des Orientaux (disant): "La Trinite est une divinite, une nature, une
essence; celui qui ne signera pas cette lettre doit etre anathematise ." Sept
eveques et le patriarche signerent . Conon et Eugene dirent: "Nous ne
signerons pas, nous combattrons ces (lettres)." Alors I:Ieret dit: "Je sais
83 Cf. the two clear references to Arethas' party in the preceding letter.
84 As he did in 563; see BASIC 1.1, 282-84 .
85 See ibid., 325-31.
maintenant que vous etes heretiques . Nous et nos armees, nous acceptons
ces choses, ainsi que Jacques et les Orientaux. " 86
Noteworthy is the fact that most of the passage is in oratio recta, and this
suggests strongly that Michael had drawn on a primary source ocher than the
Documenta Monophysitarum. Naturally there would have been such other docu-
ments since the conference lasted for several days, and only a few words of
Arethas are preserved in the Documenta. The passage reveals Arethas as a "theo-
logian," and chis is the second time that Michael presents Arethas in this
light, the first being the equally precious passage in which he argued with
Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, who tried to win him over to the
Chalcedonian position. 87 There Arethas spoke of Quaternitas, and now he
speaks of Trinitas Deorum.
88 Thus the phylarch emerges, contrary to the com-
monly held view, not as a rude soldier but as an informed Christian who could
use, at least in a simple manner, the theological terms of the controversy.
Striking is the statement on his armies: chat they, his armies, accept the
doctrines enunciated in the encyclical. This is positive evidence that involves
not only the chief federate phylarch but also the armies of the Ghassanid
federates in theological controversies, a fact supported also in various ocher
ways. 89 This statement may be brought together with those in the Documenta
just analyzed, on the party that accompanied Arechas, where it was suggested
that those around him were distinguished phylarchs of the various provinces
whom he had brought along with him to the conference in order to give
support to the encyclical by their presence.
One of the most important sentences in the passage is the one that opens
it, namely, that Arethas went to Constantinople for the final phase of the
confrontation with the two dissenting bishops. 90 The venue is not clear in the
Documenta, with statements that are ambiguous and oscillate between Arabia
and Constantinople.
In favor of the view that this last phase of the confrontation at which
Arethas presided was held in Constantinople, the following may be adduced.
There is first the statement in Michael the Syrian that has just been men-
86 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 256.
87 See above, 746-55.
88 For the phrase, see Documenta, p. 13 7, line 10; see also ibid., p. 145, line 17.
89 It is noteworthy that the text speaks of armies in the plural, which in this case means
the various groups of troops under the various phylarchs in Oriens. These apparently were well
informed about the controversy and other theological matters, and it is natural to suppose that
each group had its priest, a chaplain assigned to it.
9 Chabot confuses this with the well-known journey recorded by Theophanes in 563. The
final phase of the encounter with the two bishops was certainly not in 563. Devreesse implies
from his reference ro Eugenius and Conon (lase paragraph in PA, 85) chat the conference was
not held in Constantinople. Honigmann (Eviq11e1, 185) is the only one who states chat it was
held there.
tioned . It comes in a paragraph that derives from a document and so is not
likely to be a confused account of some other journey that Arethas made to
Constantinople. Also, considering the importance of the final encyclical,
which carried with it the threat of excommunication, and that Justin II was
deeply interested in this, it is natural to suppose that Constantinople was the
obvious choice for the venue.
Furthermore, the statement in the second letter that Arethas invited the
participants to come to him does not specifically state the place to which he
invited them, but a similar statement for a previous conference in the first
letter specifies it was Arabia. Thus it can be argued that if it had been Arabia,
the province would have been mentioned. This is corroborated by the fact that
he invited bishops who lived in Constantinople. These same Monophysite
bishops who lived in Constantinople
91 are referred to again as the ones who
gave the bishops five more days of grace. The natural presumption is that the
scene of all this is Constantinople.
In their reply to this letter, the archimandrites of Arabia also speak of
the long distance that separates them from the bishops who sent them the
letter.
92 This suggests a place very far from Arabia such as Constantinople,
rather than one in Oriens. Finally, and this is decisive, there is the statement
in the HE of John of Ephesus who was a contemporary of these events, signed
this letter, and lived in Constantinople. Of the two bishops, he says that after
being anathematized, they stayed on in Constantinople, "postquam anathema-
tizati sunt in urbe regia permanserunt . " 93
Thus the conclusion that may be drawn from all this is that the confer-
ence was indeed held in Constantinople and that Arethas did make the jour-
ney around 570 to the capital, since his presence at the final phase and en-
counter with the two bishops is attested in both the Documenta and the
Chronicle of Michael the Syrian. He must have been very committed to have
made a journey of at least three months' duration at this stage in his life when
he was some seventy years old. Shortly after, he died, and the journey possibly
affected his health adversely. But it is evidence of the fact that he cared so
much for the welfare of his church that he was prepared to undertake such an
arduous journey at his advanced age.
C
The two letters of the Documenta and the account in the Chronicle of
Michael the Syrian have demonstrated the significant place that Arethas had
91 Documenta, p. 144, line 6.
92 Ibid., p. 146, lines 8-9 .
93 John of Ephesus, HE, V.3, p. 193, lines 3-4. Noldeke was of the view that Arethas
did go to Constantinople for the final encounter with the Tritheists; see his "Zur Topographie
und Geschichte des Damascenischen Gebietes und der l:laurangegend," ZDMG 29 (1876), 419.
in the history of the Tritheistic heresy. In addition to their value as docu-
ments for Arethas, their contents raise some other questions.
1. The Monophysite bishops wrote letters to the various provinces, and a
copy of that letter has survived, the first long letter. Yet they seem to have
singled out the Provincia Arabia for special attention since the letter to Arabia
is not an exact copy of the one to the other provinces. It is distinguished from
the letters to the other provinces by the elaboration of paragraphs on Arethas.
This is the key to understanding why Arabia was so privileged. It was the
province of the protagonist in this drama, Arethas, and so it was natural that
the letter to his province should be so written . It was also the province of
Theodore, one of the two ranking hier;archs who dealt with the Tritheistic
heresy. Although he was appointed for the whole of the Ghassanid limitrophe
and beyond, Arabia, the headquarters of the Ghassanids, was likewise his
headquarters. Thus two of the major actors in this drama were related to
Arabia, and it is only natural that the letter should have been specially pre-
pared for this Provincia, which thus emerges not only as the military province
of the warrior king of the federates but also as an ecclesiastical province im-
portant in the Patriarchate of Antioch .
2. Noteworthy in the letter is that it is addressed not only to the various
orders of clerics, but also to the people of Arabia: "populo fideli Christum
diligenti qui in Arabia habitat. " 94 The bishops want the people also to be
aware of the controversy, and this reflects the keen interest that not only the
clerics but also the congregations of the various churches had in theological
controversies. 95 This raises the question of the language that these people un-
derstood. No doubt both Greek and Syriac were understood by most of the
clergy, but whether everybody in the Provincia Arabia could read either lan-
guage is doubtful. If the urban Rhomaioi of the Provincia were bilingual,
knowing both Syriac and Greek, there were those in the villages. Even if these
rustic Rhomaioi were conversant with these two languages and needed no
translation, there remained the foederati, the armies about which Arethas
spoke when he said that they believed in the encyclical and what Jacob and
the Oriental bishops had decided. No doubt Arethas and the prominent phy-
94 Documenta , p. 142, line 21.
95 The first letter co the provinces is also addressed co the congregations of the provinces,
congregationibus fidelibus (ibid., p. 136, lines 17-18) . Some of these, such as Phoenicia Li-
banensis, had a strong Arab ethnic element, but ochers did not. The writers of this first letter
indicate in the last sentence chat they sent copies co ocher places "ad confirmationem et persua-
sionem eorum qui legant" (ibid., p. 141, lines 36-37). The Syriac for /egant is not the normal
word for read, qra, butfga', which means "to happen to, to chance to read." So presumably the
bishops hoped their letter would be read not only by those whom they specify at the beginning
but others who may happen on it, the implication being that they wanted a wider readership
for it.
larchs who had co transact business with the authorities knew Greek and
Syriac, but chis is difficult co predicate of the soldiers, the armies Arechas
spoke about . These probably had a version in Arabic for their information.%
The Third Letter
The third leccer 97 is closely related co the first two, especially the second,
to which it is a reply. While the first two letters tell much about Arethas,
this one cells much about his province and the ecclesiastical situation in it. It
is a most precious document not so much for what it says as for its 13 7
subscriptions, an astounding number that reveals the pervasive presence of
monastic life in the province of the Ghassanid phylarch. In addition to the
wealth of information these subscriptions provide on a variety of subjects, they
are also an indication of the extent of Christian life in the whole of Oriens: if
one single province had so many monasteries, how many more churches must
it have had! The letter contains subscriptions of only the abbots of the prov-
ince; but the second letter was addressed also to other clerics, the priests and
presbyters, and if the reply of these had survived, it would have revealed at
least an equal number of churches in the province. 98 The same may be predi-
cated of the other provinces of Oriens co which letters were sent, as indicated
in the second letter. These provinces must have replied, but their replies have
not survived. Thus the intensity and pervasiveness of religious life in Arabia
and the ~hassanid limitrophe receive resounding confirmation from this pri-
mary document, inferential as this statement is.
The analysis of this letter will be limited to the Arab and Ghassanid
profile. The analysis provides exciting-confrontations with Arabic sources of
three types: ( 1) the references to Ghassii.nid toponyms in the contemporary
poetry of Nabigha and 1:fassan, especially the latter; (2) references to the lo-
calities associated with the Ghassii.nids in the later Arabic sources, especially
the two geographical dictionaries of BakrI and Yaqut; (3) and the list of
Ghassanid buildings to be found in the work of l:famza, of later Islamic times .
As this Syriac letter is the most primary of all documents in this respect, it
provides splendid testimony to the essential reliability of these Arabic sources.
99
Noldeke was the first to grasp the crucial imponance of the list that had
been published by W. Wright . In a brilliant article, he commented on the
subscriptions with his usual masterliness, fifteen years before he wrote his
96 On the strongly Arab character of the Provincia Arabia and the neighboring regions in
Palestine and Phoenicia, see below, 824-25, 835-37, cf. 929, 935-38, for Niildeke's conclusions.
97 Documenta, 145-56 .
98 Reference co Ghassanid churches in general has been noted in connection with the
restoration of Paul the Black's name co the diptychs of the Monophysice church; see above,
802-3 .
99 An intensive study of these coponyms in the Arabic sources will be undertaken in
BASIC II.
classic work on the Ghassanids. 100 All who have dealt with this letter since
then have been in his debt. 101 However, with the lapse of more than a century,
with so many advances in Byzantine and Ghassanid history, these subscrip-
tions are due for a thorough reexamination. But before analyzing them, it is
necessary to say a few words about the text, especially as Noldeke disregarded it.
The text may be described as the profession of the Monophysite faith in
general but with special reference to the Tritheistic heresy.
1. Although Arabia was the province of Arethas and of his bishop, The-
odore, the name of Jacob precedes that of Theodore in the list of addressees.
This was, of course, how the second letter was signed; nevertheless it testifies
to the prestige of Jacob and the fact that he was the senior member of this
ecclesiastical pair.
2. As in other Monophysite documents, there emerges a Monophysite
orthodoxy based on the teachings of the doctors of this church-Severus,
Anthimus, and Theodosius, 102 the late patriarchs of Antioch, Constantinople,
and Alexandria, respectively.
3. In expressing their hopes for the union of the churches, the archi-
mandrites speak of "serenos et triumphatores imperatores nostros. " 103 This is
noteworthy since there was no reference to imperatores ("kings") in the letter of
the bishops to the archimandrites (as there was at the end of their letters to
the provinces). Consequently the phrase could not have been simply copied
from the letter of the bishops to the archimandrites but must have been an
addition of the latter. This can only have been an implied reference to the two
rulers most directly concerned with this controversy, Justin II and Arethas,
perhaps especially Arethas. The letter to the archimandrites had clearly in-
formed them of his efforts in the Tritheistic controversy, while the emperor's
role in it for the last three years must have been explained to them by Arethas
and Theodore. 104 The reference is of some importance because of the identity of
the referents and the titles used to describe the imperatores.
a. The abbots who wrote from the Provincia Arabia, of which Arethas
100 See his "Topographie," 419-44 .
101 Notably T. J . Lamy, "Profession de foi," Actes du onzieme congres international tks orien-
ta/istes (Paris, 1897), 117-37; and Aigrain, in "Arabie, " cols. 1209-11. The first article pays
attention to the text of the letter and not only to the subscription since Noldeke was not
interested in the former. Lamy makes no real advances in discussing the subscriptions ; in fact,
he indulges in some grave mistakes in his "Remarques, " pp. 134-37 , one of which was cor-
rected by Aigrain. The best feature of his article is the list of subscriptions which is clearly
presented (pp. 125-34) and is easy to follow and read.
103 Ibid ., p. 148, lines 6-7 .
104 In spite of the doctrinal differences, the Byzantine basi/eus remained for the Mono-
physites of the empire their ma/kiilma/iklbasi/eus , and Justin 's genuine efforts at reconciling the
Monophysites was greeted with enthusiasm by them. Provincial and Monophysite attachment
to and respect for the basi/eus are reflected stylistically in the letter in the phrase regia via (ibid.,
p. 146, line 32).
was phylarch, and in reply to a letter of the bishops in which the role of
Arethas is fully and powerfully described, must have had Arethas in mind and
so included him in the term imperatores. In fact Monophysite Arethas was more
the king of the archimandrites of Arabia than the distant Dyophysite Justin.
There is no mention of him by name in the letter, which may sound strange
in view of such reference to him in the letter of the bishops. But this omission
may be consonant with the serious tone of their reply and its involvement in
purely theological and spiritual matters .
b. On the other hand, the letter was written around 570, about the time
that Arethas died, although exactly when his death occurred is not known. His
death has been inferred from the reference to Mungir, his son and successor, in
the subscriptions, 105 and their omission of Arethas' name. This is possible, and if
so, the reference to the Ghassanid within the term imperatores would be to Mun-
gir. However, the argument ex silentio is not necessarily valid. Arethas may have
been taken ill, or for some reason an abbot associated with him did not sign or
was not present. This could be confirmed by the fact that the epithets applied to
imperatores are not entirely appropriate to Mungir who would have just succeeded,
had won no victories yet, and had not reigned long enough to be described as
serenus . In fact, he turned out to be the opposite, a very aggressive warrior.
c. This leads to the discussion of the two terms. They are not the same as
those in the first letter of the bishops, which used piissimi and christophili of
the imperatores . In Syriac they appea_! as "nihe wa lbi shay zakuthii," for 11eqo;
(mansuetus) and tqonmouxo; (triumphator), which appear in the titulature of
Justin II, 106 especially mansuetus, apparently for the first time 107 in imperial
titulature, in March 570. The archimandrites may have echoed this, but it is
not clear how they, in distant Arabia, would have thought of these titles since
mansuetus was a new title and Justin II had won no victories that reverberated
in Oriens to suggest triumphator to the archimandrites. Both titles, however,
are applicable to Arethas, whose victories over his Lakhmid adversaries were
crowned by the resounding victory of the battle of Qinnasrin in 5 54, and who
since then had survived in the consciousness of Oriens, which he rid of the
devastating raids of the Lakhmid Mungir, as both the victorious king and the
keeper of the peace 108 in the limitrophe for some fifteen years. The two titles
appear not conventional ones when applied to Arethas (as they do when ap-
105 See below, 8 3 1.
106 For these Greek and Latin terms in the ciculacure of Justin II, see G. Rosch, ONOMA
BAIIJ\EIAI (Vienna, 1978), 168. Thus Chaboc's translation of the Syriac as Jereni is not quite
accurate.
107 Ibid., 48. This confirms Noldeke's observation (GF, 13) chat these Syriac documents
were translated into Syriac by a competent, learned man.
108 On the pax Ghauanica imposed by Arechas in the Jimicrophe, see John of Ephesus,
HE, V.3 , p. 212, lines 20-25 . On the application of the term man1uetu1 co the Germanic kings
of the Occident , see Rosch, ONOMA, 48 note 79; see also ibid., 104.
plied to the autokrator in Constantinople)
109 but well deserved. As they were
also applicable to Justin, it was possible to apply them to both. uo
Thus, of the three kings possibly implied in the word ma/ken (imperatores)
in the letter, the two titles are most applicable to Arethas, and consequently
he must be included in its denotation, although it is possible, even probable,
that he had died by then. m If so, the titles would have been used about him
posthumously and would have been applied to Mungir proleptically. As it
turned out, the title triumphator proved eminently applicable to Mungir but
mansuetus singularly inappropriate.
V. THE SUBSCRIPTIONS OF THE ARCHIMANDRITES OF ARABIA
The importance of the 13 7 subscriptions in the third letter has already been
indicated. They were carefully examined and commented upon by Noldeke in
the most adequate manner. 112 But as he commented on the entire list of 13 7
subscriptions, the Ghassanid and Arab elements in it were not highlighted as
they will be here for the light they shed on Ghassanid history .
1
The first problem that the list raises is the extent and boundaries of the
Provincia Arabia as presented in it. Noldeke noted that it was more extensive
than the secular Byzantine province, arguing that the ecclesiastical province of
Arabia contained portions of Phoenicia Libanensis, especially Damascene, the
region around Damascus in the south, to which belonged many of the monas-
teries included in the list. 113
This observation that the power and authority of the Ghassanids ex-
tended beyond the boundaries of the imperial Provincia into these adjacent
regions is valid, but his conclusion on the existence of "the ecclesiastical prov-
ince of Arabia" is not and can be confusing. u 4 There was no ecclesiastical
province of Arabia wider in extent than the imperial one, and the abbots refer
to it by its technical Greek secular name, U3tUQ')(La (hyparchy).
115 Noldeke
109 Justin II was anything but triumphant in 570, and was far from gentle; witness, inter
alia, his treatment of Mungir himself (BASIC 1.1, 346-50); but a good case was made for his
gentleness (Rosch, ONOMA , 104).
uo It should be remembered that these titles do not have to be true as predicated of the
rulers; they were conventionally applied to them.
111 The year 569 may then be taken as the year of his death, which would fit well with the
forty years allotted to his reign in a pre-Islamic poem, the first year of his reign being 529.
uz In '"Topographie."
u 3 Noldeke, '"Topographie," 420-21. To Phoenicia Libanensis may be added part of Pa-
laestina Secunda, to which belonged some monasteries in the list.
u 4 For his phrase '"Kirchenprovenz Arabia," see Noldeke, '"Topographie," 419-20 .
u 5 Documenta, textus, p. 209, line 17, where not the standard bmgx[a but fomgxla is
used, transliterated into Syriac. On vnagxla used for P,-QVinca in the laudatio of Augustus for
Agrippa, see H.J. Mason, Greek Terms for Roman Institutions, American Studies in Papyrology
wrote his topographic article some fourteen years before his monograph specif-
ically devoted to the Ghassanids, and even in his monograph he had no clear
conception of the Ghassanid presence in Oriens. The power of the Ghassanids,
especially at the end of the reign of Arethas, extended well beyond the bound-
aries of the Provincia, and consequently these subscriptions belonging to Pa-
laestina Secunda and Phoenicia Libanensis cannot argue for the existence of
what he called the ecclesiastical province of Arabia. They may be explained by
the fact that the signatories joined their colleagues for the general meeting
which the abbots of Arabia held in order to answer the letter of the bishops,
specifically addressed to the clerics of Arabia. It has also been suggested by
Noldeke that the place may have been Darayya in Damascene. 116 If this was
the venue, many abbots from that region, which is in Phoenicia, attended,
and so did those from Palaestina Secunda, which was nearby. But participa-
tion of the Phoenician and Palestinian bishops cannot argue that these be-
longed ecclesiastically to Arabia or that there was a "Kirchenprovinz Arabia." 117
2
From the list of 137 signatures, the following may be singled out as
associated with the Arabs and specifically the Ghassanids. 118
A
1. Theodore, priest and abbot of the monastery of Abbot Marcellinus of
the Mountain of l:farith, 119 who signed after the letter was translated for him
13 (Toronto, 1974), 138. unaQxia may turn out to be neither an individualism in documents
of August-us nor a scribal error.
1! 6 See below, 829.
117 Noldeke ("Topographie," 422) also noted that the region of Arabia south of the
l:fawran (the Balqa', Amonitis) was not represented in the subscriptions, and he explained the
non-participation as owing either to the fact that the region had few monasteries or that some of
the as yet unidentified monasteries in the list belonged to that region. On the geographical
groups into which the monasteries may be divided, see Aigrain, "Arabie," cols. 1209-1310.
118 As Noldeke has discussed these subscriptions, there is no need to repeat what he said,
and the reader is referred to his discussion. But each subscription will be noted briefly in order
to show its Ghassanid or Arab connection. New materials will be added ro the discussion when
available. A detailed treatment of all these toponyms is assigned to BASIC II. Unlike Nol-
deke's, Lamy's list of subscriptions (above, note 101) is numbered and clearly printed; so those
relevant co the Ghassanids and Arabs will be cited from Lamy's list and numeration, which will
dispense with the necessity of continual citation of page and line numbers.
The names of the clerics in these Syriac subscriptions are unvocalized, as are the toponyms.
Hence an exact and accurate transliteration is not possible, but the consonantal skeletons are so
clear that there is no chance of error in the process of identification. Chabot transliterated them
into Latin in his version of che letter in CSCO and Lamy into French, while Noldeke desisted
and commented on them after reproducing chem in Syriac. Arabic and Syriac macrons are not
exactly identical in their function of expressing phonetic values, but the difference is minimal
and does not conduce co any confusion in the process of transliterating these Syriac words and
their Arabic equivalents.
H 9 Noldeke, "Topographie," 430-31.
(no. 1 in the list). What significance should be given to the fact that he is the
first subscriber is not clear. The subscription refers directly to I:Iarith/Arethas,
one of two such references in the list. The mountain (present-day Tall al-1:Iara)
is in the Golan and is called after him. The name of the convent is strange.
Marcellinus is a saint in the West, but here he is the abbot after whom the
convent is named. Who this abbot Marcellinus was is not clear. If he was a
sixth-century monk, he may have had a special relationship to the Ghassanids
on whose mountain he had his monastery. Theodore apparently knew no
Greek, the original language of the letter of the bishops, but he signed it after
it was translated for him into Syriac. What his ethnic background was is not
clear. He may or may not have been an Arab. His name is no evidence that he
was not, since this was also the name of Theodore, the Arab bishop of the
Ghassanids.
2. Anastasius, a monk of the great monastery of Ghashimin, who signed
in Greek (no. 2). Ghashimin, Arabic Jasim, is a town solidly associated with
the Ghassanids, as is clear from the poetry of I:Iassan. Noldeke made the
connection and also noted that more than one monastery in or near
Ghashimin/Jasim were represented in the list1 20 and their abbots all signed in
Greek. In addition to the one just mentioned, there were:
a. George, priest and abbot of the monastery of Beth-Sabnin (Sabinianus)
of Ghashimin/Jasim, who signed by his own hand (no. 23).
b. Proclus, priest and abbot of the monastery of Ghashimin/Jasim, who
signed by his own hand (no. 31).
c. Manes, priest and abbot of the monastery of Ghashimin/Jasim, who
signed in Greek by his own hand (no. 35).
d. Elias/Iliya, priest and abbot of the monastery of Ghashimin/Jasim,
who signed in Greek by his own hand (no. 36). This same priest and abbot of
Jasim signed for his namesake, priest and abbot of the monastery of the vil-
lage of Kephar Ushai (no. 128).
3. I:Iabshush, 121 priest and abbot of the monastery of Bath-Ar' , signed by
the hand of Thomas, priest of the Mountain of I:Iarith (no. 4). This recalls the
first subscription which involves Theodore, a priest and abbot of the monas-
tery of Abbot Marcellinus of the Mountain of I:Iarith. In this subscription
Thomas is called only a priest and is not related to a monastery but to the
mountain, which leaves his function ambiguous. Was he an inmate of the
same monastery or was he only a priest for the churches of the entire moun-
tain?
4. Iliya/Elias, priest and abbot of the monastery of Beth-Mar-Stephen of
120 Ibid., 429.
121 I:Iabshush is an Aramaic name according co Noldeke, ibid., 444.
'Aqrab (no. 6). 'Aqrab/'Aqraba' is a Ghassanid residence associated with them
in Yaqiit, who also speaks of Dayr 'Aqraba' , the monastery of 'Aqrab. 122
5. George, priest and abbot of the monastery of Beth-1::"[ala (no. 13). As
noted by Noldeke, 123 the Arabic sources, especially l::"[amza, associate this with
the Ghassanids, and 1::"[amza states that it was built by 'Amr ibn-Jafna, the
Ghassiinid king .
6. David, abbot of the monastery of Beralia, signed for Mar Paul, priest
and abbot of the monastery of Burga l::"[awra, "the White Tower" (nos. 14-
15). Noldeke
124 has argued that this locality, the White Tower, or the other,
called Burga de 1::"[ariph (no. 59), may be associated with al-Burj, where an
inscription set up by Mungir was found, while "the White Tower" reminds
one of al-Khirbat al-Bayc;la'. m
7. Thomas, priest and abbot of Tubnin/Tubna (no. 18). Noldeke has
already identified this with the Tubna in the Lajii./Trachonitis, attested in the
poetry of Nabigha on the Ghassanid Nu'man.
126
8. George, who signed for Mar Alos, priest and abbot of Beth-Mar-
Sargis (Sergius) of Gabitha/Jabiya, after receiving his authorization (no. 24).
This is the most celebrated of all the Ghassanid residences, Jabiya , in the
Golan. It had a monastery with the name of Beth-Mar-Sergius, further evi-
dence of the dedication of the Ghassanids to St. Sergius. 121 Presumably the
abbot of the monastery was not available for signing the letter and so dele-
gated the priest George to sign for him.
9. SabnI, priest and abbot of the monastery of Mar Tirus of 'Aqrab, who
signed by the hand of his priest Conon (no. 26). 'Aqrab/'Aqraba', as a
Ghassanid residence, has already been noted in connection with another con-
vent, that of Beth-Mar-Stephen. So it had two convents.
10. John, priest and abbot of Nahra d'Qasrra, who signed in Greek by
his own hand (no. 39). Noldeke has correctly identified this with the modern
Arabic Nahr al-Qu~ayr, northeast of Damascus. 128 Important is his drawing
attention to the fact that in Wright's catalogue it appears as the monastery of
Arab monks, Tayaye. It is noteworthy that Nahra d'Qasrra appears again in
subscription no. 46, where Theodore, priest of Nahra d'Qasrra, signed in
122 Ibid., 91.
123 Ibid., 437.
124 Ibid., 426.
125 Since then, H . Gaube has published his monograph on Khirbac al-Bayc;la' which, he
argued, was a Ghassanid structure; on chis see BASIC II.
126 See Noldeke, "Topographie , .. 4 31.
127 Ibid., 436. The list of subscriptions is striking evidence for the popularity of the name
Sergius among the Monophysices. This is the most common name among the subscribers; it
occurs some dozen times. Job (Ayyiib) recurs a few times, and is a name chat is also important
co che Ghassanids.
128 Noldeke, "Topographie,"' 423-24.
Greek. So the subscriptions provide two non-Arab names assumed by Arab
monks.
11. John, priest and abbot of the Mountain of Mal)agga, who signed by
his own hand (no. 43). The toponym was correctly interpreted by Noldeke as
a pilgrimage place, but without much comment. 129 It is, however, quite im-
portant for the Arab profile of this list.
The term is certainly Arabic, not Syriac, since ~agga in Syriac, as in
Hebrew, means festival, not pilgrimage. It is morphologically an Arabic noun
of place. Its Arabic character reflects the Arab milieu (l:fawran, Auranitis) that
surrounded it and gave it an Arabic name. Its semantics reflect its history. It
was a holy place, a place of pilgrimage. Yaqiit, who wrote in late Islamic
times, reflects the Islamized view of the place as holy. Although the details he
provides may be rejected, yet the essehtial character of the place as holy is
preserved in his work. Of Mal)ajja he says: "It is one of the villages of l:fawran
in which there is a stone which is visited. It is alleged that the Prophet
(Mul)ammad) sat on it; but the truth is that the Prophet did not travel beyond
Bostra, and it is said that seventy prophets are (buried) in its mosque. " 130 It is
easy to divest the account of its legendary character. The stone may have stood
over the relics of a saint, while the mosque must have been a church, possibly
a martyrion, with the relics of one or more saints or martyrs.
This subscription is unique in the list. The term itself in Arabic is a
precious one, since it is rarely attested in this sense, 131 although there must
have been many ma~ajjas, pilgrimage centers, in pre-Islamic times among the
Arabs. The place itself must have been an important religious site, perhaps
the repository of relics of many saints, elevated by local practice into a pil-
grimage center, in spite of its proximity to the place of pilgrimage par excel-
lence, Jerusalem in the Holy Land. It is noteworthy that the phrase, the
Mountain of Mal)ajja, involves two places, the village of Mal)ajja and the
mountain near it. The monastery apparently was built on the mountain.
The list (no. 52) makes another mention of the Mountain of Mal)agga.
Stephen, priest and abbot of the monastery of Qunitha, signed through Mar
Sergius of the Mountain of Mal)ajja.
12. Khulayf, priest and abbot of the monastery of Kefar Shemesh, who
signed this letter and also declared himself a follower of the orthodox fathers
129 Ibid., 432. His reference co Waddington 2413b is mistaken, since chis inscription
pertains co 'Aqraba', not Ma):iajja.
130 Yaqiic, Mu'jam, s.v. Mu):iajja, so vocalized. As Yaqiic does not indicate the vocaliza-
tion in his own words as he sometimes does, che editorial vocalization muse be a mistake: chis is
a noun of place from che well-known Arabic verb ~ajja. le is correccly cransliceraced by Chabot,
Documenta, p. 150, line 33.
131 Curiously enough the lexica give the meaning, possibly derivative, ofMa):iajja, noc as a
pilgrimage center, but as che road chat leads co one, the wide road.
who assembled at Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus (no. 48). This place
has been left unidentified by Noldeke. 132 What is interesting is the priest's
name, a hypocoristicon, the only definitely Arab name in the whole list. 133
Khulayf must have been possessed of a strong sense of Arab identity since, on
attaining the priesthood and the abbacy, he did not, on ordination, assume a
biblical or a Christian name.
13. Maron, priest and abbot of the monastery of Beth-Ilana of Darayya
(no. 86). Noldeke identified Darayya with the well-known toponym, associ-
ated with the Ghassanids in the contemporary poetry, and noted that since it
occurs more frequently than any other name, it might have been the meeting
place of the abbots of these subscriptions.
134 In addition to the monastery of
Beth-Ilana ("the Monastery of the Tree") just mentioned, there are the follow-
ing attestations of Darayya.
a. Daniel, priest and abbot of the monastery of Darayya, who signed by
his own hand (no. 87).
b. Conon, priest and abbot of the monastery of Kapha, signed by the
hand of Maron, of the "Monastery of the Tree" in Darayya (no. 91).
c. Iliya/Elias, priest and abbot of the monastery of ~afrin, who signed by
the hand of Daniel, priest and abbot of the monastery of Darayya (no. 102).
d. Romana, deacon and abbot of the monastery of Darayya, who signed
by his own hand (no. 103).
e. BarkI, priest and abbot of the monastery of Darayya, signed by the
hand of the preceding deacon Romana (no. 104).
This of course raises the problem of many abbots presiding over the same
convent or different convents in the same village, Darayya.
f. Paul, deacon and abbot of "the monastery of Loze (Monastery of the
Almonds), of the village of Darayya," signed by the hand of the deacon John,
of the same village of Darayya (no. 105). The status of this John is not clear,
whether he belonged to a monastery in Darayya or to a church in the village.
g. Sabnin, deacon and abbot of the monastery of Darayya, who signed by
the hand of Maron, priest and abbot of the monastery of Beth-Ilana (Monas-
tery of the Tree) (no. 107).
h. }::Ialphai, priest and abbot of the "Monastery of the Field in Darayya,"
who signed by his own hand (no. 110).
i. The same, }::Ialgbai , also signed for Mar John, priest and abbot of the
monastery of Darayya (no. 111).
132 Noldeke, "Topographie," 422.
133 Ibid., 444.
134 Ibid., 427 . It is noteworthy that two Muslim ascetics (zuhhad) of the 10th century 'are
associated with Darayya-Abii Sulayman al-DaranI and his son Sulayman. The tomb of the first
in Darayya is a shrine that is visited; Yaqiit, Mu'jam, s.v. Darayya.
j. Sebaf, deacon and abbot of the monastery of Mar Jonan (Jonas) in
Darayya, who signed by the hand of Mar John, the disciple of the monastery
of Beth-Mar-Salman (Solomon) of the Kurds (no. 112).
14. John, priest and abbot of the monastery of Mar Paul in Sakia
(Sakka'), who signed by the hand of Mar Stephen of the monastery of Mar
Salman of the Kurds (no. 93). Sakia is none other than the Sakka' of the
poetry of l:Iassan, who associates it with the Ghassanids, as noted by Noldeke. 135
15. l;labush, priest and abbot of the monastery of Sakia/Sakka', who
signed by his own hand (no. 94). While the preceding priest John signed as
abbot of the monastery of Mar Paul in Sakia/Sakka', l;labush signed as the
abbot of the monastery of Sakka', 136 which could suggest another monastery at
Sakka'.
16. Leontius, deacon and abbot of the monastery of Mar Sergius of
Butsa', signed by the hand of Mar Manes (no. 97). Noldeke 137 has suggested
Arabic Bu~ay' and Bu~', mentioned by }:lassan in his poetry on the
Ghassanids, but was not so certain. However, the absolute rarity of the name
suggests correct identification. Butsa' is mentioned again in subscriptions 98
and 101.
17. l;lalphai, deacon and abbot of the monastery of the village of Kusita
(Kiswa), signed by the hand of Elias, priest and abbot of the monastery of the
Kurds (no. 100). This was identified by N6ldeke 138 with Kiswa, also associ-
ated with the Ghassanids.
18. Antiochus, priest and abbot of the monastery of Gabt"il, who signed
by his own hand (no. 113). Noldeke was unable to identify Gabtil. 139 He drew
attention to an approximate homophone in South Arabia and thought the
South Arabian tribes who emigrated to Syria might have brought the name
with them. But the foederati of Byzantium in Oriens such as the Tanukhids
and the Ghassanids did come from the Arabian south; hence this could have
been one of _their residences. The question arises whether this was the same
Antiochus that appears as one of the abbots of Oriens who sent a letter to the
bishops in Constantinople, giving support to the Monophysite patriarch Paul
after the latter was calumniated . There Antiochus appears as the abbot of the
"monastery of the Arabs," which suggests not the "monastery of Gabtil" but
the one discussed earlier (above, no. 10) as the monastery of Nahra d'Qasfra,
northeast of Damascus. 140
19. Sergius, priest and abbot of the monastery of 'Dqabta, signed by the
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid., 427.
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid., 439.
14 Further on Antiochus, see below, 843-45 .
hand of the priest, Mar Eustathius, his prior, who is the priest of the church
of the glorious, Christ-loving patrician Mungir (no. 121). This is perhaps the
most important subscription in the entire list as it involves the Ghassanid
Mungir. The discussion here will be limited to the two clerics of the signature
and to the toponym. 141
The two clerics of the subscription as well as the locality '-Oqabta present
many problems .
a. Noldeke
142 discussed the locality and its possible relation to 'Aqabat
al-Shahiirat; he considered the identification precarious. However, in the ab-
sence of any other possible toponym, the chances are that he is right, since the
area in which it lies, south of Damascus, has other localities associated with
the Monophysite Ghassanids, and the name 'Aqabat is not common in this
region. According to the historian he cites, Abii al-Fida', it is a path on Jabal
al-Aswad (Mountain of the Black) that leads from the Ghiifa to Kiswa.
Aigrain accepted this and considered the monastery of '-Oqabta to be "the
monastery of Jabal al-Aswad. " 143 This may be tentatively accepted.
b. The first cleric, Sergius, was absent, for some unknown reason, and
signed by the hand of his prior (Syriac thenyana), his second in authority, who
is also simultaneously the priest of the church of Mungir . The latter is the
more important of the two clerics. He is at one and the same time a monk, a
prior at the convent of Jabal al-Aswad, and a parish priest of the church of
Mungir. Since this is a meeting of conventual archimandrites, he is present
there in his capacity not as a parish priest but as the prior of a monastery,
serving under his abbot. Even so, his participation is striking, and it is per-
fectly possible that the abbot of the monastery had him sign in his place for
this very reason, namely, that he was the priest of the "Church of Mungir,"
whose father, Arethas, had played an important role in the Tritheistic contro-
versy about which these archimandrites had received a letter. So it is just
possible that they wanted to reflect the Ghassanid presence in the subscription
in this fashion, especially as there was no explicit reference by name to either
Arethas or his son in their letter. The subscription made good this omission
and reminded the readers of the Ghassanid presence. 144
B
In addition to the identifications made by Noldeke, the following may
be added as monasteries associated with the Ghassanids.
1. Conon, priest and abbot of the monastery of Goufna, who signed by
141 On Mungir and the Ghassanid profile on the subscription, see below, 834-38 .
143 Aigrain, "Arabie," col. 1211.
144 Although the Ghassanids had a strong sense of Arab identity, as reflected in their
names, their clerics assumed non-Arab names-biblical, Christian, or Graeco-Roman-such as
Eustathius.
his own hand (no. 10). Strangely enough, Noldeke does not associate this
monastery with the Ghassanids, in spite of the strikingly Ghassanid name,
Jafna. In I:Iamza he is a famous builder, although not of monasteries. His son
'Amr is, and I:Iamza did not give an exhaustive list of Jafna's buildings. His
son may have built the monastery in his honor since he built three monasteries
which I:Iamza enumerates. 145
2. George, priest and abbot of the monastery of NMR, who signed by
his own hand in Greek (no. 30). The Ghassanid association of this monastery
is much less certain than the preceding one and is more or less conjectural.
The vocalization of the Syriac is not clear at all. Chabot transliterates Namara;
Lamy gives it as Namar. Noldeke leaves it untransliterated.
146
It is noteworthy that, in the process of identification, Noldeke could not
entertain Namara, the well-known burial place of Imru' al-Qays, "the King of
all the Arabs" of the fourth century, because he could not find evidence for the
association of the locality with the Arabs; only Latin and Greek graffiti and
inscriptions were found there at the time by Waddington. But after the dis-
covery of the famous Arabic Namara inscription, the identification cannot be
entirely ruled out . Namara could very well have been a Christian federate
center not inappropriate for the erection of a monastery. In the List of I:Iamza,
the Ghassanid al-Ayham is associated with Qat Anmar. Lamy transliterated
NMR as Namar, and in one of Dussaud's detailed maps, there appears
Namar, south of 'Aqraba' and slightly east of Nahr 'Allan, one of the tribu-
taries of the Yarmiik. 147
3. John signed for Elias, priest and abbot of the monastery of Gadirta,
after receiving his authorization (no. 57). I:Iamza ascribes to the Ghassanid
Tha'laba the building of Sarra):i al-Ghadir, 148 and it is just possible that the
Gadirta monastery may be identified with this Ghassanid building. Again this
is purely conjectural as the preceding one was.
4. Iliya/Elias, priest and abbot of the monastery of ~afrin, who signed by
the hand of Daniel of the monastery of Darayya (no. 102). This subscription
has been noted before in connection with Darayya, but it is more important
for the locality, ~afrin. Noldeke commented on the locality and identified it
with Dayr al-'A~afir, "the monastery of the birds, " 149 but does not seem to
have remembered that I:Iassan in his poetry associates ~afrin with the Ghas-
145 Noldeke, "Topographie," 434. For Jafna and 'Amr, see I:Iamza, Tiirikh, 99. Foe the
vocalization that yields Goufna rather than Jafna, see also Malalas, who transmits the name of
the Ghassanid phylarch as the list does; BASIC 1.1, 63.
146 Noldeke, "Topographie, " 437.
147 I:Iamza, Tiirikh,
103; for Imru' al-Qays and Christianity , see BAFOC, 32-34. For
Namar see Dussaud, Topographie, map l, D2 (opp. p. 8).
148 Hamza, Tiirikh, 99-100 .
sanidsl) 0 and mentions it as a residence, maghna, for them. Noldeke refers to
Yaqut on the battle of the Y armuk where there is reference to ~afrin and the
Ghassanids, but he seems to have thought of it only as the site of the battle,
not as a residence.
5. Sergius, priest and abbot of the monastery of I:Ialioram, signed by the
hand of brother Julian
1 )1 (no. 119). Noldeke has left this monastery without
comment, but since then there have been advances in identifying it with Latin
Heliaramia of the Tabula Peutingeriana . This toponym appears there and has
been identified by Honigmann with the I:Ialioram of the Monophysite sub-
scriptions. Dussaud later identified Latin Heliaramia with Q~r al-1:Iayr al-
GharbI, southwest of Palmyra in Phoenicia Libanensis, but rejected Honig-
mann's identification of Heliaramia with the Monophysite monastery, on the
ground that the latter was located not in Phoenicia Libanensis but in Ara-
bia. in Dussaud's contention, however, may now be rejected on the following
grounds.
a. The name is so uncommon that it is most unlikely that there were two
localities with that name.
b. Dussaud apparently was under the impression that all the toponyms
mentioned in the Monophysite document belonged to the Provincia Arabia.
But, as Noldeke was the first to show, this was not the case, and toponyms
from Phoenicia Libanensis (to which belonged Q~r al-1:Iayr al-GharbI) even as
far as north of Damascus were included, in the subscriptions. 153
c. Archaeology has revealed that before the Umayyad palace was built at
Q~r al-1:Iayr al-GharbI, a Byzantine monastery had existed. Two Greek in-
scriptions that involve Arethas the Ghassanid were also discovered, and these
reveal him as a friend and possibly a benefactor of the monastery. 154
As research has not revealed a place in the Provincia Arabia with the
name I:Ialioram, the chances are that this monastery was none other than the
Heliaramia of the Peutinger Map, which has been identified with the locality
southwest of Palmyra and which had a monastery and a Ghassanid inscription .
If clerics from monasteries north of Damascus came to the meeting and signed
the Monophysite document, it is not unnatural to assume that they also came
from this locality, farther as it was from Damascus, but still in Phoenicia Li-
banensis.
6. John, priest and archimandrite of the monastery of 'Issanayye, for
150 Hassan Diwan
151 Noldeke, "Top~graphie, " 439 .
152 Dussaud, Topographie
, 265 note 1.
153 And if the "monastery of the Ghassanids" discussed below turns out to be the one in
Palestine, this would provide the case of another distant monastery that, like l;lalioram, sent a
representative to the meeting of the Monophysite abbots.
154 On this see BASIC 1.1, 259-60.
whom signed Mar Elias, the archimandrite of the monastery of the Ar 'abnaia
(no. 129). This by far is the most important gain from these subscriptions as
far as the Ghassanids are concerned. Noldeke, mirabile dictu, left it uncom-
mented upon, m but 'Issanayye can only be the Syriac form of the Ghassanids. 156
The term "Ghassanid" very rarely occurred in the Syriac sources and had not
been known to have occurred at all when Noldeke wrote. Its first attestation
was in the recently discovered letter of Simeon of Beth-Arsham, composed
around 520, in which it appears as it does in the list, with the exception of
the addition of a yodh after the ayn. m No other toponym can be identified
with it, and it is quite natural to assume that the Ghassanids, who were such
staunch Monophysites, would have built a monastery that carried their name,
an assumption that is confirmed by the existence of the monastery in Palestine
called "the Monastery of the Ghassanids,"
158 Dayr Ghassaneh, or Ghassani.
Furthermore, the Ghassanids did build churches, such as the one described in
this very list, as "the Church of Mungir," Arethas' son and successor; if a
church carried their name, so did a monastery. The identification raises the
question of whether or not the monastery in this list is the same as that in
Palestine, or was it some other monastery with the name of "the Monastery of
the Ghassanids." The monastery in Palestine was rather far from the meeting
place of the abbots of the list; but it has been argued that the monastery of
l:falioram, a rather distant monastery southwest of Palmyra, was represented.
Alternatively, this monastery of the Ghassanids in the list might be identified
with one in the Provincia Arabia, 159 since there is a toponym with the name
Ghassane there, and it is just possible that the monastery mentioned in the
list was located there.
The name of the monastery raises the question of whether it was only
built and/or endowed by the Ghassanids or whether its inmates were them-
selves Ghassanids. If the former, it is likely to have carried the name of the
benefactor, as in the case of "the Church of Mungir" or "the Mountain of
l:{iirith/ Arethas." Chances are that some Ghassanids decided to devote them-
selves to the monastic life and so lived there . 160 The Lakhmid king Nu'man
became a monk, and so did the Salil:iid king Dawud. Some of the Ghassanid
156 In Arabic the Ghassanids are referred to as Ghassan, Ghasasina, Ghassaniyyiin, and
Ghassaniyya. The last is the closest to the Syriac form. Syriac does not have the Arabic gh,
which it expresses in this case through the 'ayn.
The "Monastery of Ar'abnaia" should probably be read as the "Monastery of the Arba'in or
Acba'inaia," that is, the "Monastery of the Forty" Martyrs.
lH See Martyrs, p. xxxi, line 22.
158 See BASIC 1.1, 654-55.
159 Arabian Ghassiine lies close to Bostra, to its northeast; see Sartre, TE, map 5.
160 See BAFIC,
161-64, 257-58, 292-300.
troops opted for the religious life with St. Simeon the Younger
161 after their
victory in the battle of Qinnasrin in 554. Finally, there is, of course, "the
Monastery of the Arabs, " 162 Arab monks who lived together in their monas-
tery, and this could suggest that the monastery of the Ghassanids consisted of
monks who were Ghassanid Arabs. This raises the further question of the
language of devotion in this monastery, where not Rhomaic Arabs lived but
federate Arabs, who, instead of distributing themselves among the various
monasteries, decided to live together as Ghassanid Arabs, a datum to be
added to the difficult question of an Arabic Bible and liturgy before the rise of
Islam.
3
When Noldeke wrote his "Topographie," he had no particular interest in
the Ghassanids. When he developed an interest in them fifteen years later, his
goal was mainly to establish the correct chronology of the dynasty and the
sequence of its rulers. Hence he only referred the reader to his article on these
subscriptions and did not comment on their implications or on that of the
Documenta Monophysitarum for the crucial role of the Ghassanids in the eccle-
siastical history of the period, and this, of course, affected his overall view and
perception of them. The preceding discussion has attempted to do what
Noldeke omitted: to present the Ghassanid role and contribution in both the
letters and the subscriptions by singling them out for intensive examination. 163
The following observations and conclusions may now be made.
1. The letters and the subscriptions have fully demonstrated the powerful
Ghassanid presence in the Monophysite movement in Oriens and elsewhere.
The number of monasteries associated with them, once these have been disen-
tangled from the Monophysite monasteries in general, turns out to be truly
impressive. Within the large area in which these monasteries are diffused,
there emerge three principal monastic centers: Darayya, Jasim, and the Moun-
tain of l::larith/ Arethas. It is, of course, difficult to say anything about the
ethnic identity of the inmates of these monasteries, since biblical and Graeco-
Roman names hide it, or about the devotional languages used in them. But the
correlation of Ghassanid physical presence and the monastic centers is striking
and clearly suggests at least Ghassanid patronage of the monastic life and institu-
tions. Specifically and explicitly Ghassanid are only two items in the list: "the
Dayr (Monastery) of the Ghassanids" and "the Church of Mungir."
161 See BASIC 1.1, 244, 247.
162 See below, 838-43 .
163 Noldeke, Lamy, and Aigrain have commented on various aspects of the subscriptions
such as their date, the language of the original document, and the question of clerical literacy;
see their articles cited in this chapter.
The Ghassanid and Arab involvement in monasticism will reveal various
pockets of Arab monasticism in Oriens and elsewhere. In addition to the
Ghassanid monastic clusters in the regions of Darayya, Jasim, and Mount
l:Iarith, there was, of course, the Arab monastic pocket in the Desert of Juda
in Palestine, and others that spread in l:Iijaz, such as the region of Madyan,
Wadi al-Qura, Najran, and Hira. 164 This is of much relevance to the study of
the ascetic movement in Islam which, according to one view, was the basis of
Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. 16 )
The Syriac list of subscriptions gives splendid confirmation to the essen-
tial reliability and historicity of the Arabic one of J::lamza, which is a partial
list of the buildings of the Ghassanids and of various types. There are refer-
ences to the adyar, monasteries, that the Ghassanids built. The Syriac list
(itself a partial list that does not include other monasteries in Oriens) confirms
the data in the Arabic list, such as Dayr J::lali, and suggests that the Ghas-
sanid monasteries were much more extensive than J::lamza chose to transmit, a
conclusion that can be drawn even without the help of the Syriac list. Before
the latter had been laid under contribution, J::lamza's list was confronted with
epigraphic evidence, which was solid and valuable but scanty. Now the Syriac
list, a long list of monasteries, makes possible a new confrontation, Arabic
and Syriac, and the wealth of evidence for monasteries suggests that many
relevant sources have been lost, which tell the story of the Ghassanids in
building castles, palaces, and other structures that survive in J::lamza's list in
only a truncated fashion. 166
2. The question also arises from an examination of the list of subscrip-
tions concerning the Arabness of the region. The inhabitants of the region,
the Provincia Arabia, had been "Nabataean" Arabs before they became Rho-
maic Arabs after the annexation of Nabataea by Trajan in A.D. 106. But there
were ethnic groups other than Arabs in the province, notably the Greeks of
the Decapolis and others. After a very careful examination in his usual man-
ner, Noldeke concluded that the region of these subscriptions was Arab m
spite of the many Aramaic names of persons and places:
Aus den auf den griechischen Inschriften vorkommenden Eigennamen,
aus den Nachrichten der Araber und noch aus andern Grunden konnen
wir schliessen, dass die Bewohner der von uns besprochenen Gebiete,
wenn wir die Ebene von Damascus (vielleicht diese auch nur theilweise)
ausnehmen, im 6. Jahrhundert und selbst viel friiher schon iiberwiegend ,
in einigen Gegenden wohl ausschliesslich, aus Arabern bestanden . . . .
164 For all these, see BAFIC,
289-301.
165 This is of much importance for those who deal with early Islamic asceticism (zuhd) and
the contacts of the early Muslim ascetics (zuhhiid, plural of ziihid), not only with Christian
monks in general, but more specifically with Arab monks in these regions.
166 l:lamza's list will be fully treated in BASIC II.
Wenn aber auch die Zahl der Ortsnamen, wekhe sicher arabisch sind
oder doch arabisch sein konnen, noch geringer ware, als es wirklich der
Fall ist, so ware das noch kein Beweis gegen die arabische Nationalitat
der Mehrzahl ihrer Bewohner-immer die nachste Umgebung von Da-
mascus abgezogen. Denn die alten Namen haften eben fest und mussten
hier um so fester haften, als bis dahin das Aramaische ohne Un-
terbrechung als Cultursprache den Dialecten der eingewanderten
Nabataer und Jemenenser seine voile Ueberlegenheit bewiesen hatte. 167
The further question arises as to the ethnic background of the inmates of
these monasteries. 168 Although they did not have to come from the region, the
presumption is that many, or at least some of them, did come from it. One is
left in the dark about the devotional language employed in these monasteries.
It is certain that Greek and Syriac were used, but it is not so certain whether
Arabic was. If it was, it must have been in such monasteries as were exclu-
sively Arab, such as "the Monastery of the Ghassanids" or "the Monastery of
the Arabs," since the exclusively ethnic Arab constitution of the monastery
could suggest that. 169 The language of the letters sent by the Monophysite
bishops to Oriens and to Arabia could provide material for the study of the
problem of whether an Arabic version of the profession of faith was available
to the "people of Arabia" 110 to whom the letter on the Tritheistic heresy was
addressed in addition to its being addressed to the clerics of the Provincia.
Noldeke did not address this question in his article. What is more, he
went on to say that in this period "one did not dare to write a pair of words in
Arabic": "Zu einer Zeit, in der die arabische Dichtkunst schon vollig ihre
feste Form gefunden und sich so an den kleinen Hofen der Ghassaniden und
Lachmiden horen liess, wagte man noch kaum , ein paar Worte arabisch zu
schreiben. " 111 Little did he know when he wrote, that some twenty-five years
167 Noldeke, "Topographie, " 442-43.
168 As argued previously, Graeco-Roman, biblical, and Christian names are not evidence
for the non-Arab ethnic background of the monks and priests, since they assumed such names
on ordination . Noldeke could identify only one truly Arabic name in the onomascicon of the
archimandrites of Arabia-Khulayf. That the Arab origin of many of these archimandrites has
been concealed under the cloak of these biblical names is evidenced in the HE of John of
Ephesus, where he speaks of the exploits of "two blessed monks, both Arabs," whose names
were Benjamin and Samuel. Had it not been for the testimony of John of Ephesus, their names
would not have suggested that they were Arabs; see HE, VI.19, p. 239, lines 18-20.
169 For analogies, see "The Languages of the Liturgy in Palestine" in BAFIC, 196-99.
170 That is, not only to the clerics. The Provincia Arabia was mostly Arab ethno-
graphically, and although the "people of Arabia" used Aramaic in their inscriptions , as the
Nabacaean Arabs had done, there is no doubt chat they also knew and spoke Arabic. Undoubt-
edly, the clerics knew AramaidSyriac, and so did many of the inhabitants of the Provincia, but
that all of them did so is an unwarranted presumption . For the "people of Arabia" to whom the
letter of the bishops concerning the Tritheistic controversy was sent, see Documenta, p. 142, line
21: "populo fideli Christum diligenti qui in Arabia habitat ."
171 Noldeke, "Topographie ," 443.
later the region he discussed would yield the most glorious Arabic inscription
of pre-Islamic times, the long Namara inscription, dated as early as A.D. 328,
at the very same place which he had thought presented only some crude Greek
and Latin graffiti and inscriptions. 172
3. Finally, these subscriptions and the two letters related to them repre-
sent the climax in the group of documents that present the Ghassanids, espe-
cially Arethas, in an entirely new light. Historians of this period and of Arab-
Byzantine relations, including Noldeke, projected an image of Arethas as a
federate warrior at the head of his troops fighting the battles of the oriental
limes. This he ceratinly was, but he was much more. These documents reveal
the other facet of his historical personality-protector of Monophysitism and
patron of a vast network of monasteries in the Provincia Arabia. To its history
as a military province in the imperial Diocese of Oriens is now added a new
dimension, that of a province in the Monophysite Patriarchate of Antioch.
Together with the precious passages preserved in the Chronicle of Michael the
Syrian on the subscription of his armies to orthodox Monophysitism, the Do-
cumenta Monophysitarum present him now as the commander-in-chief of a Mono-
physite army, 173 the only Monophysite army within the empire. This close
involvement in the ecclesiastical history of Oriens and the empire provides one
of the keys for understanding the reason why the Ghassanid foederati were so
well integrated into the Byzantine society of Oriens. In addition to living in
territory that had been demographically Arab for centuries, unlike the Roman
Occident on the soil of which appeared the German regna, the Arab foederati
immersed themselves totally not only in the wars of the empire but also in its
theology, the soul of Byzantium, and so emerged as the protectors and patrons
of Monophysite orthodoxy. And it is thus that Arethas makes his exit from
the sources, not as a commander on the battlefield but as a Christian leader
working for the peace of the church.
VI. THE MONASTERY AND THE CHURCH OF THE ARABS
A
In the correspondence among Monophysite ecclesiastics concerning the Tri-
theistic heresy, there occurs the name of a certain John, "the archimandrite of
the monastery of the Arabs." It occurs in the letter addressed by the bishops
in Constantinople to the clerics of Oriens and in their reply to the same
172 For Noldeke on Namara, see ibid., 437. Since the Namara inscription was discovered,
more inscriptions have been found in both Oriens (Bilad al-Sham) and the Arabian Peninsula,
most remarkably at Faw, all of which suggests that the pre-Islamic Arabs were not as illiterate
as scholars had thought .
173 Thus the Ghassanid military camps, their 4iras on the frontiers (the oriental limes),
manned by troops faithfully wedded to the Monophysite confession, became something like the
ribiifs of later Islamic times; on ribii!, see El, III, s.v.
bishops. 174 In both cases, the Syriac for "Arabs" is "fayaye, clearly reflecting the
fact that these were not Rhomaic Arabs but foederati, since "f ayaye was the
usual word used in the Syriac sources for the Ghassanids and the other federate
Arabs. The two attestations of this archimandrite of the monastery of the
Arabs call for some observations and raise some questions relevant to the min-
istry of Theodore.
The geographical location of the monastery is not in Arabia but in Syria
Prima in the north. This is clear from a statement in the reply of the archi-
mandrites who describe themselves as "nosque omnes praefectos coenobiorum
diocesis Antiochiae seu Theopolis. "m Antioch belonged to Syria Prima. The
archimandrites speak of the province of Antioch, although this was not the
correct name. But as clerics, they want to relate themselves not so much to
the secular imperial province but to the great Christian center, Antioch, and
indeed they immediately describe it as Theopolis. The archimandrite of the
monastery of the Arabs is referred to as a presbyter since he is included in the
list of presbyters, Syriac qashishe, to whom the bishops addressed their letter. 176
The attestation of a monastery specifically and explicitly described as a
monastery of the Arabs in the north near Antioch brings to mind the parallel
case of another monastery of the. same description, the monastery of the
Ghassanids in the province of Arabia. Although the Ghassanid monasteries
were singled out from the list of monasteries in the previous section, there was
no guarantee that their inmates were Arabs since it could be argued that they
were simply built, endowed, or patronized by the Ghassanids. 177 Thus the two
monasteries of federate Arabs, one in the Provincia Arabia in the south and
one in Syria Prima in the north, fall within the same category of federate Arab
monasteries. But while the former is specifically called "the monastery of the
Ghassanids," the latter is not so specifically named, and this raises the ques-
174 See Documenta, versio, p. 101, line 24; p. 119, line 8; textus, p. 146, line 61 and p.
170, line 25.
The standard work on the monasteries of northern Syria is still E. Honigmann's article,
"Nordsyrische Kloster in vorarabischer Zeit," Zeitschrift fiir Semitistik 1 (1922), 15-33; this
should be supplemented by the same author's "Historische Topographie von Nordsyrien im
Altertum," ZDPV 47 (1924), 1-64, and E. Littmann, "Zur Topographie der Antiochene und
Apamene," Zeitschrift fiir Semitistik 1 (1922), 163-95 .
Honigmann noted this "monastery of the Arabs" in "Nordsyrische Kloster, " 19, and the
curious survival of the name in its Syriac form in these sources; see also BAFOC, 434 note 83.
17 ~ Documenta, versio, p. 116, lines 30-31 ; textus, p. 167, lines 17-18 . The use of
diocese in the Latin version is inaccurate and leads to confusion with the imperial Diocese of
Oriens. The Syriac has the term "huparchia d'Antiochia," "the province of Antioch," "the
eparchy of Antioch." The Syriac sources use huparchia instead of the regular and normal eparchia
for province. The archimandrites of the letter are those of the province of Syria Prima, within
the Diocese of Oriens.
176 Documenta,
versio, p. 101, line 19; textus, p. 146, line 1.
177 For this list, see above, 825-35.
tion of the federate tribal affiliation of this monastery of the Arabs in Syria
Prima, located far from the center of Ghassiinid power. Syria Prima was the
land of the Taniikhids, the Arab federates of Byzantium in the fourth century,
and they, too, were zealous Christians who had founded monasteries in the
Land of the Two Rivers before they emigrated to Oriens. So, if Taniikhid, its
inmates must have gone over to Monophysitism, since the monastery was
clearly Monophysite in the sixth century, when John was its archimandrite . 178
The attestation of at least two monasteries whose inmates were federate
Arabs and the possibility, even probability, that one of the two, that in Syria
Prima, was not Ghassiinid but possibly Taniikhid, a group that had come over
to Monophysitism only in the sixth century, raises some important questions
pertaining to the ministry of Theodore as bishop of the limitrophe and beyond
in western Arabia. The previous Arab foederati of Byzantium in Oriens, the
Taniikhids and the Sali}:lids of the fourth and fifth centuries respectively, had
been touched by the monastic way of life, and some monasteries have been
attributed to them. 119 These two groups flourished before the rise of Mono-
physitism and before the advent of the Ghassiinids in Ori ens. In 5 30 the
Ghassiinid king Arethas was given extraordinary jurisdiction over almost all
the federates of Oriens, and a decade later, around 540, Theodore was given a
similar jurisdiction over the same Arabs in the same area. Arethas united the
foederati who fought under his command, and the question arises whether or
not Theodore, the Monophysite missionary and bishop, did the same with the
souls of the same federates. The case of the "Monastery of the Arabs" in Syria
Prima suggests that he might have done something in that direction; how
successful he was with the others is impossible to tell.
The Arab monastic establishment for the two centuries before the appear-
ance of the Ghassiinids had not been inconsiderable. There were Arab monas-
tic pockets in the north in Chalcidice, in the south in the Desert of Juda, in
Sinai and in Palaestina Tertia, in the l:Iijiiz, Madyan, WiidI al-Qurii, and the
l:Iismii. 180 The Arab attachment to monasticism was vouched for in Syriac
hagiographic sources. So what did Theodore do with this establishment which
he inherited as the appointed bishop of the limitrophe and the federate Arabs?
The sources again are silent, but it is not rash to conclude that he must have
given it an impetus, especially as he himself had been a monk before he was
called to the episcopate. What exactly he did is not on record, but he must
have encouraged the spread of monasticism, especially as he was also an evan-
gelist with a mandate after his consecration, and he knew that the monastery
was a more effective means of conversion in the Arabian desert than the
178 For the Taniikhids and their Christianity, see BAFOC, 418-35.
179 Ibid., and BAFIC, 289-306 .
180 Ibid.
church. The 137 subscriptions in the letters of the archimandrites of the Pro-
vincia could be evidence for the achievement of Theodore: after a ministry of
three decades, it contains an astounding number of monasteries. While it is
not valid to say that this was the work of Theodore, it would not be invalid to
say that he must have contributed to the spread of monasticism in the prov-
ince over which he was bishop, where his patron and protector was Arethas,
the king of the Ghassanids, with whom some monasteries are definitely associ-
ated.
More important than the preceding are the implications of the monas-
tery's description as the "Monastery of the Arabs." It suggests a strong sense
of identity and community as Arabs on the part of the monks who chose to
live together with their fellow Arabs. These, it should be remembered, were
not Rhomaic Arabs but federate Arabs, allies who had come from the Arabian
Peninsula in fairly recent times. Although some of chem, especially their phy-
larchs, acquired a knowledge of Syriac and Greek, the majority of the federate
Arabs were most probably monolingual, and Arabic was their language for the
affairs of everyday life. If so, the question arises concerning their devotional
language. Did they have a simple Arabic liturgy which they celebrated
through the community of the Arabic language? As has been mentioned ear-
lier, this might have been the case if the example of other ethnic communities
of monks is an indication, communities that belonged to one ethnic group
such as the Armenians in the Desert of Juda. 181
B
What was said of the monastery of the Arabs and its relation to the work
of Theodore as a bishop of the limitrophe may be said of another Christian
structure, namely, Kanisat al-A'rab, "the Church of the Arabs," in Ma'arrat
al-Nu'man in Syria Prima. Ma'arrat al-Nu'man has been previously examined
with the view of ascertaining the tribal affiliation of two Christian structures,
"the Church of the Arabs (al-A 'rab") and "Daye al-Naqira. " 182 The view was
put forward that the town received its name from the Tanukhid king al-
Nu' man. This view can still be supported. But further research in the history
of this locality suggests that it could also have been a Ghassanid town with
Ghassanid associations.
While the Tanukhid al-Nu'man is a shadowy figure, a mere name in a
genealogical tree, the Ghassanid Nu 'man is a large historical figure, well
documented in contemporary Greek and Syriac sources. The name of the lo-
cality, "Ma'arrat al-Nu'man," which is certainly Syriac for "Magharat al-
Nu'man" ("the Cave of Nu'man") may well be related to an episode in the life
181 See BAFIC, 196-99.
182 See BAFOC, 377-78, 434-35.
of Nu'man, when he rebelled against the Byzantines in the 580s and could
very well have taken refuge in a cave that gave its name to the locality.
Furthermore, a previous chapter established some important links between
Nu'man and this locality-the inscription and the medallion of the cameleer. 183
So the Ghassanid association with Ma'arrat al-Nu'man can be based on some
solid ground, but it is also consonant with an earlier Tanukhid association,
since the locality could have had associations with the two federate groups_.
The existence of a "Church of the Arabs" in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man in medi-
eval Islamic times could point only to a pre-Islamic origin going back to the
Tanukhid or Ghassanid era. What is significant is its federate status in pre-
Islamic Oriens and the light it throws on Christianity among the federate
Arabs. Just as Theodore must have attended to the spread of monasticism, so
must he have attended to the building of churches for the federates. As noted
earlier, there is no list of Ghassanid Arab churches as there is for monasteries,
only scattered references in the literary sources and some in epigraphy as in
the J::larran inscription . 184 So reference to this "Church of the Arabs" provides
an example of the many churches that Theodore must have built for the Arab
federates along the limes.
It will be remembered that Theodore was appointed, in the words of his
biographer, John of Ephesus, to the f?ira of the Ghassanids. The laconic state-
ment can be easily understood to mean that he looked after the various mili-
tary camps along the limes where the federate Arab troops were stationed from
the Euphrates to the Gulf of Eilat. So in one important sense Theodore was an
"army chaplain" visiting the military encampments of the Ghassanids , and
naturally building churches for the various sedentarized groups among the
foederati. It must have been such churches that Arethas referred to when he
restored Paul's name in the diptychs in the mid-560s. 18 )
Just as the sources are not explicit on how he organized the churches that
he built, neither are they informative on how he spread or revived the faith in
the limitrophe . The Life of Al)udemmeh , another sixth-century Monophysite
missionary, who also operated among the Arabs in Mesopotamia, sheds light
on how Theodore may have roughly approached the same problem. According
to this Life, Al)udemmeh would appoint to each Arab group a deacon and a
priest, build a church which would carry the name of the chief of the group,
and encourage the Arabs to make endowments for the churches and the mon-
asteries. 186 This is how Theodore must have spread the Christian faith among
183 See BASIC 1.1, 505-9.
184 See ibid., 325-31.
18 ) See above, 802-3 .
186 On AJ:ii.idemmeh see BAFOC, 419-22.
the Arabs of the Outer Shield, 187 in the limitrophe and in 1:fijaz. On the
analogy of what Al)udemmeh had done-and the two were contemporaries-
Theodore would have built churches, each with a deacon and a priest, possibly
bearing the name of the chief of the group, and endowed by them. This
explains the Arab names that attach to such churches and monasteries in the
sources such as Dayr l:fabib and Dayr Sa'd. 188 Perhaps to this list may be
added the "Church of Mungir" which appears in the list of 13 7 subscribers
from the Province of Arabia. Thus an Arab federate hierarchy must have arisen
with the ranks of deacon, priest, and bishop. The sources are not extant on
the hierarchy of such Arab federate churches in Oriens, but one precious docu-
ment has preserved a complete list of the hierarchy of an Arab church else-
where, that of the city of Najran in South Arabia in the sixth century. 189
As the number of churches and monasteries that Theodore built in the
limitrophe, the Outer Shield, and northern 1:fijaz is shrouded in obscurity, so
is the list of clerics he must have ordained . The list of monasteries has some
137 signatures, and those with Ghassanid associations have been singled out.
Perhaps Theodore was responsible for the ordination of the clerics associated
with these monasteries. As has been pointed out earlier, what is strictly a
federate monastery or church is not clear even in the restricted list. Hence
their priests cannot with certainty be related to ordinations by Theodore.
What is more likely to be his are those clerics associated explicitly with the
Arabs and the federates: (1) John, the priest and archimandrite of the monas-
tery of the Arabs in Syria Prima; (2) John, the priest and archimandrite of the
monastery of the Ghassanids in the Provincia Arabia; (3) Eustathius, the priest
of the Church of Mungir; (4) Antiochus, the archimandrite of the monastery
of the Arabs, and/or Antiochus of Arabia, if Antiochus stands for two different
clerics. 190 The onomasticon of these clerics is noteworthy; while the Ghassanid
and Arab phylarchs retained their strictly Arab names, the onomasticon of the
ecclesiastical establishment was exclusively non-Arab and understandably bib-
lical and Graeco-Roman.
VII. ANTIOCH US OF ARABIA
In 567 the archimandrites of Oriens, especially Syria Prima, met at the con-
vent of Mar Bassos in Bitabo, expressed their conformity with Monophysite
orthodoxy against Tritheism, and supported the recently maligned patriarch
of Antioch, Paul. Among the subscribers was a certain Antiochus, who is
187 On the Outer Shield, see BAFlC, 478- 79.
188 See BAFIC, 296-300.
189 For the Najran hierarchy, see Martyn, 64.
190 For Antiochus, see the following section.
described as "the archimandrite of the Monastery of the Arabs." There is no
doubt about his name Antiochus, or his description as an archimandrite of the
monastery of the Arabs, since he is referred to as such in another letter written
by the same archimandrites.
191
Coming at about the same time when the name of John, 192 archimandrite
of the monastery of the Arabs, is attested twice in these Monophysite docu-
ments on the Tritheistic heresy, Antiochus presents a problem. Were there
two monasteries in Syria Prima, both called "the Monastery of the Arabs?" It
is possible but unlikely. One of the two archimandrites, probably John, may
have died or for some reason did not sign again, and Antiochus substituted for
him as the new archimandrite of the monastery of the Arabs. This could be
supported by the fact that in the first letter in which the name of Antiochus
appears, the first subscriber, the archimandrite of the monastery of Mar
Bassos, appears as Mares, while in the second, the archimandrite of the same
monastery appears as Eusebius. 193
The name Antiochus appears again in the Documenta Monophysitarum, this
time in the 5 70s when Paul, the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, travels to
the court of Mun<jir in Arabia during the strife that divided the Monophysite
world into Paulites and Jacobites. At that court assembled a group of bishops
and abbots who presented a petition through the Ghassanid Mungir to a cer-
tain Antiochus, whom the Documenta call Mar Antiochus, for a thorough dis-
cussion of the strife that divided the two distinguished clerics. The reference
to him in the Documenta reads as follows: "ut fiat negocii discussio et examen,
sicut declarat protestatio ab eis data Mar Antiocho per gloriosum patricium
Mundarum. " 194
The identity of this Antiochus, clearly an important personage in the
counsels of the Monophysite church and of Mungir, has exercised the inge-
nuity of Brooks, Gerber, Chabot, and Honigmann.
195 Was he the same as his
namesake, the archimandrite of the monastery of the Arabs in the 560s? He
could have been. His appearance at the court of the A:rab king Mungir is not
decisive for predicating his Arab origin, but it could suggest it. Brooks 196
proposed that he might have been the archimandrite who had that name and
who was the archimandrite of Gabtil, one of the monasteries of the Provincia
Arabia. If so, he could have been an Arab, since Noldeke
197 suggested that this
191 See Documenta, versio, p. 113, line 30; p. 126, line 26; the word for Arab is the usual
one for the non-Rhomaic federate Arabs, 7;' ayiiyi.
192 On John see above, 838.
193 See Documenta, p. 113, line 20; p. 126, line 16.
194 Ibid., p. 185, lines 5-7 .
195 See Honigmann, Eviques, 203 note 2.
196 Ibid.
197 Above, 830.
was a South Arabian name given to the place by a South Arabian group that
had hailed from the Arabian south, where the name is attested.
The name Antiochus appears for the fourth time in a late Syriac source,
in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, in connection with the conference of
Callinicum in 567, convened by the patrician John, the emissary of Justin II.
The words of the historian read as follows in the French version: "Quand le
pacrice Jean arriva, ii reunit Palladius, archimandrite de Mar Bassus, Anti-
ochius d'Arabie, Jean de Qartamin, et d'autres hommes et deres celebres. " 198
It is clear from the passage in Michael that Antiochus was an important
cleric, since he was not simply implied anonymously in the phrase "deres
celebres" but was, together with the other two, singled out by name. So who
was this Antiochus? Is he to be identified with his namesake of the monastery
of the Arabs? ls he to be identified with the Antiochus to whom was handed
the petition at the court of Mungir? Since he appears as an important figure
both at Callinicum and at the court of Mungir, it is tempting to think that
these two names represented one person, and since the reference in Michael
states that his residence was Arabia, Mar Antiochus could have come from
Arabia, possibly from the monastery of Gabtil, close to the court of Mungir.
Thus there may have been two Antiochuses: the archimandrite of the
monastery of the Arabs in Syria Prima and Antiochus of the Provincia Arabia,
who was present both at Callinicum and at the court of Mungir; the former
being definitely Arab, while the latter being possibly so. The two Antiochuses
can be reduced to one, if it turns out that Michael the Syrian did not express
himself carefully when he described his Antiochus as hailing from "Arabia"
instead of saying "of the Arabs," that is, "the Monastery of the Arabs." 199 If
this identification of the two Antiochuses with each other proves correct, then
the archimandrite of "the Monastery of the Arabs," presumably under the
jurisdiction of, and possibly placed there by, Theodore, must have been an
important figure in the affairs of the Monophysite church, appearing at the
conference of Callinicum in connection with the Tritheistic heresy and at the
court of Mungir in order to participate in the negotiations conducted for the
reconciliation of Paul with Jacob.
VIII. ABD KARIB AND THEODORE:
CODEX SYRIACUS DLXXXV' THEOLOGY' BRITISH MUSEUM
The collaboration of Bishop Theodore with Arethas in the service of the
Monophysite church leads to a discussion of his association with another
199 Honigmann (Eveques, 203 note 3) noted the difficulty of identifying the two on the
ground that they belonged to two different provinces. But the difficulty would disappear if
Michael indeed confused "Arabia" with "the Arabs."
Ghassanid figure, Abu Karib, the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia. This
Ghassanid was discussed previously in Part One dealing with political and
military history, but, like Arethas, he also played a role in the ecclesiastical
history of the Arabs in Ori ens in the sixth century . It is therefore necessary to
discuss this role, scant and exiguous as the sources on him are. As he was the
phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, the vast province that comprised both Sinai and
parts of northern }:Iijaz, he must have been associated with Theodore and his
mission as the bishop of the Arabs, since this very area fell within Theodore's
episcopal jurisdiction. Before discussing this association, it is necessary to
dispose of the problem of identifying occurrences in the sources of the name
Abu Karib, which, it will be argued, are all references to one and the same
person, the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia .
A
A previous section in this volume compared the Greek literary account of
Procopius with the epigraphic evidence of the Sabaic Dam inscription . The
resulting conclusion was that the Arab federate phylarch of Palaestina Tertia
mentioned by Procopius, around 530, was a Ghassanid, the brother of the
better-known Arethas. The Sabaic inscription confirmed that he was alive
around 540 and important enough to send an independent envoy to the court
of Abraha in Ma' rib in South Arabia. 200
A new light is shed on this Ghassanid figure by a Syriac manuscript
found together with others in al-Nabk between Damascus and Palmyra and
which W. Wright noticed in his Catalogue. Reference to Abu Karib appears in
a marginal note on a homily that forms part of codex DLXXXV in the section
of the catalogue on theology, the commentary of John Chrysostom on the
Gospel of Matthew. The note, in Wright's words, "informs us that the manu-
script belonged to the monastery of Naf pha of Zagal, near Tadmur or Pal-
myra; and that it was written at the expense of the abbot Simeon and the
brotherhood, in the days of the bishops Jacob and Theodore, when Abu Karib
was king. " 201
Noldeke noted this manuscript and drew on it when writing his mono-
graph on the Ghassanids, thus drawing attention to its relevance to this his-
tory.
202 He rightly disregarded what Caussin de Perceval and Assemani had
written on Abu Karib as utterly inaccurate, which Wright had quoted; he also
corrected "Nafpha" in the text and in Wright's note into Nabk, the village
200 For Abu Karib in the political and diplomatic history of this period, see BASIC
1.1,
124-31.
201 See W. Wright,
Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1871),
part II, p. 468.
202 See Noldeke , GF, 26-27.
that lies between Damascus and Palmyra. But he groped in the dark in his
attempt to identify the Abu Karib mentioned in this marginal note. He could
not identify him with the Abu Karib mentioned by Procopius, since the latter
did not answer to the description of the Abu Karib in the manuscript, and so
Noldeke was forced to identify him either with Arethas himself or with Mun-
gir his son, assuming that either could have been known by the tecnonymic
Abu Karib. This was, of course, a counsel of despair, at the time. There is no
evidence that either Arethas or his son Mungir was called by such a tec-
nonymic. 203 Besides, at the time that this manuscript was written, Mungir
had not yet become king; this is clear from the reference to Theodore in the
marginal note since Theodore died in 570, while Mungir became king only
then, and it is difficult to maintain that the manuscript was written in 570.
The presumption is that it was written before that date; hence Mungir is
excluded as the king referred to by his tecnonymic in the manuscript as Abu
Karib . Noldeke wrote at a time when knowledge of the career of Theodore
was inadequately known, and he was unaware that he died in 570. Hence he
appealed to the death of Jacob in 5 78 as the terminus for dating the manu-
script, 204 and this enabled him to think that Mungir could have been the one
referred to in the marginal note, since by that date Mungir had reigned for
some eight years. The Sabaic inscription referred to above has shed new light
on Abu Karib as an important figure that was still alive in the 540s. So the
reference in the marginal note could only be to him and not to his brother
Arethas. Thus the Sabaic inscription and the death of Theodore in 570 have
both invalidated Noldeke's identifications and have excluded both Arethas and
Mungir from the process of identification . 205
B
The relevance of this marginal note to the ecclesiastical history of the
Ghassanids is considerable, and the following data may be extracted from it.
1. That the manuscript is dated to the time of bishops 206 Jacob and
Theodore is significant. The fact reflects the importance of their episcopate in
the history of the Monophysite church, so much so that it became a chrono-
203 Both, especially the former, were well known by their patronymics, Arethas as "the
son of Jabala" and Mungir as "the son of Arethas." In the Chronicle of Zacharia of Mytilene,
Arethas even appears without his name and is referred to only by his patronymic, in Syriac,
Bar-Jabala; see Zacharia, HE, p. 67, lines 25-27.
204 The death of Theodore ca. 570 should thus be the terminus ante quern for dating the
manuscript, not that of Jacob, which took place some eight years later.
205 E. Glaser, who discovered and published the Sabaic inscription, identified the Abii
Karib of the inscription with that of Procopius and the Syriac manuscript; Aigrain ("Arabie,"
col. 1216) entertained as only possible both Noldeke's and Glaser's identifications.
206 In Syriac, "bi-yomai
qadishe apisqupi shariri," "in the days of the holy and true bishops,
Mar Jacob and Mar Theodore. "
logical era for dating instead of doing so through reference to the reigning
Dyophysite basi/eus or to one of the many eras used in the region, such as the
Era of Bostra, Pompey, or the Seleucids. This invites comparison with the
dating of the establishment of another monastery by the phy/archia of Arethas. 207
Thus two Monophysite monasteries date events in their history through refer-
ence to the Ghassanid phylarch and the Ghassanid bishop respectively. Note-
worthy in the Syriac text is the word shrire, "true," which together with
qadishe describe the two bishops. For the Monophysites, the consecration of
Jacob and Theodore was canonical and they were, unlike the Dyophysite per-
ception of them, truly consecrated bishops. The use of the term perhaps re-
flects that the canonicity of their consecration was of topical interest then . The
striking sentence in the Syriac marginal note, however, is the following: "May
the Lord with their prayers (i.e., Jacob and Theodore) have mercy on the King
Abu Karib and on his believing brothers. And may you, 0 Lord, bring back
the erring among them to the knowledge of truth."
2. Neither Procopius nor the Sabaic inscription gives any inkling as to
the religious persuasion of Abu Karib. But this Syriac note does, as it clearly
reveals him to have been a Christian committed to orthodox Monophysitism,
presumably of the Severan type, 208 and, moreover, unites him with Theodore.
This is the meaning of the term "believing" in the Syriac text. Although it
could be easily inferred from the sources that the Monophysite clergy must
have prayed for the Ghassiinid Arethas and that his name was in the diptychs,
in view of his contributions to the welfare of that church, there is no express
reference to this in the sources. It is, therefore, good to have this invocation
for the Ghassanid phylarch and his brothers expressly stated . The invocation
reflects the place of the Ghassanid royal house in the thoughts and affection of
the Monophysite community. 209
207 See BASIC 1.1, 259-60.
208 Reference to him as king is also noteworthy . Among the federates, his brother Arethas
was the king, par excellence, especially after the extraordinary Basileia that was conferred on
him by Justinian ca. 530. This marginal note provides a new and valuable datum on Abii
Karib, who was known from Procopius as having been made a phylarch of Palaestina Tertia .
However; he was a distinguished phylarch within the Arab federate presence in Oriens, and this
is clear from his sending an ambassador to Abraha in South Arabia, just as his brother Arethas
sent one of his own. Thus he could have been considered a king and referred ro as such by the
Monophysites of the region as well as by his own troops. That the title basileus, granted the
federate chiefs, was graded in Byzantium may be seen from the conferment of a higher-grade
crown to Muncjir by Tiberius in 580; see ibid., 398-406.
209 Incidentally, the marginal note testifies ro the large number of brothers that Abii
Karib had; the plural is used both of those who were "believing" and those who were "in error."
So Jabala must have had an abundant household, and all these brothers must have been phy-
larchs who functioned simultaneously, a fact that may be kept in mind when studying the
genealogical tree of the Ghassii.nids in I:Iamza. Some members may have been brothers rather
than members of the house related to one another lineally.
3. Most interesting is the reference to the two groups of brothers, those
who are "believing" and those "in error. " This reveals a crack in the Ghassanid
dynasty, which usually appears as a monolith. But here there is evidence that
some of the princes or phylarchs must have been lured away from the path of
strict Severan orthodoxy. Were they lured to Dyophysitism, as when
Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, tried to convert Arethas to the Chalcedo-
nian position in the late 5 30s? Or was it to the Phantasiast or to the Tri theis-
tic position within Monophysitism? There is no way of telling. In the 560s
Theodore dealt with Monophysites who went over to the Chalcedonian posi-
tion but later returned to the Monophysite fold. 210 And after the fall of Mun-
gir in the early 580s, one of his brothers who apparently became a Chalcedo-
nian was temporarily installed in his place. 211 So the chances are that what is
involved here is conversion to the Chalcedonian position. This position is
what would have attracted the Ghassanid phylarchs because of their relations
to their overlords who were Chalcedonian.
Noteworthy is the tolerance of the Ghassanids toward those who decided
to go over to other doctrinal persuasions. They did not force them to return.
These apparently felt free to do so if they so wished, and the ecclesiastical
community could only pray for their return to the fold. The relevance of all
this to Theodore and his mission in J:Iijaz should be clear now. The Syriac
manuscript has added a new dimension to the historical personality of Abu
Karib. He emerges as a Christian ruler and an important one, as important in
his jurisdiction as his brother Arethas was in his. The two brothers were in
contact with each other, 212 and it is natural to suppose that Abu Karib emu-
lated the example of his brother in his zeal for the preservation and propaga-
tion of the Christian faith in its Monophysite version. 213
Palaestina Tertia and J:Iijaz were open for Theodore's missionary activity .
J:Ii.jaz was a Byzantine and a Ghassanid sphere of influence, especially after the
Monophysite victory in South Arabia over Yusuf, the Judaizing king of
J:Iimyar. Abu Karib had presented Justinian with Phoinikon, in J:Iijaz, the
date palm oasis, and there were other Azdite pockets 214 in Medina, Mecca, and
Najran amenable to Ghassanid influence. Imperial economic and political
plans for western Arabia coincided with spreading the Christian faith there.
And it is difficult to think that Theodore would have been inactive in this
region during his long episocopate of three decades. If the Ghassanids did
210 See below, 858-59.
211 See BASIC 1.1, 471-75 .
212 Reflected in the scant sources by their dispatch of two ambassadors co the court of
Abraha in South Arabia.
213 On the survival of an echo of chis in the Arabic sources which deal with the propaga-
tion of Christianity in South Arabia earlier in the century, see above, 710-11.
2 14 The Ghassanids belonged co the large tribal group , Azd.
something to propagate the Christian faith in }::lijaz, they would have done it
during this time, which was also its golden period. Before Theodore, the
Ghassanid church was not so well organized, and after him it entered into a
period of eclipse, as the career of his successor, John, will show. m So if The-
odore did missionary work in }::lijaz, it would have been in the first twenty
years of his episcopate before he became involved in the problems of the
Monophysite church within Oriens in the 560s. But what exactly he did in
}::lijaz cannot be stated precisely. He might have developed some Christian
centers that had existed before him, and he may have initiated new ones. It is
tempting to think that Masajid Maryam in }::lijaz,
216 near Mecca, may go back
to his missionary activities. The Monophysite ecclesiastics went out of their
way to emphasize the place of Mary in their theology by always ending their
letters with the invocation of the name Maryam, the Mother of God, as their
intercessor.
IX. THEODORE, THE ARAB BISHOP OF THE LIMITROPHE, CA. 540-570
The name of Theodore is inseparably linked with that of Jacob Baradaeus from
the time both were consecrated around 540 until Theodore's death around
570. But while the sources are abundant and informative on Jacob throughout
his ministry of some forty years (d. 578), they are not so on Theodore; what is
more, they are sporadic and their narrative is intermittent.
217 This may partly
explain why Theodore has found no biographers, unlike Jacob, whose career
has always attracted the attention of ecclesiastical historians in addition to the
fact that Jacob was the more important of the two. 218 But in his own way
Theodore was important both for his role in the Arab sector of Oriens and the
Near East and also for his role in the Monophysite movement. It is therefore
necessary to give some attention to the career of Jacob's colleague, who was
the principal figure in federate Arab ecclesiastical history in the sixth century.
Previous sections in this volume 219 have examined in detail what has sur-
215 See below, 869- 7 5.
216 On chis see BAFIC, 294-95.
217 This is reflected even in the primary source for Theodore, namely, John of Ephesus. In
his Life of James and Theodore, Jacob (James) receives the lion's share, while Theodore is given
shore shrift. Although he muse have given Theodore some attention in the HiJtoria EccleJiaJtica,
in his account of the events of the reign of Justinian, Jacob's mission, not Theodore's, was
John's main concern, and he was of course better informed about the former's mission than the
laccer's, which unfolded in the distant limicrophe and in western Arabia.
218 This is clearly reflected in the Documenta MonophyJitarum,
where he is referred co as
"primus inter episcopos." Although both were consecrated in order chat they might ordain
ocher clergy, yet it was Jacob alone co whom a leccer, sometime in the 540s, was addressed by
Patriarch Anthimus concerning ordinations: see F. Nau, "Litceracure canonique syriaque ine-
dice," ROC, ser. 2, 14 (1909), 123-24.
219 Above, 761-68, 806-8.
vived in the sources on Theodore, his consecration around 540 and his in-
volvement in the Tri theistic heresy. It remains to present as succinctly as
possible a resume of his career in its entirety. This is all the more important
in view of the fact that he is an opaque figure to ecclesiastical historians and
even to specialists on the Monophysite movement to which he belonged . Hon-
igmann was the only scholar to give him some prominence by according him
separate treatment instead of the marginal references to him in general church
histories . But the treatment is utterly cursory and inadequate, coming as it
does from a distinguished scholar but one who had vague conceptions of the
Ghassanids of whom Theodore was bishop. 220 The appearance of an article on
Jacob, the other member of the pair, which gave an excellent evaluation of
him, calls now for the better understanding of the place of his colleague,
Theodore. 221 So this section is a contribution in the same direction, the explo-
ration of the various dimensions of his career. It is hoped that this brief
discussion will be the basis for a more detailed treatment of Theodore by
ecclesiastical historians.
A
Theodore had been a monk in Constantinople before he was consecrated
bishop. It is natural to assume that his monastic training is reflected in the
spread of monasticism in the area of his jurisdiction, in the Byzantine lim-
itrophe, the north Arabian Outer Shield, 222 and western Arabia in l:lijaz. Mon-
asteries certainly existed in this Arab area before the episcopate of Theodore,
but as a former monk he must have contributed to the growth of the monastic
establishment. How many monasteries can be attributed to his initiative is
impossible to tell. 223
Around 540 he was consecrated bishop together with Jacob. As he hailed
from the Provincia Arabia, he was probably a Rhomaic Arab, who spoke
Arabic; hence his assignment to the Arab area over which the Ghassanids
220 Honigmann , Eveques , 163-64 . As a detailed treatment of the career of Theodore has
been undertaken in this volume, there is no need to go through Honigmann's mistakes and
inaccuracies in the two pages he devoted to Theodore. By the time Honigmann wrote his
Eviques, the Syriac Documenta had been translated into Latin by Father Chabot . The frequent
references to Theodore in those documents alone could have inspired Honigmann to have a
more adequate perception of Theodore's place in the ecclesiastical history of the period.
221 See Bundy, "Jacob Baradaeus," 45-86 .
Understandably, I. Engelhardt could write in Mission und Politik in Byzanz (p. 92): "sonst
ist nichts iiber seine Aktivitat in Arabien und Palastina bekannt ." It is hoped that this section
on Theodore, the conclusions of which have only inferential validity, might fill part of the
vacuum in the hisrory of the Monophysite mission in the 6th century.
222 For the Outer Shield, see BAFIC , 478-79 .
223 The difficulty of "precise attributions " and of "chronological pinpointing" that faces
the student of the limes of Chalcis also faces students of the Arab monastic establishment in the
limitrophe and in l:lijaz. On the former, see BAFOC, 468 .
presided within the limes directly and without it indirectly . Specifically this
may be described as comprising the Byzantine limitrophe, roughly from the
Euphrates to the Red Sea, the north Arabian Outer Shield, and l:Iijaz in
western Arabia. Primarily he was the bishop of the federate Ghassanids and
possibly other non-Ghassanid federates within the limes, and thus his episco-
pate fell within the jurisdiction of the Monophysite Patriarchate of Antioch in
Oriens. But his mission as an evangelist must have extended beyond the limes
in north Arabia and l:Iijaz.
Most probably Jabiya, the main seat of the Ghassanids, was his see,
where he normally resided,. but his assignment to the federate Ghassanids
made him a sort of "army chaplain" who would visit the various military
encampments of the Ghassanids along the limes and within the limitrophe.
But this does not make him an itinerant bishop without a fixed see. Jabiya, in
the Golan of Palaestina Secunda, was most probably his see. His association
with Bostra as its bishop in one Vita is controversial. After his consecration he
almost certainly never resided there in the 540s but could have done so later
in his career; at least in the perception of the Monophysite hagiographers, he
was the bishop of Bostra and such was possibly his own self-image. Jacob was
always described as the bishop of Edessa, although he never resided or dared
to reside there. And the two Monophysite patriarchs, Sergius and Paul, never
resided in Antioch. As the Phantasiasts later on consecrated a bishop of their
own and called him the bishop of Bostra, 224 it is not unlikely that the Severan
Monophysites, to whom Theodore belonged , also acted similarly in declaring
Theodore a bishop of Bostra. But as late as 564 in his letter to Paul, the
newly elected patriarch of Antioch, he signs as Theodore, bishop from Oriens.
This is a primary document as well as his own self-description and should
therefore be the safest guide to his jurisdiction. As has been indicated, he was
the bishop of the Arab area, tripartite in its structure; but in an ecclesiastical
document such as this letter addressed to Paul, he emphasizes his affiliation
with the Monophysite church in Byzantium, with the Diocese of Oriens, al-
most coterminous with the Patriarchate of Antioch, of which Paul had just
been elected the incumbent . Hence the appropriateness and validity of this
subscription, which allies him with Oriens.
Much is known about Theodore in the 560s but hardly anything in the
course of the twenty years that preceded them and that followed his consecra-
tion around 540. He surely must have been very active then in view of two
facts: he was ubiquitous in the 560s when he had become old, so he must
224 See R. Draguet , ''L'ordination frauduleuse des Julianistes ," Le Museon 54 (1941), p.
78, line 16. In his French translation of the Syriac document , Syriac B~ra (Bostra) appears
erroneously transliterated as Bassora (ibid., 86), which normally stands for the Muslim city in
Iraq, al-B~ra.
have been at least as active when he was very much younger; his consecration
took place amidst unusual circumstances and great expectations that called for
some activity on his part, related to the determination of the Monophysites to
revive their church and activate its mission after the ranks of their clergy had
been decimated by Chalcedonian persecutions; he and Jacob were consecrated
with a clear mandate. Jacob's activity is known, and he carried out his man-
date. His colleague must have acted similarly, and the silence of the sources
does not argue against his activity in the Arab area. This was the period when
Justinian was trying hard to reconcile the Monophysites and restore the eccle-
siastical unity of the empire, and finally he became one himself, with his
Aphthartodocetism. There is no mention in the sources of any activity that
associates Theodore the Monophysite with Justinian's endeavors, and he cer-
tainly did not attend the Council of Constantinople in 553. The natural pre-
sumption is that Theodore was busy elsewhere, attending to his primary as-
signment in the Arab area. Indeed, his intense involvement in non-Arab
Monophysite matters in the 560s suggests that, after twenty years of minister-
ing to the needs of the Arab area, he had accomplished his life's work and
could pay some attention to the fortunes of the Monophysite church in Byzan-
tium.
In spite of the scantiness of the sources for Theodore's activity in the
Byzantine-Ghassanid limitrophe, there can be no doubt about its reality.
What is not so clear and needs further argumentation is his activity in western
Arabia, especially }::lijaz. This is the region that turned out to be the crucial
one in Arabia for Byzantium in the seventh century, since it was the birth-
place of Islam. m Something has been said on what must have been the mission of
Theodore in }::lijaz in the section on Abu Karib, and it has been argued that the
energetic Ghassanid Monophysite phylarch must have put himself at the disposal
of the Ghassanid church for missionary activity in his sphere of influence, }::lijaz .
This argument needs to be buttressed in this context with others.
His colleague, Julian, was consecrated bishop of Nubia about this time
too (542), and he succeeded in the conversion of a vast tract of the Nile Valley
to Monophysitism. Julian, and later Longinus, the other bishop of Nubia,
were closely associated with their Severan Monophysite colleagues in Oriens,
and their names appear in the Monophysite documents in connection with
such controversies as that of the Tritheistic heresy; Longinus was known per-
sonally to the Ghassanid phylarchs whose military camp he visited.
226 It is
difficult to believe that Theodore failed to do on the eastern littoral of the Red
Sea what Julian and Longinus did on the western.
225 See T. Mommsen's penetrating observation, already referred to by the present writer in
RA, 18 note 2.
226 See below, 882-84.
If this inference on Theodore's activity in }:Iijaz proves valid, then The-
odore would take his place alongside the other apostles of Monophysitism who
in the sixth century were propagating Christianity in various regions in the
Near East, such as John of Ephesus in Anatolia, Jacob in Anatolia and else-
where, A9udemmeh in Mesopotamia, and Julian in Nubia. 227 The missionary
work of Julian is closest to that of Theodore, since it involved the Red Sea
area where Julian, through his conversion of Nubia, was able to close the gap
that existed in the valley of the Nile between Ethiopia and Egypt, already
won to Monophysitism. Likewise, Theodore might have tried to close another
gap on the eastern littoral of the Red Sea, that represented by }:Iijaz which lay
between already Christianized South Arabia and Palaestina Tertia, but the
task was difficult in view of the many well-entrenched Jewish communities in
the various oases of }:Iijaz and the resistance of Mecca to conversion. Since
}:Iijaz became Byzantium's Achilles' heel in the seventh century, the success or
failure of Theodore's mission becomes extremely important. Whatever he
might have done and whatever his success was, the mission and ministry of
Theodore is a link in a chain which represents the strong impetus that Chris-
tianity among the Arabs and in the Arabian Peninsula was receiving in the
sixth century and which invites comparison with the impetus given to Juda-
ism in the fifth, witnessed to by Sozomen. 228 Whether this mission in }:Iijaz
can be related to such military expeditions such as the Ghassanid thrust
against the Jewish oases Tayma' and Khaybar and Abraha's expedition against
Mecca remains to be seen. 229
Equally important is the ministry of Monophysite A9udemmeh, the
metropolitan of Takrit in Persian Mesopotamia. A9udemmeh shared with Ju-
lian the fact that both were consecrated bishops with the express purpose of
spreading the Christian faith in its Monophysite version, and they succeeded
in so doing in their respective areas. But A9udemmeh's career throws more
light on the mission of Theodore in }:Iijaz, because he was consecrated bishop
of the Arabs of Mesopotamia and beyond the limes. Luckily, and unlike The-
odore, he found a biographer who left an account of his mission among the
Arabs, including a detailed account of the churches and monasteries he built
and the deacons and priests he ordained for them. 230 As these details are lack-
ing for the ministry of Theodore, it may be safely assumed that Theodore's
ministry in proselytizing and spreading the faith followed similar lines. More-
227 For Julian, the monk who converted Nubia ca. 541, and for Longinus, consecrated
bishop for the Nubians, John of Ephesus is the main source; see Frend, Rise, 298-301. The-
odore, of course, also takes his place alongside the other bishops of the Arab foederati in the 4th
and 5th centuries; BAFOC, 330-37; BAFIC, 214-18.
228 See BAFIC,
175.
229 For this see BASIC II.
230 On Af:iiidemmeh's mission among the Arabs, see BAFOC, 461.
over, Af:iiidemmeh was consecrated by Jacob Baradaeus, Theodore's colleague,
231
and so a link is established between Theodore and A}:liidemmeh, the two
bishops of the Arabs in Byzantium and Persia. When it is remembered that
A}:liidemmeh's consecration took place in 557/58, that is, after Theodore had
spent almost two decades in his ministry in the Arab area, it is not altogether
inconceivable that Theodore's ministry was the model for Af:iiidemmeh's, and
so the details that the biographer of A}:liidemmeh has included in his Life were
actually in imitation of those that Theodore had employed in the propagation
of Christianity among the Arabs in Oriens. Jacob, Theodore's colleague who
consecrated A}:liidemmeh, could easily have advised him on the propagation of
Christianity among the same people that Theodore had been assigned to in the
past two decades.
Finally, Theodore's mission in J:Iijaz may be supported by appealing to
that of the Nestorians in Persian territory. These had succeeded in spreading
the Christian faith in its Nestorian version in the eastern parts of the Arabian
Peninsula. The Monophysites were their most active rivals, and Monophysite
aggressiveness in missionary activity is reflected in the consecration of
A}:liidemmeh to propagate Monophysitism in northern Mesopotamia in Per-
sian territory, which the Nestorians considered their own backyard and the
sphere of political domination of their protectors, the Persians. But western
Arabia was a sphere of Byzantine influence, and it is inconceivable that the
Monophysites would not have seized the opportunity to spread their version of
Christianity in this region of Arabia, in the context of the struggle for Arabia
between the two rival Christian confessions. The 520s witnessed the fall of the
southern part of western Arabia to Monophysitism, and only J::lijaz, the north-
ern part, remained mostly unconverted. This was Theodore's opportunity,
especially after almost the whole of the Red Sea area had been won over by
Monophysite missionaries, Theodore's contemporaries.
Theodore's mission must have been difficult and was probabfy not
crowned with success. No doubt it struck the hard core of Jewish resistance in
the oases of J::lijaz, inhabited by Israelite communities, well established proba-
bly since the sixth century B.C., while further south it must have struck
another pocket of hard resistance in Mecca, where Arab Ishmaelism and
Abrahamism had also been established. 232 Christianity could only leave faint
traces of itself in Jewish Medina and Arab Mecca. 233 The monastery, therefore,
231 On this see F. Nau, PO 3 (Paris, 1909), p. 20 note 3.
232 On the Ishmaelism and Abrahamism of the Arabs, see BAFIC, 332-49.
233 On Medina see BASIC II; on Mecca see BAFIC, 390-92. The puzzle presented by
what Cheikho called Mawqif al-N~rani in Mecca (ibid., 391 note 2) is no longer a puzzle. This
is really Mawqif al-N~ara, a station on the Muslim pilgrimage route from 'Arafat to Mina, also
called Wadi al-MuJ:iassir; and so it is not a place in Mecca as suggested by Cheikho. It will be
discussed in BASIC II.
rather than the church, represented Christianity in J::lijaz and in areas outside
Mecca and the Jewish oases, especially Medina. 234
Conclusions on what Theodore did in these twenty years in J::lijaz must
remain speculative and their validity inferential. They constitute no real evi-
dence for what he actually did in J::lijaz but can only suggest it. Confirmation
of these conclusions can come only from archaeology, and the case of Nubia is
illuminating . The few references in the sources of this period to the propaga-
tion of Christianity among the Nubians has been confirmed by archaeology, 235
and archaeological research in the Arab area of the ministry of Theodore may
produce similar results.
However, even before archaeology can produce the desired evidence for
Theodore's mission, there are scattered in the extant literary sources a few
references that might reflect traces of his mission. A bishop with a mandate
such as Theodore's would have been active in building churches and monas-
teries and in ordaining priests and deacons. These may be detected in the
sources as follows.
The Arabic sources are informative on Arab monasteries, such as those in
Madyan, Wadi al-Qura, near Medina, in J::lijaz, and in Palaestina Tertia,
Arabia, and Chakidice in the limitrophe. The Syriac sources, notably the list
of subscriptions in the letter of the archimandrites of the Provincia Arabia on
the Tritheistic heresy, analyzed earlier in detail, 236 with its vast number of
monasteries in the Provincia and in some adjacent regions in Phoenicia and
Palaestina Secunda, are the most eloquent testimony for what must have been
at least partly the initiative of Theodore in promoting monasticism in the
Ghassanid province par excellence, Arabia.
Churches are harder to enumerate since no list has survived comparable
to that for the monasteries. Yet traces of Ghassanid Monophysite churches are
traceable in the sources, while reference to specific church building during his
ministry may be referred to in one of the subscriptions of the archimandrites
of Arabia, that of Eustathius, who described himself as the priest of the
church of Mungir . This is dated circa 570, and the church must have been
built before then, and so falls within the time span of Theodore's ministry. 237
Jacob ordained a vast number of Monophysite clergy in his area, and,
while Theodore could not have come even within measurable distance of the
number of those that Jacob ordained, he did ordain some clergy. These were
234 On the monastery of the Mujrimiin, Daye al-Mujrimin in Medina, see BASIC II.
235 For the work of the Polish archaeological mission in Nubia, see the bibliography for
chapter 8 in Frend, Rise, 390-91.
236 See above, 824-38 .
237 That federate churches were built not only at the initiative of Theodore is clearly
reflected in the }::larran inscription, which commemorates the building of a marlyrion by a
phylarch, Shar~il; see above, 701.
most probably the archimandrites of the Arab or Ghassanid monasteries men-
tioned in the subscriptions of the monasteries in the Provincia Arabia, possi-
bly those of the monasteries of the Arabs in Syria Prima, and the Antiochuses
mentioned for the Provincia. Thus after twenty years of active service, it is
possible to say that there arose an organized Arab church with a hierarchy of
its own composed of the ranking bishop Theodore, and with priests and dea-
cons under him in the various churches and monasteries in the limitrophe. 238
No Notitia Ghassanica or Arabica has survived for the limitrophe to inform the
student of this problem and this period on the Arab church of the limitrophe
in the sixth century. But a church of this description did exist, organized and
administered by Theodore for some thirty years, apparently from his see at
Jabiya, which thus now emerges not only as the main military headquarters of
the Ghassanid federate phylarch but also as the see of the bishop of the Arab
federates in Oriens.
The missionary saga of the Monophysite church in the sixth century is
well known. That church was making conquests in many directions of the
Near East such as the valley of the Nile and I:Iimyarite South Arabia. Not so
well known is that Arab sector in Oriens and in l:Iijaz, and it is likely to
remain so unless and until archaeological research has performed its task. In
the meantime, it is hoped that this discussion and the previous ones involving
Theodore have thrown some light on the obscurity that shrouds what might
be termed the "unknown mission" of Theodore in Arabia.
B
The preceding section has treated Theodore's mission to the Arabs, and
it remains now to discuss his activity in the non-Arab sector in Oriens, within
the Monophysite church in Byzantium. The sources begin to be abundant and
informative on Theodore in the 560s, unlike their silence on him in the pre-
ceding fifteen years. Theodore appears as an active member of the Mono-
physite church in Oriens and in the capital and takes part in important issues
that concerned that church and also divided it. His role may be summarized
as follows.
The Patriarchate of Antioch had been vacant and had no Monophysite
incumbent since the deposition of Severus in 518 and no incumbent extra
muros since his death in 538. Some twenty years after his death, Theodosius
attended to this problem and succeeded in having two Monophysites conse-
crated as the Monophysite patriarchs of Antioch, Sergius in the late 550s and
Paul in the early 560s.
Theodore's involvement in the patriarchate of Paul is documented. Al-
238 The sources have preserved a list of only one Arab church with its complete hierarchy,
that of Najran; see Martyn, 64.
though he was absent from Constantinople when the initial moves were begun
for the consecration of Paul, his phylarch, Arethas, with whom he was in
contact, was in the capital and was involved, while he himself wrote Paul a
letter of support after the latter's consecration, which has been preserved.
Arethas' letter to Jacob Baradaeus concerning Paul has also been preserved. So
the bishop and his king were both involved in Paul's patriarchate over Anti-
och. As far as the previous patriarchate of Sergius over Antioch is concerned,
little is known about it. The extant sources do not mention king or bishop,
but in view of the record of both in the patriarchate of Paul some three years
after the death of Sergius, it is natural to assume that they must have been
involved in that one as well.
More important and more indicative of the place of Theodore in the fortunes
of the Monophysite church was his active role in dealing with the divisive move-
ments that had rocked the Monophysite church, the orthodox Severan Mono-
physite church in the Orient, which comprised the Tritheists, the Phantasiasts,
and the Secessionists who went over to the Chalcedonian position.
The best documented of all these divisive movements , as far as The-
odore's involvement in it, is the Tritheistic movement . He participated in all
the various phases of attempts to deal with it, both the Monophysite and the
imperial, in Constantinople and in Callinicum. The imperial government col-
laborated with Severan Monophysitism in fighting Tritheism partly for taking
a united stand with Monophysitism in the hope that this would lead to final
reconciliation between the Dyophysite and the Monophysite churches and thus
unite the empire doctrinally. In this aspect of the problem, Theodore had for
the first and last time, perhaps, had the edge over Jacob Baradaeus in impor-
tance, since the imperial government of Justin II realized that behind The-
odore lay the power of the redoubtable Ghassanid phylarch; hence the friendly
gestures of Justin II in courting Theodore and the latter's arrival in Constan-
tinople without Jacob, where he was royally received by Justin. And it was
also he who conducted the negotiations in the final stage of the controversy
and actually excommunicated Conon.
Not well documented is his role in fighting the dangerous Phantasiast
heresy, which had plagued Monophysitism since the days of Severus himself,
and which received considerable impetus and support and indeed a new lease
on life when the autokrator himself, Justinian , adopted it and tried to impose
it on the church but died before he could exercise the last act of his Cae-
saropapism. As these Phantasiasts penetrated the provinces and were in evi-
dence in the Arab area, 239 and even went so far as to consecrate a bishop for
Bostra itself, his see (according to one Vita) , Theodore must have dealt with
this issue too, but the extant sources are again silent .
239 On chis see above, Appendix, 775-77 .
The Monophysite church had to deal with members of its own commu-
nion who defected to the Chalcedonian position, and this concerned Theodore
intimately, since even members of the Ghassanid royal house were lured to
that doctrinal position, and in the 570s even Theodore's own successor, John,
the bishop of the federate Arabs, was won over, however temporarily, to the
Chalcedonian fold. 240 The sources are not so silent on this, and there is an echo
of Theodore's treatment of this affair. 241
It is not entirely clear whether Theodore's zeal for his doctrinal confes-
sion also led him to attempt to convert Arab foederati who were non-Mono-
physites, such as the Tanukhids and the Salif:iids. These, at least the Salif:iids,
were certainly Chalcedonians. If the case of the monastery of Dayr Dawud is
an indication, chances are that Theodore did make efforts to convert federate
Chalcedonians. That monastery, built for the Salif:iid king Dawud in the fifth
century, appears in the sixth century as a Monophysite monastery. 242 The strife
recorded by Cyril of Scythopolis between Arethas the Ghassanid and another
phylarch in Palestine, al-Aswad, could suggest that in the 540s Theodore
tried to convert the Chalcedonian phylarch and that Arethas was lending him
a hand in that effort. 243
C
After the final excommunication of the Tritheists, Eugenius and Conon,
the sources fall silent on Theodore, and an express statement in Michael the
Syrian 244 refers to his death in the fifth year of Justin H's reign, that is, 570.
At almost the same time died his protector, the Ghassanid Arethas, and so
570 truly represents the end of an era in Arab-Byzantine relations not only
because of the almost simultaneous death of the two who for the last thirty
years had presided over the imperium and the ecclesia of the federate Arabs but
also in view of the deterioration in these relations, which ended with the
disastrous confrontation around 580.
That the two were united in the consciousness of the medieval Syriac
writers is reflected in Pseudo-Dionysius, who referred to them in one passage:
Et a nouveau quels etaient les patriarches qui s'illustrerent en ce temps?
A Antioche etait celebre Ephraim, fils d'Aphinus, d'Amida; d'Alex-
andrie, le patriarche Zoile; de Rome, Agapet; de Constantinople, Menas;
de Jerusalem, Macaire. Des orthodoxes et persecutes, ceux-ci: Theodose,
240 See below, 869- 7 5.
241 On this see Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 264.
242 See BAFIC, 297-98.
243 See BASIC I. 1, 251-55.
244 See Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 300; for Honigmann's questioning of chis firm
date, see his Eveques, 164. Whether Theodore had something to do with the election of his
successor, John, as bishop of the federate Arabs is not clear.
patriarche d'Alexandrie; Serge, patriarche d'Antioche; de Constantinople, le
patriarche Anthime; Theosebius d'Ephese; Thomas de Damas; Jacques d'Edesse,
du monastere de Pesilta, et Theodore de la frontiere de Na'aman. 245
Quant aux souverains, s'etaient illustres ceux-ci: Chosroes, roi des
Perses; Justinien, empereur des Romains; Arethas, fils de Gabala, roi des
Arabes et chretien; Abraham, roi des Himyarites et fidele; Andoug, ro1
des Cousites et chretien . 246
Theodore was the most important Arab federate cleric of the sixth century,
dwarfing those who came before and after him among the federate bishops. With
his consecration as bishop of the Ghassanid limitrophe, the Arab federate church
became organized and emerged with its hierarchy, monasteries, and churches.
With Theodore, the Ghassanid phylarchate/kingdom received its complementary
facet, and emerged as a truly Christian Basileia. For thirty years bishop and
phylarch worked hand in hand for the spiritual welfare of its federates.
In addition to the Arab profile of his ministry, there was the non-Arab,
when he collaborated with his senior partner, Jacob Baradaeus, in caring for
the Monophysite church and its status within Byzantium. The pair stole the
show from the Monophysite patriarchs of Antioch, Sergius and Paul, and
became the ranking hierarchs. In so doing, the Ghassanid phylarchate
achieved yet another degree of integration into the Byzantine system, as the
federates became part and parcel of the Byzantine ecclesia just as their phy-
larchate had made them an integral part of the Byzantine imperium.
Thus Theodore takes his rightful place among other Arab ecclesiastics,
Moses and Aspebetos of the fourth and fifth centuries respectively. Earlier in
the century, another Arab from the Provincia, Elias, had occupied the see of
Jerusalem and was its Dyophysite patriarch. Theodore, of the same century,
was his Arab counterpart in the Monophysite church and foreshadows George,
the well-known bishop of the Arabs in Islamic times.
B
I. INTRODUCTION : THE ACCESSION OF MUNI_?IR, 569
If Justin II's reign opened the era of the successors of Justinian in Byzantine
history, the accession of Mungir in 569 ushers in the era of the successors of
245 Author and translator have committed inaccuracies. Theodore was bishop not of "l_tirta
de Na'man" but "l_tirca d'l;larith/Arethas ." For the Syriac version see Chronicon Anonymum,
texcus, ed. J. B. Chabot (Louvain, 1933), vol. II, p. llO , lines 9-10. The translation of f?irta
as frontiere is inaccurate; it should be translated the "camp." For the Roman frontier , Syriac
writers often use limiton.
246 Chronicon A;onymum, trans. R. Hespe!, CSCO 507, Scriptores Syri (Louvain, 1949),
vol. II, pp. 82-83.
Arethas, a new one in the history of Arab-Byzantine relations. The preceding
quadrennium had witnessed harmonious Arab-Byzantine relations since Arethas
was still alive and Justin II was courting the Monophysites. Now the situation
dramatically changed. The old phylarch, who had been a stabilizing force in
Arab-Byzantine relations, died and in his stead came a younger, more forceful
successor who also had as his overlord a younger successor-and an unstable
one at that. The clash of personalities at the highest level was thus inevitable,
and the result was a period of hardships for Monophysitism and a collision
course for Arab-Byzantine relations. In spite of short spells of harmony and
reconciliation, the incredible finally happened when, in 582, Mungir was
arrested and exiled, an event that changed the course of Arab-Byzantine rela-
tions. The reign of Mungir is thus the crucial reign for these relations, and
consequently every aspect of it deserves close attention in order to understand
what led to the extraordinary events of 582.
Justin again tried to reconcile the Monophysites in 5 71 when he issued his
second edict, appropriately called the Second Henotikon. Its sincere and genuine
attempt to reconcile the Monophysites attracted no less a figure than John of
Ephesus himself, but it finally failed to reconcile and unite the two churches. The
strongly Chakedonian and anti-Monophysite patriarch of Constantinople, John
,Scholasticus, exercised great influence on Justin, who began a new persecution of
the Monophysites, called the Second Persecution, in both the capital and the
provinces, which continued throughout his reign. 24 7 In addition to the troubles
the Monophysite church had to go through at the hands of a hostile Dyophysite
imperium and ecclesia, that church also experienced dissensions within its own ranks
which almost rent it apart. There was first the defection of its own patriarch,
Paul, to the Chalcedonian position, which left the church without its consecrated
hierarch for some time. Then there was the regional strife between Monophysite
Egypt and Monophysite Oriens, subsequent to Paul's visit to Alexandria in 575
and the question of the consecration of Theodore as the new Monophysite patri-
arch of Alexandria. Finally, there was the unholy strife that erupted for the last
three years of the reign of Justin within the Monophysite camp, when it was
sharply divided between the supporters of Patriarch Paul and those of Bishop
Jacob-the Paulites and the Jacobites.
It was this situation that Mungir inherited immediately as he acceded to
the Ghassanid Basileia in 569. He was now the secular protector of the Mo-
nophysite church, a role he inherited from his father. As his successor in the
Basileia, he was also the continuator of his ecclesiastical policies in his com-
mitment to Monophysitism. Nothing illustrates this better than the two let-
ters248 involving the Provincia Arabia in the Documenta Monophysitarum, the one
247 See Frend, RiJe, 321-23 .
248
On the two letters, see above, 814-24 .
addressed to it and the one addressed from it. The first presents Arethas as its
protector; the second is silent on Arethas, who in the meantime had died, but
presents Mungir, the new Ghassanid king, as the new fidei defensor of Mo-
nophysitism, a role that finally proved to be his undoing.
Even more than his father, he dominated ecclesiastical affairs in these
years. During the reign of Arethas, it was Theodore, the bishop of the
Ghassanid limitrophe, that shared the limelight with Jacob Baradaeus in ec-
clesiastical matters while Arethas watched from afar and moved quickly when
he was needed. This was not the case now. Theodore had died in 570, in the
first year of Mungir's reign, and his death had left a vacuum that was not
filled by anyone around him. The patriarch Paul was discredited as he caved
in to Chalcedonian advances; and so did Mungir's own bishop, John, the
incumbent of the Ghassanid episcopate. As for the holy man, Jacob, he was
getting very old after thirty years of strenuous struggle in behalf of Mo-
nophysitism, and it was rumored that he was also getting senile.
Such then was the ecclesiastical scene and such was the Ghassanid king
on whose shoulders fell the task of protecting the persecuted Monophysite
church in the last nine years of Justin's reign. The following sections will treat
in detail the course of events in these final years of the reign.
II. MUNQIR: GLORIOSUS, CHRISTOPH/LOS, PATRIC/US
The reign of Mungir opens not with a military engagement but with an
ecclesiastical conference which thus sets the tone for the reign that was to be
heavily involved in ecclesiastical as well as military encounters, a twofold
involvement that Mungir inherited from his father. His name appears for the
first time in Syriac sources in the letter of the archimandrites of Arabia, writ-
ten around 570, in which they gave their approval of the condemnation of the
heresy of Tritheism.
249 Mungir's name explicitly appears in one of the signa-
tures: "Sergius, priest and abbot of the monastery of 'Oqabta, I have signed
through the hand of the priest, Mar Eustathius, my prior, who is the priest of
the church of the glorious, Christ-loving and patrician, Mungir."
This subscription, together with the others, has been analyzed in a pre-
vious section. 250 That discussion centered on the clerics, Sergius and Eu-
stathius, and the toponym. 251 Also discussed there was the question of whether
the reference to Mungir implies that his father, Arethas, had died by 570 and
that he was now the reigning Ghassanid phylarch and king. This is the most
plausible conclusion, and Noldeke was of this view. He also concluded that
249 For the letter, see above, 821-23.
250 See the section on the subscriptions, above, 831.
251 Ibid.
the conference of the archimandrites was held under Mungir's patronage, m
which is also perfectly possible. Whatever the truth may turn out to be,
Mungir cuts a large figure in the letter as a Christian ruler, with an exclu-
sively Byzantine and Christian titulature, "glorious, Christ-loving, patrician,"
with whom a church is associated ("the Church of Mungir"), and with a priest
assigned to it by the name of Mar Eustathius, who, as Noldeke observed, may
be considered a court chaplain. m
In order to test these hypotheses on Mungir and extract some data on his
involvement in ecclesiastical affairs, it is necessary to analyze the Ghassanid
profile of the subscription. This is the earliest attestation of Mungir in the\
primary Syriac sources, and it most probably reflects the fact that he is now no
longer only the crown prince but the reigning king of the Ghassanids. Al-
though it has been argued that the silence of the signatures on Arethas is not
necessarily evidence that he had died, still the chances are that he did, espe-
cially as his son is referred to as patricius. The term !kbi~a (gloriosuslglori-
osissimus) is not decisive since it is also applied to the Ghassanid princes, but
patricius most probably is, and its application to Mungir suggests that he was
by this time king and that Arethas had died. This first attestation also indi-
cates the deep involvement of the Ghassanids in Christianity and especially
Monophysitism. This, then, is his image as soon as his reign begins, not on
the battlefield but in a conference of archimandrites, who wrote a letter con-
cerning Monophysite orthodoxy. His titles, which reflect this, are not the
Arabic ones that ally him to the pagan world of pre-Islamic Arabia but to the
Christian Roman Empire.
This subscription thus reflects the strong Ghassanid presence in Mo-
nophysite Arabia. The vast number of signatures are all ecclesiastics; Mungir
is the only non-cleric mentioned in them. The Ghassanid presence is reflected
powerfully, though indirectly, in the localities with which they are associated
in the list, but this subscription reflects it directly by mentioning Mungir,
just as his father's presence is reflected in the two subscriptions that involve
"the Mountain of Arethas/I:Iarith," Mount Arethas.
The church itself, "the Church of Mungir," raises a number of questions.
Did he build it, endow it, or pray in it? The chances are that he built it or
endowed it, as he was to endow churches later in his life. If so, he must have
done this while he was still a crown prince, which suggests that his involve-
ment in Christianity did not begin at his accession but started earlier. Note-
worthy is the fact that its location is not given, while those of other monas-
teries in the list are. The conclusion may be drawn that it is so close to
252 Noldeke, GF, 23-24 .
253 Ibid., 24.
'Oqabta, where the monastery lay, that it was unnecessary to repeat it, a
conclusion further supported by the fact that its priest was the prior of the
monastery. It does not make sense to have a second in authority if he lives far
from the monastery. This reference to a church of Mungir is welcome and may
be added to others of the same kind in the literary sources, such as John of
Ephesus. It maysalso be added to the archaeological evidence which associates
him with a house in Hayyat , with a tower in al-Burj, and with a praetorium
outside the walls of Sergiopolis, another confirmation of the essential re-
liability of J::Iamza's list on the Ghassanids as great builders.
Noldeke raised the question of the place where these archimandrites met
and suggested Darayya on the ground that many archimandrites came from
monasteries in and around it. 254 This is possible but does not necessarily fol-
low. One would expect the meeting. to be held at a well-known Ghassanid
center such as Jabiya (Gabitha), the monastery of which was represented. The
reference to the "Church" of Mungir remains striking as it is isolated in the
midst of some 137 signatures of abbots of monasteries, not churches. Thus it
is possible that the meeting was held in the "Church of Mungir" and that this
Ghassanid presence is reflected indirectly by the signature of its priest Eu-
stathius who did not forget to mention his Ghassanid affiliation as the priest
of Mungir's church. Arethas, as has been suggested, was most probably dead
when the letter of the abbots was written, but his son and successor was alive
and very much so. This reference to him and also the implied reference to him
at the end of the letter itself could suggest that Mungir was not absent from
the meeting, although he apparently did not preside over it, since it may have
been uncanonical to preside over a meeting of archimandrites . Mungir must
have been in the area at the time, rather than at the frontier; with the recent
death of his father, he had probably hurried back to the Golan, where Jabiya
was located, to be recognized and hailed as king by his people.
In addition to this explicit reference to Mungir in the letter of the archi-
mandrites, there is an implicit reference to the Ghassanid dynast or dynasts-
to Arethas or Mungir or both of them-at the end of the letter where the
abbots express hopes for the union of the churches and remember the efforts of
"sei;enos et triumphatores imperatores nostros." This phrase was analyzed in a
previous section, 255 and it was concluded that both father and son are implied
in it, in addition to Justin II. Thus the letter projects an image of the
Ghassanid Mungir explicitly and implicitly, the image of a ruler concerned for
the welfare of his church in which he appears as a secular figure, shepherding
its fortunes. His father had presided over the last conference in Constantinople
that condemned the Tritheists, and apparently his son, now king, participates
254 Niildeke, "Topographie," 427.
255 Above, 822-24 .
in the Arabian conference of archimandrites that supported the condemnation
of the Tritheists. The son inherits the father's role as fidei defensor of the
Monophysite church, and, as the father strove throughout his reign in support
of that church, so did his son. But while the father was able to elude the
intrigues of Dyophysite ill-wishers and died full of years and honors, the son,
after only one decade or so, was entrapped mostly by Dyophysite intrigues
which brought about his downfall.
III. THE APOSTASY OF PATRIARCH PAUL, 571-575
Hardly had the Monophysite church disposed of the Tritheistic heresy with
the final condemnation of its two proponents in 570, when it was convulsed
again the following year by the apostasy to the Chakedonian position of none
other than the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, Paul. His apostasy pre-
sented the Monophysite church with an internal problem and with an external
one relating to Dyophysitism and the Byzantine state in Constantinople. The
Ghassanid dynast Murnjir was heavily involved in both aspects. This section is
thus devoted to the period during which Paul went over to the Chakedonian
position, recanted, fled to the court of Mungir, addressed a libel/us of repen-
tance to the Eastern Synod in 574, went to Egypt in the same year, and was
finally accepted back conditionally into the Monophysite fold in 575.
The various phases of this extraordinary drama and the role of Mungir in
it may be presented as follows. 256
1. When Justin II issued his second edict 257 in 5 71, Paul was still in
Constantinople after his participation in the preceding year in the conference
with the Tritheists . Like John of Ephesus, he decided to communicate with
the Chakedonians as a result of the second edict, which was favorable to Mo-
nophysite sentiment. Paul is usually portrayed as a weak and vacillating
cleric, but it is just possible that he really felt that the edict satisfied all
Monophysite hopes and aspirations and that accepting it would mean the
union of the churches and the end of the disastrous schism. As he had been
anathematized by Justin II in the 560s for his role in the election of the
Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, it is also possible that he thought that
accepting the edict would end his estrangement from the imperial govern-
256 The fundamental article on the career of Paul in the 570s is that of E. W. Brooks, who
used the Documenta Monophysitarum for reconstructing it, thus making obsolete previous schol-
arship on Paul; see his "The Patriarch Paul of Antioch and the Alexandrine Schism of 575," BZ
30 0930), 468- 76. But Brooks' conceptions of the Ghassiinids and their role in this episode
were vague. Arethas to him was a shaikh called Al-1:liirith (ibid., 469) and Mungir was the
successor of that shaikh (ibid., 471). Honigmann's conception of the Ghassanids was equally
vague.
257 For which, see Fliche and Martin, Histoire de /'Eglise, IV, 487, where it is called "le
second Henotique ."
ment. As mentioned earlier, some of the princes of the Ghassanid dynasty
were won over to the Chalcedonian position, 2 ) 8 possibly because they thought
that communion with the Chalcedonians would eliminate tension between the
dynasty and the central government.
2. Paul, however, recanted, possibly because his hopes that Chakedon
would be denounced were dashed to the ground. He was incarcerated for nine
months and was able to escape from his prison and seek refuge with Mungir.
His flight may be assigned to 5 72. The primary source for this episode is John
of Ephesus, who unfortunately expatiated on such trivia as the condign pun-
ishment with which John Scholasticus, the Dyophysite patriarch of Constan-
tinople (565-577), was visited as a result of his Chakedonian "wickedness."
At the same time the ecclesiastical writer exasperatingly dismissed the escape of
Paul in a few lines, saying that he finally escaped from his prison, went down and
lay hidden in the region of Arabia with the privity of the house of Mungir, son of
}::larith, until the time of the terrible chastisement: "Et deinde postea exiit et
discessit et in regione Arabiae delatuit, consciis viris aulae Mondir filii Harith,
usque ad tempus supradictae castigationis terribilis. " 2 ) 9 This brief sentence calls
for close examination since it is the only passage in John of Ephesus that has
survived on the role of the Ghassanid dynast in the episode.
The principal phrase that involves the Ghassanids is "b'yida'thon d'Beth
Mongir bar }::larith," "with the privity of the house of Mungir, son of }::larith."
Thus Payne-Smith understood that Paul's escape was effected with "the privity
of" the Ghassanids. 260 This is only remotely possible: the Ghassanids had their
connections in Constantinople and could have contributed to Paul's escape,
but this is unlikely , especially as the language of John of Ephesus does not
suggest this interpretation. Chabot did better when he translated "delituit,
consciis viris aulae Mondir," thus connecting the privity of the Ghassanids
with Paul's taking refuge with them. The law of proximity suggests this,
since the Syriac "estatar" ("lay hid or took refuge") precedes "b'yida'thon
d'Beth Mondir" ("with the privity of the house of Mondir") . Furthermore, on
semantic grounds, b'yida'thon, "with the privity or knowledge," goes better
with "he lay hid" than with nfaq, "he escaped. " 261
The term Arabia in this passage cannot refer to the Provincia Arabia.
258 See above, 849 .
259 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 48, lines 1-4 ; textus, p. 67, lines 8-11.
260 See R. Payne Smith, The Third Part of the Ecc/e.riastica/
History of John, Bishop of Ephe.rus
(Oxford, 1960), 89, where he translates the phrase as "he escaped with the privity of the
household of Mondir, son of Hareth ."
261 And the whole sentence contrasts with the preceding one where John of Ephesus says
that Paul was hidden in a closet fixed in a wall for nine months in Constantinople before he
escaped; then he hid without the authorities' knowledge of where he was, unlike the
Ghassanids, who knew of his being with them: "is autem intra urbem, ut dicunt, celatus erat in
armario parieti infixo novem menses"; HE, p. 47, line 34-p. 48, line 1.
This is clear from the fact that the term eparchia,
262 used by Syriac writers to
refer to the Provincia Arabia when Arabia is mentioned, is not used in this
context but only the general term, the "country" or "region" (Syriac athra).
Thus Arabia here must mean the Arabian Peninsula, whither Mungir fled or
retired when he left the service of Byzantium in 572.
The phrase on the Ghassanids in Syriac reads "by1da.th6n d'Beth Mongir
bar I:Iarith." Chabot translates "consciis viris aulae Mondir filii Harith" or
"Mundie et sociis eius," 263 both inaccurate. The crucial Syriac word is Beth,
which here means the "royal house" of Mungir or the Ghassanids. Terms such
as socii and au/a are alien to the text. Beth is used by Syriac writers and applied
to such Arab groups in the sense of royal house. 264 In John of Ephesus, the
Ghassiinid dynasty appears closely united round its king with a very strong
sense of family ties; so here "Beth Mongir" means his brothers and sons, as it
is used later on, 26 ' and both are attested in the sources, since Mungir did have
brothers and sons.
Not so clear is the last phrase in the passage which speaks of Paul's
hiding until the time of the terrible punishment that was mentioned before,
"usque ad tempus supradictae castigationis terribilis." Payne Smith under-
stood this to be a reference to the illness that befell his enemy, the Chalcedo-
nian patriarch, John Scholasticus, and so he paraphrased the sentence freely as
"until the time when the terrible retribution of Heaven fell upon the Patriarch
John . " 266 There is something to be said for this interpretation. John Scholas-
ticus had been the villain of the whole episode as far as John of Ephesus was
concerned; he describes the illness to which he succumbed and uses the same
word, mardiita, in the two passages; and the passage on John's illness does
indeed precede this one on Paul. 267 Yet it is difficult to relate the illness to the
period during which Paul stayed as a refugee and fugitive at the court of the
Ghassiinids. John died in August 577, while Paul left Mungir's court for
Egypt in 574. This implies that John lay ill for some three years! In any case,
the phrase, whatever it refers to, is not helpful for establishing the duration of
Paul's stay with the Ghassanids, which is known to have taken place from 572
to 574 when he left the Ghassanid court for Egypt. 268
3. Paul's decision to flee back to Oriens and seek refuge with the
262 On the substandard huparchia, see above, 824 note 115.
263 As in the footnote; see HE, p. 48 note 1.
264 See the present writer in "Ghassan and Byzantium : A New terminus a quo," Der Islam
33 (1958), 254-55 .
265 See, for instance, HE, p. 162, lines 15-16.
266 Payne Smith, Ecclesiastical History, 89.
267 For the passage on the illness of John Scholasticus, see HE, Book I, chap. 38, while
this passage on Paul appears later in Book II, chap. 8. For =rdiita in the two passages, see HE,
textus, p. 48, line 1 and p. 67, line 11.
268 See Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 471.
Ghassanid king suggests the following observations. Paul had sought and
found refuge at the court of Mungir's father, Arethas, in the ~ate 560s, and he
correctly assumed that the son would follow his father's example in granting
him asylum. Moreover, Arechas had been instrumental in his own election co
the Patriarchate of Antioch in 564, and so the dynasty was solidly behind
him. It should be remembered chat 572 was the year in which Mungir fell out
with the central government, after Justin II treacherously wanted co arrest
him. For three years, until 575, Mungir was outside Byzantine territory and
angry with Justin. 269 Hence Paul muse have felt he was in the same boat as
Mungir in their being out of favor with the imperial government. As far as
the image of the Ghassanid dynasty is concerned, Paul's decision co seek ref-
uge with him indicates chat even when the Ghassanids were considered out-
laws by Byzantium and were living extra /imitem, they were still perceived as
the fidei defensores of Monophysicism, which in fact they were.
4. Mungir 's welcoming Paul as a refugee at his court muse have been
inspired by a number of considerations. The Ghassiinid house was an ex-
tremely well-knit and loyal group. In according Paul refuge at his court,
Mungir was following in the footsteps of his father who had done the same in
the lace 560s, and was also supporting the cleric whom his father had worked
hard to put on the patriarchal throne of Antioch. In addition to family loy-
alty, there was the veneration for the person of Paul which the Ghassiinid
house cherished. John of Ephesus, speaking of his stay with them in the lace
560s, described the impression Paul made on the Ghassiinids and the Arabs of
the desert through his qualities of moderation, gravity, and learning . 270 This,
too, must have been an element in the receptive mood of the Ghassiinids
coward Paul.
In addition, Mungir at this time was no longer in the service of Byzan-
tium . After he discovered the conspiracy chat Justin II had woven around
him, he moved extra /imitem for three years. News chat the patriarch of his
church also was a fugitive from Justin and Chalcedonian Constantinople
would only have commended Paul to Mungir's attention. Perhaps he felt chat
the advent of the patriarch of Antioch in his camp would give him moral
support during this period when he himself was outlawed by Byzantium and
was living under a cloud outside the limits of the imperium. Thus, for the
second time, the house of I:Iarith/Arethas crossed the imperial will of Byzan-
tium in relation co Monophysice clerics. First Arechas had accepted Paul after
his being outlawed by Justin II and ordered his name to be restored to the
diptychs of the church, and now his son Mungir received Paul, who had fled
Chalcedonian justice in Constantinople after his recantation. This should be
269 On this see BASIC 1.1, 356-64 .
270 See John of Ephesus, HE, p. 162, lines 8-9 .
taken into account in the study of the deterioration of Ghassanid-Byzantine
relations during the reign of Mungir and be added to the other causes of
political friction.
Thus the years 572-574 emerge as a dismal period in the history of
Monophysitism. The Ghassanid king in Oriens, its secular protector, was in
disfavor at the imperial court and was outside the imperium; and so was the
ranking hierarch of the church in Oriens, Paul, and the two were living to-
geth~r in one and the same camp. It is a cheerless period in the history of
Monophysite Oriens and is reminiscent of the period around 520 when Justin
I exiled the Monophysite bishops and with them went the Ghassanids, termi-
nating their service to Byzantium.
5. The final stage in this episode began when Paul left the Ghassanid
camp in 574 and went to Egypt. Before doing this he had written his libel/us
of repentance to the Eastern Synod and asked to be received back into commu-
nion. A year elapsed before this took place, and it was done conditionally.
Jacob again is the principal figure in the acceptance, and again it is the
Ghassanid king who is instrumental. Both Michael the Syrian 211 and Bar-
Hebraeus confirm that Jacob accepted Paul at the request of Mungir, and in
so doing they were quoting from what has not survived of the Ecclesiastical
History of John of Ephesus. In Bar-Hebraeus' Latin version, the Ghassanid
involvement is expressed as follows: "Tres autem post annos susceptus fuit a
sene Jacobo rogatu Mundari, Gabalae filii." 272
It is noteworthy that this took place in 5 7 5, the same year that Mungir
himself was reconciled with Byzantium and returned to its service. It is not
altogether unnatural to suppose that, during the biennium when he stayed with
Mungir, Paul may have talked to the Ghassanid king about reconciliation
with Byzantium as he himself had tried to do doctrinally in 5 71. In any case,
the two years are further evidence of the interrelation of religion and politics
during this period. The year 575 thus witnessed a return to normality after
the two leading Monophysite figures in Oriens had lived in total eclipse, the
one a fugitive from Chakedonian Constantinople, the other an unemployed
federate who had pitched his camp outside the limes, which his dynasty had
protected for decades. With the reconciliation of Mungir to Byzantium and
the acceptance of Paul into the church, Monophysite Oriens received back its
Antiochene patriarch and its federate Ghassanid king.
IV. THE GHASSANID EPISCOPATE
The historians, in what is extant of their works, are silent on the fortunes of
the federate episcopate after the death of Theodore in 570. That episcopate
had been established for some thirty years on a new basis, and it is impossible
272 Chronicon Ecclesiasticum,
I, 238.
to believe that it had no incumbent in this decade during the reign of Mun-
<Jir. That valuable collection, the Documenta Monophysitarum, comes to the fore
with an incidental reference that makes it possible to establish the continuing
existence of the episcopate during this time.
The precious reference comes in that long letter written by a recluse,
Sergius, in defense of the Monophysite patriarch Paul against nine counts
advanced by an archimandrite named John. Sergius answers these counts one
by one and in the course of his defense of Paul grapples with the question of
Paul's crossing over to the Chalcedonian position in the early 570s and how he
recanted and repented. 273 In defense of Paul, Sergius invokes the precedents of
Liberius, the bishop (pope) of Rome; Hosius, the bishop of Cordova; and
Gregory, the father of St. Gregory the Theologian; they had all erred doc-
trinally but were received back into their confessions. 274 After the names of
these three, he invokes the name of John, bishop of the Arabs, 275 who, he says,
"died in our own days," and thus he rounds off the enumeration by referring
to him.
Episcopos autem aliquando in communionem cum haeresi, sive sponte
sive invitos, cecidisse, et conversos prompte ab omnibus orthodoxis ac-
ceptos fuisse, docet historia beati Liberii patriarchae Romae, et Osii con-
fessoris, episcopi Cordubae civitatis, et beati Gregorii patris sancti Gre-
gorii theologi, et, ut plura omittam, tempore nostro lohannis defuncti
episcopi Arabum. 276
There is no doubt that the John in question was a bishop of the federate
Arabs. 277 The Syriac term for Arabs in the text is 'f ayaye,
278 the normal desig-
273 For Sergius' exchange with John, see Documenta, 157-206 . Brooks, as noted before,
was the first to use the Documenta effectively, after the publication of the Syriac text in CSCO,
for his study on Patriarch Paul in BZ 30 (1930), 468- 76. For his notice of the letter and his
dating of it to either 580 or early 581, see ibid., 468-69.
274 In so doing, Sergius must have had before him one of the letters of Severus, the
Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, in which he refers to the defection from doctrinal correctness
of Liberius and Hosius; see The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, ed. E. W. Brooks
(London, 1902-4), II, 206. Sergius now adds Gregory and John, the bishop of the Arabs.
275 Thus he puts John in the same category as the distinguished churchmen whom he
enumerates. John is unlikely to have reached the ecclesiastical importance of the ochers, but the
insertion of his name here could suggest that the writer thought highly of him. How important
he was is impossible to tell, since nothing else is known about him other than this solitary
reference in the letter.
276 See Documenta, p. 166, line 32-p. 167, line 2.
277 As was recognized by Honigmann (Eviques, 164), but qualified with probablement . John
was unknown to Niildeke, who had used the Documenta as interpreted by H. G. Kleyn and
before their authoritative publication in the CSCO, and also to Aigrain ("Arabie," cols. 1214-
16), who did not read Syriac and so could not use the Documenta, the Latin version of which had
not been produced when he wrote his monumental article.
278 Documenta, textus, p. 239, line 11.
nation for non-Rhomaic Arabs, and especially the federates. That he must
have been such may be confirmed by the fact that the Ghassanid federate
episcopate had been well established, and its incumbent was the distinguished
Theodore who had shared the limelight with Jacob Baradaeus himself, with
whom he was consecrated bishop during the historic moment when Arethas
undertook the revival of the Monophysite hierarchy. It is inconceivable that
after thirty years of distinguished service the Ghassanid episcopate would have
lapsed, especially as the death of Theodore in 570 coincided with a triumph
for orthodox Severan Monophysitism over Tritheism and with the accession of
the redoubtable and zealous Mungir.
It remains to examine this laconic and passing reference to John, the
bishop of the Ghassanids in the 570s.
1. Sergius wrote his letter in 580 or early 581, by which\time John had
died. This raises the first question: the date of his consecration and the dura-
tion of his episcopate during the 570s. Sergius' letter gives no clue; it pro-
vides only the terminus ante quern, 580 or early 581. The chances are that he
was consecrated around 570 when Theodore died . It is impossible to believe
that no incumbent was appointed to fill the vacant federate Ghassanid see,
and the reasons are the same that have just been adduced for the identity of
John as a Ghassanid. It may then be safely assumed that John followed The-
odore immediately 279 as the Ghassanid bishop, and it is possible that Theodore
had something to say concerning the election of John, who may even have
been related to Theodore as his syncellus. Theodore was Jacob Baradaeus' close
associate for thirty years; Jacob was still active when Theodore died and sur-
vived him by eight years. It is quite possible, therefore, that he consecrated or
took part in the consecration of John .
2. The next question is that of John's doctrinal switch to Chalcedon.
How and when did this happen? This is a matter of considerable interest and
significance in the study of the ecclesiastical history of the Ghassanids. These
were staunch Monophysites, and here is none other than their own bishop
going over to the Chalcedonian position.
The most likely date for John 's desertion of the Monophysite confession
is the early 5 70s. 280 It was in this period that Mungir's relations with the
central government soured and ended in his withdrawal from the service of
Byzantium for some three years. With the disappearance of the powerful phy-
larch, who was the mainstay of the Monophysite faith in Oriens, it was not so
difficult for an ecclesiastic such as John to succumb to official Chalcedonian
279 H. Charles committed the blunder of chinking chat Paul, the Monophysice patriarch ,
was the successor of Theodore; see his Le christianisme des arabes nomades sur le limes (Paris,
1936),
30, 67. le was noticed by Honigmann, Eveques, 64 note 8.
280 On chis, see BASIC 1.1, 346-56 .
pressure and change doctrinal color, which would not have been the case if the
powerful phylarch had remained on the scene of Near Eastern history support-
ing his bishop.
3. Such doctrinal crossing over does not seem incredible on the part of
the bishop when it is remembered that the Ghassanid royal house itself con-
tained some members who had gone over to Chalcedon. In the Syriac manu-
script found at Nabk, 281 written in the days of Theodore and Jacob, there is a
prayer for the Ghassanid king Abu Karib, the brother of Arethas, and also for
the return of some of his erring brothers to the correct Monophysite position.
Later, in the early 580s and after the arrest of Mungir himself, the central
government sent Magnus to Oriens, and he installed one of Mungir's brothers
who had become a Chalcedonian. 282 If this was the case with members of the
royal house themselves, the fidei defemores of Monophysitism, it is not surpris-
ing that the bishop went in the same direction under pressure from fellow
Chalcedonian ecclesiastics.
4. The circumstances under which this happened are unknown but can
be guessed from some of the data that the extant sources provide. In the HE of
John of Ephesus, there is an account of the conversion of Patriarch Paul him-
self to Dyophysitism. The Monophysite historian states that the Monophysite
patriarch Paul lapsed into the communion of the two natures, when he was
summoned to the capital in the hope that at last the union of the churches
might be established. m In the course of this narrative, John of Ephesus men-
tions that Paul did not go to Constantinople alone but was summoned there
together with others ("cum ceteris aliis"), 284 and that after they were received
by the emperor and after many discussions with those in Constantinople, Paul
and the three that were with him ("Paulus et tres alii cum eo erant") 285 finally
succumbed and lapsed into communion with the Dyophysites.
It is therefore most likely that John converted to Dyophysitism in these
circumstances and on this occasion. He could easily have been one of the
three, presumably bishops, who were summoned to Constantinople. The
Dyophysite Patriarchate of Constantinople wanted some influential members
of the Monophysite communion in Oriens to come and be converted. Natu-
rally they thought of the patriarch and also one of the most influential bishops
in his patriarchate, the incumbent of the federate Ghassanid episcopate whose
predecessor had visited Constantinople for important assignments and had
been invited there by Justin II himself in the late 560s. Even if he was not
281 See above, 845-50.
282 See BASIC I.1, 471-75.
283 HE, p. 150, Jines 9-12.
284 Ibid., line 4.
285 Ibid., line 9.
summoned by the Dyophysites of the capital, John might easily have been
picked up by Paul to accompany him, since Paul knew the status and prestige
of the Ghassiinid bishop very well. 286 And it is not impossible that once in
Constantinople, and in the constant company of Paul, he was influenced by
him in his decision to go over to the Chalcedonian position after being fully
convinced of the correctness of this decision in the interest of church unity. In
so doing, he would have simply followed the lead of his patriarch.
5. The chronology of the events associated with the doctrinal defection of
John can thus be assigned to the early 570s or the first half of the decade.
This is supported by the fact that John of Ephesus gives the whole affair of the
defection to Dyophysitism-the recantation and the acceptance of the clerics,
including Paul, by the Synod of the East-the duration of some five years,
two for the process of their conversion to Dyophysitism in Constantinople and
three for their recantation and acceptance back into the Monophysite fold. 287
This seems right and fits well with the withdrawal of Mungir and then his
return in the mid 5 70s. The writer of the long letter in the Documenta Mo-
nophysitarum says that John was pardoned, and this must have taken place with
Mungir's full knowledge and approval, since the last thing that the Ghassiinid
phylarch, who had just been reconciled with Byzantium, would have wanted
was dissension within his ecclesiastical camp. He had always worked for the
unity of the church, and he would surely have welcomed the return of John to
the fold and to the Ghassiinid episcopate.
6. The last question that reference to John in Sergius' letter raises is his
whereabouts in the mid and late 570s. The sources are completely silent on
him, whereas they should have something to say in view of (a) the course that
events took and that called for his participation in them-the Paulite-Jacobite
struggle; (b) the important and active part the Ghassanid phylarch took in
reconciling the two parties-one would expect his own bishop, John, to be
similarly or even more involved; and (c) the fact that he was one of the rank-
ing bishops of the Monophysite hierarchy, the successor of Theodore, the old
associate of Jacob for thirty years. Yet there is not a word about him.
The clue to what must have happened is provided by Sergius, the writer
of the long letter in the Documenta. As noted earlier, Sergius wrote his letter
in 580 or early 581 after John had died. So John could have died in the mid-
570s shortly after his reception back into the Monophysite fold by the Synod
of the East. Thus his episcopate may have been of short duration, and there
are parallels in church history for a brief incumbency of bishops and patri-
286 And it is not unlikely that Paul may have participated in the consecration of John, in
the laying on of hands, together with Jacob Baradaeus. If so, he would have been well known to
him .
287 See HE, p. 150, lines 6, 17-18.
archs. Sergius, who was elected Monophysite patriarch of Antioch in the late
5 50s, lived for only three years. 288 And Peter IV, the Monophysite patriarth of
Alexandria in the 570s, did not occupy the see of St. Mark for more than two
years. 289 Perhaps the stress that John went through during his defection and
reconversion to Monophysitism shortened his days.
7. The question must inevitably arise as to who his immediate successor
was. It is impossible to believe that the Ghassanid episcopate was left vacant,
especially as the second half of this decade was a glorious period for the Ghas-
sanid phylarchate/kingship. Mungir would not have left his Ghassanid feder-
ates without a bishop. Yet again the sources seem to be silent on any
Ghassanid bishop, at least one who is explicitly referred to as such. There is,
however, a candidate in the sources who could be identified with the Ghas-
sanid bishop in this period, and this returns the discussion to the identity of
that mysterious ecclesiastic, Antiochus, who has been discussed previously. 290
In a crucial passage in the Documenta,
291 he appears at a conference held at
the court of Mungir in Arabia where bishops and abbots had assembled to
reconcile the Paulites and Jacobites in the mid 570s. These ecclesiastics pre-
sented a petition to the Ghassanid Mungir as the instrument through which it
might be presented to Antiochus, who is referred to by the reverential title
"Mar." In a previous section, a number of suggestions were made for identify-
ing this person. It could also, with much plausibility, be suggested that he
was the Ghassanid bishop in the second half of this decade, the successor of
John. He seems to answer to the description, since he appears at the court of
Mungir; he is influential, and one of his predecessors in the see, Theodore,
had functioned on similar occasions in the same capacity as a leading figure in
Monophysite disputes.
The sources are silent on Antiochus after this reference to him in connec-
tion with the reconciliation of the Paulites and Jacobites, and they are also
silent on other Ghassanid ecclesiastics throughout the reign of Mungir and
even after. This does not mean that these ceased to exist or to function. The
Greek sources are notoriously uninformative on Ghassanid ecclesiastical his-
tory, and the Syriac sources have not survived in such a way as to be informa-
tive on what to them was not central to their interest. The presumption is
that the Ghassanid episcopate persisted, but its fortunes remain unknown.
The conversion of the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch and the Mo-
nophysite bishops of the Ghassanids to Dyophysitism was a coup on the part of
288 Honigmann,
EvequeJ, 193.
289 For the determination of the short duration of Peter !V's patriarchate (575-577),
see
Maspero, HiJtoire deJ patriarche.r, 212 and note 1.
290 On Antiochus see above, 843-45.
291 Ibid.
the Byzantine Chalcedonian establishment. As has already been observed, it
was done at a propitious moment, when the powerful Ghassanid phylarch had
withdrawn from the service of Byzantium after he had discovered the plot that
had been concocted to do away with him. The Monophysite hierarchs must
have felt isolated and without the protective Ghassanid shield that Mungir
had provided them with .
Awareness of this concurrence-Mungir's absence from the scene and the
invitation to the Monophysite clerics to convert-returns the student of this
period to an important question, namely, the plot against Mungir, which is
engulfed in mystery. After winning a crushing victory over the enemies of
Byzantium, he expected a warm welcome from Justin II; yet the emperor's
reply was a plot to do him in. Some answers have been given to the circum-
stances that may have led to the plot, but now in the context of the eccle-
siastical history of the period, especially the attempt to convert the Mono-
physite ecclesiastics, it is possible to suggest a new approach. In a previous
chapter, 292 it was suggested that the plot was more the work of Dyophysi te
clerics than non-clerics. This view could now be corroborated in view of the
attempts to convert the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch and the bishop of
the federate Ghassanids, which followed the Byzantine plot and the Ghassanid
withdrawal from the service. These attempts shed new light on the
Dyophysite plot which may be reinterpreted in this new context.
After the failure of the second edict issued by Justin II in 5 71, the
stumbling block toward uniting and receiving the Monophysites into the
Chalcedonian fold was probably identified as the powerful Ghassanid phylar-
chate, its protective shield. Hence it was decided to do away with Mungir as a
step toward effecting the desired union. Thus the stage was set for luring the
ecclesiastics, who thus were more amenable to the approaches of the Chalce-
donian church, to convert them without their having to be afraid of the oppo-
sition of the secular fidei defensfJY of their church in Oriens. The chief architect
of the plot could have been Gregory, the Dyophysite patriarch of Antioch
and the inveterate enemy of Monophysitism, who is especially remembered
by ecclesiastical historians for his attempts to win over Monophysite Oriens
and the patriarchate to strict Chalcedonian orthodoxy. His incumbency of the
see of Antioch began in 570 and lasted until 593; so he might have wanted to
celebrate the inception of his incumbency by engineering this coup against
Monophysitism, doing away with its secular head, the Ghassanid Mungir. His
possible role in the plot has been explored previously in this volume, and the
new context of this section on ecclesiastical history can only confirm that role. 293
292 See BASIC 1.1, 445-46, 458-59.
293 Ibid.
V. THE SCHISM WITHIN THE PATRIARCHATE OF ANTIOCH:
PAULITES VERSUS JACOBITES, 575-578
Hardly had the problem of Paul's apostasy been solved in 575 by his accep-
tance on the part of the Eastern Synod and Jacob, when a new storm raged
that divided the recently united Patriarchate of Antioch into Paulites and
Jacobites. It lasted from 575 to the death of Jacob in 578 and continued
beyond that date. The Ghassanid king Mungir played an important role in the
efforts to reconcile the two parties, but in order to understand and evaluate his
role, it is necessary to treat briefly the background of this schism. 294
Paul had alienated the Alexandrians in the late 560s when he visited his
native country and became involved in the struggle for the incumbency of the
vacant see of St. Mark. He alienated them again in the mid-570s for the same
reason, in the course of the year or so when he arrived in Alexandria in 575
and departed a year later, possibly in January 576. 295 The Alexandrian see had
been vacant now for some years after the death of Theodosius in 566, and the
phases of the complicated situation that obtained in the course of the year
575/76 may, in the interest of clarity, be outlined as follows.
a. Longinus, the bishop of Nubia, together with two bishops from
Oriens, John of Chalcis and George of 'Urtaya, consecrated Theodore, a Syrian
archimandrite, as the new patriarch of Alexandria in 575. Although Paul
himself did not participate in the laying on of hands, apparently the consecra-
tion was in his interests, since the new patriarch would receive him, as in fact
he did.
b. The news of Theodore's consecration was received with fury by the
Alexandrians, who were used to choosing their own patriarch. But now a
patriarch was thrust upon them, consecrated by the bishop of Nubia and two
bishops from Oriens and, what is more, was a creature of Paul, whom they
had rejected.
c. After some disagreements, the Alexandrians elected Peter, an old dea-
con and an associate of the late Theodosius, who was thus consecrated patri-
arch of Alexandria as Peter IV in 575.
d. One of his first acts as patriarch was to depose Paul; furthermore, he
issued an encyclical attacking Paul and also Jacob Baradaeus, who had conse-
crated him.
e. Jacob retaliated by calling Peter a "new Gaian," and then proceeded to
Alexandria, which he reached possibly in the autumn of 5 7 5, when and where
the unexpected happened.
f. Although he made the journey to Alexandria to support Paul and avert
294 The best account of this background may be found in Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 468-
79, and Honigmann, Eveques, 200-203 .
295 As correctly calculated by Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 476 note 5.
a schism, he ended up by surrendering to the Alexandrians. He not only
recognized Peter IV as the new patriarch of Alexandria but also agreed to
depose Paul on condition that he not be anathematized. An exchange of syn-
odical letters between Peter IV and Jacob confirmed the agreement between
the two.
Such was the strange transaction in Egypt which was to divide the
Monophysites of Oriens into Jacobites and Paulites. It ranged the Egyptian
Monophysites with the Jacobites against the Paulites and their patriarch,
Paul, the incumbent of the see of Antioch, and rocked the patriarchate and
Oriens for some years to come. It was this grave problem that Mungir, the
Ghassanid king, inherited, with the return of Paul to Oriens in January 576
since it was to him that Paul turned for help.
The involvement of Mungir and his role in the process of conciliation is
documented in some primary sources, principally John of Ephesus and the
Documenta Monophysitarum. But it is sporadically and intermittently presented;
hence the necessity of organizing it and presenting its three stages in a consec-
utive account. In view of the paucity of the extant sources, and the misunder-
standing of the true and extensive role of the Ghassanids in the history of the
Monophysite church and this schism, 296 it is well to let the primary sources
speak through some revealing quotations.
1
The first phase of the negotiations for reconciling the two parties took
place probably in 576 after Paul's return from Egypt in January. He naturally
invokes the aid of Mungir and requests a thorough investigation of the issue.
So the scene shifts to the court of Mungir, but even the king's prestige was
not sufficient to render his intercession fruitful. The two main sources for this
phase of the schism are John of Ephesus and the Documenta Monophysitarum.
John of Ephesus
In a passage in chapter 21 of Book IV of his Ecclesiastical History, J oho of
Ephesus relates in general terms that Mungir, the believing and zealous Arab
king, worked hard to make peace between the two; that the Jacobites would
not consent in spite of Paul's fair request that the matter be investigated; that
the Ghassanid Arabs revered both Jacob, whom they had known since the
days of Arethas, and subsequently Paul; and that as a result the Ghassanids
themselves were divided into Paulites and Jacobites.
296 As noted earlier, Brooks' conception of the Ghassanids was extremely vague. For him
Mun4ir, who was patricius, was a shaikh, and he refers to him as such without further ado, as he
had referred to his father, Arethas (ibid., 469, 475).
Caput XXI, de zelo et studio Mondir filii Harith regis Tayaye. Mondir
vero etiam filius Harith rex Tayaye, vir fidelis et zelosus et studiosus, diu
ambas partes adhortari et obsecrare perstitit, ut, ira ac pugna omissis,
inter se convenirent, et colloquerentur et inter se pacem facerent, nee
lacobitae ei obtemperaverunt, cum ipse Paulus ipsum Mondir et multos
obsecraret ut de eis quae a Satana inter eos commota erant quaestio et
cognitio fieret.
Et, quoniam diu et a diebus Harith patris eius senem lacobum ut
virum magnum habuerant, itemque tandem et Paulum etiam, et cum ad
tantam procacitatem et immanitatem et discordiam inter se pervenissent,
nee lacobitarum pars leniri adnuissent, facta est exinde in omnibus etiam
exercitibus Tayaye discordia, cum multi eorum offensi essent, et pars
Paulum et pars lacobum secuti essent. 297
The passage in John of Ephesus is not detailed and lacks the specificity of
the other sources to be analyzed below, but it is valuable for the picture it
draws of the Ghassanid phylarch and his camp and how they were affected by
the schism.
a. Mungir appears as a true Christian, "fidelis et zelosus et studiosus,"
who urged both parties to come to terms and be reconciled. His anxiety that
this should happen is understandable since his reign had witnessed the end of
the Tritheistic controversy and the problem of Paul's apostasy; hence he natu-
rally did not want to see his church disunited again. There was also a more
pressing reason for his desire for reconciliation. He himself had been at odds
with the central government for the last three years during which he had left
the service of Byzantium and had withdrawn from his headquarters in the
Provincia Arabia into the Arabian Peninsula. He had just made his peace with
Byzantium, and so it must have grieved him to see his own church rent by
internal schism, as this augured ill for its relations with hostile Dyophysite
Byzantium .
b. There was another reason behind Murnjir's ardent desire to have the
two parties reconciled: his own armies became divided in their sympathies
between the two parties, with one group taking the side of the Jacobites,
another that of the Paulites. This was not conducive to good morale in the
federate army, the seasoned army that had been invincible in Mungir's cam-
paign against the Persians and the Lakhmids. The passage also throws light on
the seriousness with which the Ghassanid army took its Monophysitism and
its Christianity, and it suggests that it took a keen interest in ecclesiastical
controversy, 298 a point already made by Arethas when he addressed the two
proponents of Tritheism, Eugenius and Conon.
297 HE, p. 155, Jines 27-36 -
p. 156, lines 1-6.
298 See above, 818.
c. From the passage, Paul appears more reasonable than Jacob since he
requested a thorough investigation of the charges made against him; hence the
support Mungir gave Paul throughout, in addition to the latter's being the
patriarch, the symbol of unity for the Monophysite church in Oriens. Jacob,
on the other hand, appears adamant, but his prestige emerges clearly from the
veneration the Ghassanid army held him in since the days of Arethas, and this
is made even clearer with the realization that it was not he but Paul who was
the ranking hierarch in the Patriarchate of Antioch.
The Documenta Monophysitarum
One of the most valuable parts of the Documenta consists of the long
letter written by the recluse Sergius, 299 in which he defends Patriarch Paul
against a certain archimandrite by the name of John, written shortly after
these events, in 580 or 581. The writer cites original documents and gives
some specific valuable details, not to be found in John of Ephesus, on the
Ghassanid profile of this schism and the scene in Mungir's province and court
during these negotiations for reconciliation.
In one of his many arguments for Paul, Sergius recounts that Paul went
to Arabia together with other archimandrites and bishops, enduring the rigors
of winter there as well as bad food; their presentation of a petition that the
problems should be thoroughly investigated; that Mungir was the intermedi-
ary who presented the petition to a certain Antiochus but without avail.
Qui noverit, dicat. Numquid latet quempiam cursus eius et omnium
sociorum eius in Arabiam? Protractum tempus ibi egerunt in omni vexa-
tione ob rigorem hiemis et pravos cibos, rogantes viros cuiuscumque
ordinis et conditionis ut causa examini subiciatur, sit iudicium legale et
omnia peragantur sicut postulat pukra dispositio ecclesiastica. Quis au-
tern ita solus peregrinus est in Jerusalem ut haec ignoraret? Et ut haec
omittam, quid faciemus de altera, quae subsequuta est, profectione vene-
rabilium episcoporum qui cum eis erant, et virorum senectute cur-
vatorum, archimandritarum plurimorum coenobiorum, qui rursum in re-
gionem Arabiae cucurrerunt in omni alacritate, medio hieme, obliti, ut
ita dicam, debilitatem corporis, supplicantes cum lacrimis et adiurantes
omnibus adiurationibus, in scriptis et viva voce, ut fiat negocii discussio
et examen, sicut declarat protestatio ab eis data Mar Antiocho per glori-
osum patricium Mundarum. Et eo tempore seipsos urserunt progredi
adeo ut, prae vehementia frigoris et nivium abundantium, quidam eo-
rum in itinere mortui sint et qui aegre evaserunt longo tempore variis
morbis laboraverint. 300
299 See Documenta, pp. 157-206.
300 See ibid., p. 184, lines 28-36 -
p. 185, lines 1-10 .
This passage gives a rare and vivid glimpse of the scene at the court or
camp of Mungir , where the clerics assembled in order to resolve the schism.
The first question which arises concerns Arabia, to which Paul came as a
refugee. Was it the Byzantine Provincia or the Arabian Peninsula? Before this
question is answered, some reference to the difficulties encountered by the
clerics should be made, and it is relevant to answering the question of which
Arabia is meant . The passage speaks of inclement climatic conditions in two
phrases: "ob rigorem hiemis et pravos cibos" and "vehementia frigoris et
nivium abundantium. " A savage winter and abundant snow greeted the clerics
in addition to bad food ("pravos cibos").
One would naturally think first of the harsh winter conditions of the
Arabian Peninsula where Mungir had his advance military posts facing the
Lakhmids and the Persians. But a realization that this was 576 could argue in
favor of the Provincia. The year before, Mungir reconciled himself with By-
zantium , returned to the service, and won a crushing victory over the
Lakhmids. 301 But this happened before the three-year truce, 302 which was con-
cluded between Byzantium and Persia later in 5 7 5. Consequently, Mungir
would have spent the winter of the following year back at his headquarters in
the Provincia Arabia and Palaestina Secunda, in the Golan at Jabiya or some
other camp-town rather than at his camp in the limitrophe. The letter that
the archimandrites of the Provincia Arabia wrote in 570 concerning Tritheism
has given a large number of toponyms, ecclesiastical centers 303 at which Mun-
gir could have met Paul and the clerics. As to adverse climatic conditions and
poor nourishment, it is just possible that the winter of 576 was a particularly
harsh one and that abundant snow, unusual in that part of the world, could
have interrupted communications and transportation and consequently the
supply of food. 304 So the chances are that the Arabia referred to in the letter of
Sergius was the Provincia, which probably in ecclesiastical parlance included
also the region of Damascene in Phoenicia Libanensis ,#.nd Palaestina Secunda,
as it did in the letter of the archimandrites of 570.
The second question is the identity of the mysterious Mar Antiochus
mentioned in the passage. The Paulites had prepared, according to the canon
law of the Monophysite church, the pulcra dispositio ecclesiastica, a petition (c'.)ta-
f,A.UQ"tUQta) so that a thorough investigation of the matter be conducted . This
is where Mungir comes in, described as gloriosus and patricius. The Ghassanid
301 See BASIC 1.1, 378-82.
302 See ibid., 383-84 .
303 See above, 824-38 .
304 Reference to bad food brings to mind the meal that Arethas prepared for Ephraim,
patriarch of Antioch, when he offered him camel meat in order to make his point . But one
would hardly expect that Mungir would have served the clerics, who were his guests, such food.
On the encounter between Ephraim and Arethas, see above, 752-53 .
king had inherited all the prestige of his father, Arethas, as fidei defensor and
had already in his own right acted on two occasions on matters pertaining to
the Monophysite church, one of which concerned Paul himself and the accep-
tance of his repentance, when he asked Jacob to receive him back into the
Monophysite communion. So Paul and the clerics did well to come to Mungir
for resolving this new difficulty . They handed him the petition and he acted
as intermediary between the Paulites and Jacobites. He, in turn, handed the
petition to Mar Antiochus, who appears in the passage without any qualifica-
tion or description that can give a clue to who he was. But this lack of any
clue may be a clue in itself: when the recluse Sergius wrote his letter in 580 or
581, Mar Antiochus may have been a well-known figure in the Monophysite
world of Oriens who needed no further qualification or description .
The identity of this Mar Antiochus has exercised the ingenuity of many
scholars, and it has been discussed in a previous section. 30 ) No certainty can be
attained without new data. Inter alia, it has been suggested above that he was
the Ghassanid bishop of the limitrophe, consecrated after the death of Bishop
John in the mid 570s. 306 The case for Antiochus ' being the Ghassanid bishop
in the second half of the eighth decade may be restated with more cogency in
this context.
a. In recent times, the Ghassanid bishop had been a most influential
cleric in the Monophysite communion. For thirty years, Theodore ranked sec-
ond only to Jacob Baradaeus in the counsels of Monophysitism and thus estab-
lished the status of the Ghassanid episcopate on a solid basis. The Ghassanid
phylarchate became even more important with the reign of Mungir, and it is
natural to suppose that the status of the episcopate rose commensurately, or at
least did not diminish in status.
b. Mungir had just returned to the service of Byzantium from a self-
imposed exile, anxious to reassemble the various constituents of his Basi/eia,
established by his father on the twin pillars of the phylarchate and the episco-
pate. He celebrated his return with a smashing victory over the Lakhmids,
and it is consonant with the tone of his reign and his restoration that he
should have been anxious for the restoration of the episcopate as well. It is
therefore practically certain that the Ghassanid phylarchate had its episcopate
too in this period.
c. At this juncture, the Ghassanid bishop would have been a most influ-
ential person. Patriarch Paul had been discredited twice in the course of the
last ten years, and Jacob was getting very old; in fact he died two or three
years later in 578, and some had insinuated that he was by now senile or
305 For this see above, 843-45.
306 On John, the bishop of the Ghassanids, see above, 870-74 .
deteriorating . Thus the Ghassanid bishop must have been, by process of elim-
ination, one of the most influential clerics of the Monophysite church.
cl. A cleric of this description would certainly have been involved in one
of the most delicate problems that faced the Monophysite church of this pe-
riod, namely, the reconciliation of the two warring parties into which it was
divided, the Paulites and Jacobites. So when a certain Mar Antiochus appears
at the court of Mungir, whither the two parties had come for the resolution of
the dispute at a peace conference, it is not unnatural to assume that he was the
Ghassanid bishop of the period, receiving the instrumentum unionis from his
phylarch, who in turn had received it from the assembled clerics. In so doing,
he would have presented the instrumentum unionis, backed by the prestige of
the Ghassanid king whom Jacob trusted and respected. A Ghassanid bishop
had been closely associated with Jacob since Theodore was consecrated with
him around 540, and for thirty years the two worked closely together. Thus a
Ghassanid bishop in the 5 70s could very well have been the right choice for
delivering the petition to Jacob with the earnest wishes and hopes for recon-
ciliation of his dintinguished secular chief, gloriosus and patricius Mungir. That
he does not receive further mention may be due to the nature of the sources
and their survival, besides the fact that he must have been overshadowed by
the commanding personality of Mungir as the protector of the Monophysite
church (witness his astounding performance in Constantinople in 580).
If the identification turns out to be correct, then another Ghassanid
bishop may be added to the short list that has survived in the sources,
namely, Theodore and John. From the manner of his reference to Antiochus,
the writer of the letter, Sergius, clearly implies that Mar Antiochus was still
alive and well around 580 when he wrote. It is noteworthy that the Ghassanid
bishops assumed either biblical or Greek names on their consecration, in con-
trast to the phylarchs who kept their Arabic names. This was only natural and
is a reflection of the utter integration of the Ghassanid clerics into the Chris-
tian fold.
2
The second phase of the negotiations toward a resolution of the differ-
ences that obtained between the two parties opened shortly after the conclu-
sion of the previous fruitless attempt at the court of Mungir. This time it was
on the initiative of Longinus, the bishop of Nubia, who, after news of the
bitter strife between the Paulites and Jacobites reached him in Egypt, hurried
in 576, together with Theodore, to Oriens in order to confer with the Paulites
on how to effect a reconciliation with the Jacobites. While Theodore remained
in Tyre, Longinus proceeded to the headquarters of Mungir to whom he gave
a full account of the dispute, which made Mungir even more anxious to medi-
ate and resolve the dispute, but the Jacobites remained adamant and refused
the mediation. John of Ephesus is the primary source for this phase as he was
for the first.
Ob causam igitur eiusdem rixae et turbationis quae ubique obtinebat, et
praesertim in tota Syria, Longinus et socii eius et Theodorus qui ab eis
patriarcha factus erat, ad regionem Aegypti profecti, inde etiam ad re-
giones Syriae orientales et ad Paulitas descenderunt, ut una cum lacobitis
causam agerent, et, si possent, contentionem et malum quod a malo
inter eos commotum erat dissolverent. Tum Theodorus in urbe Tyro
otiosus manebat, Longinus autem usque ad castra tribus Harith filii Ga-
bala ad Mondir filium Harith descendit; et, cum sermones cum eo contu-
lisset eumque totam veritatem accurate docuisset, rex Mondir eos congre-
gare et ad pacem adducere rursus studuit; cui lacobitae omnino non
obtemperaverunt.
307
The role of Longinus, who took the initiative and who, as will be seen
further on, was almost lynched by the monks for taking up the cause of Paul,
needs to be explained. This was the evangelist of Nubia who, in the late 560s
and early 570s, had completed the conversion of Nobatia, begun by the other
Monophysite evangelist, Julian, in the 540s. Although he was the missionary
of Nubia, Longinus had been associated with Paul since the latter 's consecra-
tion as patriarch and was his apocrisiarius in Constantinople. Like Paul, he was
an Alexandrian but belonged to the Monophysite Patriarchate of Antioch. The
late patriarch, Theodosius, who had recommended Paul for the patriarchate,
also sent Longinus to convert Nobatia. But he remembered Paul and remained
faithful to him. In 575 he left Nubia for Alexandria where he tried to have
Theodore elected, and in so doing worked in the interest of Paul, since The-
odore would accept the controversial patriarchate of the latter. Now that his
efforts to have Theodore accepted by the Egyptians failed, he hurried to
Oriens in order to help Paul in that region. 308
Theodore, who came along with him, was none other than the rejected
patriarch whom longinus had recommended and consecrated. He was a Syrian
archimandrite, and so Oriens was his native region . John of Ephesus does not
say why he did not join Longinus immediately at the conference with Mungir,
but Michael the Syrian provides some additional information: "Theodorus
demeurait a Tyr pres des partisans de Paulus, voulant discuter avec ceux de
Jacques. " 309 Paul had much support in Syria, while Jacob's supporters were
mainly in Mesopotamia. Apparently the two clerics thought it best to divide
307 HE, p. 156, lines 8-21.
308 For Longinus and Theodore, see Honigmann, Eviques, 284-99, 233-34 .
their labors. Longinus, the much more important and influential cleric, natu-
rally went to confer with Mungir.
310
As in the account of the first phase, the meeting place of Longin us and
Mungir is not explicitly stated. The Latin text of John says that Longinus
went down to the "castra tribus Harith filii Gabala." So he went to the camp
of the Ghassanids. The Latin version, which has tribus as the translation of
Syriac Beth, is inaccurate since the Syriac term signifies "House" and the Latin
version should read "castra domus Harith, filii Gabala," "the camp of the
House of Harith, son of Gabala. " 311 As the Syriac original does speak of a ~erta
("camp") of the Ghassanids, the question arises as to whether ~erta here simply
means "camp" or is a proper noun such as Mount l:Iarith. It is striking that
I:Iarith/ Arethas had been dead for five years, and so the involvement of his
name in the reference to the camp can mean either that his prestige persisted
posthumously or that the term here is a toponym that carried his name, such
as reflected in Jabal al-1:Iarith, the Mountain of l:Iarith.
312 The year is 576,
and this was the first year of the three-year peace with Persia; so Mungir is
more likely to have been at his court in Jabiya rather than his camp in the
limitrophe; but he may have been at the latter when Longinus came to see
him hurriedly concerning Paul and Jacob.
John of Ephesus' account of the conference that Longinus held with
Mungir raises two points . The first is the language employed by the two. The
natural presumption, from a close look at the passage, is that they spoke the
same language without an interpreter. This language could not have been the
native language of Longinus-which presumably was Coptic since he was an
Alexandrian-nor Mungir's native Arabic, but Greek, the common language. 313
The second point that the account raises is the implication of the phrase
"eumque totam veritatem accurate docuisset ." Longinus was partial to Paul,
and apparently John of Ephesus too; so Longinus informed Mungir of the
whole truth about the dispute, from the Paulite point of view, and this was
noted approvingly by John of Ephesus.
That the bishop of Nubia should have come to Mungir for the solution of
this problem is another indication of the importance of Mungir in the Mono-
physite church of the sixth century. His importance is now not only regional
in Oriens but much wider, recognized in the Nile Valley in Africa. And
subsequent events only confirm this fact. It does not diminish his importance
310 Longinus may have known Mungir as a crown prince in the 560s when he was still in
Oriens, associated with Paul as the newly consecrated patriarch of Antioch, and he certainly
must have known his father, Arethas, and the dynasty's role in the election of Paul.
311 For the Syriac text, see HE, textus, p. 209, line 2. On the meaning of Beth in such a
context, see the present writer in "Ghassan and Byzantium," 254, where for baytii read beth.
312 On Mount J:Iarith, see above, 825-26.
313 As an Alexandrian, Longinus may have been a Greek, not a Copt .
that his efforts to bring about a reconciliation were not successful at this
phase.
3
The third phase in the negotiations moves away from the court or camp
of Mungir to the monastery of Mar J:Ianina. The course of events that led to
the transference of the scene may be described as follows. After spending the
last part of 576 in Oriens, Longinus wrote in November of that year to John,
the archimandrite of the monastery of Mar J:Ianina, 314 which was the principal
venue of the partisans of Jacob. Longinus expressed his willingness to appear
before an assembly of its inmates and bishops in order to answer the charges
leveled against him by the Jacobites, a course apparently suggested by the
archimandrite. John wrote to Longinus that he should come to the monastery
for a conference composed solely of himself, Longinus, and Jacob. When
Longinus appeared, not alone but "with others," he found himself facing a
crowd of angry monks, but no Jacob. After a stormy meeting in which the
monks grew violent as they handed him a written document which was an
indictment and asked him to answer it, he refused to read it. So it was read
for him against his will, while he kept his fingers in his ears. Finally, he
succeeded in escaping, not without difficulty.
The principal source for this is again John of Ephesus,3 15 whose account
of this conference at the monastery of Mar 1:fanina may be analyzed as follows. 316
1. The hostility of the monks toward Longinus, who appears as a man of
peace trying to compose differences, is an indication of the intensity of the
schism between the two camps. The opposition of the monks and the Jac-
obites in general derives from the fact that Longinus had long been associated
with Paul and so he was considered not impartial but one trying to gloss over
Paul's defects. Then there was the problem of his consecration of Theodore as
patriarch of Alexandria without consultation with the Syrian bishops, and so
he was associated with another discredited and rejected patriarch, Theodore.
These must have been some of the elements in the indictment against Lon-
ginus read by the monks, but which are not listed by John of Ephesus who
only refers to the indictment . 317
2. Longin us could not have gone to the monastery of J:Ianina without the
knowledge and approval of Mungir, who was the principal secular figure in
the reconciliation process. After negotiations at his court or camp failed,
314 He was also the bishop of Sura in Euphratesia; see Honigmann, Eveques,
191-92.
315 See HE, p. 156, line 20-p . 157, line 19; see also Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 475-76;
Honigmann, Eveques, 203, 228.
316 Unfortunately his account of the sequel to this conference is not extant, except for two
fragments.
317 For the "charta quae contra eum scripta erat," see HE, p. 157, line 5.
Mungir must have felt that a journey by Longinus to see Jacob himself at the
monastery might be beneficial. That Longinus had the approval and blessing
of Mungir is clear from a statement made by Longinus which has been pre-
served in oratio recta in the text of John. When the monks became violent and
started reading the indictment against Longinus' wishes, he shouted and pro-
tested for being so roughly handled: "Vae! regem habeo. Cur dolo occidor?"
("Woe! I have a king. Why am I to be treacherously murdered?").
318
The crux resides in the first sentence, regem habeo, which has exercised the
ingenuity of Payne Smith, Chabot, and Brooks. In Syriac it may be translit-
erated malka ith Ii. In his translation of the Ecclesiastical History, Payne Smith
rendered the exclamatory sentence, "Woe, woe, what have I done?" In his
footnote he translated the Syriac sentence "I have a king" and added: "but this
is nonsense," emending the sentence into mana ith Ii. 319 Chabot in his French
version of Michael the Syrian translated the sentence as "ma resolution est
prise," and in his edition of the text of John of Ephesus in the CSCO he
clearly understood the crucial word not as malka (king) but as melka (counsel),
as noted by Brooks in his Latin version of the text. 320 Brooks in his Latin
version left the sentence as it is, malka ith Ii, and translated literally: regem
habeo. In the footnote, however, he thought the text was corrupt.
321
Surely the text is not corrupt, and the sentence makes excellent sense.
None of the commentators seems to have remembered that before his long
account of the conference at the monastery of Mar 1:Ianina, John of Ephesus
had discussed at length Mungir, the king of the Ghassanids, in connection
with the Paulite-Jacobite strife and explained his role in the peace process
between the two parties. The opening part of this section has explained how
Mungir must have known of Longinus' prospective conference with archi-
mandrite John at the monastery of Mar I:Ianina and how he most probably
encouraged him to do so. So what Longinus was doing when he was faced
with an angry, murderous crowd of monks was to tell this hostile crowd that
he had the support of the redoubtable Ghassanid king, the fidei defensor of
Monophysitism in Oriens. So the two parts of the exclamatory sentence com-
plement each other, and were meant as a shield for Longinus against the
monks who threatened his life. Brooks conceived of Mungir as shaikh, as he
had done of his father, Arethas. Thus, he could not associate the term malka
(king) with the Ghassanid and so erroneously thought the text was corrupt . 322
3. The monastery of Mar I:Ianina, the meeting place, deserves some rec-
318 HE, p. 167, line 13; for the Syriac version, seep . 210, lines 2-3.
319 See Payne Smith, Ecclesiastical History, 287 and note r.
320 See Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, p. 325; John of Ephesus, HE, textus, p. 210,
line 2.
321 See HE, p. 157, line 13 and note 2.
322 See Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 469, 475.
ognmon. This was a monastery that took its name from the thaumaturge of
that name who died in 499/500. It lay not far from the Euphrates, between
Barbalissos and Callinicum. 323 The location of the monastery in the north of
Oriens near the Euphrates raises the question of the f?erta of the house of
J:Iarith/Arethas where Longinus met Mungir during the second phase of these
negotiations . It was argued that he may have met him either at his court in
the Provincia Arabia or Palaestina Secunda, possibly at Jabiya, since a peace
then obtained between Persia and Byzantium, or he may have met him at his
camp in the limitrophe. The proximity of the monastery of Mar J:Ian10a to the
limitrophe and the Persian-Lakhmid border could suggest possibly, but not
necessarily, that Longinus met Mungir at his camp in the limitrophe not far
from the monastery.
The sequel to the conference at the monastery of Mar J:Iani"na was de-
scribed by John of Ephesus, but that part of his HE is not extant . In view of
the threat to his life at the monastery of Mar J:Iani"na and his invocation of the
name of the king (Mungir), Longinus most likely returned to the protective
court or camp of Mungir, where he spent a year. On his return to Alexandria
in 5 77, he wrote a letter to Paul before returning to his missionary work in
Nubia.i 24
As for Paul, his end may best be told in the words of the scholar who
disentangled the complexities and intricacies of these events by laying under
contribution the Documenta Monophysitarum, then not yet translated into Latin. m
This is how Paul spent the last four years of his life: "Paul after Longinus'
departure gave up the struggle and retired to Constantinople, where for four
years he lived in a hiding-place known only to a few friends and here in 581
he died and was buried by night in a nunnery under a false name without
funeral rites. " 326
The Ghassanid Involvement in the Paulite-Jacobite Controversy
The involvement of the federate Ghassanids in this controversy had been
recorded by John of Ephesus not only in the sporadic references to Mungir
scattered in his Ecclesiastical History but also in chapter 36 of Book IV, a
chapter entirely devoted to it; It is a valuable account recording the various
phases of the controversy and the corresponding Ghassanid reaction to them .
1
The account of the first phase yields the following data on the federate
Arabs: they were devoted to Jacob; later they became also devoted to Paul
323 See Honigmann, Eviques, 192....:93_
324 Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 476.
325 Hence Aigrain could not use them in his monumental article "Arabie" but had co
depend on Kleyn's unsatisfactory publication.
326 Brooks, "Patriarch Paul," 476; for a few more details, see Honigmann, Eveques, 204.
after he took refuge with them, hiding among them from the authorities; they
were then impressed by his moderation, gravity, and learning; the devotion of
the federate Arab Ghassanids to the two clerics increased after the death of
I:Iarith, when the two clerics met together while visiting the Ghassanids, at
which time they received each other in a friendly fashion; and so the federate
Ghassanids were equally devoted to the two, Paul and Jacob.
Caput XXXVI, de Mondir filio I:Iarith rege 'fayaye, et de omnibus ca-
tervis eius, qui propter eandem occasionem quae inter Paulum et
Iacobum erat vexabantur et adflictab,1ntur. Cum igitur omnes catervae
'fayaye ab initio beato lacobo devincti essent, necnon et vivente etiam
sene I:Iarith Paulus illuc ivisset et apud eos celatus esset, et per eum
etiam propter moderationem et gravitatem et eius doctrinam aedificati
sunt. Necnon magis post mortem I:Iarith, cum partes ambae apud eos
convenissent, tum alter alterum amice receperunt, tum ibi in ipsis castris
'fayaye ambobus Paulo et lacobo omnes devincti erant. 327
The striking feature of this passage, and also of the remaining part of the
chapter, is the emphasis not so much on Mungir about whom John of Ephesus
had said much elsewhere, but about the Ghassanid troops themselves, who
were passionately engaged in the controversy. The Syriac for these troops is
the term yahle, which generally means "tribes," but here in this military fed-
erate context it means the Ghassanid federate troops 328 and is rightly translated
by Brooks as catervae, the Latin term used for non-Roman auxiliary troops in
the Roman army, as opposed to the legions and regular troops. 329
The passage indicates the involvement of the Ghassanid armies in the
theological and ecclesiastical disputes, evidenced by the fact that John of
Ephesus thought it appropriate to devote an entire chapter to them. Notewor-
thy is the emphatic omnes, "all" of them, used twice in the passage to reflect
the extent and pervasiveness of this involvement.
The passage records the devotion that the Ghassanid armies nursed to-
ward the old man Jacob, who became a sort of holy man of Monophysite
Oriens and the most prestigious cleric, in spite of the fact that he was not the
patriarch but only the bishop of Edessa, technically. This devotion must de-
rive both from genuine admiration for Jacob and also from that of I:Iarith
toward him, reflected most eloquently in I:Iarith's/Arethas' letter 330 addressed
to him in 563.
327 See John of Ephesus, HE, p. 162, lines 3-13 .
328 Explicicly referred to as armies when Arethas refers to
them during the Tritheistic
controversy, ca. 570, for which, see above, 818. Closer is an earlier passage in John of Ephesus,
HE, p. 156, line 4, which explicitly refers to the armies of the Ghassanids, divided by the
Paulite-Jacobite schism; above, 878.
329 On catervae
in this sense, applied to Arab federate troops, see BAFOC, 171.
330 On this letter, see above, 782-88 .
The devotion to Paul derives from reasons similar to those that informed the
Ghassanid devotion toward Jacob. But there were additional ones. Paul had come
as a refugee from Egypt in the late 560s, and the old king, Arethas, gave him
the privilege of Arabic jiwiir, the privilege of being a protected neighbor. So the
Ghassanid troops supported him on that score, in addition to the fact that they
were impressed by his virtues-moderation, gravity, and learning.
Later in the mid 570s, both of them, Paul and Jacob, stayed with the
Ghassanids when both were on friendly terms with each other, and the troops
became attached to both of them . The ecclesiastical historian speaks of the
castra, the ~irtii of the Ghassanids, as the venue, and this may mean his camp-
town, such as Jabiya in the Golan, or a camp in the limitrophe, probably the
former. This reference to the meeting of two distinguished clerics at the court
or camp of the Ghassanids sheds a bright light on the non-military aspects of
the history of the Ghassanids. They emerge from these references as a military
group that was deeply involved in the cultural currents of the day. The
Ghassanid military tamp becomes the venue for the patriarch of Antioch and
the holy man of the Monophysite Orient, and thus it ceases to be merely a
camp for a group of rude soldiers but a center where matters of ecclesiastical
concern are discussed. This picture of the Ghassanid camp-town is important
for grasping the truth about the Ghassanids in the history of Arabic and
Christian culture in Oriens in the sixth century .
2
The second phase of the controversy and response begins when relations
between Paul and Jacob soured in the mid 570s after the Alexandrians re-
jected Paul and agitated against him while he was in Egypt, and were also
able to win to their side Jacob, who agreed to depose Paul from the patriarch-
ate. John of Ephesus refers to this phase when he says that all the Arabs were
disturbed by the schism, especially Mungir their king, together with his
brothers and sons and others who besought the old man, Jacob, to be recon-
ciled and be united with Paul. Jacob refused either to receive Paul or to be
joined in union with him, giving as a pretext the Alexandrian rejection and
deposition of Paul, saying "If they will not receive him, neither will I." As a
result, the Arabs were disturbed and grieved.
Tandem vero, cum Satanas perturbationem inter eos iecisset, 'fayaye omnes
vexabantur; et praesertim ipse rex eorum Mondir cum fratribus et filiis suis
et ceteris, qui ipsum senem Iacobum obsecrabant ut alter ad alterum acced-
erent et unirentur; qui eis non obtemperabat ut eum reciperet eique uni-
retur, cum Alexandrinos obtenderet: "Nisi illi eum recipient, nee ego eum
recipiam." Itaque omnes 'fayaye indignabantur et vexabantur. 331
331 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 162, lines 14-20.
The passage emphasizes, as had the preceding one, the fact that all the
Arab federates were perturbed by the schism between the two Monophysite
prelates. This is the record of the first reaction of the Ghassanid federates to
the schism and reflects their concern.
In addition to the troops, there was also the king, Mungir, who was
especially concerned. There is also reference to his brothers and sons who were
also concerned about this schism. This reference may be added to others in
John of Ephesus on the Ghassanid royal house, which appears united around
its chief in ecclesiastical as well as military matters, and it must be the earliest
implied reference to Nu'man, Mungir's son, who comes to prominence in the
580s, after the arrest and exile of Mungir in 582. The text speaks of "others"
too, who were concerned, together with the Ghassanid royal house; most
probably they were phylarchs from other tribal groups within the federate
army.
Jacob's inflexibility and adamant refusal to be reconciled sound strange,
coming as it does from one who had himself consecrated Paul as patriarch in
the 560s, who had accepted him after he apostasized to Dyophysitism in the
early 570s, and with whom he exchanged the most cordial letters. Jacob was
either getting senile or had come to the conclusion that Paul was truly a bad
penny.
3
The third phase opened when even the Ghassanid and other federates
became themselves divided, like the rest of the Monophysite community in
Oriens. Some of them became partisans of Paul and others of Jacob. John of
Ephesus gives some details on how this happened. He says that the Arabs took
communion at the hands of Paul when he stayed with them; that they also
took it at the hands of Jacob who, however, ordered them not to take it from
Paul. This divided the Ghassanid federate Arabs into Paulites and Jacobites,
while others among them accepted both. This schism annoyed, perturbed,
and grieved the federate Arabs, especially Mungir, who tried in vain to recon-
cile the two. This deplorable state of affairs did not come to an end with the
death of Jacob while on his way to Alexandria, 332 but continued even after his
demise.
Et, quandocunque Paulus ad eos ibat, eum recipiebant, et ab eo eu-
charistiam accipiebant; et, quando Iacobus etiam, similiter; donec
Iacobus eos eucharistiam ab eo accipere vetuit. ltaque omnes in indigna-
tione et adflictione et perturbatione usque ad mortem senis Iacobi per-
332 This took place in 578, apparently at the monastery of Cassian near the Egyptian
border; see John of Ephesus, HE, Book IV, chap. 58.
stiterunt. Post mortem eius autem maior pars eorum eum secuti sunt, et
pars Paulitas, et pars etiam ambos accipere perstiterunt, cum omnes pari-
ter ob bane discordiam et contentionem alienam quae inter eos facta erat
maererent et adfligerentur, et praesertim ipse Mondir rex eorum, qui
ambas partes ut inter se conciliarentur semper obsecrabat, nee invidia et
odium et inimicitia quae a Satana effecta erat, et eorum qui secundum
voluntatem eius consiliarii erant ambas partes rursus placari et conciliari
usque ad mortem sivit. ltaque, cum senex Iacobus Alexandriam eadem
controversia iter direxisset, Deus qui omnia scit, cum in adiutorium eius
prius spectasset, de eo in via exitum decrevit ut etiam supra saepe notum
fecimus. 333
John of Ephesus' account of this third phase of Ghassanid involvement in
the Paulite-Jacobite schism contains data that are important to cultural as well
as military matters in the history of the Ghassanids.
Murnjir was a pious Christian and a zealous Monophysite, as his father
had been before him. Hence his effort at reconciling the two parties, exam-
ined in other passages in John of Ephesus, is understandable within this con-
text of a devoted Monophysite working for the unity of his church. But this
passage on the effect of the schism on the Ghassanid troops adds a new dimen-
sion to Mungir's interest in the reconciliation . The Ghassanid army was pos-
sessed of a high morale, part of which was religious zeal. Dissension within
his army, especially on ecclesiastical grounds, was corrosive of military unity
and combat readiness, especially important to a commander such as Mungir
who was known for his innovative techniques in conducting a lightning war
against his adversaries. Hence the additional reason for his desire to heal
Monophysite wounds opened by this schism.
The passage gives a rare glimpse of Christian life at the Ghassanid camp-
town. None other than the patriarch of Antioch resided there for some time,
celebrated the liturgy in the camp church, and administered the Eucharist,
which the troops took from his hand. Jacob, the holy man of the Monophysite
Orient, did the same at the Ghassanid camp, and the soldiers took commu-
nion at his hands. Thus the ~ira, the camp-town of the Ghassanids, with the
visit and stay of the two ranking hierarchs in Oriens, ceases to be merely a
military camp for a federate frontier force. It becomes the home of a Mono-
physite army that took its Christian service and worship seriously.
Even more important is the involvement of the Ghassanid troops in the
ecclesiastical intricacies of the schism that divided them into Paulites and
Jacobites. The schism and the controversy center around many of the activities
of Paul before and during his incumbency of the Patriarchate of Antioch, m
333 See HE, p. 162, line 21-p. 163, line 2.
addition to the canonicity of his consecration. The passage in John of Ephesus
gives the strong impression that the troops were passionately interested in the
controversy, and this must have involved legal matters of canon law. The
question arises as to whether these troops, Arab troops who spoke Arabic, and
probably knew little or no Greek or Syriac, discussed such matters in Arabic.
The Documenta MonophyJitarum contain many letters and exchanges on Paul
and his controversial career including an apologia. Paul stayed for some time
among the Ghassanids, and it is not unnatural to assume that he would have
circulated some defense of himself for the benefit of his hosts and the troops
that supported him. If so, it is not unlikely that it may have been translated
into Arabic, ~he language of these troops; this would have enabled them to
engage in the dispute with the enthusiasm and zeal that is apparent from the
passage in John of Ephesus.
A few years before, in 569, their king Arethas spoke of how the
Ghassanid armies accepted the theological position presented by the orthodox
Monophysite church against the Tri theists, Eugenius and Conon. 334 The pre-
sumption is that the Arab federate troops could understand and use a simple
theological vocabulary for taking part in the controversy and for accepting the
orthodox Monophysite position. Now this passage in John of Ephesus, which
brings the Paulite-Jacobite schism to the Ghassanid camp and to the
Ghassanid troops, suggests that these had a working knowledge of a simple
and limited Arabic vocabulary pertaining to Monophysite canon law as well. 335
VI. APPENDIX
The Episcopate of the Golan
The Chronicle of Michael the Syrian provides data that enable the student of the eccle-
siastical history of the Ghassanids to conclude, as has been already suggested in this
volume, that the Ghassanid episcopate did not disappear after the death of John in the
570s or of Antiochus who, it has been argued, could have been John's successor.
In two documents of the Islamic period, pertaining to the seventh and the eighth
334 See above, 818.
335 A passage from Gregory of Nyssa is most relevant in this connection. The church
father speaks of the popularity of theological discussions in Constantinople toward the end of
the 4th century. The discussions were conducted not only in councils, cathedrals, and churches
among theologians but also among ordinary people in the city's streets and markets. In his
Oratio de Deitate Fi/ii et Spiritus Sancti, he says: "Everything is full of those who are speaking of
unintelligible things-streets, markets, squares, crossroads. I ask how many oboli I have to
pay; in answer they are philosophizing on the born or unborn; I wish to know the price of
bread; one answers: 'The Father is greater than the Son'; I inquire whether my bath is ready;
one says, 'The Son has been made out of nothing'"; quoted by A. Vasiliev, History of the
Byzantine Empire (Madison, Wisc., 1952), 79-80.
Taste for theological discussion was widespread in this prom-Byzantine period during
which christological controversies continued to rage beyond the 4th century. If the bath atten-
dants and shopkeepers of Constantinople discussed such matters passionately, the Ghassanid
troops, who were zealous soldiers of the Cross, did likewise, as intimated by the sources.
centuries respectively, there is reference to the bishop of the Golan. In the encyclical
letter of John, the metropolitan of the Orient, mention is made of "Jean de Djaulan"
1
as having signed the document, together with other Monophysite clerics, for the
peace of the church brought about by the metropolitan in 684. In another document
that speaks of the consecration of Monophysite bishops by Patriarch Cyriacus (conse-
crated in 793), there is reference to "l:fabib, eveque de la region de Djaulan, du
monastere de Sarmin. "'
The "Djaulan" in these documents is the Gaulanitis/Golan, the base of the
Ghassanids in Oriens in pre-Islamic times where their capital, Jabiya, was located.
That a bishopric in Islamic times carried the name Golan can easily suggest that it
was a continuation of a bishopric that existed in pre-Islamic times without interrup-
tion. Jabiya continued to flourish after the Muslim Conquest, and in fact it was the
capital of Mu'awiya as the governor of al-Sham (Oriens) for some two decades until he
was proclaimed the first Umayyad caliph and moved to a new capital, Damascus, in
661. So it was still a flourishing town then, and it is only natural to suppose that as
the capital of the Ghassanid Golan, Jabiya had also been the see of its bishop in recent
pre-Islamic times, some twenty years earlier, and before the battle of the Yarmuk in
636 put an end to Ghassanid political and military presence in Oriens. This leads to
the conclusion that the Ghassanid episcopate did not cease to exist after the Muslim
Conquest of Oriens and that the region retained its Christian character, or some of it,
after that conquest, a fact also consonant with the Christian-Muslim symbiosis, char-
acteristic of the Umayyad period in Bilad al-Sham.
The emergence in the Syriac source of a Monophysite bishopric in 684 by the
name of the Golan, going back to the recent pre-Islamic period, could throw light on
the episcopate of Theodore, the Ghassanid bishop whose career has been treated at
length in this volume. In "Theodore, the Arab Bishop of the Limitrophe,"
3 it was
suggested that his see, in which he normally resided, was Jabiya, the capital of the
Ghassanids, of whom he was bishop. This suggestion now receives some further con-
firmation from the designation of the Golan as a bishopric in the later Syriac source.
After the disappearance of the temporal power of the Ghassanids in Oriens in
636 at the battle of Yarmuk, their ecclesiastical presence evidently persisted in the
most Ghassanid of all territories, the Golan, their heartland. The episcopate presuma-
bly ministered to those who did not withdraw to Anatolia after the end of Byzantine
rule in Oriens and who chose to stay there and remained Christian, becoming Scrip-
turalists (Qimmis) in the new Islamic order. Thus the Ghassanid episcopate survived
the extinction of the phylarchate.
1 Chronique, II, 461; for the Syriac, seep. 440, col. B, line 9.
2 Ibid., III, p. 452, no. 51; for the Syriac seep. 753, col. B, no. 51. '"Golan" is recogniz-
able in the unintelligible Syriac word ar-go/ana. See also Chabot's footnote, p. 452 note 5,
where the Arabic version read '"bilad Golan."
l:fabib is an Arabic name, and so the bishop was ,\rab . Jean/John is the Christian biblical
name, which the first bishop of 684 could easily have assumed on his consecration. le thus
remains an open question whether he was also Arab. The presumption is chat he was, continu-
ing che tradition of the Arab bishops of che Ghassanids, as Theodore himself had been in pre-
Islamic times.
3 Above, 850-60.
XIII
The Reign of Tiberius (578-582)
I. INTRODUCTION
T
he accession of Tiberius in 578 augured well for Arab-Byzantine rela-
tions. His co-rulership with Justin for the preceding four years had wit-
nessed the reconciliation of Mun<Jir and his return to the service of Byzantium
in 575. This set the stage for even better relations when Tiberius became sole
ruler with the death of Justin II in 578. The well-intentioned emperor made a
very gallant effort at renewing imperial efforts co reconcile the Monophysices,
which contrasts with that of his predecessor after the failure of his second
Henotikon and the unleashing of the second persecution against the Mono-
physites. He apparently had begun this policy of reconciliation even before the
inception of his reign as sole ruler in October 578. In the preceding year he
had asked three of his ambassadors to Persia to mediate a reconciliation be-
tween the Paulites and Jacobites in Oriens, but to no avail, and was to con-
tinue his efforts in that direction in the most vigorous way, as will become
clear in the course of this chapter.
The zeal of his federate Ghassanid king, Mun<Jir, for bringing about this
reconciliation matched his own. Hence the harmonious relations that obtained
between the two; and it was during the first three years of the reign that the
career of Mun<Jir, politically and ecclesiastically, reached its climax. In the
winter of 580, and after an outstanding military record on the Persian front,
the Ghassanid king was invited by Tiberius to visit Constantinople, and was
there given a magnificent reception, described in detail by John of Ephesus. 1
During his stay in the capital he transacted political and ecclesiastical business
with the autokrator, and it is the ecclesiastical part that is the concern of this
chapter. On March 2 of the same year, he convened a conference of the various
warring Monophysite parties and achieved the impossible when his quest for
an accommodation among the three Monophysite parties was crowned with
signal success. 2 Not only was he hailed and acclaimed in the capital, but also
1 For this and his coronation with a higher-grade crown, see BASIC 1.1, 398-406.
2 In so doing, he was repeating, but on a much larger scale, what his father, Arethas, had
achieved in Constantinople a decade earlier when he presided over the church council that
excommunicated the two Tritheists, Eugeni.us and Conon; see above, 805-24 .
The Reign of Tiberius 895
in the provinces. His return journey to Oriens was a triumph; in Antioch he
was given a reception similar to that in Constantinople . Shortly after, he won
the smashing victory over his enemies, the Lakhmids, which, according to
John of Ephesus, won him universal fame and admiration. So evidently 580
was his annus mirabilis on three fronts-political, ecclesiastical, and military. 3
Then, all of a sudden, the fortunes of the Ghassanid king took a sharp
turn for the worse. He was lured to a church dedication ceremony in Oriens,
was arrested by one of his trusted friends, and was taken to Constantinople,
where he was put under house arrest. He was then exiled to Sicily where he
languished for some twenty years. As a result, Arab-Byzantine relations expe-
rienced a setback that changed their course and influenced that of the extra-
ordinary events of the seventh century.
Mungir was accused of high treason, and the charge has haunted the
imagination of historians till the present day. Only one modern historian of
the reign of Tiberius did justice to Mungir's place in the history of Byzan-
tium-Ernst Stein. He painted a glowing picture of the Ghassanid king, not
undeserved in view of the positive appreciation of the contemporary source
and the objectivity and perspicacity of this modern historian . 4 But his account
of the ecclesiastical part of his achievement remains necessarily brief, and his
well-known monograph is not essentially a contribution to ecclesiastical his-
tory. Historians since then have not left Mungir unnoticed, but the treatment
is perfunctory and fails to do justice to the role he played in the fortunes of
the Monophysite church; and there are inaccuracies. 5 In view of the sporadic,
though fairly detailed , reference to him in the primary sources, 6 it is necessary
to give a full treatment to this last phase of the Ghassanid king 's contribution
to ecclesiastical history. If his conference of Constantinople had not been sub-
sequently torpedoed, Mungir 's place would have been even more important
3 See HE, Book IV, pp. 163-66 .
4 For Stein on Mungir, see BASIC 1.1, 448-51.
5 A few of the more recent works on ecclesiastical history may be singled out as illustra-
tions: J . S. Trimingham , in a monograph on Arab Christianity , seems completely unaware of
the conference of Constantinople . He discussed only Mungir's crown and dismissed it in a few
lines; see Trimingham , Christianity among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (London, 1979), 185.
Frend is more aware of the role of Mungir, but his discussion is brief and has inaccuracies: (a) he
ascribes to Mungir 's father, Arethas, the praetorium extra muros at Ru~afa, whereas it belongs to
his son; (b) he conceives of the Ghassanids as pastoralists, since he speaks of their tents and
tribes and pasturages ; see Frend, Rise, 326, 327, and 329. E. H . Hardy associates the confer-
ence in Constantinople , not with Mungir, but with his son, Nu'man; see The Coptic En-
cyclopaedia, s.v. Damian, vol. III, p. 688. Only an old work has done Mungir some justice and
has drawn some attention to his importance, but reference to Mungir is intermittent since it is
not a work on the Ghassanids, but on the patriarchs of Alexandria: see the chapter on Damian
in J . Maspero, Histoire des patriarches d'A/exandrie (Paris, 1923), 258.
6 The best source remains John of Ephesus; Michael the Syrian and Bar-Hebraeus have
little to say. The former is slightly better than the latter and will be drawn upon when useful.
than Stein thought. In the interests of clarity, the treatment of this triennium,
from 578 to 581, which witnessed these dynamic events, may be divided into
four sections: ( 1) the biennium that preceded the conference of Constantinople
in 580; (2) the conference itself in March of that year; (3) the sequel to the
conference-the triumphal return of Mungir to Oriens; (4) and finally, the
anticlimax to the great successes scored, from the fall of Mungir after the
summer of 580 until the end of 581.
II.THE BIENNIUM OF 578-580
In order to understand exactly what Mungir achieved in March 580, how he
was able to accomplish what he did, and also the ardent desire he displayed at
the conference for ecclesiastical unity, noted by his historian, it is necessary to
discuss briefly the background of the conference of Constantinople in 580,
namely, the biennium that preceded it. It is a complex and intricate back-
ground related to three groups: (a) the Monophysite camp divided into three
parties, with the Alexandrians and the two warring ones in Oriens, the Jac-
obites and Paulites; (b) the Dyophysite camp of both the imperial central
government and the ecclesiastical establishment, composed of the three patri-
archs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria; and (c) the Ghassanid
camp, itself divided between loyalties to the Paulites and Jacobites.
The Monophysite Camp
The triennium that followed the death of Jacob Baradaeus in A.O. 578
might have been a period of peace for the Monophysite church. With the
disappearance from the ecclesiastical scene of the "old man Jacob," the with-
drawal of the ranking hierarch, Paul himself, to live in obscurity elsewhere
than in the patriarchate, and the death of Peter IV of Alexandria who had
deposed Paul, all seemed set for a return to normality and the quieting of
factional hostility within the Monophysite communion. But it turned out to
be otherwise, and the period was a stormy one partly due to the emergence of
a powerful ecclesiastical personality on the scene, namely, the newly conse-
crated Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria, Damian, in 578, who gave a new
lease on life to the fierce passions that had rent the Monophysite church
asunder. Consequently, in addition to the Jacobites and Paulites in Oriens,
there now appeared a third party involved in the inter-Monophysite strife,
namely, that of the Alexandrians, and so Mungir had to deal with the three in
Constantinople.
1. The relentless Jacobite opposition to PauF continued even after he left
the Patriarchate of Antioch for Constantinople in 577, some four years before
he died, in 581. This opposition found expression in two ways. (a) They sent
7 See Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 336; also Honigmann, Eveques, 203-4.
to Constantinople two synce//i of Jacob, namely, Sergius and Julian, who, with
their followers, continued the agitation against Paul in the capital, even after
Jacob's death. (b) Even more expressive of their opposition to Paul was their
election of a new patriarch for Antioch in 581: Paul had already suffered one
humiliation when he was deposed by Peter IV of Alexandria in 575, and now,
even while alive, he had to suffer the further humiliation of being superseded
by another patriarch. The new Monophysite patriarch of Antioch was Peter of
Callinicum in whose candidacy for the patriarchate Jacob himself had ex-
pressed interest before his death, but Peter would not accept. Even now he
accepted with great hesitation, and he continued to have scruples of con-
science until he heard of the death of Paul in 581.
2. The third party in the inter-Monophysite war was the Alexandrian. Its
motives and the considerations that governed its conduct was more complex
than the Jacobite, and they increased the difficulties that Mungir encountered
in Constantinople in March 580. There was first the legacy of the past-a
legacy of opposition to, and rejection of, Paul, their countryman. 8 In the late
560s, they had rejected him and questioned the canonicity of his selection as
patriarch; in the mid-570s, after he interfered again in Egyptian ecclesiastical
politics through Bishop Longinus, they deposed him and convinced Jacob
Baradaeus to do likewise. 9 Throughout the patriarchate of Peter IV over Alex-
andria (575-577), they continued their opposition. Monophysite Alexandria
in the last triennium inherited this legacy of ill-will toward Paul.
The intensity of this inveterate hatred of Paul on the part of his country-
men might have subsided with the death of Peter IV in 577 and the with-
drawal of Paul from the scene altogether, but for the appearance of a new
strong man on the patriarchal throne of Alexandria, Damian. As the new
incumbent, he continued the Alexandrian war first against Paul and later
against the new patriarch of Antioch, Peter of Callinicum, thus initiating a
rift between the two Monophysite sister churches of Antioch and Alexandria
that lasted until 616. It is important to examine briefly his motives and the
course of action he chose to take in these crucial years, because they were not
unrelated to the downfall of Mungir. 10
8 What exactly the charges leveled against Paul by his countrymen were is not recorded in
the sources. It is possible that these charges were real and serious and not made up by the
Alexandrians; the fact that he, the Copt, chose to leave his country and retire in his youth to a
convent in Syria might suggest that he wanted a change of scene from where he may have
misbehaved. So this could give some support to the validity of the charges of the Alexandrians
against him.
9 Jacob's acceptance of the Alexandrian charges against Paul is surprising in view of his
long record of support of Paul whom he had consecrated. It is just possible that the Alex-
andrians convinced him during his visit of the charges they had made against Paul in the 560s.
10 Judgments on Damian vary; while John of Ephesus and Michael the Syrian are hard on
The new patriarch was a dominant, even domineering, personality in the
new Monophysite camp, especially after the death of the ranking Mono-
physite, the old man Jacob. He was energetic and fearless, a respectable theo-
logian, and all these qualities found arenas for their display during this period
and after it. It should be remembered that Damian was a Syrian by birth and
was politically connected in Oriens; his brother was the governor of Edessa.
This could easily explain the extraordinary action he took, described in detail
by John of Ephesus, namely, his journey into Oriens, entering Antioch itself
where he tried to consecrate a new patriarch for the city, even during the
lifetime of the incumbent Paul." It is possible to see in this action an attempt
to assert his preeminence as the leading Monophysite prelate of the day and
possibly as a form of retaliation against Paul, who traveled from Oriens to
Alexandria in the mid-570s in order to interfere in its ecclesiastical affairs,
which led to the consecration of Theodore as patriarch of Alexandria by Lon-
ginus . Personality traits and the legacy of the past apart, it is possible to
detect in Damian's behavior a trace of a revival of the Alexandrian claim of the
see of St. Mark to guide and direct the fortunes and destinies of all the Mono-
physite churches of the East. 12
The Dyophysite Camp
The Dyophysite camp was composed of the imperial government repre-
sented by Tiberius and the patriarchs of the three sees in the East: Constanti-
nople, Antioch, and Alexandria. 13
1. The three patriarchs continued their relentless opposition to the
Monophysites in what the latter called the "Second Persecution," begun by
Justin II (and continued through the co-rulership of Tiberius from September
574 to October 578). Eutychius, in Constantinople, who, on the death of
John Scholasticus in 577, was recalled and consecrated patriarch, continued
his predecessor's anti-Monophysite policy, which elicited, however, from
Tiberius a spirited reply. 14 The patriarch of Antioch was none other than
Gregory, the bete noire in Monophysite sources. He emerged as a vigorous
persecutor of the Monophysites and played an important role in bringing about
the eventual downfall of Mungir. 15 The patriarch of Alexandria, John the
him, ochers are not so hard and some are admirers of the Alexandrian patriarch. For the latter
group, see the notice of him in Fliche and Marcin, Histoire de l'Eglise, IV, 490-91; Hardy,
"Damian"; and C. D. G. Muller, "Damian, Papsc und Patriarch von Alexandrien," OC 70
(1986), 118-42.
11 See HE , Book IV, chap. 41, pp. 166-68.
12 Further on Damian's motives, see below, 912-16 .
13 They were Eucychius, Gregory, and John respectively.
14 For chis see John of Ephesus, HE, Book III, chap. 21, pp. 109-10; and below, 899,
917.
15 The most recent and satisfying coverage of Gregory's career and personality may be
found in Pauline Allen, Evagrius Scho/asticus, the Church Historian (Louvain, 1981); see the
"Synodite," began his patriarchate in 568. Before his death in 579, he had
conducted a campaign of repression against the Monophysites of the city to
the extent of arresting many of their clerics and sending them to Constantino-
ple, which they reached in May 579. On their refusal to communicate with
the Chalcedonians, they were incarcerated in various monasteries in Constanti-
nople by Patriarch Eutychius. 16
2. This triennium coincided with the beginning of the reign of Tiberius as
sole ruler after a co-rulership with Justin and a regency that lasted from Septem-
ber 574 to October 578. The new autokrator was well-disposed and continued the
policy of Justin II in trying to reconcile the Monophysites. He apparently started
this policy even before the inception of his retgn as sole ruler in October 578, as
noted earlier, when he asked three of his ambassadors to Persia to mediate a
reconciliation between the Paulites and Jacobites in Oriens, but failed. 11
Even more significant of his desire to solve the Monophysite problem
that had plagued the reign, and the preceding ones, was his reply to two of
his patriarchs in Constantinople, who wanted him to share their antipathies
and repressive actions against the Monophysites . When John Scholasticus ap-
proached him on the subject, his reproachful reply was to the effect that the
patriarch was asking him to behave as if he were a Diocletian, a persecutor of
the Christians; also, he had enough trouble warring with the barbarians and
did not want a war with his own people. 18 When John's successor, Eutychius,
approached him again on the same subject, he gave him a similar answer: that
he was warring with the barbarians and did not wish the extra burden of
persecuting the Monophysites, adding that he was innocent and free of guilt
in the matter of persecution. 19
His replies to the two patriarchs are significant. They reveal a ruler fully
aware of where the danger for the empire lay and where his energies should be
spent. The requests of the two patriarchs could only have alienated him from
the ecclesiastical solution of the Monophysite problem and made him sus-
picious of patriarchal intentions. Hence his decision to resort to a secular
solution worked out by himself, and this is the perfect explanation for the
extraordinary course of action he took in Constantinople in the winter of 580
when he excluded the entire Chalcedonian establishment in Constantinople
from participating in his attempts to solve the Monophysite problem . 20
Such must have been the thinking behind his invocation of Mungir's
help for a solution. The three-year peace with the Persians had come to an end
in 578, and the emperor had to worry about the course of the war with the
index, s.v. Gregory.
16 See John ofEphesus, HE, Book IV, chap. 37, p. 163.
17 Ibid., chap. 35, pp. 161-62.
18 Ibid., Book III, chap. 12, pp. 101-2 .
19 Ibid., chap. 21, p. 109.
20 See below, 900-908.
secular enemy in which the Monophysite king, Mungir, was taking part ,
together with Maurice, 21 the magister militum per Orientem. Hence his coura-
geous decision, in spite of patriarchal opposition to the Monophysites , to
summon Mungir to Constantinople in the winter of 580. He clearly under-
stood that the key for solving the Monophysite problem was none other than
Mungir, whose support for the Persian war he needed and whose prestige
among the Monophysites in Oriens and in Egypt was established, partly on
the record of his father, Arethas, and partly on his own record in the 570s.
Hence his initiative in inviting Mungir to the fateful conference of Constan-
tinople in the winter of 580, during which important political and military,
as well as ecclesiastical, problems were discussed and solved.
The Ghassanid Camp
The Paulite-Jacobite schism has also affected the Ghassanid federate
army. The stay of Paul among the Ghassanids twice, especially in the 570s,
and the conference held at the court of Mungir in order to resolve the confes-
sional differences, divided the Ghassanid army, or even armies, into two
camps, Paulites and Jacobites . 22
One of the . secrets behind the victories of the Ghassanids over their ene-
mies, the Lakhmids, was the absolute monolithic structure of the Ghassanid
army united by tribal and familial loyalty, as well as by religious affiliation-
Christian and Monophysite. This was in sharp contrast with the Lakhmid
army, composed of pagans, Christians , and sometimes Jews. This was now
threatened by theological dissension and division in the Ghassanid camp into
Paulites and Jacobites , which did not help the Ghassanid war effort, and
affected its morale, especially at a time when the Persian front became active
in 578 with the expiration of the three-year peace.
This, then, was the military and ecclesiastical scene that Mungir had
before him in this biennium-sad division in his phylarchate and also in the
patriarchate. Both the Monophysite imperium and the ecclesia were divided .
Hence the ardent desire of the Ghassanid king to see the Monophysite camp
united and his efforts in that direction in 580 at the top in Constantinople.
Ill. THE CONFERENCE OF CONSTANTINOPLE: 2 MARCH 580
Perhaps the foregoing paragraphs have sufficiently described the situation in
the camps of the three parties: the Monophysites, the Dyophysites, and the
Ghassanids. This will now serve as a background for explaining the reasons
behind Tiberius ' extension of an invitation for Mungir to come co Constan-
tinople and for Mungir co accept it. The valuable chapter in the Ecclesiastical
21 Mungir had campaigned with Maurice against Singara and in Mesopotamia, for which,
see BASIC 1.1, 409-16.
22 See above, 887-92 .
History of John of Ephesus will now be drawn upon and quoted in extenso in an
effort to let the contemporary sources speak through the voice of the foreml1'St
Syriac historian of the sixth century, John of Ephesus. His account falls into
three parts: (a) a description of the success Mungir achieved in the winter of
580 in Constantinople; (b) his return to Oriens, his activity in Antioch, and
the reception he was accorded in the spring of 580; and (c) the sequel to his
success at Constantinople and Antioch, and the eventual failure of the accords
of Constantinople, which partly led to the downfall of Mungir in the summer
of 581. This section will deal with the first part, Mungir in Constantinople.
Mungir arrived in the capital in February 580 and was then received by
Emperor Tiberius in the most magnificent manner, as discussed in a previous
chapter in this volume. 23 Presumably it was only after he was through with
political and military transactions with the emperor that he attended to the
business of reconciling the warring Monophysite parties in Constantinople by
preparing them for the conference to be held on 2 March in the capital.
A
John of Ephesus devoted chapter 39 of Book IV to the efforts of Mungir
in this direction, and indeed the title of the chapter speaks of the ascent of
Mungir to Constantinople and his zealous labors in composing the differences
between the Jacobites and Paulites: "CAPUT XXXIX, quomodo Mondir filius
l:larith rex Tayaye ad urbem regiam ascenderit, et de eis quae zelo propter
discidium quod inter Iacobum et Paulum fuit gesta sunt. " 24
After a long passage in which John of Ephesus describes in strong terms
the very sad state of affairs that obtained between the Jacobites and Paulites,
even after the death of "the old man Jacob," he discusses the role of Mungir,
who had come co Constantinople and had been magnificently received by
Tiberius. He praises his piety and zeal in composing the differences between
members of the same communion. He further states that he assembled them,
scolded them, and admonished them on account of the quarrels that had taken
place among them; and he urged them to come to terms with one another,
especially as they were members of the same faith, the same advice that he had
given in person to Jacob and Paul, the two antagonists.
The Latin version of John of Ephesus on the efforts of Mungir in Con-
stantinople reads as follows.
Quoniam, cum gloriosus Mondir patricius ad regem vocatus ascendisset
et magnifice receptus esset, in omnia haec mala quae ab eis qui eiusdem
fidei et eiusdem communionis inter se erant invicem patrari viderat
zelum fortitudinis et Dei timoris induit . Tum is, ambabus partibus con-
23 See BASIC I. 1, 398-406.
24 HE, p. 163, line 33-p. 164, line 1.
gregatis, de omnibus his malis et discidiis et contentionibus quae inter
eos orta erant reprehendere et admonere et obiurgare incepit, eisque ut
discidiis desisterent et certando ac contendo abstinerent et inter se concili-
arentur suadebat, et praesertim pro eo quod eiusdem fidei inter se erant.
Ab ipso enim initio etiam personas Paulum et Iacobum inter se conciliari
et caritate uti cogebat et suadebat et obsecrabat. 25
The passage is a valuable one, in that it gives us a glimpse of the charac-
ter and personality of Mungir. He unites in his own person both the virtues of
a valiant soldier and a good Christian. For the Latin "zelum fortitudinis et Dei
timoris," the Syriac 26 has three distinct virtues: "fniina, ganbaruta, dii)lat al-
a.ha," "zeal" or "enthusiasm," "manliness" or "heroism," and "fear of God." So
the Arab virtues which became conjugates after the rise of Islam (din and
murii'a) are already united in Mungir. 27
The strength of his personality is reflected in what the historian says of his
attitude toward the clerics when he assembled them. Before he advised them to
come to terms with one another and be reconciled, he scolded and reproached
them. The historian uses strong terms in describing the layman, addressing an
assembly of reverend fathers. 28 As he suffered from no lack of veneration for the
clerics, his attitude could only have been inspired by his impatience with their
quarrelsomeness and his zeal for an accord, qualities which may be predicated of
Mungir as a general who wanted action and results and not_ words.
It is noteworthy that the historian who penned this passage on Mungir
was speaking from autopsy. As will be seen further on in this chapter, John of
Ephesus personally attended the conference and thus watched Mungir address
the assembly personally. It is not clear whether Mungir's appearance before
the assembly of Monophysite ecclesiastics was preliminary to this later appear-
ance at the formal conference which was to be held a little later on 2 March or
was the same as this latter one. But this is how Mungir appeared to his
historian when he convened the assembly of Monophysite clerics, presided
over it, and addressed it, on one of the occasions or on both of them.
John of Ephesus goes on to describe the conference of Constantinople and
Mungir's achievement at it. He devotes an entire chapter to it, and his ac-
count may be divided into two parts.
B
The title of the chapter speaks of the role of Mungir as a mediator be-
tween the two parties: "CAPUT XL, de concilio et promisso pacis unionis
25 Ibid., p. 164, lines 17-28 .
26 For the Syriac phrase, see ibid., textus, p. 219, lines 12-13.
27 On these two virtues, on I. Goldziher's views of them, and the M~ammadan tradition
(hadith) chat unites chem, see BASIC II.
28 He was even able co overwhelm the overbearing and domineering Damian.

mutuae quae ab utraque parte glorioso Mondir mediatore facta sunt. " 29 The
historian proceeds to say that after Mungir received from the emperor all that
he wanted, he convened a conference on 2 March 580 to which he invited the
three parties, the Jacobites, the Paulites, and the Alexandrians; that he be-
sought them to cease from the quarrels that Satan had stirred up among them.
He refers to the debate that then took place among the three parties, which
included John himself. He notes that there were men of discernment in the
three parties who regretted the violent deeds wrought by turbulent men
among the three parties and that these rejoiced at the prospect of peace and
the termination of hostilities, and it was their unanimous decision that they
would unite again:
Cum igitur illustris Mondir quidquid voluit apud regem effecisset, de-
inde die mensis adiir die secundo eius eiusdem anni concilium virorum
insignium utriusque partis cum Alexandrinis convocavit, quos ut in-
vicem conciliarentur et quaecunque a Satana inter eos commota erant
tollerent et exstinguerent obsecrabat. Et, cum multa quae narrationem
excedunt inter eos dicta et commota essent, iam non a duabus partibus,
sed a tribus invicem a Iacobitis et a Paulitis, necnon ab Alexandrinis,
cum parvitas nostra etiam inter eos esset, et quoniam in utraque parte
multi prudences erant, et de omnibus quae a turbulentis eorum qui in
partibus supradictis erant procaciter et immaniter perpetrabantur se valde
adflictabant et pace gaudebant tum, ut omnia haec mala tollerentur,
omnes una se accommodaverunt, et promissa dederunt fore ut unio inter
eos fieret. 30
The passage makes clear that Mungir's convocation of the conference
took place after his meeting with Tiberius. This makes practically certain that
it was convened with Tiberius' knowledge and approval since he had been
working toward that end. It is noteworthy that Mungir did not invite every
Monophysite of the three parties to the conference, only men of note, since it
would have been difficult to deal with all of them, and he assumed that the
rest who did not attend would concur with what their notable representatives
had agreed to.
The passage makes clear that the Jacobite-Paulite schism no longer in-
volved the two parties in Oriens but a third party, that of the Alexandrians,
and indeed he refers explicitly to the three parties. In a sense, there were only
two parties, since the Alexandrians sided with the Jacobites against the Paul-
ites. But in view of the subsequent regional struggle between Alexandria and
Antioch within the Monophysite church, John of Ephesus did well to refer to
three parties and thus draw attention to the Alexandrians.
29 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 165, lines 1-2 .
30 Ibid., p. 165, lines 2-16.
John of Ephesus refers to the debate which apparently was long, and so
much so that he says that it was too long to be reported in full. So he only
gave a brief summary of the important features of the debate. The three par-
ties expressed their regrets for the violent deeds done by the turbulent mem-
bers of each of them. And with this repentant mood, they expressed their joy
at the prospect of peace and unanimously promised to bring about the union
of the church . Coming, as it did, from three parties that had ferociously
warred against one another, this could only have been a reflection of the
courage and enthusiasm of the Ghassanid king who convened the conference,
the qualities that John of Ephesus endowed him with. The assembled clerics
could not resist the impact of the powerful personality of the redoubtable
soldier of the Cross; his father before him had impressed imperial Constanti-
nople itself during his visit of 563, including the future emperor Justin II. It
is noteworthy that John of Ephesus speaks of himself as a participant and
witness in this passage, where he modestly speaks of "our humble self' ("cum
parvitas nostra etiam inter eos esset").
The description of the debate among the three parties and Mungir's pres-
idency of the conference raises the question of the language that Mungir spoke
when he addressed them. John of Ephesus does not mention any interpreter,
and the most natural presumption is that he spoke a language intelligible to
all. It could not have been his native Arabic; it could not have been Coptic
which he did not know and was intelligible only to the Alexandrians, or a
portion of them; it could not have been Syriac, intelligible only to the Jac-
obites and Paulites of Oriens . It could only have been Greek, the language of
cultural dominance in Oriens and of Christian theology.
C
John of Ephesus goes on to describe the second phase of the conference
which followed their hopes and promises to unite: after all the parties had
promised to have all their points of difference examined and be disposed of,
they drew up a deed or instrument ofunion,
31 by which their quarrels were to
cease, and furthermore, all the orders of the clergy, monks, and laity should
receive one another after this period of separation and estrangement . Then
prayers were offered to God for this achievement and also promises that the
participants at the conference would exert themselves to bring those that be-
longed to their parties but who were absent to accept the union and peace
brought about there:
Et decretum est ut, dispensatione facta, omnes res adversae quae a Satana
inter eos commotae erant desinerent et cognoscerentur et tollerentur.
31 Ibid., lines 26-30 .
905
Quamobrem, cum omnes huic rei adsensi essent, tum instrumentum etiam
unionis inter eos factufn est quod omnes discordias et contentiones quae
inter eos factae erant sustulit, et constituit ut omnes archiepiscopi et episcopi
et clerici et monachi (coenobia omnia), et laici qui divisi erant se invicem
reciperent, et omnes una ad unionem mutuam sine contentione venirent.
ltaque preces unionis a sacerdotibus utriusque partis itemque ab
Alexandrinis factae sunt; et facta est unio, cum omnes Deo gratias
agerent qui malum et omnes qui eius et ab eo sunt de medio removit, et
omnes promissum dedissent se studio usuros et omnes partis suae fau-
tores qui corpore aberant ad unionem quae facta erat adducturos . 32
The instrumentum unionis (Syriac "ktaba d'):iuyada") 33 referred to by John of
Ephesus is not reproduced by him as a document; he only refers to it and to
its clauses in general terms. Evidently, it contained two principal clauses. The
first involved mempers of the Monophysite communion represented by the
three warring parties to the effect that they should henceforward receive one
another. This applied to the archbishops, bishops, clerics, and monks of all
the monasteries, and it applied to the laymen, too. Prior to this, members of
each party would not receive members from the other, let alone communion.
John of Ephesus, in his chapter on the Ghassanid involvement in this, stated
that Jacob would not let them receive communion from Paul, 34 and that this
divided the Ghassanid army into Paulites and Jacobites. So presumably the
reference to the laymen could be to soldiers in the Ghassanid armies, among
others.
The second clause involved members of each of the three parties, that
they should exert every effort to bring those of their party who were absent to
agree to the decisions of the conference on the peace and union of the church.
This was an important matter since the failure of the conference eventually
was due to the fact that those who belonged to these three parties but who did
not attend the conference later agitated in Oriens and Egypt when they heard
about it and were instrumental in bringing about the collapse of the agree-
ment reached in Constantinople.
The chapter ends with a statement on the offering of thanks to God and
Mung.ir. Thus Mung.ir emerges as the one who dominated the.conference from
beginning to end. He was the one who convened it, opened it with his ad-
dress and recommendations, and with his commanding presence insured its
success. 35 And so the conference ended as it began with prominence given to
32 For the Syriac phrase, see ibid., textus, p. 220, Jines 25-26 .
33 See above, 904.
34 See above, 889-91.
35 It is of interest to note that Mungir's leadership at the conference of Constantinople is
remembered in a later Syriac collection in the following manner:
Mungir, with thanks offered to him from communities that extended from the
valley of the Nile to the Land of the Two Rivers, thus making him a Near
Eastern figure and not merely a local or regional one in Oriens: "Concilium
vero in pace et gaudio dissolutum est, cum omnes Deo itemque illustri Mon-
dir gratias haberent. " 36
D
After a digression on Damian, the patriarch of Alexandria, which occu-
pies the whole of chapter 41, John of Ephesus returns to Mungir and describes
in chapter 42 the sequel to the conference of Constantinople. The Ghassanid
king intercedes with Tiberius for the freeing of the Alexandrian clergy whom
the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, John, had sent to the capital and
whom the Chalcedonian patriarch of Constantinople had incarcerated. The
clergy are set free, given presents by Mungir, and leave for Egypt. Mungir
returns again to Tiberius for the final meeting to negotiate this time for
Dyophysite-Monophysite relations, for the peace of the church, and for termi-
nation of the persecution that had been unleashed against the Monophysites
by Chalcedonian Byzantium during the reign of Justin II. He swears to
Tiberius that if the latter were to do this, he would also act likewise and bring
the desired peace to the church. The negotiations are entirely successful, and
Tiberius gives his promise that he would act accordingly, thus setting the seal
on the complete success that Mungir scored during his stay in Constantinople:
CAPUT XLII, quomodo clerici alexandrini, itemque postea ipse Mondir
ab urbe regia dimissi sint. Quoniam igitur Alexandrini cum laicis insig-
nibus propter rationem fidei in urbe regia propter mandatum compre-
hensi erant, postquam concilium factum est et dimissum, gloriosus Mon-
dir ingressus regem misericordem Tiberium de eis obsecravit, qui eos
dimisit . Et eis mandatum datum est, necnon res magnas eis fecit ob
causam unionis quam fecerunt. Itaque gaudentes exierunt, et, nave con-
scensa, ad urbem suam abierunt. Post haec vero gloriosus Mondir ob-
And while this division lasted a long time and many bishops died and also influential
persons, finally there came to them Mundie bar }:Iarit, the king of the Arabs, a Christian
man and lover of God and who was much grieved about the decline of the orthodox
(people). And he brought together the two parties and admonished them and rebuked
them and blamed them, leaving (room) for a true inquiry and through (wise) steering
brought about their peace and established their unity. In this way these separated mem-
bers were reconciled with one another prudently, however, beyond the strictness (of the
canons).
The passage comes in chap. 84, "A Discourse concerning Ecclesiastical Leadership," The
Synodicon in the West Syrian Tradition, trans. A. Voobus, Scriptores Syri, vol. 164 (Louvain,
1976), II, p. 183.
36 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 166, lines 7-8.
secravit ut ipse etiam dimitteretur, et regem misericordem de pace ecde-
siae etiam obsecravit, et ut Christianorum persecutio conquiesceret. Qui
ei cum iureiurando promisit se, si a bellis conquieturus essec, pacem
stacim faccurum. 37
The Alexandrian clergy referred to in the passage were those sent by the
Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, John, to Constantinople, where his op-
posite number, Patriarch Eutychius, incarcerated them after they refused to
communicate with him and go over to the Dyophysite position. That Mungir
should have made it his business to work with Tiberius for their emancipation
says much for his circumspection. The Egyptian contingent at the conference
of Constantinople was an important one, and Mungir must have noted that
Alexandria now had a powerful patriarch in the person of Damian whom he
had encountered at the preliminary conference. So this was an excellent ges-
ture on the part of the Ghassanid king for winning the goodwill of the Egyp-
tians, although even this did not insure their ultimate collaboration. In order
to cement the newly forged alliance with the Alexandrians, he even gave them
presents and made sure that they were on board and on their way to Alex-
andria. Apparently, it was only then that he went back to Tiberius, expressed
in the text, post haec.
38 He himself had been the object of imperial intrigues
and bad faith in the early 5 70s, and this perhaps made him extremely careful
in accepting promises from the imperial government.
Now that he had accomplished all that he had set out to do within the
Monophysite camp, he returned to Tiberius with a good bargaining position;
he had pacified the Monophysite church and its warring parties, and had
extracted a written instrument or deed of union, and so he could negotiate
with Tiberius from a position of strength. The next hurdle was that of Mono-
physite-Dyophysite reconciliation for which Tiberius was anxious. The most
burning issue was the persecution unleashed by Chalcedonian Byzantium
against the Monophysites after the failure of Justin H's generous gesture with
the Second Henotikon. Mungir asks for its termination as the basis of the
reconciliation, and swears that if the king would grant this, he for his part
would react accordingly and throw all his weight toward effecting the recon-
ciliation and the peace of the church. 39 This Tiberius granted, and thus Mun-
37 Ibid., p. 168, lines 14-27.
38 Ibid., line 22.
39 The language of John of Ephesus here could be misleading. Mungir swears that if the
king would cease from military proceeding, he (Mungir) would make peace. The words used, a
bel/is and pacem, could suggest real war, but as Pauline Allen has well argued, what was in-
volved was the ecclesiastical war between the Dyophysites and the Monophysites. This is con-
firmed beyond any doubt by the use of the word pacem later in the passage (HE, p. 167, line 4)
in the clearly ecclesiastical context of confessional war. The passage is correctly understood by
908
gir set the seal on the astounding success which he scored on all fronts m
Constantinople in February and March of 580.
IV. THE SEQUEL TO THE CONFERENCE
The second phase of Mungir's effort to bring peace to his church begins with
his departure from Constantinople and his journey to Oriens. He asks Tiberius
for permission to leave after the completion of his mission; the emperor grants
his permission and, moreover, gives him magnificent presents and the right to
wear a higher-grade crown. Mungir travels and reaches another capital, that of
Oriens, Antioch , where he is received by the authorities. There he makes
known the w'ishes of Tiberius concerning the peace of the church and the
agreement reached with him, especially concerning the termination of the
persecution of the Monophysites. The patriarch then has letters written to the
provinces to that effect, and so the persecution stops for a short time:
league hac promissione data eum cum magnis honoribus dimisit, et
donis regiis auri et argenti multi et vestibus splendidis, et ephippiis et
frenis multis argenteis et armis. Et praeter haec omnia diadema etiam
regium ei donavit, quod usque ad hunc nullis regibus 'fayaye umquam
fuerat nee datum erat, sed nonnisi coronam tantum sumere eis fas erat.
league dimissus est et pompa et laetitia magna exiit. Quamobrem, cum
Antiochiam pervenisset, et ibi etiam receptus est, et, regis voluntate et
promissionibus et iureiurando eius de unione ecclesiae confisus, eum et
persecutionem conquiescere iussisse urbis patriarchae et ceteris nuntiavit .
Et statim patriarcha mandavit et ad omnes provincias scriptum est, ne
quis persecutionem facere auderet, quod rex mandasset et pacem facere
quaereret. league paulisper conquievit persecutio . 40
The great pomp with which Mungir was sent off from Constantinople,
indicated in this passage, has been analyzed with much detail in a previous
chapter in this volume, 41 but it is quoted again in this section as the appropri-
ate background for Mungir 's departure. It was reflective of the great hopes
that Tiberius had pinned on Mungir, and Tiberius' rather unexpected reaction
to later accusations against Mungir may be related to the disappointment he
experienced when Mungir ultimately failed to bring about a reconciliation of
the warring Monophysite parties.
Allen (Evagrius, 35), that it was with reference to the confessional "war," and that peace here
meant that Mungir "undertook to maintain the union between the dissident Monophysite
groups." Ir is also possible that , in dealing with the Monophysites, the central government had
used troops to enforce obedience to imperial Chalcedonian edicts. That is the context that a
bel/i s could yield in the form of military action.
40 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 168, line 27-p . 169, line 4.
41 BASIC 1.1, 398-406.
Mungir would have traveled by the state post from Constantinople to
Antioch and would have arrived there by late spring 42 since he must have left
late in March. Antioch was, of course, the great port of call for him and his
cause. It was the capital of Oriens and the see of the patriarchate. Above all,
its Dyophysite see was occupied by the powerful and notoriously anti-Mono-
physite Gregory. Muncjir met him in Antioch and must also have met the
magister militum per Orientem who resided in the same city.
The passage in John of Ephesus expatiates on what the earlier part of the
chapter had laconically told concerning the agreement between Tiberius and
Mungir. It is clear from it that Tiberius had given promises, made solemn by
oaths which he had sworn, that he would bring about the peace of the church,
and that the persecution of the Monophysites should cease. Evidently there
were some written documents handed over to Gregory concerning the termi-
nation of the persecution. With an imperial order before him, Gregory could
only obey, and so he had letters written to the various provinces in his patri-
archate to that effect. Thus the persecution ceased at least for a short time.
Although John of Ephesus is the primary source for these events, Michael
the Syrian, late though he is, has a version of the course of events at Antioch
that is not an exact replica of John's. In Chabot's French translation it reads as
follows.
Sur la demande de Mondar I' empereur ecrivit des lettres en tous lieux et
specialement a Gregorius, patriarche chalcedonien d'Antioche, en vue de
la paix des Eglises. II permit a chacun de louer (Dieu) comme ii l'enten-
dait et de se reunir ou ii voulait. Mondar aidait beaucoup les .1.ta-
XQLVOE'VOL, c'est-a-dire Jes Orthodoxes; car ii etait de leur opinion. Mais
Gregorius d'Antioche ne voulut pas de la paix et ne permit pas de lire
la lettre de l'empereur. Tandis que Mondar etait occupe a faire proclamer
l'edit en tous lieux, des envoyes vinrent Jui annoncer de la part de
ses enfants que les Perses se preparaient a envahir son pays. Aussi partit-
il rapidement, et l'affaire des Eglises resta en suspens. Alors Jes hereti-
ques firent annuler l'edit de l'empereur et continuerent a maltraiter les
fideles. 43
The passage in Michael the Syrian is noteworthy for its details as to what
the accord with Tiberius meant to the Monophysites and in that it gives a
different account of Gregory's reaction to Tiberius' orders. The details consist
in allowing the Monophysites to praise their Lord (to pray) as they thought
proper, presumably according to the doctrines of their confession. More im-
42 On the duration of the journey from Nisibis co Conscancinople, as caking three months,
see ibid., 519.
portant is permission for them to assemble anywhere they wanted. This im-
plies that they could now worship in places that had been closed to them by
the Dyophysites, including Antioch. This account sounds authentic and is a
welcome addition to John's, which is laconic on the terms of the accord with
Tiberius as it is on the instrumentum unionis among the Monophysites.
Surprising, however, is his account of Gregory's reaction. Whereas in
John's account, Gregory was receptive and obedient to the emperor's orders
and so had letters written to the provinces informing them of the imperial
wishes, Michael's presents him in an unreceptive mood: he took the imperial
order ill and disobeyed it, so that Mungir himself had to write the letters to
various places in Oriens . John's account is likely to be the more accurate one,
since he was a contemporary and primary source, while Michael's could reflect
the dislike which the Monophysites harbored toward Gregory, notorious for
his anti-Monophysite stance. So what Michael says on Gregory's reaction most
probably represents the later stage in the unfolding of this drama of intrigues
when Gregory was party to the conspiracy against Mungir and when the per-
secution of the Monophysites was resumed .
It is not difficult, however, to conclude from either account that Gregory
was not thrilled by all this. He was clearly not consulted; Mungir had clearly
bypassed him and gone directly to Tiberius in Constantinople, where he nego-
tiated all these matters, against the wishes and apparently the knowledge of
Patriarch Gregory. The latter no doubt would have preferred to be consulted
and not only to be informed of the outcome of the negotiations which made
him an outsider to an ecclesiastical issue that was very much his business and
within his jurisdiction . That he was not the only member of the Dyophysite
ecclesiastical establishment who was not made happy by Mungir 's success will
become clear further on in this chapter .
. Immediately after his return, Mungir won the smashing victory over his
lakhmid enemies, the allies of Persia against Byzantium, no doubt stimulated
by the euphoria that attended his success on the ecclesiastical front in Con-
stantinople . Thus the late spring or the summer of 580 saw the climax of his
meteoric career on both the military and ecclesiastical fronts.
V. THE BIENNIUM OF 580/81: THE ANTICLIMAX
The period after the summer of 580 until the end of 581 or the beginning of
582 represents the third and final phase of this period. It is the anticlimax to
the splendid successes of 580, and it ended with disaster for Mungir and a
course of events that eventually proved disastrous for Byzantium itself. Hence
the importance of ascertaining exactly what happened to Ghassanid-Byzantine
relations. The problem is not only important to ecclesiastical but also to secu-
lar history, and it has not been examined thoroughly .
After an annus mirabilis of successes on all fronts and a send-off charac-
terized by barbaric splendor on the part of the emperor toward his client-king
and attended by high expectations, there began a period of a year or so charac-
terized by unrelieved failures on all fronts with sharp disappointments that
must have matched in their intensity the high expectations of both. The hero
suddenly becomes the victim and villain, and the punishment meted out to
him was nothing less than an arrest, a charge of treason, and a long exile.
What, then, were the forces that brought about the change in the imperial
mood that finally caused the downfall of Mungir and the collapse of the efforts
to unite the Christian church in the Orient?
The Monophysite Reaction
In his account of these events of the third phase, John of Ephesus' narra-
tive, sporadic and rambling, begins with the Monophysite rejection of the
accords of the conference of Constantinople. In chapter 40 of Book IV, in
which he gave a full account of the conference, he inserted a digression on the
subsequent reaction to it. He spoke of turbulent and iniquitous men who had
not taken part in the conference, which was chiefly restricted, and naturally
so, to the chiefs and the notables of the Monophysite community. Those who
were absent took offense at their exclusion, agitated both in Syria and in
Alexandria, won over many to their cause, and worked strenuously to annul
the accords reached at the conference:
Turbulenti autem nonnulli et tumultuarii forte fue11.u1t, qui sordium ini-
quitatis pleni pacem factam molestissime tulerunt nee ea gavisi sunt; et,
quoniam concilium virorum primorum et insignium apud regem Mondir
factum est, nee multitudine totius populi ei opus fuit, hac de causa
praesertim quod totius multitudinis ratio non habita est nee vocata est,
nonnulli in contrariam partem se verterunt et id quod factum est tollere
studuerunt. Qui congregati coetum fecerunt et scripserunt et turbas
commoverunt, tum in Syria tota tum Alexandriae, et multos contur-
baverunt ut obsisterent neu se accomodarent neu id quod factum est
acciperent, quod Satanam et omnes daemonum eius greges delectavit. 44
Noteworthy in this passage is the fact that dissatisfaction with the ac-
cords of Constantinople existed not only in Egypt but also in Syria itself,
which in this context means Oriens as opposed to Egypt. It is best to begin
with the situation in the former.
Oriens
As happened in the 560s, when attempts were made to bring about
accord at Callinicum in 567, the monks and some of the clergy were the
representatives of extremism and the rejection of all compromise. Unfor-
44 HE, p. 165, line 30-p. 166, line 8.
tunately, John of Ephesus did not give the text of the instrumentum unionis,
drawn up at the conference of Constantinople. But whatever it was, there
must have been clauses in it chat did not appeal to the extremists who felt left
out. In addition to the Monophysite clergy in Oriens, there were of course the
Ghassiinid armies that had also been divided in their loyalties toward Paul and
Jacob. But it is unlikely that discord within the Ghassiinid armies was signifi-
cant. Immediately after his return from Constantinople, Mungir united his
armies and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Lakhmids, partly explicable by
the new morale infused into the Ghassiinids by the recent accords. Mungir
could control Ghassanid soldiers but not Monophysite clerics.
The schism among Monophysite clergy in Oriens, however, was real, and
John of Ephesus has preserved data that reflect this division in the ranks of the
Monophysites of the region in connection with the election of Peter of Cal-
linicum as the new patriarch of Antioch in place of the incumbent Paul. 45 In
this transaction Mungir is conspicuous by his absence, especially as the Ghas-
siinid dynasty had by now been recognized as fidei defensores of Monophysitism.
Mungir's father was instrumental in the election of Paul and protected him
during his troubles, and so did Mungir . The canonicity of Peter's election was
a point much debated even by the new patriarch himself, who had scruples of
conscience about being elected while the duly consecrated patriarch of Anti-
och, Paul, was still alive. Mungir, who, like his father before him, was a
staunch supporter of Paul, would certainly have disapproved of the election of
Peter on grounds ot both canon law and Arab jiwar and wa/a' toward Paul.
Hence the silence of the sources on Mungir in connection with Peter's election
suggests that it was done without his knowledge or approval and that the
extreme Monophysites, old partisans of Jacob, were still strong and influential
in the Oriens of Mungir .
Egypt
More important was what happened in Egypt, where the Monophysites
were stronger and now better organized, presided over by the newly elected
patriarch, the Syrian Damian, who played a crucial role in inflaming passions
in Oriens against Paul. The Alexandrian delegation at the conference, as well
as the clergy who had been set free from Constantinopolitan jails by Mungir,
must have faced the same problem that the Oriental ones faced when they
went back to their colleagues in Alexandria-rejection of the accords in the
discussion of which those absent in Alexandria were not included . But more
important than the opposition of these elements in Egypt is the fact that the
Monophysite church of Egypt was now run by a powerful ecclesiastic, the new
45 Ibid., Book IV, chap. 45, p. 171, line 12-p . 172, line 26.
patriarch, Damian. He proved to be a disturbing force that contributed sub-
stantially to the enhancement of discord within the ranks of the Monophysite
church in this period that immediately followed the conference, a discord that
culminated in a formal schism between Antioch and Alexandria that lasted
until 616.
Although he owed much to Mungir, who protected him, met him at
night on his arrival in Constantinople after his flight from Antioch, 46 and met
him again at the conference where Damian gave his full assent to the accords
as the head of the Egyptian delegation, he immediately and completely
changed his position on his return to Alexandria. 47 What were the reasons
behind this change? A few preliminary observations have already been made
earlier in this chapter, and the following four points will complement and
elaborate on them.
1. No doubt, like his Syrian colleagues who had signed the accords,
Damian found himself facing an angry Alexandrian clergy that rejected them. 48
He, therefore, had to choose between concord at home in his patriarchate and
discord with Oriens and Mungir, and he apparently chose the former.
2. It is possible that he inherited from his predecessor, Peter IV, the
latter's animus toward Paul and the Paulites, and Peter had gone the length of
deposing Paul. Damian had been the protege of Peter who had brought him
from his monastery to that of Enaton, where he became deacon and secretary
to him, and Damian owed Peter his subsequent elevation to the patriarchate .
3. Perhaps he also reflected the old Alexandrian self-image of the see of
St. Mark as superior to that of Antioch; hence his assertiveness almost border-
ing on aggressiveness. He must have been encouraged by the fact that the see
of Antioch was in complete disarray because of Paul and that for some time it
was virtually vacant. Twice had the ranking Monophysites in the Patriarchate
of Antioch come to Alexandria. Jacob made the journey twice in the 570s,
and now Peter of Callinicum, after his election at Mar J:Ianina, came to Dam-
ian for consecration. Even before he arrived in Constantinople for the confer-
ence in the winter of 580, he quite fearlessly tried to consecrate a Mono-
physite patriarch of Antioch in the city itself, which he entered by night and
which he had to leave hurriedly and under humiliating circumstances after his
plan to consecrate had been reported to Gregory, the Chalcedonian patriarch
of Antioch. 49
4. Damian was deemed to be a very respectable theologian. 50 It is not
46 Ibid., p. 168, Jines 8-11.
47 Ibid., p. 169, Jines 25-30 .
48 Ibid., Jines 25-26; Muller, "Damian," 128.
49 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 166, line 9-p . 168, line 6.
5 Fliche and Martin, HiJtoire de l'Eg/ise, IV, 491.
altogether impossible that his renunciation of what he had sworn to in Con-
stantinople and his subsequent theological bout with Peter of Callinicum were
inspired by genuine conviction that his was the true, orthodox Monophysite
position.
Whatever his motives were in his renunciation of the accords of Con-
stantinople, Damian was a major factor in undoing the work of Mungir and
bringing about his downfall. 51 John of Ephesus is more explicit on him than
on the Syrians, and he almost lays the blame at Damian's doorstep in chapter
43 of Book IV of his Ecclesiastical History. In that chapter he states that on his
return to Alexandria he was blamed for making peace with Paul; hence he
went back on the promises he had given to Mungir. He even wrote anathemas
against Paul and sent a circular letter on Paul to Syria, which was used there
by turbulent people who stirred up schisms in the region. Not only Damian
but also the Alexandrian clergy that Mungir helped set free through interces-
sion with Tiberius acted likewise and went back on the promises they had
given to Mungir. The Latin version of John of Ephesus, describing this unfor-
tunate turn of events in Egypt, reads as follows.
CAPUT XLIII, de eodem Damiano, et de mendacio eius et quomodo
pacem in urbe regia factam inique everterit, necnon de eis dericis qui
mutati sunt et ipsi etiam promissa fefellerunt. Damianus vero syrus im-
periosus, qui tempore dignus erat ut Alexandriae patriarcha fieret, idem
cuius supra mentio facta est, cum Alexandriam pervenisset et a qui-
busdam propter Paulum reprehensus esset, deinde ut hominibus placeret
et non Deo, vel ecdesiae paci studeret, dicto revocato promissum suum
ad gloriosum Mondir et ad ceteros fideles qui ex utraque parte eum ob-
secraverunt factum fefellit, et mutatus est, et Paulo adversatus est; et in
eum anathemata et probra et contumelias asperas scripsit, nee suffecit ut
ipse solus his rebus uteretur, sed ut in epistula encydica etiam, hoc est
circulari, omnia scripserit et ad Syriam et quoquoversus in dicione sua et
extra dicionem miserit. Quae epistulae eius viris turbulentis et im-
manibus praecipue datae sunt, qui cum Satana coniuncti erant et curre-
bant et laborabant, nee cum Christo congregaverunt, sed in contrarium
currentes re vera sparserunt, qui studiose commotiones et turbas con-
civerunt, et discidia exagitaverunt et contentiones germinaverunt, et
iurgia et rixas et contumelias, et quaecunque diabolo cordi sunt magis
quam antea fecerunt.
Sua vero, et fortasse haud indecorum est dicere et Satanae etiam, et
in dericis etiam operatus est qui in concilio unionis quod in urbe regia
factum est adfuerunt. Quamobrem ei etiam cum eo Spiritui sancto men-
5 1 Frend (Rise, 341) thinks that his Syrian origin explains his aggressiveness.
titi sunt, et dictum revocaverunt, postquam studio Mondir recreati et
soluti sunt et ex angustia exierunt, propterea quod ante eum et ante
coetum multum unionem promiserunt et uniti sunt, et scripto etiam
nominibus suis fecerunt, qua de causa etiam soluti sunt et e custodiis et e
carceribus exierunt, et 'averterunt se et mentiti sunt quemadmodum pa-
tres eorum', ut pater eorum videlicet Damianus, qui eis dignus est et
quo ei.) 2
In addition to laying the blame squarely on Damian and after describing
his violation of the promises he gave to Mungir and his divisive activity, John
of Ephesus gives an account of the reaction of Mungir to Damian's machina-
tions which he became aware of after his return from his victorious campaign
against the Lakhmids in the summer of 580. John describes his sorrow at
Damian's circular letters and how he took the trouble of writing letters to
each of the Alexandrian clergy by name, in which he admonished them for
playing false against God, the church, and himself. But these neither received
his letters nor answered them because of shame and mortification. Conse-
quently Mungir was deeply offended and must have felt betrayed because
Damian's letters were disastrous for the peace of the church in Oriens, since
they fueled its fires and enhanced the noise that was already rocking it.
The Latin version of John of Ephesus' account of Mungir's reaction to
Damian's circular letters reads as follows:
Quamobrem, cum rex Mondir, postquam a caede hostium suorum rediit,
de mutatione eorum etiam didicisset et quomodo a veritate ad men-
dacium immodicum perversi essent, adflictus est et eum piguit, et prae-
ter haec miratus est; et epistulis encyclicis Damiani praesertim obstipuit,
quae ab improbitate completa haud multum aberant. Quamobrem Mon-
dir ad unumquemque eorum nomine eius scribere non praetermisit eos-
que de mendacio eorum in Deum et in se et in totam ecclesiam facto
admonuit et obiurgavit. Ei autem ob causam dedecoris sui et pudoris nee
litteras eius recipere nee responsum etiam ei facere potuerunt. ltaque
indignatus est, cum ob has causas fornax irae in totam ecclesiam fidelium
mag is arderet et ferveret et flagraret, necnon incrementum mag is dis-
cidiorum et contentionum et probrorum et contumeliarum et rixarum
quae inter duas partes semper effrenate et sine timore Iudicis aequi ar-
denter flagrabant . )3
Mungir's zeal, enthusiasm, and energy commented upon by John of
Ephesus are fully expressed in this passage. The names of each and every one
52 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 169, line 20-p. 170, line 17.
53 Ibid., p. 170, lines 18-33 .
of the Alexandrian clergy he evidently had with him, since, as has been said
earlier in the chapter, they had signed their names during the conference of
Constantinople giving assurances that they would be reconciled. This is the
list that Muncjir kept with him, and so he must have used it now to write
them the letters. The letters must have been in Greek. As has been argued
previously, this was the common language for the multiethnic and multi-
lingual community of Monophysites in the Near East.
John of Ephesus' interpretation of the non-communicativeness of the Al-
exandrians is probably correct. Muncjir had obliged them by interceding in
their behalf, and they must have felt ashamed that they had not kept their
word. 54 Muncjir must have felt completely betrayed on all fronts. He had
worked hard to bring about the union of the church by bringing the parties
together. He had then interceded with the emperor for the staying of the
persecution and the setting free of the Alexandrian clergy. He had given them
presents and sent them off safely to Alexandria. Damian he received at night
when the former came as a refugee from Antioch having fled that city, after
Gregory discovered his intrigue to consecrate a Monophysite patriarch in An-
tioch itself. Now both Damian and the Alexandrians betrayed him, and so did
the Jacobites of Oriens. More betrayals were in store for him on the part of the
Chalcedonians, including Magnus, his own patronus.
The Dyophysite Reaction
The sources are not as informative on the Chalcedonian as they are on the
Monophysite reaction. John of Ephesus, the primary source, provides a few
data; he is expansive on what the Monophysites in both Oriens and Egypt did,
especially the latter, but hardly anything is said on the Dyophysite reaction.
He does, however, provide one datum as important as it is revelatory.
In chapter 42 of Book IV he describes the triumphant return of Muncjir
to Antioch and his encounter with its Dyophysite patriarch, Gregory, and the
latter's execution of the order of Tiberius concerning the termination of the
persecution of the Monophysites in the provinces. He also states that when the
Dyophysites of Constantinople heard all this, they were furious with the
Ghassanid king and hastened to accuse him before Tiberius, but he did not
54 Muller ("Damian," 128) thinks that the Alexandrians did not vouchsafe him an answer
and that he was without influence in Egypt . There may be some confusion in the narrative of
John of Ephesus on the Alexandrian clergy. Those who were imprisoned in the jails of Con-
stantinople by Eutychius did not attend the conference of 2 March since they were freed after it
through the good offices of Mungir. Those who signed the instrumentum unionis were the other
group of Alexandrians who attended the conference. And these were the ones that went back on
their word, but it was not they whom Mungir had set free. Perhaps the inconsistency may be
reconciled by assuming that the former group had also promised to support the instrumentum
unionis after Mungir set them free and sent them off to Alexandria.
917
listen to their accusations: "Quamobrem, cum hoc Diphysitae urbis regiae
audivissent, ira magna in Mondir commoti, sine mora ingressi eum ante re-
gem vehementer incusaverunt; il/e autem Dei amans aurem eis non praebuit. "ll
This paragraph, thrown in parenthetically in the middle of a chapter on
Mungir's successes, illuminates the obscurity that surrounds the place of the
Dyophysite party during those winter months in Constantinople when Mungir
was negotiating for the peace of his church. The Dyophysites are conspicuous
by their absence in a transaction that was very much their business and within
their jurisdiction. And yet the scene is occupied by seculars-the autokrator
and his federate king-while the ecclesiastics who appear in the limelight
were the Monophysites. The paragraph cited from John of Ephesus enables the
following conclusions to be drawn.
First and most astounding is that Tiberius had conducted all these nego-
tiations without allowing the Dyophysites of the capital, including their pa-
triarch, to participate. Not only this, but it is clear from the paragraph that
all these negotiations were conducted in secret; the Dyophysites were not even
kept apprised of what happened nor did they appear to know of the instrumen-
tum unionis, the deed of union that was agreed upon and signed by the three
Monophysite parties at the conference.
This is perfectly consonant with the ardent desire of Tiberius to solve the
ecclesiastical problem which had plagued his empire and which he also consid-
ered related to the military problems of the barbarians that were threatening
it. The scene in which two patriarchs, first John Scholasticus and then his
successor Eutychius, come to him for continuing the repression of the Mono-
physites can serve as a background for this extraordinary situation. The em-
peror sternly rebukes his patriarchs for recommending such a course when he
had enough barbarians or external enemies to deal with. 56 The two visits must
have made the emperor suspicious of his patriarchs and must have convinced
him that he could not expect any constructive thinking from them toward
solving the Monophysite problem. Hence his decision to exclude them from
the deliberations and to call on one who, like himself, was a non-ecclesiastic,
namely, Mungir, for help. And he could not have made a better choice in
view of the prestige and influence of the Ghassanid royal house in the Mono-
physite world. So, as it turned out, it was two secular personages, the em-
peror and his client-king, who directed the negotiations for solving the eccle-
siastical problem.
The decision of Tiberius to conduct these negotiations by excluding the
Dyophysite establishment in the capital adds a new dimension to the person-
55 John of Ephesus, HE, p. 169, Jines 5-8.
56 See above, 898-99.
ality of Tiberius. He has been deemed a good-natured and gentle emperor ,5
1
but his decision on the conduct of these negotiations proves that he could be
decisive and capable of carrying through a bold policy independently in a
matter he considered vital to the interests of the empire.
Gregory had to write letters to the provinces of his patriarchate by order
of Tiberius for terminating the persecution, but he also must have written
letters of his own to his counterpart in Constantinople, Patriarch Eutychius,
informing him of what had happened. This is most natural to assume, since
Dyophysite Constantinople heard of the instrumentum unionis and the cessation
of hostilities against the Monophysites from those in Antioch. And he may
even have written letters to his counterpart in Alexandria, too. Thus Gregory
emerges as the chief protagonist in this drama of intrigues as it unfolded
itself. The beginning of the end for Mungir was ushered in not by the secular
military establishment but by the ecclesiastical. Although the three Chalce-
donian patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria could not have
cherished the spectacle of the redrawing of the ecclesiastical map of the empire
without their participation, Gregory was the one most concerned. The power-
ful Ghassanid king who protected the Monophysites of his patriarchate was a
thorn in his side; and it must have been Gregory among the patriarchs who
spearheaded the opposition to Mungir's plan and took an active part in the
plot that finally brought about the downfall of the Ghassanid king.
The Imperial Reaction
A previous chapter in this volume has discussed in detail the fall of
Mungir within the political and military context of Byzantine history around
581/82. Now the ecclesiastical dimension that contributed to his fall may be
discussed. The preceding sections have explained the ecclesiastical situation
that obtained around 581 and that led Tiberius to make the decision that led
to the arrest of Mungir. As Tiberius' decision was a historic one that turned
out to be fraught with grave consequences for Byzantium and Arab-Byzantine
relations, it is necessary to analyze the thinking that led him to make that
decision, especially as a detailed analysis of this has not been attempted in
histories of the reig_n. The primary source, John of Ephesus, is laconic about
it, while modern historians treat it in a perfunctory manner . This has left
Tiberius' own judgment under a cloud, as it did the Ghassanid phylar-
chate/Basi/eia represented by Mungir. What happened to Tiberius that made
him make that disastrous decision?
1. Mungir's efforts to bring about peace in the summer of 580 and
shortly after saw the emperor solidly and faithfully behind his client-king; as
the passage in John of Ephesus has clearly indicated, the Dyophysites of the
57 For this judgment on the part of one who knew him personally and intimately, namely,
John of Ephesus, see HE, p. 110, lines 19-35 .
919
capital were furious when they heard of what Mungir achieved in the Patriar-
chate of Antioch after his return from Constantinople and his meeting with
Gregory in Antioch. They hurried to the emperor to complain, but he gave no
ear to their accusations, no doubt hoping that his policy of toleration and
compromise with the Monophysites under the leadership of Mungir would
succeed, and he wanted to allow time for the plan to be carried out.
The second phase, which opened a year or so after the summer of 580,
witnessed the reversal in the attitude of the emperor, rather startling from one
who reposed so much confidence in his client-king and whom he had received
and entertained royally. The Dyophysite ecclesiastical establishment repre-
sented by the three patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria,
who no doubt were in touch with one another, could no longer be resisted.
Now that Mungir had failed to unite his Monophysites, their case became
strong and irresistible. Tiberius had gone the length of ignoring his own
patriarch in Constantinople and negotiating with the Monophysites as if this
patriarch had not existed. And now he was embarrassed by the realization that
his bold attempt to solve the ecclesiastical problem singlehandedly had failed.
He himself was now vulnerable and so was his judgment in trusting the
Monophysites and their secular leader, Mungir. Mungir of course was not to
blame for the failure of his efforts. He himself was betrayed by the extremists
among the Monophysites, especially the Egyptians whom he had set free and
loaded with gifts. But that did not change the fact that in the view of Con-
stantinople he had failed, and his failure had focused attention on the "bad"
judgment of the emperor who had placed confidence in his client-king to the
alienation of his own ecclesiastical establishment.
2. A previous chapter in this volume 58 has analyzed the second pressure
that was brought to bear on the emperor-the secular pressure that Maurice, his
magiJter militum, exercised on Tiberius. That, too, passed through two stages, and
in this it paralleled the pressure from the ecclesiastical establishment. This may
be briefly referred to here for completing the picture and for bringing out an
ecclesiastical dimension to the secular arm. The first stage: Tiberius stood by his
client-king when Maurice wrote to him from the front complaining alxmt Mun-
gir and his conduct in the joint expedition against Ctesiphon. He refused to
entertain the accusations against him and actually appointed mediators to com-
pose the differences between Maurice and Mungir. The second stage: Maurice
came to see the emperor in person in Constantinople and accused Mungir of
prodosia, treason to the state. That there was no truth in the accusation did not
matter; what mattered was that it was made by none other than the future
emperor and prospective son-in-law of Tiberius, and so in a sense the closest
citizen to Tiberius, one whose wishes he could not ignore.
58 See BASIC I.1, 444-48
Although Maurice was not a cleric, it is possible, even probable, that his
antipathy toward Mungir also had an ecclesiastical base which should be dis-
cussed in the context of this chapter. Maurice was a staunch Chalcedonian,
and this doctrinal stance may have been operative in his hostile attitude. His
Chalcedonian Dyophysitism was well known to Chalcedonian Constantinople,
already hostile to Mungir and plotting against him. Maurice's appearance in
the capital at this juncture may thus have been especially fatal to Mungir's
standing with Tiberius, since both the secular and the ecclesiastical arms in
the capital now united in an unholy alliance for Mungir's undoing. If the
patriarch of Constantinople had been a persona non grata with Tiberius because
of his violent anti-Monophysite policy that had alienated the emperor, the
prospective son-in-law was not, but was close to Tiberius. Thus it was pos-
sible to reach the ear of the emperor through Maurice, who thus may have
represented at the court both the secular and ecclesiastical hostility toward
Mungir. The combination of the representatives of the magisterium of the Ori-
ent and the Patriarchate of Constantinople was a formidable one, and this
must have been the solid opposition front that finally broke the will of
Tiberius and brought about the downfall of Mungir. 59
The two pressures must have projected an uncomplimentary image of the
emperor in Constantinople, who, in the perception of those around him, secu-
lar and ecclesiastical, had made a great blunder. He had trusted his client-
king to solve the religious problem in the empire and to cooperate in the
all-important military command of 581 against Ctesiphon. On both counts
the expected results did not materialize, and in connection with one of
them-the military assignment-he was accused of high treason to the state.
This must have been the image of the emperor in that year-that of a blun-
derer, a dim image especially in view of the fact that the Byzantine monarchy
was Chalcedonian and the fidei defensor of orthodoxy since the advent of the
house of Justin I in 518.
The emperor did not enjoy very good health and indeed died shortly after
in 582. He was succeeded by none other than Maurice, Mungir's accuser and
inveterate enemy. It is only natural that, with all this depressing background
for his own image, with the disastrous Persian campaign, and with an Orient
and Egypt still rampant with heresy and sectarian strife, he should succumb
this time to the anti-Monophysite faction in Constantinople. In the summer
59 The collaboration between the magisterium and the patriarchate in the conception of the
plot against Mungir is confirmed by its execution, when Magnus and Gregory lure Mungir to
}:Iuwwarin for the dedication of the church. Magnus represents the secular military arm and
Gregory the ecclesiastical. Maurice certainly knew the patriarch of Constantinople, and he most
probably knew Gregory personally. Upon his appointment as magister, Maurice went to Syria in
order ro recruit, and so he could have met Gregory at Antioch.
of 580 he had turned a deaf ear to the calumniators of Mungir, but now he
listened and acted and let the authorities deal with him. It must have been a
painful decision to make, in view of the face chat Mungir had been the object
of a previous treacherous plot on the part of Justin II in the early 570s, and it
was during the co-regency of Tiberius 60 that he was reconciled after a moving
scene before the martyrion of Sc. Sergius at Ru~afa. Since then, the Ghassanid
king had served Byzantium well and won signal military triumphs. As re-
cently as the winter of 580, he was received magnificently by Tiberius and
dispatched with equal magnificence co Antioch in order that he might bring
peace to religious life in Oriens. When Mungir was brought to Constantino-
ple and stayed under house arrest, he was not allowed to see Tiberius. Stein
has suggested that this was another piece of evidence for his innocence from
the absurd charge, trumped up and trumpeted, for fear that he might con-
vince the emperor, his old friend, of the falsity of the charge. 61 But there is
another reason which may be suggested- Tiberius' embarrassment co face an
old friend who had already been betrayed once 62 and whom he had sent off
magnificently only a year ago; and now he had been betrayed once more by a
combination of forces in the capital which the emperor himself, now ailing,
was unable co resist.
It is noteworthy that the plot co arrest him was prepared within an
ecclesiastical context. He was invited to attend the consecration of a church in
l:fuwwarin, at which the patriarch himself, Gregory, was co be present. And
chis makes possible two further observations. The plot, and its details, must
have been hatched principally in Oriens by Gregory, who knew Mungir well
and how co ensnare him, although the orders naturally must have come from
Constantinople. 63 And it indirectly testifies co the deep involvement of the
Ghassanid king in ecclesiastical affairs. The prospect of attending a church
consecration must have appealed co him, and his enemies knew it. 64 The
"Mundir Affair" is an outstanding example of the interrelation of policies and
religion in the history of the Christian Roman Empire.
60 That is, when Justin II was not functioning as an emperor, having been declared insane.
Thus it was Tiberius who received Mungir after a three-year estrangement from Byzantium.
The scene in which Tiberius appears very embarrassed by the treachery of his senior imperial
colleague is well described by Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 344. Although the passage is
possibly conflated and may contain elements that pertain to the second reception of Mungir in
580, others are sound and authentic for the earlier meeting in the mid 570s; such is the
statement "Tiberius en appprenant cela demeura stupefait et loua Dieu qui avait dejoue J'am-
buche deJustinus"; ibid., lines 18-19.
61 See BASIC 1.1, 448-50, 461-63.
62 See ibid., 346-56.
63 For details of this plot, see ibid. , 4 5 7-61.
64 Already noted by Stein and, after him, Aigrain ("Arabie," col. 1214). One could
wonder how the church at }:luwwarin was dedicated after this piece of treachery. For the
church, which apparently has survived, but in ruins, see BASIC 1.1, 458 note 183.
XIV
The Reign of Maurice (582-602)
I. INTRODUCTION
T
he sources that have been informative on the ecclesiastical history of the
Ghassanids during the reign of Justin II and Tiberius, which coincided
with that of Mungir, are not so for the long reign of Maurice, which lasted
twenty years. This is primarily due to the death of the chief historian of the
Ghassanids, John of Ephesus, in 585/86 and the fact that his account of the
Ghassanids ends with the disestablishment of this phylarchate after the arrest
and exile of Mungir in 581/82. However, the later Syriac sources, Michael the
Syrian in particular, have preserved some data out of which the ecclesiastical
history of the Ghassanids during the reign of Maurice can be reconstructed.
Two distinct phases of this history can easily be detected: the first, which
extended from 582 to 587, the period of interregnum, after Byzantium had
disestablished the Ghassanid phylarchate and most probably depended on non-
Ghassanid federates for its foederati in Oriens; the second, which may be said
to have opened in 587, when the Ghassiinids suddenly reappear as the domi-
nant federate group; they continue as such until the end of the reign and
indeed until the Muslim Conquest of Oriens.
II. THE CHALCEDONIAN ATTEMPT TO CONVERT THE GHASSANIDS
The first phase witnessed an attempt on the part of Byzantium to impose
Dyophysitism on the Ghassiinids or at least to win them over to it. A previous
chapter has described the political situation that obtained during this period,
which may be briefly stated. After news of the Ghassanid revolt, led by Mun-
gir's son Nu 'man, reached Constantinople, Tiberius sent Magnus to try to
restore the situation and install one of the brothers of Mungir, who was ac-
ceptable to Tiberius, as king and commandant of the Ghassiinids. This mem-
ber of the Ghassanid royal house did not last long but died shortly after he
was installed. Who his successor as commander of the federate troops was is
not clear, but non-Ghassanid phylarchs suddenly appear fighting with the
Byzantine army against the Persians, and their names, J::lujr and i:;>uj'um,
suggest that at least one of them, I;)uj'um, belonged to the foederati of the
fifth century whom the Ghassanids replaced, namely, the Sali}:iids.
The Reign of Maurice 923
How Byzantium tried to win over the Ghassanids to the Dyophysite fold
in this phase may be reconstructed as follows. The new Ghassanid king, with
whom Tiberius chose to replace Mungir, could easily have been a Dyophysite
doctrinally. In fact if he had been otherwise, his appointment would have
been unintelligible. This could be supported by the fact that the Syriac manu-
script, analyzed in an earlier chapter, does speak of members of the Ghassanid
royal house as Dyophysites, and they were uncles of Mungir. So Byzantium
could count on certain Ghassanids to rule as Dyophysite phylarchs and hope-
fully to sway the mass of the Ghassanid troops with them. Apparently, this
did not work, since the new king died shortly after his installation.
1
The appearance of the non-Ghassanid phylarchs l;lujr and I;>uj'um in
military operations conducted against the Persians, to the exclusion of the
Ghassanids, in 586 suggests that Byzantium was now relying on its old feder-
ates, the Tanukhids and the Sali):iids of the fourth and fifth centuries respec-
tively, rather than on the Ghassanids . Those had, of course, persisted in the
phylarchal federate structure of Oriens, although they had lost their dominant
status. What is more, they were not Monophysites but orthodox. However, as
has been pointed out in a previous chapter, Byzantium's attempt to give
prominence to these did not work, and it was forced to reestablish the
Ghassanids again, who appear in 587 in control of the federates in Oriens.
The most explicit reference in the sources to the attempt of the imperial
government to convert the Ghassanids to Dyophysicism comes in the Chronicle
of Michael the Syrian, when he gave an account of the encounter between
Maurice and Nu'man, Mungir's son, in Constantinople, after the latter des-
perately agreed to travel there co free his father who was under house arrest in
the capital or in exile in Sicily. The passage in the Chronicle of Michael was
discussed earlier in this volume in a different context, but it deserves to be
analyzed here for its great relevance to ecclesiastical history. Michael relates
that after the death of Magnus, Nu'man went to Constantinople where he was
received by Maurice, who promised to return his father from exile if Nu'man
agreed to fight the Persians. Nu'man was also approached to convert to Dy-
ophysitism but refused, saying that if he did the Arab tribes would kill him.
He left the capital angry, but on his way back to Oriens, he was arrested:
Magnus, homme scelerat et cres mechant, mourut ensuite. Alors Na'man
prit sur lui-meme de mooter trouver le Cesar Mauricianus . Celui-ci l'ac-
cueillit et lui jura que s'il combattait concre les Perses, il delivrerait son
pere de I' exil.
On die a Na'man de communiquer avec les Synodites. 11 s'y refusa
en disant: "Toutes les tribus des Taiyaye soot orthodoxes; et si je com-
1 On all this, see BASIC 1.1, 471-75 .
munique avec les Synodites, ils me tueront." A cause de cela, sa haine
s'accrut, et, en partant, Na'man jura qu'il ne verrait plus volontairement
le visage des Romains. C'est pourquoi, tandis qu'il etait en route, on
s'empara de lui et on l'envoya en exil, avec Mondar son pere. 2
The quotation from Michael the Syrian clearly indicates the predicament
of the Ghassanid rulers and their inextricable involvement in Monophysitism.
Maurice's request reveals him as a truly Chakedonian ruler who wanted to see
doctrinal uniformity in his realm. This express request in behalf of Dyophysi-
tism supports the view that his hostility toward Nu'man's father, Mungir,
was not exclusively grounded in professional rivalry about the conduct of the
campaign against Ctesiphon; it was also doctrinally inspired.
Noteworthy is Nu'man 's reply that the Arabs, no doubt the federate
Arabs, explicitly the Ghassanids, are all "orthodox," that is, Monophysites,
and that if he converted they would kill him. This is the second reference to
the Ghassanid armies as zealous Monophysites, after Arethas' reference to
them around 570, when the Ghassanid king presided over the conference that
tried the Tritheists, Eugenius and Conon. Not only were they confirmed in
their Monophysitism, but they would also go the length of killing their ruler
if he deviated from the path of doctrinal correctness. Even if this was an
exaggeration or an elegant way out of the embarrassing imperial invitation to
convert, the essence of the statement is roughly true.
This was the situation in this period . With the Ghassanids in total or at
least partial eclipse, the cause of Monophysitism among the federates, many of
whom were non-Monophysites such as the Salil_1ids and the Tanukhids, must
have been in disarray, commensurately with the disarray in the secular Ghas-
sanid camp. Whether a Ghassanid bishop existed at this time is not known . If
he did, he could not have had a prominent role in the fortunes of the Mono-
physite church as previous Ghassanid bishops, such as Theodore, had. He may
even have lived in the countryside, maintaining a very attenuated presence at
a time when his secular protectors were being hunted or frowned upon by the
central government .
It is not inappropriate to refer in this connection to the fortunes of Arab
Monophysitism across the borders in Persian Mesopotamia. AJ:iudemmeh, the
apostle of the Arabs, had been active there for some two decades and had
succeeded in establishing a strong Monophysite presence among the inhabit-
ants of Beth-' Arabaye, the Arabia of Xenophon and the classical historians, in
Persian territory . Although AJ:iudemmeh, as a result of his zeal for proselytiz-
ing, met with a violent death as a martyr, he left behind him a viable Mono-
physite Arab church in Persian Mesopotamia, and it was thither that some of
2 Chronique, II, 3 51.
the rebellious Ghassanid phylarchs during the interregnum fled and found
refuge among fellow Arabs who shared with them the same doctrinal persua-
sion. 3 As has been argued in a previous chapter, one of these phylarchs may
well have been none other than Jafna, who appears in the next phase of the
reign of Maurice as the chief figure of the restored Ghassanid phylarchate in
587.
111. THE ROLE OF THE GHASSANIDS IN lNTER-MONOPHYSITE
CONTROVERSIES: DAMIAN OF ALEXANDRIA AND PETER OF CALLINICUM
After a five-year absence from Monophysite ecclesiastical affairs in Oriens, the
Ghassanids suddenly appear with a vengeance in 587. A Syriac s~urce attests
this restored Ghassanid presence in connection with the theological contro-
versy that erupted within the Monophysite church between its two leading
hierarchs, Damian, patriarch of Alexandria, and Peter of Callinicum, patriarch
of Antioch . The account of the Syriac sources has been analyzed by scholars of
the Patriarchate of Alexandria, such as J. Maspero and C. D. G. Muller. 4 But
the role played by the Ghassanids in this controversy remains to be analyzed
and discussed in detail for the bright light it sheds on the restored Ghassanid
phylarchate and its contribution to ecclesiastical history. 5
This precious acount of the Ghassanid involvement in the ecclesiastical
history of the period comes in a letter that Peter of Callinicum wrote to his
Syrian compatriots who lived in Alexandria, in which he describes his encoun-
ter with Damian in both Egypt and Oriens. In order to understand the role of
the Ghassanids, it is necessary to give a resume of the encounter, physical and
theological, between the two patriarchs .
With the death of Jacob Baradaeus in 578 and that of Paul in 581, the
Jacobite-Paulite strife most probably would have ended, but, as already noted,
the domineering patriarch Damian of Alexandria revived the controversy and
renewed the tension. There was a clash of egos and personalities, between
Damian of Alexandria and Peter of Callinicum, and it developed into a re-
gional struggle between Egypt and Oriens, represented by their respective
patriarchs. The controversy was in a sense a legacy of that Monophysite heresy
which was quashed in 570 at the conference of Constantinople, the Tritheism
of Eugenius and Conon. Damian's efforts to reach an acceptable compromise
3 On A~iidemmeh and the Arabs of Mesopotamia, see BAFOC, 419-22.
On the possi-
bility that some Ghassanid phylarchs defected to them, see BASIC 1.1, 548.
4 Only J. Maspero and recently C. D. G. Muller have discussed this source in detail,
respectively in Histoire des patriarches d'Alexandrie (Paris, 1923), 312-16, and "Damian, Papst
und Patriarch von Alexandrien," OC 70 (1986), 131-35 . In spite of some inaccuracies, the
older work of Maspero has not outlived its usefulness.
5 The secular dimension of the account in the Syriac sources has been analyzed in a pre-
vious chapter; see BASIC 1.1, 554-56.
between the orthodoxy preached by Severus of Antioch and the many Mono-
physite sects and heresies in Egypt led him almost to embrace Tri theism. 6 The
opposition co Damian's views came from the cleric whom Damian had conse-
crated in 581, Peter of Callinicum, who first protested and then wrote an
extensive treatise against Damian's. 7
The physical encounter between the two patriarchs is described in a letter
of Peter of Callinicum which cells of his unsuccessful attempts co meet with
Damian in Egypt and of attempts to meet in the Provincia Arabia in Oriens,
but which also failed even after Damian and his party traveled there. Tenta-
tive meetings that were held turned out co be tumultuous and bloody, and
thus the controversy was not resolved.
The texts of these encounters are co be found in the Chronicle of Michael
the Syrian: (a) the general account of Michael himself in which he briefly
describes these encounters and explains how the theological controversy be-
tween the two came about; and (b) the letter that Peter wrote to his com-
patriots in Alexandria on chis problem, describing the physical encounters
between him and his party with Damian and his party, in Egypt and in
Oriens.
8
Michael's own account has no great value compared co Peter's letter, a
primary source of the first importance . It is, of course, tendentious since Peter
is not impartial in describing what happened, but generally speaking it is
reliable even in its picture of Damian. Whatever the truth about that, the
data he provides on the Ghassanids are not open to doubt since they are
pedestrian, and no motive for falsification can be suspected. These references
to the Ghassanids will therefore be extracted from the letter and assembled for
a detailed analysis. But as the letter is involved in its description of the var-
ious phases of the encounter, some brief account of the background for each
paragraph that pertains to the Ghassanids becomes necessary. The paragraphs
that refer to them may be divided into two parts: (1) the first part, in which
6 Or so his antagonists claimed, who accused his partisans of being Tetradites, while the
partisans of Damian charged those of Peter with Sabellianism.
7 Fliche and Martin, Histoire de /'Eg/ise, IV, 493.
8 See Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, 364- 71. These texts are arranged in the Chronique
in an awkward manner, not easy to follow. Michael's own account is in the left column and
runs from p. 364 to the middle of p. 367. The letter of Peter runs from the middle of p. 367 to
the end of p. 370, also in the left column . The letter is then continued in the right column
from p. 364 top. 370 and continues on the full p. 371. Chabot has footnotes for the guidance
of the reader (p. 364 note 8 and p. 370 note 2). On p. 371 Michael has what Chabot calls a
"note marginale," in which he says that the letter of Peter of Callinicum which he has included
in his Chronicle is taken from Dionysius of Tell MaJ:ire, where it may be found in its entirety.
The letter, then, as preserved in the Chronicle of Michael, is not complete since Michael in-
cluded only extracts from it to illustrate the cause of the difficulties that arose between the
Egyptians and the Syrians.
the reference is implied; and (2) the second part, in which the Ghassanids,
through their phylarch Jafna, are explicitly referred to.
The Letter of Peter of Callinicum
1
The most valuable part of this letter is that which describes the scene in
which Peter and his party meet with the party of Damian, which had been
sent in advance by the latter to negotiate concerning the place where Damian
and Peter might meet and where they could agree on where to meet for the
formal discussion. During the meeting, Peter suggests the Provincia Arabia as
the rendezvous for fear of the Byzantine authorities. Damian's party suggests
Antioch, but Peter counters by saying that this is not safe since the patriarch
of that see never dared to set foot in it. 9 Then both agree on Arabia. In
Chabot's French translation, the dialogue between Peter and Damian's party
reads as follows.
"Pour moi, je pense que l'Arabie est un lieu convenable pour l'assemblee,
a cause de la crainte de ceux qui gouvernent." Ceux-ci repondirent : "A
Antioche" . Plusieurs en entendant cela les blamerent; car depuis que
nous avons ete etabli clans ce ministere redoutable, sans en etre digne,
nous n'avons pu, de tout ce temps assez long, approcher de la ville.
Ceux-ci s'engagerent alors formellement (en disant): "Nous irons pres du
pape en Arabie". Et (moi je dis): "J' irai avec vous ou vous voudrez". 10
The passage is not only informative on the importance of the Provincia
Arabia to the Monophysites but also for the Monophysite patriarchate of Peter, as
extra muros; throughout his incumbency, he could not set foot in Antioch, where
lived the rabid, anti-Monophysite and redoubtable Gregory. More important is
the choice of the Provincia Arabia and the reason for it. This was the headquar-
ters of the Ghassanid dynasty, the powerful and zealous protector of Monophysi-
tism in Oriens. The astounding number of Monophysite monasteries that existed
in the Provincia testify to the strong Monophysite persuasion of Arabia. Peter was
aware of this, since he lived in Oriens, in the area of Ghassanid dominance and
prestige, and thus was aware of the support the dynasty had given to Monophysi-
tism. As to Aritioch, he himself, the patriarch of that city, had to be content for
a patriarchal residence with the monastery of Gubba Barraya, for fear of Chalcedo-
nian seculars and ecclesiastics; hence the explicit statement in his rejection of
Antioch as the rendezvous and the _choice of Arabia.
9 According to Michael the Syrian, chis preparacory meeting took place in Paralos, Egypt;
see Chronique, II, 366.
10 Ibid., left column, p. 370, lines 13-26.
There was another reason why Peter wanted the meeting to take place in
the Provincia. This becomes apparent in the second part of the letter, which is
more expansive on the role of the Ghassanids than the first. The chief Ghas-
sanid phylarch, Jafna, was expected to attend the meeting of the two parties,
so the Provincia would have been the most convenient region for his presiding
over a Monophysite meeting. It was the headquarters of his dynasty, where he
was all-powerful and influential and where no one could molest the Mono-
physite clerics meeting under fiis patronage. The Provincia had been the scene
of a similar meeting, that of the archimandrites of Arabia in 570, who con-
demned the Tritheism of Eugenius and Conon and who met most probably
under the patronage of the Ghassanid king Mungir. This was a precedent, and
Damian's and Peter's parties were thus meeting in the traditional location for
such a Monophysite gathering under Ghassanid patronage.
This raises the question of the relationship of Peter to Jafna, the Ghas-
sanid phylarch. Since Damian had emerged as the ranking and leading Mono-
physite hierarch in both Egypt and Oriens, Peter, who already had reserva-
tions about him and thought he was veering toward heresy, may have wanted
to strengthen his own position vis-a-vis the powerful and domineering Da-
mian. The best way of achieving that goal was no doubt the resuscitation of
the role of the Ghassanid dynasty in the arbitration of ecclesiastical disputes, a
role played by Arethas and Mungir. But the Ghassanid dynasty stood behind
the see of Antioch, in Oriens, the area of operation for the Ghassanids; hence
this alliance between the Ghassanid phylarchate and the Monophysite patri-
archate, and Peter's understandable desire to have present the prestigious
Ghassanid phylarch as arbitrator .
What of the Ghassanid episcopate, especially after its eclipse, or seeming
eclipse, in the preceding five years? No doubt it was in the best interest of the
patriarchate of Peter to revive it as an influential episcopate and restore it to
the power it had wielded during the incumbency of Theodore. The extant
sources are silent on it, but it is possible that one of the two bishops 11 that
Peter sent to meet the party of Damian may have been the Ghassanid bishop.
This would have been an appropriate choice since he was the bishop of the
powerful phylarch who would side with Peter in the prospective meeting and
the bishop of the dynasty that would host it.
2
Finally, after much manuevering by both parties, especially that of Da-
mian, the patriarchs met in a monastery, whose name and location are not
clear. It was, generally speaking, in the Provincia Arabia or adjoining areas,
11 Ibid., p. 368, lines 19-21, left column.
The Reign of Maurice
929
possibly in Damascene. The letter uses such yague terms as voisinage and that
the monastery was at a distance from the village, but which village in Arabia
or in its vicinity is not clear. 12 The party of Damian had come from Tyre, and
Peter was on his way form the north, from Euphratesia where Gubbii Barriiyii
was located. The letter speaks of how Damian and his party wanted to know
first who the participants in the colloquium would be and then the place
where it would take place. Peter was more interested in the latter, and he
suggested Gubbii Barra.ya, his own residence, which Damian rejected on the
ground that it was "distant and barbaric. " 13 He gave Peter the impression that
12 For the French terms voisinage
and village, see Chronique, p. 365, lines 6-7, 9-10, right
column. For the Syriac terms, see ibid., p. 382, lines 5 and 7, right column.
The account is lacking in topographical and toponymical precision. What voisinage ("prox-
imity, vicinity, neighborhood") really means is not clear since no toponym has been mentioned
to which the term could be related, unless Arabia, the provincia, is meant, which is mentioned a
few lines before (p. 365, line 1), which Peter says he reached. Since he was coming from the
north, from Gubba Barraya in Euphratesia, this province adjacent to Arabia from the north and
on his way could be Phoenicia Libanensis, and that part of it closest to Arabia is Damascene.
The term village is equally vague since the name of the village is not given. This could raise the
suspicion that the Syriac term might be read not qrfta, "village" in the singular, but qeryiita in
the plural, which it can be, since the text is not vocalized. This could be a proper noun, the
name of a well-known village in the region, al-qurayyiit, "the villages," associated with the
Ghassanids and known to the contemporary poet l;lassan, who lauded them. This would also be
in Damascene. It is therefore just possible that the two patriarchs met in a monastery outside
this particular town or village, Qurayyat, in Damascene in Phoenicia Libanensis, on which
would have converged Damian, coming from Phoenicia Maritima to Libanensis, and Peter,
coming from Euphratesia. On qurayyiit, see the Diwan of lf.assiin, I, p. 255, verse 2. The
toponym does not appear in Yaqut nor Bakri.
On the other hand, the difficulty may be negated by realizing that the letter is not
complete; Michael the Syrian included only extracts from it (above, note 8). The name of the
village may have been mentioned previously, in one of the paragraphs that Michael did not
extract and include in the letter as it appears in his Chronique . This is the more likely solution .
13 There has been some confusion on the location of Gubba Barraya. Maspero (Histoire,
313 note 1) thought it was in Arabia Petraea, citing Ptolemy, and so did others, such as Nau,
Le christianisme, 90. But this identification is completely out of the question . The two parties
had settled and agreed on meeting in the Provincia Arabia, but Petraea was then a part of
Palaestina Tertia, having been separated from Arabia long before; see G. W . Bowersock, Roman
Arabia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 143. And Petraea would have been a most unlikely place for
the colloquium, being so far out of the way of the two patriarchs who had already met in the
Provincia Arabia and were soon to meet in Gabita, in the same provincia.
As to its correct location, it should be sought exactly where the letter places it, in the
Euphrates region, near what ti)e letter enumerates-Hierapolis (Manbij), Beroea (Aleppo), and
Antioch (Chronique, II, 366, lines 1-5, right column). So it is either in Syria Prima or Eu-
phratesia. This coo was far from where the two patriarchs had met, but at least a reason was
given for its consideration as convenient for the colloquium, namely, that this was Monophysite
territory, and Gubba Barraya was the see of the patriarch of Antioch. It may be difficult to pin
down exactly where in that region Gubba Barraya was, but this is a matter of detail; most
probably it was between Doliche and Cyrrhus. It is strange that Maspero should have chosen to
locate it in Petraea in spite of what the letter, a primary document, says, and he does cite the
letter by referring to Michael's Chronique, II, 366. See Honigmann, Eveques, 205. Miiller
930
he was not interested in a real discussion during the colloquium but preferred
an epistolary correspondence in order to wriggle out from certain difficulties
his theological position had led him into. Having described this impasse,
Peter begins to mention the role of the Ghassiinids in a series of paragraphs
that will be presented in sequence below.
A
The first paragraph states that it was decided to wait for the arrival of
Jafna and do what he thought fit: "A la fin, ii leur plut d'attendre le venue de
l'illustre Gophna, qui etait a Mabboug, pour faire ce qu'il prescrirait et tenir
discussion ou ii voudrait. " 14 The arrival of Jafna clearly implies that there had
been a previous correspondence between him and Peter concerning his atten-
dance at the conference.
It is noteworthy that he was coming from Manbij (Mabbough, Hiera-
polis) in distant Euphratesia. This implies that the Ghassiinid phylarch, a
soldier, was still a concerned Monophysite who would travel that distance in
order to attend an ecclesiastical synod. Perhaps this may be related to the fact
that this was his first year in office as phylarch. After a quinquennium of invisi-
bility (possibly in Persia) following the dissolution of the Ghassiinid phylar-
chate of Mungir in 582, the newly appointed phylarch of the Ghassiinids may
have thought it conducive to the restoration of his prestige to assume the role
of arbitrator between warring Monophysite parties, the role that Mungir and
Arethas before him had played. The prestige of the Ghassiinid phylarch is
fully indicated in the statement of complete surrender to his wishes. The two
parties awaited his arrival and his orders on what to do and where to meet. 15
B
The meeting at the monastery was tumultuous. The letter states that
most of those who attended knew that truth did not reside in the position
taken by Damian, and the party of Peter was unable to suppress the agitation
that Damian's party had created. It was in this atmosphere and at this junc-
ture that Jafna arrived on Monday of Holy Week. Peter then suggested to
Damian that he and Damian appear before Jafna so that the phylarch might
suggest a convenient place for the colloquium, or that each party send three
representatives to the phylarch for that purpose. But Damian rejected the
suggestion and said that the selection of the representatives who would take
("Damian," 133-34) accepts its position in the north in the Euphrates region. Honigmann
(Eveques, 205), who writes authoritatively on coponymy, accepts its general location in Eu-
phracesia but adds chat its exact site has not been determined .
14 Michael the Syrian, Chronique, II, p. 366, lines 27-30, right column.
15 On the honorific tides applied co Jafna, see BASIC I. 1, 563.
part in the colloquium was more important than the decision on the location
of the meeting, because, according to Peter, he had counted on some partisans
from Tyre to arrive who would support him.
Gophna etant arrive le lundi de la Passion, nous fimes dire (au pape) OU
de se rendre avec nous pres de lui, pour qu'il nous fixat un lieu conve-
nable, ou d'envoyer trois personnes avec les notres. Mais le pape, comme
s'il avait oublie ce qui s'etait passe auparavant, repondit: "Nous ne par-
lerons pas du lieu avant d' avoir designe les personnes". II comptait sur
quelques personnes de Tyr, qu'il avait seduites, pour venir a son aide. 16
It is noteworthy that Jafna arrived on the Monday of Holy Week . This
could not have been accidental. The presumption is that Peter wanted the
meeting with the phylarch to coincide with a holy season in the ecclesiastical
calendar, an appropriate time for a meeting to discuss christology. The two
alternatives proposed by Peter to Damian again reflect Jafna's prestige: the
patriarchs were to go to the phylarch, and not vice versa. Presumably Jafna
stayed in a praetorium or a camp prepared for him not far from the monastery
where the two patriarchs were staying.
C
When Peter received Damian's reply stating that he would rather decide
on those who were to represent each party rather than on the place of ren-
dezvous, he thought it just to proceed with a c>taa()"t'U()ta against Damian .
On being apprised of this, the Ghassanid phylarch became aware of Damian's
bad intentions and started to blame himself for getting involved in their af-
fair. Finally, pressed by Peter and the Ghassanid phylarch, the two parties
agreed to meet in the church of St. Sergius at Gabita (Jabiya).
Quand nous eumes rec;u leur reponse, et que nous eumes vu leur perver-
site, nous crumes juste d'user de protestation vis-a-vis de lui. Quand le
philarque apprit ces choses, ii comprit leur mauvais vouloir. II se re-
prochait a lui-meme de s'etre engage clans leur affaire.
Presses par nous et par le glorieux philarque, ils se reunirent avec
nous pour la seconde fois clans le temple de Mar Sergius, a Gabita . 17
The use of the Greek legal term c>taa()"t'U()ta raises the question of its
exact meaning here. The term can mean either a legal appeal or a plea/petition
for a case to be referred to a higher court, or a solemn statement or declara-
tion . It is practically certain that it meant the former since it has been used in
17 Ibid., lines 13-24, right column.
the Syriac Monophysite sources for a legal appeal, and the following sentence
supports the choice of this interpretation . 18 Chabot's translation "vis-a-vis de
lui" reproduces the ambiguity of the original Syriac /wiiteh, where the anteced-
ent of the pronominal suffix is not dear-Damian or Jafna, most probably
Damian. In any case, the appeal rested in the hands of Jafna, both because he
was there to arbitrate and because there was no higher ecclesiastical authority
to whom to send an appeal of one patriarch against another . A Ghassanid
predecessor of Jafna's had received such an appeal in the years 575-578, when
he was trying to reconcile the Paulites and Jacobites. 19 He handed it to Mar
Antiochus, the mysterious ecclesiastic who was present at the court of Mun-
gir; and it was only right since only ecclesiastics could decide on the future of
Paul. The .case of the present appeal was different; it was procedural, not
doctrinal, involving the meeting place of the two parties.
Apparently the prestige of the phylarch was such that after much wran-
gling the stubborn Damian finally agreed to meet with Peter and his party at
the church of St. Sergius in Gabtta (Jabiya). It was only natural for Jafna to
suggest Gabtta as the place where the colloquium should take place since it
was the "capital" of the Ghassiinids. The phylarch was a newly appointed one
and had traveled a great distance in order to attend the meeting, thereby
enhancing the prestige of the restored Ghassanid dynasty in Oriens within the
Monophysite church as its protector. This role was clearly implied in Peter's
previous request for a meeting in Arabia for security reasons in a hostile Dy-
ophysite world. No site could have been better for the conference than the
church of St. Sergius, one of the saints especially revered by the Mono-
physites. Thus, in the calculations of the Ghassanid phylarch, he could cele-
brate the inception of his phylarchate in Oriens not only by winning military
victories on the Persian front but also by appearing in the role of his ancestors,
as the protector of the Monophysite church of Oriens , and by enabling his
"capital" to be the site of an unusual meeting that involved both Oriens and
the two most active and powerful Monophysite communities in the world.
D
The meeting at the church of St. Sergius was not unlike the preceding
one at the monastery. Peter describes in the letter how he tried to let himself
and Damian carry on a dialogue on the issue without the tumult contributed
by the party of Damian as well as his own. But he failed to impose silence,
and Damian was not helpful in that endeavor. Even the phylarch and those
18 Translated protestation in Chabot's French version (lines 15-16) . For its use previously in
the Documenta Monophysitarum, see above, 880-81.
19 Above, 876-92 .
with him failed to bring order to the meeting, and he understood that Da-
mian's party, by its conduct, was concealing its leader's feeble argument. As
the phylarch was anxious to go back to his troops, he gave the two parties
some sort of ultimatum: either accept for the meeting a place determined by
him, or let him depart. When Damian started to speak not of the place but of
those to be chosen for participation, the phylarch replied that it was not meet
that clerics be corrected by seculars like himself. When Damian refused to be
persuaded by the phylarch and did not accept the note which he had written
concerning the place, the phylarch was irritated and departed. The relevant
part of the letter on this transaction reads as follows.
Le philarque et ses gens ne purent leur imposer silence, de sorte que le
discours se prolongea (demesurement); ils comprirent qu'ils excitaient du
trouble pour cacher sa faiblesse.
Le philarque avait hate de retourner pres de ses troupes. Il dit:
"Vous plait-ii de vous rendre a l'endroit determine par nous? sinon,
laissez-moi partir". Alors le pape chercha des pretextes au sujet des per-
sonnes. Le philarque repondit: "Il ne convient pas que vous soyez corriges
par nous autres seculiers". Comme le pape ne se laissa pas persuader et
n'accepta pas le libelle qu'il avait eerie apropos du lieu, le philarque s'en
alla irrite. 20
It is clear from the passage chat Jafna had with him his own Ghassanid
group who thus formed a third party at the meeting. There must have been
some lesser phylarchs under his command, possibly some of his brothers or
sons; familial ties were strong among the Ghassanids, as has been pointed out.
It is not impossible that he had with him some Ghassanid clergy, chaplains
assigned to the troops, and possibly the Ghassanid bishop-ecclesiastics who
could advise him on the theological controversy he was supposed to listen to
as arbitrator.
It is noteworthy that the Ghassanid phylarch was unable to reduce the
tumultuous gathering to silence. This is striking since the Ghassanids had
great prestige on such occasions~ One of his ancestors, the redoubtable Are-
thas, had left a deep impression on the capital itself when he appeared there in
563. Jafna lacked no strong presence, and his failure to silence the tumult can
therefore be an indication of the strength of Damian's personality, noted by
those who have written about him. There . is no better reflection of it than his
refusal to be impressed by the presence of the powerful Ghassanid phylarch.
On a previous occasion when he encountered the Ghassanids, he was overpow-
ered by Mungir in Constantinople in 580, but then he had come as a refugee
from Antioch and was given protection by Mungir.
Jafna's reaction to Damian's refusal to accept the former's choice of a
formal place for the meeting elicited from the phylarch the reply that he was
not a cleric but a secular leader, and it was not meet that the secular should
correct the spiritual. In this, he was acting in full conformity with the rever-
ential attitude of the Ghassanid royal house toward their spiritual leaders,
expressed in Arethas' letter to Jacob Baradaeus in 563.
The libelle,
21 the written note composed by Jafna concerning the place for
the formal meeting, seems to be the only positive thing that he accomplished.
It is clear from the context that the libelle was written by the phylarch, and
the presumption is that it was written in Greek, as were all the communica-
tions written by Arethas and Mungir to the clerics of the Monophysite
church. 22 The letter does not specify which place Jafna had chosen, but it is
likely to have been one of the residence towns or monasteries of the
Ghassanids in Arabia, for both the security of the participants and the prestige
of the dynasty.
After Damian rejected Jafna's suggestion of a place for the prospective
meeting, the latter departed in a state of irritation. His irritation had been
clear and was noted twice in the letter; his decision to depart was a soldier's
decision. Although he did not preside over the formal meeting, he did par-
ticipate and the meeting did take place in the Ghassanid residence town of
Gabita/Jabiya. Thus the Monophysite clerics did give prominence to the
Ghassanid capital, which the dynasty needed after its five-year interregnum
and lack of visibility in the military and ecclesiastical history of Oriens. Fur-
thermore, the meeting was a very special one involving not merely the Mono-
physite groups of his diocese, Oriens, or the Patriarchate of Antioch, but the
two principal Monophysite communities of the empire, those of Egypt and
Oriens. The two met in the Ghassanid capital, thus giving it and the dynasty
an international character and prominence that it had enjoyed some seven
years before when Mungir presided over the conference in Constantinople
composed of communities from the same two regions and succeeded in recon-
ciling them, although only for a short time.
The sudden departure of the phylarch after a long journey from Hiera-
polis, and away from the highest gathering of the Monophysite hierarchy in
which both Egypt and Oriens participated, calls for an explanation; it sounds
strange in spite of the irritations he experienced, as recorded in Peter's letter. 23
His departure admits of at least one or two explanations. Jafna was tempera-
21 The Syriac text uses the Greek term :rm:i:axwv; ibid., note 2.
22 On the use of Greek in the world of Oriens Christianus, see the perceptive observations
of Mi.iller in "Damian," 130-31.
23 Whatever the explanation may turn out to be for the departure of the phylarch, it could
not have been what Maspero (HiJtoire, 315) suggested. The Ghassanid phylarchate had by then
been restored. Nor is there evidence that there was a difficult political situation that required
his presence with his troops; Mi.iller, "Damian," p. 134.
mentally such as not to brook opposition or nonsense; he was a soldier, and
perhaps military necessities on the Persian front required his presence. On the
other hand, it is possible to detect in his departure a note of dissatisfaction
with the Monophysite hierarchy and with ecclesiastical politics. Only five
years before, Monophysite bickering had contributed to the downfall of the
illustrious Ghassanid king Mungir. The two patriarchs whom Jafna faced at
Gabita had not served the Ghassanid cause well. Damian had betrayed Mungir
on his return to Egypt after the conference of Constantinople in 580, and had
continued to annoy the Ghassanid king after his betrayal. This behavior con-
tinued after Peter had been consecrated patriarch while Paul (the true patri-
arch of Antioch) was still alive, and Paul had been supported by Jafna's
Ghassanid predecessors, Arethas and Mungir. It is, therefore, possible that
Jafna remembered all this. So while he remained a faithful Monophysite, he
seems to have had some reservations about the two clerics and, what is more,
about being too involved in ecclesiastical controversies that had contributed to
the downfall of the dynasty a few years before.
Peter's letter has succeeded in giving a vivid picture of the newly appointed
Ghassanid phylarch, just as John of Ephesus and other sources had done for
Mungir and Arethas. The almost complete aridity of the Greek and Syriac
sources on the Ghassanids in this period, during the reign of Maurice and
after the fall of Mungir, has made of this letter a veritable oasis. 24 It has
established the return of the Ghassanids not only to the imperial fold as phy-
larchs but also to the Monophysite church and, what is more, as its patrons.
Jafna left Gabita for Hierapolis after having failed to bring about a recon-
ciliation of the two churches of Egypt and Oriens. The controversy and breach
remained alive even after the deaths of the two antagonists, Peter in 591 after a
tenure of the Antiochene see for ten years and Damian in 606. The estrange-
ment persisted until 616 when it was another soldier, Nicetas, the cousin of
Emperor Heraclius, that reestablished the reconciliation of the two commu-
nities, the Syrian and the Egyptian, represented by their two respective patri-
archs, Athanasius and Anastasius. 25
IV. POPE GREGORY AND THE PROVINCIA ARABIA:
THE GHASSANID PROFILE
After two Ghassanids, Nu'man and Jafna, crossed the paths of Maurice and
two patriarchs in the 580s, a third phylarch, the exiled king Mungir, crossed
(at least in correspondence) the path of Pope Gregory. A previous chapter has
24 Completely unknown to Noldeke when he wrote his monograph on the Ghassanids,
since the Syriac version of Michael the Syrian's Chronicle had not yet been discovered.
25 The main source is Michael the Syrian, on whom David Olster drew in his competent
article, "Chalcedonian and Monophysite: The Union of 616," Bulletin of the Society /<>r Coptic
Archaeology 27 (Cairo, 1985), 93-108 .
analyzed the letter that the pope wrote to Maurice in July 600 in behalf of the
exiled Ghassanid king in Sicily. 26 Eight months after, in February 601, the
pope wrote a letter to Marianus, one of the bishops of the Provincia Arabia,
Mungir's province. The bishop had sent one of his clergy, an abbot named
Candidus, to Rome in order to ask the pope for holy relics to be brought
thence to the Provincia. In his reply, the pope refers to Candidus to whom he
gave the requested relics, and which he mentions in the first short sentence.
The rest of the letter is devoted to an extended apology for Gregory's inability
to see the abbot in person owing to the pope's ill health.
The letter to Marianus, bishop in Arabia, has been analyzed by Pierre-
Louis Gatier who argued well that Marianus was not the bishop of Bostra, the
metropolitan bishop of Arabia, but of Gerasa, a city of the Decapolis; that the
bishop was an orthodox Chalcedonian bishop; and that the relics sent per-
tained to Sts. Peter and Paul. He related all this to the building of a church in
Gerasa dedicated to the two Apostles by Anascasius, Marianus' successor. 27
The pope's letter raises some important questions. Pope Gregory is
known to have sent relics to the Orient, but these were to the patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch, 28 not to a relatively unimportant town such as Ge-
rasa. The relics of the two saints could not have been plentiful in Rome, and
so they were precious and of special value to the bishop of Rome who claimed
primacy among the pontiffs of Christendom based on what Christ said to
Peter, "Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church." Furthermore,
the letter is unduly long in apologies on the part of the pope for his inability to
see the envoy of this Arabian bishop. All this suggests that the pope had a special
interest in the Arabian bishop, the roots of which deserve to be probed.
Pope Gregory was naturally a staunch upholder of orthodoxy since he sat
on the same cathedra as the very pope who issued the famous Tome for those
assembled at Chalcedon. This strict orthodoxy which he both upheld and
wanted to enforce is reflected in his letter to the Chalcedonian patriarch of
Alexandria, Eulogius, whose synodal letter he criticized in detail on doctrinal
grounds with pointed references to the Monophysites and their theologians,
26 See BASIC 1.1, 602-5.
27 See P. L. Gacier, "Une leccre du Pape Gregoire le grand a Marianus eveque de Gerasa,"
Syria 64 (1987), 131-35. For che Latin cexc ofche leccer and ics French cranslacion, see ibid.,
132-33 .
28 Pope Gregory stood for the primacy of the Roman see over the ocher patriarchates of the
Orient, and so sending the incumbents of cwo of these patriarchates relics of the cwo Apostles,
Peter and Paul, would have carried a message reminding chem chat Rome was the city where
the cwo great Apostles were martyred. le is pertinent co remark chat Pope Gregory supported
the tradition chat Paul was martyred in Rome on the left bank of the Tiber . On the relics sent
by the pope co the cwo patriarchs, see Fliche and Marcin, Histoire de l'Eglise, V (Paris, 1947),
61.
Eutyches, Dioscorus, and Severus. 29 And, as is well known, he stood for the
primacy of the Roman see and objeqed to the Constantinopolitan patriarchs'
use of the tide "ecumenical patriarch."
His letter to Eulogius was written some ten years before his letter to
Marianus. But now his letter on behalf of Mungir must have revived his
interest in Monophysitism, to him a heresy. Mungir was the military protec-
tor of the movement; and the pope, as has been argued,3 was in Constanti-
nople as an apocrisiarius of Pope Pelagius II in 579. He was thus aware of the
Monophysite problem that faced Tiberius in 580 when he assembled its clerics
in Constantinople, whom Mungir reconciled. He knew, therefore, much
about the Ghassanids and their chief province, Arabia, in Oriens.
The letter of Marianus to the pope has not survived, but it is easy to
imagine its contents. This was the bishop of a province that had a very strong
Monophysite complexion, reflected in the vast number of monasteries that
were to be found in it, in addition to the protective shield of the Ghassanids
and their strong military presence in the Provincia.
Not only Severan Monophysitism but also the Julianist version of it,
even more unacceptable to the pope's orthodox Christianity, tried to establish a
presence in the Provincia Arabia. Slightly after 549 a Julianist bishop, Eutropius,
consecrated ten bishops and sent them in various directions to spread the faith.
One of them, Theodosius, was apparently assigned to the Provincia Arabia, but
he died crushed in a house destroyed by an earthquake. Another bishop, Stephen,
was consecrated in his place. 31 Later on, in 584, the Julianists made an attempt to
consecrate bishops for the sees of Edessa and Bostra. The second of the two was
assigned to George Bar-Abshai who, like his Severan counterpart, never lived
there and was only bishop extra muros, and that for only a few days. 32
29 Ibid.
30 BASIC 1.1, 604.
31 For this see R. Draguet, "Pieces de polemique antijulianiste,'" Le MuJeon 54 (1941), 84,
where a Syriac anti-Julianist document is given in French translation.
32 See Draguet, '"Polemique," p. 78, line 6, where B~rii/Bostra is clearly written. Dra-
guet erroneously thought it was B~ra/Bassora in Iraq (ibid., 86), a mistake noted by Honig-
mann, Eveque.r, 160 note 6. The consecration of the two bishops, George and Daniel, did not
last long since they were deposed by those who consecrated them a few days after on the ground
of non-canonicity. They were consecrated in September and deposed in October 584; see Dra-
guet, "Polemique," 62.
This consecration, ephemeral as it was, is of some importance in the history of Monophysi-
tism in the 6th century: (a) it was done during the quinquennium of eclipse for the Ghassanids;
and so the J ulianists were encouraged to consecrate the two bishops when the protectors of
Severan Monophysitism were not on hand to threaten them; (b) the consecration of the two
bishops for Edessa and Bostra confirms that the previous Severan one of ca. 540 involving Jacob
and Theodore for the same two cities cannot be viewed with doubt; (c) Stephen, who was
consecrated bishop for Arabia after Theodosius, appears as the one from whom proceeded or
derived the Julianist hierarchy; Draguet, '"Polemique," 61-62 .
Such was the image of the Provincia in the perception of the orthodox
pope: Arabia haeresium ferax, Arabia the breeding ground of heresies. Thus it
was from the time of Origen to the sixth century, when Monophysitism be-
came rampant in it, in both its Severan and Julianist versions, and where the
most towering monument of its religious architecture was the Cathedral of
Bostra, dedicated to what had become a Monophysite saint, Sergius, and con-
secrated in an impressive ceremony in 513 in which participated Severus him-
self and Philoxenus of Mabboug.
Important in this connection is the question of relics in Oriens, which
were the main burden of Marianus' letter to the pope, surely a striking request
from a small provincial town such as Gerasa to the bishop of Rome-relics of
the two Roman martyrs! The sixth century witnessed those extraordinary
events in South Arabia, the martyrdoms in Najran, in which a number of
Christians laid down their lives rather than renounce their faith, and that
within the orbit of Byzantine influence and some two centuries after the Peace
of the Church. But these martyrs were Monophysites; hence the Monophysite
church could boast of an abundance of relics available for the dedication of its
churches in Arabia and in the Fertile Crescent. This was especially true in
Byzantine Oriens where the Ghassanids, related to these South Arabian mar-
tyrs by consanguinity and confession, must have been promoters of their cult. 33
Their headquarters were in the Provincia Arabia, where Gerasa was located.
In view of these facts, it is not extravagant to assume that the Chakedo-
nian bishop of Gerasa wrote to the Chalcedonian pope for relics which would
be a counterpoise to the spread of Monophysitism in his province, promoted
by the abundance of relics of Monophysite saints. As bishop of Gerasa, he
might have thought it a coup to write to Rome itself, the see of the most
distinguished of the ecclesiastics of Christendom, invoking his aid for relics of
the foremost saints and martyrs of Christianity, Peter and Paul, for the erec-
tion of a Chalcedonian church dedicated to them . The pope, stimulated by his
intercession in behalf of Monophysite Mungir eight months before, most
probably was in a receptive mood for such a request on the part of Marianus.
He probably thought that this would strengthen the cause of Dyophysitism in
that important province, so close to the Holy Land in which he had a special
interest.
33 On this and on Najran in the Provincia Arabia, see the present writer in "Byzantium in
South Arabia," DOP 33 (1979), 78-80.
xv
The Reign of Phocas (602-610)
T
he Syriac sources, the only sources that record the ecclesiastical history of
the Ghassanids, are silent on their involvement in church affairs after the
reign of Maurice. With the departure of the phylarch Jafna, irritated from the
conference at Jabiya in 587 by inter-Monophysite bickering, the Ghassanids
also make their exit from the Syriac sources for the pre-Islamic period. This is
especially true of the reigns of both Phocas and Heraclius, and the student of
these two reigns is reduced to catching echoes of such involvement which
come indirectly from related and circumstantial data.
I. THE RETURN OF MUNQIR FROM SICILY
The most important fact in the life of the Ghassanids was the return of their
king Mungir from exile in Sicily where he had languished throughout the
whole of the reign of Maurice. The Ghassanids thus celebrated the inception
of the reign with the return of their king. A previous chapter has examined
the problems related to that return. 1 Was it a purely secular operation, involv-
ing the new emperor who supplanted Maurice and naturally tried to undo his
work including the exile of the Ghassanid king, or was it again Pope Gregory
whose mediation this time was successful? In either case, the return has impli-
cations for the Ghassanids in their relations to both the imperium and the
ecclesia . Phocas was an avowed Chalcedonian; so the question arises whether
the price of the return of the Monophysite king was Ghassanid concessions
concerning their support of the Monophysite movement, as Maurice himself
had requested from Nu man as the price for the return of his father. 2
II. GHASSANID MONOPHYSITISM DURING THE REIGN
There is no definite answer to this question. The possibility, or even proba-
bility, is that the Ghassanids in this period were no longer the zealous cham-
pions of Monophysitism . This is already noticeable in the attitude of the
phylarch Jafna toward the two Monophysite parties of Peter, the patriarch of
1 See BASIC 1.1, 618-22.
2 The actual request made by Maurice was Nu'man's return to fight against the Persians,
but that was immediately followed by a request to convert to the Chalcedonian position; see
BASIC 1.1, 529-32 .
Antioch, and Damian, the patriarch of Alexandria. He did not think it worth
his while to linger at Jabiya trying to reconcile the two warring parties. And
it has been suggested that his attitude was governed by the fate of Mungir,
whose staunch support of Monophysitism brought him to grief. 3 In 602 an
embittered and broken-spirited Mungir returned after twenty years of captiv-
ity and exile in a distant and foreign country, and his sudden appearance on
the Ghassanid scene in Oriens must have reminded the Ghassanids, if they
had forgotten, of the price they once paid for their support of Monophysitism,
and what a thankless task this had proved co be.
The test must have come in 608/9, which witnessed one of the outbursts
of Phocas, this time against the Monophysites of Oriens. The emperor's dis-
pleasure and determination to enforce strict orthodoxy and obedience to
Chalcedon found expression in the dispatch of Bonosus and Cottanas, who
brutally quelled the Monophysite uprising in Oriens. 4
Ghassanid reaction to Bonosus' campaign against the Monophysites is
not recorded, and there is no way of telling what form it cook. If the
Ghassanids were now lukewarm and not so zealous as before in their support
of Monophysitism, they would have distanced themselves from active partici-
pation in the campaign as a negative contribution . There is no evidence that
they withdrew from the service as they had done in 519 when Justin I insti-
tuted a severe persecution of the Monophysites. But whatever they might have
done, they must have been pleased with the outcome of the struggle between
Bonosus and Nicetas, the cousin of Heraclius,
5 in Egypt, and the subsequent
fall of Phocas that brought in another emperor, even more favorable to the
Ghassanids than Phocas had been.
If the Syriac sources are silent on the ecclesiastical history of the Arabs
during the reign of Phocas, the Greek sources are not. One Greek inscription,
from Anasartha in Syria, speaks of a certain Gregorios Abimenos, who dedi-
cated a building co God in 604. Nothing is known about this personage, and
a previous chapter has examined the possibility of his being a Ghassanid or a
non-Monophysite Arab, such as the Tanukhids were. And it was concluded
that most probably he was neither but was a Rhomaic Arab. 6 This is the one
solitary voice of Arab Christianity that is explicitly recorded in the sources for
the reign of Phocas.
The aridity of the sources, both Greek and Syriac, on Ghassanid eccle-
siastical history during this reign is relieved by a truly exciting reference to
the Ghassanid religious complexion in the Arabic sources. Although this will
3 See above, 933-35 .
4 On Bonosus and Coccanas in Oriens, see BASIC I. 1, 630-31.
5 Ibid., 635-37.
6 See ibid., 628-30.
The Reign of Phocas 941
be analyzed intensively in BASIC II, it should be mentioned here. The refer-
ence is owed to the contemporary Arab poet Nabigha, who wrote panegyrics
on the Ghassanid kings in the reigns of Maurice and Phocas. He refers to their
religion as "straight." The Arabic adjective "straight" (qawim, 7 Greek OQ06~)
is as frustrating as it is tantalizing. It is not at all clear whether it is used in
the Dyophysite or the Monophysite sense, since the followers of the latter
confession invariably referred to themselves as orthodox, as they have done to
the present day.
7 This term will be analyzed and discussed in detail in BASIC II. It occurs in one of the
odes of Nabigha on the Ghassanid 'Amr.
XVI
The Reign of Heraclius (610-641)
T
he possibility of writing the ecclesiastical history of the Ghassanids dur-
ing the reign of Heraclius is slightly better than for the reign of Phocas.
The reign was long, and Heraclius' policy toward Monophysitism is well doc-
umented. It emerges clearly from the sources as it is pursued from the very
beginning of the reign till its end. Although the references to the Ghassanids
are not plentiful, it is possible to set them against the ecclesiastical policy of
the reign and interpret them accordingly . A previous chapter in this volume
has treated the role of the Ghassanids in the military history of the reign and
has indicated their whereabouts during its three decades; so it has set the stage
for writing their ecclesiastical history, the main features of which become clear
after a brief survey of the policy of Heraclius toward the Monophysites.
I. INTRODUCTION
The reign of Heraclius is not unlike that of Justinian in that one may follow
the emperor's attitude toward solving the religious problem in his realm in all
its stages. 1 Heraclius began his reign with an understanding of the importance
of the problem posed by Monophysitism, in which he was involved even more
than Justinian. The people he belonged to, the Armenians, formed one of the
three main groups of Monophysites in the Byzantine East, the other two being
those in Oriens and in Egypt. His father, the exarch of Africa, had recently
come from the East where he had fought against the Persians, and he was
naturally familiar with the problem as it presented itself during the reign of
Maurice. Even before his departure from Carthage, Heraclius must have dis-
cussed with his father the problem of reconciling the Monophysites of the
empire with its Chalcedonians.
His motives in so doing are all easily recognizable. While he himself
sailed with the fleet against Phocas in Constantinople, his cousin Nicetas
marched overland to Egypt and was to continue his march through Oriens.
1 Foe the ecclesiastical policy of the reign of Hecaclius, see the account of Frend, Rise,
344-52, and the extensive chapter in Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, I, 283-304 ,
with its bibliography . The material presented there has been reorganized in the three following
paragraphs; they treat Hecaclius' comprehension of the problem, his motives in dealing with it,
and the measures he took.
The Reign of Heraclius 943
Thus he would be operating in territories in which the Monophysites were
powerful, and he needed them for the success of his adventure against Phocas.
Moreover, Phocas had alienated the Monophysites as recently as 609 when he
instituted harsh measures against them and sent them Bonosus and Cottanas.
Immediately after the fall of Phocas, both Heraclius and Nicetas had to fight
the Persians in Oriens, also full of Monophysites . Furthermore, this was
Ghassanid territory, and the contribution of these seasoned foederati would be
invaluable in the war with the Persians. Almost a decade later, Heraclius
would begin his counteroffensive against Persia in 622, and he begins it from
Armenia itself, Monophysite to the hilt, where he recruited troops for his
army.
It was then only natural that he should have engaged in a series of efforts
throughout his reign in order to conciliate the Monophysites. The highlights
of these endeavors were his conferences with their patriarchs and chief eccle-
siastics. It was also his cousin, the Chakedonian Nicetas, who effected the
union of the two Monophysite churches of Egypt and Oriens in 616, when he
brought the two patriarchs, Athanasius and Anastasius, together. Even after
the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Muslim Arabs at Yarmuk, Heraclius
issued the Ekthesis in 638. In all these endeavors, he had the support of his
patriarch in Constantinople, Sergius, a Syrian himself, 2 who did most of the
theological thinking behind these efforts at reconciliation with his Mono-
energism and Monotheletism, with clever emphasis on Monos as a sop to the
Monophysites.
Such an ecclesiastical policy could only have endeared the new emperor
to the Ghassanids, especially after their experiences with the anti-Monophysite
outburst of Phocas in 609/ 10. Even though they may have lost the edge of
their enthusiasm for an uncompromising support of the confession after the
exile of their king Mungir, they remained Monophysites until the very end of
the Byzantine period, and most of them crossed over to Anatolia after the
Muslim occupation of Oriens. Their history throughout the reign was that of
support for Heraclius, first against Phocas and then against the Persians, and
this has been treated in a previous chapter of this volume. With this support
must have been coupled their approval of the emperor's friendly gestures to-
ward Monophysitism to which they belonged.
The sources for the Ghassanids on ecclesiastical matters are even less
informative than they are on their political and military contributions . Only
echoes have survived that can be treated in an ecclesiastical context. Most of
these come toward the end of the second decade of the reign, which is under-
2 And, according to Michael the Syrian and Theophanes, of Monophysite parentage; see
Stratos, Byzantium, I, 287, and Frend, Rise, 344. On Byzantine contacts with Theodore, the
bishop of Pharao in Sinai, and the problems these contacts raise, see below, 983-84.
standable since, with the Persian occupation of Oriens for almost two decades,
the Ghassanids were off with Heraclius in Anatolia. Even then there is only
one echo which might be caught from the sources before their return to
Oriens after the Persian evacuation of the region.
II. THE ARA~ FOEDERATI IN A HERACLIAN VICTORY BULLETIN
On 15 May 628, the feast of Pentecost, the victory of Emperor Heraclius over
Persia was announced from the ambo of St. Sophia. In that important histori-
cal document, there is an explicit reference to the services of the Arab/Saracen
foederati to the Byzantine war effort against the Persians, which consisted of
their dispatch, 3 together with parts of their regular Byzantine troops, to find
out what had happened between Chosroes Parviz and his son Seiroes: EX n:
toov EU'tU')(EO'tCl'tO)V ti&v EXO'tQCltEUatwv xal EX t&v ~<lQ<lXl')VOOV t&v ov-
tWV im:o t'llV q>LAO')(QLO'tOV ti&v J'tOAL't1,(lV, Ota to, 00 ELQl')'t<lL, yv&vm
flct ClXQt~& ta exei:oe XtVrJ0evta.
4 The military aspect of this reference has
been commented upon in a previous chapter/ what matters here is its Chris-
tian profile.
The affiliation of the Saracens to Christianity is clearly implied in the
phrase that speaks of them as living in the shadow of "our Christ-loving
state." This roundabout way of referring to the Arab foederati, the Ghassanids,
is clearly made in the context of Heraclius' war as a crusade against the en-
emy, the Persians, a war not waged against another Christian state but against
a fire-worshiping one such as Sasanid Persia was. The Saracen contingent re-
ferred to in the victory bulletin shared the faith of the rest of the Byzantine
army since it was a Christian contingent.
That this citation of the services of the Arab foederati should have been
included in the bulletin, which was read in such solemn surroundings, from
the ambo of St. Sophia on the feast of Pentecost, suggests that they had come
a long way in the Byzantine perception. After a century of vilification by a
succession of Byzantine historians-Procopius, Evagrius, and slightly later
Simocatta-who never even associate the Ghassanids, the protectors of Mono-
physitism, with Christianity, they are referred to in this Christian context and
their service to the Christian empire is acknowledged . 6
3 As is dear from the text of this victory bulletin, which has survived, Heraclius had
written other letters to the Senate in which other contributions of the Arabs may have been
mentioned. This one penains only to the year 628, and only to what happened shortly before
the bulletin's dispatch.
4 Chronicon Paschale
(Bonn ed.), p. 730, lines 7-10.
5 See BASIC 1.1, 642-43.
6 That these Saracen allies referred to in the bulletin were the Ghassanids has been argued
for in a previous chapter; see ibid., 643-46. That they are not referred to as such should cause
no surprise, since the Byzantine Greek sources never refer to them as Ghassanids but always as
III. THE TRANSLATION OF THE RELICS OF ST. ANASTASIUS THE PERSIAN
Three years after this reference to the Arab allies/Ghassanids was read from the
ambo of St. Sophia, another spoke of their federate presence in Oriens in a
hagiographic context, the Acta of St. Anastasius the Persian. 7 A brief account
of the events that preceded the reference will allow a better comprehension of
the passage.
After the martyrdom of St. Anastasius in Persia, the abbot of the monas-
tery of St. Anastasius in Jerusalem, Justin, sent one of its inmates, referred to
as "the brother, " to find out what happened to the martyr . On the brother's
return from Persia, Justin sent him out again to bring back the body of the
martyr. In the attempts to possess the body, two ecclesiastics in Persia, the
catholicus and a bishop, aided the brother. They finally succeeded in acquir-
ing the body stea.lthily and in putting it in a reliquary chest. Finally, they
committed the chest and the brother to the protection of the phylarch of the
Saracens, who guarded them all the way from the Euphrates to Palmyra,
whence the brother traveled to Arad and Tyre and thence to Caesarea.
The passage involving the Saracen or Arab federate presence in the Acta
reads as follows.
airml ev oi,v 'tL~oavn:; 'tO A.L'ljJUVOV 'tOU aQ'tlJQO; ru; dxo; ~v
xal 3tUQU00CO'X.O't; 'tOV aOEA.cj>ov 'tq> 'tWV ~UQU'X.'l'JVOOV cj>UA<lQXCJ)
E~EJtE'\jlav EV ELQ~VTI E'tCl xal yQaa'tWV lo(wv JtQo; 'tOV aJto-
O'tELA.UV'tU. 6 Oe cj>uA.aQxo; OLCl tij; ~ou aJtE'X.U'tEO't'l'JOE'V 'tOV CXOEA.cj>ov
EXQL IlaAUQ'I'); XQOv(oav'ta E't' au't&v EV 'tai; JtaQE~oAai; xa-
'X.i:0EV aJtA.0cov El; y AQaOov xal E~a; EV l'tA.OLCJ) ~A.0EV ew; TUQOU. 8
The first sentence in the paragraph principally deals with the ecclesiastics
involved in the successful attempt to secure the body of the saint: au'tol
refers to the catholicus and the bishop in Persian territory who helped the
monk; 'tOV aOEAcj>ov refers to the monk of the monastery of St. Anastasius in
Jerusalem who traveled to Persia to obtain the saint's body (he is left anony-
mous in the Acta); 'tOV aJtOO'tLA.av'ta refers to Justin, the abbot of the mon-
astery of St. Anastasius in Jerusalem, who had sent the monk to Persia. The
letters sent to Justin (yQaa'twv lo(wv) may be related to the letter that
Justin had sent to Persia to the catholicus there 9 and which the monk carried
Saracens or symmachoi ; furthermore, since they were notoriously Monophysite, it would have
been rather inappropriate to call them by name from the ambo of a cathedral that was a fortress
of Chalcedonianism.
7 See Acta M. Anastasii Persae, ed. H. K. Usener (Bonn, 1894); Bib/iotheca Hagiographica
Graeca, I, 27-28 . A previous chapter has treated the political and military aspects relevant to
the Arabs in the Acta; see BASIC 1.1, 649-50, 658-59 .
8 Acta, p. 13, lines 31-38, right column.
9 Ibid. , Jines 10-11, left column.
with him, presumably involving his aid in securing the body. The catholicus
had succeeded in securing the body and, as a final act in this drama, sent
letters to the abbot informing him of the success of his endeavors.
In a previous chapter it was argued that this could only have been a
Byzantine phylarch, a federate, and that it is practically certain he was a
Ghassanid.
10 The route from the Euphrates (the boundary that separated Per-
sian from Byzantine territory) goes through the desert. This is the world
of the oriental limes and the Strata Diocletiana over which the Ghassanids
watched, and this was the most dangerous segment of the route from the
Euphrates to Palmyra. 11 Once there, the phylarch apparently left him since the
hagiographer uses the singular, ~A.0Ev, referring to the brother who traveled
safely westward to Arad and then boarded a ship to Tyre. The implication is
that the route from Palmyra to Arad was safe, and the monk could travel
without fear on his westward journey. 12
The journey from the Euphrates to Palmyra was a long one, and it is
stated in the passage that the brother stayed and rested throughout the jour-
ney at the camps (parembolae) of the Arab phylarch. These dotted this bound-
ary line. So the federate Arabs of the region, both the phylarch and those
stationed at these camps, were hosts to the relics of the martyr . Thus the
journey added a new dimension, a spiritual one, to these military outposts,
which functioned as the temporary resting place of the body of the saint who,
moreover, was a miracleworker and as such appears at Palmyra, where he
performed a miracle toward the end of his journey with the Arab phylarch . 13
What must have been especially gratifying to the Arab phylarch was the
background of the martyr. He had been a Persian soldier in the occupation
10 BASIC 1.1, 650-51.
11 Noteworthy is the face chat the Acta do not name the provinces through which the route
from the Euphrates co Palmyra extended; two provinces muse have been involved, Euphracesia
and Phoenicia Libanensis, chat is, if the provinces still retained their names in 631. Similarly,
when the body of the saint arrived in Arad and Tyre, no province is named, and none when ic
arrived in Caesarea. On the other hand, there is reference ro the provinces of Syria, Cilicia, and
Cappadocia, during the translation of the body from Jerusalem ro Constantinople; see W. E.
Kaegi, Jr., "Notes on Hagiographical Sources," Byzantina 7 (1975), 68. In addition co what H .
Gelzer says in chis connection as quoted by Kaegi, one might add chat the reference co the three
provinces may have been inspired by the desire co say chat the journey to Constantinople was
not undertaken by sea but by land, unlike the journey from Tyre co Caesarea, which was a sea
voyage. Note chat two of the provinces mentioned are not in Oriens but in Anatolia, while
Syria sometimes is used co denote a large portion of Oriens in general (as in the work of John of
Ephesus), and not the particular province which went by chat name.
12 Presumably the phylarch was assigned co chat territory chat extended from the Eu-
phrates co Palmyra. When that city was reached, the phylarch apparently turned the brother
over to the Byzantine authorities who escorted him co Arad. The phylarch appears as the
warden of the march, " assigned co chat sector of the oriental limes.
13 One among the many miracu/a of Sc. Anascasius. For the miracle at Palmyra, see Acta,
p. 22. The Arab element in and around Palmyra muse have been strong .
army of Chosroes Parviz in Oriens, but he converted to Christianity and cou-
rageously declared his desire to be a martyr. The phylarch was a soldier like
the martyr, and he must have derived a special satisfaction from the fact that
he was escorting the body of a fellow soldier, a comrade-in-arms. As is well
known, the Arabs, especially the Monophysite Ghassanids, were particularly
attached to St. Sergius, the Roman soldier and military saint, who was buried
in the middle of their desert, the barbarikon pedion, and they had guarded his
shrine for centuries. The escort service which the phylarch performed for Ana-
stasius must have solidified the faith of the phylarch and all the federate
troops along the road from the Euphrates to Palmyra.
Finally, the spectacle of an Arab federate phylarch escorting the remains
of a saint across the desert brings to mind previous involvements of the Arabs
of pre-Islamic times in the lives of Christian saints and martyrs. St. Sergius
has already been mentioned, and St. Simeon the Stylite in the fifth century
comes to mind as a closer parallel. In the case of Sergius, the Arab involve-
ment in the escort of his body and the circumstance of his burial in his final
resting place are not entirely clear. In the case of Simeon, it is explicitly
recorded in the Vita of Simeon by Theodoret. When news of the saint's death
was announced, the Arabs, who were devoted to the saint, appeared and
wanted to possess themselves of the body. 14
Thus the "funeral procession" 15 of St. Anastasi us late in 631, from the
Euphrates to Palmyra, escorted by an Arab phylarch, is the last echo in the
sources of the devotion of the federate Arabs to a Christian saint in pre-Islamic
times before the Arab Conquest of Oriens, a few years later in the same de-
cade.
IV. THE GHASSA.NID DEFEAT IN ORIENS, EASTER SUNDAY, 634
The last recorded association of the Ghassanids with Christianity appears in
the sources before the crushing Byzantine defeat of Yarmiik in 636 which
decided the fate of Oriens. After his historic dash from Iraq to Oriens,
Khalid, the foremost general of the Arab Conquests, appeared near Damascus
and beat the Ghassanids at Marj Rahif
6 on Easter Sunday while they were
14 See BAFOC, 160.
15 Shortly before, the region witnessed another procession carrying the holiest of all Chris-
tian relics from Persia, that of the Cross, escorted by Heraclius himself, to Jerusalem .
16 Marj Ra.hi~ is a plain that lies fifteen miles northeast of Damascus. It is not far from
'Agra', a toponym associated with the Ghassanids in the poetry of their court poet, r.Iassan; see
BASIC II. For the battle and the chronology of the military engagements associated with it, see
F. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, 1981), 124-25. The fact that the battle was
fought on Easter Sunday attracted the attention of the Muslim historians of the conquests who
thus recorded it and in so doing helped fix the correct chronology of the engagements as
explained by Donner, ibid.
celebrating the feast, on 24 April 634. The defeat was one of many that
Byzantium and its allies suffered in these crucial years of disarray in Oriens,
but the fact that the Ghassanids were celebrating Easter suggests that Khalid
fell upon them unawares, catching them off-balance, and this may have con-
tributed to the defeat.
For the zealously Christian Ghassanids, who lived the liturgical year, 17
the defeat must have stung them to the quick. Some sixty years before, the
invincible Ghassanid army under Mungir won a resounding victory against
their pagan Lakhmid adversaries on Ascension Day, and this was considered a
victory for a Christian army since the Syriac source that reported it so de-
scribed it: crux triumphavit. 18 The defeat at Marj Rahit must have aroused in
them thoughts all too familiar in Byzantine literature, which tried to under-
stand the meaning of the Muslim Arab victory over the Christian Roman
Empire in the 630s in terms of a punitive act of God inflicted on the "New
Israel of God" because of its sins. 19
If the Ghassanids harbored any doubts about the succor which their God
had denied them at Marj Rahit or at Yarmuk, they did not evince any signs of
it after the final and definitive defeat of Byzantium. The negotiations with the
second orthodox caliph, Omar, concerning their status were conducted by
their king Jabala, around whom was woven a cycle of legendary accounts both
while he was still negotiating in Oriens and after he departed and took up
residence in Anatolia with the Byzantines. A close look at the sources reveals
that Jabala remained firmly within the Christian fold. 20
17 That they did so is clear from the poetry of }:Iassan, who in one of his poems describes
preparations for Easter at the Ghassanid court. This will be discussed at length in BASIC II; for
the time being, see Noldeke, GF, 46 note 1.
18 See BASIC 1.1, 345.
19 Fifty years after the defeat of the Ghassanid host at Marj Rahif, another Christian Arab
tribe, Kalb (and others with it), won the caliphate for the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad
dynasry in 684 on the same battlefield; see P. K. Hitti, History of Syria (London, 1951), 452.
20 For the fortunes of the Ghassanids and their king Jabala after the battle of the Yarmiik,
see the present writer in "Ghassan post Ghassan," in The Islamic World from Classical to Modern
Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. C. E. Bosworth et al. (Princeton, 1989), 324. In
that article the question of Jabala's conversion to Islam, considered as a possibility by Noldeke,
was also entertained, but now a closer study of the sources has convinced the present writer that
the accounts that tell of his conversion were tendentious yarns.
XVII
T
he attachment of the Arab foederati to Christianity and their involvement
in the theological controversies of the sixth century will now serve as a
background against which to survey their relation to certain saints whose cults
were popular in Oriens in this prom-Byzantine period.
I. THE ARABS AND ST. SERGIUS
Since the appearance of Jean Sauvaget's celebrated article in 1939, "Les
Ghassanides et Sergiopolis," 1 not much has been written on the subject of the
Arabs and their relation to both the saint and the city that bore his name. In
fact not much has been written on Sergius himself in comparison with other
saints. Father H. Delehaye left him out in his well-known monograph, and in
the most recent dictionary of Byzantium he appears in a short entry. 2 But the
saint is very important for the Arabs, for the Monophysites, and for Oriens in
general. After a half century since Sauvaget wrote, it is only appropriate that a
detailed examination of the subject be attempted, especially necessary in a
volume such as this one devoted to Byzantium and the Arabs. 3 The praetorium
erected by the Ghassanid Mungir outside the walls of Sergiopolis still stands,
reminder of the involvement of the Arabs, especially the Ghassanids, in the
cult of St. Sergius. But the Ghassanids were not only Arabs; they were also
Monophysites and the defenders of Oriens . Hence in order fully to appreciate
and understand the Ghassanid and Arab involvement in the cult of St. Ser-
gius, it is necessary to treat the subject from several angles.
1 See Byzantion 14 (1939), 115-30. Before Sauvagec, H. Charles wrote briefly on the
Arabs and their veneration for Sc. Sergius in Le christianisme, 31-3 5. The standard work on
R~afa/Sergiopolis is now the multivolume series published by the Deucsches Archiiologisches
Institut, of which two volumes had already appeared (see BAFIC, 124 note 22), while the third
has just come out; see Th. Ulbert, Resafa Ill: Kreuzfahrerzeitliche Silberschatz aus Resafa-
Sergiupo/iJ
(Mainz am Rhein, 1990). The volume on the praetorium is eagerly awaited.
2 See H. Delehaye, Les ligendes grecques
de saints militaires (Paris, 1909), and ODB, III,
1879.
3 Besides, Sauvaget wrote as an arc historian interested mainly in the architecture of the
Ghassanid structure outside Sergiopolis and trying to prove it was not a church but apraetorium.
The present chapter, on the other hand, is a contribution co ecclesiastical history, but it also
provides the larger cultural background for discussing the praetorium.
The Fourth to Sixth Centuries
The origins of the Arabs' veneration of St. Sergius are shrouded in obscu-
rity. It must have started long before the sixth century 4 when the Ghassanids
appear on the stage of Arab-Byzantine relations. The saint was buried in their
midst, in the sands of Ru~afa in the vicinity of which he was martyred, and
Ru~afa/Sergiopolis was in the middle of the "barbarian plain," the ~UQ~UQL-
x&v 3tEOtov of Procopius . This was Arab/Saracen territory. Some Arab tribes
may have been witnesses to the martyrdom, and it is possible, on the analogy
of other similar situations, that soon after the martyrdom they became the
custodians of his relics. 5 In addition to this, the saint was credited with mira-
cles, most of which pertained to healing, and this may have been another
factor that increased the Arabs' devotion to the saint. Furthermore, Ru~afa
was a station on the route which caravans 6 traversed from the Euphrates to the
southwest, and this would have attracted the Arabs of the region to visit the
spot where the mawsim was held. 7 The feast of the saint apparently was cele-
brated at an early date, although its first attestation comes in Theodoret of
Cyrrhus in the fifth century. 8 Thus Sergiopolis developed into a pilgrimage
center, second in Oriens only to Jerusalem. And the ethnic group that was
most associated with the pilgrimage and veneration of the saint were the
4 For the earliest attested dedication of a church co Sc. Sergius in the Provincia Arabia (as
early as A.D . 354), see P. Le Bas and W. H. Waddington, Voyage archeo/ogique (repr. New
York, 1972), III, no. 2124.
5 Cf. ocher episodes involving the Arabs in the preservation of the relics of saints and holy
men: on che competition of the inhabitants of cwo Arab villages for che relics of some martyred
hermits, see Cassian, Co//ationes, VI, chap. 1, in The Library of the Nicene and PoJt-Nicene
Fathers,
second series, XI, 351-52; on che veneration of the Arabs for Sc. Symeon Stylites and che fight
for keeping his corpse among chem, see BAFIC, 149-53, esp. 160 note 7. le was only che
intervention of che magister mi/itum, Ardabur, chat extricated the relics of che saint from che
devoted Arabs and transferred chem co Antioch.
Perhaps the Arabs of Euphracesia guarded the relics of Sc. Sergius while they reseed in the
necror,Jis outside of R~afa, before they were transferred inside ic.
R~afa remained a station on the caravan route and a commerce center even in Islamic
rimes after the fundamental changes in trade routes cook place; see Yaqiic, Mu'jam a/-Bu/diin
(Beirut, 195 7), III, 481.
7 The Arabic word mawsin means both the "season" and "festival, marker"; see El, III,
422, s.v.
The coincidence of che mawsin with che celebration of the saint's day is dated 7 October or
15 November, depending on whether the celebration commemorates his martyrdom, which
cook place on the first dace, or the dedication of his church in Ru~afa, which, according to the
Arabic Jacobite Syna:xarion, took place on 15 November . See Charles, Le christianiime, 33 and
Nau, Arabes chretiens, 69 note 1. le is stated in the Synaxarion chat fifteen bishops attended the
dedication of che church of the saint in R~afa; see R. Basset, Le Synaxaire arabe Jacobite, PO 3
(Paris, 1909), p. 311.
8 See Bib/iotheca Sanctorum (Rome, 1968), XI, p. 877, quoting Theodoret, Graecarum Af-
fectionum Curatio.
The Arab Foederati and the Christian Saints 951
Arabs, who lived in the vicinity and who also traveled to Sergiopolis from
other parts. 9 Sergiopolis also became a center of conversion for the Arabs
whither they would go for baptism. 10
Soon after the martyrdom of Sergius during the Tetrarchy, the Arab
federate system in the Orient came into being, and the foederati of Byzantium
in the fourth century were the Tanukhids.
11 The Tanukhids were settled south
of the Euphrates in Chakidice, not far from Ru~afa, and so the protection of
the shrine and Ru~afa may have fallen within the frontier area that the Tan-
ukhids defended. 12
The involvement of the Arabs continued in the fifth century. Ru~afa was
not only a station on the caravan route, but also a post on the Strata Diocle-
tiana. Toward the beginning of the fifth century, it appears in the Notitia
Dignitatum, dependent on the dux of Syria and Euphratesia who had stationed
there a military unit, the Equites Promoti Indigenae. 13 But these, it is prac-
tically certain, were Arabs recruited locally for the defense of that spot, most
probably Rhomaic Arabs. Other units of Indigenae were under the command
of the dux and these, too, were Arab. So for the defense of Ru~afa, where the
shrine of St. Sergius was located, Arabs of the regular Roman army, Rhomaic
Arabs, were deployed. But these were not the only Arabs who defended the
shrine. As has been indicated, federate Arabs-the Tanukhids of the fourth
century-may have participated in its defense, and these remained in the
service of Byzantium in the fifth century, which witnessed the arrival of an-
other group of Arabs, the Salil:iids, who became the dominant federate Arab
group in the service of Byzantium in that century. 14 These were stationed in
the south of Oriens far from Ru~afa, but one of their kings, Dawud, re-
nounced the world and built for himself a monastery, Dayr Dawud, not far
from Sergiopolis, which may witness to the veneration that the new group of
9 This is attested in three 6th-century authors: (1) in Severus of Antioch: see his homily on
Sergius, PO 4, pp. 83-94 (the reference co the Arabs occurs on p. 93); (2) in the Life of
A~iidemmeh, for which see Histoires d'A~oudemmeh et de Marouta, PO 3 (1909), p. 29; for
A~iidemmeh and the Arabs, see BAFOC, 419-22; and (3) in Theophylact Simocacta, The
History of Theophy/act Simocatta, trans. Michael and Mary Whitby (Oxford, 1986), 132. The
Arabs are referred co explicitly in the Histoires d'A~oudemmeh, bur clearly implied in the ocher
two authors, who speak of the pascoraliscs around R~afa (Sergiopolis).
10 See Severus, op. cit., p. 93.
11 Under Maximianus Daia, rather than Maximian, since the latter never ruled in the
West, while the former ruled the prefecture of the Orient within which lay Euphratesia, as well
noted by A. Amore in Bib/iotheca Sanctorum, XI, p. 876.
12 For chis see BAFOC, esp. 465- 76.
13 For these see BAFIC, 467. The Arab unit that defended R~afa is explicitly described as
consisting of equites, not cameleers: cf. W. Karnapp, Die Stadtmauer von Rusafa in Syrien,
Deucsches Archaologisches Inscicuc (Berlin, 1976), 4.
14 See BAFIC, which is mainly on the Sali~ids.
federates, the Salil)ids, had for the saint, near whose shrine the Salil)id king
wanted to be. 15 Soon the imperial government began to withdraw its regular
troops from their advanced positions along the oriental limes,
16 and so the
defense of the easternmost approaches to Oriens fell into the hands of the
federates, the Arabs/Saracens in alliance with Byzantium. This process reached
its climax in the sixth century with the arrival of the Ghassanids who, toward the
end of the fifth century, opened a new chapter in the history of Arab-Byzantine
relations and in the Arab veneration of St. Sergius. But before discussing this in
detail, it is necessary to discuss the involvement of the Monophysites in his cult.
The Ghassanids became fervent Monophysites, and their devotion to the saint was
enhanced by their adherence to Monophysitism.
The Monophysites and St. Sergius
Ecclesiastical historians have noted the devotion, even the infatuation, of
the Monophysites with St. Sergius, 17 sometimes even to the exclusion of the
Nestorians from his devotion, and this continued throughout the sixth cen-
tury and after. 18 Related to this is the popularity of his cult in Oriens, both
this side of the Euphrates and the other in Mesopotamia. So many churches
were dedicated to him; so many Christians, especially clerics, bore his name. 19
This Monophysite devotion to St. Sergius, therefore, calls for an explanation.
The first emperor associated with the promotion of the cult of St. Sergius
in a large way was Anastasi us ( 491-518). Sometime during his reign, he took
a sudden interest in the saint and either brought one of his relics (his thumb)
to Constantinople or sent it to Ru~afa, which he renamed Sergiopolis and
made into a metropolis. 20 Anastasius was the first and only Monophysite em-
peror to reign in Constantinople; after being inclined toward that confession
early in his reign, he became openly a Monophysite in its last decade.
Monophysite clerics responded to the interest of their emperor in the
saint, and two distinguished members of the Monophysite hierarchy reflect
this response. Severus, the patriarch of Antioch, composed a homily on Ser-
gius and delivered it at Chalcis (Qinnasiin), while Jacob, bishop of Sariij,
composed a metrical panegyric. 21 Thus both the Monophysite imperium and
15 Ibid., 297-301.
16 On this see BAFOC, 465-90 .
17 SeeJ. M. Fiey, "Les saints Serge de J'Iraq," AB 79 (1961), 102-14, esp. 111-12 .
18 Ibid ., 104, 109-11.
19 See Charles, Le christianisme, 30-31; and A. Poidebard and R. Mouterde, "A.
propos de
Saine Serge: Aviation et epigraphie," AB, Melanges Paul Peeters, 67 (1949), 112-14.
20 See E. Honigmann, "Sergiupolis," RE, II, A, col. 1658; Devreesse, PA, 288 note 12;
Madia M. Mango, ODB, s.v.
21 For the homily, see PO 4, pp. 83-94 ; for the panegyric, see P. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum
et Sanctorum Syriace (repr. 1958), VI, 650-61.
953
ecclesia were united in their veneration of the saint during the reign of Ana-
stasius, reflected in the consecration of one of the great cathedrals of Oriens,
that of Bostra in 513 and its dedication to Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. Thus
arose a tradition of devotion to St. Sergius among the Monophysites who
looked at the reign of Anastasius as the golden reign when the only Mono-
physite emperor was the autokrator in Constantinople and when the patriarch
was Severus, after whom Monophysitism in Oriens took on its doctrinal color.
The saint continued to be revered in the sixth century by Monophysite rulers,
such as the empress Theodora, who sent to Sergiopolis a jeweled cross and,
according to one view, built in Constantinople the church in honor of the
saint and his companion Bacchus. Other rulers, such as Justinian and Chos-
roes Parviz, continued to revere him, partly influenced by their Monophysite
wives, Theodora and Shiri"n respectively. 22
The question must inevitably arise as to why Anastasius was interested in
this particular saint. The most probable explanation may be sought in the
outbreak of the Persian war during his reign. After more than a century of
peace between the two empires, Byzantium and Persia, the Persian war sud-
denly erupted . The emperor may have wanted a symbol of resistance to Per-
sian aggression, represented by the invasion of Mesopotamia and the capture
of Amida, and a spiritual force that had religious overtones to back his war
efforts. St. Sergius afforded the best instrument of that policy. Here was a
saint who was a soldier, martyred on the Euphrates front where he was sta-
tioned against the Persians, and who above all was buried not far from the
border with Persia and the Persian front, in Ru~afa. Thus, in this respect, he
dwarfed other military saints in Oriens, such as Procopius and George, who
were supposedly buried in faraway Palestine.
The Persian war, as a background for the interest of Anastasius in Ser-
gius, may now be related to the involvement of the Arabs. Around the year
500, Nu'man, the Arab Lakhmid king of l:lira, the client of Persia, opened a
campaign against Euphratesia with the aim of capturing Ru~afa, but he was
beaten by Eugenius, the dux of Syria and Euphratesia. In addition to posing a
direct threat to the holy shrine, which had become the most important pil-
grimage center in Oriens after Jerusalem, the thrust of the Lakhmid king was
Persian-inspired and was the prelude to the Persian war which broke out
shortly after in 502 and continued until 506, when it was concluded, not by a
peace, but by a truce. 23
22 Justinian may also have been attracted by the fact that Sergius was Roman, with the
good patrician name of Sergius. Zacharia mentions that Pope Agapetus was well received by
Justinian when he came to Constantinople since both of chem could speak Latin co each ocher
("quod lingua eadem usus est"); Zacharia, HE , versio, p. 94, line 16.
23 For the campaign of Nu'man against Ru~afa (Sergiopolis), see BAFIC, 121-25.
Although the emperors of the sixth century were all Chalcedonians after
the death of Monophysite Anastasius, the cult of Sergius continued, perpetu-
ated and enhanced by the Persian wars which broke out in the reign of every
emperor of the century. 24 Sergius had become the patron saint of the army of
Oriens in its fight with the Persians for the reasons explained earlier. And
Persian thrusts against Sergiopolis in the second Persian war of Justinian's
reign only riveted attention on the saint, while the failure of the Persians to
capture Sergiopolis must have confirmed the faith of Byzantium in the efficacy
of the saint's relics as a palladium of Oriens. But it all started with the reign
of the Monophysite emperor Anastasius, which witnessed the outbreak of the
Persian war. The enhanced interest in Sergius as the Byzantine patron saint in
the Persian wars may have been sparked by the above-mentioned campaign of
the Lakhmid king Nu'man against the shrine of the saint at Sergiopolis
(Ru~afa). The fact that the Ghassanids were the inveterate enemies of the
Lakhmids only confirmed them in their devotion to Sergius, if only because
the Lakhmids had made a point of attacking his shrine as well as other Chris-
tian establishments in Oriens.
The Ghassanids and St. Sergius
The preceding sections have explained the relationship of the Arabs to
St. Sergius and Ru~fa (Sergiopolis) in the fourth and fifth centuries, involv-
ing both federate (Tanukhid and Salil).id) and non-federate Arabs. They are the
immediate background for understanding the relationship of the Ghassanid
Arabs to St. Sergius in the sixth century, and for understanding the praetorium
erected by the Ghassanid Mungir outside the walls of Sergiopolis. In the
Ghassanids, Arab veneration of St. Sergius reached its climax, as these inher-
ited the tradition of previous Arab veneration of the saint. Their veneration
was enhanced by two features of Ghassanid life and history related to it. The
Ghassanids were not only Christians but zealous Monophysites, and thus
added to the traditional Arab veneration of the saint that of the Monophysites.
They also emerged as the most powerful Arab federate group in this proto-
Byzantine period and, what is more, participated regularly in the continual
Persian wars of the sixth century along the Euphrates front, after a lull of
more than a century in the fifth. This insured their constant awareness of the
Sergian presence in their midst, as the saint was the protector of the Byzantine
army of the Orient, especially in its wars with Persia. Special mention must
be made in this context of the fact that, after the death of Anastasius, the
24 In this connection the equestrian statue of Justinian, erected in Constantinople, may be
mentioned, as a reflection of the emperor's interest in the Persian war. According to Procopius,
the hand of the emperor pointed to the East, as if against the Persians; see Procopius, History,
1.5.
Ghassanid supreme phylarch and king emerged as the Monophysite fidei defen-
sor, the only Monophysite political and military figure in Oriens in the midst
of a Chalcedonian Byzantine hierarchy, political and military, starting with
the autokrator in Constantinople. This further cemented the ties with the mar-
tyr of Euphratesia, whom the Monophysites venerated.
Evidence for this view of the Ghassanids and St. Sergius is provided by
the sources-Greek, Syriac, and Arabic-
25 and these, such as they are after
the accidents of survival, will now be laid under contribution. The relevant
data from the sources will be outlined chronologically for the reign of each
emperor, and they will speak for themselves.
Anastasius
The following data may be gathered together for the reign of Anastasius
(491-518).
1. The campaign of the Lakhmid king Nu'man against Ru~afa (Ser-
giopolis) around the year 500: the Arabs of Byzantium, whether foederati or
Rhomaic Arabs, must have been involved in the operation that repulsed
Nu'man and which was led by the dux Eugenius . 26
2. The Ghassanid thrust in 503 during the Persian war, which was di-
rected against l:Hra itself, is noteworthy, perhaps in retaliation, inter alia, for
the attack of the Lakhmid king against Ru~afa.
21
3. Severus, the patriarch of Antioch, delivered his homily in Chalcis
(Qinnasrin) in memory of St. Sergius and made a specific reference to the Arab
pastoralists of the region who would visit the shrine and receive the light of
Christianity and baptism. 28
4. The Christian Arab inscription, the Zabad Trilinguis-in Greek, Syr-
iac, and Arabic-with its Sergian onomasticon, testifies to the Arab awareness
of Sergius at the baptism of their children. 29
5. In 513 the great cathedral of Bostra was dedicated to Sts. Sergius and
Bacchus in a splendid ceremony attended by Philoxenus, the bishop of Hiera-
polis. It is practically certain that the phylarch of Arabia, the province
of which Bostra was the capital, must have attended. Mun<)ir, his grand-
son, was invited to the dedication of a much less important church at Evaria
(}::luwwarin).
30 The celebration in Bostra must have made a great impression
25 For the Arabic sources, see below, 962, and BASIC II.
26 On this see BAFIC,
467.
27 Before his death in 502 as the result of a wound, he had threatened to take another holy
city, Edessa, but died before he could join Kawad in the offensive against it; see BASIC 1.1,
12-13, 15, 18, and Rothstein, DLH, 74.
28 See above, note 9.
29 See above, 700-701.
30 See BASIC I. I, 457-61.
on the phylarch, presumably Jabala . Perhaps from this may derive the fact
that the principal church of the Ghassanids in their main camp-town, Jabiya,
was dedicated also to St. Sergius. Thus the saint was commemorated in two
capitals, the capital of the imperial province and the capital of the federate
Arabs, the Ghassanids. 31
jUJtin I
Justin I's reign was short (518-527), and the Ghassanids withdrew from
the service during most of it owing to the persecution of their fellow confes-
sionalists, the Monophysites, by the house of Chakedonian Justin, but the
following data may be culled from the fragmentary sources. They deal mainly
with the activity of their enemy, the Lakhmid Mungir, in Oriens.
1. Mungir waged campaigns of his own, 32 but no doubt inspired by
Persia, against the oriental limes and committed barbarities against the Chris-
tian establishment in the first two years of the reign and later in 527.
2. More directly related to Ru~afa is his campaign (undated) during
which he captured the two Roman dukes, Timostratus and John. It has been
argued that John was the dux of Euphratesia, which Mungir apparently at-
tacked. This conclusion is fortified by the fact that at the conference of Ramla
in the early 520s the bishop of Sergiopolis, Sergius, appeared, and the confer-
ence was convened, among other reasons, to free the two dukes. 33
3. Early in the reign of Justin, the Monophysite bishop Simeon of Beth-
Arsham in Persia appeared in Jabiya, the camp-town of the Ghassanid king
Jabala, and invoked his aid in helping the Monophysites of South Arabia after
their persecution by the }::limyarite dynast of South Arabia, Yusuf. 34 The
Ghassanids could not participate in the crusade against South Arabia, but a
shrine of St. Sergius appeared in the region (preserved in later Islamic times as
"the Mosque of Sarjis," Masjid Sarjis). This reflected the migration of the
fame of the military saint to that distant region, possibly effected through the
Monophysite missionaries who converted South Arabia to their confession,
with the possible participation of the federate military group in Oriens, the
Ghassanids, whose protective saint he was. 35
31 In addition to the church dedicated to Sergius in Constantinople . Who of the Ghassanid
phylarchs built the church of Sergius in Jabiya is not clear. He could have been Jabala or
Arethas, probably the latter; on the church at Jabiya , see above, 931-32 .
32 BASIC 1.1, 42-48 .
33 See "The Conference of Ramla, " ibid., 40-42 .
34 Simeon appears in Jabiya just before the Ghassanids withdrew from the service of By-
zantium ; for this see ibid. , 33, 36.
35 On Masjid Sarjis in South Arabia, see the present writer in "Byzantium in South Ara-
bia," DOP 33 (1979), 85-87. Of the various candidates suggested for the identification of
Sarjis, in the name of the mosque "Masjid Sarjis," I am now inclined to believe that it is St.
Sergius.
Justinian
The reign of Justinian (527-565), the longest reign of the century, is
also most informative on what the imperial government did for Sergius both
in Constantinople and in the city that carried his name: building his church in
Constantinople and the well-known extensive works of renovation in Ser-
giopolis. The reign also witnessed the outbreak of two Persian wars and a
Persian offensive in Euphratesia that targeted Sergiopolis itself, the city of the
patron saint of the Byzantine army in the Persian war. The main source for all
this is the chief historian of the reign, Procopius. The contemporary of Justin-
ian was Arethas, the Ghassanid Monophysite supreme phylarch of the Arab
foederati who inherited veneration for Sergius from his ancestors, and yet Pro-
copius is completely silent on the Ghassanid relationship to Sergius. This is
not out of character for Procopius, whose anti-Ghassanid attitude is well
known. 36
1. The first Persian war (527-532) was fought mainly in Mesopotamia,
far from Euphratesia, but the second (540- 544) involved three holy cities in
Oriens-Antioch, Edessa, and Sergiopolis itself. There is no doubt that the
Ghassanids were involved in the operations that centered round these three
holy cities, especially the last. This was the most easterly sector of the Limes
orientalis and a sector of the Strata Diocletiana over which Arethas watched, as
is clear from Procopius' own account of the Strata dispute of 539 which was
the occasion for the second Persian war. In 542 the Persian army advanced
against Sergiopolis. With them was a contingent of their Lakhmid allies
led by Mungir who, in attacking the city, was repeating what his father,
Nu'man, had done around the year 500. 37 The city, however, did not fall
because of the intelligence that an Arab soldier in the contingent of the
Lakhmid Mungir conveyed to the inhabitants of Sergiopolis, and this saved
the city. 38 If an Arab in the Persian army felt so strongly about Sergiopolis, it
is easy to imagine how Arethas and his Ghassanid foederati must have felt
about it. This was a Persian campaign that failed, and it is possible that the
Ghassanids contributed to its failure b_y a spirited defense of the city, whose
saint was their (?Wn patron saint, and by fighting in desert territory very much
their sector to defend. Since the Ghassanids fought under the aegis of Sergius,
36 On this see BAFIC , 121-25 .
37 On Ambros (Amr), the Christian in the army of Mungir who saved the city, see
Procopius, History, 11.xx.10, 14.
38 It should also be remembered that Arethas visited Constantinople during the second
Persian war in 542/43 for the consecration of the two Monophysite bishops, Jacob and The-
odore. Thus religion was not far from his mind , even during the armed conflict with Persia. So
the omission by Procopius of the participation of the Ghassiinids in the defense of Sergiopolis
may be added co the list of suppresio veri in his works.
it is inconceivable that they would not have participated in the one campaign
that was fought in Euphratesia and around the city of the saint. 39
2. The Ghassanids waged a private war with the Lakhmids for many
years after the end of the second Persian war in 544. It was most probably
waged in those desert regions in Euphratesia, or not far from Sergiopolis. The
religious undertones of the war are audible in the account of Procopius, who
says that the Lakhmid Mungir sacrificed one of the captured sons of Arethas to
the Arabian Aphrodite. They are also found in the account of Michael the
Syri,an, who says that after Arethas' great victory over Mungir in 554, Arethas
buried his own son, who had fallen in the former battle, in a martyrion near
Chalcis. These ten years were years of continual warfare with his Lakhmid
adversary, in regions not far from Ru~afa, and so the Ghassanids and their
king Arethas must always have been especially aware of their relationship to
their patron military saint. In fact, before the final battle was joined in 554, a
living saint, St. Simeon the Younger, had prophesied to the Ghassanids their
victory over their Lakhmid adversaries. 40
3. The Ghassanids were great builders who erected monasteries and
churches, among many other structures. They must have built some monas-
teries and churches dedicated to their patron saint, Sergius. There is an im-
portant reference to a church of Sergius in their capital Jabiya in Palaestina
Secunda, the rendezvous of the warring Monophysite parties 41 of Damian of
Alexandria and Peter of Callinicum in 587. This then must have been the
principal church of the camp-town, Jabiya, the capital of the Ghassanids, and
it is quite possible, even probable, that it was built during the reign of Are-
thas, a long reign that came to an end only seventeen years before that confer-
ence was held. Arethas visited Constantinople on various occasions, and he
must have seen or even worshiped at the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus
built in Constantinople by Justinian. 42 Arethas might then have imitated his
overlord, Justinian, and built in his own capital a church dedicated to his
patron saint. Whether or not the church was built by Arethas is a matter of
detail. But it was a Ghassanid structure, the principal church in the capital, a
fact reflective of the place of the saint in Ghassanid religious life.
4. Toward the end of his reign, Arethas presided over a church council
which condemned the Tritheistic bishops, Eugenius and Conon. A letter has
survived, written by the abbots of his Provincia Arabia, which they addressed
to Jacob Baradaeus and Theodore, the two Jacobite bishops, endorsing the
condemnation. It is noteworthy that the name Sergius recurs often among the
39 On all this, see BASIC 1.1, 231.
40 Ibid., 241-47 .
41 Procopius, Buildings, I.iv.3.
42 Noted by Charles, Le christianisme, 29-30.
signatories, 43 and such was the name of the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch
(557-560), whose consecration may have been partly brought about by Are-
thas himself, as was definitely that of Paul in 563. The popularity of the name
is indicative of the fact that the Ghassanids lived in an ambience filled with
memories of the saint.
5. Finally, it was probably during the reign of Arethas that the Mono-
physite metropolitan of the Orient, A}:iudemmeh (559-575), did missionary
work in Persian territory among the Arabs of Mesopotamia . Especially rele-
vant is his building a martyrion for St. Sergius who, according to the writer of
the Life of A}:iudemmeh, was the favorite saint of the Arabs. He did so as a
replica of the martyrion in Sergiopolis in order to save the Arabs of Persian
Mesopotamia the trouble of having to journey to distant Sergiopolis in Byzan-
tine Euphratesia. 44
Justin Il and Tiberius
The reigns of Justin II and Tiberius (565-582) coincide roughly with
the reign of the Ghassanid king Mungir (569- 581?), which witnessed the
climax of Ghassanid veneration to Sergius, at least as far as extant sources
allow one to judge.
1. The first and last years of Mungir 's reign are associated with figures
around him who bear the name Sergius. The 121st signatory among the ab-
bots of the Provincia Arabia, who in 569 wrote against the Tritheistic bishops
Eugenius and Conon, describes himself as "Sergius, priest and abbot of the
monastery of 'Oqabta : Mar Eustathius, the priest, my auxiliary, the priest of
the church of the friend of Christ , the glorious patrician Mungir, has signed
on my behalf." In 581, when Mungir was living under house arrest in Con-
stantinople, Maurice allowed him to have one of his notables to accompany
him during his exile to Sicily, and he was called Sergius. Between these two
dates, when Mungir waged his many successful campaigns against the Lakh-
mids of J:IIra, he no doubt did it under the protection of the patron saint,
Sergius. His wars were understood by the chroniclers to be religious wars
fought in behalf of Christianity. About his victory in 570, the chronicler
wrote "crux triumphavit. " 45
2. However, it is the praetorium extra muros at Sergiopolis that is the most
outstanding token of Ghassanid attachment to Sergius. Not only the structure
and the inscription, but also the antecedents are evidence for that attachment;
hence it is a tripartite story and will be presented accordingly.
a. In 575, Mungir, after a withdrawal from the service of Byzantium for
43 See Honigmann , Eviques, 192- 95.
44 On chis, see BAFOC, 419-20 , esp. note 14.
45 On all chis see BASIC 1.1, 345, 463, 539-540, and above, 830-31.
three years, decided to return to the service. Treacherous conduct on the part
of Byzantine officials had made him very suspicious of Byzantine intentions.
In order to effect a reconciliation, he thought of a most holy spot in the
shadow of which he could meet the Byzantine commander Justinianus for the
reconciliation, and nothing could be holier than the shrine of St. Sergius. So
it was he who suggested the martyrion of Sergius at R~afa as a holy place for
the restoration of trust. His trust in the saint who protected him in his wars is
evidenced not only by his choice of the latter's martyrion, but also in going
inside the city with only a few followers. Justinianus could have arrested him
if he had wanted to. So it was before "the shrine which contained the bones of
the holy Mar Sergius" that the two talked for a long time and were reconciled.
Thus the saint worked one of his most important miracles for the Ghassanids
and for Arab-Byzantine relations. 46
b. The praetorium: it has been suggested that the undated structure can
most appropriately be assigned to the year 5 75 or slightly after, that is, the
year of the reconciliation of Mungir with Byzantium and his return to the
service. The Arab king had for three years left the area open to Persian and
Lakhmid raids, as stated by John of Ephesus, and now that he was reconciled,
he hastened to put the defense of the region in order by erecting this prae-
torium. From its strategic site, he could control the tribes around it and orga-
nize the defense of the region, the region of the saint who made possible his
reconciliation and his return to fight against the pagan Lakhmids. 47 It was
extra muros for obvious reasons. Sergiopolis was a holy city surrounded by a
wall which enclosed churches and monasteries. A secular building that in-
volved defense and meeting with tribal chiefs could only be erected outside
the walls of the city. The structure may also have served as headquarters for
Mungir when conducting campaigns in the north against the Persians and the
Lakhmids. For a Christian soldier who fought his wars as a crusader, it is
possible that he erected the praetorium to reflect his gratitude to the saint
whose sanctity had insured his reconciliation with Byzantium and whose eulo-
gia, his blessings, he probably invoked when he would open his campaigns in
the north along the Euphrates front.
c. The inscription in the apse of the praetorium, vtxq l) 'tllx.rl 'AA.aouv-
6aQOU, has been discussed in a previous chapter.
48 Although it is a set formula
which was used on various occasions, it is possible to see in this context the
special relationship of Mungir to the saint. The reference to victory in the
verb vtxq could easily apply to the victorious general that Mungir was, but it
could also be nuanced to include reference to the victory that Mungir's fortune
46 On this see BASIC I. 1, 373-77.
47 See ibid., 501-5 .
48 See ibid.
scored when he was reconciled in the martyrion of the very saint who had
protected him on the battlefield .
Maurice
The sources for the reign of Maurice (582-602) ally the Arabs closely to
Sergius and Sergiopolis. One is a Greek inscription, and the others are two
literary Syriac sources.
1. This Greek epigraphic source has been analyzed in a previous chapter 49
on Ghassanid epigraphy, but the conclusions may be summarized here in this
new context . The medallion on which the inscription is engraved has the
image of the saint on horseback with the pa/lium floating, and the inscription
identifies the owner as a cameleer of St. Sergius. The cameleer was one of
others like him, who formed a caravan that provisioned Sergiopolis, a town in
the middle of an arid desert region that needed provisions from the outside
world . What is significant in the inscription is that the simple cameleer de-
scribes himself as one in the service not of the city but of the saint himself, as
if the saint was alive as far as he was concerned. One can imagine how much
more devoted the Ghassanid soldiers were, whose patron saint Sergius was.
Thus, in addition to protecting the city militarily, the Ghassanids were also
responsible for provisioning it. As will be indicated in BASIC II, they also
cared for its water supply.
2. Michael the Syrian has preserved a document that has important refer-
ences to the relation of the Arabs to Sergius and Sergiopolis, namely, the
letter of Peter of Callinicum to Damian of Alexandria, the two warring Mono-
physite clerics of the year 587. The Ghassanid phylarch Jafna was at Hier-
apolis, so close to Ru~afa, and this implies that the Ghassanids, after their
revolt in the early 580s and their return to the service, were again protecting
Euphratesia and with it Sergiopolis. More important is the suggestion of the
phylarch that the two Monophysite parties should meet at the church of St.
Sergius in Jabiya . 50 As suggested above, this church was most probably built
by Arethas who wanted perhaps to imitate his overlord Justinian, who in his
capital Constantinople had built the church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. In
any case, whoever built it, the principal church in the principal Ghassanid
town, Jabiya, was dedicated to St. Sergius, sure sign of the importance of the
saint in the consciousness of the Ghassanids.
3. Another Syriac source, a late but reliable one, also speaks of the rela-
tionship of the Arabs to Sergiopolis a few years later than 587, during the
revolt of Bahram Chub in against his master, the Persian king, Chosroes Par-
viz. When the latter decided to invoke the assistance of the Byzantine em-
49 Ibid., 507-8 .
50 See above, 931-32.
peror Maurice in 591, it was an Arab phylarch, Jafna, who acted as intermedi-
ary between the two. In the Syriac Chronicle he is described as having had his
residence in Ru~afa itself. 51 Whether or not this is to be taken as literally true
is immaterial, but what matters is the continuing association of the
Ghassanids with R~afa (Sergiopolis) in the 590s as its guardians.
The Greek and Syriac sources on Arab-Byzantine relations in the reigns
of Phocas and Heraclius are so scanty that they could hardly be expected to say
much of anything on the relationship of the Arabs to Sergiopolis. However, in
631 there is an implied reference to the fact that the Arab phylarchs were still
protecting the region of Sergiopolis. In the Life of St. Anastasius the Persian,
an Arab phylarch escorts the monk who carried the relics of St. Ana-
stasius in its journey from Persia to Byzantine territory. The phylarch accom-
panied the monk from a point not clear in the Life, possibly the Euphrates at
Callinicum or Circesium, until Palmyra. 52 If he followed the Strata Diocle-
tiana, he would have passed through Sergiopolis. In any case, the phylarch
clearly was protecting the whole region down to Palmyra.
The Arabic sources, especially contemporary Arabic poetry which goes
back to pre-Islamic times, have important references to the association of the
Arabs and the Ghassanids with Ru~afa, and they are important since they
provide intimate details which complement what the Greek and Syriac sources
have to say. They will be analyzed in BASIC II which is devoted to these
sources.
The Arabic sources have also some important information on Sergiopolis
in Islamic times, then of course known as R~afa. It attained celebrity when
the Umayyad caliph Hisham (724- 743) chose it as one of his residences where
he built lodges. 53 Thus the very Christian holy city of pre-Islamic times be-
came a "capital," or one of the capitals, of the Muslim Umayyad Arabs. The
Umayyads took over other recognizably Ghassanid sites such as Jabiya itself,
the Ghassanid capital, and this takeover at Ru~afa could suggest that there
was a substantial Arab presence around it in pre-Islamic times. Ru~afa re-
mained a Christian center after the fall of the Umayyad dynasty, 54 and it was
the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century that finally brought about its
ruin and destruction.
51 See BASIC 1.1, 559.
52 See above, 945-47.
53 On Hisham in R~afa and the Muslim Arab period, see the material collected by Musil
in Palmyrena, 268-72 .
54 On the Christian Arabic inscription and graffito of Islamic times, found in Sergiopolis,
see R. G. Khoury, "Vll. Die arabischen Inschriften," in Th. Ulbert, Re.rafa ll: Die Basilika des
Heiligen Kreuze.r in Re.rafa-Sergiupolis (Mainz am Rhein, 1986), 179-80. The Christianity of most
of the inhabitants of Ru~afa in late Islamic times is also attested in Yaqiit, Mr/jam, III, 48.
963
II. Two ARAB SAINTS: CosMAS AND DAMIAN
Veneration for the two patrons of medicine and pharmacy, 55 Cosmas and Da-
mian, witnessed a certain revival in the sixth century, although their memory
had always been green in the East and the West. Since the two are said to
have come from Arabia, it is appropriate to discuss them briefly here. Accord-
ing to tradition, the two brothers were martyred during the reign of Diocle-
tian. The cult of these "silverless" (anargyroi) doctors received a wide vogue,
and Theodoret testifies to the fame of their basilica in Cyrrhus as early as the
fifth century. Their Vita and Passio present many problems, but only two that
are relevant to the concerns of this volume will be discussed: their alleged
Arabness and the rise in their popularity in the sixth century. 56
Their Arabness
The problem of their Arabness is entangled with the question of the
existence of three pairs of saints who have these names. With one of these
pairs are associated three other names: Anthimus, Leontius, and Euprepios. It
is this pair considered Arab that is recognized by the Roman Catholic church, 57
which celebrates their martrydom on 27 September.
The evidence for their Arabness rests on two foundations: (a) the many
references to them as coming from Arabia, 58 naturally the Provincia (and thus
they were Romanized and Christianized citizens of the Provincia); and (b) the
three distichs found in the Menaia, 59 which first speak of the martyrdom of
the pair, Cosmas and Damian, and then of the other three. They read as
follows:
EX tOU ytvOU 'Aeaf3a EX OE 'tOU ;(q>OU
0ELOU CtQL<JtEL oloa tO'U CtVClQYUQOU.
Awvt(ou i:TJ0tvto wAEto n:A.avo
A.EOvtouQT);, 00 '100!3 !3(!3AO MyEL.
"Av0T)O Eii1tQ1tELO EXtEtT)tvm
av0ouOL A.ClJtQOV xal 3tClVElJ3tQE3tE aA.a.
Reference to their provenance, Arabia, is normally understood to mean
that they were also of Arab origin since the Provincia had been the former
Arab kingdom, Nabataea, and with the exception of the non-Arab inhabitants
of the Decapolis, the population was mainly Arab. Besides, a non-Arab inhab-
55 They are still so considered today by the medical profession in the United States.
56 For a recent comprehensive article on the two saints, see M. van Esbroeck, "la diffusion
orientale de la legende des saints Cosme et Damien," Etudes augustiniennes (Paris 1981), 61-77.
57 The Greek Orthodox Synaxaria celebrate their martyrdom on 17 October.
58 Ibid., passim.
59 For these three distichs see 'AyLOMyLOv
Tij; 'OQ0oM~ou 'Ex.x.A."l]Ota; (Athens, 1960),
s.vv. Kocra;, dawv6;, p. 257.
964
itant of one of the cities of the Decapolis would not have been referred to as
coming from Arabia. This Arab origin may be supported by the distich wh~ch
specifically refers not to their provincial provenance, but to their ethnic ori-
gin. 60 The conclusion that they were Arab may then be accepted; it is difficult
to believe that statements on their provenance and ethnic origin could have
been concocted.
Their reputation had spread even to the Roman Occident and to Rome,
where their names had been inserted in the canon of the Mass; they were the
last of the saints to be accorded that honor. 61 But the surge of their popularity
and the vogue of their cult in the sixth century may be related to the plague
that spread throughout the Near East in 541-544. There was a natural con-
nection between the outbreak of the plague and the popularity of saints who
were the patrons of doctors and who were saints of healing; they became
especially relevant in that circumstance. The truth of this statement is not
purely inferential. There is an explicit statement to that effect in Procopius,
who described the rebuilding and enlargement of their church in Constanti-
nople.
At the far end of the bay, on the ground which rises steeply in a sharp
slope, stands a sanctuary dedicated from ancient times to Saints Cosmas
and Damian. When the Emperor himself once lay seriously ill, giving
the appearance of being actually dead (in fact he had been given up by
the physicians as being already numbered among the dead), these Saints
came co him here in a vision, and saved him unexpectedly and contrary
to all human reason and raised him up. In gratitude he gave them such
requital as a mortal may, by changing entirely and remodelling the ear-
lier building, which was unsightly and ignoble and not worthy to be
dedicated to such powerful Saints, and he beautified and enlarged the
church and flooded it with brilliant light and added many other things
which it had not before. So when any persons find themselves assailed by
illnesses which are beyond the control of physicians, in despair of human
assistance they take refuge in the one hope left to them, and getting on
60 Unfonunately these distichs which speak of their ethnic origin were composed much
later in the 11th century by Christopher of Mytilene. It is possible that he based them on some
Vita that referred to their ethnic origin, but he may also, for metrical reasons, have spoken of
Arab rather than Arabia. His Calendars of saints have been partially published; see I Calendari in
metro innografico di Cristoforo Mitileneo, ed. and trans. Enrica Follieri, Subsidia Hagiographica
63,
(1980), 1-11; for reference to the Arabs Cosmas and Damian, see vol. I, p. 340 note 3; on
Christopher of Mytilene, see her article, "La poesia di Cristoforo Mitileneo come fonte storica,"
Melanges Georges Ostrogorsky (Belgrade, 1964), II, 133-48 .
61 See Bibliotheca Sanctorum, IV, col. 224. For churches and monuments in their honor in
Rome and elsewhere, see ibid., cols. 224-25 . For their representation in art, see ibid., cols.
225-37; and Lexikon derchristlichen Ikonographie, VII (1974), cols. 344-51.
flat-boats they are carried up the bay to this very church. And as they
enter its mouth they straightway see the shrine as on an acropolis, prid-
ing itself in the gratitude of the Emperor and permitting them to enjoy
the hope which the shrine affords. 62
The passage does not say whether it was during the plague that Justinian
was cured of his illness, but the important fact is that his interest in the saints
was enhanced after he was restored to health through their intercession. He
not only redecorated and enlarged their church in Constantinople, but also
paid attention to the city where the two saints were buried, namely Cyrrhus,
in Euphratesia, the walls of which he repaired and where he built an aque-
duct. Thus imperial interest in the two saints, expressed in both Constanti-
nople and Cyrrhus, must have added to their fame, especially in Oriens, their
region of provenance, already deeply interested in the saints because of the
great plague. As the region was subject to subsequent plagues throughout the
sixth and seventh centuries, interest in the two saints of healing never waned. 63
It remains an open question whether or not Justinian was aware of the
Arab origin of the two saints and whether this projected an image of the
Arabs in his perception different from that which his contemporaries, such as
Procopius, presented. The same question may be raised about the Arabs of
Oriens, both federate and Rhomaic, whether they were aware that the cele-
brated saints to whom the Christians of the world came for intercession were
Arabs. 64
III. ST . SIMEON THE YOUNGER AND ST. JULIAN
Although the Ghassanids and the foederati in general looked upon Sergius as
their patron saint-for obvious reasons, since he was the military saint closest
to them-the Ghassanids appear associated with two other saints in the extant
sources. Mention has already been made of their veneration for St. Simeon the
Younger and the latter's prophecy of the crushing Ghassanid victory in 554
over the Lakhmids. 65 In addition, one of the inscriptions set up by the
Ghassanid Mungir involves a saint, Julian. It is the one set up at al-Burj,
northeast of Damascus, in Phoenicia Libanensis. He had erected a tower there,
62 Buildings, I.vi.5-8 .
63 On this, see L. Conrad, The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East, Ph.D. diss. (Prince-
ton University, 1981).
64 Muslim writers refer to the church of Cosmas and Damian as one of "the wonders of the
world," but it is doubtful whether Arab visitors to Cyrrhus, who wondered at the church
realized that the two saints to whom the church was dedicated were Arabs! For an Edessene
family called "Beit Qozma Bar Arabi," "the family of Cosmas, son of 'Arabi," see Michael the
Syrian, Chronique, II, 412.
65 See BASIC 1.1, 244-48 .
and he offered thanks to God and St. Julian for his safety and that of his sons.
66
The inscription was discussed earlier in its political and military context; a
few words may now be added on its ecclesiastical profile.
Which saint was this to whom Mungir offered his thanks? Oriens had a
number of saints with that name: Julian of Arabia, Julian of Jerusalem, Julian
of Caesarea, Julian of Apamea, and Julian of Emesa. The chances are that
Mungir offered thanks to the last, Julian of Emesa. The presumption is that at
that time he was the regional patron saint in Phoenicia Libanensis, where
Mungir erected his tower at al-Burj, near I;)umayr. 67
Mungir offered thanks to Julian for his safety, sotiria: apparently he had
come back from a journey or a campaign that was perilous. This might imply
that the saint was one that was invoked on such an occasion, a safe return.
Hence the thanks offered to him by the Ghassanid. 68 The inscription suggests
that religious sentiments were alive in the consciousness of the Ghassanid
royal house, not only when they fought under the patronage and protection of
their military saint, but also on other occasions, in times of peace, when they
would offer thanks to saints other than their favorite military one, Sergius.
66 See ibid., 495-501.
67 On Julian of Emesa, see Bibliotheca Sanctorum, VI, cols. 1195-97.
68 le is noteworthy that Julian, martyr and saint, was a doctor by profession; thanks
offered after a safe journey or campaign to a saint that was such becomes more understandable .
XVIII .
T
he Arab presence in Sinai, so well documented for the fourth and fifth
centuries, is hardly ever noticed for the sixth and the first part of the
seventh centuries, and when it is, it is plagued with anonymity . There is no
Moses, Ammanes, or Obedianus to enliven the pages of Sinaitic studies in the
Arab presence as there are for the two preceding centuries. There are only a
few references in secular and ecclesiastical historians to the usual Saracen raids
that frighten monks. And yet toward the end of this period, all of a sudden
Sinai reenters the limelight of ecclesiastical history with the figure of The-
odore, the bishop of none other than the Arab oasis of Pharan in the southern
part of the peninsula . In addition to the role he played during the reign of
Hera~lius, he survived in the annals of ecclesiastical history through his con-
demnation at both the Lateran and the Sixth ecumenical councils.
Around 530, Justinian reshaped the structure of the Arab phylarchate in
Oriens by making the Ghassanids supreme in its federate history. Arethas was
created king and supreme phylarch in Oriens from Arabia to the Euphratesian
region, and his brother Abu Karib, the powerful and energetic soldier, was made
the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, which administratively included Sinai, after
Sinai was separated from the Provincia Arabia and attached to Palestine as part of
the newly created Tertia. Although the Ghassanid presence, or rather its extent,
in Sinai is not very clear, it is appropriate to round off this part on ecclesiastical
history, in a volume focusing on the Ghassanids, by catching the few echoes that
point to the Arabs and the Ghassanids in an attempt to discover their role, if any,
in the history of Arab Christianity in the peninsula, and whether their champion-
ship of Monophysitism has left any traces in Sinai. 1 In order to appreciate fully
the Ghassanid dimension of this discussion, it is necessary to elucidate the Arab
presence in general in Sinai, especially as this is obscured by the sporadic accounts
of the sources on "Saracen raids," and with it the contribution of the Arabs to the
history of Christianity in that region.
1 Basic works on Christianity in Sinai are: R. Devreesse, "Le christianisme clans le penin-
sule sinai"tique, des origines a J'arrivee des Musulmans," RB 49 (1940), 205-33; and H.
Leclercq, "Sinai," in DACL, XV. l (Paris, 1950), 1463-90. Devreesse's misinterpretations of
certain aspects of Sinaitic history have been pointed out in BAFOC, 308-15, and 145 note 28.
I. THE PENINSULA
Ethnically the Sinai Peninsula was as Arab as the Arabian Peninsula, even
more so, since the latter had in the southwest, even at this period, non-Arab
groups that were closely related to the Arabs in the larger context of Semitic
ethnography but were quite distinct from them. 2 After the Arab Nabataean
period in its history, Sinai became part of the Provincia Arabia in the second
century and then part of Palaestina Tertia, and it remained such in this proto-
Byzantine period. Not unlike other areas in which the Arabs in the Near East
were to be found, Sinai had two types of Arabs: ( 1) the nomads or pastoralists
who roamed about in search of food and water for themselves and their
flocks-the Saracens of the Byzantine sources, who raid monasteries, disturb
monks, and sometimes massacre them; and (2) the sedentaries who settled in
arable lands and habitable spots where an urban life was developed, mainly in
the oases. These were not plentiful in Sinai, but what is relevant in this
context are the two fertile valleys of Pharan and Ra"ithou.
In the toponymical trio for which the Sinai Peninsula is known in eccle-
siastical history-Mount Sinai, Pharan, and Ra"ithou-the first is distin-
guished from the other two by being not a town but a hermitage. It was
inhabited by monks who, attracted by its being the reputed scene of the
reception of the Ten Commandments by Moses, flocked there from various
parts of the Christian world. It is therefore at the two other localities, Pharan
and Ra"ithou, that the Arab element should be sought. These, unlike Mount
Sinai, were towns in which people lived and where there was a Christian
establishment. In addition to the famous monasteries of the two towns, there
were churches built for the tiny Arab communities that lived in them . 3
Thus Sinai had these two types of Arabs, the nomads and the sedentaries.
The Arabs and Arab authors were very aware of the distinction between the
two, and this awareness is reflected in the terms used to denote them . The
first, the nomads, are referred to as Badw, al-Badw, or al-A'rab, while the
second are referred to as al-' Arab. Moreover, the Arab sedentaries were not on
good terms with the Arab nomads and did not think highly of them. This
scorn harbored by the sedentaries toward the nomads is expressed powerfully,
even enshrined, in none other than the Holy Book of the Arabs and Islam, the
Koran itself. There they are referred to, not as Arabs, but as al-A'rab : "The
A'rab are more hard in disbelief and hypocrisy and more likely to be ignorant
of the limits which God has revealed to His Apostle. " 4 This distinction is
2 On this see the present writer in "Pre-Islamic Arabia," Cambridge History of Islam (Cam-
bridge, 1970), I.
3 Pharan is the biblical toponym, while Rai"thou is considered to be Arabic Rayat; but see
BAFOC, 305 note 77.
4 Koran, chap. IX, verse 97.
Arab Christianity in Sinai 969
entirely obliterated in the Byzantine sources, and the curious term "Saracen,"
with its pastoralist overtones, is unfortunately used to denote both types of
Arabs and also Arabs in general. Only one ecclesiastical author seems to have
observed the distinction and used the correct term when talking about Saracen
raids in Sinai. He was a late author who lived in what was then a Muslim
country, Egypt, and used Arabic as the language of his Chronicle-Eutychius.
II. THE TWIN CITIES: PHARAN AND RAITHOU
The two urban centers of Pharan and Ra:ithou are important in the history of
Arab Christianity in Sinai. Pharan was the more substantial and is the better
documented of the two, although Ra:ithou attained more celebrity because of
its forty martyrs and thus became the city of martyrs in the Sinai Peninsula.
Documents pertaining to both towns have been analyzed in the two preceding
volumes of this series. Hence only the briefest account will be given here, and
only as a synthesi_s for the Arab element in them, since this is obscured in all
discussion of the two localities, and also as background for understanding the
situation in the sixth century.
Pharan
Pharan, "the pearl of Sinai," according to one ecclesiastical historian,5
was the major Arab urban center and the see of the bishopric of Sinai in this
proto-Byzantine period. It is an oasis of date palms and lies northwest of
Mount Sinai. The following observations will help to underline its Arab and
Christian Arab character.
Monks flocked from various parts of the Christian world to live in Sinai,
as they did in the Desert of Juda, but there is no doubt that the city's inhabit-
ants were Arab, and so Pharan forms the main Christian Arab ethnic concen-
tration in the Peninsula. 6 It has been a disaster for writing its history that the
relevant section on Pharan in Egeria's Travels has not survived, since that
observant Christian traveler must have included important information on this
city.
Thus Phariin appears as a little polis in this proto-Byzantine period, in-
habited by Christian Arabs who were Rhomaioi. Both the Relatio of Ammonius
and the Narrationes of Nilus contain details on Phiiran that make it come to
life for the student of this small Sinaitic town in this period, and not merely
survive as a toponym on a map or in the sources.
Secular Phiiran appears in both the Relatio of the fourth and the Narra-
tiones of the fifth century. In the former it appears as a Byzantine city, whose
5 Devreesse, "Le christianisme," 211.
6 The Arabness of Phiiriin was noted by Eusebius and Jerome; see Devreesse, "Le chris-
tianisme," 205.
inhabitants fight for the safety of neighboring Rai:thou under the leadership of
one Obedianus ('Ubayda). 7 In the fifth century Pharan appears as a city with a
boule one of whose members, a curia/is with an Arab name, is mentioned .
When Saracens around them raid and kill , they send remonstrances to the
phylarch in the north, Ammanes, who makes amends . 8
Evidence of the military activity of the Arabs of Pharan in the service of
Byzantium is not lacking for the sixth century when these appear enlisted for
defensive operations in Egypt , in spite of the fact that Egypt was separated
from Oriens early in the reign of Theodosius. The papyri have revealed that
vexillations from Pharan appear in the numerus of Antaioupolis, the capital of
the Antaioupolite Nome in the Thebaid in 524/25 and in 529/30, and also in
another unknown numerus . 9 Again later in the century, during the biennium
568-570, when Athanasius was the dux of the Thebaid for the second time
since 553/54, Pharanites served under him in repelling the Blemmyes, 10 and
according to the poet, Dioscorus, also against the Saracens. 11 Thus the Phar-
anites are attested in the Thebaid in the sixth century, not only in An-
taioupolis but also in the southern Thebaid as far as Syene 12 (Aswan) on the
frontier.
Ecclesiastical Pharan first comes into prominence with the name of
Moses, an Arab from Pharao who converted Obedianus ('Ubayda) and the
people of Pharan, and who also exercised influence on the eremitic community
of Ratthou . 13 Around the year 400 it is attested as an episcopal see, with one
Nathyr (a Semitic name, and probably Arab), natural to assign to an Arabic-
speaking town. There follows a series of bishops after Pharao emerged as an
episcopal see, the principal one in Sinai under the control of which were also
Ratthou and the monks of Mount Sinai. The list includes Macarius (to whom
Emperor Marcian wrote), Photius, Martyrius, and Theodore. 14 The question
must remain open whether these bishops of what must have been almost an
entirely Arab city were also Arab. The first attested bishop has a -Semitic
name, and he was probably an Arab. That this set a precedent for his suc-
cessors to be Arab does not necessarily follow. Their names, unlike the first
7 See BAFOC, 297-308.
8 See BAFIC, 134-39 ; for the Arab name of the curia/iJ, seep.
134 note 11.
9 See R. Remondon, "Soldats de Byzance d'apres un papyrus trouve a Edfou," Recherche.r
de
papyrologie 1 (Paris, 1961), 41-92, esp. 85.
10 See J. Gascou, "L'institution des bucellaires, " B111/etin
de l'lmtitut FranfaiJ d'Archeologie
Orientate 76 (1976), 154 and note 3.
11 See Leslie MacCoull, "Dioscorus and the Dukes," Byzantine Studie.r/Et11deJ
byzantineJ 13
(1986), 29-39 .
12 Attested in P. Lond. V.1735, which speaks of a numeruJ/arithmoJ
of Pharanitae stationed
there. See Gascou, "L'institution, " 154 note 3. For the numeruJ as a tactical unit in the Byzan-
tine army, see the still very useful footnote in Bury, HLRE, II, 76 note 1.
13 See BAFOC, 298-99.
14 See Leclercq, "Sinai," col. 1469.
one, are non-Arabic, but even this is not decisive since Arabs assumed biblical
and Graeco-Roman names when they were ordained or consecrated. 15
Rai"thou
This other oasis is in the valley southeast of Phiiriin. Although it appears
as the smaller local town and less important ecclesiastically, since, unlike
Phiiriin, it was not an episcopal see, it attained importance as a flourishing
monastic center that attracted anchorites from outside Sinai.
Rai"thou existed and lived in the shadow of Phii.riin, the larger town and
episcopal see. It was a native of Phariin, Moses, himself a monk and celebrated
ascetic of the region, that exercised a powerful influence on the monastic
community of Rai"thou. It was also the chief of the Phiiranite Arabs, Obe-
dianus, that won the battle against the Blemmyes, who had attacked the
monastic community and massacred its monks.
Less is known about the town than about the monastery. Since the town
was close to the sea, it was accessible to monks who came from overseas, such
as Menas, the friend of Cosmas lndicopleustes. At Rai"thou one of the inmates
of the monastery, Daniel, wrote the biography of John Climacus, the author
of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, while Climacus himself wrote his famous work
at the request of John, the hegoumenos of Rai"thou.
More relevant to the theme of this section is the Arab profile of Rai"thou.
It must have been especially prominent in the non-monastic portion of the
town, where the inhabitants lived, but next to nothing is known about it.
More important is the monastic establishment and the Arab component in it.
According to the report of Ammonius in his Relatio, only one of its hermits
was "Roman," an observation that led Tillemont as early as 1732 to think that
the other hermits were native to the area, and so Arab. 16 This is possible. Even
if this turns out to be an exaggeration, there is no doubt that there was an
important component of native Arabs in the hermitage . It also received strains
from other Arabs such as those from Petra and Ayla across Wadi 'Araba . 17
It is relevant to this discussion of the Arab element in Sinai to mention
15 In this connection it is useful to refer to the bishops of the Palestinian Parembole and
those of Elusa in the Negev. These were Arabs, or most of them were, beginning with Petrus,
in spite of their names. But no one would have argued for Petrus' Arabness had it not been for
the explicit information supplied by Cyril of Scythopolis that he was such. Even the 6th-
century bishop of the Arab Parembole, who attended the Council of Jerusalem in 5 18, namely,
Valens, could have been an Arab. The name, a Latin name, was common in the Near East as a
cognomen and "was accepted throughout the Roman Empire," so it could have been assumed
by an Arab in Palestine who later became the bishop of the Parembole; on the cognomen
Valens, see E. Dvorjetski and R. Last, "Gadara-Colony or Colline Tribe," Israel Exploration
Journal 41 (1991), nos. 1-3, p. 162. The bishops of Elusa are more clearly Arab in view of the
names of two of them. On the bishops of the Parembole and Elusa, see BAFIC, index, s.vv.
16 See R.-G. Coquin in The Coptic Encyclopaedia,
s. v. Rai"thou, vol. VII, 2050.
17 Such as Paul and Joseph from Petra and Ayla respectively; see BAFOC, 304-5 .
that the architect who built Justinian's monastery on Mount Sinai was Ste-
phanus of Ayla. 18 Whether or not he was an Arab cannot be determined. But
Ayla was an Arab city ethnically, and the region was that of the Nabataean
Arabs who demonstrated some talent in architecture in their capital, Petra.
The Christian Arabs of this period assumed Graeco-Roman names including
the name Stephen. 19 So he could have been a Romanized Arab of Ayla. One
might add that southern Sinai seems to have attracted the inhabitants of Ayla
and Petra, as witnessed by the departure of two Arabs, Joseph and Paul,
natives of Ayla and Petra respectively, for the monastic center of Ra1thou.
Although Ratthou owes its fame to its being a monastic center, it is even
better known for having been the locality where its forty monks were mar-
tyred, whose feast is celebrated by the Christian Orthodox church on 14 Janu-
ary, together with those of Mount Sinai. It is not often realized that the Arab
involvement in these martyrdoms was considerable. The martyred monks, ac-
cording to the reasoning above, must have had many Arabs among them . The
massacre of the monks was perpetrated not by any Saracens of Sinai but by
overseas Blemmyes, who crossed over from the African side of the Red Sea. In
addition, those who came to the rescue of the monks during their trial were
Arabs, and the rescue mission occurred twice: the first when the Saracens of
the area battled the Blemmyes but were worsted by them; and then when the
Pharanite Arabs, six hundred strong, arrived under the leadership of Obe-
dianus and fought the Blemmyes all day long and vanquished them.
Such then was the picture of the Arab urban scene in southern Sinai in
these two centuries, consisting of Pharao and Ratthou. And in neither of the
two monastic establishments was there any molestation of monks by Saracens.
Ill. THE PASTORALISTS OF SINAI: THE SARACENS
The Saracens, that is, the nomads, pastoralists whom the Arabs themselves
called al-A rab or al-Badw, roamed the Sinai Peninsula and were mentioned in
the ecclesiastical sources. In the Ammonii Relatio of the fourth century, they
defend the monastic establishment of Ra1thou against the Blemmyes, though
unsuccessfully. Another group of Saracens raid the hermitages and cells of
Mount Sinai and kill forty monks on 28 December. This happened after the
death of their phylarch/king when they became lawless. 20
In the fifth century they appear again as raiders who massacre a caravan
of Pharanite Arabs, molest monks in the vicinity, and kill one, a curia/is of
18 For the inscription that records his services as architect, see I. Sevi'enko, "The Early
Period of the Sinai Monastery in the Light of Its Inscriptions," DOP 20 (1966), 257,262 .
19 For Stephanus, the Arab hegoumenos
of the lavra of St. Euthymius, in the Desert of Juda,
see BAFIC, 210.
20 See BAFOC, 297.
Pharan. These were Saracens/nomads, who apparently went wild but were
punished by their phylarch, Ammanes. In addition, they kill some of the
monks of a monastery near Mount Sinai. 21
This then was the situation in the fourth and fifth centuries during
which the Sinai Peninsula was not safe from the Saracens, who roamed it even
when they were governed by their chiefs, who had some kind of arrangement
with the urban centers for their protection. These Saracens sometimes acted on
their own and took advantage of the death of a chief to act lawlessly and
engage in raiding.
The descendants of these Saracens of the fourth and fifth centuries are
mentioned in the Greek and Arabic sources of the sixth century as having
molested the monasteries in Sinai. This finally caused Emperor Justinian to
give protection to two of them, Mount Sinai and Ratthou. The implication is
that Pharan, being a city, was well fortified, as is clear from the testimony of
the Anonymous of Placentia.
22 What is noteworthy in these sixth-century ac-
counts is that, in spite of imperial concern and requests from these monas-
teries for imperial protection, there were no massacres or large-scale disrup-
tions.
It is not difficult to relate this to improved security in the region as a
result of the far-reaching changes that Justinian effected in Oriens with the
elevation of the Ghassanids to power around 530. This affected the southern
regions, where most probably Abu Karib ruled as a phylarch, praised by Pro-
copius for his energy in keeping in check the Saracens, both those who were
enemies to Rome and his own Saracens over whom he was phylarch. As has
been argued in a previous chapter, Abu Karib's sphere of operation as a phy-
larch probably included Sinai or part of it. Another Arab chief, the powerful
Kindite Qays, may have been given part of northern Sinai around 530. So the
Sinai Peninsula experienced some amelioration in security, which had been
poor in the two preceding centuries and which thus explains the unruly be-
havior of the Saracens at both Pharan and Mount Sinai in those centuries. The
Byzantine garrison at Clysma no doubt contributed to the maintenance of law
and order in the peninsula, but because of the. nature of the terrain and the
climate, federate soldiers, whether Ghassanids or Kindites, must have been
more efficient in dealing with their Arab congeners in Sinai.
21 See BAFIC, 135-36.
22 The account of the Anonymous of Placentia, the 6th-century traveler in Sinai, was an-
alyzed in BAFOC, 319-24 .
For the use of "Saracen mares" in 6th-century Sinai, recorded by the Anonymous of Placentia,
see BAFOC, 323. For the use of the Arabic loanwordfaras, "horse or mare," in Greek <j)aQa~,
see Gascou, "L'institution," 154 note 3, where he corrects Remondon on his use of the phrase
"chevaux arabes." The attestations of <j)aQa~ in DuCange's G/ossarium all come from the Islamic
period.
In this connection, mention might be made of the road that connected
Ayla on the Gulf of Eilat with Wadi Pharan. This was an old Nabataean
highway which connected the two parts of Palaestina Tertia east and west of
Wadi 'Araba. The Ghassanid phylarch, such as Abu Karib, who had impor-
tant duties in the Trans- 'Araban region, thus had easy access to the south of
the Sinai Peninsula with its three Christian centers of Mount Sinai, Pharan,
and Rai:thou. 23
IV. PROCOPIUS AND EUTYCHIUS ON MOUNT SINAI
Saracen raids in the sixth century against the monasteries of Mount Sinai and
Rai:thou, mainly and explicitly the former, are documented in the Buildings of
Procopius in a laconic passage and in the Annals of Eucychius, 24 the Chalce-
donian patriarch of Alexandria in the tenth century. Boch have been examined
closely by historians of Mount Sinai, and it is not proposed here to repeat
their discussion. Rather these authors will be analyzed for the Arab profile in
their accounts relevant to the Arab involvement in Mount Sinai and to the
image of the Arabs in Byzantine historiography in the sixth century.
Procopius
In a well-known passage in the Buildings on Mount Sinai, Procopius
speaks of Justinian's building of a church for its monks and a strong fortress
for their protection: "And at the base of the mountain this Emperor built a
very strong fortress and established there a considerable garrison of troops, in
order that the barbarian Saracens might not be able from that region, which,
as I have said, is uninhabited, to make inroads with complete secrecy into the
lands of Palestine proper. " 25
The passage appears without a context that could explain the action of
the emperor who was moved to undertake these constructions. Although this
can be supplied from ocher sources, such as Eutychius, the passage will, for
the time being, be examined internally and with reference to Procopius him-
self in another passage in his History.
1. One would expect the historian to say that the fortress provided pro-
tection for the monks who were living in an isolated part of Sinai. Instead, he
hastens to give a curious reason for building the fortress, namely, the protec-
tion of villages in Palestine against the barbarian Saracens.
23 For a description of this road see B. Rothenberg, "An Archaeological Survey of South
Sinai," Palestine Exploration Quarterly (1970), 18-19.
24 See, for instance, on Eutychius, Devreesse, "Le christianisme, " 212-13 .
25 The English version of H. G. Dewing in the Loeb Classical Library, Buildings, V.viii.9.
"lnro the lands of Palestine proper" in the English version cannot be the correct translation of
the Greek t ta brl TiaAmotLVT) xooeta, which should be translated "into the villages (or
small inhabited spots) of Palestine."
2. The statement also sounds strange. A fortress at the foot of Mount
Sinai was supposed to offer protection for the province of Palestine against the
inroads of the Saracens. The defense of Palestine, both by regular Roman
soldiers and by federate troops, was well provided for, and the erection of a
fortress could only have been for the protection of the monks in that area of
Mount Sinai.
3. Procopius, antipathetic toward the Arabs, succeeds in picturing the
Arabs of the region as marauding Saracens, and he enhances the picture of
their rapacity by explicitly referring to them not merely as Saracens but also as
barbarians.
Another passage in Procopius, in his History, throws light on this one in
the Buildings. In his digression on the Red Sea area and Arabia after the
Byzantine defeat at Callinicum in 531, Procopius has a precious passage on
the Ghassanid phylarch Abii Karib, whom Justinian appointed as the phylarch
of Palaestina Tertia. The passage in its entirety has been analyzed earlier in
this volume, but the relevant sentence in the passage on Abii Karib may be
quoted here: "And he guarded the land from plunder constantly, for both to
the barbarians over whom he ruled and no less to the enemy, Abochorabus
always seemed a man to be feared and an exceptionally energetic fellow. " 26
1. Abii Karib was the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia to which Mount Sinai
belonged. His assignment, in addition to fighting the wars of Byzantium
extra limitem, was internal security within the limes, especially in the desert
areas such as Mount Sinai, where his federate troops could function more
efficiently than regular Roman troops.
2. Ghassanid or other federate Arab troops must have been the ones that
defended such a remote place as the Mount Sinai area. Procopius had already
praised the energy and efficiency of Abii Karib, in spite of the pejorative
"barbarian" that he applies to those under him, seasoned Ghassanid troops
who fought for Byzantium and were Christian soldiers at that. Hence they
cannot be described as barbaroi.
3. The monasteries of Mount Sinai no doubt were attacked by some
unruly Arab pastoralists, but it also must have been Arab federate troops that
defended the monasteries against these marauding Saracens. Instead, Pro-
copius gives the opposite impression, which excludes the Arabs entirely from
participation in the defense of the monasteries and assigns to them only raid-
ing and looting.
Thus the separation of the federate Arabs, whether Ghassanid or other,
from the protection of Mount Sinai is consonant with what is known about
Procopius' anti-Arab sentiments and his technique. But he gave himself away
26 History, l.xix.11.
in the passage in the History that assigns Palaestina Tertia, in which Sinai was
located, to Abii Karib. A Sabaic inscription has revealed what he had con-
cealed, the relation of Abii Karib to Arethas, his brother. Finally, a Syriac
manuscript reveals Abii Karib as a pious Christian soldier who would have
zealously defended such a holy place as Sinai, which was possibly within his
sphere of phylarchal jurisdiction. 27
Eutychius
The most extensive and detailed account of Justinian's involvement in
the erection of churches and monasteries in Sinai comes from Eutychius . In
spite of the many questions that his account raises, he remains a basic source
for this Justinianic involvement . He was a Christian writer who lived in Alex-
andria, not far from Mount Sinai, and naturally he had a special interest in
Christian monuments and history, living as he did in the Muslim world of the
tenth century. The kernel of truth in his account is easily discernable.
28
His account is lengthy and may be summarized as follows. When the
monks of Mount Sinai heard that Emperor Justinian had acceded to the re-
quest of St. Sabas, who had gone to Constantinople after the Samaritan revolt
of 529, and had provided protection for the monasteries of the Desert of Juda,
they too sent representatives to ask the same for Mount Sinai. The emperor
then ordered that a church be built at Clysma, a monastery at Rai"thou
(Rayat), and a well-fortified monastery at Mount Sinai. The emperor was dis-
satisfied with the building of the monastery and, according to the account,
killed the man who was in charge of the construction and sent another person
to insure the protection of the monks there. 29 The Arab profile of this account
consists of two passages, and both deserve a careful analysis.
A
The first passage comes at the beginning of the account when the monks
complained to Justinian that the A'rab were molesting them as they raided
27 For the Sabaic inscription and the Syriac manuscript, see BASIC II and BASIC 1.1,
328, and above, 845-50 .
28 Since L. Cheikho prepared the critical edition of Eutychius in the CSCO, two more
recent studies on Eutychius with translations of his work into German and Italian have ap-
peared: M. Breydy, DaJ Anna/enwerk deJ EutychioJ von A/exandrien, CSCO 471-72, tomi 44-45
(Louvain, 1985); and B. Pirone, Eutichio, patriarca di Almandria: Gli Anna/i, Studia Orientalia
Christiana Monographiae l (Cairo, 1987). For a review of Pirone's work, see the present writer
in JAOS 110 (1990), 530-31. For the old edition of L. Cheikho, see Eutychii Patriarchae
A/exandrini Anna/e.r, CSCO 50-5 l, tomi 6-7 (Louvain, 1954). For a penetrating study of the
Anna/J, see the recent article by S. Griffith , "Historiography in the Annals of Eutychius of
Alexandria," in Prob/emJ in the HiJtoriography of the Early /J/amic Period, ed. L. Conrad (London,
1944), l-26.
29 For the full account, see Pirone, Eutichio, 293-95 .
their dwellings, ate their food, and carried away their belongings. In the
Italian translation of Eutychius by B. Pirone, the passage reads as follows.
Avendo avuto notizia delle buone disposizioni del re Giustiniano e della
sua predilezione nel costruire chiese e monasteri, i monaci di Tur Sina si
recarono da lui e si lagnarono del fatto che gli arabi ismaeliti li mo-
lestavano, si cibavano del loro viveri, distruggevano i loco siti, irrom-
pevano nelle loco celle prendendone tutto cio che vi si trovava ed en-
travano nelle chiese cibandosi dell'Eucarestia. 30
It is noteworthy that the monks did not complain of any massacres that
the Saracens had perpetrated. These were interested only in pillaging the
monasteries and in the food that they could find therein . And it is perfectly
possible that they did so, not driven by desire to raid and pillage monasteries,
but because, living in a desert region, they could suffer from famine. In the
same decade, a group of Saracens invaded the oriental limes, driven there by a
drought.
31
What is necessary to note in the passage is the careful idiom of Eutychius
in reporting. He clearly uses the term A 'rab for the Arabs who raided Mount
Sinai, exactly the term used in the Koran for the pastoralists, the Beduins
among the Arabs, 32 and as a biblical scholar, Eutychius adds the biblical term
for the Arabs, the sons of Ishmael.
B
The second passage comes at the end of the account. It speaks of at-
tempts by Justinian to protect the monastery of Mount Sinai by sending a
hundred of "the slaves of the Romans" as guards and adding to them an equal
number from Egypt. Houses were built for them near the monastery when
they protected the monks. During the caliphate of 'Abd al-Malik, much con-
fusion reigned among them; and some of these "slaves" adopted Islam, and
they have survived to the present day and are called "the sons of ~alil:i."
Poi mando un altro messo assieme e cento uomini scelti tra gli schiavi
dei Rum con le loro donne e i loco bambini, ordinandogli di prendere
dall'Egitto altri cento uomini con le loro donne e i loro bambini, scelti
tra gli schiavi, e di costruire loco, fuori dal Tur Sina, delle case perche vi
si stabilissero e proteggessero il monastero e i monaci, curando che
30 Ibid., p. 293, line 39-p. 394, line 5.
31 On this Saracen raid caused by a drought, reported by Marcellinus Cornes, see BASIC
1.1, 194-96.
32 Not precisely translated in either the German or the Italian version of Eutychius where
al-A 'rabis rendered die Araber and g/i arabi (see Breydy, Eutychios, t. 45, p. 88, line 31; Pirone,
Eutichio, p. 294, line 2). For the term in the Koran, see above, note 4.
avessero i necessari mezzi di sostentamento, facendo portare ad essi e al
monastero sufficienti viveri dall'Egitto . Giunto che fu al Tur Sina, il
messo fece costruire, fuori del monastero, ad oriente, molte abitazioni, le
muni d'una rocca e vi fece abitare gli schiavi. Costoro presero a proteg-
gere il monastero ea difenderlo. Il luogo si chiama ancor oggi "il mona-
stero degli schiavi." Cresciuti e moltiplicatisi col passar del tempo ed
essendosi imposto l'Islam durance il califfato di 'Abd al-Malik b. Mar-
wan, s'attaccarono gli uni gli altri e s'uccisero tra di loco: di essi alcuni
furono uccisi, altri fuggirono, altri si convertirono all'Islam. I loro dis-
cendenti ancor oggi presenti in quei luoghi, sono dei musulmani detti
Banu Salih, chiamati anche Ghulman ad-Dayr/ = domestici del mona-
stero/, da cui provengono i Lakhmidi . In seguito alla loro conversione
all'Islam, i monaci ne distrussero le abitazioni .
The passage bristles with problems. It is not altogether impossible that
Justinian sent "slaves" to protect the monastery. On the other hand, it is
strange that he should have done that, in view of the newly organized phy-
larchal power in Sinai, with the Ghassanids and possibly also the Kindites in
charge. This, together with certain words or phrases in the passage, could
suggest that these "slaves of the Romans" were federate Arabs who were sta-
tioned there to guard the monastery. In support of this proposition , hypothet-
ical as it is, the following may be adduced.
a. The reference to the "slaves" throughout the passage may have been
inspired by the fact that in Eutychius' day the monastery on Mount Sinai was
called Dayr al-'Abid, "the monastery of the slaves." He or his source wanted
to give an explanation of this curious appellation; hence the references to the
abid ("slaves") in the passage, projected back to the reign of Justinian.
b. A close examination of the word abid could suggest that there was
some confusion with another Arabic word, almost homophonous, 'ibad. Both
are plurals of abd, which can mean both "slave" and "servant." The Christian
Arabs called themselves '[bad, "the servants" of the Lord or of Christ, as is the
case with al-'Ibad of J:Iira, the Christians of J:Iira. If so, this points to a
Christian Arab group that guarded the monastery, and these were possibly
federate Arabs or a group related to them, who were placed there by some
phylarch or by the authorities.
c. The names that Eutychius gives to them could also point in the same
direction . Bam:i ~ali}:i is a good Arabic patronymic. It could be a confusion
with Banu Sali}:i,
34 the foederati of Byzantium in the fifth century, but this is
33 Pirone, Eutichio, p. 295.
34 See, for instance, the confusion in the ODB, s.v. Salil,iids. The entry is on the Salil,iids,
the 5th-century foederati of Byzantium, but it appears as Salil,iids, due to some error in printing .
unlikely in view of the existence of the tomb of al-Nabi SaliJ.:in Sinai itself. 35
The other appellation given in the passage, however, admits of no great doubt
about some former federate status that may be attributed to these "slaves,"
namely al-Lakhmiyyiin, the Lakhmids. This is a most uncommon name and
can only be the well-known federate Arab group in Persia whose capital was
l:lira, but some of whom were represented in Byzantine Oriens, most probably
as a result of the defection of the Lakhmid king lmru' al-Qays to the Romans
in the fourth century. 36
d. Finally, the two words "Lakhmid" and abid in the passage may be
brought together. They are the solid spots in a passage that, as mentioned,
bristles with problems. The two words are related in that the Lakhmid branch
of Byzantium had come from the very city in which the abid/ 'ibad lived, the
name given by the Arabs to the Christian population of l:lira. Thus, although
this conclusion remains hypothetical, the chances are that these guardians of
Mount Sinai were former federates whom the authorities or even the Ghas-
sanids had stationed there to guard it.
Now that the two accounts of Procopius and Eutychius have been con-
fronted with each other, it is possible to gauge Procopius' prejudice in the
report he gave on Mount Sinai that involves the Arabs.
a. Both are agreed that there were Saracen raids on Mount Sinai, and
Eutychius is even detailed on this. But he is careful to specify that these were
pastoralists, Beduins, hence his use of the correct term, A 'rab.
b. His account makes clear that the guardians of Mount Sinai in his day
were Arabs, Christian Arabs; 37 and this section has argued that they were
prob~bly former foederati, who had been stationed there and charged with the
defense of the area.
35 See the note in Pirone, Eutichio, p. 311 note 17, where he says that the tomb of ~iilih,
whom he identifies with the Koranic Arabian prophet, is in Wadi al-Shaykh and that he has a
maw/id celebrated in May. ~iilil_i was a prophet of the Thamud, who lived in northern l:Iijiiz in
pre-Islamic times , and the transference of his veneration to Sinai is strange.
36 For Imru' al-Qays and the Lakhmid presence in Oriens, see BAFOC, 31-61.
In the text of Eutychius, the Lakhmids are mentioned after the reference to Banu ~iilil_i and
with the introductory prepositional phrase wa-min-hum, "and from them are the Lakhmids."
This has been construed by both translators of Eutychius to mean that the Lakhmids are de-
scended from Banu ~iilil_i, thus understanding the pronominal suffix hum to refer to Banu ~iilil_i
as antecedent; see Pirone in text quoted above and Breydy who translates "von ihnen stammen
auch die Lakhmiden" (Eutychios, p. 90, line 31). But the prepositional phrase minhum could be
construed coordinately with the three other occurrences of the phrase minhum in the preceding
lines, where Eutychius categorizes the various groups into which the "Slaves" were divided,
when confusion set in in their midst during the caliphate of 'Abel al-Malik. So this construction
put on the prepositional phrase restores the identity of this group as Lakhmids of the 7th
century, when they are attested in Oriens during the Muslim Conquests; see BAFOC, 382.
37 It is impossible to believe that they were non-Arabs, those who, centuries later, called
themselves Banu ~iilil_i and venerated a well-known prophet, such as Arabian ~iilil_i .
c. In his account of what St. Sabas requested from Justinian, Eutychius
includes reference to the Church of Theotokos, in Jerusalem, begun by the
Arab patriarch of Jerusalem, Elias, and completed by Justinian.
38
Thus, although there were Arab pastoralists roaming in Sinai and the
Desert of Juda who molested monasteries, most of the Arabs of the three
Palestines were sedentary Rhomaioi or sedentarized foederati, who were protect-
ing Christian establishments in Palaestina Tertia and Prima. So just as the
Chronicle of I:Iamza al-I~fal:_iani supplied the data on Ghassanid buildings that
Procopius withheld, 39 so do Eutychius and others provide data that supply
what Procopius had omitted to mention and correct the image he had pro-
jected of the Arabs as raiders of Christian establishments.
Thus, in the last analysis, Procopius loses to Eutychius, as far as the
history of Sinai during the reign of Justinian is concerned . 40 The ecclesiastical
historian is detailed and specific, and no motive can be suspected for his
having "doctored" the account. His account is punctuated thrice by reference
to the contemporary scene of his own day, and this suggests that he may even
have visited the site and saw for himself or that he derived his account from
some reliable source. A splendid confirmation of the reliability of Eutychius'
account has been provided by an exciting discovery made by Dr. Peter
Grossmann who, in the late 1980s, uncovered the foundations of the tower
which Eutychius had mentioned in his account of Mount Sinai and which was
still standing in his day in the tenth century, the same tower that had been
mentioned by Ammonius in his Relatio.
41 Grossmann also reached the conclu-
sion that, of the two writers on Mount Sinai, Procopius and Eutychius, it is
the latter that should be followed. This judgment, coming from one who is
not an armchair historian but a resident archaeologist in Egypt, who knows
the site and the region intimately, and, what is more, who had his training as
an architect, carries considerable weight. And he has indeed presented the case
for Eutychius with considerable cogency, namely, that what Justinian built on
Mount Sinai was not a fortress but a fortified monastery. 42
38 On Elias, the Arab patriarch of Jerusalem, see BAFIC,
192-96.
39 When he stopped the description of Justinian's building program at Palmyra, and thus
left the sector from Palmyra to Ayla, which witnessed a strong Ghassanid presence, unrecorded.
On this and on Hamza, see the detailed discussion in BASIC II.
40 When th~ section on Eutychius and Procopius appeared in BAFOC, 328-29,
in 1984,
research on the Ghassanid presence in Sinai was not advanced enough; hence in that section
Procotus had the edge.
1 See Peter Grossmann, "Neue Baugeschichtliche Untersuchungen im Katharinenkloster
im Sinai," Archao/ogischtr Anzeiger, Deutsches Archaologisches lnstitut (1988), Heft 3, pp.
556-58, also 552. For the tower in Eutychius, see Pirone, Eutichio, p. 294, lines 11-14.
42 Grossmann, "Untersuchungen,"
551-53. In note 22 on p. 551, Dr. Grossmann is
quite right when he speaks of Han al-Qanar as "ein ganz normaler Burgos," which was to be
met with all over the Roman frontier and which was occupied by regular Roman soldiers. I did
V. THE GHASSANID PROFILE
The Arab federate presence in Sinai has been sketched for the fourth and fifth
centuries. It is now only appropriate, to sketch that of the Ghassanids with
whom this volume primarily deals.
1. The political and military presence is easier to present, since it entails
referring to major figures in the history of the Ghassanids who were involved
in Palestine: Amorkesos, the adventurous phylarch of the reign of Leo in the
fifth century; and Jabala, who appears on the borders of Palestine around the
year 500 and who, through the foedus of 502, establishes the Ghassanids
firmly in the Byzantine orbit. But it is around 530 when Abii Karib becomes
the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia that the Ghassanids are more firmly estab-
lished in that province, on both sides of Wadi 'Araba, thus including Sinai.
2. More important for the ecclesiastical profile is their involvement in
the Monophysite movement, which they championed so passionately, and the
possibility that this may have had some effects in Sinai which, as part of
Palestine, was strictly orthodox. What Abii Karib did or might have done in
this respect in Sinai is a closed chapter . Codex Syriacus 43 DLXXXV has re-
vealed him as a Monophysite of the Severan type, but whether or not this
affected his phylarchate over Sinai is not known.
His more illustrious brother Arethas, however, was involved in Sinai
directly. A previous chapter has analyzed the passage in the so-called Spurious
Life of James, when he crosses the Euphrates to meet Jacob Baradaeus in the
hope that his army might be cured from a malady (insanity) that had afflicted
it. Jacob tells him to release the holy man from Sinai who was held captive in
his camp and adds that if he did that, his army would be cured. Arethas goes
back to his camp only to find that his army has already been cured, presuma-
bly through the intercession of the saint, and so he releases the holy man of
Sinai and has his captor killed. 44
Something has been said in defense of the possibility that the miraculous
account has a kernel of truth in it. In this new context the case may be
restated with a few more suggestions for its authenticity.
1. Insanity as the condition that afflicted the Ghassanid host could easily
have been related to the famous plague of circa 540. 45 This is easier to accept
than insanity, pure and simple, as the affliction of the Ghassanid army.
2. The association of the Ghassanid Arethas with Sinai, which in the
not, however, identify Han al-Qagar with the Arab enclosure. The latter is distinct from the
Roman burgos; see pl. I in BAFOC and the caption that goes with it, which speaks of "later
accretions of Bedouin enclosures"; pl. II presents the enclosure alone without the burgos .
43 On this see above, 845-50 .
44 On this encounter of Arethas with Jacob, see above, 768- 71.
45 On this see above, 964-65.
nineteenth century seemed remote co the scholars who expressed their doubts
about the authenticity of the account, has been established since 1900, with
the publication of the Sabaic Dam inscription in which Abu Karib appears as
none other than the brother of Arechas. 46 Thus Ghassanid influence in Pa-
laescina Tercia including Sinai can easily be predicated, and Arethas' relation
to Sinai can be seen co be possible through the phylarchate of his brother over
that area.
3. Arechas' brushes with fellow Arab phylarchs in Palaestina Tertia do
not seem so remote in view of the data provided by Cyril of Scychopolis on his
encounter with a phylarch, al-Aswad, in Palaestina Prima. 47 The incarceration
of a phylarch by another is also attested for the fifth century when Terebon,
one of the phylarchs of the Palestinian Parembole, was put in jail by another
phylarch in Arabia and was released only after a holy man, Euthymius, inter-
ceded for him. 48 So this is a parallel case to chat of Arethas and the holy man
from Sinai.
4. Finally, there is the question of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which
the Monophysices zealously undertook. This included not only the Holy Land
proper but also Mount Sinai in Palaescina Tertia, to which there was an old
Nabataean road that began at Ayla. Arechas lived close to the Holy Land
whose military protector, in a sense, he was, guarding it from pastoralist
raids. He lived to a ripe old age, and it is difficult co believe chat through his
long reign of forty years this pious Christian and zealous Monophysite did not
make the pilgrimage to Sinai and Jerusalem . So it is perfectly possible that his
encounter with the holy man of Sinai took place during such a pilgrimage to
the Holy Mountain. 49
What all this amounts to is that the detention of a man from Palaescina
Tercia in the Ghassanid camp is not so incredible. The actual circumstances
that led co his arrest and detention are not known, but the fact that they are
shrouded in obscurity should not argue against the authenticity of the ac-
count. It is perfectly possible co imagine that the powerful and aggressive
Ghassanid Arethas may have been flushed by success and confidence after his
elevation to the supreme phylarchate and kingship in Oriens around 530, and
that he accordingly behaved abrasively with some persons in the diocese, in-
cluding a religious man, since he was also a zealous Monophysite with strong
confessional convictions.
46 On this see BASIC II.
47 On this see BASIC I. 1, 251-55.
48 See BAFIC,
185.
49 On the pilgrimage of the Monophysites to the Holy Land, see J.-M . Fiey, "Le pele-
rinage des Nestoriens et Jacobites a Jerusalem," Cahim de civilisation midieva/e 12 (1969), 113-
26; also the recent anicle by A. Palmer, "The History of the Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem,"
oc 75 (1991), 18-43.
VI. THEODORE OF PH.ARAN
The possible intrusion of Monophysitism into areas such as Sinai and Pal-
estine, which had always been strongly Chalcedonian and Dyophysite,
through the extension of Ghassanid political power over Sinai sets the stage
for the discussion of the chapter written by Theodore of Pharan in the theo-
logical controversy that turns around Monoenergism/Monotheletism in the
first half of the seventh century. io
The three monastic communities of South Sinai-Mount Sinai, Pharan,
and Raithou-counted among them some respectable figures in ecclesiastical
history, although they cannot be compared with those of the other Palestinian
monastic community of Mar Saba in the Desert of Juda. But early in the
seventh century, a bishop of Pharan, Theodore by name, attains fame and
distinction with the central authorities in Byzantium, Heraclius and Patriarch
Sergius, and notoriety with the Chalcedonians who condemned him at the
Lateran Council and the Sixth Ecumenical Council. Sinai had been staunchly
orthodox, and all of a sudden one of its bishops in Pharan is accused of down-
right Monophysitism, which led to Monoenergism and Monotheletism. He
appears as the spirit behind the vigorous ecclesiastical policy of Heraclius to
unite his empire doctrinally throughout the three decades of his reign. Not
Sergius but Theodore was the theologian of the new doctrine, while Sergius,
although patriarch of Constantinople, seems to have been the intermediary
between Theodore the theologian and Heraclius the emperor. ii
Since little is known about Theodore, and in view of his importance in
the imperial theology of the first half of the seventh century, it is well that
some questions concerning him be raised in this context of Arab Christianity
in Sinai and the Monophysite Ghassanid presence in that peninsula .
1. His ethnic origin, like that of the overwhelming majority of ecclesias-
tics of this proto-Byzantine period, is impossible to tell from his name. These
ecclesiastics assumed Graeco-Roman or biblical names, which thus concealed
their ethnic origin. This becomes known only when an author goes out of his
way to indicate it, as was done, for instance, in the case of another ecclesiasti-
cal celebrity on the Palestinian scene, Elias, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who
died in 516. Pharan was an Arab town, and the question arises whether or not
its bishop, who had to deal with the local population as part of his episcopal
50 The best and most lucid account of Theodore of Pharao may be found in E. Amann 's
article in Dictionnaire de thio/ogie catho/ique (Paris, 1946), XV. I, 269-82, where he is also
distinguished from the Chalcedonian theologian, his namesake and neighbor in Rai:thou, to
whom another article is devoted.
For a recent survey of the sources for Monotheletism, see F. Winkelmann, "Die Quellen
zur Erforschung des monoergetisch-monothelitischen Streites ," K/io 69 (1987), 515-59.
51 Cf. Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 283-307,
where the author could have
consulted with profit Amann 's article, referred to in the preceding note .
duties, was an Arab. The first attested bishop of Pharan, Nathyr, had a Semi-
tic name, and so he was most probably an Arab, in view of the ethnic makeup
of the city and the desirability of having a bishop there, especially the first
one, who could communicate with the population. Whether this policy was
continued or not after Nathyr is not known. All the names of the recorded
bishops of Pharan are non-Arab, and so it is impossible to tell their ethnic
origin.
2. Theodore has been considered a Monophysite of the Severan type, and
this raises the question of whether or not he was influenced by the Mono-
physitism of the politically and militarily dominant Arab group in the area,
the Ghassanids. There is no way of telling . Macarius, the bishop of Pharan,
was the recipient of a letter from Emperor Marcian in 451 , warning him of a
certain Theodosius, a heretic, who caused turbulence in Jerusalem and Pal-
estine, including the Holy Mountain . But after that, Pharan is solidly ortho-
dox until the early seventh century when Theodore appears on the scene. ) 2
3. In addition, at about this time the Monophysite church had a bishop
in Jerusalem in the Holy land: Severus, whose incumbency of the Mono-
physite see of Jerusalem extended from 590 to 635. Thus at last the Holy
land, which had been kept strictly orthodox after Chalcedon, had its Mono-
physite bishop. This coincided with the episcopate of Theodore over Pharan,
and it is not impossible that a Monophysite influence on him emanated from
Severus of Jerusalem. ) 3
It is difficult to believe that the Ghassanid phylarchs would or could have
affected the doctrinal persuasion of an orthodox bishop of Pharan. But then
there was the Ghassanid bishop, the namesake of this bishop of Pharan, The-
odore, who for thirty years in the sixth century had been preaching Mono-
physitism in Oriens, and his assignment was in these southern regions, in-
cluding Sinai. Could he then have done some missionary work in Sinai which
finally influenced Theodore of Pharan in the seventh century? There is no way
of telling. The only explicit relation of the Monophysite Ghassanids to Sinai
consists of the reference in the Spurious Life of James to Arethas' detention of a
holy man from Sinai in his camp, but that is an isolated episode. Thus one
can only refer to these relevant facts in view of the scarcity of information on
this Theodore and the influences that affected the evolution of his Monoener-
gism, but no definite conclusions can be drawn.
VII. THE IMAGE
In spite of the fact that Sinai was inhabited by Christian Arabs who, as urban-
ites and sedentaries, formed most of its population, their image was tarnished
52 For Marcian's letter to Macarios, see Devreesse, "Le christianisme, " 207.
H For Severus, the Monophysice bishop of Jerusalem, see Palmer, "History ," 27.
by the pastoralists that roamed the peninsula and apparently still represented
its unconverted pockets of paganism. However, the contribution of the Arabs
to Christian life in Sinai was not inconsiderable. The inmates of the two
monastic centers of Pharao and Rai"thou must have counted Arabs among
them, and one bishop of Pharao was Arab: Moses, who spread the monastic
life in southern Sinai. Obedianus (Ubayda) of Pharao fought off the Blem-
myes and defended it, and Arab federates guarded the monastery of Mount
Sinai in the reign of Justinian .
But what was remembered were the more sensational episodes that asso-
ciated the Arabs with the massacre of monks and with raids on their monas-
teries. This was the image that was riveted in the memory of succeeding
Christian generations and influenced their perception of the Saracen pastoral-
ists, and with it the Arabs in general. The diffusion and continuance of this
perception were due to two circumstances.
1. The massacre of the forty monks of Rai"thou and others at Mount Sinai
was celebrated in the Christian calendar on 14 January as part of the church's
liturgy . This has been one of the main reasoQs for the survival of this episode
since it is renewed every year with the feast of the Sinai martyrs. The cele-
brants of the Mass for the martyrs understandably forget that it was the Arab
contingent of Pharao under 'Ubayda that came to the rescue of Rai"thou, albeit
too late to save the forty monks.
2. Hagiographic writers, such as Cyril of Scythopolis and John Moschus,
who have written on monasticism in the Holy Land, both in Sinai and the
Desert of Juda, have naturally recounted episodes of Saracen attacks on monas-
teries. These have survived in the memory of a large Christian readership
rather than the other passages such as those on the Arab bishops of the Parem-
bole in Palestine or on Elias, the patriarch of Jerusalem. The spread of monas-
ticism in the East and the West, and interest in works on monasticism in the
East where the movement started, tarnished the image of the Arabs in Europe
even before the Arabs as Muslims possessed themselves of a large part of the
Byzantine Occident . Indeed , not only in the two principal centers of monasti-
cism in Palestine-Sinai and the Desert of Juda-but also in another major
center of monasticism in Oriens, Chalcidice, the same image of the Arabs as
Saracens was projected by Jerome. Before he settled in Bethlehem, he had
written on his unpleasant experiences with the Saracens of that region, and so
with his prestige in the West he also contributed to the projection of the
image of the Saracen as the eternal enemy of the inmates of the monastic
Christian establishment in the Orient . What Jerome had done in the fourth
and fifth centuries, the Anonymous of Placentia completed in the sixth with its
description of the pagan Saracen pockets in Sinai that had not yet been re-
claimed to Christianity, and of the general atmosphere of insecurity that the
Saracen presence in Sinai presented to its Christians, both visitors and resi-
dents. Thus his ltinerarium may be added to the work of Jerome as a contribu-
tor to the projection of that image of the Arabs in the West as unregenerate
Saracens, hostile to Christians and Christianity. 54
VIII. THE SINAI PENINSULA AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Knowledge of the history of the three Christian centers in the southern part of
the Sinai Peninsula-Mount Sinai/St. Catherine's, Pharao, and Ra1thou-is
owed to literary documents which recorded their history in the prom-Byzan-
tine period . Such are the Ammonii Monachi Relatio and the Sancti Nili Narra-
tiones and others, which have been analyzed in two of the volumes of this
series. 55 These literary sources have been so thoroughly examined that there is
not much room for improvement in the understanding of these texts. Further
advances in the study of the early history of these centers rest in the hands of
the archaeologist, and this is especially true of Pharao and Ratthou since,
unlike Mount Sinai, they were small towns that came into being in the fertile
valleys in which they are situated. It is therefore to the results of archaeologi-
cal work that the student of these two localities must turn for more informa-
tion. Most of this work has been concentrated on Pharao rather than Ratthou,
although St. Catherine's has also benefited from recent archaeological reseatch 56
conducted by Dr. Peter Grossmann, the excavator of Abu Mina in Egypt. All
students of the early history of southern Sinai are therefore deeply in his debt, 57
and it is hoped that he will continue to dig at Pharao and to research its early
history.
From what has so far emerged from an excavation of the site of Pharao, it
is possible to present the following data on this Christian Arab city in south-
ern Sinai, based on publications of Dr. Grossmann as well as personal commu-
nications which he kindly supplied. 58
a. The ancient site of Pharao has been located at what is now called Tall
al-Mal_irad. The houses, now in ruins, are visible, some of which apparently
54 For the AnonymouJ of Placentia, see BAFOC, 319-24. In a personal communication, Dr.
Peter Grossmann cells me chat the dace of the Anonymous of Placencia's visit co Sinai has co be
changed from ca. 570 co the period 550-560.
55 See BAFOC, 297-319, and BAFIC, 134-39, notes of which will guide the reader co
the work of scholars who have dealt with these documents and with Sinai in general.
56 See the preceding chapter on his discovery of the foundations of the cower referred co in
the Ammonii Relatio; above, 980.
57 For a preliminary survey of southern Sinai, see Rothenberg , "Archaeological Survey."
58 The discussion of Pharan derives its data from the following studies by Dr. Grossmann:
(a) "Early Christian Ruins in Wadi Fayran (Sinai): An Archaeological Survey," Annale.r du Service
deJ AntiquitiJ de l'Egypte 30 (1984-85), 75-84; (b) "Report on the Season in Fayran" (March
1990), typescript communicated co me personally; (c) two reports on numismatic finds at
Pharan: "Einzelfunde Fayran (1986 und 1987)" and "Einzelfunde Fayran (1990)," typescripts.
To these most recent studies on Pharan, may be added Leclerq, "Sinai," cols. 1469-72.
987
had more than one storey. They are not far from a river that flows in the
valley. On an elevated area, there is a sort of a citadel or acropolis. 59
b. The most impressive ruin of Pharao is the church, the former cathe-
dral of the town. It is built of sun-dried brick, while its columns are made of
red sandstone. 60 The 1990 season of excavation uncovered a "town church" in
Pharan, which may have been erected in the second half of the fifth century. 61
c. In addition to the many graves to be found in the hills surrounding
Pharao, tombs three storeys high were found in the western part of the town
outside the city wall. 62 To the north of the town there is a locality called Jabal
Ta}:luna, "the Mountain of the Mill," in which the following monuments were
found.
a. On the hill is a necropolis with numerous small tombs of various types
but within which may be marked some mausolea of brick or stone; each of
these has a domed inner square chamber. 63
b. Overlooking the necropolis, on higher ground, stood two small
churches, whose ruins are still visible. Both are basilicas, referred to as
Churches B and C. Church C, Dr. Grossmann has argued, "forms an early
example of the Weitarkadenbasilika known hitherto from the early Christian
architecture in Syria." He does not exclude altogether its identification with
the church described by Egeria, when she visited Pharao, which she located
on "the very lofty steep mountain which overhangs Paran. " 64
These monuments of Pharao are dated by Dr. Grossmann to the fifth and
sixth centuries, including the cathedral, which he thinks should be dated to
the second half of the sixth century.
There is also a ruin which is locally referred to as Dayr al-Banat, "the
monastery of the maidens," but which the author thinks is more likely to have
been a military post erected for guarding the southern entrance of Wadi
Pharao, since the ruin stands on a steep hill. 65
Pharao has yielded a relatively large number of coins, which are still
unpublished. Some of them were minted in Nabataean times, but most are
from the Roman period. They cease, however, before the end of the sixth
century. 66 There is a gap in this numismatic evidence on Pharan between the
first and fourth centuries. 67 Most of these coins are Roman-Byzantine.
As for inscriptions, they are not abundant so far, but it is hoped that
59 "Survey," 75.
60 Ibid., 75- 77.
61 "Report," 1-3.
62 Ibid., 3-4 .
63 "Survey," 78-79 .
64 Ibid., 79-81, and '"Report," 5-8 .
65 "Survey," 81.
66 See "Einzelfunde."
67 Dr. Peter Grossmann, personal communication, 1991.
they will be, when the excavation of Phiiriin progresses. In addition to the two
published by R. Lepsius and H. Leclercq, a new one was found at the church
dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which the editor assigns to the fifth century. 68
Fragments of other inscriptions are reported by Dr. Grossmann with hopes for
more discoveries in later excavations.@
All these are Christian inscriptions; unfortunately they are not very infor-
mative. Dr. Grossmann writes that the cathedral church of Phiiriin "contains a
number of names in the pavement of the narthex's floor." Perhaps there are
some names that may reflect the Arab character of Phiiriin, although Christian
Arabs of this period assumed non-Arab names, biblical and Graeco-Roman.
Through the efforts of the Deutsches Archaologisches lnstitut in Cairo
and under the leadership of Peter Grossmann, an Arab Christian town of this
proto-Byzantine period in Sinai is coming to life, as its cathedral and churches
are brought to light and emerge out of the ashes, debris, tumu/i, and kiimJ that
litter the fertile valley of Phiiriin. Thus the town regains, in the consciousness
of students of Christian Sinai, its previous status, conceived by one ecclesiasti-
cal historian as "la perle du Sinai. " 70
One can only hope that the Institute. will also excavate the twin city,
Rai'thou, the monastic settlement. Archaeology has already made an impor-
tant contribution in establishing the most fundamental fact about Rai'thou, its
correct site, which now has been identified not with Arandara 71 northwest of
Phiiriin, but with Tor, which lies to its south. 72
Postscript. Since this chapter was written, Dr. Grossmann (personal com-
munication, July 1992) reported that in the excavation season of February
1992 at Pharao he discovered another small church and succeeded in clarifying
a number of questions pertaining to the other churches. We look forward to
the publication of these results. In addition, his communication contained the
following items relevant to this chapter:
68 See Y. Meimaris, ''Two Unpublished Greek Inscriptions," Liher Anmms 30 (1980), 228-33.
69 Dr. Peter Grossmann, personal communication, 1991.
70 Devreesse, "Le christianisme," 211. For what struck one writer as the splendeur of the
first church, see Leclercq, "Sinai," col. 1471.
71 Devreesse, "Le christianisme," map, p. 207.
72 Yoram Tsafrir established the identity of Rai:thou with Tor; see P. Mayerson, "The
Ammonius Narrative," in The Bible World-Essays in Honor of C. H. Gordon, ed. G. Rends-
burg et al. (New York, 1980), 142 note 33.
Pharao was, of course, a Byzantine city belonging to the province of Palaestina Tercia, and
its inhabitants were Rhomaic, not federate Arabs. But this chapter on it has been included
because of the relevance of the fortunes of the Rhomaic Arabs in Oriens to the general theme of
Byzantium and the Arabs and especially because of the Ghassanids. In this southern region of
Sinai, it has been argued that the Ghassanids most probably had a military presence near Mount
Sinai for the defense of the monastery and that the Monophysitism of Theodore of Pharao in the
7th century may possibly have had some remote relation to that presence.
The town church from the east, Pharao, Sinai (photo: courtesy Dr. Peter Grossmann, Deutsches
Archaologisches Institut, Cairo).
1. An Arabic inscription was found in the debris of the town church,
apparently before the February excavation season. It is fragmentary and unfor-
tunately was used as a pivot for a door. It is so badly mutilated that it is
impossible to make sense of what it says. It is important, however, for dis-
cussing the Arab identity of Pharan.
2. It had been thought that epigraphy in the narthex of the cathedral
might reveal some Arabic names, but apparently it does not since the inscrip-
tion is an invocation of the Virgin.
3. However, some names were recovered beside one of the mausolea on
Jabal Ta9una "written in the technique of the Nabataean inscriptions but in
Greek letters." Some names are recognizable, such as Menas, Sergius, and
Cosmas; one or two do not sound Greek and are likely to be Arabic or possibly
Coptic.
Epilogue
The Arab and the German F oederati:
Monophysitism and Arianism
I. INTRODUCTION
T
he preceding chapters in Part Two have traced for more than a century
the role of the Ghassanids as zealous Monophysites in the ecclesiastical
history of this long period . It is not inappropriate to reflect on this long
record of support to the Monophysite church on the part of the Ghassanids
and the consequences that followed from it, 1 and to discuss it within the
comparative context of the Germanic tribes who, like the Ghassanids, were
affiliated doctrinally with a confession, Arianism, considered heretical by or-
thodox Byzantium .
Byzantium understood the great value of the Ghassanids as seasoned fed-
erate troops. But as it was intolerant of doctrinal pluralism, it could not
accept their Monophysitism and wanted them to come over to the official
Chalcedonian fold. Maurice formally tried to bring Nu'man over in the early
580s and asked him point blank, but the Ghassanid phylarch refused, and so
the last chance of converting the Ghassanids was lost. Before Maurice, Justin-
ian had tried to do the same through the mediation of his patriarch and
former comes Orientis, Ephraim, who approached the grandfather of Nu'man,
Arethas, but he, too, refused. Thus Ghassanid-Byzantine relations in the ec-
clesiastical sector remained strained to the detriment of both parties. The
consequences of this unshakable devotion of the Ghassanids to the Mono-
physite cause were immensely adverse. It finally led to the arrest and exile of
Mungir in 582 and the dissolution of the Ghassanid phylarchate for a quin-
quennrum.
There is no doubt that Maurice and Justinian before him strongly be-
lieved that the Ghassanid phylarchs had affiliated themselves with a doc-
trinally erroneous confession and genuinely wanted their reclamation to ortho-
doxy. That they succeeded in attracting some members of the royal house,
brothers of Arethas and of Mungir, is explicitly stated in the sources. In view
1 This will be treated at great length in the fifth volume of this series, which deals with
the rise of Islam and the Arab conquests in the 7th century.
Epilogue 991
of what happened to Ghassanid-Byzantine relations as a result of Ghassanid
Monophysitism, it is not inapposite to raise the question of what might have
happened had the Ghassanids either converted from the beginning to an or-
thodox faith or responded to the call of Justinian and Maurice. They would
then have lived in perfect unison with the central government, without the
tensions that punctuated their relations throughout the sixth century.
What the course of Ghassanid history turned out to be for more than a
century of Near Eastern history as a result of their affiliation with Monophysi-
tism is well known, and this volume has recorded it with much detail. What
it might have been if the Ghassanids had become Chalcedonians can only be
speculation, legitimate though it is. Comparisons and contrasts with the Ger-
manic reges of the Roman Occident who were faced with the same problem of
doctrinal persuasion as the Ghassanid kings are very illuminating and can
relieve these reflections on the Arab federates of their speculative nature by
presenting concrete cases of the counterpart of the Ghassanid historical might-
have-been. It is especially fruitful to conduct this comparison with reference
to the Ostrogoths and the Franks in Italy and Gaul, as represented by Clovis
and Theodoric. And it is a striking coincidence that the three chiefs-Clovis,
Theodoric, and Jabala, the kings of the Franks, Ostrogoths, and Ghassanids
respectively-were all clients of the same Byzantine emperor, Anastasius.
So it was in the reign of Anastasius (489-518) that these three barbarian
peoples began their historic role in the Roman Orient and Occident under
these leaders. All were foederati of the empire, 2 and all were faced with doctri-
nal choices when they adopted Christianity . All recognized the authority of
the Byzantine emperor and the continuity of Roman rule and received from
the emperors the symbols of their power. But the one element that distin-
guished Clovis and his Franks from all the other German peoples was his
conversion, not to the heresy of Arianism, but to the orthodoxy of the Catho-
lic church in the Occident, and this charted the course of all subsequent
Frankish history and indeed German medieval history. A quick survey of the
careers of the three rulers will make this point clear.
II . THEODORIC AND CLOVIS
Theodoric (493-526) was an Ostrogoth and an Arian and, like his Ghassanid
contemporary, he remained so throughout his reign and refused to change his
doctrinal position. He rid the empire of Odovacar and his Heruls/Ruggians in
493/94 when he slew him with his own hands and, in so doing, gave Italy
thirty-three years of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
Anastasius had an ambivalent attitude toward him, but finally in 497
2 Although their federate status was not exactly identical.
992 Epilogue
confirmed him as master of soldiers, and recognized, but not without condi-
tions, his governorship of Italy. There was nothing that Anastasius could do
with the distant and powerful Ostrogothic king in Italy as far as his doctrinal
position was concerned. His antipathy, however, is reflected by his dispatch of
some hundred ships against him in 508, at a time when Arian Theodoric was
supporting the Arian Visigoths in Gaul. 3 The emperor could not do more than
this against a Germanic king who, viewed from Constantinople, was only a
robber king who had carved for himself a large chunk of imperial territory and
was a heretic at that , not conforming to the doctrinal confession of the central
government . After a long and glorious reign, the Ostrogothic kingdom of
Theodoric was shattered in the decade following his death, when Justinian,
who too viewed the Ostrogothic kingdom as that of a robber and a heretic,
decreed it out of existence through the military skill of another German,
Belisarius. So in spite of his successes and the long period of peace and pros-
perity he gave to Italy, his kingdom turned out to be ephemeral. 4 His failure
to lay the foundation of an enduring state may be attributed in large mfa$ure
to his Arian doctrinal complexion, which was not tolerated by orthodox By-
zantium nor by the powerful Catholic ecc/esia in the West.
In sharp contrast to Theodoric and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy was
Clovis and his Frankish kingdom in Gaul. Although the Frank was not far
behind the Ostrogoth in ability, there is no doubt that it was his conversion
to Catholic Christianity after his victory over the Alemanni in Alsace in 496
that made all the difference for his subsequent extraordinary career. The chief
of the Salian Franks, unlike all the other German chiefs who had declared for
Arianism, became an orthodox Catholic Christian and behaved as a representa-
tive of the official Catholic Christianity that prevailed in both the East and the
West. He received from Emperor Anastasius the codicils of the honorary con-
sulship. 5 What is more, Clovis became a protagonist of the Catholic faith. His
Catholic militancy is reflected in his campaign against the Visigoths of Gaul
whom he attacked as Arian heretics. 6
Toward the end of his reign in 5 11, the founder of the Merovingian
house had succeeded in conquering most of Gaul for himself and the Catholic
3 See Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon , MGH, Chronica Minora, ed. Th. Mommsen (Berlin,
1894), II, 97, for the year 508.
4 And so was che Arian Visigothic kingdom in Spain; it is noteworthy that it, too, fell to
the Muslim Arabs, in 711, while the Catholic Frankish kingdom in Gaul did not, and actually
beat off the Arab offensive in the decisive battle of Tours in 732.
5 "Igitur ab Anastasio imperatore codecillos de consolato accepit"; Gregory of Tours,
MGH, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, I, p. 88, line 15.
6 Gregory of Tours quotes him as saying: "Valde molestum fero, quod hi Arriani partem
teneant Galliarum. Eamus cum Dei adiutorium, et superacis redegamus terram in dicione nos-
tra"; ibid. , p. 85, line 517.
Epilogue 993
church, and his great success was in large measure due to his fortunate alliance
with that church from which he benefited greatly during his career both as a
warrior and as an administrator. Thus, unlike Arian Theodoric, Catholic
Clovis did not swim against the imperial and ecclesiastical currents of the day
and so succeeded in founding an enduring state . He is the founder of the
medieval Frankish monarchy and of the modern French nation. 7
111. )ABALA
More allied to the fortunes of Theodoric than those of Clovis was the fate of
the Ghassanid king Jabala. His was a checkered 8 career due to two facts:
unlike Theodoric, he lived in the pars orientalis and so was within reach of the
imperial displeasure; and unlike Clovis, he lived long enough to witness the
confessional change of Anastasius himself from the Chakedonian position to
the Monqphysite one around 510. Most probably he swam first with the im-
perial ecclesiastical current as a Chakedonian and then as a Monophysite, and
so ended up, together with his Ghassanids, as staunch Monophysites. The
return of Byzantium to the Chakedonian creed after some eight years of Ana-
stasius' rule was the beginning of a long history of tensions between the
Ghassanids and Chalcedonian Byzantium, and it started immediately, as soon
as Justin ascended the throne in 518. There was a period of estrangement
between lord and vassal following the persecution of the Monophysites, early
in the reign of Justin, and the expulsion of their bishops. This estrangement
lasted for some years until Jabala was restored in the late 520s, since Justinian
could not fight his Persian war without the help of the Ghassanid foederati.
Furthermore, Monophysite Jabala and his followers were able to survive be-
cause of the protective imperial umbrella of Theodora and the benevolent
7 The words of the translator of Gregory of Tours are worth quoting in this connection. Of
Catholicism to which Clovis converted, he says:
It placed at his disposal the whole body of the Gallo-Roman bishops, almost all of whom
were drawn from distinguished provincial families. The bishops of Gaul were the chief
repositories of the higher culture and tradition; they understood diplomatic usage, and
possessed the art of administration; they enjoyed immense prestige among the common
people, of whom they were the protecrors against ill-usage and aggression. No more
valuable allies could have gathered to the Frankish standard. They brought not only the
strength due to their virtues and their accomplishments, but the influence which they
were able to exert among the Gallo-Roman Catholics in Visigothic Aquitaine, who were
both numerous and disaffected. Their adhesion assured the triumph of the Franks.
See The History of the Franks, trans. 0 . M. Dalton (Oxford, 1927), I, 92-93.
This long paragraph has been cited for contrast with the career of the Ghassanid Jabala and
all subsequent Ghassanid rulers after him, who not only did not have the support of the
orthodox Catholic ecclesia in the East, but actually had it against them, and it finally contrib-
uted its generous share to their downfall.
8 The exact course that this conversion took is not clear; see above, 694-96.
994 Epilogue
ambivalence of Justinian toward the Monophysites. And thus was established
the dynasty of Jabala during the reign of Anastasius, a curious federate struc-
ture, the Monophysitism of which was frowned upon and fitfully tolerated . As
Jabala did not have the full support of the central government and the ortho-
dox ecclesia, he and his descendants lived under a cloud, and this circum-
scribed their historic role in Oriens and the Near East throughout the entire
sixth century.
IV. CONCLUSION
In light of the comparatist effort attempted in the preceding pages on what
the Frank, Clovis, the orthodox Christian , was able to do, and what The-
odoric the Ostrogoth , the non-orthodox Arian, was unable to do, it is now
possible to return to Jabala and the Ghassanids and make the following obser-
vations on what they, as non-orthodox, achieved and what they might have
achieved.
1. What they achieved as a service to the Monophysite church in Oriens
has been fully documented in this volume. What they achieved in Arabia will
be discussed in BASIC II, which deals partly with Byzantium and Arabia.
2. What they might have achieved may be described briefly as a work in
the Arabian Peninsula similar to that of Clovis in Gaul, in spite of obvious
differences that obtained between Clovis and Gaul on the one hand and Jabala
and Arabia on the other.
Both Judaism and Christianity had made some inroads in that peninsula
toward the conversion of the Arabs to a monotheistic faith, but vast tracts
remained unclaimed by either faith, and those who were converted were only
slightly tinctured by Christianity. The Ghassanids were the most powerful of
all the three groups of foederati that Byzantium had in this proto-Byzantine
period. They were most zealous Christians, and above all they were well con-
nected through Azdite tribal affiliation with many and various parts of the
Arabian Peninsula whence they had hailed, from the Arabian south. Sup-
ported by a central government as well as an ecclesia, both of which were
zealously evangelistic in the sixth century, the Ghassanids might have made
more progress in the process of converting the Peninsula than they had done,
progress that might have affected the course of events in the seventh century .
But unlike the orthodox Tanukhids and the Salil)ids, the Ghassanids did not
live in unison with the central government and the ecclesia doctrinally, since
they were Monophysites . This operated to their disadvantage as evangelists in
the Peninsula. The evangelistic efforts lacked strong imperial and ecclesiastical
patronage . Besides, evangelistic efforts in the Peninsula were not concerted.
Nestorianism had for its sphere of operations the eastern half of the Peninsula,
while Monophysitism had the western, with influences coming from Meso-
Epilogue 995
potamia, Ethiopia, and Oriens. 9 This achieved a measure of success, but the
Ghassanids, who would have been the ideal propagators of the faith, were
handicapped in their efforts. Internal dissensions within the Monophysite
camp distracted the Ghassanids, and conflicts with the central government
made them insecure in their home base in Oriens. The climax came in the
early 580s when the Ghassanid phylarchate was extinguished. Although this
lasted for only a five-year period, the Ghassanids did not regain their former
power, and the bitter experience left them suspicious of Byzantium. The effect
of all this on the efforts outside the limes in western Arabia can be easily
imagined. Especially important was the consequence on their activity in
}:Iijaz, the cradle of Islam in the seventh century.
Thus the adoption of Monophysitism by the Ghassanids in the reign of
Anastasius, and their later refusal to convert to the orthodoxy of the central
government, emerge as the most important fact in their cultural life and that
of the Arabs in Oriens and western Arabia in the sixth century. Previous Arab
foederati had been orthodox, the Taniikhids of the fourth century and the
Sali):iids of the fifth. If the third wave of foederati, the sixth-century Ghas-
sanids, had become orthodox, as their predecessors had been, they would have
continued the evangelistic impetus begun by the Taniikhids and continued by
the Sali:J:iids, in much the same way that the second Frankish dynasty, the
Carolingians, continued the work of the Merovingians in extending the ortho-
dox faith from the Rhine to the Vistula and adding the Germany of the
Saxons to the Gaul already won by Clovis for the orthodox Christian faith.
9 This is well illustrated for the other side of the Red Sea by the rivalry between the
Chalcedonians and the Monophysites for the conversion of Nubia. The Christian camp was
divided in its efforts. Chalcedonian Justinian sent his orthodox bishops, while Monophysite
Theodora sent her Monophysites. The latter arrived before the former, and thus Nubia became
Monophysite; see Frend, Rise, 298-99.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century 1.1
David Olscer's doctoral dissertation (p. 618 note 1) has now appeared in print
as The Politics of Usurpation (Amsterdam, 1993). And so did Andrew Palmer's
manuscript "In the Shadow of the Moon" (ibid., note 2) as The Seventh Century
in West-Syrian Chronicles (Liverpool, 1993).
Dayr Ghassaneh
Dayr Ghassaneh, discussed on p. 654-55, was apparently called as late
as the eighteenth century "Dayr Ghassan," when the traveler M. al-BakrI
passed through it. This brings it even closer co the Ghassanids. The inhabit-
ants co whom BakrI spoke thought that they were descended from "al-~adif, a
}::limyarice tribe," but they had no very clear conception of their ultimate
tribal affiliation, since al-~adif belonged to }::la9ramawt, not to }::limyar. It is
noteworthy, however, that they thought they were not North Arabs but South
Arabs, which the Ghassanids also were. The Ghassanids most probably only
built the monastery but did not provide it with settlers . The inhabitants who
affiliated themselves with the South Arab tribe al-~adif may have moved there
in the Islamic period, but they could also have moved in pre-Islamic times. It
would be remarkable indeed if the inhabitants of Dayr Ghassan came to Pal-
aescina Prima with the Kindices, also, like al-~adif, a South Arab tribe from
}::la9ramawt, when the Kindite chief Qays was given by Justinian the hege-
monia of Palestine around 530, as discussed in BASIC 1.1, pp . 158- 160.
Near Dayr Ghassan lies Khirbet al-Duwayr (Duwayr is diminutive of
Dayr, "monastery"), which still contains the ruins of a church and a monas-
tery. For Dayr Ghassan and Khirbet al-Duwayr, see M. M. al-Dabbagh, Bi-
laduna Filas!in, vol. VIII.2, 266-70 .
Karawa BanI Ghassan
This toponym was discussed in BASIC 1.1, p. 655. After visiting the
area, it became clear that the Ghassanids had no presence south of Nablus
(Neapolis). What appears as Karawa BanI Ghassan is in reality Karawa BanI
}::lassan or }::lasan. Ghassan is simply a mistransliteration of }::lassan or }::lasan
997
in the atlas, and Karawa is the local dialectal form of standard :ura (villages).
I should like to thank M. Sharon for answering my questions on this locality.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century
Dayr 'Amr/Dayr 'Ammar
On p. 255 it was argued that Dayr 'Amr in Palestine was possibly a
Salil:_lid foundation rather than a Ghassanid one. But more intensive research,
conducted for BASIC I, on the involvement of the Ghassanids in Palestine
suggests that a Ghassanid provenance for Dayr 'Amr cannot be ruled out.
'Amr is an equally good Ghassanid name, and the Ghassanids were heavily
involved in building monasteries, as is clear from BASIC I. 2.
Dayr 'Amr was also identified with Dayr 'Ammar, hence its description
as "a locality north of Jerusalem." But more detailed maps of the monastic
establishment in Palestine have revealed that these are two distinct monas-
teries. Dayr 'Ammar lies indeed to the north of Jerusalem, more precisely to
the northwest; Dayr 'Amr is located 18 kilometers west of Jerusalem, and the
remains of a dayr (monastery) are visible there. See al-Mawsi/a al-Filasfiniyya
(Damascus, 1984), vol. II, 428, and Map VI in BASIC 1.2.
Mawqif al-Na~rani
On p. 391 the question of the location of Mawqif al-N~rani was raised.
L. Cheikho assigned it to Mecca but did not document adequately . It turns
out to be not in Mecca but outside it. It is actually a station on the pil-
grimage route from 'Arafat or Mina to Mecca and is called Wadi Mul:_lassir or
Batn-Mul:_lassir; see the geographical dictionaries of Bakri and Yaqut, s. v.
Mu9assir. It will be discussed in BASIC II.
Platonic Love
On p. 444 note 143, I referred to Platonic love in the strict sense as
conceived by Plato himself in the Symposium, namely, non-sensual love that
obtained between Socrates and his pupils, the Amor Socraticus. In the fifteenth
century Amor Platonicus was used by Marsilio Ficino as a synonym for Amor
Socraticus, and is now the usual term for non-sensual love between a man and a
woman. See Thomas Gould, Platonic Love (Westport, Conn., 1981 [reprint of
1963 ed.}).
Al-Mazini
Readers of the Appendix on al-Mazini on pp. 457-58 may now read the
short article on him by Rudolph Sellheim in E/2, s.v. al-Mazini, Abu 'Uthman
Bakr b. Mu9ammad.
Ecclesiastical Lists
THE ARAB EPISCOPATE IN ORIENS
The Bishops of the Ghassanids
1. John of Evaria (l:luwwarin): Most probably their bishop, exiled 519
2. Theodore: ca. 540-570
3. John ca. 570-575
4. Antiochus ?
The Bishops of the Palestinian Parembole
1. Petrus I (Council of Ephesus, 43 1)
2. Auxolaus (Second Council of Ephesus, 449)
3. John (Council of Chalcedon, 451)
4. Valens (Council of Jerusalem, 518)
5. Petrus II (Council of Jerusalem, 536)
Non-Federate Rhomaic Prelates
A. Two Bishops of Elusa
1. Peter (Council of Jerusalem, 518)
2. Zenobius (Council of Jerusalem, 536)
B. Patriarchs
Elias, Arab Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem 494- 516
With the exception of the Monophysite Ghassanid bishops, all the others
were Chalcedonian. Theodore of Pharan of the seventh century may possibly
have been Arab.
MONASTERIES IN TOWNS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GHASSANIDS
1. The monastery of Abbot Marcellinus
2. The Great Monastery of Gashmin (Jasim)
3. The monastery of Beth-Sabnin
4. The monastery of Gashmin (Jasim)
7. The monastery of Beth-Ar'
8. The monastery of Beth-Mar Stephen
9. The monastery of Bech-}::lala
10. The monastery of Burga }::lawra (the White Tower)
11. The monastery of Tubnin (Tubna)
12. The monastery of Mar-Sarjis (Sergius)
13. The monastery of Mar-Titus
14. The monastery of Nahra d'Qagra (Nahr al-Q~ayr)
15. The monastery of the Mountain of Mal_tagga
16. The monastery of Kfar Shemesh
17. The monastery of Beth-Ilana
18. The monastery of Diirayya
19. The monastery of the Tree
20. The monastery of Darayya
22. The monastery of Loze (Almond)
24. The monastery of the Field of Darayya
26. The monastery of Mar-Jonan
27. The monastery of Mar-Paul
28. The monastery of Sakka
29. The monastery of Bu~~a' (al-Bu4ay')
30. The monastery of Kusita (Kiswa)
THE CHALCEDONIAN PATRIARCHS OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Fravitas (489-490)
Euphemius (490-496)
Macedonius (II) (496-511)
Timotheus I (511-518)
John II Cappadoces (518-520)
Epiphanius (520-535)
Anthimus I (535-536)
Menas (536-552)
Eutychius (552-565)
John Scholasticus (565-577)
Eutychius (restored) (5 77-582)
John IV the Faster (582-595)
Cyriacus (596-606)
Thomas I (607-610)
Sergius I (610-638)
Pyrrhus (638-641)
Paul (II) (641-653)
999
1000
THE CHALCEDONIAN PATRIARCHS OF ANTIOCH
Palladius (490-498)
Flavian II (498-512)
Paul (519)
Euphrasius (521-526)
Ephraim (527-545)
Domninus (545-559)
Anastasius (559-570)
Gregory (570-593)
Anastasius II (598/9-609)
THE CHALCEDONIAN PATRIARCHS OF JERUSALEM
Sallustius (486-494)
Elias (494-516)
John (516-524)
Peter (524-544)
Macarius (552)
Eutychius (552-563)
Macarius (563/4-574)
John (574-593/4)
Amos/Neamus (594-601)
Isaac ( 601-609)
Zacharias (609-628)
Modestus (630-634)
Sophronius (633/4-638)
Sergius
Stephan
John (649-?)
THE CHALCEDONIAN PATRIARCHS OF ALEXANDRIA
During the period 482 to 537, the patriarchal see was disputed between the
Chakedonians and the Monophysites, but the latter prevailed. After 537 the double
hierarchy was established.
Paul the Tabennesiot (537-539)
Zoilos (539-July 551)
Apollinarios (July 551-570)
John II (570-580)
Eulogios (581-February 605)
Theodore Scribon (608-609)
John III Eleemonarios (610 to 11 November 619)
George (620-630)
Cyrus (630/31-643/44)
THE POPES OF ROME
Felix III (483-492)
Gelasius I (492-496)
Anastasius II (496-498)
Symmachus (498-514)
Hormisdas (514-523)
John I (523-526)
Felix IV (526-530)
Boniface II (530-532)
John II (533-535)
Agapetus I (535-536)
Silverius (536-537)
Vigilius (537-555)
Pelagius I (555-561)
John III (560-574)
Benedict I (575-579)
Pelagius II (5 79- 590)
Gregory I (590-604)
Sabinian ( 604-606)
Boniface III (607)
Boniface IV ( 608-615)
Deusdedit (Adeodatus I)
(615-618)
Boniface V (619-625)
Honorius I (625-638)
Severinus (640)
John IV (640-642)
THE MONOPHYSITE PATRIARCHS OF ANTIOCH
Severus (512-February 5 38)
Sergius (557-560)
Paul the Black (564-581)
Peter of Callinicum (581-591)
Julian (591-594)
Athanasius (595-631)
John (631-649)
THE MONOPHYSITE PATRIARCHS OF ALEXANDRIA
Athanasius II (488-494)
John I (494-503)
John II (503-515)
Dioscorus II (515-517)
Timothy III (517-535)
Theodosius I (535-567)
Peter IV (567- 569)
Damian (569-605)
Andronicus (616-622)
Benjamin I (622-661)
1001
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1020
Map I illustrates the Monophysite mission to the Arabs from the two bases in Oriens,
Antioch and Mabboug/Hierapolis, whence Patriarch Severus and Bishop Philoxenus
sent emissaries to distant }::lira on the Euphrates and Najran in South Arabia. The
map shows also Takrit, the see of the Monophysite bishop A):iiidemmeh, who evan-
gelized the Arabs of the Mesopotamia region.
N
r
Yathrib
Najran
Ma'rib
Map I
1022
Map II represents the northern half of Cis-Euphratesian Oriens, comprising the prov-
inces of Euphratensis, the two Syrias, and the two Phoenicias. Most of the towns and
cities on the map figure in the ecclesiastical history of the Ghassanids and other Arab
federates in the sixth century.
Hierapolis
Beroia
Chalcis (Qinnasrin)
N
i
Sergiopolis (Ru~afa)
Palmyra
Qa~r al-I:Iayr (Heliorama)

ijuwwarin (Evaria)
Nabk
J;)umayr
Damascus
Jabiya
0
Bostra
I
Usays
50
I
100km
I
Map II
1024
Map III represents the southern part of Cis-Euphratesian Oriens, comprising the prov-
inces of Arabia and the three Palestines, the scene of a strong Ghassanid ecclesiastical
presence, especially during the phylarchate of the two brothers Arethas and Abu
Karib, the proteges of Justinian.
Elusa
Petra
Ayla
Jabiya
Damascus
l:larrlin
N
i
Shohba (Philippopolis)
Bostra
Gerasa
Philadelphia
Ziza
Map III
1026
Map IV represents mainly the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev, the larger part of
Palaestina III (more clearly than in Map III), where the strongly Monophysite Abu
Karib was phylarch, succeeded by other Ghassanid phylarchs of the same doctrinal
persuasion; see "Arab Christianity in Sinai."
Phi!ran
Sinai
Beersheba
Eiusa
Nessana
0
I
N
r
Phaino
Petra
100km
I
1028
Map V represents the monastic establishment in the Desert of Juda and the area
around Jerusalem. The Parembole is the site of the diminutive Arab church, the
episcopate of the Parembole.
N
r
',..,. Jericho
' ... -- ....
.......... ; ... __
Jerusalem
PMran
Lazarion
Bethabodis
'---- ...... __ , . ',
Elias
ROUBA
Bethlehem
Sabas ,
.....
....
'
Tekoa
'\
~-,-- ........ '-', --,
'
...
'\
KOUTILA
10km
'
0
II
MapV
1030
Map VI shows the one Ghassanid monastic foundation in Palaestina Prima that is
recognizably such, Dayr Ghassaneh, as well as Dayr 'Amr, possibly a federate Salii).id
or Ghassanid monastery. The map also shows the village of 'Abiid, which suggests an
etymology for Bethabudison different from the one commonly held. Dayr 'Ammar is
shown because it was thought to be identical with Dayr 'Amr; see BAFIC, 255, and
above, 698, and the Addenda et Corrigenda.
Dayr Ghassaneh
'Abod
Dayr 'Ammar
N
i
JERICHO
JERUSALEM
Dayr 'Amr
Bethabudison .. /!
BETHLEHEM
0 20km
Map VI
1032
Map VII shows the towns associated with the monasteries, the archimandrices of
which wrote the letter condemning the Tricheiscic heresy; (see the chapter on Justin
II). The region chat the map shows is chat of Palaescina Secunda, Damascene in
Phoenicia Libanensis, and the northern pare of the Provincia Arabia.
DAMASCUS
N
Darayya
Sakka'
i
Kiswa
KafrShams
Tubna
Mal)ajja
PHILIPPOPOLIS
Ghassan
Map VII
Index
'Abel al-Malik, caliph, 977-78, 979n
'Abel al-MasiJ:i, Lakhmid chief, 704, 706
Abimenos, Gregorios, 940
Abraha, South Arabian ruler, 765, 770,
774, 846, 848n, 849n, 854
Abraham, Byzantine diplomat, 727
Abii Karib, Ghassanid phylarch, son of Ja-
bala
and Bishop Theodore, 845-49
Monophysitism of, 848-49, 981
and Palaestina Tertia, 765
and Phoinikon, 849
and Sinai, 967, 981
Abii Ya'fur, Lakhmid ruler, 702-7, 739
'Abud, 1030 (Map VI)
Agapetus, pope, 745
AJ:iiidemmeh, Monophysite bishop of Takrit,
773, 842-43, 854-55, 924, 959,
1020
Aigrain, R., 750n, 771n, 802n, 807, 831,
835n
Alexandria, 797
Severus in, 714
Alexandria, Patriarchate of, 734-35, 797,
925, 1000, 1001
'Alqama, Lakhmid chief, 704, 706
Amida, 770n
Ammanes, 5th-cent. Arab phylarch, 967,
970
Ammonii Monachi Relatio, 969-70, 971, 972,
980, 986
Amorkesos, 5th-cent. Arab phylarch, 694n,
720, 748
'Amr, grandfather of Kindite princess Hind,
708
'Amr ibn-'Amir, Ghassanid phylarch, 766
'Amr ibn-Hind, Lakhmid king, 697
'Amr ibn-Jafna, Ghassanid king, 827, 832
Anasartha
"camp" of, 712-15
Greek inscriptions at, 713, 940
Anastasius, emperor, 691, 703, 704, 709,
711,721,730,737,762, 955-56,
991, 992
and Monophysitism, 693-95, 708, 716,
993
Anastasius the Persian, saint, 945-47, 962
Anatolia, 772, 774, 893, 948
Anbar, 707
Angaios, in the Martyri11m Arethae, 727
Annona foederatica, 718
Anonymo11s of Placentia, 973, 985-86
Anthimus, patriarch of Constantinople, 735,
740, 744, 745, 822, 850n
Antioch, 839, 908-9, 916, 1020 (Map I)
Antioch, Patriarchate of, 791-92, 85 7, 909,
1000
and Monophysitism, 693, 697, 699, 769,
770,779,783,852,868, 896-97,
919, 1001. See also Severus
schism within, 876-92
Antiochus/ Antioch us of Arabia, archiman-
drite of the Monastery of the Arabs,
843-45, 874, 881-82, 892,932
Apamea, 797
Aphrodite, Arabian, 722, 775. See also
al-'Uzza
Aphthartodocetism, 778, 794
Apocrisiari11s, 798, 800, 937
Apollinaris, 735
Aqaba, Gulf of, 767
'Aqraba', 827, 832
al-A'rab (Arab nomads), 968,972, 976-77,
979
Arab Conquests, of 7th cent., 893, 922,
947, 979n
Arabelis, 808
Arabes, in the Notitia Dignitat11m, 718
Arabia. See Provincia Arabia
Arabia, South, 776- 77. See also Najran
Christianity in, 728-32
crusade against, 728-29, 736-37
Index
Arabia, South (cont.)
Monophysite mission co/conversion of,
702, 703, 709-11
Monophysitism in, 728, 737
persecution of Christians in, 726, 728-31
Arabia, western, 77 3n, 851, 995. See a/Jo
l:lijaz
Arabia Petraea, 929n
Arabic language, 753, 761, 772-73, 787-
88, 820-21, 834n, 837n, 884, 892,
904, 970. See also Inscriptions, Arabic;
Poetry, Arabic
Bible/liturgy in, 744, 803n, 835, 841
documents written in, 821
ecclesiastical use of, 701, 7 44, 83 7, 892
sources in, 704, 754, 821, 969. See also
Poetry, Arabic and individual authors
Arabs. See Foederati, Arab and individual tribes
and tribal groups
Arabs, Rhornaic, 698, 700-702, 718, 851,
969, 980, 988n
languages of, 820, 851
Aramaic language, 837n
Archimandrites of Arabia, letter ca. 570 on
Tritheistic heresy, 821-38
list of subscriptions, 824-38, 843, 862
Areobindus, magister militum per Orientem,
696n
Arethas (l:larith), Ghassanid king (529-569),
722,726, 757-762n
Basileia of, 738, 739, 741, 751, 757,
762,774,791,811,812, 848n
and bishops Jacob and Theodore, 736,
738, 740, 746, 755-74, 777, 781
Christianity/Monophysitism of, 726, 758-
60, 775
in Constantinople (ca. 540), 736, 738,
740, 746, 755, 759, 768, 781; (in
563), 759, 770, 780-87, 811; (ca.
570), 817-19
death of, 793, 819, 864
involvement in Monophysite movement,
736,738, 744-74, 777-78, 780,787,
788-89, 793
and John of Ephesus, 753-54
and Justin II, 738, 754, 780-83
languages of, 753, 787-88
letter to Jacob Baradaeus, 780, 782-88
as supreme phylarch, 741, 765
theological argument with Patriarch
Ephraim, 744, 746-55, 770
titulature of, 784
and Tritheistic controversy, 808-24
Arethas (l:larith), Kindite king, son of 'Amr,
697n, 724-25
Arethas, saint. See al-l:larith ibn-Ka'b
Arians/Arianism, 693, 744, 751, 754, 992n
of German foederati, 69 l, 7 3 5, 7 3 7, 990-
94
Armenia/Armenians, 743
Askusnaghes, John, Tritheistic theologian,
797, 805
Asoudos. Seeal-Aswad
Aspebetos, 5th-cent. Arab phylarch and
bishop, 704, 808
al-Aswad, Arab phylarch, 696n, 766, 859,
982
Athanasius, Monophysite monk, 794-803,
805
Auranitis . See I:Iawran
Autokrator, Byzantine tide, 813, 824
Ayla, 971-72, 974, 982
Elias banished to, 697
Ayyiib, house of, 706
Azd, Arab tribal group, 731, 849, 994
Bacchus, saint, 699
Bakri, geographer, 821, 997
Bal!)arith, Arab tribe, 73 ln
Banii 'Alqama, Lakhmid clan, 704, 706
Banii ~ii.Iii), 977, 978, 979n
Baradaeus. See Jacob Baradaeus
Bar-Hebraeus, 758, 769n, 803n, 869
Bar-~auma, Nestorian bishop of Nisibis, 703
Basileia, Ghassanid, 860, 861, 918
of Arethas, 738, 739, 741, 751, 757,
762, 791, 811, 812, 848n. See also un-
der Arethas
of Mungir, 861
Basileus, title, 784, 796n, 822n, 848n
Beduins, 977, 979
Belisarius, 754, 992
Beth-'Arabaye, 924
Beth Mar-)\braham (near Callinicum), 710
Beth Mar-Antiochina (Edessa), 710
Bethabudison, 1030
Bilad al-Sham (Oriens), 838n, 893
Blemmyes, 730n, 970, 971, 972
Bonosus, count of the East, 940, 943
Bostra, 699, 722, 828, 852
cathedral of, 699, 938, 953
Ghassanids and, 769, 955
see of, 768-69, 937
Bostra, Era of, 848
Index
British Museum, Theology, Codex Syriacus
DLXXXV, 765, 845-49, 872, 981
Brooks, E. W., 712, 733, 742, 756n, 768,
770n, 782-83, 802n, 844, 865n,
877n, 886, 888
al-Burj, 864
inscription at, 827
Caesarea, 946n
Caleb (Ella-A~beha), Negus of Ethiopia, 729,
737, 740, 774
Callinicum, conference at (567), 795-96,
845
Carneleer of St. Sergius, 961
Castra (camp), 714-15, 762-63
Caucasus region, 724n
Caussin de Perceval, A. P., 846
Chabot, J.B ., 717-18, 733, 748, 749n,
752, 782, 784, 798, 802, 806, 825n,
832, 844, 851n, 866-67, 886, 909,
927
Chakedon, Council of (451), 699, 719, 748,
749, 751-52, 782n, 795,797
Chakedonians (Dyophysites), 716, 734, 745,
749, 778. See also individual patriarchs
and bishops
Arethas and, 748
attempt to convert Ghassanids, 922-25
in Constantinople, 691
in l:Iira, 697
and Justin II, 794-96
Chakidice, 840, 856, 951, 985
Chalcis, 952
battle of (554), 778-79, 823, 835
martyrion near, 775, 779, 958
Charles, H ., 871n
Cheikho, L., 855n, 976n, 997
Chosroes I Aniishravan, 7 43
Chosroes II Parviz, 944, 947
Christianity, in Arabia, 729- 30
Christophilos, title, 810, 813, 816, 823, 862
Chronicle (Eutychius of Alexandria), 969,
976-80
Chronicle of Sa'ard, 727-28
"Church of Mungir," 831, 834, 835, 843,
856, 862-63
"Church of the Arabs" (Kanisat al-A'rab), in
Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, 841-42
Church of the Theocokos (Jerusalem), 698
Cilicia, 806, 946n
Circesium, 962
Client-kings, 917
Clovis, 991-94, 995
Clysma, 973, 976
Comes Orientis, 751, 754, 758
Conon, Tritheistic bishop of Tarsus, 744,
746, 770, 771, 779, 782, 789, 791,
792, 805-9, 859
Constantine, bishop of Laodicaea, 779
Constantinople, 745, 785
Arab foederati in, 736, 738, 740
Constantinople, conference of (580), 900-
910
Dyophysite reaction to, 916-18
imperial reaction to, 918-21
Monophysite rejection of, 911-16
Constantinople, Council of, in 536: 749; in
553: 734,745,774,778,853
Constantinople, Patriarchate of, 735, 744n,
872,920,999
Coptic language, 788, 884
Copes, 743
Cosmas, Monophysite monk, 795
Cosmas, saint, 691, 730n, 963-65
Cottanas, 940, 943
Ccesiphon, 724
Cyril of Scythopolis, 766, 985
Dada, anchorite, 732
Darn inscription, 846-47 , 848, 976, 982
Darnascene, in Phoenicia Libanensis, 824,
825, 880, 929n, 1032 (Map VII)
Damascus, 717, 721, 824, 827, 833, 836-
37, 947n
metropolitan of, 719, 721
Damian, Monophysite patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 896, 897-98, 906, 912-16
and Peter of Callinicum, 925-35
Damian, saint, 691, 730n, 963-65
Daras, military commander of, 798, 799,
800, 802, 804
Darayya, 809, 825, 829, 832, 835-36, 864
Dawiid, SaH~id king of 5th cent., 834, 859,
951
Dayr. See Monasteries; Monophysites, monas-
teries of; and individual sites
Dayr al-'Abid (Mount Sinai), 978
Dayr al-Banat, 987
Dayr al-Naqira, 841
Dayr 'AJqarna, 706n
Dayr 'Ammar, 997, 1030 (Map VI)
Dayr 'Amr, 697n, 698, 766, 997, 1030
(Map VI)
Dayr 'Aqraba', 827
Index
Daye Dawiid, 859, 951
Daye Ghassaneh (Monastery of the Ghas-
sanids), 697, 698, 766, 833n, 834,
83 5, 83 7, 843, 996, 1030 (Map VI)
Daye }::labib, 843
Daye }::la.Ii, 836
Daye }::lan~la, 706
Daye Sa'd, 843
Decapolis, 836, 963-64
Delehaye, H., 949
Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Cairo,
988
Devreesse, R., 759n, 818n, 967n
Diakrin<>menoi, 798, 802, 909
Diaria ( = annona), 718
Diehl, C., 738
Dionysius of Tell-Mal_:ire, Syriac historian,
717, 926n
Dmer/ed-Dumer . See I;)umayr
Documenta Monophysitarum, 806-24 passim,
838, 844, 850n, 861, 865n, 870, 873,
874, 877, 879, 887, 892
Draguet, R., 775-76
I;)uj'um, Arab phylarch, 922, 923
I;)umayr, 966
Dussaud, R., 832, 833
Dux, 699, 799n, 951
Dyophysites. See Chakedonians
Edessa, 704, 705, 710, 725n
see of, 756, 767, 769, 852, 937
Egeria, Travels, 969
Egypt, 738, 745, 969, 970
and Monophysitism, 711, 726n, 735,
739, 912-13, 927n
Eilat, Gulf of, 842, 974
Elias, patriarch of Jerusalem, 698, 762, 983
banished by Anastasius, 697, 698
Chalcedonianism of, 696, 697
Elias, presbyter of }::la9ramawt, 710
Elusa, bishops of, 97 ln, 998
Emesa, 733
Emisa, 733
Endless Peace (532), 738n, 747
Endoxotatos (gloriosissimus), 783, 784, 863
Ephesus, 759
Council of, 808
Ephraim, patriarch of Antioch, 758, 774
and persecution of Monophysites, 740,
745, 751, 755
theological argument with Ghassanid king
Arethas, 744, 746-55, 757, 770
Epiphanius, patriarch of Constantinople, 735
Ethiopia/Ethiopians, 753. See also Caleb
(Ella-A~beha)
expedition against South Arabia, 728-29,
736-37
Monophysitism of, 711, 726n, 737, 743
Eugenius, Tritheistic bishop of Seleucia,
744,746,770,771 , 779,782,788,
789,791,792, 805-9, 859
Eulogius, Chakedonian patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 936
Eunomius, Monophysite bishop of Amida,
788, 789n
Euphrates, 767, 842, 887, 951
Euphratensis/Euphratesia, 701, 720, 956,
957, 1022 (Map II)
Eustathius, 5th-cent . bishop of the Salil_:iids ,
719, 721
Eustathius, priest of the Church of Mungir,
843, 856, 862-63
Euthymius, St., lavra of, 713
Eutropius, Julianist bishop, 775-77, 937
Eutyches, 735, 736
Eutychius, patriarch of Constantinople, 778,
898-99,907, 917,918
Eutychius, 10th-cent. patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 969, 976-80
Evaria. See }::luwwarin
Exercitus comitatensis, in Oriens, 764
al-Faw, 838n
Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), 734, 745,
774, 778, 853
Foeaerati, Arab, 695, 700-701, 718-22,
75 ln, 980. See also Ghassanids; Kinda;
lakhmids; Salil_:iids; Taniikhids and other
individual tribes
in Byzantine Oriens, 694, 838
compared to German foeaerati, 990-95
and cult of the saints, 949-66
encamped near Anasartha, 712-15
languages of, 820-21, 841, 892
Monophysitism of, 691, 838-39, 990-
91, 993-95
Foeaerati, German, 990-95
Arianism of, 691, 990-94
Foeaus of 502, 708, 981
Franks, 991-95
Frend, W. H. C., 709n, 728n, 783, 914n
Gabita. See Jabiya
Gatier, P. L., 936
Index
Gaulanitis (Jawlan), 761n, 762, 764, 777
Gaza, 697
Gelimer, Vandal king, 754
George, bishop of the Arabs, Islamic era,
860
al-Ghariyyan, pagan idols of Lakhmid dy-
nasty, 723
Ghassanids. See also Basileia, Ghassanid; Phy-
larchate, supreme and individual rulers
bishops of, 719-22, 740, 998. See also in-
dividual bishops
buildings of, in Oriens, 779, 832. See also
l;lamza al-I~fahani
and Chalcedonians, 694, 849, 922-25
Christianity of, conversion: 694; zeal for:
731
churches and monasteries of, 692, 697-
98, 779, 824-41 passim, 1030 (Map
VI). See also individual churches and mon-
asteries
dynasty, 753-55, 835, 848n, 849
episcopate of, 869- 75
in foedus of 502, 694
and l;lijaz, 726, 995
involvement in Paulite-Jacobite contro-
versy/schism, 887-92, 896, 900-906
and Justin I, 716
Monophysitism of, attachment to: 691,
698-99, 73 l; conversion: 695-96; in-
volvement in/protection of, 736, 739,
783, 838, 912, 990-91, 993-95 ; tol-
erated by Justinian, 775
and Najran, 711, 730-31
in Palestine, 697-99
and Patriarch Damian of Alexandria, 925-
35
in Persian wars of Justinian , 73 7, 758
and Peter of Callinicum, patriarch of Anti-
och, 925-35
private life of, 754
and St. Sergius, 954-63
and Sinai, 981-83
and Tritheism, 805-24
withdrawal from Byzantine service, reign
of Justin I: 717, 739; reign ofJustin II:
875
Ghazi, raider of the frontier, 723
Glaser, E., 765, 770, 847n
Gloriosissimus (endoxotatos), 783, 784, 863
Gloriosus, 810, 811, 815, 862, 863, 880,
882, 901
Golan, 732, 748, 786, 826, 864, 893
episcopate of, 852, 892-93
Goldziher, I., 902n
Goths, 735, 737, 758
Greek language, 712, 714-15, 772, 787-
88, 791, 792, 820-21, 837, 841, 884,
904. See also Inscriptions, Greek
sources in, 718. See also individual authors
and works
Gregorios Abimenos, 940
Gregory, patriarch of Antioch, 909
and Ghassanid king Mungir, 898, 916,
920n, 921
and Monophysitism, 909-10, 918
Gregory I, pope
and Emperor Maurice, 936
and Ghassanid king Mungir, 935-36, 939
and the Provincia Arabia, 935-38
Gregory of Nyssa, 892n
Grossmann, P., 980, 986-88
Gubba Barra.ya, monastery of, 927, 929
l;lajramawt, 710,711,996
l;lajjaj (Angaios), 727
Halleux, A. de, 702
l;lamza al-I~fahani, on Ghassanid dynasty/
buildings, 779, 821, 827, 832, 848n,
864, 980
l;lan;ala, 7 06
al-l;larith ibn-Ka'b (Arethas), saint, martyr
of Najran, 730, 731
l;larlan, 717, 720-21, 740
l;larran inscription, 701, 803n, 817, 842,
856n
l;lassan ibn-Thabit, Ghassanid poet, 73 ln,
821, 826, 830, 832, 929n, 947n, 948n
l;lawran (Auranicis), 825n, 828
l;layyan, merchant of Najran, 710
Hayyac, 864
Heliorama/l;lalioram, monastery in, 779,
833
Heraclius, emperor, 935, 967, 983
Ekchesis, 943
and Monophysicism, 942-43
relations with Ghassanids, 691, 942, 944
victory bulletin of, 944
Hierapolis (Mabboug), 71 ln, 929n, 1020
(Map I)
Philoxenus and, 693, 704, 706, 7 lln
l;lijaz
Ghassanids and, 726, 765, 995
monasticism in, 836, 840, 851
l;lims (Emesa), 733
l;limyar/l;limyarices, 726, 776-77
Monophysite mission co, 709-11
Index
Hind, queen, wife of Lakhmid king MuncJir
III, 696-97, 708, 724
lfira (camp), 838n, 891, 946
l;lira, capital of the Lakhmids, 723, 724,
776- 77, 1020
churches and monasteries in, 696, 722,
836
inscriptions in, 696-97, 706
Kindite interregnum in, 725
Monophysite missions to, 702-9, 726-27
Nestorianism in, 697
l;lirta, 775- 77
lfirtii (camp), 860n
l;lirtha of the Saracens, in John of Ephesus,
756, 762-63
Hisham, Umayyad caliph, 962
Hisham al-Kalbi, historian, 706
l;lisma, 840
Holy Land, 698, 706, 765-66, 828, 984,
985
Honigmann, E., 717-18, 719, 733, 759n,
761n, 763n, 769n, 783, 833, 844,
845n, 85 ln, 865n, 930n
Hormisdas, palace of, 745
l;lujr, Arab phylarch, 922, 923
l;luwwarin (Evaria), 695, 699, 715, 717,
719, 721, 764n, 767n, 920n, 921
Hyparchia, 824, 825n, 839n, 867n
lbas of Edessa, 745
Ibo Khaldiin, 73 ln
Ibo Sa'id, 731n
Il/1111ris, 811
Imperatores, 812, 813n, 822, 823-24
Imru' al-Qays (Mar'alqais), 700, 701
Imru' al-Qays, 4th-cent. Lakhmid king,
703, 723, 832, 979
Inscriptions, Arabic
Dayr l;lan~la, 706
Daye Hind, 696-97
Namara, 701, 832, 838
Pharan, 987-88, 989
Usays, 701
Inscriptions, Arabic-Greek
l;larran, 701, 803n, 804n, 817,842,
856n
Inscriptions, Greek, 832
Anasarcha, 940
al-Burj (J;)umayr), 827, 965-66
Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, 842
~r al-l;layr al-Gharbi, 779, 833
R~afa, 959, 960
Inscriptions, Latin, 832
Inscriptions, Sabaic
Dam, 765, 770, 846-47, 848, 976, 982
Inscriptions, trilingual
Zabad, 699-702, 955
Ishmaelism, 855
Islam, 774, 836, 977, 995
Jabal al-l;larith, 825-26, 884
Jabal Tal)iina, 987, 989
Jabala, Ghassanid king (d. 528)
in battle of Thanniiris, 736, 762n
Monophysitism of, 732, 993-94
and Severus, 739
and Simeon of Beth-Arsham, 719-20,
731-32, 740, 743
and South Arabian expedition, 732
Jabala, son of Ghassanid king Arethas, 722,
726, 775, 779
Jabiya, Ghassanid camp-town, 719, 740,
743, 762-64, 786, 789, 791, 809,
827, 852, 864, 893
meeting of Monophysites at, 931-35, 958
Jacob, bishop of Sariij, 952
Jacob Baradaeus, Monophysite bishop of the
Ghassanids, 757, 760, 768-71, 855
consecration of, 736, 740, 755-56, 760
death of, 896
and Ghassanid king Arethas, 736, 740,
755, 769, 771-72
influence on the Ghassanids, 696n
and John of Ephesus, 780
jurisdiction of, 766-67, 772
and letter from Arethas, 780, 782-88
and Patriarch Paul, 780, 783, 785, 788,
789, 897
Jafna, Ghassanid phylarch (ca. 587-591),
925, 927, 928, 930-35
and Monophysitism, 939-40
Jasim (Ghashimin), 826, 835-36
Jawlan. See Gaulanitis
Jerusalem, 756, 765-66, 828, 984, 1028
Jerusalem, Council of (518), 97 ln
Jerusalem, Patriarchate of, 762, 792, 984,
1000
religious orthodoxy of, 697
Jews, 753, 854
in Medina, 855
in northern l;lijaz, 732
Jiwar (protection/refuge), 751, 889, 912
John, archimandrite of the Monastery of the
Arabs, 843, 844
Index
John, bishop of the Arabs (5 70s), 870- 7 4
John, Byzantine patrician, 795, 799, 845
John, Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria,
907
John, patriarch of Jerusalem, 698n
John Climacus, 971
John Diacrinomenus, 709
John of Ephesus, church historian, 732
on bishops Jacob and Theodore, 756- 70
Ecc/e;iastical History, 746, 753-54, 756,
761, 780, 887, 900-901, 914
on Ghassanid king Arethas, 738, 753-54,
756-58, 780
on Ghassanid king Mundie, 780, 887
as historian of the Ghassanids, 753-54,
761, 780
on John of Tella, 740-41
on Justin II, 781-82
and Michael the Syrian, 746, 753
missionary work of, 759
and Monophysitism, 794
on Simeon of Bech-Arsham, 740, 741-43
John of Evaria (J:luwwarin), Monophysice
bishop of the Ghassanids, 695, 715,
717-22, 740, 767n
John ofTella, 710, 711n, 740-41, 745,
755, 756
John Rylands Library (Manchester), 702
John Scholasticus, patriarch of Constantino-
ple, 806n, 861,866, 867, 898, 899,
917
John the Arab (Tayaye), and letter of Philox-
enus, 695
Jonathan, Monophysite cleric of Anbar, 707
Jordan, river, 766
Juda, Desert of, 698
monks/monasteries in, 696, 713, 836,
841, 976, 983, 985, 1028 (Map V)
Judaism, 729-30, 994
Jugam, Arab tribe, 767, 774
judicatum, of Pope Vigilius, 745, 774,
775
Julian, Byzantine ambassador, 737-38
Julian, Monophysice bishop of Nubia, 726n,
853, 854
Julian of Emesa, saint, 691, 965-66
Julian of Halicarnassus (the Phantasiast),
728, 778
Julianist bishops, 775-77, 937
Justin I, emperor, 716-31, 736, 737, 740,
757, 956
Chalcedonian faith/policy of, 691, 695,
716, 729, 993
and Ethiopian expedition against South
Arabia, 729, 736-37
persecution/exile of Monophysites by, 695,
715, 716-17, 728,993
Justin II, emperor, 793-95, 812-14, 894,
959
Chalcedonianism of, 794
edicts of, 795, 799, 865, 875
780-83
insanity of, 782, 793
and Monophysitism, 782n, 794-804,
861-62, 868, 894, 898, 907
and plot against Ghassanid king Mungir,
921
Justinian, emperor, 711, 734-82, 800,
957-59, 992. See also under Persia, wars
with Byzantium
Chalcedonianism of, 7 34
churches built by, 698, 976, 980
decrees/edicts on heretics and Mono-
physites, 735, 736, 737, 741, 745,
747
edict on the Three Chapters, 734, 745,
755, 774, 775, 778
and the Ghassanids, 736-38, 760, 967,
990-91, 993
and Monophysitism, 734-36, 740, 745,
747,755,759,775,778,993
and Mount Sinai, 976, 977-78, 980
Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem, 792
Ka'ba, martyrion, 730
Kalb, Arab tribe, 767, 774, 948n
Kanisac al-A'rab (Church of the Arabs), in
Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, 841-42
Karawa Bani Ghassan (J:lassan), 996-97
Kawad, Persian king, 706, 743
and Christianicy/Monophysicism, 703-5,
725, 741n
and Lakhmid king Mungir III, 705, 709,
724-25
Khalid ibn-Walid, Muslim general, 947-48
Khaybar, 854
Khirbet al-Duwayr, 996
Kinda, Arab tribe, 696-97, 698
conversion of, 696
dynasry, 697n
and foedus of 502, 696
orthodox Christianiry of, 696
Kleyn, H. G., 768
Koran, 968,977, 979n
Index
al-Laja. See Trachonitis
Lakhmids. See also I:Iira and individual rulers
Christians in army of, 725
dynasty of, 706, 723
pagan idols of, 723
paganism/anti-Christian acts of, 722-26
Lamy, T. J ., 822n, 825n, 832, 835n
Lateran Council, 967, 983
Latin language, 714-15, 718
Leclercq, H., 988
Leo, emperor, 694n, 748
Leo, pope, 734
Leo, Tome of, 721, 748, 749, 752, 754
denounced by Severus, 699
Leoncius, saint, 699
Lepsius, R., 988
Life of Af/udemmeh, 842, 855, 959
Life of James Uacob) (John of Ephesus), 756,
758, 761, 768
Life of James and Theodm-e (John of Ephesus),
756,761,768, 771n, 850n
Life of John of Tel/a (John of Ephesus), 740-
41
Life of Simeon, the Bishop (John of Ephesus),
741-43
Limes, 694, 707n, 715, 723, 730, 731, 737,
838n, 842, 946, 952, 975, 977
Limiton, 860n
Littmann, E., 700, 701, 733
Lives of the Eastern Saints (John of Ephesus),
756
Longinus, apocrisiarius of Patriarch Paul,
798, 800
Longinus, Monophysite bishop of Nubia,
853, 854n, 876, 882-87, 897
Lucius, Arian patriarch of Alexandria, 751
Ma'arrac al-Nu'man, 841-42
inscription at, 842
Mabboug (Hierapolis), 71 ln, 929n, 1020
(Map I)
Macarius, 5th-cent. bishop of Pharan, 970,
984
Madyan, 836, 840, 856
Magi, Persian religious class, 723. See also
Zoroastrians
Magister- milit11m, 799n
Magnus, 721, 872, 916, 920n, 922, 923
Maiouma, 697
Malalas, on Anasarcha, 715
Malchus of Philadelphia, 7 48
Manbij. See Mabboug
Manichaeans, 693, 703
Mar Antiochus, 879-82, 932
Mar Bassus, monastery of (Cilicia), 806
Mar I:Ianina, monastery of, 885-87
Mar-Isaac, monastery of, 712, 713
Mar Saba, monastery of, 983
Mar Zakkai, monastery in Callinicum, con-
ference at (567), 795, 796
Marcellinus Comes, 750n, 977n
Marcian, emperor, 970, 984
Marianus, bishop in the Provincia Arabia,
936-38
Ma' rib, in South Arabia, 846
Marj Rahif, battle of (634), 947-48
Martyria, 828
in Najran, 730, 731
near Chalcis, 775, 779, 958
of St. John the Baptise, 701, 803n, 804n,
817, 856n
of St. Sergius (RU!jafa), 959, 960; (Zabad),
699, 701
Martyrium Arethae, 727
Maspero, J., 925, 929n, 934n
Mas'udi, 731n
Maurice, emperor, 922, 923-24, 925, 939,
961
Chalcedonian position of, 920
and Ghassanid king Mungir, 900, 919-20
and Ghassanid king Nu'man, 990
and the Ghassanids, 691, 990-91
and Pope Gregory, 936
Mavia, 4th-cent. Arab queen, 713, 720,
744, 751, 773n
Mawqif al-N~rani, 855n, 997
Mazdakism, in Persia, 705, 725
al-Mazini, 997
Mecca, 849, 850, 854, 855-56, 997
Medina, 849, 855-56
Menas, patriarch of Conscancinople, 745
Merovingians, 992, 995
Mesopotamia, 772, 924-25, 957
Monophysite missions to, 924, 959, 1020
Michael the Syrian, church historian, 717,
733
on Arethas and Ephraim, 746-55
on bishops Jacob and Theodore, 756
Chronicle, 746, 755, 776-77, 892, 923,
926; Armenian version of: 755
on Monophysitism, 776-77, 795, 799-
802, 838
on Tri theistic controversy, 806, 807-8,
817-20, 845
Mommsen, Th., 853n
Index
Monasteries/monasticism
associated with the Ghassanids, 824-41
passim, 856-57, 998-99, 1030 (Map
VI)
in Desert of Juda, 713, 840, 1028 (Map
V)
Monophysite. See under Monophysites and
individual monasteriei
Monastery of the Arabs, 835, 837, 838-41,
843, 844-45
Monoenergism, 943, 983
Monophysites/Monophysitism
and Anasartha, 712-15
bishops exiled by Justin I in 519, 695,
715, 740
bishops recalled by Justin II, 795
confessions of faith, 741-44
in Constantinople, 693, 703, 735-36,
739, 745, 794-96
and Ghassanid phylarch Jafna, 939-40
and Heraclius, 943
hierarchy and clergy, 710, 716, 744,
755-74. See also individual bishops and
prieJts
internal dissension of, 796-805, 925-35 .
See also Paulite-Jacobite controversy/
schism
missionary activities of, 693- 711, 726-
32, 854-855, 1020 (Map I)
monasteries of, 697-98, 710, 712, 713,
779, 825-41 passim, 851, 856-57,
859, 1032. See also individual monasteries
persecuted by Justin I, 695, 715, 716-
17, 728
persecuted by Justinian, 745, 747, 751,
755
and Sc. Sergius, 952-54
in South Arabia/Red Sea region, 709-11,
728-30, 737, 743
in Syria, 693
theology of, 695, 746, 749-54, 771
vernacular languages used by, 743
Monochelecism, 943, 983
Moschus, John, 985
Moses, biblical figure, 968
Moses, 4th-cent. Arab bishop, 713, 730n,
751, 773n
Moses, monk of Ra'ichou, 971
Moses, 6th-cent . bishop in Himyar, 777
Mountain of f:Iarich (Arechas), 825-26, 834,
835-36, 863
Mu'awiya, caliph, 893
Miiller, C. D. G., 916n, 925
Mul:iammad, the prophet, 828
Mukha, 710
Mungir, Ghassanid king (569-582), 699,
785, 831, 894
accession of, 793, 860-62
Christianicy/Monophysicism of, 760, 891
in Constantinople, 754, 894, 900, 901-8
entrapment and fall of, 719, 721, 875,
895, 918, 921
involvement in Monophysice movement,
769, 8ll, 880-81, 889-91, 894,
900-908, 912
and John of Ephesus, 754, 894
and Justin II, 793, 921
and Lakhmids, 881, 895, 948
languages of, 788
and Maurice, 900, 919-21
praetorium of, 864, 895n, 949, 959-61
prodosia charge against, 895, 919
return from exile of, 939
and Tiberius, 894, 899-903, 906-8,
919-21
ticulature of, 862-63
trial and exile of, 890, 895, 922
Mungir III, Lakhmid king (d. 554), 696,
704, 705, 727, 770, 778
invades Arabia and Palestine, 706
and Monophysicism, 706-8, 709n, 739
paganism/anti-Christian acts of, 722-26,
732, 958
Nabataea, 836-37, 963, 974, 982, 987,
989
Nabataean script, 701
al-Nabigha, Ghassanid poet, 821, 827, 941
Nabk, 765, 846, 872
Nablus (Neapolis), 997
Najran/Najranites, 703, 710-ll, 728, 743,
773, 836, 1020
Ka 'ba, martyrion, 7 30, 7 3 1
persecution of Christians in, 726, 730-31
Namara, coponym, 832
Namara inscription, 701, 832, 838
Names, of Arabs, 700-701, 773, 829, 835,
837n, 843, 882, 989
biblical/Christian, 701n, 713, 720, 762,
831n, 893n, 971,983,988
Graeco-Roman, 762, 971, 972, 983, 988
N~rids, 704, 705
Nachyr, bishop of Pharao, 970, 984
Nau, F., 782, 788n
Neapolis (Nablus), 996
Negev, 765, 971n, 1026 (Map IV)
Nestorians/Nestorianism, 697, 702-8 pas-
sim, 727, 741, 744, 855, 994
Nestorius, 808
Nicaea, Council of, 744
Nicene Creed, 744
Nicetas, Byzantine military commander,
935, 940
Nile Valley, 853, 854, 884
Nisibis, 703, 909n
Noldeke, Th., 702n, 705
on the Ghassanids, 755, 762-63, 766
on list of subscriptions by archimandrites,
821-22, 824-38, 862-63, 864
on Spurious Life of James, 768
Notitia Antiochena, 719
Notitia Dignitatum, 718, 951
Nubia, 711, 726n, 743n, 853, 854, 882,
883, 995n
Nu'man, Ghassanid king, son of Munc;!ir,
841-42
in Constantinople, 923-24
and Monophysitism, 749, 890
revolt of, 842, 922
al-Nu'man, Tanukhid king of 4th cent.,
841
Nu'man I, 5th-cent. Lakhmid king, 703,
723
Nu'man II, Lakhmid king (499-503), 703,
705, 722
Obedianus, 967, 970, 985
Odovacar, 991
Old Testament, 753
Omar, caliph, 730, 948
Oratio de Trinitate (Theodosius, patriarch of
Alexandria), 805
Oriens, Diocese of, 791-92, 967
in letter of Bishop Theodore, 790, 791-
92
triculturalism of, 701-2
Ostrogoths, 991-93, 994
Outer Shield, 767, 774, 843, 851, 852
Palaestina Prima
Ghassanids and, 697-99, 1030
and Kindites, 696, 698
Monophysitism in, 697-99
Palaestina Secunda, 825, 1032 (Map VII)
and Ghassanids, 719, 748, 764
Index
Palaestina Tertia, 840, 849, 1026 (Map IV)
Abu Karib and, 765
Palestine, 1024 (Map III)
administrative structure of, 765, 792
hegemonia of, 996
Palmer, A., 996
Palmyra, 779, 833, 834, 846, 946, 962
Paneuphemos, title, 815
Parembo/ae. See lfira (camp)
Parembole, 1028 (Map V)
bishops of, 97 ln, 998, 1028
phylarchs of, 698, 704, 982
Patricius, title, 783, 784, 796n, 810, 815,
816,862,863, 877n, 880, 882,901
Paul I, Monophysite bishop of Najran, 710
Paul II, Monophysite bishop of Najran,
710
Paul the Black, Monophysite patriarch of
Antioch
apostasy of/problems caused by, 794,
796-805, 865-69
and Bishop Jacob Baradaeus, 780, 783,
785, 788
and Bishop Theodore, 788-92
consecration of, 759, 770, 782, 783,
788-89, 796
782-83, 785, 786-87
influence on the Ghassanids, 696n
Paulite-Jacobite controversy/schism, 796,
876-92, 896-98, 900-906
Payne Smith, R., 866, 867, 886
Pelagius II, pope, 937
Pella, 779
Persia/Persians
Christianity/Nestorianism in, 697, 703,
704-6, 723-24, 727, 741, 743
and Monophysitism, 703, 704, 727
Sasanids, ruling dynasty, 723-24, 725
wars with Byzantium, reign of Justinian
(first war): 737, 760, 957-58; of Jus-
tinian (second war): 743, 747, 760; of
Tiberius: 899-900
Persian language, 705
Peter IV, Monophysite patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 797n, 876- 77, 896, 897
Peter of Callinicum, Monophysite patriarch
of Antioch, 897
letter of, 927-31
and Patriarch Damian of Alexandria, 925-
35
Peter the Iberian, monastery of, 697
Petra, 971- 72
Phantasiast heresy, 858
Index
Phiriin, 967,968, 969-72, 983-85
excavation of, 986-89
inscriptions in, 987-88, 989
Phesiltha, monastery of, 768, 769, 770n
Philoponos, John, 797, 805
Philoxenus, Monophysite bishop of Hier-
apolis
influence on the Ghassinids, 698-99
letter to John the Arab, 695, 744
letters to Abu Ya'fur, 702-7, 739
missionary activities of, 693, 695, 702- 7,
710-11, 1020
and Najran, 730
Phocas, emperor, 939-40, 942-43
Phoenicia Libanensis, 695, 820n, 824-25,
833, 1022 (Map II), 1032 (Map VII)
bishoprics of, 719-20, 721, 767n
Phoinikon, in 1:Iijiz, 849
Phylarchate, supreme (Ghassinid), 796, 860,
875, 918. See also Basileia, Ghassanid
of Arethas and Mungir, 760, 765, 811,
967
and Justin II, 796
during reign of Phocas, 939-41
restoration of, 691
suspension of, 691, 922, 995
Phylarchos, 784
Pilgrimage centers/routes, 828, 855n
Holy Land, 828, 982
Ka'ba of Najran, 730, 731
Mount Sinai, 982
Pirone, B., 977
Pisidia, 693
Plato, Symposium, 997
Platonic love, 997
Poetry, Arabic. See also individual poets
pre-Islamic, 744, 754, 791, 824n, 829,
962
Praetorium extra muros, of Ghassinid king
Mungir, 864, 895n, 949, 959-61
Procopius of Caesarea, 770n
on Abu Karib and Phoinikon, 765, 975-
76
on the Arabs of Sinai, 974-75, 979-80
on the Ghassinids, 754
Prodosia theme, and Ghassinid king Mungir,
895, 919
Provincia Arabia, 753, 773, 927-29, 935-
38, 963, 1024 (Map III), 1032 (Map
VII)
Arab church and hierarchy of, 773
boundaries of, 824-25
as headquarters of Ghassanids, 699, 719,
722, 747-48, 764-65
importance to Monophysites, 927
monasticism in, 773, 779, 821, 824-41
passim, 927
Pseudo-Dionysius, 75 ln, 859
~r al-1:Iayr al-Gharbi inscriptions, 779,
833
Qas!ra (fort), 714-15
Qays, Kindite phylarch, 996
Qinnasrin. See Chalcis
Quaternitas, 744, 748-50, 754, 818
Rruthou, 968, 969-72, 985
Ramla, conference of, 725n, 726, 727, 728
Red Sea region, 711, 729, 737, 855
Rh=ioi (Romans, Byzantines), 751
Rh=ioi, Arab. See Arabs, Rhomaic
Romanus, monastery of, 697-98
Rome, see of, 870, 936, 964, 1000-1001
and Anastasius, 694
and Justin I, 716
Rothstein, G., 702n, 706
Ruhayma, saint, martyr of Najran, 730
R~ifa (Sergiopolis), 864
attacked by Lakhmids/Persians, 955, 956,
957-58
inscription, 959, 960
and St. Sergius, 701, 949-54, 959-62
Sabas, saint, 976, 980
Sachau, E., 699
~afrin, Ghassinids and, 832-33
~afrin, monastery of, 829, 832
Salil:iids, 719, 840, 922, 923, 924, 951,
1030
religious orthodoxy of, 694, 719n, 994,
995
Samaritan revolt (529), 976
Samuel, Monophysite cleric of Anbir, 707
Sancti N iii Narrationes, 969, 986
Saraceni/Saracenoi, 718
Saracens. See also under Sinai Peninsula
in Byzantine sources, 944n, 968-69,
974
Same, M., 776
Sasanids. See under Persia/Persians
Sauvaget, J., 949
Seiroes, Persian king, 944
Seleucia, Council of (488), 703, 727
Sergiopolis. See Ru~afa
Index
Sergius, abbot of monastery of 'Uqabta,
830-31, 959
Sergius, bishop of l;lirca, 775- 77
Sergius, Monophysite patriarch of Antioch,
779-80, 783,788,797,874
Sergius, saint, 938
Arab/Ghassanid veneration of, 691, 699,
701,827,947, 949-62
church of Qabiya), 931-32
martyrion in R~afa, 921, 959, 960; in
Zabad, 699, 701
Severus, Monophysite bishop of Jerusalem,
984
Severus, Monophysite patriarch of Antioch,
697-98, 759, 779
and consecration of Stephen, 712, 713-14
in Constantinople (534/35), 735, 736,
739
denounced by Justinian, 736, 745
and Empress Theodora, 738-39
exile of, 745
influence on Ghassanids, 695, 696, 698-
99
and Lakhmid king Mungir III, 695, 706-
7, 709n, 725, 739
missionary activities of, 693, 695, 702,
706-8, 713-14, 1020
Shariil;iil ibn-~lim, 701, 856n
Sharon, M., 997
Shilas, Nestorian Catholicus, 727
Silvanus, Monophysite bishop, 709-10
Simeon of Beth-Afiliam, Monophysite bishop
at conference of Ramla, 727, 728
in Constantinople, 740
ecclesiastical diplomacy of, 739-40
and Empress Theodora, 739-40
letters of, 707n, 708, 710, 711, 727n,
728n, 834
and Monophysite confessions of faith,
741-44
and South Arabian crusade, 728, 731-32
Simeon the Stylite, saint, 947
Simeon the Younger, saint, 770, 778-79,
835, 958, 965
Sinai, Mount, 968, 969, 972-73, 976, 982,
983, 986
Eurychius of Alexandria on, 969, 974,
976-80
monastery of (St. Catherine's), 713n, 972,
986
Procopius on, 974- 76
Sinai Peninsula, 1026 (Map IV)
Arab Christianity in, 691, 967-89
Arab foederati in, 765
archaeology in, 986-89
image of the Arabs in, 984-86
monasticism in, 840, 969, 970, 985. See
also under Sinai, Mount
Saracens of, 967-69, 972-74, 977
Singara, 745
Sixth Ecumenical Council, 967, 983
Sophia, empress, 780-82, 783, 794, 797
Sozomen, church historian, 744, 773, 854
Sozopolis, Severus and, 693
Spurious Life of James (attributed to John of
Ephesus), 768-71, 772n, 981, 984
Stein, E., 759, 895-96
Stephanus, apocrisiarius of Patriarch Paul,
798-99, 800
Stephen, monk of the monastery of Mac-
isaac, 712-15
Strata Diocletiana, 946, 951, 957, 962
Strata dispute, 743, 957
Strategos, 737
Strate/ates, 703, 705, 799n
Sufism, 836
Symmachoi, 945n
Syria Prima, 712, 839-40, 841, 843, 1022
(Map II)
Syria Secunda, 1022 (Map II)
Syriac language, 712, 714-15, 761, 767n,
772, 787-88, 820-21, 834,841,888,
902, 904
ecclesiastical use of, 743, 791, 837
inscriptions in, 699- 702
sources/documents in, 744, 770n, 775-
77, 791-92, 806, 839, 840. See also
Documenta Monophysitarum and individual
authors
Tabari, 705
Tabula Peutingeriana, 833
Tadmur (Palmyra), 846
Takrit, 854, 1020 (Map I)
Tall al-Mal:trad, 986
Taniikhids, 700-701, 713, 840, 841-42,
923, 924, 940, 951
religious orthodoxy of, 694, 719n, 994,
995
Tapharas. See Jabala (d. 528)
7;' ayiiye, Syriac term for Arabs, 827, 839,
844n, 870, 889, 923
Tayma', 854
Tekoa, 698
Tella, 741
Index
Terebon II, Arab phylarch, 982
Tha'Jaba, Ghassanid chief, father of Arethas,
832
Thanniiris, battle of (528), 736, 743
Theodora, empress, 794, 797
and Ghassanids, 736-38, 781
and Monophysitism, 735-36, 738-40,
745, 756, 757-59, 775, 781, 993
and Severus, 738-39
and Simeon of Beth-Arsham, 739-40
Theodore, Monophysite bishop of Pharan
(7th cent.), 983-84, 988n
Theodore, Monophysite bishop of the
Ghassanids, 713, 719, 722, 761-68,
839
and Abii Karib, 845-49
career of, 840-41, 850-60
and conference of Callinicum, 795, 808
consecration of, 736, 740, 755-56, 760
755-57, 762, 771-74
jurisdiction of, 762-69, 772, 791-92,
851-53
and Patriarch Paul, 788-92
and Tritheistic controversy, 806-8
Theodore Anagnostes, 707
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 745
Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 745, 754, 950
Theodoric, Ostrogoth king, 991- 94
Theodosius, Monophysite patriarch of Alex-
andria, 735, 744
and Arethas, 786-87
consecrates bishops Jacob and Theodore,
756, 760, 771
death of, 782n, 794
exile of, 745
and Patriarch Paul, 782-83, 788
on the Trinity, 805
Theopaschite formula, 734, 735
Theophanes of Byzantium, historian, 782,
783, 785
Theotokos ( = Deigenitrix), 784, 785, 787
Theotokos, church of (Jerusalem), 980
Thomas, 5th-cent. bishop of Evaria (l::luw-
warin), 721
Thomas, presbyter, martyred in I:Iac;lramawt,
710, 711
Thomas the Apostle, church of, 722, 733
Three Chapters, edict on, 734, 745, 755,
774, 775, 778
Tiberius, emperor, 722, 894-921, 959
as co-ruler with Justin II, 793, 894, 921
and Ghassanid king Mungir, 894-95, 921
Timothy, Monophysite patriarch of Alexan-
dria, 735, 738
Trachonitis (al-Laja), 827
Trajan, emperor, 836
Treaties, Byzantine-Arab. See Foedus
Trilinguis Zabadaea inscription, 699-702,
955
Trimingham, J . S., 747n, 895n
Trinity, in theological arguments, 734, 748,
750
Tritheistic controversy/heresy, 744, 746,
771, 773, 782, 792, 794, 797, 802,
803, 805- 24, 859
letter of archimandrites on, 779, 821-38,
843-44, 1032
Triumphator, 823-24
Tzath, Lazic king, 724n
Umayyads, 720, 721n, 962
'Dqabta, monastery of, 830-31, 862, 864,
959
Usays inscription, 701
al-'Uzza, pagan goddess (Arabian Aphrodite),
722, 726, 732, 733, 775
Valens, emperor, 744, 751
Van Esbroeck, M., 728n
Vigilius, pope, 745, 774, 778
Virgins/nuns, sacrificed by Lakhmid king
Mungir, 722, 732-33
Waddington, W . H., 832
Wadi al-Mul)assir, 855n
Wadi al-Qura, 836, 840, 856
Wadi 'Araba, 971, 974, 981
Wafa' (faithfulness), 731
Wala' (loyalty), 731,912
Wright, W ., 821, 827, 846
Xenophon, 924
Ya'qiibi, on the Ghassanids' conversion to
Christianity, 694
Yaqiit, 821, 827, 828, 833, 997
Yarmiik, battle of, 774, 833, 893, 943,
947, 948
Yarmiik, river, 832
Yazdgard II, Persian king, 704, 724n, 725n
Yazid, Umayyad caliph, 720n
Yusuf, king of l;Iimyar, 733n, 849, 956
and Lakhmid king Mungir, 726, 727
Zabad, 699-701, 955
Zabad inscription. See Trilinguis Zabadaea
Index
Zacharia Scholasticus, of Mytilene
on the four hundred virgins/nuns, 732-33
and Monophysitism, 744, 747, 751
on Severus in Constantinople, 739
?afar, 710
Ziza, 717-18
Zizae, 717-18
Zoroastrians/Zoroastrianism, 709, 723, 725
'wl-t1r , r~ 10 l,...i( :~( ' ''~l.l }J1010r":f l '"1~J1/n,r1m11
:,r ai' ,41r1 ,,.,,;,,,1,,,'Tt-, .. n'>, 1i11 Yf';, .; ;,,11,1,,,1, /,>, ,,; ~'"'"'"''
The martyrdom of Saint Arethas in sixth-century Najran, South Arabia. A miniature in the
Menologion of Basil II, Vat. gr. 1613, fol. 135 (photo: courtesy Monseigneur Paul Canarc,
Biblioteca Aposcolica Vaticana).
BYZANTIUM
AND THE
ARABS IN
THE SIXTH
CENTURY
Volume 2 | Part 2
IRFAN SHAHD
IN THE
SIXTH CENTURY
A mosaic in the floor of the southern sacristy of the Church of St. George at Mt. Nebo. It is dated
536 and so its Arabic term, bi-salm, illustrates the calligraphic expression of the Arabic script in
pre-Islamic times, as discussed in the chapter on Calligraphy in this volume.
IN THE
SIXTH CENTURY
IRFAN SHAHD
Volume II
Part 2: Economic, Social, and Cultural History
PUBLISHED BY
DUMBARTON OAKS RESEARCH LIBRARY AND COLLECTION
Washington, D.C.
Copyright 2009 by Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
All maps by K. Rasmussen (archeographics.com), 2009 by Dumbarton Oaks,
Trustees for Harvard University
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data available
ISBN 978-0-88402-347-0
IN MEMORIAM
P. MICHELE PICCIRILLO
19442008
P. FRANCIS DEMARET
19272009
Contents
Abbreviations x
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xxi
I
Economic History
I The Role of the Ghassnids 3
II The Ghassnids and the Security of Oriens 6
III The Ghassnids and International Trade Routes 10
IV The Fairs 33
V The Ghassnids as Tax Collectors 41
VI A Ghassnid Dyarchy in Oriens 43
VII Other Contributions 45
VIII The Wealth of Arabia 47
IX Economic Rivalry in Arabia: Byzantium and Persia 52
Appendix Al-Numn ibn al-Mundir:
Ghassnid or Lakhmid? 57
II
Social History
A Background
I Ghassnid Federate Society 61
II The Women of Ghassn 81
Appendices
I Elizabeth of Najrn 110
II Yawm al-Khurj: The Day of the Exodus 111
IIi Palm Sunday 112
Iv The Education of a Ghassnid Princess 113
v Al-Jd, Laylas Father at Dma 115
vi Yawm al-Furt, the Battle-day of the Euphrates 116
Contents
III Prose Accounts on the Ghassnids 118
Appendix Reynold Nicholson
on the Ghassnid Royal Court 125
B Daily Life
IV Food 127
Appendix Paradise in the Koran 135
V Drink 138
Appendix Garisaean Bacchus 157
VI Clothes 159
Appendix The Vestimentary System:
Further Observations 173
VII Medicine 176
C Rituals, Entertainment, and Leisure Activities
VIII Music and Song 182
Appendix and in Arabic 201
IX Dance 204
X Victory Celebrations 207
XI Votive and Victory Offerings 220
Appendix The Ghassnids and the
Old Testament: Job/Ayyb 228
XII The Horse 230
XIII The Hunt 238
Appendix Traps and Snares 246
XIV Ghassnid Banquets 250
XV Recreation in the Countryside: Tabaddi 255
ix Contents
III
Cultural History
I The Ghassnid Limitrophe 261
II The Ghassnid Sedentary Presence 268
III Architecture and Decorative Art 277
Appendices
I On the Archaeology of the Limitrophe 285
II The Monasteries of the Ghassnids 287
III Al-Jawhara al-Nafsa 289
IV The Monastery as a Cultural Center 291
V The Arabic Script 297
VI Chivalry: The Birth of an Ideal 303
VII Poetry 306
Appendix Poetry at the Court of the Occidental
Foederati: The Vandals 324
VIII The Poets 326
IX Oratory 331
Appendix Michael Psellos: The
on His Daughter 336
X The Ghassnid Identity 338
Addenda et Corrigenda 347
Bibliography 351
Index 375
Abbreviations
BAFOC: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century
BAFIC: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century
BALA IIII: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs: Late Antiquity, IIII
BAR: British Archaeological Reports
BASIC I.1: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century:
Political and Military History
BASIC I.2: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century:
Ecclesiasti cal History
BASIC II.1: Shahd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century:
Toponymy, Monuments, Historical Geography, and
Frontier Studies
BASOR: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (Jerusalem)
BGA: Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum
BSOAS: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London)
BZ: Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CSCO: Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium
DOP: Dumbarton Oaks Papers
EI2: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.
GAS: Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums
GF: Nldeke, Die Ghassnischen Frsten
JAOS: Journal of the American Oriental Society
JB: Jahrbuch der sterreichischen Byzantinistik
JRA: Journal of Roman Archaeology
Lib.ann Studium biblicum franciscanum: Liber annuus
LSJ Liddell, Scott, and Jones, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon
Martyrs: Shahd, trans. and annot., The Martyrs of Najrn
OC: Oriens Christianus
OCP: Orientalia Christiana Periodica
ODB: Kazhdan, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
PAS: Nldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden
PG: Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca
PO: Patrologia Orientalis
xi Abbreviations
RA: Shahd, Rome and the Arabs
RE: Paulys Realencyclopdie, new rev. ed.
SubsHag: Subsidia Hagiographica
ZDPV: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Palstina-Vereins
Preface
T
his volume, BASIC II.2, is the last of six volumes that constitute the middle sec-
tion of a three-part work, Byzantium and the Arabs. Its first part treated Arab-
Roman relations in the centuries that elapsed from the settlement of Pompey in
63 b.c. to the reign of Diocletian (a.d. 284305)the centuries of the pagan empire.
The third part and the climax of this project, Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh
Century (BISC), will treat in two volumes the rise of Islam and the Arab Conquests.
The six volumes of the middle part have their own identity as a contribution to the
study of Arab-Byzantine relations in late antiquity, the proto-Byzantine period, but
they are also prolegomena to the concluding part. The most relevant as prolegom-
enon is this volume, since it involves a brief discussion of the economic influences on
the prime mover of both Islam and the conquests, the Prophet Muammad.
This volume builds on its predecessor, BASIC II.1, which is devoted to
Ghassnid toponymy, monuments, and historical geography. Elucidation of the
Ghassnid Lebensraumthe limitrophe and the transverse wedge, with their set-
tlements, villages, and townsis the sine qua non for discussing the three themes
of this volume, namely, Ghassnid economic, social, and cultural life and history.
The preceding volume revealed a new subdivision of Arab archaeology during the
three centuries that preceded the rise of Islam in Oriens that had been terra incog-
nita; it was neither pagan Arab, such as that of Petra and Palmyra, nor Muslim
Arab, such as that of Damascus and Jerusalem, but Christian Arab. BASIC II.1
also revealed another aspect of Arab archaeology in the Oriens of the Muslim Arab
period, now Bild al-Shm: the strong Ghassnid substrate in the structure of
many Umayyad structures, the so-called desert castles and palaces.
I
Two of the main strands of continuity between the two volumes may now be
pointed out.
1. This volume has unearthed the history of a truly mature and unique Christian
Arab culture that arose in the shadow of the Christian Roman Empire. Its birth,
growth, and maturation took place in the context of Byzantiums mission civilisatrice,
not outside the limits of the imperium among the barbarian peoples that surrounded
Preface xiv
it, but within Oriens, whither the Ghassnids and other Arab foederati had wandered
from regions of the Near East that were physically and culturally disadvantaged and
less developed. In the Diocese of Oriens, they inevitably were subjected to the gravi-
tational pull of Byzantium in its tripartite structure of Romanitas, Hellenism, and
Christianity, all of which deeply affected their life. The third component was the most
powerful and pervasive; it transformed innumerable aspects of their life and history.
The result was the rise of a mature Christian culture, which obtained only once in
Arab history in Oriens (Bild al-Shm), then came to an end in the seventh century,
when its active and fruitful life ceased to flourish within a Christian political entity.
Its flame, independently rekindled some twelve centuries later, has been flickering
fitfully and intermittently in present-day Lebanon. In an effort to recover its history
from oblivion, traces of this Byzantinized Christian Arab culture in distant proto-
Byzantine Oriens have been ferreted out in this volume and retrieved from the debris
of extant sources.
2. Just as Ghassnid structures in the Oriens of the sixth century have been
revealed in BASIC II.1 as substrates in many structures that the Umayyads erected
in the later Muslim period, much of the Ghassnid contribution to the economic,
social, and cultural life of Oriens persisted in the Umayyad state, especially as the
Ghassnids, even after their defeat at the Yarmk in 636 toppled them from their
position as the phylarchs and client-kings of Byzantium in Oriens, succeeded in
maintaining a strong presence in Umayyad Bild al-Shm. Their three fairs, or
aswq, survived in the Umayyad period, as did many aspects of their social life,
especially those pertaining to wine, song, and tavern life; these were enthusias-
tically embraced by the more hedonistically inclined of the Umayyad caliphs,
such as the two Yazds and Wald, the son of the second Yazd. Especially impor-
tant was the survival in Umayyad times of the various forms of entertainments
in which the Ghassnids had indulged: namely, their sojourns in the country
or tabaddi, the hunt, and horse races. These took place not in Inner Oriens but
in the limitrophe, to which the Ghassnids had been consigned by their over-
lords, the Umayyadsbut which the Umayyads, now themselves the lords of
Bild al-Shm, occupied and made the venue of their entertainments. Thus the
Ghassnid substrate is disclosed by a strand of continuity in Umayyad social life,
just as in the preceding volume it was disclosed by continuities in Umayyad mon-
umental structures. These continuities clearly suggest that the better-known and
the better-documented Umayyad period can cast light on some aspects of social
life among the Ghassnids.
II
The recovery of the life and history of this Christian Ghassnid community
prompts the following two observations.
Preface xv
1. Oriens has previously been conceived as bicultural, consisting of the
Graeco-Roman and the Syriac/Aramaic. The final part of the present volume,
devoted to cultural history, has revealed a third component, the Arab, which
flourished not in the old familiar urban venue of the Graeco-Roman establish-
ment in Oriens but in the limitrophe and the transverse wedge; its most impor-
tant component was poetry. What is more, the Arab culture proved to be the
most enduring of the three components, since it survived the Muslim Conquests
and enjoyed a Nachleben in Umayyad times, during which poetry experienced
an efflorescence that was a continuation of the pre-Islamic Ghassnid poetry of
Byzantine Oriens.
2. The recovery of the cultural life of this Byzantinized Arab Christian com-
munity in Oriens is also a contribution to the history of the more extensive Oriens
Christianus, which comprised the Armenians, Georgians, Aramaeans, Copts, and
Ethiopians. They were all the beneficiaries of the Byzantine mission civilisatrice, and
they each developed their own version of Christian culture in which their ethos
and mores were married to the ideals of the new faith that they had adopted
a fact most patently demonstrated in their art and architecture. In histories of
Oriens Christianus, the Arab element is either missing or unclear, its outlines
vague. The present volume has now made the arc of Oriens Christianus a perfect
circle, as it has restored the missing segment. This Arab identity contributed to the
diversity of early Christian culture in Oriens Christianus and to the birth of some
new elements, such as Christian chivalry, which developed in this pre-Islamic,
proto-Byzantine period. Further archaeological research will undoubtedly shed
more light on the Arab sector of Oriens Christianus.
Methodology and Terminology
A
BASIC II.2 is also methodologically a continuation of its predecessor, which was
written in strict obedience to Nldekes Law for reconstructing the history of
Arab-Byzantine relations in pre-Islamic times: namely, the employment of Greek
and Latin sources and early Arabic poetry rather than the prose sources of later
Islamic times.1
These sources, like all sources of ancient and medieval history, are mostly
concerned with wars and politics and thus are not very informative on economic,
social, and cultural life. But the information they supply, though scant and inter-
mittent, remains invaluable and indispensable for elucidating these three aspects
of the history of the Arab foederati of Byzantium in Oriens in the sixth century.
The sources become more revealing when set against the background of Byzantine
1 See BASIC II.1, xxvixxvii.
Preface xvi
economic, social, and cultural history, as presented in well-known contributions to
the field. The social history part of the present volume has profited from the monu-
mental work of Phaidon Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos; Cyril Mango,
Daily Life in Byzantium; Harry Magoulias, The Lives of Saints as Sources of
Data for Sixth and Seventh Century Byzantine Social and Economic History;
Speros Vryonis, Aspects of Byzantine Society in Syro-Palestine; and the most
recent articles of Apostolos Karpozilos.2 Its discussion of economics has benefited
from the work of A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire; a number of articles
in The Economic History of Byzantium, edited by Angeliki Laiou; and the relevant
essays in the first volume of Le monde byzantin, edited by Ccile Morrisson, espe-
cially Morrissons own contribution.3 On culture, especially poetry and rhetoric,
the works of Marc Lauxtermann and George KennedyByzantine Poetry from
Pisides to Geometres and Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition
from Ancient to Modern Times, respectivelyhave been valuable.4 With the excep-
tion of Speros Vryonis, these scholars focus solely on Byzantium in discussing
the three aspects of its history on which the present volume focuses; but because
BASIC II.2 is a history not of the Arabs as such but of the Arab-Byzantine rela-
tionship, the cited works were important for providing historical background.
Just as the Byzantine background of economic, social, and cultural history
presented in these works has been helpful in reconstructing the history of the Arab
foederati in these areas, so has been the Arab background of the Lakhmids of ra
in Lower Mesopotamiathe contemporaries of the Ghassnids, and Arabs similar
to them in ethos and moresespecially since there are abundant sources on them.
Also useful have been the sources on the Umayyads, who immediately followed
the Ghassnids as masters of Oriens, and who willingly assimilated the Byzantine
experience of their predecessors.
2 Ph. Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos, 6 vols. (Athens, 194857); C. Mango, Daily
Life in Byzantium, JB 31 (1981), 33753; H. Magoulias, The Lives of Saints as Sources of Data
for
Sixth and Seventh Century Byzantine Social and Economic History (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University,
1962); S. Vryonis, Aspects of Byzantine Society in Syro-Palestine, in Byzantine Studies in Honor
of
Milton V. Anastos, ed. S. Vryonis, Byzantina kai metabyzantina 4 (Malibu, Calif., 1985), 4363;
and
A. Karpozilos in various entries in ODB.
3 See A. H. M. Jones, The Late Roman Empire: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey,
2 vols. (Oxford and Norman, Okla., 1964); A. Laiou et al., eds., The Economic History of
Byzantium
from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 2002), especially I,
11520,
171220; and C. Morrisson, Peuplement, conomie et socit de lOrient Byzantin, in Le monde
byz-
antin, ed. C. Morrisson, vol. 1, LEmpire romain dOrient, 330641 (Paris, 2004), 193220.
4 M. D. Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres, Wiener Byzantinistische
Studien 24/1 (Vienna, 2003); G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition
from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999); idem, Judeo-Christian
Rhetoric,
in Rhetoric in Byzantium, ed. E. Jeffreys (Aldershot, Eng., 2003), 13782; and see also W.
Hrandner,
Court Poetry: Questions of Motifs, Structure and Function, in ibid., 7585.
Preface xvii
B
Because certain terms peculiar to the history of the foederati of Byzantium in
Oriens are frequently employed, they must be explained at the outset so that
this volume can be more easily understood. The need for such clarification was
addressed in the preceding volume, where two of these terms, limitrophe and
Ghassnland, were explained. To these were added urbanization and ruralization,
two terms that, though not limited in their application to the Arab foederati, were
also highly significant.5
A term not explicitly discussed in the previous volume, foederati, is the one
most frequently applied to the Ghassnids in this series of six volumes, especially in
this one. The publication, after the completion of BASIC II.1, of a monograph spe-
cifically devoted to the foederati has also made it appropriate to consider this term
at some length here.
Foederati
In the course of the three centuries that preceded the rise of Islam and the Arab
Conquests in the seventh century, Byzantium availed itself of the services of three
Arab groups in succession: the Tankhids in the fourth century, the Salids in
the fifth, and the Ghassnids in the sixth. And the five volumes devoted to them in
this series have correctly described them as foederati. Recently, in his monograph
Foederati, Ralf Scharf has raised questions on the application of the term to groups
in the Orient.6 Hence the following clarifications are called for.
A
I have applied the term foederati to these three Arab groups because the Byzantine
sources did so, using both the Latin and Greek forms, foederati and .
1. In the fourth century, the forms of the term in Greek, such as , were
used propos of Mavia, the Arab queen, and her group, who fought the emperor
Valens.7 After her victory over Valens and the conclusion of peace, Mavia observed
the terms of the .8 Early in the reign of Theodosius, relations soured between
the emperor and these Arab foederati, which led to their revolt. This entailed the
dissolution of the , referred to in its Latin form, foedus, by Pacatus in his
Panegyricus, addressed to Theodosius in a.d. 389.9
2. In the fifth century the Arab foederati of Byzantium are expressly referred
5 See BASIC II.1, xxxiiixxxv.
6 R. Scharf, Foederati, Tyche, Supplementband No. 4 (Vienna, 2001); see the chapter Foederati im
Osten, 4548.
7 See BAFOC, 140.
8 Ibid., 159 note 83.
9 Ibid., 204.
Preface xviii
to as such in the well-known Novella 24 of Theodosius II, where their annona or
food allotment is also mentioned.10 The Novella as it related to the Arabs is also
discussed by Scharf.11
3. The sixth-century Arab allies, the Ghassnids, are referred to as foederati
by the early ninth-century chronicler Theophanes, who employed the terms
Greek form: in a.d. 502, Emperor Anastasius concluded a treaty, , with
two groups, the Arabs of Kinda and Ghassn.12 A quarter of a century later, the
Ghassnids are described in a crucial passage in Procopius History as o.13
B
In view of such consistent references in the Byzantine sources themselves to the
Arab allies as foederati, it is clearly correct to apply the term to them. These Arab
foederati received the annona and they were settled within the Byzantine Diocese
of Oriens, not outside it.
The Arab foederati of the Orient, especially the Ghassnids, were well inte-
grated in the Byzantine army of the Orient. Epigraphy reveals that the Ghassnid
Numn, the chief phylarch late in the sixth century, had the title ,14
which made him at least the titular counterpart of the magister militum, even if
his title was mostly honorary. It has also been cogently argued, on the strength of
the Greek inscription at Qar al-ayr al-Gharb, that before Numn, the famous
Arethas of the reign of Justinian was endowed with the same title.15 One of the
principal duties of the Arab foederati was the protection of the Byzantine fron-
tier from the inroads of the nomads, a task that explains their frequent association
with the limitanei, the frontier troops who watched over the limes; another impor-
tant duty was participation in the wars against Persia, the enemy of Byzantium, to
which they contributed an important contingent. The three groups of Arab foe-
derati, in three successive centuries, joined the exercitus comitatensis in its cam-
paigns far away from their headquarters in the Provincia Arabia. Even Procopius,
no friend of the Ghassnids, described the Ghassnid participation at the battle of
Callinicum (a.d. 531) as the contribution of an army, (History, I.xvii.7).
In the fourth century, the Arab foederati took part in Byzantiums Persian
and Gothic wars. They fought in the Persian wars with the House of Constantine
and even more conspicuously in the Gothic wars of the reign of Valens, when they
marched to faraway Thrace. After participating in engagements that culminated
10 BAFIC 4950, 480481.
11 Scharf, Foederati, 4445 and note 115.
12 Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor (Leipzig, 188385), I, 144; see BASIC I.1, 36.
13 Procopius, History, I.xvii.46; see BASIC I.1, 9596.
14 BASIC I.1, 5056.
15 See L. MacCoull, Notes on Arab Allies as foederati in Inscriptions, Tyche 11 (1996), 15758.
Preface xix
in the battle of Adrianople in a.d. 378, the cuneus or wedge of cavalry sent by
the federate queen Mavia saved Constantinople itself from the Goths, as Zosimus
described in striking detail.16
In the fifth century, the Salids took part in the two Persian wars of
Theodosius II (a.d. 420422, 440442), and one historian commented on their
creditable performance in those wars.17 Even more remarkable was their partici-
pation in the Vandal Wars of Emperor Leo I (468 and 470). And as has been
argued, their participation in the battle of Cape Bon, in present-day Tunisia, may
have contributed to their downfall later in the century, since the battle was a
disaster for the imperial army and its Salid contingent.18
In the sixth century, the Arab foederati performed and even more impressive
function, as described in BASIC I.1. Indeed, the famous Ghassnid warrior king,
Arethas, not only participated with his contingent in all the wars of Byzantium but
also on one occasion in the Assyrian campaign of a.d. 541 commanded Byzantine
troops, when Belisarius sent twelve hundred troops of his own guards and, in the
words of Procopius, directed them to obey Arethas in everything they did.19
Finally, in connection with the limitanei and the associations of the Arab
foederati with them in the latters garrison duties, it may also be mentioned that
the Ghassnid foederati were given the duties of the limitanei when Justinian dis-
banded the latter. This shift in responsibility was reflected in the Ghassnid phy-
larchs assumption of the title of , Greek for limitaneus. 20
It has always been clear to me that the terms of the foedus with the Arabs of
the Orient were not identical with those of the foedus with the Germans in the
Occident. But despite those differences, foederati is a term capacious enough to be
applied to both sets of allies, those of the Orient as well as those of the Occident.
Irfan Shahd
Dumbarton Oaks
July 2009
16 See BAFOC, 17583.
17 See Sozomen below, p. 211 and n. 26.
18 See ibid., 2540; on the Persian and Vandal wars, see 9196.
19 Procopius, History, II.xix.15; see BASIC I.1, 22025.
20 BASIC II.1, 3551, especially 45.
Acknowledgments
T
his volume would not have been ready for publication, had it not been for
the contribution of the following institutions and individuals who have given
generously of their time and expertise.
Institutionally, all my publications that have the term Byzantine in the title
must first and foremost be related to the great center of Byzantine studies in the
United States, indeed in the world, namely, Dumbarton Oaks. As an associate fel-
low, it is there that I have researched and written my articles and six volumes, availing
myself of its wonderful library with its unrivalled collection of books and journals,
and enjoying the support of those who run and administer Dumbarton Oaks. Its
director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski, has helped in expediting the publication of this
volume. Alice-Mary Talbot, as director of Byzantine studies, has been the one most
intimately connected with it. Her accipitral eye has scanned the long manuscript
and has contributed much to the elimination of certain repetitious passages and the
rearrangement of certain sections and chapters. Joel Kalvesmaki, editor in Byzantine
studies, has gone through the manuscript and gathered together all that still needed
to be attended to, inter alia, precise citations, orthography, and Greek accents. I am
grateful to him for all this as I am to Alice Falk, who so very competently copy-
edited the manuscript, and also to Kathy Sparkes, our publications manager, who in
the final stage supervised and expedited its composition and production.
The library staff has extended to me the assistance for which they are known
to all who have used the library. Deborah Stewart, Bridget Gazzo, Emily Gulick,
Kim North, and Sandra Parker Provenzano have been helpful in locating biblio-
graphical items which were difficult to locate or were not at Dumbarton Oaks.
This was especially helpful since my participation in the technological revolution
was and still is not above reproach, and in this area Polly Evans was most helpful.
Georgetown University, where I had been the Oman Professor for many
years, before I retired and became Emeritus in 2007, also contributed much. Its pro-
vost, Dr. James ODonnell, a classical scholar and ancient historian, gave me every
administrative and academic support for the successful completion of this volume,
as did the associate provost Marcia Mintz, and I should like to thank them both
warmly for their support and contribution. Just as the Dumbarton Oaks library
xxii Acknowledgments
and its staff have been invaluable for researching this volume, so has the Lauinger
Library at Georgetown, with its full collection of Arabic sources, so important
for this particular volume, BASIC II.ii, thus complementing the Byzantine col-
lection at Dumbarton Oaks. Two members of the staff, Brenda Bickett and Mark
Muelhausler, were especially helpful in locating certain works in Arabic and getting
some through the interlibrary loan service. I am extremely thankful for their help.
Outside the confines of the Lauinger Library, I should like to make special men-
tion of Nancy Farley, who skillfully typed some chapters in this manuscript, and
Kelli Harris and Meriem Tikue, the administrative assistants of the Department
of Arabic and Islamic Studies, who always responded so to my calls on their gener-
osity for help in various ways.
The scholars who converge on Dumbarton Oaks as annual fellows or visit-
ing scholars or joint-appointees should be remembered in this context. Foremost
among these for this particular volume have been Stratis Papaioannou and Michael
McCormick, whose writings and conversations have influenced the course of
my thought in writing certain chapters in this volume. In addition to these two
scholars, there are those with whom I have conversed and corresponded, and
they include: Edmond Bosworth, David Frendo, Kyle Harper, Robert Hoyland,
Stephen Humphreys, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Walter Kaegi, Apostolos Karpozilos,
Lorice Malouf, Cyril Mango, Leslie MacCoull, Michael Morony, Polyvia Parara,
Daniel Potts, Manfred Ullman, Jose van Ess, Jan Geer van Gelder, and Speros
Vryonis.
Publishing books is expensive nowadays, and in this respect the liberality of
Tawfiq and Abla Kawar has been remarkable. They have contributed funds toward
the publication of this volume and the research that had been conducted for it in
various parts of the world. I am deeply in their debt. Within this circle of relatives
and the list of those to whom this volume owes much is my wife, Mary. She has
contributed in various ways to the composition of this volume, which sometimes
necessitated the cancellation of weekend activities and the interruption of vaca-
tions, for technical assistance in the preparation of the long manuscript, such as
typing and corrections. Of all her substantial contributions, I am very sensible and
to her I am most grateful.
***
A debt of an entirely different kind is owed to the two dedicatees, the two Franciscan
priests, the French P. Francis Demaret and the Italian P. Michele Piccirillo, both
closely related to my work on Byzantium and the Arabs.
P. Michele Piccirillo, celebrated Christian archaeologist, was the indefati-
gable laborer in the vineyard of Christian archaeology who recovered the strong
Christian presence in Jordan in Byzantine times. He also gave visibility to the con-
tribution of the Christian Arab community to Byzantine monuments of Jordan, as
xxiii Acknowledgments
he uncovered and collected the recognizably Arab names of donors and mosaicists
involved in these monuments, thus complementing archaeologically what my vol-
umes have done through the literary sources. As important was his excavation of
the Church at Nitil in the Madaba region, with its Greek inscription saluting the
reigning Ghassnid king, Arethas, and a funereal one remembering the Ghassnid
officer Thalaba, buried in the hypogeum of the church. He reported on the church
in the many pages of Liber Annuus as an archaeologist and asked me to contribute
the article on the historical Ghassnid dimension of the church. He kindly sup-
plied me with the plates representing various facets of the church at Nitil, which
appeared in my volume, BASIC II.i (2002) and appear now in the frontispiece of
this volume, a mosaic in the church of St. George at Mt. Nebo. His tragic death at
the early age of 64 after he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer was a great loss to
Christian archaeology, and to me personally, and it has precluded his further exca-
vation of Ghassnid sites, for which BASIC II.i has provided a map. Although he
passed away at his Italian home in Livorno, he chose to be buried at the scene of
his other home, to which he donated many decades of his short life on earth
Mount Nebo.
P. Francis Demaret, friar of the convent of Clart Dieu, France, was another
indefatigable laborer in the vineyard of Arab Christianity. Completely unknown to
me, he approached Dumbarton Oaks in 1991 to translate my volumes on Byzantium
and the Arabs into French, which he continued to do for almost two decades until
recently, when he was taken seriously ill. But before he was incapacitated, he had
translated my six volumes published by Dumbarton Oaks in eleven substantial tomes
and also some of my articles, including a long one, Byzantium in South Arabia,
which appeared in DOP 1979. P. Demarets twelve volumes have been truly a labor
of love. Not only did he type the translation himself but he also reproduced the vol-
umes and deposited them in various learned and cultural locales in Paris in order
to spread knowledge of Arab Christianity, the Cinderella in the circle of Oriens
Christianus. In addition to keeping his volumes in my library as a monument to his
zeal and industry, I have kept all his letters since 1991, a dossier of single-minded
devotion to a theme, the Christian Arab presence in the Byzantine Orient, especially
in the Holy Land, which goes back to pre-Islamic times. It is a pity that he could
not read what he had looked forward to, namely, this volume, which has recovered
from oblivion an entire Arab Christian culture that had flourished in the shadow
of Byzantium in Oriens, Bild al-Shm, before the rise of Islam. I had hoped against
hope that his health would be restored to normalcy, but my expectations were dashed
to the ground when I received from La fraternit dOrsay, to which he belonged, the
sad news, couched in simple but touching terms, that Le Frre Francis Demaret,
Franciscain-Prtre est entr dans la Paix de Dieu, le mardi 21 juillet 2009, Athis-
Mons dans sa 82e anne, aprs 61 ans de vie religieuse et 53 ans de sacerdoce.
I
Economic History
I
The Role of the Ghassnids
T
he contribution of the Ghassnids and the other Arab foederati of Byzantium
to the economic life of the empire and to Oriens in particular is terra incognita
to Byzantinists, largely because these Arabs are usually referred to as foederati and
often as symmachoi, fighting allies; consequently, their military role has been
emphasized over all others. Procopius bias, his ira et studium, has further obscured
their role in the economic history of the region. But as the present volume will
clearly demonstrate, their role was considerable, especially during the reign of
Justinian. The nature and extent of their contribution will be examined as it relates
to Oriens itself and also to international trade, involving the world of the Indian
Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula on the one hand and that of Mediterranean
Rome on the other. The investigation of their role must rely on sources that,
regarding economic and social history, are far from copious. Nevertheless, when set
against the background of the better-known economic history of the empire and of
Oriens in particular, the sources become more revealing and shed more light on the
role of the foederati, especially the Ghassnids of the sixth century.
The standard work on the economic history of the empire has recently
appeared in three massive volumes, which treat the period from the seventh
through the fifteenth century.1 The editor explains the reason for omitting the pre-
vious three centuries;2 one article, however, gives a general overview of that time,
providing good background for a future detailed and concentrated account of the
sixth century in Oriens.3 The seventh century is touched on by other essays.4
For the economic history of this proto-Byzantine period, the monumental
Late Roman Empire by A. H. M. Jones is still the standard work, although the
1 See The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed.
A. Laiou et al., 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 2002).
2 Ibid., I, 8.
3 See C. Morrisson and J.-P. Sodini, The Sixth Century Economy, in ibid., 171200.
4 See, e.g., A. Muthesius, Essential Processes, Looms, and Technical Aspects of the Silk Textiles,
in ibid., 14768, and K.-P. Matschke, Mining, in ibid., 11520.
4 byzantium and the arabs in the sixth century
author practically ignored archaeology in discussing rural life.5 To this great
synthetic work may now be added two chapters in the new Cambridge Ancient
History.6 Even more recent are two articles in the first volume of a new collection,
Le monde byzantin.7
Against the background of these general works, the economic history of
Oriens and the role of the Ghassnids in the sixth century will be set and will
become clear. Because the Arabs or the Ghassnids appear in the Byzantine sources
as foederati, soldiers fighting the wars of Byzantium, the studies cited hardly men-
tion them as a force in the economic history of the region and the century. The
Arabic sources, however, have important relevant data on the Ghassnids. A 1971
work in Arabic on the economic history of the Arabs and Arabia before the rise of
Islam contains much useful material, although it does not specifically deal with
Byzantine involvement in this history.8 A more recent and more accessible work
is Robert G. Hoylands Arabia and the Arabs, which devotes a welcome chapter
to the economic history of the Arabs, although again without focusing specifi-
cally on the Byzantines or Ghassnids.9 Until the manuscript of the lost Akhbr
Mulk Ghassn is discovered,10 archaeology will remain the most important
source for enhancing knowledge about Ghassnid participation in the economic
life of Oriens and Byzantium. The mineral wealth of Arabia has been revealed
by Gene W. Hecks publication of The Precious Metals of West Arabia,11 which
has shed a very bright light on the keen interest of Byzantium in the Arabian
Peninsula. That interest began in the days of Leo I (457474) and of the adventur-
ous phylarch, Amorkesos, of the fifth century, and reached its climax during the
reign of Justinian.12 More directly and concretely related to the Ghassnids has
5 See A. H. M. Jones, The Late Roman Empire: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey,
2 vols. (Oxford and Norman, Okla., 1964).
6 See B. Ward-Perkins, Land, Labour, and Settlement, in The Cambridge Ancient History,
vol. XIV, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, a.d. 425600, ed. A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins,
and
M. Whitby (Cambridge, 2000), 31545, and idem, Specialized Production and Exchange, in ibid.,
34691. For the just assessment of Jones by Angeliki Laiouone who should knowsee The
Economic
History of Byzantium, I, 8.
7 See C. Morrisson, Peuplement, conomie et socit de lOrient byzantin, in Le monde byzantin,
vol. 1, LEmpire romain dOrient, 330641 (Paris, 2004), 193220; and G. Tate, La Syrie-
Palestine,
in ibid., 374401. See also A. E. Laiou and C. Morrisson, The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge,
2007),
2342.
8 See Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1971), VII.
9 See R. G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs (London, 2001), 85112, and his rich bibliography,
28692.
10 On Akhbr Mulk Ghassn, see BASIC II.1, 36474.
11 See G. W. Heck, The Precious Metals of West Arabia and Their Role in Forging the Economic
Dynamic of the Early Islamic State, King Faial Center for Research and Islamic Studies (Riyadh,
2003).
12 On Leo I, see BAFIC, 61113, esp. 9699; on Justinian, see BALA III, xixvi.
5 The Role of the Ghassnids
been the discovery of a Ghassnid church at Nitil;13 its excavation has provided
much evidence for Ghassnid involvement in the art and architecture of sixth-
century Byzantine Oriens and demonstrates the regions prosperity, to which the
Ghassnid protection of trade routes that led to Oriens contributed. Other archae-
ological excavationsperhaps guided by the preceding volume in this series, which
has provided a road map to and onomasticon of Ghassnid sitesmay reveal more
information.
13 For the Arab character of this church, excavated by Fr. Michele Piccirillo, see the present writer
in
The Sixth-Century Church Complex at Nitl, Jordan: The Ghassnid Dimension, Lib.ann 51
(2001),
28592. On the prosperity of the region in this context, see also M. Sartre, Bostra, des origines
lIslam
(Paris, 1985), 13239.
II
The Ghassnids and the Security of Oriens
T
he Ghassnids were a group employed by Byzantium as foederati in the army
of the Orient to defend that diocese and fight the wars of the empire in the
east. But they and other Arab foederati also performed nonmilitary duties, just as
the regular Roman legionaries always did in peacetime. A passage in the Cambridge
Ancient History details some of the nonmilitary duties of those legionaries:
Detachments of soldiers were involved in major civilian projects like build-
ing the road from Carthage to Theveste, harbour-dredging in Egypt, or
supplying stone for the forum at Colonia Ulpia Traiana at Xanten in the
Rhineland. One sphere in which the military will have been always involved
was administration. The commanders of auxiliary units in Britain or Judaea
might find themselves in charge of the census at local level, which centuri-
ons on secondment from their legions served as district officers (centuriones
regionarii).1
The Ghassnid foederati, it is almost certain, were called upon to perform
similar duties in Oriens. Unlike the Ostrogoth troops in Italy or the Franks in
Gaul or the Visigoths in Spain, the Ghassnids were not alien to their congeners
Arabs of Nabataea and Palmyrena who had become Rhomaioi after their terri-
tories were annexed by the Romans. Hence no tension such as that which arose
between a Germanic alien army of occupation and the native populations of the
Roman Occident was present between the Ghassnids and these Arab Rhomaioi;
thus, it was easy for them to engage in civilian nonmilitary works and contrib-
ute to the economic life of Oriens. Their civilian, nonmilitary duties included
building bridges;2 they also acted as umpires in disputes that erupted among the
1 On the role of the army in peacetime, see M. Hassall, The Army, in The Cambridge Ancient
History, vol. XI, The High Empire, ad 70192, ed. A. K. Bowman, P. Garnsey, and D. Rathbone,
2nd ed.
(Cambridge, 2000), 34143; quotation, 342.
2 On the qanir, bridges and aqueducts, constructed by the Ghassnid king Jabala, see BASIC
II.1, 32627.
7 The Ghassnids and the Security of Oriens
Rhomaioi.3 Moreover, as enthusiastic Christians they took part in the construc-
tion of many monasteries and churches, as when in the fifth century the phylarch
of Parembole aided St. Euthymius with the construction of his monastery in the
Jordan valley.4
The role that the Ghassnids played in the economic history of Byzantium
in the sixth century was complex and was related to the significance of the dio-
cese that they protected. In this late antique, proto-Byzantine period, the Pars
Orientalis became more important than the Occidentalis. This shift was reflected
in Diocletians choice of Nicomedia as his capital, and the eastward move culmi-
nated in the foundation of Constantinople as the new capital, the new Rome. In
this Pars Orientalis, the Ghassnids were established in Oriens, a diocese of great
importance economically and otherwise. Historians noted its prosperity in the
sixth century, before, according to one view, decline set in later in the century.5 But
prosperity requires security. And it is within this framework of security as the key
to the prosperity of the diocese that the first contribution of the Ghassnids has to
be sought. The diocese was especially exposed and vulnerable, and the Ghassnids,
together with the regular stratitai of the Roman army of the Orient, shouldered
the responsibility of shielding it from three major threats.6
1. A nomadic threat originated from the Arab Peninsula. The creation of the
supreme phylarchate in a.d. 529 extended the power of the Ghassnids from Ayla
on the Red Sea to the Euphrates, enabling them to meet the threat along that long
frontier in its entirety. Their role was especially significant after they superseded
the limitanei who had been engaged in performing that function, which more nat-
urally suited the Arab foederati than the Roman stratitai under the direction of
the various duces.7
2. A better organized and more concentrated threat emanated from the
Lakhmids of ra, especially during the long fifty-year reign of their king Mundir
(504554), who terrorized the diocese with his brutality and anti-Christian
3 For the Ghassnid phylarch Ab Karib as a mediator in a dispute in adaqa, see P.Petra inv. 83,
called the Kings Scroll (see Bibliography). See BASIC II.1, 46 and n. 55.
4 On the phylarch Aspebetos and St. Euthymius, see BAFIC, 182.
5 See B. Ward-Perkins, Specialized Production and Exchange, in Cambridge Ancient History,
vol. XIV, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, a.d. 425600, ed. A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins,
and
M. Whitby (Cambridge, 2000), 35254.
6 BASIC I.1 provides a detailed account of the Ghassnid contribution to meeting all these
threats. On the contribution of the Roman army to security, see B. Isaac, Trade Routes to Arabia
and
the Roman Presence in the Desert, in LArabie prislamique et son environnement historique et
culturel,
ed. T. Fahd (Leiden, 1989), 24156. The article deals with the earlier Roman period and the fourth
century. The imaginative new system devised by Byzantium, the phylarchate, laid the main burden
of
security involving the Arab threat upon the shoulders of Arabs in its employ.
7 See BASIC II.1, 3551.
outbursts. But he met his match in the Ghassnid Arethas, who overpowered him
at the decisive battle of Chalcis in 554, when the Lakhmid king was killed.
3. A third threat, the most serious, gave the Ghassnids a special place in the
Byzantine defense system. Unlike those allies who were defending the Roman
Occident along the Danube and the Rhine, and were facing barbarians such as
the Germans, Huns, and Sarmatians, the Ghassnids, as a contingent in the army
of the Orient, were facing a world powerSasanid Persia, which even captured
Antioch, the capital of the diocese, in 540. The Ghassnids distinguished them-
selves in all these military encounters; particularly notable was their performance
at the battle of Callinicum in a.d. 531.8
Even within Oriens, the Ghassnids helped enforce law and order when they
participated and were sometimes the principal agent in pacifying certain areas;
for example, they crushed a dangerous revolt around 530 after the Samaritans laid
waste parts of Caesarea and Skythopolis.9
When, in the fourth century, Christianity became a religio licita and later, the
official religion of Byzantium, the status of one of its provinces, Palestine, was imme-
diately elevated to being a holy land, whose capital, Jerusalem, became the spiritual
capital of the entire Christianized empire and the destination of pilgrims. Thus,
Palestine and the Diocese of Oriens, within which Palestine was located, assumed
great spiritual importance in the perception of the entire Christian oikoumene.
The Ghassnids bore the major brunt of the defense of the Christian Holy Land
because they were stationed in the three provinces that surrounded it, the Provincia
Arabia, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia, through which ran the two
gateways of the nomads from the Arabian peninsula to Oriens: Wd Sirn and
the Tabkiyya in northern ijz. In addition to protecting the Holy Land against
the threat of the nomads, the Ghassnids protected it from the Lakhmid scourge,
Mundir, who celebrated his accession to power in ra by launching a bold cam-
paign that brought him to the borders of the Holy Land around a.d. 503.10 The
Ghassnids effectively protected Palestine from the south and southeast through
the efforts of Ab Karib, the energetic phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, and from the
east and northeast through those of Arethas, his brother. This led to the prosperity
of both provincial Arabia and Palestine, reflected in the efflorescence of Christian
art and architecture.11
8 See BASIC I.1, 13442, and BALA II, 1318, especially the testimony of Malalas on the loyalty
and courage of Arethas, the Ghassnid commander in chief:
(14).
9 See BASIC I.1, 8292.
10 Ibid., 1719.
11 See M. Piccirillo, LArabia cristiana: Dalla provincia imperiale al primo periodo islamico
(Milan,
2002), whose title is itself relevatory of the thoroughly Christian character of the provincia in this
period, reflected in its art and architecture.
9 The Ghassnids and the Security of Oriens
Security, provided to a considerable extent by the Ghassnids, was conducive
to a prosperity that enabled the Rhomaioi in the region to finance and subsidize
the erection of many churches and monasteries on both sides of the Jordan. The
foederati, especially the Ghassnids, took part in this sixth-century explosion of
Christian art and architecture, including the recently excavated church of Nitil in
the Madaba region of the Provincia Arabia.12
12 In the Provincia Arabia and its environs alone were constructed at least 137 monasteries, some of
which were Ghassnid; see BASIC I.2, 82438, and BASIC II.1, passim.
III
The Ghassnids and International Trade Routes
T
hough important, the contribution of the Ghassnids to the security of
Oriens was indirect: defending the diocese and enabling its economy to pros-
per. A more substantial contribution was their protection of important segments
of the international trade routes.
The last segment of the Silk Road connecting the Far East and central Asia
with the world of the Mediterranean passed through Mesopotamia and the north-
ern part of Oriens. It is often referred to as the Mesopotamian route. According
to the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, the Silk Road was in fact
two routes: one by sea, extending from China to Ceylon to the Red Sea, and the
other on land, stretching through central Asia and Persia and finally reaching
Mesopotamia.1
The West Arabian route connecting the world of the Far East, India, and
the Indian Ocean with that of the Mediterranean was a land route that traversed
South Arabia and ijz. Its final segments passed through the Provincia Arabia
and Palaestina Tertia. To its west and east were two other routes: a sea route, which
passed through the Red Sea to the island of Iotabe (modern Tirn) and finally
to the port of Eilat/Ayla in Palaestina Tertia, and a shorter land route through
Wd Sirnat the southern end of which was Dma, sometimes called Dmat
al-Jandalwhich led to the Provincia Arabia.2
Oriens was, thus, the confluence of all these major arteries of international
trade in the sixth century. Hence the importance of the group of foederati in whose
provinces of Arabia and Palaestina Tertia were located the termini of the West
Arabian routes and through which traveled the caravans that carried this long-
distance trade. Because the caravans passed through difficult and dangerous ter-
rain, attractive to raiders, they needed protection, which the Ghassnids provided.
1 Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographie chrtienne, ed. and trans. W. Wolska-Conus, Sources
chrtiennes no. 141 (Paris, 1968), Book II, sections 4546, pp. 35155.
2 See E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India (1928; reprint,
London, 1974); N. Pigulewskaia, Byzanz auf den Wegen nach Indien (Berlin and Amsterdam,
1969).
11 The Ghassnids and International Trade Routes
In this trade were manifest the rivalry and the struggle between Byzantium and
Persia; these trade routes hence took on added political and military impor-
tanceas did the role of the Ghassnids, who protected the caravans that traveled
along them.3
***
The four sketch maps that accompany this chapter are intended solely to illustrate
the role of the Ghassnids in the economic history of Byzantium in the Oriens of
the sixth century. By visually presenting the convergence of the trade routes on
Oriens, the maps contribute to a clearer and better understanding of how impor-
tant this diocese was in the economic life of Byzantium and how grave was its loss
to Islam after its conquest in the seventh century. An additional map in the follow-
ing chapter graphically represents the fairs, aswq, frequented by the Arab caravans
in Oriens. The maps focus on the final stations of the trade routes, especially their
termini in Oriens overseen by the Ghassnids, but include some stations on the
remoter segments of the long trade routes, which help put the stations involving
the Ghassnids in geographical context.
While the Periplus Maris Erythraei of the first century cast much light on
the Red Sea route, as did the Mansiones Parthicae of the same century for the
Mesopotamian one, no such guides seem to exist for the sixth.4 In the world of
the Christian Roman Empire of the sixth century, maps and itineraries were avail-
able for pilgrims to the Holy Land such as those used by Theodosius.5 When the
Byzantine Cosmas ventured into composing something similar to the Periplus of
the Red Sea,6 he approached his task with an explicitly Christian agenda (an xious
to prove that Ptolemy was wrong, that the earth was not a globe, and that the uni-
verse resembled the Tabernacle of Moses). Nevertheless, he preserved valuable
information on Axum and Ceylon and made reference to a few ports relevant to
seafaring in the Red Sea, such as Adlis on the African coast and Leuke Kome and
Rhaithou on the Asiatic.
3 See M. Morony, The Late Sasanian Economic Impact on the Arabian Peninsula, Nme-ye
Irn-e Bstn 1.2 (2002), 2537.
4 See The Periplus Maris Erythraei, trans. and annot. L. Casson (Princeton, 1989). For Isidore of
Charax, and his Mansiones Parthicae, see The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond
and
H. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992), s.v. Isidorus (1), a more informative entry than is found in
the 3rd
ed. (1996). The indefatigable modern traveler and explorer Alois Musil traversed the Mesopotamian
seg-
ment of the route described by Isidore; for his comments and reservations on Mansiones, see The
Middle
Euphrates: A Topographical Itinerary (New York, 1927), 22732. The Tabula Peutingeriana is a
twelfth-
or thirteenth-century copy of a fifth-century tourist map; see A. Kazhdan, Tabula Peutingeriana,
ODB, III, 20045.
5 See Y. Tsafrir, The Maps Used by Theodosius: On the Pilgrim Maps of the Holy Land and
Jerusalem in the Sixth Century c.e., DOP 40 (1986), 12945.
6 See Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographie chrtienne.
I. The Mesopotamian Route
War with the Persians, which suddenly broke out in a.d. 502 after a long period of
peace, reignited in the reign of each emperor of the sixth century; this conflict con-
tributed to the West Arabian route gaining some advantage over the Mesopotam-
ian (for the Mesopotamian route, see Map I). Nevertheless, the latter route retained
much of its significance.7 That two clauses in the peace treaty of 561, the prod-
uct of complex negotiations between the two powers, involve the Arabs and the
Ghassnids reflects their importance in the Byzantine-Persian relationship.8
The second clause of the treaty deals with the Ghassnids directly and is
military in character. After the decisive Ghassnid victory over the Lakhmids at
the battle of Qinnasrn/Chalcis, in 554, hostilities continued between the two
Arab groups independently of their Persian and Byzantine overlords. To address
the resultant souring of relations between the two world powers, it was necessary
to devote the second clause of the treaty to putting an end to any further strife
between the Ghassnids and Lakhmids. The fifth clause is even more relevant to
our theme, since it dealt with economic problems. It reads as follows:
It is agreed that Saracen and all other barbarian merchants of either state
shall not travel by strange roads but shall go by Nisibis and Daras, and shall
not cross into foreign territory without official permission. But if they dare
anything contrary to the agreement (that is to say, if they engage in tax-
dodging, so-called), they shall be hunted down by the officers of the frontier
and handed over for punishment together with the merchandise which they
are carrying, whether Assyrian or Roman.9
This clause has elsewhere been commented upon copiously by the present writer,10
and the following point may be added here. Financial considerations were behind
the restrictions imposed on Arab traders who engaged in tax dodges. The emperor
Justinian was naturally concerned about building up the economy and the trea-
sury, which suffered heavily owing to his wars of reconquest in the West and his
expensive building program, and these worries were reflected in his exorbitant
duties on merchandise and in the establishment of state monopolies in certain
7 The importance of silk and the Silk Road was reflected in Julians embassy of around a.d. 530,
which Justinian dispatched to the Ethiopian Negus to invoke his aidmilitary and otheragainst
the
Persians. This embassy is discussed below, in The West Arabian Route; see also M. Kordosis,
China
and the West: The Silk Route, Graeco Arabica 78 (2000), 23341.
8 For the peace treaty of a.d. 561, see Menander Protector, The History of Menander the
Guardsman,
ed. and trans. R. C. Blockley (Liverpool, 1985), 7077 (Greek text and English version).
9 Ibid., 72, 73.
10 See The Arabs in the Peace Treaty of a.d. 561, in BALA III, 5459.
Map I. The Mesopotamian Route. All maps by K. Rasmussen (archeographics.com),
2009 by Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University
industries such as silk manufacturing. The pursuit and arrest of those merchants
who were engaged in illegal trading and thus tax dodging would have fallen to a
great extent upon the shoulders of the Ghassnids.11 The power of these foederati
had been extended by Justinian in a.d. 529 to the whole of Oriens, including its
northern provinces where Daras was located and where tax dodging would have
occurred. The Ghassnids had taken part in campaigns involving those northern
areas, such as the Assyrian campaign of Belisarius in 540. So they were perfectly
familiar with the topography of the region, parts of which were ethnically Arab.
The Ghassnids could conduct such operations involving Arab peoples more effi-
ciently than could the regular Roman stratitai.
***
The most important commodity carried over the Mesopotamian route was silk.
A luxury article, silk was widely used for vestments by members of the imperial
court as well as by clerics, and was also used to decorate both churches and secular
buildings. The silk industry in Oriens passed through two stages. In the first stage,
private factories in such cities as Berytus and Tyre manufactured goods from raw
silk bought from the Persian merchants. When in 542 the manufacturing of silk
became a state monopoly, it provided a welcome source of revenue for the state trea-
sury.12 The second stage began in 552 and witnessed the introduction into Oriens
of sericulture, which made Byzantium less dependent on Persian raw silk. Oriens
thus became the first region in the empire to pursue silk manufacture, which
remained an important part of its economy. But this industry, like others more
ordinary, could flourish only when securitya major duty of the Ghassnids
prevailed in the Oriens provinces.
Extant contemporary poetry refers to the clothes of the Ghassnids, includ-
ing linen and saffron robes.13 Though silk is not mentioned, it appears in the
poetry of the Umayyads,14 who ruled Oriens immediately after the Ghassnids and
who acquired many of their social graces from their predecessors. It is thus logical
to conclude that the Ghassnids wore silk garments on festive occasions. assn,
the brother of the Kindite lord of Dma at the southern end of Wd Sirn in
11 One of the Arabic words for thief, li, is suspected of being a Greek loanword, . Its
appearance in Arabic may be related to such illegal activities in Byzantium on the part of the Arabs,
who
tried to evade the customs officials and avoid paying taxes on their merchandise.
12 The imperial kommerkiarioi levied a substantial tax on the traders at emporia. By catching these
tax dodgers, the Ghassnids contributed indirectly to the Byzantine economy. For the
kommerkiarioi,
see N. Oikonomides, Kommerkiarios, ODB, II, 1141.
13 See Clothes, Chapter 6 in Part II, below, and BASIC II.1, 295 note 7.
14 For instance, it appears as sarik/q in the poetry of the Umayyad poet Ubayd Allh al-Ruqayyt;
see Dwn Ubayd Allh al-Ruqayyt, ed. M. Najm (Beirut, 1986), 159, verse 8, where silk
appears as
sarak/q. Sarik is the Arabic version of , the term used by Procopius for silk in History, I.xx.9.
northern Arabia, wore a silk robe woven in gold when Dma was captured by
Khlid ibn al-Wald around a.d. 630.15 Ukaydir, the Kindite lord of Dma, was
less affluent than his Ghassnid allies; if his brother wore a silk robe, then a fortiori
the Ghassnids also wore such robes.
II. The West Arabian Route
Of all the international routes, the overland route of West Arabia, the via odorifera
(see Map II), was the most important for the economic history of Byzantium in the
sixth century and for the Arab-Byzantine relationship involving the Ghassnids.
The Roman Empire during the principate of Augustus tried and failed to con-
trol it through Aelius Gallus expedition against South Arabia; and after a check-
ered history, it languished before it revived in the sixth century at the height of
the Ghassnid presence in Oriens. In a previous publication I have suggested five
reasons for its sudden revival,16 of which the most important was the renewal of
the Byzantine-Persian war after a fifth-century lull. The conflict, which resumed in
a.d. 502 during the reigns of Anastasius and Kawad, broke out anew under every
emperor of the sixth century, reaching its climax in the seventh century in the
gigantic struggle during the reign of Heraclius. Another reason, of critical impor-
tance for the extraordinary events of the seventh century, which witnessed the
birth of Islam and the Arab Conquests, was the rise in the sixth century of Mecca
to a position of dominance as the main Arab caravan city.17 This rise contributed
to the promotion of the spice route of western Arabia as a major artery of interna-
tional trade. Of the three western routes, this overland one, which extended from
Arabia Felix in the south to Palaestina Tertia in the north, had a decided advantage
over the maritime route, which required merchants to navigate the Red Sea with its
contrary winds and dangerous shoals.
Even before Mecca reached its position of dominance late in the sixth century,
the Byzantine emperor Justinian was promoting the revival of the western route at
the expense of the Mesopotamian. Around 530, he sent his ambassador Julian to
15 See Balduri, Futh al-Buldn, ed. S. Munajjid (Cairo, 1956), I, 73. Wqidis account of the cap-
ture of Dma by Khlid is fuller than that of Balduri. According to him, Ukaydir, too, was wearing
a silk brocade when he came to Medina after the capture of Dma. Wqidi also says that the silk
robe
of his brother assn elicited the admiration of the Muslims in Medina when the robe was sent to
the
Prophet; see al-Wqidi, Kitb al-Maghzi, ed. M. Jones (London, 1966), III, 102627.
16 Explored in detail in BALA III, 4754.
17 See BALA III, 5254. On the lively discussion started by Patricia Crone on this theme, see her
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, 1987); in response, see R. Sergeant, Meccan Trade
and
the Rise of Islam: Misconceptions and Flawed Polemics, JAOS 111 (1990), 47286. A comprehen-
sive response to Crones very stimulating work is a doctoral dissertation in Arabic submitted by
Victor
Sab to the Lebanese University in Beirut, Ilf Quraysh (1992). The precise identity of the
goods
these caravaneers brought with them to Bostra and Gaza and what they bought there has also been
the
subject of a lively discussion initiated by Crones volume.
Map IIa. The West-Arabian Route
Map IIb. The West-Arabian Route
Map IIc. The West-Arabian Route
urge the military and economic mobilization of the Christian world of the Red Sea
and the Arabian Peninsula against Sasanid Persia. The key to the success of his plan
was the Ethiopian Negus. The economic component of his diplomatic offensive
entailed the Ethiopians purchase of silk in Ceylon or India directly from Indian
and Chinese merchants, thereby eliminating the hostile Persian intermediaries
who sold silk to the Byzantines at exorbitant prices. In this way, he hoped to divert
tradeat least the silk tradefrom the Mesopotamian to the western route.18
Justinians diplomatic offensive was too complex to succeed, but the western spice
route prospered even though the contemplated crusade against Persia on the part
of the southern Semites, Ethiopians and Arabs, never materialized. Nevertheless,
it was a most enlightened foreign policy, and the words of Procopius are relevant in
this context:
At that time, when Hellestheaeus was reigning over the Aethiopians, and
Esimiphaeus over the Homeritae, the Emperor Justinian sent an ambassador,
Julianus, demanding that both nations on account of their community of
religion should make common cause with the Romans in the war against the
Persians; for he purposed that the Aethiopians, by purchasing silk from India
and selling it among the Romans, might themselves gain much money, while
causing the Romans to profit in only one way, namely, that they be no longer
compelled to pay over the money to their enemy. (This is the silk of which
they are accustomed to make the garments which of old the Greeks called
Medic, but which at the present time they name seric).19
Before the Ghassnid role with regard to the via odorifera is discussed, some
facts about this route should be set forth.
1. This long overland route started from South Arabia (Map IIc) and ended
in the two Byzantine provinces of Palaestina and Arabia. One of its two termini,
after its course ran mostly through Palaestina Tertia, was Gaza in Palaestina Prima
(Map IIa). Its other terminus was Bostra (Map IIb), the capital of Provincia Arabia.
Before reaching its two termini it passed through Phoinikn, the Palm Grove
(probably Tabk), in Byzantine territory.20
2. While still traversing the peninsular segment of the route, caravans passed
18 For an analysis of the embassy of Julian, see BALA III, xiixvi.
19 Procopius, History, I.xx.9; trans. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library (1914; reprint London
and Cambridge, Mass., 1961), I, 192.
20 Ibid., I.xx.913; for the Ghassnid presence in Phoinikn, see I.xix.813. Pace the animadver-
sions of Procopius, Phoinikn was an important station on the spice route, most probably
identifiable
with Tabk. A very detailed and useful account of this route, culled from the Arabic sources, may be
found in Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1971), VII, 34764.
through some of the main cities of western Arabia: Najrn, in the south; Mecca, in
the center; and Yathrib/Medina, in the north.
3. The caravans that took this long route traveled through difficult and dan-
gerous terrain and needed protection, guides, and provisions, both while they were
still in the Peninsula and after they crossed the Byzantine frontier at the southern
portion of Palaestina Tertia.21
4. The prosperity of the route depended to a great extent on who controlled
South Arabia in this tumultuous century. In the first part of the sixth century,
the imyarites, under a Judaizing king, were unfriendly toward Byzantium. For
some fifty years after the Ethiopian occupation, ca. 520, Arabia became a Christian
country and was very friendly toward Byzantium. After 570 and until the rise of
Islam, it was under Persian domination, but that political shift does not seem to
have affected the flow of merchandise from South Arabia to Byzantium.
The Ghassnids contributed substantially to this long-distance trade in west-
ern Arabia.
1. The Ghassnids could be most helpful since they originated from the
Arabian Peninsulaspecifically, from South Arabia, with which they maintained
tiesand they belonged to a large, powerful, and influential tribal group, the Azd,
which had settled at various strategic sites on this trade route.
2. While the caravans were traveling in Byzantine territory, the Ghassnids
exercised more immediate control over them and could provide even more sub-
stantial help, both because Justinian extended their power and influence to the
whole of the diocese and because he established in the southern portion of Oriens
a virtual dyarchy, composed of the famous Arethas in the Provincia Arabia and
his brother, the very efficient Ab Karib, as the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia. Even
more remarkable, the Byzantines endowed them with unusual responsibilities in
handling the taxes imposed on foreign traders.
A
As noted above, the three principal centers through which caravans passed on their
way from South Arabia to Oriens were Najrn, Mecca, and Yathrib/Medina. In
all of these centers, the Ghassnids had a strong presence and were on good terms
with the Arab inhabitants.
Najrn. The Ghassnids most probably had settled in that city during their
wanderings from South Arabia to Oriens. The Arabs who ruled the city, the
Balrith, were Azd, like the Ghassnids, although some genealogists describe
them as affiliated with Madhhij. Around a.d. 520 the Najrnites appealed to
21 See M. Marqaten, Dangerous Trade Routes: On the Plundering of Caravans in the pre-Islamic
Near East, Aram 8 (1996), 21336.
the Ghassnid king, Jabala, at his headquarters in Jbiya to help them against the
imyarite king, Ysuf; indeed, the Ghassnids may have participated in the expe-
dition that finally toppled Ysuf. Ever since the Ethiopian victory, the Ghassnids
were on the best of terms with Najrn, which they viewed as the Arabian city
of martyrs. And when their king Mundir fell out with the emperor Maurice in
a.d. 582, the Ghassnid phylarchs for a short time left the service of Byzantium;
some of them went all the way to Najrn in South Arabia.22 Najrn was the most
important urban Arab center in the Peninsula. In addition to its being a major car-
avan hub and a fertile oasis with a flourishing agrarian economy, it was an indus-
trial center noted for its leather work.23 Its caravan leaders and merchants must
have been very welcome in Ghassnland, as its poets were.24
Mecca. The Ghassnid presence in Mecca was represented by two groups
of allies, or halfs. (1) The Khuza, who settled in Mecca and belonged to the
Azd, had ruled Mecca before Quayy transferred its control to the Quraysh.
They remained a power even after they had lost the rule. (2) The well-known
Quraysh clan of Ban-Asad ibn Abd al-Uzz included Khadja, the first wife of
the Prophet Muammad.
The Quraysh had some important relations with Byzantium. Quayy was
aided by Byzantium when he seized Mecca, evicted the Khuza, and relieved them
of their custodianship of the Kaba. In the sixth century Uthman ibn al-uwayrith,
a Meccan who belonged to the clan of Ban-Asad, unsuccessfully attempted to
become Byzantiums representative in Mecca in what would have marked a turn-
ing point in Byzantine-Meccan relations. By the end of the century, Mecca was the
main caravan city of western Arabia.25
Yathrib/Medina. Even closer to the Ghassnids than the Najrnites and
Khuza were the Arabs of Medina, the Aws and the Khazraj groups, Ban-
Qayla. The Ghassnids had tarried with them on the last leg of their wanderings,
before they crossed the Roman limes. These two Arab groups were so close to the
Ghassnids that they always took pride in that affinity, even when they adopted
Islam after the Prophet Muammad emigrated to Medina. The close relationship
22 On all this, see the present writer, Najrn, EI2, V, 27172, and Najrn, in Encyclopaedia of
the
Qurn, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden, 2003), III, 500501.
23 See L. Massignon, Le rle conomique du Najrn, in La Mubhala de Medine et lhyperdule
de Fatima, Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut, 1963), I, 55072.
24 On the Najrn poet Yazd at the Ghassnid court, see Music and Song in Najrn below in Part
II, Chapter 8. Riding parties are attested in South Arabia, in the verse of umayd ibn Thawr: he
com-
pares the white tops of the mountains of Kulln/Kalln to the white robes worn by the Ghassnid
rid-
ers or caravaneersArabic arkb, plural of urkb, riders of camels or horses. For the verse, see
Bakri,
Mujam (Cairo, 1951), IV, 113334. On Byzantium and Najrn, see BAFIC, 36076.
25 On Mecca in the two centuries before the rise of Islam and on its Byzantine connection, see
BAFIC, 35060.
between the Arabs of Medina and the Ghassnids may be sketched as follows.
(1) The Ghassnids came to the rescue of the citys Arabs when their chief, Mlik
ibn al-Ajln, invoked their aid against the Jews of Medina. (2) One of the Aws
namely, Ibn al-Mughraactually became a commander in the Ghassnid army
and had the Usays inscription carved to commemorate that service. (3) The Aws
also served in a.d. 554 at the famous battle of Chalcis against the Lakhmids, cel-
ebrated by Alqama in his panegyric on the Ghassnid Arethas.26 Medina was an
important caravan station and, unlike Mecca, also a fertile oasis in which agricul-
ture flourished. It was made even more important by its Jewish inhabitants, whose
skill as ironsmiths and jewelers ensured that it was an industrial center as well.
This strong presence of Ghassnids on the West Arabian route and their influ-
ential connections provide useful context for discussing the problems that attended
the caravan trade within the Peninsula. The caravans that crossed the long dis-
tance from South Arabia to Oriens had to pass through inhospitable and dangerous
regions,27 inhabited by Arab tribes who were indispensable for the smooth running
of this international trade. They were paid to perform essential services for these
caravans: (1) they acted as escorts, offering protection from the attacks of hostile
tribesmen, who would have been attracted by the rich booty they could get from
the caravans; (2) they guided the caravans along paths where such clear Roman
strata as those in Oriens did not exist; and (3) they supplied them with provisions.
The dangers that attended the journeys along these routes can be illustrated by
one of the ayym, the battle-days of the Arabs in pre-Islamic times: arb al-Fijr,
the Sacrilegious War, so called because it broke out in the holy months of pagan
times, when war was forbidden.28 Although this war involved a caravan not of the
Ghassnids but of their Lakhmid enemies, it is instructive. The war broke out late
in the sixth century, over a caravan that was dispatched by Numn (d. 602), the
Lakhmid ruler of ra, to the inter-Arab fair of Uk z near Mecca. A tribesman
from Kinna, a group related to Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet Muammad,
murdered the caravan leader and took possession of it. War ensued between the
two groups, the Quraysh/Kinna and the Hawzin, centered between Mecca
and if. According to one account, its many encounters stretched over four
years before peace was concluded. A detailed description of one of these encoun-
ters, Yawm Nakhla,29 provides some relevant data on this trans-Arabian trade.
(1) The caravan is called lama, the technical term for the camels of the caravan
26 On Medina, see W. M. Watt, EI2, s.v. al-Madna. On the Ghassnid connection, see BASIC
II.1, 18; BASIC I.1, 12223; for Alqamas ode, see in Part II, Chapter 6, Clothes.
27 See Marqaten, Dangerous Trade Routes.
28 On this war, see J. W. Fck, Fidjr, EI2, II, 88384.
29 See M. Jd al-Mawl et al., Ayym al-Arab fi al-Jhiliyya (Cairo, 1969), 32730.
that started from Lakhmid ra.30 (2) It could not have been sent to its destination
in West Arabia before a.d. 570, the year that the Persian overlords of the Lakhmids
occupied South Arabia, which under Ethiopian rule had been a Byzantine sphere
of influence. (3) The caravan was expected to bring from Mecca back to ra its
celebrated goodsinter alia, leather and textiles of all sorts, which had originally
come from Najrn. (4) Leading the caravan and its crossing of the tribal territories
in Najd and Tihama, the ijza, was the difficult part of the caravans journey from
ra to Uk z; it was in those territories that its leader was murdered, causing the
outbreak of the war. (5) Mecca and the future Prophet Muammad were involved
in this war. J. W. Fck has accurately assessed the significance of the War of Fijr:
The real aim of it was the control of the trade routes in the Nadjd and conse-
quently the benefit of the great gains which this trade offered. In this great context
the Kuraysh [Quraysh] were leading.31
The extant sources have not preserved memories of Ghassnid caravans tra-
versing the West Arabian route southward to Najrn, but items of merchandise
emanating from Ghassnland must have made their way to the south. Their echoes
are detectable in a verse of the poet umayd ibn Thawr, of the tribe of mir, which
lived not far from South Arabia; a simile refers to Ghassnid arkb, riders or cara-
vans, which he saw there.32
B
The Ghassnids became more directly involved in the long-distance trade and its
caravans once they crossed the southern boundaries of Palaestina Tertia in north-
ern ijz. The first significant stopping place was Phoinikn. Procopius explicitly
documents the Ghassnid character of Phoinikn/Tabk, a site that belonged to
the Ghassnids and was offered to Byzantium by its master, the Ghassnid phy-
larch Ab Karib. Even after becoming Byzantine territory, it continued to have a
strong Ghassnid presence, consonant with the appointment of Ab Karib as its
phylarch.33
After Phoinikn/Tabk, the route ran through Palaestina Tertia to Petra,
where it bifurcated:34 one branch ran through Palaestina Tertia to Gaza, in
Palaestina Prima; the other went north to Bostra, the capital of the Provincia
30 For the explication of this strange term, whose root is related to the word meaning perfume,
see
S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint, Hildesheim, 1962), 176
77.
31 See Fck, Fidjr, 884.
32 See above, note 24.
33 Procopius, History, I.xix.11.
34 Some believe that Adru/Udhru, not Petra, is the station where the route divided; see Z. T.
Fiema, Late-antique Petra and Its Hinterland: Recent Research and New Interpretations, Roman
and
Byzantine Near East 3 (2002), 191252.
Arabia.35 All these routes ran through territories of the ethnically Arab Nabatae-
ans, who had become Rhomaioi after the promulgation of the Edict of Caracalla
in a.d. 212. And now in the sixth century, these territories formed the provinces
of Arabia and Palaestina Tertia, the headquarters of the two Ghassnid phylarchs
Arethas and Ab Karib. So the Ghassnids could provide the escorts, guide the
caravans, and attend to their needs with perfect ease.
While the branch of the spice route that ran to the north reached its final ter-
minus in Bostra, the branch to Gaza continued on to the eastern part of the Delta
in Egypt,36 also passing through a region that was Arab (and was called Arabia in
the Travels of Egeria), and indeed used to have an Arabarch as its governor.37 Gaza
itself, the terminus in Palaestina Prima, had had a strong Arab element since the
days of Alexander the Great;38 in the sixth century an Arab caravaneer named
Hshim, the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muammad, was buried there.
The city is therefore often referred to as the Gaza of Hshim, Gazzat Hshim.39
Before the caravans reached Gaza, they traversed the Negev, the southern desert
of Palestine, passing through what might be called the Heptapolis of Palaestina
Tertiaa cluster of seven Arab Nabataean settlements, the main city of which
was Elusa.40 Their prosperity was clearly related to the sixth-century revival of
the via odorifera, which greatly benefited the Heptapolis. Conversely, the decline
of the via odorifera after the rise of Islam, and the consequent drastic change in
trade routes, explains the decline of urban settlements in this area of Palaestina
Tertia.41
In Wd Araba, which extends from the southern tip of the Dead Sea
to Ayla/Eilat on the Gulf of Eilat, the last leg of the spice route, from Petra
35 On routes involving the via odorifera in this region of Oriens and northern ijz, see D. Graf,
Les routes romaines dArabie Ptre, Le Monde de la Bible 59 (1989), 5456; F. Zayadine,
Lespace
urbain du grand Petra; les routes et les stations caravanires, Annual of the Department of
Antiquities 36
(1992), 21730.
36 See P. Figueras, Road Linking Palestine and Egypt along the Sinai Coast, in Madaba Map
Centenary, ed. M. Piccirillo and E. Alliata, Collectio Maior 40 (Jerusalem, 1999), 21114; and
idem,
From Gaza to Pelusium: Materials for the Historical Geography of North Sinai and Southwestern
Palestine
(332 bce640 ce) (Beer-Sheva, 2000).
37 On the Arab character of this region in Egypt, see Egerias Travels, trans. J. Wilkinson
(Warminster, Eng., 1999), 11518; see also RA, 5 note 12, with its cross-references to the Arab
presence
in Egypt. On the Arabarch, see RA, 7 note 19.
38 See Jan Rets, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads
(London,
2003), index, s.v. Gaza.
39 See Ibn Ishq, The Life of Muhammad, trans. A. Guillaume (1955; reprint, Karachi, 1990),
5859.
40 On these cities of the Negev, see J. Shereshevski, Byzantine Urban Settlements in the Negev
Desert
(Beer-Sheva, 1991). The seven cities are Kurnub, Eboda, Nessana, Subeita, Elusa, Saadi, and
Ruheibeh.
41 J. Magness has disputed the view that the arrival of Islam in the region caused a decline in these
Negev cities; see The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake, Ind.,
2003).
to Gaza, ran most straight, especially in the central and southern part of the
wd.42 This area was under the phylarchal jurisdiction of the Ghassnid Ab
Karib, appointed by Justinian over Palaestina Tertia; protecting the caravans and
attending to their needs must have been among his main paramilitary duties, in
which he had been involved even when he was the chief of Phoinikn, an impor-
tant station of the spice route in northern ijz. In Roman times, the legionar-
ies of the Third Cyrenaica in this region engaged in work at the copper mines of
Wd Araba and at Timna.43 The Ghassnid foederati might have undertaken
similar work.
Such then was the involvement of the Ghassnids in the spice route, which
conveyed to the Byzantine world of the Mediterranean the luxury products of the
Far East and India. Arabia provided its own unique product: frankincense, which
grew only in the southern part of the peninsula and which became indispensable in
the fourth century for Christian rites.
III. The Wd Sir n Route
Wd Sirn in North Arabia was another major route to Oriens, running about
360 kilometers from Dmat al-Jandal in the southeast to al-Azraq in the north-
west, where its northern entrance led to the Provincia Arabia, the headquarters of
the Ghassnids (see Map III). The term wd, which suggests a narrow passage-
way, might seem misapplied to this broad lowland.44 Important personages passed
through this wd in ancient and medieval timesmost relevant to our theme, the
Salids, the federates of Byzantium in the fifth century.45 In the sixth century,
when the defense of Oriens was enhanced by the employment of the Ghassnids,
the wd was controlled by a powerful Arab group of the Outer Shield, Kalb;46
behind them were the Ghassnid foederati in the Provincia Arabia, the base
from which Arethas protected the diocese from the nomadic threat. In conduct-
ing his own campaigns in inner and eastern Arabia, in what might be termed the
Unknown War, Arethas marched through this wd when he fought such tribes as
the Tamm. The poet Alqama must have traversed the same wd when he came
as a suppliant and pleaded with the Ghassnid king for his brothers release, which
42 I should like to thank Professor Andrew Smith for informing me of the archaeological field
research that has been going on for more than a decade in the Wd Araba region, about which he
read a
paper at the Tenth Conference of the History and Archaeology of Jordan, in Washington, D.C., on
May
24, 2007. I hope to visit this wd in order to see the extent and degree to which archaeology can
help
deepen our understanding of this segment of the spice route.
43 See B. Rothenberg, Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines (London, 1972).
44 A most valuable work on Wd Sirn is Fi Shaml Gharb al-Jazra (Riyadh, 1981), by the late
Saudi scholar amad al-Jsir; see especially his description of the wd (6089).
45 On the Salids, see BAFIC, especially 34637.
46 On the Kalb and the Outer Shield, see ibid., 47879.
Map III. Wdi al-Sirhn
his splendid panegyric on the king effected.47 The wd was protected by two for-
tresses: one at the southern entrance, at Dma, and the other at the northern
entrance, at Azraq. At both, Latin inscriptions commemorate the strong Roman
presence there and the movement of Legio III Cyrenaica based in Bostra.48 When
Justinian drastically reorganized Arab federate power in Oriens, around a.d. 530,
the watch over Wd Sirn fell not to Ab Karib but to his brother Arethas, as
the supreme phylarch and king of all or almost all the Arab federates in Oriens;49
the responsibility of this watch grew even greater when the foederati became in
effect the limitanei of Oriens.50 The wd was also protected and guarded by the
powerful tribe of Kalb, which participated in the defense of the diocese as part of
both the Inner and the Outer Shield.51 The Kalbs influence reached as far as the
southern entrance of the wd at Dma.
The historical geography of Wd Sirn provides background necessary to
understand its role in the economic history of Byzantium. Its soil made it an impor-
tant source of salt, which apparently was still sold in modern times in Ammn, the
capital of the Hashimite kingdom of Jordan.52 But more significant was the wds
function as a gateway for caravans and as the site of the great fair that was held at its
southern entrance at Dma, where trans-Arabian trade routes intersected.53
IV. The Maritime Route
In addition to the three overland routes overseen in part by the Ghassnids was a
maritime route, which is less well known than the other three but also involved the
Ghassnids (see Map IV).
Palaestina Tertiathe southernmost province in Oriens, assigned by
Justinian to the Ghassnid Ab Karibhad two seaports: Zoghar on the southern
47 An incident discussed below in Clothes, Chapter 6 in Part II.
48 The more remarkable inscriptions, of a Roman centurion, are at Dma; for facsimiles, see
G. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), plates 14, 15, and see his valuable
appendix
on the importance of Wd Sirn for the prosperity of the Provincia Arabia, 15459. See also M. P.
Speidel, The Roman Road to Dumata, in Roman Army Studies (Stuttgart, 1992), 21317,
corrected by
C. Zuckerman on the extent of the fortified road, which, he observed, ran only from Bostra to
Azraq; see
his Aur. Valerianus (291/305) et Fl. Severinus (333), commandants en Arabie, et la forteresse
dAzraq,
Antiquit Tardive 2 (1994), 8388.
49 A Ghassnid presence at Dma may be implied in the verse in assn that refers to Qar Dmat;
see BASIC II.1, 24142.
50 See ibid., 2151.
51 Kalb acted through its subgroup, Kinna. For Kalb in Wd Sirn, Dma, and northern Arabia,
see L. Veccia Vaglieri, Dmat al-Jandal, EI2, II, 625.
52 . al-Jsir, Fi Shaml Gharb al-Jazra, 75.
53 The most extensive account of Dma, often called Dmat al-Jandal in the Arabic sources, may
still be found in A. Musil, Arabia Deserta: A Topographical Itinerary (New York, 1927), 53253.
The sq
of Dma is discussed at length below in Chapter 4, The Fairs.
Map IV. The Maritime Route
shore of the Dead Sea and Eilat/Ayla at the head of the Red Sea, with its two gulfs,
the Gulf of Clysma and the Gulf of Eilat/Ayla. At the southern mouth of the Gulf
of Eilat/Ayla was the island of Iotabe. The two ports and the island all were impor-
tant in the maritime trade of Byzantium in the sixth century, and the Ghassnids
were involved in all three locations.
The Red Sea became a significant maritime route for the Ptolemies after
Hippalus discovered the secret of monsoons in the first century b.c., enabling them
to be harnessed by mariners; hence the Red Sea became the gateway to commercial
relations with the world of the Indian Ocean, as spices, aromatics, precious stones,
ivory, Chinese silk, and other products were imported from both its African and
Indian shores.54 The route continued to be traveled in the Roman period, though
its importance declined in certain periods (for example, the latter part of the fifth
century). But it revived in the sixth, especially in the 520s when, during the long
reign of Justinian, South Arabia became Christianized after the Ethiopian mil-
itary intervention supported by Byzantium. It was within the next five decades,
before the Persian occupation of South Arabia in 570, that the Ghassnid involve-
ment in the Red Sea trade may be set. Bringing to light the Arab connection to this
maritime trade route, and to the overland trade route, imparts a new paramilitary
dimension to Ab Karibs role in the Byzantine economy.
1. The island of Iotabe in the straits of Tirn at the mouth of the Gulf of Eilat
was an important station on this Red Sea route. It had taken the place of Leuke
Kome as the customs clearinghouse for ships sailing to the port of Eilat at the head
of the gulf, and it thus provided the empire with considerable tax revenue.55 The
Ghassnids were involved in Iotabe on various occasions.
a. During the reign of Leo I (457474), Amorkesos, an adventurous Arab
phylarch, took possession of this island and its taxes before Leo officially appointed
him the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia. He was, most probably, a Ghassnid.56
b. During the reign of Anastasius (491518), the Ghassnid Jabala controlled
the island until Romanus, the dux of Palestine, dislodged him from it; but shortly
thereafter, he was accepted as the Ghassnid phylarch and king, thus beginning
the Ghassnid period in the history of the Arab federates in Oriens.57 The natural
presumption is that he, and his descendants after him,58 returned to occupy the
54 Agatharchides of Cnidus, a Peripatetic and guardian of a young Ptolemy in the second century
b.c., wrote On the Erythrean Sea, ed. and trans. S. M. Burstein (London, 1989); see also The
Periplus
Maris Erythraei.
55 See F. M. Abel, Lle de Jotab, Revue Biblique 47 (1939), 51038.
56 On Amorkesos, see BAFIC, 61113.
57 On Jabala and the island of Iotabe, see Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor (1883;
reprint, Hildesheim, 1963), I, 141. For analysis of the passage in Theophanes, see BAFIC, 12527;
Jabala
is discussed at greater length in BASIC I.1, 312, 6370.
58 See BAFIC, 12527.
islandbut now as phylarch of the central government, collecting the taxes for the
empire rather than for himself.
c. During the reign of Justinian, around 535, the dux of Palestine, Aratius,
took possession of the island from an occupying group whose identity was left
anonymous in Choricius account of the episode. The account does relate that
after Aratius successful campaign to free the island, he turned it over to trust-
worthy men, , who were appointed to levy taxes for the Byzantine
autokrator.59 The identity of these trustworthy men in the ambitious operation
carried out by Aratius is practically certain: they must have been the Ghassnids of
Ab Karib, who had been entrusted with the phylarchate of Palaestina Tertia only
recently and whom Procopius uncharacteristically praises.60
The data cumulatively provided by these sources indicate that the Ghassnids
collected the taxes for the empire on the island of Iotabejust as they collected
them in Bostra, the terminus of the overland spice route in the Provincia Arabia, as
the sources explicitly state.61
2. Eilat/Ayla was the window of Oriens on the world of the Indian Ocean and
the Far East. It received merchandise that arrived on ships that had stopped at Iotabe
and then sailed on after being taxed; from Eilat/Ayla, the goods were distributed
to various parts of Oriens. Some reached Tyre and Sidon in Phoenike Maritima,
whence they were conveyed to Constantinople. Because it also received merchandise
that was carried over the overland spice route of western Arabia, Eilat/Ayla was an
important emporium in this century, particularly during the reign of Justinian.
The involvement of the Ghassnids in Ayla was even deeper than in Iotabe,
and it may be presented as follows.
a. The Ghassnids were given extensive military duties in 529 throughout
Oriens, especially as they took over the responsibilities of the limitanei.62 At least
some of the Roman troops stationed around Eilat/Ayla would have been replaced
by the Ghassnids under the energetic phylarch Ab Karib. Consequently, the
Ghassnids would have guarded Byzantine interests in the region of Ayla, so close
to the pastoralist Arab threat, which they could handle better than the regular
Roman stratitai.
b. This involvement is confirmed by a verse of assn, the Ghassnid pan-
egyrist, which speaks of their being in charge of the region of Ayla on the two
59 See Choricii Gazaei opera, ed. R. Frster and E. Richsteig (Leipzig, 1929), 67.
60 Procopius, History, I.xix.11. For these operations, see BASIC I.1, 12930, 18285. Customs
were
considerable, amounting to one-eighth of the merchandises value; see P. Meyerson, The Island of
Iotab
in the Byzantine Sources: A Reprise, BASOR 287 (1992), 3 note 2.
61 On Bostra, see M. Lecker, The Levying of Taxes for the Sassanians in Pre-Islamic Medina
(Yathrib), Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002), 11520.
sides of the Gulf of Eilat.63 The Ghassnids thus had an extensive presence in and
around Ayla. One of the poets speaks of the glittering dannr (dinars) of Ayla,
which he presumably observed or received while transacting some business with
the Ghassnids there.64
c. The importance of Ayla is reflected in Koranic and Muhammadan sources
in the last days of Byzantium in Oriens. It was almost certainly referred to in the
Koran as dirat al-Bar.65 Moreover, the covenant that the Prophet Muammad
struck with Yanna ibn Ruba, the master of Ayla, refers to the security given by
the Prophet to the caravans reaching it by land and the ships arriving by sea.66 In
the later Islamic sources, which are more explicit and informative on Ayla, the city
is described as very prosperous, and the presumption is that it had been so in the
sixth century.67
Ayla was for centuries an Arab Nabataean city, whose inhabitants became
Arab Rhomaioi when Caracalla issued his edict in a.d. 212. They continued in that
status, speaking Arabic as their native language, in the sixth and seventh century, as
is clear from the Prophet Muammads covenant with them. The Ghassnids, who
levied the tax on the caravaneers of the spice route at Bostra, may also have been
responsible for levying it on those who sailed the Red Sea on their way to Iotabe and
thence to Ayla, especially if they were Arab merchants. The Ghassnids thus had a
presence in the Gulf of Eilat in both Iotabe and Aylaan outgrowth of the strong
Byzantine presence in the Red Sea in this period.68 One demonstration of that pres-
ence is the number of ships that sailed from the Red Seas northern Byzantine ports
to support the Negus of Ethiopia in his South Arabian campaign. The survivors
63 See Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971),
I, 308, verse 9.
64 For this verse, see Uaya ibn al-Jul in Yqt, Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 1955), I, 292,
Column B, verse 2.
65 Koran, 7:163.
66 See M. Hamidullah, Majmat al-Wathiq al-Siysiyya, li al-Ahd al-Nabawi (Beirut, 1987),
16118. The covenant clearly implies that the inhabitants of Ayla with whom the Prophet dealt were
Arabs, and it reflects the new world orderthe Prophet is now himself taxing the Rhomaioi Arabs
who
earlier had taxed him when he arrived at the frontier as a caravan leader.
Nldeke thought that Yanna ibn Ruba was a descendant of Ab Karib, whom he believed was
a Kindite; see GF, 17 note 1. But he came to that conclusion before the discovery of the Sabaic Dam
inscription of Abraha, which proved that Ab Karib was the brother of Arethas, a Ghassnid.
Nldeke
recognized his mistake in his Nachlass.
67 Ayla was especially prosperous in the Mamlk period. These Islamic sources have important
data
on Ayla, now al-Aqaba; one of them, Khitat al-Maqrzi, refers to the existence of a bb maqd,
possibly
a vaulted porch, that contained a military station for the Romans (referred to as Qaysar, Caesar),
where
taxes (miks) were levied; see the index of Y. Ghawanmeh, al-Trikh al-Siysi li Sharq al-Urdunn fi
Asr
Dawlat al-Mamlk al-l (Amman, 1982), s.v. al-Aqaba.
68 In effect, the Red Sea became a Byzantine lake, especially in the reigns of Justin I and Justinian;
see J. Ruska, Mila, EI2, VII, 4142.
from the martyrdoms of Najrn around 520 had come to Jbiya in the Golan to
ask their relative, the Ghassnid king Jabala, for military help; though Jabala could
not at that time aid them, the emperor Justin, according to the Martyrium Arethae,
soon thereafter sent fifteen ships from Ayla, twenty from Clysma, seven from
Iotabe, and two from Berenice.69 Surely these ships, especially those that sailed
from Ayla and Iotabe, also carried Ghassnid troops, eager to exact vengeance for
the martyrs, which they had been unable to do without Byzantine support.
3. Although seafaring and water-borne traffic in the Dead Sea is not explic-
itly mentioned in the contemporary sources, the Madaba Mosaic map does include
a scene depicting ships. That evidence from the mosaictogether with references
in the Islamic sources of later times, when the two shores of the sea were similarly
united under one powersuggests that some vessels traversed the Dead Sea. Dubbed
Mare Mortuum, it did not support fishing, but there must have been some traffic in
such products as bitumen and salt; the Islamic sources specifically name indigo, nla,
and boats built at Zoghar that reached the Dead Sea shore near Jericho.70
69 See BALA III, 39 and note 53.
70 See Gawanmeh, al-Trikh al-Siysi li Sharq al-Urdunn fi Asr Dawlat al-Mamlk al-l.
IV
The Fairs
T
he aswq (plural of sq), the markets or fairs, were a key feature of the eco-
nomic and social life of the pre-Islamic Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula as
they were in the Byzantine Empire. They were the centers at which the urban and
the pastoral sectors of Arab society met and connected within an inter-Arab and
intra-Arabian framework.1 The aswq became more important when, after mon-
soons were harnessed, the Red Sea began offering an alternative route for interna-
tional trade between the two worlds of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean;
the Ptolemies, Romans, Byzantines, and Ethiopians subsequently began partic-
ipating in this maritime commerce, sometimes as competitors with one another
and with the imyarites of South Arabia. The importance of these intra-Arabian
markets reached its peak when hostilities between Byzantium and Persia resumed
in the sixth century and war broke out in the reign of every emperor and shah
of that century. Because of these conflicts, traffic shifted from the Mesopotamian
route to the overland Arabian route, the famous via odorifera, which extended
from South Arabia to the southern part of Oriens, comprising Palaestina Tertia
and the Provincia Arabia. The same century also witnessed the rise of Mecca to the
position of the dominant Arab caravan city, as nearby Uk z became the primary
market of the Arabs in pre-Islamic timesa development of great importance to
the rise of Islam and the Arab Muslim Conquests of the seventh century.
Nothing better illustrates the surge in the economic life of Arabia and the
Arabs than the rise of about ten of these fairs, which sprang up throughout the
Peninsula.2 This feverish intra-Arabian economic expansion in sixth-century Arabia
1 For the aswq, see T. Bianquis and P. Guichard, S k, EI2, IX, especially 78687 (on the pre-
Islamic period); see also I. M. ammr, Aswq al-Arab (Beirut, 1979); S. al-Afghn, Aswq al-
Arab
fi al-Jhiliyya wa al-Islam (Cairo, 1993). For the fair, , in Byzantine life, see Ph.
Koukoules,
Byzantinon bios kai politismos (Athens, 1949), III, 27083, S. Vryonis, The Panegyris of the
Byzantine
Saint, in The Byzantine Saint: University of Birmingham Fourteenth Spring Symposium of
Byzantine
Studies, ed. S. Hackel (London, 1981), 196227; L. de Ligt, Fairs and Markets in the Roman
Empire:
Economic and Social Aspects of Periodic Trade in a Pre-industrial Society (Amsterdam, 1993).
2 A highly intelligent account of this surge and the importance of the aswq as local trade within
the Peninsula may be found in M. B. Piotrovski, Lconomie de lArabie prislamique, in
LArabie avant
Map V. The Three Arab Fairs, Aswq, in Oriens
benefited the Ghassnids, both as protectors of the caravans and as conveners and
tax collectors at these fairs.
I
The Ghassnids were involved in these markets in two different areas, one outside
Oriens in the Arabian Peninsula and the other within Oriens.
Arabia
The sources are clear on the Ghassnid ties to one important market in Arabia,
that of Dma. Dma was an important strategic site for Byzantium, both because
lIslam, ed. S. Noja (Aix-en-Provence, 1994), 21139 (reviewed by the present writer in
International
Journal of Middle East Studies 32 [2000], 53841). For the medieval Arabic sources on the aswq,
see
al-Yaqbi, Trkh (Beirut, n.d.), I, 31314; Ibn abb, Kitb al-Muabbar, ed. I. Lichtenstdter
(1942;
reprint, Beirut, n.d.), 26368; Ab-Ali al-Marzqi, Kitb al-Azmina wa al-Amkina (Hyderabad,
1914),
II, 16970.
Yaqbi lists ten fairs (for the English version, see R. G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs [London,
2001], 10910); though ammrs work (Aswq al-Arab) makes clear that the actual number was
higher, these ten were the most important.
35 The Fairs
it was located at the southern entrance of an important gateway to Oriens from the
Arabian Peninsula, namely Wd Sirn (Map III), and because it was the loca-
tion of a fair that had international as well as Arabian significance.3 The Byzantine
presence there was simultaneously direct, through its Ghassnid foederati, and
indirect, through allied groups such as Kinda and Kalb. The sources speak of the
involvement of the Ghassnids in this sq, noting that they used to run it alter-
nately with Kalb or a Kalb subdivision, the Kinna.4 The merchants who used to
frequent the sq were tithed by the Ghassnids when they were in charge of it. One
of the sources uses the verb ghalaba,5 gain the upper hand, to characterize the
alternating control of the sq between Ghassn and Kalba curious term to use
of allies. Another source, however, relates the term to a contest of wits between the
two groups that involved solving an enigma, ujiya;it explicitly states that taxes,
ushr, were levied.6
Of all the fairs in Arabia, the one in Dma had the most international impor-
tancean importance derived from the strategic position of Dma itself at the
intersection of several routes, halfway between ra and Persia on the one hand
and Mecca and Medina on the other: it was a central point on an international
trade route running from east to west. One of the two main sources on aswq gives
it more space than all the other fairs of Arabia. Apparently, the sq was a site of
Byzantine-Persian rivalry,7 which further endowed it with international impor-
tance and naturally involved the Ghassnids, as foederati.8
3 On the sq of Dma, see Afghn, Aswq al-Arab, 23239, and ammr, Aswq al-Arab,
16669.
4 For the medieval Arabic sources on the sq of Dma, see Yaqbi, Trkh, I, 27071, and the
expansive account in Ibn abb, al-Muabbar, 26364. Ibn Habb provides a detailed description of
how business in the sq was conducted and what role the Ghassnids played; M. Lecker has
clarified
some of its confusing elements in Were Customs Dues Levied at the Time of the Prophet
Muhammad?
Al-Qantara 22 (2001), 1943 (on Dma, see 2728).
5 Yaqbi, Trkh, 270.
6 Ibn abb, al-Muabbar, 264.
7 The rivalry is perceptively noted by Lecker in Were Customs Dues Levied? For the Sasanid
presence in the Arabian Peninsula and its economic implications, see M. Morony, The Late
Sasanian
Economic Impact on the Arabian Peninsula, Nme-ye Irn-e Bstn 1.2 (2002), 2637.
8 The work of the most recent traveler to Dma, the scholar amad al-Jsir, should be noted; see
Fi Shaml Gharb al-Jazra (Riyadh, 1981), 52833. Inter alia he refers to a church that used to be in
the
vicinity of the fortress, the qala (530), perhaps recalling the phrase qar Dma in assns verse;
see
Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 75,
verse 20.
A verse in an ode by the Umayyad poet Kuthayyir Azza (d. 723) refers to a monk, to merchants,
and
to pilgrims in Dma, suggesting that much of Dmas pre-Islamic Christianity persisted at least
until the
middle of the Islamic Umayyad period. Reference to pilgrims might also imply that Dma was a
pilgrimage
center, perhaps featuring a martyrion in which the relics of some martyrs (those of Najrn?) were
deposited.
Dma thus emerges as a sq that, like Dayr Ayyb in Oriens, may have had some religious
significance. For
the verse, see Abdulla al-Majdhb, al-Murshid il-a Fahm Ashr al-Arab (Cairo, 1995), I, 436.
Oriens
Three important markets were located in Oriens,9 and they all involved the
Ghassnids (see Map V).
1. The sq of Dayr Ayyb. Nowadays an insignificant village called Shaykh
Sad,10 in ancient and Byzantine times Dayr Ayyb was much more important. It
lay 10 kilometers to the south of Jbiya in the Golan. As its name indicates, it was
related in the popular mind to Ayyb, the biblical Job, a connection that has sur-
vived in the form of a maqm, a religious site associated with him in awrn, in
Ghassnland proper. This biblical figure was of importance to the Ghassnids as
warriors, since in war they invoked not just St. Sergius but also Ayyb, Job,11 cel-
ebrated in the Bible for his endurance and fortitude in the face of adversityquali-
ties that the Ghassnids saw in themselves. They identified so strongly with the
virtue of abr (endurance) that a clan or a subdivision within the Ghassnids was
called the ubr: that is, those who were known for their endurance.12
The sources state that Dayr Ayyb was the first stop for the Arabs of the
Peninsula after they completed their transactions at the three aswq of ijz
Uk z, Majanna, and Dhu al-Majz. Their caravans would then proceed to the three
markets of Oriens, beginning with Dayr Ayyb.13 And because this sq was also
one of the loca sancta of Oriens, it brings to mind Uk z, the pan-Arab sq near the
sites of the pre-Islamic Arab pilgrimage to Araft; for the Byzantine world, it recalls
the fair at Thessalonike, so closely associated with the feast day of St. Demetrios.
2. Bostra. The second sq visited by the caravans from Arabia was Bostra, the
most important of the three markets in Oriens. The town had been founded by
Nabataean Arabs and had become the capital of the Provincia Arabia. The rise to
prominence of the West Arabian spice route enhanced its importance, since Bostra
was one of the routes two termini (the other being Gaza). It therefore developed
into a great emporium frequented by the Arab caravans carrying international
goods that hailed ultimately from Abyssinia, South Arabia, and India.14
9 All unknown to the medieval sources Ibn abb and Jaqbi, but known to Marzqi; see
al-Azmina wa al-Amkina, II, 16970.
10 See R. Dussaud, Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et mdivale (Paris, 1927), 244.
11 See Al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed. S. Fayal (Beirut, 1968), 53, verse 16. The biblical figure appears in
the Koran (38:4144). See also the appendix to Chapter 11 in Part II.
12 The association of abr with Ghassn, and the unit called al-ubr or al-ubur, survived well into
the Umayyad period, since it appears in the verse of al-Akhal, the poet laureate of the Umayyad
caliph
Abd al-Malik; see his Dwn, ed. A. lni (Beirut, 1969), 106, verse 4 (with the footnote making
clear
that assn in the text should read Ghassn).
13 See ammr, Aswq al-Arab, 19596, and Afghn, Aswq al-Arab, 36263.
14 On Bostra, the standard work is M. Sartre, Bostra, des origines lIslam (Paris, 1985) (see G. W.
Bowersocks review in American Journal of Philology 106 [1985], 13942); see also A. Abel,
Bosr,
EI2 I, 127577.
37 The Fairs
The Arabic sources single out for special mention two items for which Bostra
was known among the Arabs: the wines sold there, whether locally pressed or
brought thither from other parts of Oriens, and its swords with broad blades,
safi, mentioned in Arabic pre-Islamic poetry.15 The swords prominence at this
fair suggests that there may have been a fabrica in Bostra in addition to the better-
known fabricae in Oriens.
One sign of Bostras importance is the length of its sq, which was held for
twenty-five days, a fact that no doubt derives from its being the terminus of the
spice route. The sq clearly kept its importance in Islamic Umayyad times, as its
duration increased to thirty or forty days.16
With the rise of Mecca to a dominant position as the main caravan city of
Arabia, Bostra became a final destination of the Meccans and their caravans.17
One of the caravaneers, according to the sources, was none other than the future
Prophet of Islam, who is supposed to have visited Bostra on two occasionsonce
as a child in the caravan of his uncle Ab lib and again when he himself led the
caravans of his wife Khadja. It was during one of these visits that he is said to have
met the monk Bara in a monastery, the famous Dayr Bostra.18
As the capital of Provincia Arabia, the main Ghassnid province under the
celebrated Arethas, the supreme phylarch, and until the end of the dynasty, Bostra
was a key city for the Ghassnids. There were kept the regalia of the Ghassnid
kings.19 So, as the guardians of Bostras sq full of peninsular Arabs, the Ghassnids
acted for Byzantium as they tithed Arabias caravaneers, who brought their mer-
chandise thither.
It was only natural that the Ghassnids should have been responsible for levy-
ing the tax in Bostra. The sources attest to their delegation of that charge to the
tribe of Judm at the point where the merchants first crossed the Byzantine fron-
tier in Palaestina Tertia, when the merchandise was still in transit.20 In Bostra,
selling and buying were taxed, again by Arabic-speaking Ghassnids dealing with
Arabic-speaking peninsulars.21
3. Adrit. After Bostra, the Arabs and Arabian caravans visited the third sq, at
15 See Afghn, Aswq al-Arab, 37071.
16 See Marzqi, al-Azmina wa al-Amkina, 167.
17 On Bostras relations with Mecca and ijz, see Sartre, Bostra, 12932.
18 See S. Gero, The Legend of the Monk Bara: The Cult of the Cross and Iconoclasm, in La
Syrie de Byzance Islam, ed. P. Canivet and J.-P. Rey-Coquais (Damascus, 1992), 4757.
20 See Chapter 5, below.
21 See M. Leckers ingenious argument and the sources he cites for the phrase taxes of Bostra,
kharj Busr, in The Levying of Taxes for the Sassanians in Pre-Islamic Medina (Yathrib),
Jerusalem
Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002), 10926; on the taxes of Bostra, 11520.
Adrit. It lay to the northwest of Bostra in the Bathaniyya region (biblical Bshn),
and it survives nowadays in Syria as the chief town of awrn, called Dera.22
The sources that mention it make clear that the sq of Adrit lasted a long
time, apparently longer than the other two aswq. Al-Marzqi, a writer of the
fifth century of the hijra, says that it was still functioning in his day, some five
centuries after the fall of the Ghassnids.23 Adrit, like Dayr Ayyb, was under
Ghassnid phylarchal control in the Provincia Arabia. The few sources extant
do not expressly state that the Ghassnids levied the taxes on its caravaneersa
responsibility (according to these sources) they had for Bostras, as Arabs dealing
with Arab tradersbut it seems very likely. One sign of the Ghassnid associa-
tion with Adrit is provided by the Kindite poet Imru al-Qays, a relative of the
Ghassnids, who visited it, as a verse of his reveals.24 The association is confirmed
by the famous battle of Adrit in a.d. 614. The Ghassnids were employed to
defend Oriens against the Persians during the Persian war of Heraclius reign,
and they participated in the battle fought at Adrit.25 Such links strongly suggest
Ghassnid involvement in the town and in the sq associated with it.26
It is not clear whether Adriat had any religious significance (such as Dayr
Ayyb had), which would have made its sq more attractive. When members of the
Jewish community of Ban al-Nar were expelled from Yathrib/Medina in a.d. 626,
they chose to settle in Adrit; perhaps that was their place of origin,27 or perhaps the
place held some religious association for them. 28 Such an association would also have
22 On Adrit, see Dussaud, Topographie historique de la Syrie, 325ff.
23 Marzqi, al-Azmina wa al-Amkina, 170.
24 See Imru al-Qays, Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1958), 31, verse 2. The poet, known as the
vagabond king and a confirmed hedonist, no doubt found appealing the entertainments that such
aswq provided to draw in more purchasers. Adrit was noted for its wine, an added attraction to
Imru
al-Qays; on its wine, see the verse of the Hudhali poet cited by P. Crone in Meccan Trade and the
Rise of
Islam (Princeton, 1987), 105 note 92.
25 On the battle of Adrit, see W. E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Arab Conquests (Cambridge,
1992), 11417. The battle and the subsequent fall of Jerusalem to the Persians are alluded to in srat
al-Rm in the Koran (30:13).
26 That Muwiya II, the son of the caliph Yazid ibn-Muwiya, was born in Adrit might provide
further support to its association with the Ghassnids. Yazid used to frequent Ghassnid uwwrin
and Jalliq, where he could drink and hunt, and perhaps Adrit was another Ghassnid resort where
he
spent some time.
27 So thought the late Shlomo Goitein; Adrit had an important Jewish community in pre-Islamic
times. A connection with the Jews of Medina is indicated by the arrival for the Jews of seven
caravans in
one day from Adrit and Bostra (see Crone, Meccan Trade, 102, 140 note 36).
28 Both the community of Ban al-Nar and the other Jewish tribe in Medina, the Qurayza, called
themselves al-Khinn, a reference to their priestly descent; they therefore might have sought out a
dwelling place with some religious associations. However, none can be predicated for Adrit,
biblical
Edrei, other than its falling within the portion allotted to the half-tribe of Manassah; see M. Avi-
Yonah,
39 The Fairs
been accepted by the Christians of the empire, as Job/Ayyb was.29 But in any case,
Adrit was a nodal point that dominated north-south communications east of the
Jordan;30 as such, its sq enjoyed great drawing power, to which its Jewish commu-
nity could have contributed.31 The Jews in this period were active as craftsmen and
agriculturalistsas demonstrated by the prosperity of Yathrib/Medina, which had
three Jewish tribal groups, celebrated for their craftsmanship and agriculture.32
Whether there were aswq in Oriens other than these three remains an
open question. One tantalizing verse in the Dwn of the Ghassnid panegyrist
al-Nbigha explicitly refers to a sq that was held, muqm, either at a place called
Luqmn or by a wine merchant called Luqmn.33 Regardless of its other uncertain-
ties, the verse is clear on the existence of a sq to which, according to the poet, the
wine vats came from Capitoliasone of the cities of the Decapolis and within the
Provincia Arabia. Hence a Ghassnid association with this sq can probably be
predicated, since the poem was in praise of a Ghassnid king: the poet was describ-
ing the transfer of wine from one place in the Provincia Arabia (the headquarters
of the Ghassnids) to another, and the subject was wine, so dear to the Ghassnids
and the poet, who may have tasted it at that sq.
Needless to say, these aswq were good publicity for the Ghassnids and
Byzantium, since the Arab merchants would return home bearing tales of a pow-
erful and well-ordered Ghassnid phylarchate. In addition to exchanging material
goods and commodities, merchants and customers naturally also exchanged ideas
and other intangibles, as suggested by the account of the encounter of the monk
Bara and Muammad.34
Edrei, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, VI, 381. On the Jews of Adriat during the Persian invasion, see
Kaegi,
Byzantium and the Early Arab Conquests, 11617.
29 Dayr Ayyb remained in Islamic times a locus sanctus for Muslims as well, becoming a place of
pilgrimage; the biblical figure appears in the Koran (38:4144). See Ali al-Harawi, Kitb al-Ishrt
il
Marifat al-Ziyrt, ed. J. Sourdel-Thomine (Damascus, 1953), 16, and her translation of the work
into
French, Guide des lieux de plerinage (Damascus, 1957); see also the more recent edition and
translation
by J. M. Meri, A Lonely Wayfarers Guide to Pilgrimage, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam
19
(Princeton, 2004), 35.
30 Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Arab Conquests, 115, based on J. B. Glubb, The Great Arab
Conquests (London, 1963), 136, 14043.
31 For a recent notice of the three aswq in OriensBostra, Dayr Ayyb, and Adritin the
Islamic
context, see A. Binggeli, Foires et plerinages sur la route du Hajj, Aram 1819 (200607), 571
76.
32 See W. M. Watt, al-Madina, EI2, V, especially 99495.
33 For the verse, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, 160, verse 10. The editor, citing Ibn al-Kalb, prefers to
understand Luqmn as the name of the wine merchant rather than of the sq. See also below, Part II,
Chapter 5, note 59.
34 The many fairs within the Arabian Peninsula functioned in the life of the pre-Islamic Arabs as a
great force unifying them in language, ethos, and mores. For more on this, see the present writer in
The
Arabs in Late Antiquity (Beirut, 2008), 79.
II
So much for the regional fairs, involving international trade and traders. Local
aswq must surely also have existed within Ghassnid towns; Jbiya or Jalliq
is inconceivable without its local sq. Nevertheless, for an accurate account, the
urban topographer of the Ghassnid landscape must await the excavations of the
field archaeologist of Jbiya or of some other Ghassnid town.
Although the exiguous extant sources make no reference to local aswq,35 the
contemporary scene in ijz (in Medina and Mecca) offers an informative analogy.
A sq in Medina was run by the Jewish tribe of Qaynuq, and possibly another was
run by the Nabataeans.36 In Mecca, however, the great caravan city, fairs certainly
existed, as attested in Islams holy book, addressed to Muammad, who had led the
caravans before his prophetic call. In one of the verses of the Koran he is referred
to by the unbelieving Meccans as one who walked in the aswq of Mecca.37 The
Prophet is also associated with aswq in Medina, whither he emigrated in 622.
The sq in a Ghassnid town such as Jbiya must have also been a center of
social life, much as the agora and the forum were for the Greeks and the Romans.
Whether the Ghassnid sq had the agoranomos of the Graeco-Roman world or
the mutasib of later Islamic times is not clear, but it must have had some kind of a
market supervisor or inspector. The sq became one of the main distinguishing ele-
ments in the tripartite structure of the Islamic city, the other two being the mosque
and the governors mansion, Dr al-imra.38 If in the Ghassnid cityscape such a
tripartite urban structure obtained, the cathedral/monastery would have taken on
those functions carried out by the mosque in the later Islamic period.
35 It is possible that the sq referred to in al-Nbighas verse (see note 33) was local.
36 For the aswq of Medina, see Watt, al-Madina, 995; Bianquis and Guichard, S k, 787; and
S. al-ni, Kab Ibn-Mlik al-Anri (Baghdad, 1966), 66.
37 Koran, 25:7.
38 See G. E. von Grnebaum, The Structure of the Muslim Town, in Islam: Essays in the Nature
and the Growth of a Cultural Tradition, 2nd ed. (London, 1961), 14158.
V
The Ghassnids as Tax Collectors
I
n addition to protecting caravans and ships until their merchandise reached the
termini of Gaza and Bostra, the Ghassnids also engaged in another activity that
brought substantial financial benefit to the Empirenamely, taxing that merchan-
dise. The tax was said by the fifth-century historian Malchus to have amounted
to one-tenth of the value of the goods and was probably even more, one-eighth.1
A recently rediscovered Arabic source, al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, explicitly doc-
uments this function of the Arab foederati.2
This work states that a certain Zinb, a member of the tribe of Judm, used
to tax the Meccan merchants in gold for the Ghassnids.3 Judm was a tribe of
the Inner Shield,4 an ally of Byzantium; after the extension of Ghassnid power
around a.d. 530 over the whole of Oriens, the tribe was subordinated to the
Ghassnid phylarch. Arethas, as commander in chief of the entire federate force
in Oriens, could distribute federate responsibility, as when he dispatched one of
his generals to be in charge of a fortress in the region of Usays. Similarly, he or his
brother, Ab Karib, would have empowered Zinb to impose the tax on the mer-
chandise that passed through the designated stations at the frontier where foreign
merchants crossed into Palaestina Tertia, Byzantine territory. Another source
associates the Ghassnids directly with taxes, which they collected from foreign
1 See P. Meyerson, The Island of Iotab in the Byzantine Sources: A Reprise, BASOR 287
(1992),
3 note 2.
2 Advertised to the scholarly world by M. J. Kister and published in 1984; see Ab al-Baq Hibat
Allah, al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, ed. S. Daradka and M. Khurayst, 2 vols. (Amman, 1984).
That the Arab foederati in Oriens used to collect the taxes levied on other Arabs who crossed the
frontier from Arabia is clearly stated in the sources on the Salids, the fifth-century predecessors of
the
Ghassnids. See M. ibn abb, Kitb al-Muabbar, ed. I. Lichtenstdter (1942; reprint, Beirut, n.d.),
37071; he notes that the Ghassnids, before becoming the foederati of Byzantium in the sixth
century,
were themselves taxed.
3 See Ab al-Baq Hibat Allah, al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, I, 67 (wa kana Zinb . . . shiran li
Ibn-Jafna bi al-Shm). The details and specificity of what follows (68, 70) speak to the authenticity
of
the statement on the tax levied by Zinb on Quraysh for the Ghassnids. Zinbs son, Raw, is a
better-
known figure of early Islamic times.
4 On the Inner Shield of Byzantium, see BAFIC, 47778.
traders belonging to various Arabian tribes not on the frontier but within Oriens,
at the famous Arab sq of Bostra.5 The two sources reveal the paramilitary duties
of the Arab foederati of Byzantium in the economic sector; some of the foederati
were Ghassnid, and some belonged to other tribes of the Inner Shield, such as
the Judm.
Byzantium had an official called , commerciarius, who con-
trolled trade on the frontier and collected the taxes.6 Because the Ghassnids and
other Arab federates in Oriens performed that function at the Byzantine frontier
where the various trade routes crossed it, they were commerciarii if not de jure then
at least de facto. They thereby contributed much to the Byzantine economy, since
the value of the merchandise that was carried along the four international routes
and thus the tax imposed on itwas considerable.
5 See BASIC I.1, 12223. The Ghassnid involvement in taxes at Bura (Bostra) and its fair is indi-
cated in various sources, which have been carefully examined by M. Lecker; see his The Levying
of
Taxes for the Sassanians in Pre-Islamic Medina (Yathrib), Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
27
(2002), 11617 and notes 3538; 11819 and notes 4337; 120.
The Ghassnids had a strong presence in Bostra, as most recent research on the Ghassnids has
shown (BASIC I.1 and I.2; see also Lecker, The Levying of Taxes, 119 note 48). The sq at
which taxes
were levied was most probably near but outside Bostra. There were two Sadrs in the Fertile
Crescent,
the better-known one in ra (mentioned in Lecker, 120), and another in southern Jordan, Sadr
Afra;
hence its association with Ghassn is correct.
6 See N. Oikonomides, Silk Trade and Production in Byzantium from the Sixth to the Ninth
Century: The Seals of Kommerkiarioi, DOP 40 (1986), 3353.
VI
A Ghassnid Dyarchy in Oriens
T
he foregoing pages have revealed the role of the Ghassnids in the economic
history of Byzantium in the sixth century. This leads us back to Justinians
Arab and Arabian policy and its economic dimension.1
Around a.d. 530 Justinian created the new Arab phylarchate in Oriens under
the famous Arethas, whose brother Ab Karib was given an autonomous or pos-
sibly an independent command over Palaestina Tertia. These actions reflected
Justinians understanding of the military and economic situation in Oriens.
Arethas was pitted against the Persians and the Lakhmids in the north of Oriens,
while Ab Karib in the south had to deal with the pastoralist threat from Arabia.
But it was also through his province that the two most important of the four inter-
national routes passed, and these were his responsibility. Hence the importance of
his assignment as phylarch of Palaestina Tertia. The following observations on his
assignment are relevant to assessing the soundness of Justinians Arab policy.2
1. The rising importance of the spice and the maritime routes in the sixth
century, both of which passed through Palaestina Tertia, justified the imperial
decision to assign a special phylarch to look after them, since the chief phylarch,
Arethas, was busy in the north fighting Persia and the Lakhmids.
In Justinians drastic reorganization of federate Ghassnid power in Oriens
in 529, Arethas received the lions share as the archphylarch and king. As a result,
commentators have tended to overlook Ab Karib, who was endowed with the
phylarchate of Palaestina Tertia. The present elucidation of his role in the eco-
nomic history of Oriens and Byzantium in the sixth century restores his image in
relation to his more famous brother and presents federate Oriens as a virtual dyar-
chy, in which phylarchal responsibility was divided more or less equally between
the two brothers, each performing a function peculiar to his assignment in Oriens.
1 For the most recent description of Justinians Arab and Arabian policy, see BALA III, xixvi.
2 These remarks may be added to what I have said elsewhere on his Arab and Arabian policy;
see ibid. and BASIC II.1, 2832.
The one complemented the other as they discharged their duties in the service of
the military and economic interests of the empire.
Nothing illustrates better the important status of Ab Karib as co-equal or
almost co-equal with Arethas than the Sabaic Dam inscription of Abraha, the
Ethiopian ruler of South Arabia. In that monumental epigraphical document,
Abraha recalled the visit (around a.d. 540) to him in Marib of the ambassadors
of the rulers of the Near East; in that embassy, Byzantium was represented both
by its own ambassador and by the ambassadors of the two brothers, Arethas and
Ab Karib.3
2. The Diocletianic enlargement of Palaestina Tertia entailed the addition of
the Negev and the part of the Provincia Arabia south of the Arnon river, including
Petra. The enlargement thus made the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, Ab Karib,
responsible for more of the spice route.
3. Ab Karib had been involved in the spice route even before his appoint-
ment as phylarch of Tertia, since he was already in control of Phoinikn (Tabk),
a station on the spice route, before it became part of Byzantine territory with his
enlistment as phylarch.4
4. The trade that moved along the most important of the four routes, the spice
route, was conducted not by the imyarites but by the Arabs after imyar fell to
the Ethiopians around 525. Mecca emerged as the principal caravan city of western
Arabia. Hence the decision to appoint Arabs, such as Ab Karib, to deal with the
Arab caravans of the spice route and with their taxation was sound.
5. Of all the exports of Arabia, the item most significant to the Christian
Roman Empire was frankincense. After first disdaining it as a symbol of pagan
worship, the church finally accepted frankincense in the late fourth century.5
Produced only in aramawt in South Arabia, it was brought to Byzantium by
Arab merchants and taxed at the frontier by such Arab officials as Ab Karib.
3 See Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, Part IV, Book 2 (Paris, 1911), 28081, lines 8792. J. M.
Sol Sol has made the celebrated inscriptions numbers 541 and 540 the subject of a monograph;
see Los
dos grandes inscripciones sudarbigas del dique de Mrib (Barcelona, 1960). For the reference to
Arethas
and Ab Karib, see lines 9092.
4 According to Procopius, Ab Karib presented it to the emperor as a gift; History, I.xix.813.
5 See R. Taft and A. Kazhdan, Incense, ODB, II, 991.
VII
Other Contributions
I
n what other ways did the Ghassnids contribute to the economy of Oriens
within the diocese, in addition to protecting Oriens from nomads, protect-
ing the caravans of the international routes, and controlling the fairs held in
the diocese?
1. One verse of assn, the Ghassnid poet laureate, speaks of the meadows
of the Ghassnids where cattle and goats grazed.1 If this verse accurately captures
a Ghassnid bucolic scene, it indicates that they raised livestock. That the area the
poet describes is Ghassnid is clear from the verse diyrun min Ban al-ass
(homesteads of Ban al-ass).2
2. In another poem, assn speaks of visiting the Ghassnids in a region that
lay between Kurm and Jiz al-Qastal.3 If kurm is not a proper noun but the plu-
ral of karm, meaning vineyard, then it is possible that the Ghassnids planted
vines and other crops. So apparently the Ghassnids engaged in some agriculture,
including animal management, though the extant sources have little detail on this
aspect of Ghassnid economic life.
3. Wd Araba, the depression that separated Sinai from Arabia, was known
since ancient Pharaonic times for its wealth in copper. Its mines were worked by
the Egyptians and later by the Arab Midianites and Kenites, the clan of Jethro
(known from the Bible as Moses father-in-law). Even in Roman times the copper
mines were still active. Of most relevance for the Ghassnids and their involve-
ment in the economic life of Oriens is the evidence of a Latin inscription set up
I, 17, verse 3.
2 Ibid., verse 2. Ban al-ass belonged to the clan of al-Najjr of Medina, to which assn also
belonged. Some of the Medinan Arabs, relatives of the Ghassnids, apparently lived in Ghassnland
for example, Ibn al-Mughra (who belonged to the Aws of Medina), the commander of the Usays
mili-
tary station. On Ban al-ass, see Ibn azm, Jamharat Ansb al-Arab, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo,
1962),
350. On Ibn al-Mughra, see BASIC I.1, 12223.
3 See assn, Dwn, I, 75, verse 17.
as an epitaph, which suggests that when Legio III Cyrenaica was transferred from
Libya to Provincia Arabia, some of its members worked in the copper mines.4 The
Araba depression was within the phylarchal jurisdiction of the Ghassnid Ab
Karib, and it is possible that the foederati were asked to do some work related to
these mines during his phylarchate.
4 See the work of B. Rothenberg, both his The Egyptian Mining Temple at Timna (London, 1988)
and Timna: Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines (London, 1972). On the biblical association of the
copper
mines with the Kenite Jethro and with Moses, see Timna, 18283; on the Roman copper industry,
the
references to the Third Cyrenaica legion, and the epitaph, see 22223.
VIII
The Wealth of Arabia
S
trabos tripartite division of the Arabian Peninsula into Petraea, Deserta, and
Felix suggests that the greater part of Arabia, Inner Arabia, was desert. The
preceding pages, with their emphasis on trade routes, might also have given the
impression that the Arabian Peninsula was merely a transit area through which
long-distance trade and traffic passed. The reality is quite different. The better-
informed classical writers perceived Arabia as the land of wonders and of pre-
cious metals. This was the view presented by such authors as Diodorus Siculus,
who wrote of the gold of western Arabia, as well as medieval Arab writers such
as al-Hamdn, who described its gold and silver.1 Centuries earlier, the Bible had
referred to the four hundred and twenty talents brought to King Solomon from
Ophir, associated with a distant part of Arabia, and also to the gold brought by
the Queen of Sheba from South Arabia and given to Solomon.2 All these sporadic
references to the wealth of Arabia have been confirmed in the most scientific and
detailed manner in a volume by Gene Heck that has appeared recently.3 But first let
us discuss Byzantine interest in Arabian gold during late antiquity.
1 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book III, section 45, ed. and trans. C. H. Oldfather et
al., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), II, 22024; al-Hamdn, Kitb al-
Jawharatayn,
Das Buch von den beiden Edelmetallen: Gold und Silber, ed. and trans. C. Toll (Uppsala, 1968),
14557
(on gold and ijz, 137, 141). See also D. M. Dunlop, Sources of Gold and Silver in Islam
according to
Hamdn, Studia Islamica 8 (1957), 2949; R. G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs (London, 2001),
110
12. On Byzantine gold mines, see S. Vryonis, The Question of Byzantine Mines, Speculum 37
(1962),
117, and A. Savvides, Observations on Mines and Quarries in the Byzantine Empire,
Ekklesiastikos
Pharos 82, no. 2 (2000), 13055. For further bibliography, see M. M. Mango, Gold, ODB, II, 858,
which does not discuss Arabian gold mines, since no research on their role in the pre-Islamic period
had
been done.
2 I Kings 9:28 and 10:2, 10. Eusebius Onomasticon on the toponyms of the Holy Land and
Bibleland includes Ophir; see Eusebius, Onomasticon: The Place Names of Divine Scripture, ed.
and
trans. R. S. Notley and Z. Safrai (Leiden, 2005), 165. On Ophir in Arabia, see Agatharchides,
quoted by
Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 112.
3 See G. W. Heck, The Precious Metals of Western Arabia and Their Role in Forging the Economic
Dynamic of the Early Islamic State, King Faial Center for Research and Islamic Studies (Riyadh,
2003).
I
1. Constantine I. The first volume of this series has discussed Constantines interest
in the Arabs and in Arabia. The establishment of Imru al-Qays as king of the Arab
federates and above all Constantines assumption of the title Arabicus, which sug-
gested a Byzantine connection to the famous Namara inscription of Imru al-Qays,
a long epitaph, were relevant data.4 Imru al-Qays campaign against Najrn in
South Arabia sometime before a.d. 328 may have been motivated in part by the
gold for which Arabia was well known. Gold was also dear to Constantine, who
had confiscated the pagan temples treasures and used their gold for minting his
new gold solidus.
2. Leo I. The second volume in this series has discussed at great length the
emperor Leos courting of another Arab personage, Amorkesos, whom he invited
to Constantinople in a.d. 473 and appointed phylarch of Palaestina Tertia.5 The
Arab chief gave Leo a portrait of himself in gold set in precious stones;6 he had
come from ijz, an area in western Arabia rich in gold. Behind the emperors
warm welcome may have been the thought that the chief would be a valuable ally
in a region rich in that precious metal, which Leo very much needed after the disas-
trous Vandal War, on which, according to Procopius, he had spent 130,000 pounds
of gold.7
3. Justinian I. It was in Justinians reign that an Arab and Arabian policy is
clearest.8 Especially relevant and important is the explicit reference of Choricius
of Gaza, unique in the Byzantine sources, to a Byzantine encounter with Arabian
gold. In his encomium on Aratius, the dux of Palestine in the 530s, Choricius men-
tions an operation that the dux conducted against the Saracens of northern ijz
and his capture of their fortress, which the rhetorician describes as
. Although the sentence presents a slight difficulty
in interpretation, there is no doubt that gold is involved.9
The existence of gold in western Arabia, a Byzantine sphere of influence
during the reign of Justinianespecially gold in ijz, so close to the Byzantine
frontier in Palaestina Tertiamakes it practically certain that in an operation
4 See BAFOC, 3172, especially 5659, 6272.
5 BAFIC, 61106.
6 Ibid., 7981.
7 See C. Courtois, Les Vandales et lAfrique (Paris, 1955), 201 and notes.
8 See BASIC I.1, 14466; BALA III, xixvi.
9 Choricii Gazaei opera, ed. R. Frster and E. Richsteig (Leipzig, 1929), 54, lines 67; see BASIC
I.1,
183 note 21, which suggests There was a fortress guarding the approach to the gold mines as an
alterna-
tive translation to F. K. Litsas There was a fortress the main income of which was gold
(Choricius of
Gaza: An Approach to His Work [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980], 160).
49 The Wealth of Arabia
such as the one undertaken by the dux of Palestine, Aratius,10 the Arab federates
were involved, led in this case by the Ghassnid Ab Karib, phylarch of Palaestina
Tertia.11 The Ghassnids must also have been interested in areas where the
sources explicitly state that gold was to be found. Such was Aynna, which had
a mine, a madin, located near the coast below Tabk.12 Its proximity to Tabk,
of which Ab Karib was the master, put it nearly in his territory. The most cel-
ebrated gold mine in pre-Islamic times was in the area settled by the tribal group
of Ban Sulaym, not far from Medina; it was called Madin Ban-Sulaym.13 The
Ghassnids had a strong presence in Medina, through the two Azd Arab tribes
there, and thus they must have been involved in the gold mines of Ban-Sulaym.
The Ban Sulaym used to carry the merchandise of the Lakhmids, sell it in the
fair of Uk z, and share in the profits;14 and because the Ghassnids were closer to
the Ban Sulaym than the Lakhmids and were more influential in this area, these
gold mines could not have escaped their notice and attention. It was well known
that Mecca itself suffered from no lack of gold, and when the Meccans were in
Byzantine territory, they were taxed in gold by the Ghassnid foederati through
the federate tribe of Judm.15
II
The subterranean wealth of Arabia in mineral substances such as gold and silver,
which sporadically attracted the attention of classical authors, received a specialized
monographic treatment by the distinguished Arab medieval scholar al-Hamdn
(d. 945),16 who devoted an entire work to the two precious metals in the Arabian
Peninsula. However, his text was not published until 1968, when it appeared with
a translation and a commentary.17 More recently, gold and silver received more sci-
entific treatment, made possible by the technological revolution, in Gene Hecks
10 The dux hailed from Persarmenia, where the gold mine of Pharangium had been acquired by
Byzantium before the conclusion of the Eternal Peace; see Procopius, History, I.xv.18.
11 See BASIC I.1, 18485.
12 See Heck, Precious Metals of West Arabia, 32930.
13 On Madin/Madin (in the plural) Ban Sulaym, see ibid., 25372. It was not one mine but
seven
(see 53), the most important of which was called Mahd al-Dhahab, The Cradle of Gold. For
attempts
to pinpoint its location, see A. al-Whaibi, The Northern Hijz in the Writings of Arab Geographers,
8001150 (Beirut, 1973), 13239 (in Arabic).
14 See Ab al-Baq Hibat Allah, al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, ed. S. Daradka and M. Khurayst
(Amman, 1984), II, 375.
15 Ibid., I, 67.
16 For al-Hamdn, see O. Lfgren, Hamdani, EI2, III, 12425.
17 See Toll, Die beiden Edelmetalle Gold und Silber. The work of al-Hamadn was also edited and
annotated by . al-Jsir, Kitb al-Jawharatayn (Riyadh, 1987).
The Precious Metals of West Arabia. This important work deserves special notice
for the light it sheds on the mineral wealth of Arabia.
Preceding the book were two articles: the first, based on firsthand observation,
dealt mainly with gold mining in the Peninsula, and the second targeted the major
problem of Meccan trade and the rise of Islam.18 In Precious Metals, a substantial
volume of some 500 pages, Heck unites and amplifies the themes of his articles.
The book deals mostly with gold and silver,19 the location of the mines, their wide
diffusion, and their active use in present-day Arabia. Though the number of mines
proposed is truly astronomical, the analysis is grounded in direct observation and
the scientific application of the techniques of archaeology and metallurgy. Because
Heck focuses mainly on western Arabia, the sphere of Byzantine and Ghassnid
influence in the sixth century,20 his work is relevant to the concerns of this volume.
Precious Metals also contains maps of Arabia and its trade routes, and an appendix
on the fairs of western Arabia.21 Heck has confirmed the reliability of the Arabic
sources on the mineral wealth of Arabia and has also provided a clear and persua-
sive background for understanding the interest in the Arabs and Arabia of three
Byzantine emperors, Constantine, Leo, and Justinian, in the three centuries before
the rise of Islam. The emergence of Arabia as a major source of gold provides, to a
great extent, the key to this imperial interest in the Arabian Peninsula.
III
Just as the subterranean wealth of Arabia in gold and silver has been disclosed by
recent research based on modern technology, so Heck has revealed its wealth on
the ground by taking a closer look at Inner Arabia,22 labeled Arabia Deserta by
Strabo. Although the region, generally speaking, was arid and infertile, ijz did
have a number of oases, including Khaybar, Fadak, Yathrib, Wd al-Qur, and
if.23 To the south of ijz, Asr, where Najrn was located, is now considered
the Switzerland of the Peninsula. So, Inner Arabia can no longer be considered an
empty and barren region.
18 G. Heck, Gold Mining in Arabia and the Rise of the Islamic State, Journal of the Economic
and
Social History of the Orient 42 (1999), 36495, and Arabia without Spices: An Alternate
Hypothesis,
JAOS 123 (2003), 54776.
19 Chapters 5 and 6 of Hecks Precious Metals (91138) are devoted to the theme raised by P.
Crone
in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, 1987).
20 Hecks main interest is the first century of the Islamic Hijri calendar, but the truth of his conclu-
sions on the seventh century a.d. are valid for the pre-Islamic period, as he expressly states (xxvii).
21 See Heck, Precious Metals, 41117.
22 See idem, Arabia without Spices, 56471. Hecks conclusions are fully supported by the most
primary of all sources for this period, the Koran itself, which he cites in various footnotes.
23 Because of its climate, if nowadays is the summer capital of the Saudi state. The medieval
author al-Qalqashandi called it a little bit of Heaven transported by God from Syria to ijz
(quoted
in ibid., 564).
51 The Wealth of Arabia
In the oases and fertile valleys in western Arabia where irrigation canals and
dams existed in pre-Islamic times,24 agriculture developed and herds and flocks
roamed; the products of this agropastoralism were carried by Arab traders to
Oriens, where they were taxed by Arab customs officersthe Ghassnids and the
federates subordinated to them, such as the Judm.25 The fruits produced by these
oases and fertile valleys were varied and diversified,26 but the most important were
the fruits of the date palms and the vines that abounded in the oases. Dates rather
than grapes were carried by the Arab traders into Oriens, which had its own vines
but few date palms.27
In addition to supporting crops, these oasestogether with the am, the
pastoral reserves28were the breeding grounds of Arabias livestock: camels,
horses, cows, and sheep. Although camels were the sine qua non of the transit
trade,29 the herds of cows and flocks of sheep were much more important in the
Arab trade with Oriens and Byzantium. The cows provided vast quantities of hide,
which tanners processed into leather (dibgha), perhaps the most important native
export item of Arabia to Oriens. Because the Peninsula had the qara z, the tree
that produced a substance used in tanning, leather making flourished in Arabia.30
Equally abundant was Arabias supply of wool. Out of its spun yarns were woven
textiles, and those of Najrn were the most famous. And just as qara z was essential
for tanning, so wars, another plant native to Arabia, was essential for dyeing.31
24 Ibid., 566.
25 Ghassnid involvement in taxation was noted by E. Simon in ums et lf, ou commerce sans
guerre, Acta Orientalia (Budapest) 23.2 (1970), 226, although for the wrong context, as noted by
Crone, Meccan Trade, 138. But Crones volume was published in 1987, long before the history of
the
Ghassnidsincluding their involvement in the levying of taxeshad been researched in detail.
26 A long inventory of farm products and other items of Arabian merchandise in Oriens is provided
in V. Sab, Ilf Quraysh (Ph.D. diss., Lebanese University, 1992), 23233; see also Crone,
Meccan
Trade, 87108.
27 Although the oases of western Arabia had date palms, these grew mostly in eastern Arabia; Hajar
was so famous for its dates that the Arabic equivalent of carrying coal to Newcastle is carrying
dates
to Hajar. On the dates of Yamma in eastern Arabia as trade items, see Crone, Meccan Trade, 140.
28 On the am, see BASIC II.1, 5760, 6667.
29 The number of camels in caravans on the spice route was truly impressive, even after allowing
for
some inaccuracy or exaggeration in the sources. See Heck, Arabia without Spices, 56869.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 56971 (where qar z should be transliterated qara z). On wars, a product of South
Arabia,
see Sab, Ilf Quraysh, 233. On qara z, see An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed. E. W. Lane
(London,
186393), Book I, part 7, 2518, middle column.
IX
Economic Rivalry in Arabia:
Byzantium and Persia
I
n addition to the frontier wars of the two superpowers along the Euphrates and
in Mesopotamia, there was strife in the Arabian Peninsula caused by economic
competition. Just as Byzantium in the sixth century dominated the western half of
Arabia, which it made into a sphere of influence, relying on its proximity and its
Arab federates, the Ghassnids, so Persia dominated the eastern half and the Gulf,
relying on its proximity and its clients, the Lakhmids of ra.1 The Byzantines
and Persians thus clashed in large part vicariously, through their respective clients,
the Ghassnids and the Lakhmids. This dynamic is the key to understanding the
course of the economic struggle in Arabia between the two world powers.
The Ghassnids had a strong presence in western Arabia through their affil-
iation with the large Azd group spread across this region. With the Ethiopian
conquest of South Arabia in a.d. 520, the whole of western Arabia became
Christian, while the Red Sea became a Christian lake; for a half century there-
after, and mostly through the Ghassnids, the region became a Byzantine sphere
of influence. The Lakhmids, and through them Persia, were all-powerful in east-
ern Arabia and the Gulf, including Oman at the southern tip of the Peninsula.
Besides, Persia had friends in western Arabianotably the many Jewish com-
munities in the oases of ijz, especially those of Yathrib/Medina. Their sym-
pathies were naturally with Persia, the enemy of Byzantium, which possessed as
its Christian Holy Land the territory that the Jews of the Diaspora wanted back.
And so they may have hoped that the Sasanid kings would return them to the
Promised Land as the Achaemenid Cyrus had done when he returned the Jews
from their Babylonian captivity.
1 See C. E. Bosworth, Iran and the Arabs before Islam, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol.
3, The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, ed. E. Yarshater (Cambridge, 1983), part 1, 593
612,
especially 597612; M. G. Morony, The Late Sasanian Economic Impact on the Arabian
Peninsula,
Nme-ye Irn-e Bstn 1.2 (2002), 2537.
53 Economic Rivalry in Arabia: Byzantium and Persia
The reign of Justinian, which coincided roughly with that of the Ghassnid
king Arethas, was the period that witnessed Byzantine/Ghassnid control of the
western routes of world trade, especially the overland spice route. Yet Persia did
not hesitate in attempting to win over an important station on the spice route,
namely Yathrib/Medina. The sources state that around 530, Chosroes Anshravn
extended the power of the Lakhmid Mundir in Arabia to include sites in ijz
such as if and Yathrib. The sources also note that a Persian Marzubn al-Bdiya,
satrap of the Arabian steppe, or Marzubn al-Zra, satrap of al-Zra in eastern
Arabia, had an official in Yathrib who collected taxes for Persia.2 Yet Byzantiums
grip over the western routes and arteries of trade, especially the spice route, was not
seriously affected, and the Ghassnids remained in control of the flow of merchan-
dise from the Indian Ocean to the two termini of the spice route, Bostra and Gaza.
The tide began to turn against Byzantium with the Persian conquest and
occupation of South Arabia in 570.3 This development coincided with the souring
of Ghassnid-Byzantine relations during the reign of Mundir (569582), which
reached their nadir during the reign of Maurice, when the Ghassnid king was
exiled to Sicily.4
During their sixty years of occupation the Persians were very active in the
economic life of South Arabia.5
1. As they used silver rather than gold for their coinage, they naturally were
engaged in mining that metal in a region noted for its silver mines. All the silver
miners were Persians, and according to the historian of South Arabia, al-Hamdn,
the most famous mine was Rar.6
2. The Persians also controlled the fairs of South Arabia, such as Aden and
San. At the former, a seaport, the products of India came and the Persians taxed
2 M. J. Kister and his student, M. Lecker, have elucidated and discussed in detail this Persian
penetration of western Arabia. On the Marzubn al-Bdiya, see Kisters al-ra: Some Notes on Its
Relations with Arabia, Arabica 15 (1968), 14547, which cites Ibn Khurdadbehs Kitb al-Maslik
wa
al-Mamlik, and Leckers The Levying of Taxes for the Sassanians in Pre-Islamic Medina
(Yathrib),
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002), 10926, especially 12024 on al-Zra and its
marzubans (satraps).
3 See BASIC I.1, 36472, which attempts to pinpoint the date and the circumstances of the
conquest through the Greek source John of Epiphania; see also Bosworth, Iran and the Arabs
before
Islam, 6067, for details of the conquest based on abars Trkh.
4 See BASIC I.1, 43978, 52949.
5 The intra-Arabian route that directly connected ra (and southern Mesopotamia) with Najrn
(and northeastern Yaman, or Yemen)running diagonally from Najrn through Wd al-Dawsir to
central Arabia, where it linked up with another route that extended through Wd al-Rummah and
led
to ramust have been active as well.
6 See M. Morony, Late Sasanian Economic Impact, 35. On Rar, he refers to al-Hamdns
Kitb al-Jawharatayn, Das Buch von den beiden Edelmetallen: Gold und Silber, ed. and trans. C.
Toll
(Uppsala, 1968), 14243.
the merchants who brought them;7 these products would travel thence to San
(since Ethiopian days, the capital), where another sq was held.
3. The Persians also gave an impetus to the leather and cloth industry that
had already developed in South Arabia.8
During the forty years that extended from 570 to the beginning of the reign
of Heraclius in 610, two events may be singled out. Both were related to the eco-
nomic interests of the two world powers, and both illustrate their rivalry in the
wake of the Persian occupation of South Arabia.
1. The arb al-Fijr, the Sacrilegious War, was related to the lama, the
caravan, that the Lakhmids and the Persians started to send to western Arabia
along the direct overland route connecting ra with Mecca and Uk z, the most
important inter-Arab fair. This war was an aggressive initiative by the Persians to
break into the Byzantine sphere of influence, in western Arabia.9
2. Working to expand Byzantine influence was Uthmn ibn al-uwayrith,
a Meccan of the clan of Ban-Asad, with whom the Ghassnids were allies; he had
the ambition to become the Byzantine phylarch/king over Mecca. In his address to
the Byzantine authorities, Uthmn had argued that with their support, his phy-
larchate over Mecca would countervail the Persian occupation of South Arabia;
and in his address to the Meccans seeking their acceptance of him as Byzantiums
representative, he argued that such a connection would facilitate the passage of
Meccan merchants into Byzantine Oriens. After some initial success, his plan
fell through.10
In the last quarter of the sixth century, Byzantine-Persian rivalry persisted in
two of the stations of the spice route, Medina and Mecca. In Medina the Persians
through the intervention of the last Lakhmid king, Numnsucceeded in per-
suading an Arab who belonged to the Khazraj tribe, Amr ibn al-Inba, to be
their representative.11 As he became the lord of Medina, he represented a Persian/
Lakhmid influence in that important station on the spice route, but he does not
seem to have seriously affected Ghassnid and Byzantine influence on that route.
Indeed, it was at just this time that Mecca reached its position of dominance as
the principal caravan city of the spice route. The Persian occupation of South
7 Morony, Late Sasanian Economic Impact, 3536, quoting Ab-Ali al-Marzqi, Kitb
al-Azmina wa al-Amkina (Hyderabad, 1914), II, 164. To San, the merchants brought cotton,
saffron,
and dyes, and at San they bought cloth and iron.
8 Morony, Late Sasanian Economic Impact, 36.
9 This war is discussed in The West Arabian Route in Chapter 3, above.
10 The most reliable account of this episode is found in al-Zubayr ibn Bakkr, Jamharat Nasab
Quraysh wa Akhbrih, ed. M. M. Shkir (Cairo, [1961]), 42538, especially 42526, see also Ibn
abb, al-Munammaq, ed. Kh. Friq (Hyderabad, 1964), 17885.
11 On Amr ibn al-Inba, see Kister, al-ra, 14749.
Arabia brought new masters to that region, after fifty years of occupation by the
Ethiopians. This change was not conducive to stability in South Arabia, and so con-
trol of the spice route, which historically was mainly in the hands of its own peo-
plesSabaeans, Minaeans, and imyaritesslipped into other hands. This was
Meccas opportunity to move into a dominant role.12 Ghassnid-Meccan relations
during this period were good. The clan of Ban-Asad counted the Ghassnids as
their allies,13 a relationship that neutralized whatever advantage the Lakhmids had
gained in Medina through Amr ibn al-Inba. Ghassnid relations with Najrn
also remained positive, reflected inter alia by the visits of its chief, Yazd, to the
Ghassnid court.14
***
Before the storm that wrecked Persian-Byzantine relations in the seventh cen-
tury broke out, the Ghassnids had served the economic interests of Byzantium
in the sixth century; in so doing, they deserved well of the empire. Although dur-
ing the reign of Maurice friction obtained, the Ghassnids good relations with
Byzantium were restored not long after, in the late 580s,15 and so they continued to
function as wardens of the three western trade routes: the maritime route over the
Red Sea, the overland spice route in western Arabia, and the Wd Sirn route. In
addition to protecting the caravans, they also participated in holding one impor-
tant fair outside Oriens, at Dma, and they held three fairs within it. The eco-
nomic life of Oriens was much stimulated by these three aswqDayr Ayyb,
Bostra, and Adritwhere the Ghassnids also levied taxes for the empire. These
important functions, involving the three trade routes, were performed mostly by
the Ghassnid phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, who had an autonomous status and
whose function was mainly to look after the economic interests of the empire. In
contrast, the principal phylarch/king to the north had primarily a military func-
tion, keeping Oriens secure from the Persians, the Lakhmids, and the Arabian pas-
toralists; at the same time, he contributed indirectly to the economic welfare of
Oriens by ensuring its safety. The fifty years between 520 and 570, mostly dur-
ing the reign of Justinian, were the halcyon days of Ghassnid-Byzantine relations:
Justinians Arab and Arabian policy functioned smoothly and fruitfully in the
economic sphere, as implemented by the archphylarch and king, Arethas, and his
brother, Ab Karib, the phylarch of Palaestina Tertia.
12 See BALA III, 52.
13 One of its members, Khadja, was the wife of the future Prophet of Islam. She was a wealthy
woman who ran caravans, which Muammad conducted to Oriens.
14 See Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1958), XII, 1112.
15 See BASIC I.1, 56268.
Epilogue
The balance of power in the Peninsula was shaken in a.d. 570 by the Persian
occupation of South Arabia. This signaled a major turn in the Persian-Byzantine
struggle, as Persia gained the advantage; the struggle reached its climax in the reigns
of Heraclius and Parvz, when the final Byzantine-Persian conflict broke out.16 The
Persians occupied the whole of Oriens and Egypt; as a result, they took possession
not only of the Silk Road, both by land through Asia and Mesopotamia and by
sea through the Persian Gulf, but also of the western routes formerly controlled
by Byzantium and the Ghassnids: the maritime Red Sea route and the overland
spice route, together with the two termini in Gaza and Bostra. The Ghassnids and
the imperial Byzantine army were overwhelmed by the Persians and withdrew to
Anatolia, not to return to Oriens to resume their control of the spice route until
around 630.
The forty years or so that followed the Persian occupation of South Arabia
witnessed the rise to prominence of Mecca as the principal caravan city of the spice
route; the following twenty years or so of the Persian occupation of Oriens and
the whole of the Fertile Crescent witnessed the birth and rise of Islam in Mecca,
and its subsequent development in Medina as a state, when Muhammad acted
as his own Constantine.17 During the five-year period after the Ghassnids and
Byzantium returned to Oriens around a.d. 630, most of Arabia was united by
Islam, and the Arab armies were readied to be the instruments of the future con-
quests. Within two years, 636638, the two world powers were reeling from two
historic defeats: the first gave the Arabs Oriens, and the second almost destroyed
Persia itself. As a result, the Arabs found themselves in control of both the silk and
the spice routes, as the Persians had been while they occupied Oriens. But whereas
Persian control was relatively brief, the Arab/Muslim occupation of the two prin-
cipal arteries of international trade lasted for centuries. Hence the economic revo-
lution that the Arab Conquests brought about in the struggle for the control of
the arteries of world trade, whose masters the Arabs became.18 The economic life
of the empire, now an Anatolian-Balkan state, entered an entirely new and differ-
ent phase.
These conquests had a prime mover. They were initially inspired by a truly
extraordinary personage, Muammad, who before his prophetic call in a.d. 610
16 See the present writer in The Last Sasanid-Byzantine Conflict in the Seventh Century: The
Causes of Its Outbreak, in Convegno internazionale La Persia e Bisanzio (Rome, 2004), 22243.
17 B. Lewis, Politics and War, in The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. J. Schacht and C. E. Bosworth
(Oxford, 1974), 156.
18 A leading historian of the Arabs and Islam aptly observed of the pre-Islamic period that The
successive displacements of these routes determined the changes and revolutions in Arabian
history; see
B. Lewis, The Arabs in History (1957; reprint, New York, 1966), 33.
had spent a good fifteen years as a caravan leader on the spice route. He then began
the religio-political movement, Islam, that in the seventh century brought an end
to the three centuries of late antiquity. The relevance of the spice route in this
context is its formative influence on the political, diplomatic, and administrative
genius of the Prophet, who created the Arab-Muslim state of Medina in a mere
ten years, between 622 and 632. From Medina he sent the first military expedi-
tions against Oriens, initiating the future celebrated conquests. During the years
that Muammad had led substantial caravans of the spice route, he had to deal
with the Byzantine authorities and their federates, the Ghassnids, in Oriens, a
complex operation involving negotiations at the frontier, at the termini (Bostra
and Gaza), and between termini and frontier. In addition to honing his secular
skills, the spice route enabled him to have an intimate knowledge of the geogra-
phy of the southern part of Oriens, the Provincia Arabia and Palaestina Tertia.19
It was against these regions that he directed the first military expeditions of the
conquests, and it was again in this sector in Oriens, shortly after his death in 632,
that his successors won the first victories of Islam, especially the decisive battle of
Yarmk in 636. These two provinces of Oriens, so well-known to the Prophet,
were the first target of conquests that soon would encompass a wide belt of the
globe extending from India to Spain.
Of all the parts of the present volume, it is this economic section that is the
most relevant and crucial as prolegomenon to the final volume of this series, namely,
Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh Century, since it elucidates the relevance of the
spice route to the formation of Muammad, the prime mover of Islam and of the
conquests that changed the course not just of Arab, Byzantine, and Persian history
but also of the Mediterranean world.
19 In the fifth century, Malchus of Philadelphia criticized the emperor Leo I for inviting the phy-
larch Amorkesos to Constantinople, a journey that, he thought, acquainted the Arab phylarch with
what he should not know about Byzantium. In view of the events of the seventh century, his words
sound
prophetic. On Malchus and his animadversions against Leo, see BAFIC, 100106, especially 100
note 5;
on the surviving fragment of his History, see 11213. For a more detailed account see The Arabs in
Late
Antiquity (Beirut, 2008), 2230 by the present writer.
Appendix
Al-Numn ibn al-Mundir:
Ghassnid or Lakhmid?
In his work ifat Jazrat al-Arab (The Description of Arabia), the Arab medieval
author al-Hamdn states that a member of the tribal group Bhila, namely, Ibn
Ism, was the ib, or friend, of al-Numn ibn al-Mundir, and later refers to him
as the khdim, servant, of the same al-Numn ibn al-Mundir.1 In his article on the
1 al-Hamdn, ifat Jazrat al-Arab, ed. M. al-Akwa (Riyadh, 1974), 293, 310.
gold and silver mines in Arabia, D. M. Dunlop concluded that al-Numn was
the Ghassnid king.2 If his conclusion had been correct, this would have been a
remarkable penetration of the Ghassnids into a Lakhmid and Sasanid sphere of
influence.3 The Bhila, however, was a tribal group that lived in Yamma in eastern
Arabia, where it is unlikely that the Lakhmids would have tolerated a Ghassnid
presence.
Namesakes were common among the Lakhmids and the Ghassnids; both
had Numns and Mundirs. The individual mentioned by Hamdn must have
been a Lakhmid, the famous last king of the dynasty in the fourth quarter of the
sixth century, who was killed in a.d. 602. His identity is confirmed by the verse
that Hamdn quotes: it is by al-Nbigha and addressed to Ism, the well-known
jib, chamberlain, of the Lakhmid al-Numn.4
2 See D. M. Dunlop, The Sources of Gold and Silver in Islam according to al-Hamdani, Studia
Islamica 8 (1957), 39 note 1.
3 As a matter of course, the Ghassnids would have been interested in the silver mine in the
thaniyya, defile, of Bhila; on the silver mines of Bhila, see G. W. Heck, The Precious Metals of
West
Arabia and Their Role in Forging the Economic Dynamic of the Early Islamic State, King Faial
Center for
Research and Islamic Studies (Riyadh, 2003), 34446.
4 al-Hamdn, ifat, 310, lines 1011, quoting Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm
(Cairo, 1977), 105, verses 12; see also M. al-Ashmwi, al-Nbigha al-Dhubyni (Cairo, 1960),
111.
II
Social History
A. BACKGROUND
I
Ghassnid Federate Society
I. The Arab Background
O
f the foederati of Byzantium during the three centuries of the proto-
Byzantine period, the Ghassnids endured longest in its service, 150 years,
forming the last layer of a long, strong Arab presence in Oriens in late antiquity.
Hence their social history is complex. They were settled in the Byzantine limi-
trophe, the home in Hellenistic and Roman times of the Nabataean and Palmyrene
ArabsArabs who became Rhomaioi through the Edict of Caracalla in a.d. 212,
which made them citizens of the pagan Roman Empire.1 The Ghassnids prede-
cessors during this proto-Byzantine period were the Tankhids of the fourth cen-
tury and the Salids of the fifth, Arabs much more like themselves than were the
Nabataean and Palmyrene Rhomaioi. They were settled in roughly the same area as
those predecessors, the easternmost portion of Oriens, where the Rhomaic Arabs
of Petra and Palmyra had also lived.
As Byzantinized foederati and as Christianized Arabs, the Ghassnids were
well integrated into Byzantine society in Oriens. Unlike the Germanic peoples of
the Roman Occident, who derived from an entirely different stock, the Ghassnids
were Arabs like these Rhomaioi and were accepted by them as such. This acceptance
is well illustrated in the Petra Papyrus, Roll 83, which records a request to the Arab
Ghassnid phylarch Ab Karib that he arbitrate a dispute between two Arab fami-
lies.2 The relations with the Salids and the Tankhids were equally close. Together
1 For the strong Arab presence in Oriens in the Roman period, see RA, 116.
2 For this papyrus (P.Petra inv. 83), see L. Koenen, The Carbonized Archive from Petra, JRA
9 (1996), 17788; M. Kaimio, P.Petra inv. 83: A Settlement of Dispute, in Atti del XXII
Congresso
Internazionale di Papirologia, ed. I. Andorlini et al. (Florence, 2001), 2:71924, and eadem, ed.
P.Petra
inv. 83, in The Petra Papyri, ed. J. Frsn et al. (Amman, forthcoming), vol. 4; see also BASIC
II.1, 46
note 55. Somewhat similarly, the Ghassnid phylarch was invited to take part in the consecration of
a
church in uwwrin; see BASIC I.1, 45561.
these groups helped give the Arab phylarchate a new look, after Justinian in 529
put under the command of the Ghassnid Arethas almost all the other foederati of
Byzantium. And so the Ghassnids inherited much of what the other foederati had
assimilated from Byzantium in the two centuries prior to their own advent in Oriens.
The social life of the Ghassnids was thus exposed to many influences, Arab
and non-Arab, emanating from the Graeco-Roman establishment. In writing the
history of their social life, ideally one would identify those many influences and
their provenance; but as usually happens, the sources deal mainly with the rulers
and with their political and military history. Akhbr Mulk Ghassn, despite its
title (Accounts of the Kings of Ghassn), must have contained much social history,
but the manuscript is lost. However, the surviving sources contain enough data
to paint a fairly clear picture of Ghassnid social life, especially when set against
the background of what is known of the social history of Oriens in this period
from the Greek sources and from some Arabic sources. The more plentiful material
on the Ghassnids rivals, the Lakhmids of ra,3 serves to illuminate Ghassnid
social history, since the Lakhmids, like the Ghassnids, had come from South
Arabia and lived in the shadow of a world powerin their case, Sasanid Persia. The
same applies to the Umayyads and the sources about them. Living in the same area
in Oriens as the Ghassnids before them, they were the first Muslim dynasty; they
came to power shortly after the end of Byzantine rule in Oriens and the fall of the
Ghassnids, whose presence in the Umayyad state remained very strong.4
The difficulties presented by the paucity of the sources can be negotiated by
remembering the tripartite character of the Ghassnids; as Arabs who had hailed
from the Peninsula, as foederati of Byzantium in Oriens, and as pagans who were
converted to Christianity. This realization can shed much light on their social
life, secular and religious, deriving from what is known about the social aspects of
Byzantine culture, and of Christianity in Oriens in late antiquity.
II. The Byzantine Influence
The social life of the Ghassnids reflected the Arab heritage of both their pen-
insular congeners and the urban communities of Rhomaioi in Oriens. It is well
to begin with the Byzantine influence. Once they crossed the Roman frontier,
the Ghassnids as foederati became exposed to two major influences: one from
Byzantium, the other from Christianity.
Byzantium was the lesser of the two influences, and the Ghassnids are known
3 Because Islamic historians such as abar and Baldur were Persians, they were naturally more
interested in the Lakhmids, who were clients of the Persian Sasanids, than they were in the
Ghassnids.
As Muslims, they also naturally were more interested in the Umayyads of Oriens, the first Muslim
Arab
dynasty in Bild al-Shm, than in the Ghassnids, Christians who had moved in the orbit of
Byzantium.
4 See BASIC II.1, 37591, 4034.
63 Ghassnid Federate Society
to have rejected two important aspects of Byzantine social life. (1) Although they
were avid horsemen, they did not enjoy chariot races, a sport very popular in
Byzantium and pursued in hippodromes in Oriens, including Bostra. (2) They were
not partial to theatrical performances, whether serious or light. Hence in the town-
scapes of the Ghassnids, such as Jbiya and Jalliq, the hippodrome, the amphithe-
ater, and the theatermainstays of the early Byzantine cityscapedid not appear.5
On the other hand, the tavern was an important center of social life, pro-
viding wine, women, song, and dance.6 For the Ghassnids, the baths or thermae
were not the social centers that they had been in Roman times; though Byzantine
baths were sexually segregated, the Ghassnids Arab ethos and mores must have
found nudity repugnant. The nymphaeum probably appealed to them function-
ally: water was the sine qua non of Ghassnid existence in the Peninsula and in
the limitrophe.
III. Christianity
More important than the Byzantine influence in their social life was Christianity,
which was required of them once they became Byzantiums foederati. This factor
revolutionized their social life.7
The feasts of the Christian calendar and the liturgical year had distinct social
aspects.8 As devoted Christians, the Ghassnids scrupulously observed these feasts,
which at the same time became social events; thus these celebrations became part
of their cultural life. Indeed, the Ghassnids were truly a unique Christian com-
munity, not only in Oriens but also within the entire Christian oikoumene in late
antiquity, for the following reasons.
1. As foederati encamped in the Provincia Arabia, Palaestina Secunda, and
Palaestina Tertia, they were physically very close to the Holy Land, some of whose
loca sancta they could even see from their military stations.9
5 In their rejection of many Byzantine pastimes, the Ghassnids must also have accepted both
ecclesiastical animadversions on such diversions as gladiatorial games and chariot races and
imperial
legislation, which did not spare the old forms of entertainment.
6 The tavern is treated in detail below in Chapter 5, Drink.
7 Some villages in the limitrophe provide insight into Christian concepts of social life; see E. A.
Knauf, Umm al-Jiml: An Arab Town in Late Antiquity, Revue Biblique 91 (1984), 57886, and
D. Whitcomb, Urbanism in Arabia, Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 7 (1996), 3851.
8 Banquets accompanied religious festivities, and the distinction between the religious and the
social was often blurred. The term (love feast) speaks for itself.
9 Such places were especially visible from Palaestina Secunda, where Christ performed one of
his miracles on the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5:2534). From Jbiya and elsewhere the
Ghassnids could see the Sea of Galilee, sites of the lakeside ministry of Christ, and Mount Tabor,
the
scene of the Transfiguration, as well as the Jordan, the river of baptism. A verse in one of the poems
of
their panegyrist al-Nbigha may suggest that they even had a presence in northern Galilee (see
BASIC
II.1, 221); if so, they could see the place from which the Sermon on the Mount was delivered.
2. In addition, they, together with the Byzantine regular troops, were the
protectors of the Holy Land and its holy sites from the raids and incursions of the
Lakhmids and the nomads of Arabia Pastoralis. This role gave their Christianity a
military tonethey were literally milites Christi.
3. They were the relatives of the martyrs of Najrn, some three hundred men
and women who chose martyrdom over apostasy around a.d. 520 in South Arabia.
It is not difficult to visualize how vibrant their Christianity must have become in
response to these martyrdoms, especially as their survivors appealed for help to
their Ghassnid relative, Jabala, in Jbiya of the Golan. These martyrdoms, occur-
ring long after the Peace of the Church in a.d. 313, gave the Christian Arab com-
munity in the Near East a special position. The martyrs were sanctified by the
church, which set 24 October as their feast day.10
4. Just as they were the military protectors of the Holy Land, so too they
were the ecclesiastical protectors of the Monophysite church in Oriens, which
they had resuscitated around 540 and continued to defend and protect until
their own existence as a Byzantine phylarchate ended in 636, after the battle of
Yarmk.11
Such then was the Christianity of those foederati of Byzantium in sixth-cen-
tury Oriens. The literary and epigraphic evidence for the Ghassnid celebration of
the feasts of the liturgical year will be examined in the following section.12 The dis-
cussion will be set against the background of the larger community of Christians
in Oriens, with whom, as fellow Christians, the Ghassnids shared these feasts and
celebrations of the liturgical year, emphasizing a certain number of them both as
Arabs and as Monophysites.
Feast Days
The Ghassnids no doubt celebrated the dominical, Marian, and sanctoral feasts
of the Christian calendar. Most important were the dominical: Christmas,
Epiphany,13 Transfiguration, Palm Sunday, Easter, and Ascension. Two or perhaps
more are documented in the surviving poetic fragments, which attest as well to the
social aspects of these feasts.
10 Their feast on 24 October is usually celebrated in the names of the chief male and female
martyrs,
Arethas and Ruhm. For these martyrdoms, see Martyrs. For the names of some 300 martyrs in
Najrn,
see my The Martyrdom of Early Arab Christians: Sixth Century Najrn, in The First One
Hundred
Years: A Centennial Anthology Celebrating Antiochian Orthodoxy in North America, ed. G. S.
Corey et
al. (Englewood, N.J., 1995), 16988, especially 17880.
11 The Ghassnid contribution to the welfare of the church was so substantial that a volume of
some
350 pages could be exclusively devoted to this theme; see BASIC I.2.
12 Arabic contemporary poetry is the main authentic extant source.
13 In the Eastern Church, Epiphany marks not the Adoration of the Magi but the baptism of Christ
in the Jordan.
Dominical Feasts
Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday is most frequently mentioned in the few verses that
have survived. In the Orient, Easter was the great feast day of Christianity, but
Palm Sunday was a joyous occasion, less somber than Easter and Holy Week. Palms
were available in the region for the Ghassnids, and the day was widely celebrated
in late antiquity among the Christians of the entire Arab area, even by those of
ijz in pre-Islamic times.14
Significantly, the Ghassnid celebration of Palm Sunday was noticed by
two of their panegyrists, assn and al-Nbigha, who complement each other in
their eyewitness descriptions of the scene on Palm Sunday in the mansions of the
Ghassnids. While al-Nbigha describes the young princesses of the royal house
presenting their bouquets of flowers to the Ghassnid rulers,15 assn describes
them busily weaving wreaths of coral for the occasion.16 Out of the practice of the
presentation of flowers on Palm Sunday, the term tay (plural of taiyya), salu-
tations, was applied to the flowers presented during the salutation, and became
the name by which the present itself was knowna term that apparently survived
in this signification into Islamic times.17
Easter. The climax of all the feasts of the Christian calendar was referred to
by its non-Arabic name, f-i--, pascha in the dwns of pre-Islamic poets.18 assn
mentions it once in an attractive verse of his ode, the rhyme in N,19 in which he
says that Easter has drawn near and the young maidens are weaving the wreaths of
coral quickly, that is, before it arrives. Though a hapax legomenon, the reference is
significant; the Ghassnids must have celebrated Easter with great solemnity as the
principal Christian dominical day, as Oriens Christianus still does (much more cer-
emonially than Christmas).
Ascension. This day, one of the chief feasts of the liturgical year, falls on
the fortieth day after Easter. It is not mentioned in the extant sources, but the
Ghassnids had a special reason for celebrating it: on Ascension Day in May of
14 Palm Sunday is referred to by the Prophet Muammad in a hadith asking his followers to stop
celebrating it in favor of an Islamic feast; see Muammad ibn Muammad Murtaa al-Zabd, Tj
al-Ars Min Jawhir al-Qms (Kuwait, 1967), III, 41.
15 Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 47, verses 2526. That walid in
verse 26 refers to the princesses is made clear in assn, who refers to the daughters of the
Ghassnids
as royals not engaged in degrading and servile chores; Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft,
Gibb
Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 174, verse 14.
16 assn, Dwn, I, 255, verses 68; for wreaths of coral, akillat al-marjn, see verse 6.
17 On taiyya and tay, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1957), II, 304 and note 5;
see also . al-Zayyt, al-Diyrt al-Narniyya f al-Islm, al-Machriq 36 (1938), 33237.
18 As also Ash in his ode, eulogizing the Christian ruler in eastern Arabia; see Dwn, ed.
M. usayn (Cairo, n.d.), 111, verse 69. For the term as a loan from the Aramaic/Hebrew Pesah, see
S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint, Hildesheim, 1962), 276
77.
19 assn, Dwn, I, 255, verse 6.
570 their distinguished general, Mundir, scored a famous victory against the
Lakhmids.20 No doubt the very devout Ghassnids would have noticed the coin-
cidence, as did the Syriac chronicler who remembered the victory of the protec-
tor of the Monophysite church by saying that The Lord helped Mundir and the
Cross triumphed.21 What word was used for Ascension in Ghassnland is not
clear. Even some Arabic-speaking areas often used the Syriac term, Arabicized as
Sullq.22 Nowadays it is ud, from the Arabic root --d, to ascend.
Epiphany. Unlike Ascension Day, Epiphany is not mentioned in any extant
texts. But the Ghassnids, who lived close to the river of baptism, surely celebrated
the baptism of Jesus, which may well have taken place in Trans-Jordan (not in Cis-
Jordan)that is, in the Provincia Arabia, the headquarters of the Ghassnid phy-
larchs.23 Of all the dominical feast days, this one would have been celebrated in the
context of the events of Ghassnid family life, which included the baptism of the
newly born. Such baptism was dignified as a sacrament and became a distinguish-
ing attribute of Christians, who were often called the Children of Baptism.24
Up to the present day, Epiphany has been celebrated by the Christian Arabs of the
Orient as a major social event.
It is not clear whether the Ghassnids followed the recommendation of
St. Paul and gave up circumcision in favor of baptism.25 If they did, they would
have been following the lead of Abgar the Great, the Arab king of Edessa; after he
converted to Christianity, around a.d. 200, he ordered the discontinuation of cir-
cumcision (perhaps inspired by the Roman rejection of the practice).26
Transfiguration. The sources are likewise silent about the Ghassnids cel-
ebration of the Feast of Transfiguration, but their proximity to the Holy Land
again argues that it did happen. According to tradition, Christs Transfiguration
took place on Mount Tabor or on Mount Hermon, both of which were visible
from the Ghassnids centers in Palaestina Secunda. Mount Hermon was referred
to twice by their panegyrist assn (though not in a religious context) as Jabal
al-Thalj, the Mountain of Snow.27
20 See BASIC I.1, 34346.
21 See Chronicon Maroniticum, trans. J. B. Chabot, Chronica Minora, pars secunda, CSCO,
Scriptores Syri, 3rd ser., vol. 4 (Paris, 1904), 111, lines 1415, discussed in BASIC I.1, 345 note
138.
22 For Sullq as an Aramaic term, see Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 277; Jawd Ali,
al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1971), V, 104.
23 A view popularized nowadays by the Ministry of Tourism in Jordan, and supported by John 1:28
( ).
24 Nowadays called ghis, the ceremony involves the newborns total immersion in the waters of
the
baptismal font.
25 On circumcision, see the final section of this chapter.
26 On Abgar, see RA, 10912.
27 assn, Dwn, I, 270, verse 4; 308, verse 9.
Marian Feasts
In the sanctoral cycle of feast days, no doubt those of the Theotokos, the Mother
of God, were celebrated with considerable social activity. The Theotokos was espe-
cially revered among the Monophysites, who emphasized the divinity of Christ,
as does the term Theotokos.28 Although no reference to her feast days have sur-
vived, the name Mary, Arabicized from the Greek version of the name as Mriya,
appeared in the matronymic of their most famous king, Arethas.29 Both her virgin-
ity and her role as mother of Jesus were remembered in Ghassnid toponymy and
epistolography.30
Sanctoral Feasts
All the saints to whose shrines the Ghassnids made pilgrimagenamely, Julian,
Sergius, Thomas, Cosmas and Damian, and the two Symeon Stylitesmust have
been honored by the celebration of their feast days in Ghassnid churches. Such cel-
ebrations must have received an impetus from the martyrdoms (ca. 520) in Najrn
of their relatives, who were venerated as saints and whose feast day was undoubt-
edly celebrated with great solemnity. The martyrs of Najrn, usually identified by
the names of the chief man and woman among them, Arethas and Ruhm, formed
a special group of saints with whom the Ghassnids surely felt a certain affinity,
since they were their congeners as Arabs. Such also were Cosmas and Damian, the
Arab patron saints of medicine, whom the outbreak of plague during the reign of
Justinian brought to even more prominence in the sixth century. To these may be
added another Arab saint whose shrine or place of burial remains unknown, but
who attained celebrity in the fourth century: Moses, the Chalcedonian bishop
of Mavia, the federate queen of Byzantium, who raised the standard of revolt
against the Arian emperor Valens and emerged from the struggle victorious. Moses
was sainted and his feast day set for 7 February. Surely he was remembered by
28 Luckily for the Monophysites, the term was coined after the Council of Ephesus in a.d. 431; after
Chalcedon (451), when Christ was declared by Pope Leo the perfect man and perfect God, the
epithet
instead would have been Theandrotokos and thus doctrinally unacceptable to them.
29 On Mriya, the mother of Arethas, see BASIC I.1, 69. L. Cheikho listed eight instances of
the name Mriya assumed by Christian Arab women; see al-Narniyya wa dbuh bayna Arab
al-Jhiliyya (Beirut, 1912), I, 244. For the name Fartan among Christian Arab women as an
Arabicized
form of Greek parthenos, virgin, see BASIC II.1, 196; alternatively, Lecher suggested fortuna.
30 The Arabic for virgin, adhr, appears in assns poetry as the name of a Ghassnid town,
which
still exists in Syria, northeast of Damascus; see Dwn, I, 17, verse 1. Wlidat al-Ilh appears in the
letter
of the Ghassnid king and phylarch Arethas, which he dispatched from Constantinople. For the
town,
see BASIC II.1, 238, and Map XI, p. 441; for the letter, see BASIC I.2, 784. Toponymically, Maria,
Maryam, has survived in the names of many monasteries in the region. Some of them may have
been
erected by Ghassnid queens, one of whom is explicitly credited with building a monastery, Dayr
Hind
(see BASIC II.1, 200).
the Ghassnids, who as Monophysites also rebelled against orthodoxy. The odes
celebrating the victory of Queen Mavia and her bishop were noted in the fifth
century by an outsiderthe ecclesiastical historian Sozomen31but they would
have carried special meaning to the Ghassnid Arabs, as foederati of Byzantium.
Not Christian but possibly Arab was a figure of the Old Testament, Ayyb,
Job, for whom the Ghassnids had considerable veneration, reflected by the invo-
cation of his name during military encounters and by the giving of his name to a
village in which a famous fair was held, Dayr Ayyb.32 The Ghassnids, who appar-
ently looked to him as their role model for endurance, celebrated his feast day in
March or May. The fact that in Islamic times his village, now called Shaykh Sad,
was considered one of the sites to be visited by pious Muslims33 suggests a pre-
Islamic Ghassnid custom: visits to such shrines often were continuations of older
traditions. But the figure closest to them as foederati was St. Sergius, their patron
saint and that of the Byzantine army of Oriens. And it is not difficult to visualize
the enthusiasm evinced by the Ghassnids when they celebrated the feast day of
the saint whose name and banner they carried in their military engagements.
Pilgrimage
Although pilgrimage was not a Christian religious duty and had no scriptural
authority, as it has in Judaism and more clearly in Islam,34 it was popularized by
the visit of Constantines mother, Helen, to Jerusalem in 326. Pilgrims from all
over the Christian oikoumene flocked to visit the loca sancta, consecrated by the
ministry of Christ. The four visits of Barsauma from Mesopotamia in the fifth
century, and even more strikingly Egerias travels in the fourth century from far-
away western Europe to almost all the biblical sites from Edessa to Egypt, reflect
this popularity.35
Both as Arabs and as foederati, the Ghassnids must have made pilgrimag-
es.36 For Arabs, pilgrimage was an important religious institution (entailing awf,
31 For Moses and Queen Mavia, see BAFOC, 138202, and the ODB, s.vv. Moses, Mavia.
32 Many biblical scholars believe that Job was an Edomite, and the Edomites were an Arab peo-
ple; see BAFIC, 54043, and below, p. 347; see also M. Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land (New York,
1972),
2526, 6162. For more on Ayyb, Job, and the Ghassnids, see the appendix to Chapter 11, below.
33 See al-Harawi, Kitb al-Ishrt il Marifat al-Ziyrt, ed. J. Sourdel-Thomine (Damascus,
1953),
translated by J. Sourdel-Thomine as Guide de lieux de plerinage (Damascus, 1957).
34 The aliyyah (going up to Jerusalem for the festival) in Judaism, and the hajj, one of the five
pillars
of the Islamic faith.
35 For Barsauma, who performed the pilgrimage on foot, see A. Palmer, The History of the Syrian
Orthodox in Jerusalem, OC 75 (1991), 1820; for Egeria, see Egerias Travels, trans. J. Wilkinson
(Warminster, Eng., 1999).
36 For the pilgrimage sites of the Arab Christians in Oriens generally, see the present writer in
Arab
Christian Pilgrimages in the Proto-Byzantine Period (VVII Centuries), in Pilgrimage and Holy
Space
in Late Antique Egypt, ed. D. Frankfurter (Leiden, 1998), 37389.
circumambulation around a shrine), and indeed Arabic contains an unusually
large number of words related to pilgrimage.37 As foederati, the Ghassnids were in
a special position vis--vis the Holy Land, since they lived so close to it and were its
protectors as well as protectors of Oriens, a diocese that also had a multitude of loca
sancta that were centers of pilgrimage.38
The Holy Land
The Holy Land in its widest acceptation comprised the Three Palestines. The evi-
dence in the sources that points or may point to visits by the Ghassnids may be
summarized as follows.
1. Although the reference to the famous Arethas in Sinai is shrouded in
obscurity,39 the presence of the king in Sinai, the province of his brother, Ab
Karib, may be related to a pilgrimage he had undertaken to Mount Sinai, the site of
the Decalogue, a popular destination in this period.
2. The presence of one of the Ghassnid princesses, Layla, in Jerusalem, which
is analyzed in the following chapter, may have been related to a pilgrimage. The
Ghassnids, though Monophysites, had some presence in Orthodox Chalcedonian
Palestine, as demonstrated by Dayr Ghassn, the Monastery of Ghassn, near
Jerusalem.40
3. The pre-Islamic poet al-Ash, who hailed from eastern Arabia and eulo-
gized the Ghassnids, mentions Jerusalem as a place he visited.41 Perhaps the
Ghassnids whom he eulogized happened to be pilgrims in Jerusalem then.
4. Circumstantial evidence from later Umayyad times also suggests that the
Ghassnid royal house made pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Yazd, the crown prince and
successor of the first Umayyad caliph, Muwiya, is known to have visited Jerusalem
with the Christian poet laureate al-Akhal.42 Jerusalem was not a tourist attraction
for the two hedonists Yazd and Akhal, who usually found diversions in Jalliq.
But Jerusalem was important for the Umayyads, who were anxious to legitimize
their usurpation of the caliphate from the Alids and so associated themselves with
37 See ibid., 37374; to the words listed there may be added mutamir, the one who performs the
pilgrimage not in the canonical month, and hujayja, the diminutive form of hjja, female pilgrim
(see
Masdi, Murj al-Dahab wa-madin al-jawhar, ed. C. Pellat [Beirut, 1966], I, 281).
38 See I. Pea, Lieux de plerinage en Syrie, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Minor 38
(Milan, 2000).
39 The reference is to a monk from Sinai who was a prisoner in the camp of Arethas. Doctrinal dif-
ferences in this period could result in violenceArethass own son, the Monophysite Mundir, was
cap-
tured by the Chalcedonian central governmentand perhaps the monk was captured while Arethas
was
performing the pilgrimage. On the monk of Sinai, see BASIC I.2, 769.
41 See ibid., 27374.
42 See J. Narallah, Saint Jean de Damas: Son poque, sa vie, son oeuvre (Harissa, Lebanon, 1950),
67.
the Holy City to which the Prophet Muammad made his nocturnal journey; a
desire for such legitimation may explain Yazds journey. Similarly, both Muwiya
and Abd al-Malik announced their accession to the caliphate in Jerusalem. The
Umayyads imitated and followed in the steps of the Ghassnids in many respects,
perhaps including pilgrimage to the Holy City. Moreover, Yazd was the son of
a Christian mother, Maysn, and the husband of another Christian woman, the
Ghassnid Umm Ramla.43
Ghassnid pilgrimages to the Holy Land probably included visits not only
to Jerusalem but also to the other two holy cities associated with Jesus, Nazareth
and Bethlehem.
Oriens
Oriens had other pilgrimage sites in addition to the three provinces that constituted
the Holy Land. Some of them were associated with figures of Arab Christianity;
others were not but were nevertheless visited by the Ghassnids.
1. Julian of Antioch was a saint especially revered by the Monophysites and
thus no doubt by the Ghassnids. Epigraphic evidence of their veneration is found
in the inscription at al-Burj, near Damascus, in which he is thanked by their king,
Mundir.44
2. More important was St. Sergius, the patron saint of the Byzantine army
of Oriens and of the Ghassnids, whose name was invoked during military
encounters.45 The church of Mundir in the capital, Jbiya, was dedicated to him,
and his city, Sergiopolis, was protected by the Ghassnids.46 After Jerusalem,
Sergiopolis was the most important pilgrimage center, and it also had a mawsim,
a . Ghassnids undoubtedly performed the pilgrimage to his shrine in
Sergiopolis/Rufa.
Syriac hagiography provides evidence for such activity. In the Life of
Ademmeh, the Arabs of Persian Mesopotamia are described as so dedicated
43 On Ghassnid-Umayyad relations, see BASIC II.1, 37591.
44 For this inscription, see BASIC I.1, 495501, and I.2, 96566. On Julian, see H. Kaufhold,
Notizen ber das Moseskloster bei Nabk und das Julianskloster bei Qaryatain in Syrien, OC 79
(1995),
48119.
45 In addition to the well-known invocation in the poetry of al-Akhal (see Shar Dwn al-Akhal,
ed. I. w [Beirut, n.d.], 533, verse 3), there may be another one in the ode of al-Nbigha on the
Ghassnid al-Numn (Dwn, 53, verse 16). Its final verse invokes Jesus and Job; though the
interven-
ing name is Dumiyyexplained in the commentary as a personage related to the Iyad groupit
likely
originally was Sarjis, the Arabic for Sergius, whom the Ghassnids invoked in war. Such
substitutions in
pre-Islamic verses sometimes occurred in later Islamic times.
46 On the Ghassnids and Sergius, see BASIC I.2, 94962. On Sergiopolis, see E. K. Fowden, The
Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley, 1999).
to St. Sergius that they undertook the long journey from Persian territory to
Sergiopolis in order to visit his shrine. Consequently, to spare them the hardship of
traveling to Euphratensis, Ademmeh built them a shrine for Sergius in Persian
Mesopotamia.47 If Sergiopolis was a goal of Arab pilgrims from Sasanid territory,
surely it also drew Arab foederati living in Roman territory such as the Ghassnids,
who furthermore looked at Sergius as their patron saint and defended his shrine.48
Other pilgrimage centers in Oriens were associated with Arab figures.
1. Edessa, which contained the remains of the Apostle Thomas, was the city
that its Arab dynasty, the Abgarids, made the principal center of the Christian
Semitic Orient when Abgar the Great adopted Christianity.49 Abgars correspon-
dence with Jesus and his receipt of the Holy Mandylion (a miraculous image of
Jesus), though legendary, enhanced the sanctity of Edessa in the eyes of the Arabs.
Abgar lived long in the memory of the Christians in Oriens and elsewhere.50
2. Cyrrhos, in the province of Euphratensis, contained the graves of two
important Christian saints, Cosmas and Damian the Anargyroi (the Silverless),
the patron saints of medicine. Whether the Ghassnids were aware of the physi-
cians Arab origin is not clear, but they most probably made the pilgrimage to their
shrineespecially in a century that witnessed outbreaks of plagues and the dedica-
tion of many churches to them.51
3. Qalat Simn/Telanissos was also a great pilgrimage center whose saint,
Symeon Stylites the Elder (d. 459), was associated with the Arabs of the fifth
century. Indeed, they would have immediately carried off the body of the deceased
saint to their settlements, had it not been for the arrival of the magister militum,
Ardabr.52 Although the extant sources do not retain a reference to a pilgrimage by
the Ghassnids, they must have visited the shrine, since they also became attached
to Symeon the Younger of the sixth century, buried at the Wondrous Mountain,
near Antioch.53
47 For the Life of Ademmeh, the metropolitan of the East in Persian Mesopotamia, see PO 3
(Paris, 1909, 1551); see also BASIC II.1, 17782.
48 For more on Sergius and the Arabs, see BASIC I.2, 94962.
49 For the Arab dynasty of the Abgarids in Edessa, see RA, Appendix, s.v. Abgarids (especially
10912).
50 His fame and Edessas reached distant Ethiopia. A ceremonial center consisting of a group of
churches was created during the period of the Zagw dynasty (a.d. 11371270) and was called Roha
(present-day Llibl), the Semitic form of the Greek Edessa. On Abgar, see G. Haile, The Legacy
of
Abgar in Ethiopic Tradition, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 55.3 (1989), 375410. Abgar has sur-
vived in the Near Eastern onomasticon, especially among the Armenians, as Apgar, and also among
the
Arabs, as Abjar; see I. Abbs, Shir al-Khawrij (Beirut, 1923), 61.
51 See BASIC I.2, 96365.
52 See BAFIC, 160 note 7.
53 See BASIC I.1, 24448.
4. Especially important and meaningful to them must have been the pilgrim-
ages associated with Najrn and its martyrs, their relatives. Najrn itself in South
Arabia became the great pilgrimage center of the pre-Islamic Arabs and must
have been visited by the Ghassnids.54 In addition, the strong Najrni presence in
Oriens was concentrated in two towns.
a. Najrn in the Trachonitis was the namesake of Najrn, the martyropolis
in South Arabia. According to the most reliable source, Yqt, it had a magnifi-
cent church, where vows and votive offerings were made.55 This description sug-
gests that it was also a local pilgrimage center.
b. The Ghassnids most probably had another local pilgrimage site related
to their martyred relatives: Maajja, not far from Damascus, whose very name
(Pilgrimage Center) reveals its function. It is the only such toponym in Oriens.
Presumably the Ghassnids asked for some of the relics of the martyrs of Najrn,
which were transported to Oriens from South Arabia and went through a depositio
at the site, which they then named Maajja.56 A recent work on Syrian toponymy
has revealed that the town still contains ancient oratories, churches, palaces, cem-
eteries, wells, canals, pools, and wine presses. Two miles to the north of it is Tall
Qaswa, which also has remains from the Byzantine period.57
IV. Private and Family Life
The religion that revolutionized the public social life of the Ghassnids similarly
affected their private family life. Indeed, it was only natural that their Christian
faith should have been reflected in the everyday life of such a religious community.
Its traces are clearly visible in the scant surviving sources.
1. In one verse of al-Nbigha, the panegyrist uses the phrase ayyibun
hujuztuhum, zoned in chastity, to describe the sexual purity of the Ghassnid
kings.58 In another he alludes to their Christian faith by implication, marking
their calm reaction to the vicissitudes of life.59 In a third, he employs the phrase
fama yarjna ghayra al-awqibi:60 they look forward not to this world and its blan-
dishments but to the other world, to life after death and to the Resurrection. In a
fourth verse, they are saluted as a unique people, whom God favored with a virtue
54 See the present writer in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 6976.
55 Ibid., 7879; Yqt, Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 1950), II, 539.
56 For Maajja and its dayr in the list of the subscriptions of the 137 archimandrites in their letter
addressed to the Ghassnid Arethas, see BASIC I.2, 828; see also Map V in BASIC II.1, 429.
57 See al-Mujam al Jughrfi li al-Qur al-Arabi al-Sri, ed. M. las (Damascus, 1992), IV, 438.
58 al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verse 25.
59 Ibid., 48, verse 28.
60 Ibid., 47, verse 24. See Abd al-Baghdd, Khiznat al-Adab, ed. A. Hrn (Beirut, 1981), III,
331, for al-Amas perceptive scholium.
granted to no other group, lahum shmatun lam yuih Allhu ghayrahum.61 Their
Christianity was so clearly manifest that the Arabian poet noticed it; and in salut-
ing their virtues he was not simply parroting clichs, since these terms had never
been used in pre-Islamic panegyrics.62
The lives of ordinary families were also touched, even suffused, by Christianity,
which gave certain events new significance. The newborn child was now baptized
sacramentally, rather than circumcised;63 marriage ceased to be simply a con-
tract and became a sacrament; and death itself could be viewed as a journey to the
other world, which for good Christians meant Resurrection. These changes are
reflected clearly in a verse of an elegy on one of their kings, al-Numn, composed
by al-Nbigha.64 Thus, when a member of the royal family, the crown prince Jabala,
died in battle, he died as miles Christi and was buried as a martyr in a martyrion
in Chalcis.65 Comparisons and contrasts with the pagan Arabs, their congeners in
the Arabian Peninsula, and with their predecessors in Oriens, the Nabataeans and
Palmyrenes, are instructive in illustrating the long social distance traversed by the
Ghassnids in their spiritual journey from paganism to Christianity.66
Because Christianity affected every aspect of Ghassnid social life, it also
influenced their urban landscape, especially since the kings of the dynasty were
lovers of building, philoktistai. In Ghassnid towns, the important architectural
landmarks were not those of pagan Romethe circus (hippodrome), the theater,
the amphitheater, the nymphaiabut the church, the monastery, and possibly the
baptistery (in this early period a detached structure, separate from the church).
These were significant venues for various social functions in addition to the reli-
gious ones for which they were primarily designed.67
61 al-Nbigha, Dwn, 46, verse 23. Al-Baghdds Khiznat al-Adab, III, 330, has the better read-
ing, mina al-nsi (instead of the Dwns mina al-jdi).
62 The Christian sentiments expressed by al-Nbigha in this sextet of verses in his famous ode on
the
Ghassnids are noteworthy. Rather than responding to specific events, they reflect general
conclusions
that the poet drew on the life of Christians and their expectationsconclusions perhaps arrived at
after
he had read the New Testament, or at least one of the Gospels. He does refer to Majalla (Dwn, 47,
verse
24), accepted by all commentators as the Gospel; see al-Baghdd, Khiznat al-Adab, III, 331.
63 Circumcision was abandoned generally by the church, following the views of St. Paul; after the
Council in Jerusalem, ca. a.d. 50, circumcision was no longer obligatory on gentiles. For
circumcision
among the Ismailites, see Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, books IIII, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), book I, 193; among the Arabs in general, 214.
64 See the attractive epicedium on the Ghassnid king al-Numn, in al-Nbigha, Dwn, 122, verse
30; also G. T. Dennis, Death in Byzantium, DOP 55 (2001), 17.
65 See BASIC I.1, 24349.
66 For such aspects of social life as marriage, communal meals, and banquets among the South
Arabians, whence the Ghassnids had hailed; in Arabia Pastoralis, where they had stopped on their
way
to the north; and among the Rhomaic Nabataeans and Palmyrenes of Oriens, see R. G. Hoyland,
Arabia
and the Arabs (London, 2001), 12838.
67 See The Ghassnid Sedentary Presence, Chapter 2 in Part III, below.
Childhood and Children in Federate Oriens
The interest of Byzantinists in children as a serious branch of historical research
has grown in the second half of the twentieth century.68 The latest reflection of this
interest was the Dumbarton Oaks Spring Symposium of 2006, at which the many
dimensions of childhood in Byzantium were explored.
As has been the case with other aspects of Ghassnid social life, the con-
temporary poets are the best sources of evidence; and the two most prominent
Ghassnid panegyrists, al-Nbigha and assn, are also the two main sources on
this theme.
1. al-Nbigha. In an attractive quatrain,69 the poet meets a Ghassnid prince,
still a young boy, a ghulm, and provides a detailed description of him. The first
verse is remarkable for its inclusive, comprehensive quality. The poet notes the
handsome face of the boy, who is on his way to distinguishing himself morally, and
he is physically strong enough to reach his majority or youth quickly.70 These are
the physical and moral qualities that the poet praised in the Ghassnid kings and
phylarchs, whom he eulogized more expansively in his long odes.
Also noteworthy in the quatrain is its inclusion of the female as well as male
progenitors of the Ghassnid boy. As discussed in the following chapter in this
volume, Ghassnid queens were prominent and influential, and one or two of
the Hinds mentioned in the quatrain may have come from the celebrated group
Kindat al-Mulk, Royal Kinda.71 Hence the moral and physical qualities of their
offspring were outstanding, and the child would be called muimm, one with
distinguished paternal uncles, and mukhwil, one with distinguished maternal
uncles.72
The quatrain is thus remarkable as a poetic expression of the image of the
Ghassnids as perceived by their contemporaries: a family and clan, distinguished
68 Groundbreaking work was first done by Ph. Koukoules; see his Byzantinon bios kai politismos
(Athens, 1948), I.1, 1184. He was followed by such scholars as E. Patlagean, Structure sociale,
famille,
chrtient Byzance, IVeXIe sicle (London, 1981), 8593; A. Moffatt, The Byzantine Child,
Social
Research 53 (1986), 70523; and now C. Hennessy, Images of Children in Byzantium (Aldershot,
Eng.,
2008) and A.-M. Talbot and A. Papaconstantinou, eds., Becoming Byzantine: Children and
Childhood
in Byzantium (Washington, D.C., 2009).
69 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 166. The quatrain attracted the attention of Nldeke, who discussed it in
GF, 3335.
70 The Arabic phrase mustaqbil al-khayr may be translated in various ways. One possibility is
pros-
perity and good things lie close to him; Nldeke rendered it dem das Gute bevorsteht (GF, 33). Al-
khayr
is made plural in the fourth verse of the quatrain; though the context suggests a moral connotation,
its
meaning is still not entirely clear.
71 The mother of Arethas was Mriya, a Kindite princess; relations between the two royal houses
were always good, unlike Ghassnid-Lakhmid relations.
72 These epithets were used in a verse of Antara, one of the poets of the Suspended Odes. See
Shar
Dwn Antara, ed. K. al-Bustani (Beirut, 1958), 57, verse 8.
morally and physically, who kept the purity of their Ghassnid blood unadulter-
ated.73 This image is inspired by the impression made by the Ghassnid prince,
who thus elicits from the poet the description and eulogy of the royal house as his
pedigree is recounted. It is a reflection of the premium that the Arab Ghassnids
placed on childhood and on their children, made so clear in the background of the
quatrain, which, according to the scholiast, was an invitation extended to the poet
to see the child in whom the Ghassnid king took such fatherly pride.74 That such
parental care elicited filial care is demonstrated by the heroic efforts of Numn to
win the release of his father, Mundir, the Ghassnid king, after he was captured
and exiled during the reign of Tiberius II.75
2. assn. While al-Nbighas attention was drawn by the handsomeness
of the young Ghassnid prince, assn was attracted by Ghassnid children of
a riper age: the maidens who on Palm Sunday were fashioning the coral wreaths
in preparation for the celebration of Easter.76 It was these very maidens who, in
the famous ode of al-Nbigha, appear presenting their parents and other members
of the Ghassnid royal house with these wreaths and other appropriate gifts, the
tay, described above.77
Baptism, Nomenclature, Nursing
The sacrament of baptism was especially important in late antiquity, when infant
baptism superseded the adult catechumenate. The Ghassnids lived so close to the
Jordan, the river of baptism, that the baptism ceremony of their children must have
represented a major celebratory occasion.
Baptism also raises the question of Arab identity, which was strong among
the Ghassnids. Even after living for a century and a half in the orbit of a Christian
Roman Empire and helping to refound the Monophysite church after its suppression
73 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 42, verse 8; assn, Dwn, I, 205, verse 7. The Ghassnids win in
battle
when they fight alongside those whose blood is purely Ghassnid. In both verses this belief is subtly
expressed by the use of derivatives from the root a-sh-b, mixed.
74 The scholium and the quatrain recreate a domestic scene still common in the Arab Near East:
parents proudly show their young children to their guests. On the Arab affection for their children,
see
the section On the Love of Children in Ibn Abd Rabbih, al-Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn, I. Abyr,
and
A. Hrn (Beirut, 1982), II, 43741.
75 See BASIC I.1, 341, 378, 468, 474, 531.
76 See assn, Dwn, I, 255, verse 6, and the discussion in BASIC II.1, 295 note 6.
77 For assns and al-Nbighas verses on the walid, the maidens, see the discussion in BASIC
II.1, 295. Al-walid in al-Nbigha can only be the plural of walda, daughter, and not a reference
to the
slaves or servants, as suggested by the scholiast, who explains the word as im (plural of ama,
servant,
slave); see Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 47 note 25, and ed. S. Fayal (Beirut, 1968), 63
note 25.
The context surely suggests the meaning daughters, a reading clinched by a verse of assn that
explic-
itly uses the same term, walid, of the daughters of the Ghassnids, whom he describes as royals
and not
nomads indulging in occupations appropriate only to the pastoralists; see Dwn, I, 255, verses 6, 7,
8.
by Justin I and his successors, they refused to assume non-Arab names.78 This resis-
tance is especially noteworthy in the context of the sacrament of baptism. Already
in the fourth century, John Chrysostom had chided Christian parents for calling
their children after their forebears, urging them instead to use the names of the
apostles, martyrs, and saints.79 The Ghassnids never responded to this call.80 All
their names for their sons and daughters were strictly Arab, including alma and
(their queens) Hind or Umma or Salma, as well as rith, Jabala, and Numn.
The one exception occurred not among the Ghassnids but within another phy-
larchal royal house, that of Kinda, where the name Mriya (Mary) appeared; thus
Arethas, whose father Jabala had married the Kindite princess Mriya, was called
Ibn Mriya, the son of Mriya.81
The conversion of Arabs to Christianity before the rise of Islam brought
about a change more generally in Arab attitudes toward the birth of female chil-
dren. Theirs was a society of warriors, most notably in the Peninsula but also when
they became federates of the two empires, Persia and Byzantium. Hence their par-
tiality to sons rather than daughterswell-illustrated in the Korans description of
the suppressed anger of a father told that his wife had given birth to a daughter.82
The Koran and Islam ameliorated the earlier attitudes of Arabs toward women,
but Christianity did more, since it was a woman, the Virgin Mary, through whom
the mystery of the Incarnation and the miraculous birth of Christ took place.83
Women continued to play an important role in the life of Jesus and subsequently
as saints and martyrs; hence women among the Arabs such as the Kinda and
also Muslims often assumed the name of the Virgin, as Mriya or Maryam. The
Ghassnids apparently resisted that impulse, however, as the extant sources record
no Mriya or Maryam in their onomasticon.
Ghassnid parents demonstrated their pride in their children by including
the names of their sons and daughters as part of their own names. Patronymics
(son of) are widely used across peoples and societies, but the Arabs went further
78 On Flavius and Philochristos as honorific titles bestowed on them, see The Ghassnid
Identity, below (Part III, Chapter 10).
79 See John Chrysostom, Sur la vaine gloire et lducation des enfants, ed. and trans. A.-M.
Malingrey,
Sources Chrtiennes 188 (Paris, 1972), 14647.
80 Many of their kings and phylarchs were called by the name of al-rith, the Arethas of the
Greek
sources. rith, a very Arab name, was also the name of the chief martyr of Najrn, al-rith ibn-
Kab
of the Martyrium Arethae and the Syriac Book of the imyarites; see the index to Martyrs, s.v.
Arethas.
81 This matronymic of the famous Arethas was remembered as late as the days of the poet laureate
assn, ca. a.d. 600; see his Dwn, I, 74, verse 11.
82 Koran, Srat al-Nal, 16:5859; Srat al-Zukhruf, 43:17. These verses rejected and inveighed
against the pre-Islamic ethos of partiality to male issue.
83 The veneration for Mary was also shared by the Koran; Maryam, 19:1626; l-Imrn, 3:3537.
by also adding tecnonymics (father of) to their proper names. Most of the Arab
tecnonymics involve sons rather than daughters.84
The importance of children among the Arabs is reflected in some of the cus-
toms and terms associated with them, including the Ghassnids.
1. In aristocratic circles, infants were not suckled by their own mother but
were given to another woman called the murdi or murdia. The end of suckling
represented the end of a phase of infancy, and the weaning was performed by a
woman called a ftimaa word that became a proper name assumed by many
Arab women, including the Prophet Muammads daughter.
2. The teething of infants was also considered a significant stage of develop-
ment. The Arabic word for tooth, sinn, came to mean the age of an individual, and
it also gave rise to musinn, the term for an elderly man.85
3. One of the occasions on which Arabs gave a banquet, al-khurs, was child-
birth.86 It is practically certain that the Ghassnids observed this celebration.
Education
The education of Ghassnid boys is shrouded in obscurity, for the scanty extant
sources say nothing about it. But it surely must have included a preparation for their
future duties as federates, such as training in weapons, the sword and the spear, and
in the equestrianism for which the Ghassnids were celebrated.87 Religious instruc-
tion must also have been part of their education, since their royal house was the
protector of the Monophysite church. Arabic poetry undoubtedly played a role; the
art was closely associated with the court at which poets eulogized the Ghassnid
kings, and some poetry was composed by the Ghassnids themselves. It is worth
exploring the extent to which these children were likely also exposed to non-Arab
and non-Arabic education, particularly knowledge of Latin and Greek, the two
languages important for the Ghassnids as foederati in the service of Byzantium.88
The higher echelons of the Ghassnid hierarchy probably knew both, enabling the
famous Arethas to confer directly with Justinian and Theodora, without an inter-
preter, when he visited the capital. Similarly, his son, Mundir, almost certainly
84 The Ghassnid onomasticon presents a unique case when al-rith, one of the many riths, is
called Ibn Ab-Shamir, which thus simultaneously combined both the tecnonymic and the
patronymic;
for the occurrence of this in the Arabic poetry of the period, see Nldeke, GF, 21.
85 See Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1997), III, 351.
86 For the term, see ibid., II, 239.
87 Analogies can be drawn from the education of Lakhmid children, about which more is known.
Like the Ghassnids, the Lakhmids originally hailed from South Arabia, and the two groups shared
ideas and ideals common to Arabs; see Y. R. Ghunayma, al-ra (Baghdad, 1936), 10911.
88 On Byzantine education, see School, ODB, III, 1853.
addressed the Monophysite conference in Constantinople in a.d. 580 using Greek,
the language common to all the participants, who came from different parts of the
empire or at least the Pars Orientalis, including Coptic Egypt.89
A passage in Choricius of Gaza, from the 530s, has some relevant material.
In section 25 of his Laudatio Summi, the rhetor speaks of one of his students, who
was sent to him by Summus, the dux of Palestine, and whose father was a very well
known figure in the Provincia Arabia: .90 No one after
the dux was more famous in the provincia than the phylarch, Arethas, and it is
tempting to think that it was he who sent his sonpossibly Mundir, who would
become equally celebratedto study with Choricius in Gaza.91
In this context, Choricius is also helpful when he speaks of an Arab orator
who functioned as the symboulos of the dux Summus in either assessing the taxes
of Palestine or reconciling two Arab phylarchs.92 Here the Roman officer, who
belonged to the Graeco-Roman establishment, had to depend on an interpreter
who could communicate with the Arabs of the provincia. Surely he must also have
known the languages that Summus spoke or knew, Latin and Greek. The Arab
phylarchs and their children, who were trained as future phylarchs, thus not only
spoke Arabic but also may have been taught one or both of the official languages of
the empire.
Also instructive is the case of a young Arab prince who belonged to the other
phylarchal family, Kinda, in central Arabia. To negotiate a settlement, Justinian
sent Kinda his veteran diplomat, Abraham, who succeeded in 528 in striking a foe-
dus with the Kindite phylarch, Qays; as part of the agreement, Qays sent his son,
Muwiya, to the capital as a hostage, a .93 Surely a young Arab prince resid-
ing in Constantinople received some Byzantine education at the court or some
schooling at home, learning Greek, the language of the capital where he was living,
and possibly some Latin, which was still the language of the army and thus espe-
cially important to the son of an Arab military ally. Some Ghassnid princes may
also have been sent to Constantinople, since Ghassnid-Byzantine relations during
89 For the Monophysite conference in Constantinople, see BASIC I.2, 900908.
90 Laudatio Summi, section 25, in Choricii Gazaei opera, ed. R. Frster and E. Richsteig (Leipzig,
1929), 76, lines 1718; see BASIC I.1, 189.
91 When I wrote BASIC I.1 in the 1990s, I doubted that Arethas was involved (189 note 47). But
my
subsequent lectures on and research into other aspects of Ghassnid life have led me to conclude
that the
leader left unnamed by Choricius was almost certainly Arethas; especially persuasive are Arethas
non-
military attainments, which recent research has revealed. Such an accomplished king might well
have
sent his sons to Gaza to be trained for their future careers in the service of Byzantium in the style of
the
barbarian chiefs of the Roman Occident, who cared for the education of their children.
92 Ibid., 18990.
93 See Byzantium and Kinda, in BALA III, 8690.
the reign of Justinian were very good; but the young Ghassnids did not have to
make the journey to the distant capital to learn the two languages, since instruc-
tion was available in the many schools of Oriens.
Marriage
The marriage of Ghassnid children was noticed in the prose account of the wed-
ding of the princess al-Dhalf to her cousin, which pointed out that the mar-
riage was endogamous.94 Both these accounts derive from later prose works.
Contemporary poetry on the Ghassnids, or what has survived of it, is silent on
marriages. But in federate, non-Ghassnid historysuch as that reported by the
Historia Ecclesiastica of Socratesthere is reference to the fourth-century marriage
of the daughter of Queen Mavia to the magister equitum, Victor, a remarkable mar-
riage between a Rhomaios, Sarmatian though he was, and a barbarian princess. It
was a significant political marriage, unique in the social history of Arab-Byzantine
relations.95 Its varied dimensions involved the Christian faith, which united Victor
and the princess, and the imperial interests, political and military, of Byzantium in
the second half of the fourth century.
The statement of the ecclesiastical historian on this marriage was very laconic,
even leaving the princess anonymous. There is no doubt, however, that the wed-
ding was royally celebrated and involved a nuptial banquet, which the Arabs always
gave on such occasions and which they called the urs or urus.96 To the reign of
Mavia also belongs the earliest solid reference to the composition of Arabic poetry
(celebrating victories over the imperial armies of Valens), and it is very likely that
epithalamia were composed on this unusual marriage. According to Sozomen, the
epinician odes of Mavia were still remembered and sung in the fifth century, but
theytogether with the epithalamia, if any were composedhave unfortunately
disappeared.97
Circumcision
The Arabs in pre-Islamic times did circumcise their children, a practice attested
by Josephus.98 They also celebrated childbirth with a meal called idhr/idhr/
adhra.99 But the Ghassnids, after converting to Christianity, became devoted
to their new faith. As is well known, St. Paul rejected circumcision in favor of
94 For a description of the wedding, see the Cambridge Manuscript, No. 1201, 115v.
96 On this term, see Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab, IV, 298.
97 See BAFOC, 15152 and note 54.
98 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, book I, 193, 214.
99 See Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab, IV, 286.
baptism,100 and following his recommendation, circumcision was abandoned by
the Christian Church, although it has survived among some of the Christian com-
munities in the Orient such as the Ethiopians.
Extant texts do not definitively settle the question of whether the Ghassnids
had their children circumcised. However, baptism was close to their hearts, liv-
ing as they did near the Jordan, the river of baptism. And the Ghassnids, like
other Christians, sought to distinguish themselves from the Jewswhom St. Paul
referred to as , circumcision101in an age that viewed the Jews as
Theoktonoi, deicides. Like other Monophysites, the Ghassnids were probably hos-
tile toward the Jews and Judaism.102 It is thus almost certain that the Ghassnids
did not circumcise their children. But soon after the fall of the Ghassnids, Islam
prevailed in Oriens and the practice of circumcision returned, but not as a religious
ritual.
100 Galatians 5:6, 6:15.
101 Romans 3:30; Ephesians 2:11.
102 When Michael the Syrian, the Monophysite historian and patriarch, expressed his antipathy to
the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch during the latters encounter with the Ghassnid king,
Arethas,
he pejoratively referred to him as Ephraim the Jew: see BASIC I.2, 748.
II
The Women of Ghassn
G
ender studies across the humanities have been considerably stimulated by
Joan Scotts pathbreaking article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical
Analysis, which appeared in 1986.1 The field of Byzantine studies has witnessed
the publication of many important works that have built on older well-known
ones as they have taken up the theme of women in Byzantium.2 These provide
a valuable background for considering the Arab women of Ghassn, since the
Ghassnids lived in the shadow of Byzantium for a century and a half and were
its foederati. Studies on Arab women have focused mostly on the modern period,
as societies today grapple with the problem of the veil and its return as a head-
dress, promoted by Muslim fundamentalists to reassert Muslim identity.3 None
has appeared on Arab women in late antiquity, let alone on the more special-
ized subject of Ghassnid women. Among scholars, only the late Nabia Abbott
touched briefly on the Arab women in late antiquity in an article that treated
the theme of Arab queens from the Assyrian period of the eighth century b.c. to
the Byzantine period of the seventh century a.d.4 More recently and more rel-
evantly, Sebastian Brock and Susan Harvey have dealt with the Syriac Orient in
1 J. Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, American Historical Review 91
(1986), 105375.
2 See D. M. Nicol, The Byzantine Lady: Ten Portraits, 12501500 (Cambridge, 1994); L. Garland,
Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, ad 5271204 (London, 1999); A.-M.
Talbot,
Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Aldershot, Eng., 2001); I. Kalavrezou, Byzantine Women
and
Their World (New Haven, 2003); and C. L. Connor, Women of Byzantium (New Haven, 2004). See
also A. Laiou, The Role of Women in Byzantine Society, JB 31 (1981), 23360, with a useful
bib-
liography (233 notes 12) of some important works on Byzantine women that preceded Scotts
article.
On the most famous of all Byzantine women, Theodora, the most recent study is C. Foss, The
Empress
Theodora, Byzantion 72 (2002), 14176, which contains a select bibliography on Theodora (141
note
1). To these works on Byzantine women may be added K. G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses:
Women and
Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982).
3 On the veil, see Veiling in the Islamic Vestimentary System, in the standard work on Arab
dress, Y. K. Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History; From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed.
N. A.
Stillman (Leiden, 2003), 13845.
4 N. Abbott, Pre-Islamic Arab Queens, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures
58 (1941), 123.
late antiquity in a volume that appeared in 1987, but they did not concentrate on
Arab women.5
The present writer broached the topic in 1999 in an article on the Christian
Arab women of late antiquity from the third to the seventh century; a more spe-
cialized article on the martyresses of Najrn followed in 2004.6 Hence this chapter
is the first detailed and comprehensive account of the women of federate Ghassn.
While the Greek sources have yielded data on only two Arab federate women in
the fourth centurynamely, Queen Mavia and her daughter7and on a single
anonymous woman in the fifth centurynamely, the poet daughter of the Salid
federate king, Dwd8more information is available on Ghassnid women in
the sixth and seventh centuries.
I. Overview
On Ghassnid women, as on all aspects of Ghassnid social history, the sources
have their limitations. They deal with the aristocracy and with members of the
royal house, rarely or almost never with ordinary Ghassnids. But they are reliable,
since they are mostly contemporary poetry. Only a few sources are prose accounts
written later, but even these are borne out by contemporary poetry. The first refer-
ence to the women of Ghassn appropriately begins in the reign of Justinian with a
matronymic: Arethas ibn Mriya.
The examination of the sources on the women of Ghassn has revealed the
names of no fewer than thirteen queens and princesses: Mriya, alma, two
Hinds, Umma, Salma, Maysn, Fkhita, al-Ral, al-Nara, Layla, Dhalf, and
Ramla, each discussed below. Despite their importance, revealed so clearly in the
matronymics of the Ghassnid kings, little data on them have survived, but those
data are sufficient to enable a picture of their functions in Ghassnid life to emerge.
Moreover, the limitations of the extant sources can be partially counteracted when
those sources are set against the background of what is known about the social
role of Arab women in this period,9 as well the rise of the status of women through
Christianity in the history of the Christian Roman Empire.10
5 S. P. Brock and S. A. Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley, 1987).
6 See I. Shahd, The Women of Oriens Christianus Arabicus in Pre-Islamic Times, Parole de
lOrient 24 (1999), 6177; idem, The Martyresses of Najrn, in Aegyptus Christiana: Mlanges
dhagiographie gyptienne et orientale ddis la mmoire du P. Paul Devos, Bollandiste, ed. U.
Zanetti
and E. Lucchesi, Cahiers dOrientalisme 25 (Geneva, 2004), 12333.
8 See ibid., 426, 434, 43638.
9 See Abbott, Pre-Islamic Arab Queens; Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam
(Beirut, 1970), IV, 61654.
10 For a succinct description of the status of women in Byzantium, see J. Herrin, A. Kazhdan, and
83 The Women of Ghassn
Despite the number of queens and princesses whose names are known, their
story is a practically unknown chapter in Ghassnid history. Source survival is part
of the problem. An entire long ode has survived on an Arab queen of this period,
but unfortunately she was Lakhmid, not Ghassnid, and the subject was primar-
ily her beauty.11 However, from the debris of references in the extant sources on
Ghassnid women, some significant data are retrievable on the royal house. They
make it possible to arrive at conclusions about the importance of women in the his-
tory of the Ghassnids.
Women always played a significant role in Arab history, which even had a
matriarchal period.12 After the demise of the Arab matriarchies the privileged
position of Arab women persisted, as reflected in matrilinealitygenealogi-
cal filiation through the mother rather than the father, a distinctive feature of
Arab society. Matronymics such as Ibn Mriya, Ibn Hind, and Ibn Salma have
survived in the Ghassnid onomasticon.13 That they appear as appellations of
Ghassnid kings, sometimes even without the personal name of the king, clearly
implies that these queen mothers were strong and influential personalities in the
history of the dynasty.
The first question that needs to be asked is, How can the importance and
influence of queens in Ghassnid history be explained? The history of Arab-
Roman-Byzantine relations, especially in the sixth century, together with that of
related Arab groups in the Peninsula and Mesopotamia, provides fruitful clues and
a framework for understanding their prominence. This history presents role mod-
els who stimulated and inspired the Ghassnid queens.
1. The influence of Ghassnid queens and princesses in Oriens was a continu-
ation of that of their predecessors in the previous three centuries. The third cen-
tury witnessed the climax of that influence, represented by Arab empresses of the
Severan dynasty; by the wife of Philip the Arab, Marcia Otacilia Severa; and by
the federate Zenobia of Palmyra.14 Closer still to the Ghassnids was the federate
queen Mavia, who in the fourth century successfully challenged the military might
of the empire under Valens. Memories of Mavia were certainly alive in the sixth
century. As noted in the previous chapter, the epinician odes of her victories were
A. Cutler, Women, ODB, III, 22014, and its very useful bibliography, especially the first article
listed: A. Laiou, The Role of Women in Byzantine Society.
11 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 8997; the poem is discussed below in
Part III, Chapter 7.
12 Eight Arab queens who ruled as well as reigned are known by name in the Assyrian period, the
first being Zabibi and the last Adia; see Abbott, Pre-Islamic Arab Queens, 45.
13 Even the Ghassnids relatives in Medina, the Aws and the Khazraj, were called matronymically
Ban-Qayla, the Sons of Qayla.
14 All are discussed in RA.
still recited in the fifth, when the ecclesiastical historian Sozomen heard them.15 In
addition, Mavia was the model of the Christian warrior queen, and her name con-
tinued to be found among Christian Arabs in the sixth century.16
2. The Ghassnids were zealous in their Christianity, a religion that elevated
the status of women. The figure of the Theotokos was dominant, and women played
an important part in the ministry of Jesus and of St. Paul. Like all Ghassnids,
their queens and princesses were physically the closest of all the Christians of the
world to the scene of Christs birth and to his homeland, where he performed
his ministry and where he died. The ideals presented by the women of the New
Testament were alive in the consciousness of Ghassnid queens, the most famous
of whomthe mother of Arethas, a Kindite married to the Ghassnid Jabala
carried the name of the Theotokos, Mriya.
3. Closer to the Christian Ghassnids in time and affiliation were the mar-
tyresses of Najrn, about a hundred of whom died around the year a.d. 520.17
Unlike the women of the New Testament, these were their contemporaries and
their relatives, women who laid down their lives rather than renounce their faith.
The chief martyress, Ruhm, and her speech before she died must have remained
vivid in their minds. It was to the Ghassnid king and phylarch, Jabala, that the
refugees from Najrn came seeking aid against their persecutor, and Ghassnid-
Najrni relations remained very close throughout the sixth century. They became
even closer after the martyrs relics were carried to Oriens and a new Najrn, with a
great votive church, rose in the Trachonitis.18 Memories of the martyresses would
have been especially vivid on 24 October, the date of the Feast of the Martyrs of
Najrn. Just as the example of the chief martyr, Arethas, became a model for the
kings and phylarch (who coincidentally were often his namesake), so Ruhm, the
chief martyress, became a model for the queens, who must have been inspired by
her example.19
4. Even closer in time was the influence from ra, the capital of the
Lakhmids in Mesopotamia. In the second half of the sixth century, the Lakhmid
queen Hind was active in building monasteries and spreading the Christian faith.
Whereas the poet al-Nbigha wrote a not very informative but beautiful, long
ode on one Lakhmid queen, another Lakhmid queen, Hind, left a most infor-
mative, long, and resoundingly Christian inscription that clearly revealed what
15 For Mavia and the epinician odes, see BAFOC, 138202, 276.
16 For the names appearance among the martyresses of Najrn, the relatives of the Ghassnids, see
The Book of the Himyarites, ed. A. Moberg (Lund, 1924), cxxi.
17 See Shahd, The Women of Oriens Christianus Arabicus in Pre-Islamic Times, 61.
18 On this church, see the present writer in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 79.
19 For Ruhm/Ruhayma, see Martyrs, 5759.
Christian queens could do for their faith,20 and thus what Ghassnid queens
could similarly do. Although Lakhmids and Ghassnids were not on friendly
terms, owing to the paganism of the Lakhmid kings (especially Mundir and
his father, al-Numn), relations between Kinda and Ghassn were very cordial.
Because she was both Kindite and Christian, Hind had a natural affinity with
the Ghassnid queens, her counterparts in Oriens, who must have looked upon
her as a model. Two of them assumed her name, Hind, which therefore was incor-
porated into the matronymics of their sons, the two kings of Ghassn in the late
sixth century. Her influence is clear in the actions of the Ghassnid queen Hind:
namely, building one or more monasteries. The Ghassnid queens may also have
been inspired by a descendant of Hind of ra, who became a nun toward the end
of her life; another inspiration may have been the martyrdom of the Daughters of
the Covenant in Najrn.21
5. Finally, Constantinople exerted a strong influence on Ghassnid queens.
The sixth century was the Age of Justinian and his wife, the Monophysite
Theodora, whose influence and power during that famous reign are well known
and may be briefly described as follows.
a. The Ghassnid kings were also patricii, and the wife of the promoted
patricius took part in the ceremony that raised him to that status.22 It was on such
an occasion that the Ghassnid queen would have met the imperial consort, who
was usually active in the work of Christian charity and philanthropia. The patri-
ciate of the queen (she was also patricia) cemented her loyalty to the Christian
empire; the ceremony of promotion to the patriciate had religious overtones and
would have induced in the Arab queen willingness and readiness to engage in
Christian services in Ghassnland.
b. Theodora was the great friend of the Ghassnid Arethas, who obliged her
by resuscitating the Monophysite church around a.d. 540. So she was naturally
also the friend of his wife, the Ghassnid queen; from her, as from her husband,
much was expected in the service of the revived Monophysite church. Although
the loss of the sources detailing their activities, such as the Akhbr Mulk Ghasn,
has left little evidence for their Christian activities, one piece of information has
survived: the building of the monastery Dayr Hind/Hund (discussed below).
The empress Theodora built homes and related facilities for fallen women,23 and
20 On this Arabic inscription, see the present writer in The Authenticity of Pre-Islamic Poetry: The
Linguistic Dimension, al-Abth 44 (1996), 329, especially 11.
21 On the Daughters of the Covenant, see Martyrs, 46.
22 See Constantine VII, Le livre des crmonies, ed. and trans. A. Vogt (Paris, 1939), II, chap. 56,
p. 48.
23 Procopius, Secret History, xvii.3.
the patronage of the Ghassnid queen must have been at least partly inspired by
Theodoras actions.
c. It has been noted that the daughter of Justinians nephew, Justin II, was
called Arabia,24 possibly marking appreciation for the Arab kings contribution to
the resuscitation of the Monophysite church, to which the empress belonged and
for which she was a zealous crusader. Perhaps it was Theodora who gave Justin IIs
daughter her nameArabia.
Barbarian rulers and magistri militum sometimes sent their daughters to the
capital for education, and it is possible that Theodora may have arranged for some
Ghassnid princesses to be in Constantinople.
II. Women in Wartime
Although the Ghassnids contributed considerably to the arts of peace in Oriens
and were well integrated as a sedentary community close to the Arab Rhomaioi in
the region, they owed their presence in Oriens primarily to their employment as
foederati, soldiers in the service of Byzantium. Military life was the basis of their
existence, and their women played an important part in it.
Ghassnid women accompanied their men during military operations,
according to the sources (discussed in detail later in this chapter). Their presence
on the battlefield imparted a moral force to the warriors: they encouraged the men
and recited some verses in the rajaz meter. This role is exemplified by the famous
alma and by Hind. In taking these actions, these Ghassnid princesses were
inspired by ancestresses such as the heroic Arab queen Mavia, who in the fourth
century personally led her own troops victoriously against those of the emperor
Valens.
Ghassnid women cared for the troops in other respects. They provided food,
as did Hind, and looked after the wounded. They also perfumed the warriors in
their qubbas, pavilions where they stayed, as Maysn did while the battle raged.
The memory of Ghassnid women has survived among Arabs through the battle to
which one of them, alma, gave her name: the battle of Chalcis, Yawm alma.
Their presence also imbued these military encounters with a romantic complexion,
one of the elements that make up the concept of chivalry (discussed in Part III).
III. Women in Peacetime
In peacetime Ghassnid women played an even more important role, which was
considerably enhanced by Christianity, to which they were devoted. It influenced
practically all aspects of their life, and was consonant with some aspects of their
Arab ethos and mores.
24 See BASIC I.1, 31822. For more on Theodora and Arabia, see below, pp. 34748.
As noted in the previous chapter, family and family life, already impor-
tant among the pre-Islamic Arabs, was further enhanced by Christianity. The
Ghassnids celebrated the birth of children with a feast, undoubtedly rejoiced in
their baptism, and observed marriage as a Christian sacrament, now celebrated
with the feast known in Arabic as al-milk. The rites associated with death, too,
changed, as Christianity emphasized hope in the Resurrection.
Of all these occasions on which women would have figured prominently,
only death is mentioned in contemporary poetry, as when Ghassnid women
mourned the death of a Ghassnid king, al-Numn.25 And as will be explained in
the chapter Music and Song, below, mourning became institutionalized in mem-
ory of the martyrs of Najrn. The Resurrection is also mentioned in al-Nbighas
ode on the death of al-Numn, in which the Ghassnids, both men and women,
share that hope for the deceased king, no doubt voiced in the funeral rite during
burial.26 The relevant prayers are possibly referred to in one of al-Nbighas verses
on al-Numn, if the reading muallhu and not muillhu is accepted, as some
scholiasts recommend.27
The sources refer to the death of two members of the Ghassnid royal house,
both sons of the famous Arethas: one, left anonymous by Procopius, died after
being captured by their inveterate enemy, the Lakhmid Mundir of ra, in one
of the encounters of the Ghassnid-Lakhmid war (a.d. 545550) and sacrificed
to Venus;28 the other, Jabala, died at the battle of Chalcis in 554,29 which also wit-
nessed the death of the Lakhmid king Mundir. Jabala was buried in the martyr-
ion of Chalcis/Qinnasrn. Both would have been considered martyrs dying for the
faith, since they fought against the pagan and rabid anti-Christian Mundir, and
both would have been remembered in special services and mourned by Ghassnid
women, especially by the bereaved mother.
The contributions of Ghassnid women could not have been limited to fam-
ily and family life but must have extended to the social life in Ghassnland in gen-
eral. In this area, the old Arab ethos and mores found their perfect complement in
the ideals preached by Christianity. Half of the Arab ideal of mura was karam,
hospitality, a capacious concept that included many minor virtues. Likewise
, the Christian ideal of social welfare, was broadly manifested: it was
25 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 1078, verses 45.
26 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 122, verse 30; see E. Velkovska, Funeral Rites according to the Byzantine
Liturgical Sources, DOP 55 (2001), 44.
27 For muallhu, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, 121, verse 25; for muillhu, see Dwn, ed. S. Fayal
(Beirut, 1968), 199, verse 27.
28 Procopius, History, II.xxvii.1213; see BASIC I.1, 237.
29 As recorded by Michael the Syrian, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche jacobite
dAntioche
(11661199), ed. and trans. J. B. Chabot (Paris, 1899), II, 269; see BASIC I.1, 241.
institutionalized in the hospices (xenodocheia), the orphanages (orphanotropheia),
and the hospitals (xenones).30
Ghassnid men were occupied in fighting continually on three fronts: against
the Lakhmids, against the Persians, and against the pastoralists of the Arabian
Peninsula. It was therefore a natural division of labor that left Ghassnid women to
undertake the work of social welfare. A model for the case of the Ghassnid kings
and queens was provided by the Abbasid caliph Hrn al-Rashd and his wife,
Zubayda bint-Jafar. While he was engaged in war and politics, she concentrated on
welfare and public works, such as building an aqueduct to supply water to the Holy
City, Mecca.31 The scope and nature of such work is hard to ascertain in the docu-
ments that have survived on Ghassnid social life,32 but one piece of evidence does
reveal what they might have done in this respect. The historian amza al-Ifahn
(d. 961) writes of Dayr Hind, the monastery of Hind, which, as discussed below,
may well have been built by one of the two Hinds who appear as queens in the
Ghassnid genealogical tree.
Of all the institutional manifestations of philanthropia, Ghassnid women
must have been most involved in the xenodocheia attached to some monaster-
ies. Philoxenia was the perfect counterpart to that part of Arab mura related to
peacenamely, karam in all its forms, such as offering food and lodging to strang-
ers and travelers. And life and conditions in Ghassnland and Oriens called for the
riseeven the proliferationof such hospices. They could accommodate general
travelers to the court of the Ghassnid kings and even the caravaneers of western
Arabia, on their way to the Ghassnids markets, aswq, discussed in Part I of this
volume. In particular, they welcomed pilgrims from faraway countries journeying
to the Holy Land and to other loca sancta in Oriens. This was the century in which
pilgrimage attained a wide vogue.
Though the evidence in contemporary poetry of Ghassnid involvement in
these xenodocheia is indirect and circumstantial, it is pervasive and persuasive.
Their panegyrists go out of their way to say that the Ghassnids were the fore-
most among all the Arab groups noted for hospitality.33 And hospitality is natu-
30 For instances of Ghassnid philanthropia at its best, see Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W.
Araft,
Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 74, verse 10.
31 On the social work of this Abbasid woman, see R. Jacobi, Zubayda, EI2, XI, 54748.
32 The Ghassnid kings were highly engaged in the urbanization of Oriens, as the list of kings in
amza, analyzed in BASIC II.1, makes clear; their activities included the building or repair of
aque-
ducts (see BASIC II.1, 32627). Ghassnid queens may also have been involved in this, just as
Zubayda
was in Mecca.
33 So al-Nbigha sings in his famous ode: God has gifted them with a quality which he did not
favor any other group withnamely, their generosity and hospitality; Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 46, line
23.
In a similar vein, assn describes their visitors as so many and frequent that their dogs,
accustomed to
the sight of guests, do not bark or howl to protect their masters; see Dwn, I, 74, verse 12.
rally displayed in such venues as xenodocheia. The prose sources offer one explicit
piece of evidence for womens patronage of such social activities. This is again the
construction of Dayr Hind in the Damascus region. It is unlikely to have been the
only monastery built by a Ghassnid queen; some of the 137 monasteries enumer-
ated by Syriac writers must have been Ghassnid, and some of those such as Dayr
al-Labwa may have been built by women.34
The Ghassnid monastery was not, however, primarily a foundation for
social welfare, manifested in a xenodocheion. It was an institution for imitators
of Christ, men and women who chose monasticism as a way of life. Some of the
Ghassnid warriors made that choice after participating in the battle of Chalcis in
a.d. 554; they decided to stay with St. Symeon the Younger, who, they believed, had
aided them in their victory.35 Although there is no direct evidence of Ghassnid
nuns, Ghassnid women must have been inspired by their relatives in Najrn, the
Arab martyropolis, who numbered nuns and daughters of the Covenant among
their dead.36 The Arabic term for nuns is found in the pre-Islamic period in the
poetry of Imru al-Qays, whose maternal uncles were the Ghassnids.37 More to
the point, it appears in the poetry of assn, their panegyrist. In an elegy on the
Prophet Muammad, he uses the term rawhib (plural of rhiba, nun) in describ-
ing the widow of the Prophet.38 The most likely presumption is that he saw nuns
in Ghassnid Oriens. Further evidence is provided by the Arabic term hayjumna,
which probably derives from the Greek , the mother superior in charge
of a nunnery.39 The Arabic terms hayjumna, for the head of the convent, and
rawhib, for its members, strongly argues for the existence of the institution among
the Arabs. A study of monasteries in later times has revealed about seventeen of
them in the region.40 These could not have been built in the Islamic period, when
restrictions were placed on the construction of Christian places of worship; thus
34 See The Monastery as a Cultural Center, Chapter 4 in Part III; on the Syriac document, see
BASIC I.2, 82438. On Dayr al-Labwa, see BASIC II.1, 200, 333: in Arabic, Labwa means
Lioness, a
complimentary term indicative of strength.
It is worth noting that the empress Theodora made grants in support of charity in various parts of
the empire, as far distant as Italy. It is therefore quite likely that she extended grants to the diocese
dear-
est to her heart, that of the Monophysite Ghassnids, who had revived the church of her confession.
The
remarkable number of monasteries built within a thirty-year period may thus be owed in part to the
grants extended by the empress to federate Oriens, to the queens and kings of the Ghassnid royal
house.
36 See Martyrs, 54.
37 Imru al-Qays, Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1958), 386, verse 36.
38 See assn, Dwn, I, 272, line 8.
39 Hayjumna appears in the Dwn of Salma ibn Jandal, ed. F. Qabwa (Aleppo, 1968), 190,
verse 1.
40 See H. al-Zayyt, al-Diyrt al-Narniyya fi al-Islam, al-Machriq 36 (1938), 291417; on the
nunneries, see 31215.
they must go back to pre-Islamic times. The chances then are that Ghassnid
queens, perhaps inspired in part by the imperial example of Theodora, did establish
some nunneries in Oriens.41
It is also possible that one or more were founded for fallen women who
repentedas had been done by the empress Theodora in Constantinople.42 Again,
some strong circumstantial evidence points in this direction. Despite imperial and
ecclesiastical disfavor, sensual festivities such as the Maiumas had not disappeared
in this period in Oriens,43 and some Arabs, federate and Rhomaic, must have wan-
dered into venues that featured them. These could be the breeding ground for
prostitution, as evidenced in the poetry of assn, who refers to the mmis, the
prostitute, more than once.44 Even the region whence the Ghassnids had hailed
before they became foederati of Byzantium was no stranger to prostitution. The
Laws of St. Gregentius, given to the imyarites of South Arabia, legislated against
prostitution and sexual misbehavior; and in Najrn itself, a prostitute, Miya, was
among the women who had repented and around a.d. 520 chose to be martyred as
a Christian.45
IV. Women and Religious Feasts
The Ghassnids were devout Christians, and Christianity was in effect their state
religion. It followed that all the feasts of the Christian calendar were observed
by the Ghassnids, including all members of their families. Indeed, in the scant
sources on this aspect of Ghassnid social life, contemporary poetry mentions
Ghassnid women rather than men.46
Ghassnid women naturally would have had a special interest in the Marian
feasts; their most famous queen carried the name Mriya. Also close to their
hearts would have been the Feast of the Martyrs of Najrn, their relatives, whose
numbers included about 100 women.47 And while these feast days were celebrated
41 For a general account of Arab and Ghassnid nunneries in Oriens in the pre-Islamic period,
42 See Procopius, Anecdota, XVII.56.
43 See A. Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia (Leiden, 1995), 11 note 33.
44 For references in assn to mmis, see the appendix to Chapter 8.
45 On the legislation against prostitution, see a summary of various laws in Life and Works of
Saint Gregentios, Bishop of Taphar, ed. and trans. A. Berger (Berlin, 2006), 82. On Miya of
Najrn,
see Martyrs, 5557.
46 See, e.g., the verse in which assn describes the Ghassnid maidens weaving wreaths of coral
for
the fast-approaching Easter Sunday; Dwn, I, 123, verse 6.
47 For the list of martyresses and the speech of Ruhm before her death, see The Martyrdom of
Early
Arab Christians: Sixth Century Najran, in BALA II, 16567, 170. For a study of the female
onomasti-
con of the martyresses, see Shahd, The Martyresses of Najrn. For Ghassnid celebration of feast
days
generally, see the previous chapter.
by both Ghassnid men and women, the women would have been more intimately
involved in such matters as preparing the love-feast, the , provided on
such occasions.
V. Women and Pilgrimages
The Ghassnids, men and women, also participated in the all-important institu-
tion of the early Christian Church that required travel, the pilgrimage.48 As noted
in the previous chapter, the Ghassnids would have undertaken such journeys with
particular enthusiasm because of their proximity to the Holy Land and because of
their role in defending it.
Just as women may have been more involved than men in the social aspects
of celebrating the feast days, so perhaps they may have been more active in travel-
ing to various pilgrimage centers. Ghassnid women must have been aware that the
institution of pilgrimage was established largely by a womanHelen, the mother
of Constantinewhose feast they celebrated. They would also have known of the
female pilgrim Egeria, who came from the far west of Europe and traveled all over
the biblical lands in the fourth century,49 and of the empress Eudocia, who in the
fifth century stayed long in the Holy Land.
The only extant explicit reference to Ghassnid involvement in pilgrimage
refers to Ghassnid women rather than men. The source is Ifahns al-Aghn,
which mentions Layla, a Ghassnid princess. Particularly noteworthy in this context
is that the princess apparently undertook the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in a style wor-
thy of her station in life, surrounded by a group of devoted female attendants.50 Here,
as in other aspects of Ghassnid social life, it is likely that the uniqueness of the refer-
ence reflects the scantiness of the sources, not the rarity of the event: other Ghassnid
visits to the Holy Land were no doubt mentioned in accounts that have not survived.
The sources have also revealed the Arabic term for a female pilgrim, jja,
which has survived in the form of a diminutive, al-ujayja. The term is attested
in an account of afiyya bint Thalaba, who gave refuge and the right of jiwr,
protection of a neighbor, to Hind, the daughter of the last Lakhmid king of ra,
al-Numn; both were Christian women.
afiyya is described as a courageous woman and a poet who harangued her
own people to fight against the Persians and their Arab allies. They did so around
48 For the destinations of the Ghassnid pilgrims in the Holy Land and in Oriens in general, see
the previous chapter and Arab Christian Pilgrimages in the Proto-Byzantine Period, in BALA III,
12541.
49 See Egerias Travels, trans. J. Wilkinson (Warminster, Eng., 1999).
50 See Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1959), XVII, 27375. The passage is discussed in
detail later in this chapter.
a.d. 604, at the famous battle known as Yawm Dh Qr, in which the Arabs
were victorious.
In her own verses afiyya five times refers to herself as al-ujayja. Traces
of her religious belief are clear in references in her verse to God, Allah, whom
she describes as al-Muhaymin (Preserver) and al-Mannn (Gracious Giver).
Apparently, she used to wear a veil, the custom of aristocratic women in pre-Islamic
Arabia.51 She belonged to the tribe of Bakr in northeastern Arabia and to the sub-
division of Shaybn. So she must have traveled far to reach Jerusalem in perform-
ing the pilgrimage, as did Bar Sauma, the Metropolitan of Nisibis (d. a.d. 496),
who came from distant Mesopotamia.
The implication for pilgrimages by Ghassnid women to the Holy Land is
clear. If a Christian woman from northeastern Arabia could make such a long jour-
ney, braving the harsh climate and difficult terrain, then women living close to the
Holy Land undoubtedly made pilgrimages often.52
Already in the sixth century maps to the Holy Land were being provided for
pilgrims,53 especially those who came from distant lands, who also needed xeno-
docheia and xenones. Possibly Ghassnid queens and princesses took part in one of
these important activities related to pilgrimage, the construction of the hospices and
hostels. Such involvement is attested in later Islamic times for the wives of Muslim
rulers. Zubayda, the wife of Hrn al-Rashd (a.d. 786809), constructed Darb
Zubayda, the Route of Zubayda, the long pilgrim route that extended from Iraq to
Mecca in ijz, and she provided it with stations for accommodating the pilgrims.54
VI. Queens and Princesses
Mriya
The first Ghassnid queen known to the sources is Mriya, who appears in the
matronymic of her son, the Ghassnid king al-rith ibn Mriyaal-rith/
Arethas, son of Mriya (a.d. 529569). That he was referred to more often by his
51 See B. Yamut, Shirt al-Arab fi al-Jhiliyya wa al-Islam (Beirut, 1934). He does not
specifically
identify the source from which he derived the poems of afiyya, leaving it among a long list of
sources
given at the end of the work. For references to al-ujayja in her own poems, see 11, verse 11; 12,
verse 8;
14, verse 11; 15, verse 9; 16, verse 2. For her veil, see 24, verse 6, written by Hind, the Lakhmid
princess
who took refuge with her.
52 For other Arab Christians who came from Arabia as pilgrims to Palestine, see Arab Christian
Pilgrimages in the Proto-Byzantine Period, in BALA III, 128.
53 See Y. Tsafrir, The Maps Used by Theodosius: On the Pilgrim Maps of the Holy Land and
Jerusalem in the Sixth Century c.e., DOP 40 (1986), 12646. On the Madaba Mosaic map, see the
present writers The Madaba Mosaic Map Revisited: Its Meaning and Purpose, in Madaba Map
Centenary, ed. M. Piccirillo and E. Alliata, Collectio Maior 40 (Jerusalem, 1999), 14754.
54 On Darb Zubayda and the facilities constructed along it, see Muammad ibn Amad ibn Jubayr,
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, ed. W. Wright (Leiden, 1907), 208; S. al-Rshid, Darb Zubayda: The
Pilgrim
Road from Kufa to Mecca (Riyadh, 1980).
matronymic than by his patronymic, as was usual in the Arabic onomasticon, sig-
nifies the importance of Mriya, his mother. But the name of this first Ghassnid
queen known to the sources is attended by some problems, and it raises the follow-
ing questions.
The first problem is correctly establishing Mriya within Ghassnid gene-
alogy. Was she the mother of the Arethas who was the most famous of all the
Ghassnid kings (and so the wife of Jabala, his father), or was she the mother of a
later Ghassnid king of the sixth century who was called al-rith? As a further
complication, at least two more famous riths flourished at the end of the sixth
century and the beginning of the seventh.
Nldeke was in favor of identifying Mriya as the mother of the later
Ghassnid king/phylarch,55 but the case for her being the mother of the earlier,
more famous, Arethas remains equally strong. That Arethas was also called son of
Jabala does not invalidate this identification, since a patronymic is not inconsistent
with a matronymic; Arab rulers were sometimes referred to by both.56 According
to the sources she was a princess from the tribe of Kinda, and this description
could support her being the mother of Arethas, the earlier rith, and the wife
of Jabala, who had attacked the Roman frontier around a.d. 500 together with
the two Kindites ujr and Mad Karib; this unified action suggests that the two
groups, Kinda and Ghassn, were on friendly terms.57 The marriage of Jabala to
the sister of the two Kindite phylarchs thus becomes credible. Also pointing to the
earlier Arethas is the matronymic son of Mriya in assns famous ode.58 He is
the only Ghassnid king mentioned in that ode, written long after the demise of
the dynasty, and reference is made to a mausoleum around which his descendants
gather. This can belong only to the famous early Arethas whose death was noted by
the poet Labd.59 The same matronymic appears in a verse referring to a Ghassnid
king who established the peace, Pax Ghassnica, among the various clans of ayyi,
and that king was the early Arethas.60 So it is highly probable that Mriya was the
mother of the early Arethas and wife of his father, Jabala.
55 See Nldeke, GF, 2223.
56 Arethas contemporary, the famous Mundir of the reign of Justinian, was called the son of
al-Numn (his father) and the son of al-Shaqqa (his mother).
57 See Ghassan and Byzantium: A New Terminus a quo, in BALA I, 77100, and BASIC I.1,
312.
59 Labd, Dwn, ed. I. Abbs (Kuwait, 1962), 266, verses 4952; see BASIC II.1, 27880.
60 On the peace, see BASIC II.2, 258. The phrase sulh Ibn Mriya, the peace of Ibn Mriya,
appears
in a verse by al-rith ibn illiza, wrongly attributed to Qays ibn Sharhil in Ifahn, al-Aghn,
XI,
39. The matronymic Ibn Mriya appears again in another of riths verses; see al-Khatb al-
Tbrizi,
Sharh Ikhtiyrt al-Mufaal, ed. F. Qabwa (Damascus, 1971), 24, line 9. Ibn Mriya is referred to
in
the previous verse as malik, king, a label that fits Arethas, who lived until a.d. 569long enough
to
have been remembered in his poetry; see also note 6 to the verse.
The princess who married a Ghassnid kept her Kindite affiliation, since
around a.d. 500 her group was more powerful and famous than the Ghassn,
although it began to decline upon the death in 527 of its famous king, also called
rith/Arethas.61 The retention by Mriya of her Kindite affiliation reflects the
Kindas high status.
Another problem surrounds the meaning of Mriya. Was it the Arabic ver-
sion of the name of the Virgin Mary, or was it, as has been suggested by Nldeke,
a Syriac term meaning the lady? The case for the name being Mary in its Greek
form, Maria, was made by the present writer some years ago,62 and may be sup-
ported by another observation. The Kindite princess had come from the heart of
the Arabian Peninsula, where, unlike Oriens, Syriac was not known. Kinda was
a Christian group, and the inscription of one of its princesses, Hind, vouched for
the Christianity of the entire royal house: herself, her father, and her son.63 It was
only natural that the women of Kinda should assume the name of the Virgin Mary,
especially as the latter figured so prominently in the theological controversies of
the period, which ended with her being called the Theotokos.
Mriya thus emerges from the preceding arguments as a Kindite princess; the
wife of Jabala, the Ghassnid (ca. 500528); mother of Arethas (529569); and
a Christian woman, whose name was that of the Virgin Mary, a reflection of the
strong attachment of her house to Christianity. That attachment is demonstrated
in the inscription at ra of Hind, who may have been Mriyas sister.
The sources are almost silent on Mriya, and she would have remained a mere
name in the Ghassnid onomasticon had it not been for a tantalizing reference to
some of her jewelry. The Arabic sources associate her with two earringsqur
Mriya, the two earrings of Mriyathat are discussed below in the chapter
Votive and Victory Offerings.
alma
Whereas Mriya was the most celebrated of the queens of Ghassn, alma was
the most celebrated of its princesses. She appears in the sources in a military con-
textin the army of her father, the Ghassnid kingin the course of a battle
fought with his inveterate adversary, the Lakhmid king of ra. almas role was
to perfume the Ghassnid warriors and clothe them in their coats of mail, acts
that promoted the Ghassnid victory. Some uncertainty attends the identity of
the Ghassnid king and the battle involved, but it is highly probable that the king
61 See BASIC I.1, 14860.
62 See The Women of Oriens Christianus Arabicus in Pre-Islamic Times, Parole de lOrient 24
(1999), 66 note 18.
63 For the inscription, see ibid., 68.
was the famous Arethas, of the reign of Justinian, and the battle was the decisive
battle of a.d. 554, a smashing victory in which the equally famous Lakhmid king
Mundir was not only defeated but killed.64
This rare glimpse of a Ghassnid princess on the battlefield makes possible
several observations.
1. almas identity. She was the daughter of Arethas, son of Mriya. The
identity of her mother is not clear, but at least through her father she was the
granddaughter of Mriya and so had some Kindite blood. Arethas had many sons,
at least two of whom are known by their names: Mundir, his successor in 569, and
Jabala. Whether alma had sisters is not known.65
2. almas name. Like all other Ghassnid names of the royal house, alma
was a purely Arab name. It has survived in two toponyms: a wadi, Wd alma,
and a meadow, Marj alma.66 Above all, it is attached to the most famous of
Arab pre-Islamic battle-days (ayym), Yawm alma, the battle of Chalcis, which
gave rise to the proverbial saying The day of alma is no secret, applied even in
Islamic times to a celebrated event.67
3. almas participation in the famous battle. Her contribution is striking
in many ways, one of which pertains to the Ghassnid style in waging wars: the
king, who is the commander in chief, fights together with his familynormally
his sons, who are either current or prospective phylarchs. At this battle of Chalcis/
Qinnasrn, the kings son Jabala died;68 another sonhis successor, Mundirmay
also have fought there. The involvement of his daughter means that possibly three
of Arethas children participated in the battle.
More generally, the episode underscores the importance of womens par-
ticipation in Arab warfare in pre-Islamic times. They had duties to perform,
such as looking after the wounded. But their more important function was
64 The battle is described in many sources, including Ibn Qutayba; for his description of the role of
alma in the battle, see R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London,
1969),
50. For the battle of Chalcis, see BASIC I.1, 24051. On which Lakhmid was killed in this battle,
the
judicious Ibn al-Athr is positive, and rightly so, that it was the famous Mundir; see al-Kmil f al-
Trkh
(Beirut, 1965), I, 547.
65 For the family of her grandfather Jabala, see BASIC I.1, 6970.
66 See the poem on the battle by Ibn al-Athr, in al-Kmil, 544, verses 1, 4. Nldeke doubted
(GF, 19) that the name alma belonged to a woman who accompanied the Ghassnid army,
suggesting
instead that it referred to a place, the Valley of alma (Wd alma). It is difficult to accept this
view,
which Yqt rejected; see Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 195557), II, 292. alma is clearly a
womans
personal name, though perhaps the valley was given the name alma after the Ghassnid princess.
See Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil, I, 543.
67 Even some fifty years after the engagement, al-Nbigha invokes the Day of alma to praise the
swords of the Ghassnids, handed down as heirlooms from that day and distinguished by having
been
unsheathed during that heroic encounter; see Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 45, verse 20. In another poem, he
speaks of the Two Days of alma, indicating that the battle lasted long (206, verse 4).
68 On the son Jabala, see BASIC I.1, 243.
moralimparting spirit to the warriors to do their best. Sometimes, it was a
woman who recited the rajaz verses to hearten the warriors.69 Apparently the
Ghassnids followed this Arab custom when fighting other Arabs, as in this
battle with the Lakhmids, but not when they fought as part of the army of the
Orient against the Persians.
The participation of women in military campaigns in pre-Islamic Arabia
received its classical statement in the Suspended Ode of Amr ibn Kulthm
(ca. a.d. 570), which included an octave of verses that explained the reason for
their participation. Although the lilt of the Arabic meter and the sting of its
rhyme are lost in the following English version, the substance of what the poet
says is preserved:
Upon our tracks follow fair, noble ladies
that we take care shall not leave us, nor be insulted,
litter-borne ladies of Banu Jusham bin Bakr
who mingle, with good looks, high birth and obedience.
They have taken a covenant with their husbands
that, when they should meet with signal horsemen,
they will plunder mail-coats and shining sabers
and captives fettered together in irons.
When they fare forth, they walk sedately
swinging their gait like swaying tipplers.
They provender our horses, saying, You are not
our husbands, if you do not protect us.
If we defend them not, may we survive not
nor live on for any thing after them!
Nothing protects women like a smiting
that sends the forearms flying like play-chucks.70
Female participation in campaigns is not unknown in Byzantine mili-
tary historyfor example, the empress Irene Doukaina, the wife of Alexios I
Komnenos (10811118), occasionally accompanied her husband on his military
campaigns71but this was the exception rather than the rule. Closer to alma
69 For example, on the battle-day of al-Sharabiyya a woman named Layla was al-athe one
who urges the warriors or stirs them up; see Shir al-Akhal, ed. F. Qabwa (Beirut, n.d.), 129. The
battle
was fought by the Christian tribe of the Taghlib.
70 Translated in A. J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London and
New York, 1957), 2089.
71 The campaigns of Alexios Komnenos were remembered by his daughter Anna in the Alexiad,
and the Ghassnids was the figure of Mavia, the Christian federate queen of the
fourth century; as already noted, she personally led military campaigns against
the emperor Valens. Her memory was certainly still green in the Ghassnid
consciousness.72
Women continued to participate in the wars of Islamic times, taking part in
the battle of Uud, which Islamic forces lost to the pagan Meccans, and at the
Yarmk in a.d. 636, which Islamic forces won against those of Byzantium.73
4. The qubba, the canopy. A typically Arab structure, the qubba was usually
put up for the commander in chief and also for those women of the group who
participated in the battle. This was the setting in which alma is said to have
perfumed the warriors and clad them in white sheets and coats of mail, prepar-
ing them for the charge. Women in qibb (plural of qubba) during the battle are
attested elsewhere as well in Arabic poetry and prose accounts.74
5. The romantic element. The participation of alma at the battle of Chalcis
endows the engagement with a romantic element, unrelated to the purely military
facets of the battle. Though the account was much embroidered in later times, its
core remains sound. These embroideries include reference to a warrior by the name
of Labd (not the famous poet of the Suspended Ode) who was smitten by almas
charms and was able to win her hand only after acquitting himself remarkably well
in the battle,75 illustrating the principle of none but the brave deserves the fair.
Indeed, the concept of chivalry may be rooted in this famous encounter at Chalcis,
which involved key chivalrous elements: the lady (the dame of medieval European
literature) and the knight in shining armor, riding his mare, who performs his duty
in the service of the lady. Antara, the black poet who is associated with the idea of
chivalry in pre-Islamic Arabia,76 was the younger contemporary of those involved
in the battle of Chalcis, but his lady, Abla, never participated in battle; alma
which contains data on her mother relevant to alma and to female Arab participation in war. In
par-
ticular, (1) during the campaign, an imperial canopy covered her, not unlike the qubba which
covered
Ghassnid women such as Maysn, who took part in Ghassnid military expeditions; and (2) her
dress
was modest and decorous, protecting her from the public eye. See Anna Comnena, Alexiade, ed.
and
trans. B. Leib (Paris, 1945), III, 60, lines 2224; 62, lines 811. See also the comments of Laiou in
The
Role of Women in Byzantine Society, especially section 3, Society and Politics, 24960.
72 On Mavia and her exploits, see BAFOC, 138201.
73 On Hind, the mother of the future caliph Muwiya, at the battle of Uud, see Ibn Isq, The
Life
of Muhammad, trans. A. Guillaume (1955; reprint, Karachi, 1990), 374; on Arab women at the
Yarmk,
see abar, Trkh, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1962), III, 401.
74 The qubba of Maysn, another Ghassnid princess, and of the daughter of Jabala, the last
Ghassnid king, are discussed below.
75 See Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil, I, 543, 54647.
76 On Antara and the romance, and on chivalry in his Sra, see E. Heller, Srat Antara, EI2,
I, 52021.
did. And so she provides an important element in what may be assembled as an
Arab pre-Islamic conceptwhich perhaps was a gift from pre-Islamic Arabia to
European medieval literature.77
alma died some fifteen centuries ago, but as noted above, she lives in the lit-
erary consciousness of the Arabs through the proverbial saying The day of alma
is no secret and through two toponyms, Wd alma and Marj alma. She also
is memorialized in the second verse of a celebrated couplet extolling the swords of
the Ghassnids that performed well at the battle of Chalcisnamely, Mikhdam
and Rasb; this couplet was recited in Islamic times as late as the tenth century,
when the epic Arab-Byzantine conflict involved the amdnid Sayf al-Dawla and
the Byzantine Nicephorus Phocas.78
Al-Ral
Just as Yawm alma, the Battle-Day of alma (a.d. 554), was remembered
in a poem by a Ghassnid, so was Ayn Ubgh (a.d. 570) in another Ghassnid
poem. Whereas the author of the former poem was anonymous, the poet of the
second is known through his matronymic, Ibn al-Ral, the son of al-Ral.79
That the poet did not use his patronymic suggests that the mother was an impor-
tant personage. Nothing else is known about her, and the meaning of her name
is also obscure.
Ibn al-Athr attributed the poem to a poet with almost the same matronymic,
although he calls him not a Ghassnid but a Dubyni.80 But as a historian, Ibn
al-Athrs attribution is less reliable than that of Marzubni, who made the poets
and their names his specialty. Furthermore, the poem is redolent of Ghassnica:
it connects the Ghassnid broadsword, the afa or spathe, with Bostra, where
evidently there was a factory for making swords, and mentions a Ghassnid rya,
standard, called al-Uqb, the Falcon, a favorite name for battle standards.81
77 On this controversial subject, see H. A. R. Gibb, Literature, in The Legacy of Islam, ed.
T. Arnold and A. Guillaume (London, 1931), 180209, especially 18486; F. Rosenthal,
Literature, in
The Legacy of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. E. Bosworth and J. Schacht (Oxford, 1974), 32149, especially
340; but
particularly F. Gabrieli, Islam in the Mediterranean World, in ibid., 81, 89, 9596.
78 For the two verses, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 4445, verses 1920. On their recitation
by Sayf al-Dawla in the tenth century, see Dwn al-Mutanabbi, ed. A. al-Barqq (Cairo, 1930), II,
286
note 2. The swords are discussed in detail below, in Chapter 11, Votive and Victory Offerings.
79 For the poem and its poet, see Muammad al-Marzubni, Mujam al-Shuar, ed. A. al-Sattar
Farrj (Cairo, 1960), 86.
80 See Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil, I, 542.
81 For all the Ghassnid elements, see the poem on Ayn Ubgh in Marzubni, Mujam al-Shuar,
86, verses 2, 6, 9. It provides important historical data on the Ghassnids, such as the name of their
standard in battle, al-Uqb, the Falcon (a favorite name for battle standards; it was also the name
of
Khalids standard during the Muslim conquest of Bild al-Shm).
Hind, a Princess
A quatrain of verses on Yawm alma, attributed to an anonymous Ghassnid
poet,82 refers to a certain Hind, who had with her the khalq (perfume composed
of saffron) with which she scented the warriors, as alma was said to have done.
The poem thus both documents the participation of women in Ghassnid military
operations and alludes to their perfuming the warriors, supporting the evidence
of prose accounts (considered less reliable). This Hind apparently was a Ghassnid
princess of around a.d. 554, not one of the Hinds who belonged to the later period.
Those mentioned in al-Nbighas fragment were two important queens of the later
period (see below),83 and so they may be ruled out. Whoever she was, her name is a
welcome addition to the Hind class of names, which apparently was popular in the
female Ghassnid onomasticon.
This quatrain both contains the two toponyms mentioned aboveWd
alma and Marj alma, the valley and meadow near which the battle took
placeand suggests that Ghassnid women fed as well as perfumed the warriors.84
The verse that describes platters of food being laid out does not make clear who
did the feeding, a function that naturally fell to women. Moreover, the verse as it
stands does not scan correctly; a logical emendation both corrects the scansion and
definitely allocates this function to women.85
Two Hinds, Two Queens
One of the extant fragments of pre-Islamic poetry ascribed to al-Nbigha, pan-
egyrist of the Ghassnids, is almost a genealogical list of the Ghassnid dynasts of
the second half of the sixth century.86 Two of the generations of Ghassnid rulers
enumerated are related not to the kings but to two queens, each called Hind.87 This
attestation of the queens is confirmed by the reference to the Ghassnid kings in
encomia by their matronymic son of Hind, Ibn Hind,88 which also clearly indi-
cates the significance of these Ghassnid queen mothers.
82 See Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil, I, 544, verses 14.
83 For this quatrain, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 166, discussed above in Chapter 1, in the
section Childhood and Children in Federate Oriens, and by Nldeke, GF, 3335.
84 Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil, I, 544, verse 4.
85 As written, the verb naabn (we set up) ends in a long final a and thus has an epicene referent;
if emended to naabna, with a short final a (and they set up), they must be women, since the
verb is a
third-person feminine plural.
86 The fragment and the list have been analyzed most competently by Nldeke, in GF, 3336.
87 At least one of these two Hinds has to be distinguished from the Hind who was the princess of
the previous discussion. For the Arabic version of the fragment, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed.
Ibrhm,
166, verses 14.
88 For instances of this matronymic, see, inter alia, ibid., 196, verse 1; 206, verses 5, 6. The last of
these is erroneously thought by the editor to be that of the Lakhmid.
In his important list of structures built by the Ghassnid rulers, the historian
amza al-Ifahn mentions a monastery by the name of Dayr Hund.89 It has been
argued that Hund is either a plural of Hind or a corrupt reading of the name Hind,
and that the monastery was built by the Ghassnid queen of that name, mentioned in
al-Nbighas fragment. Moreover, it has been argued that the dayr (monastery, plural
adyr) built by the Ghassnid queen is likely to have been a nunnery.90 Her patron-
age may have been inspired by the Byzantine empress, Theodora, who had built
homes for fallen women and a monastery in Constantinople. But closer to Oriens
was the Lakhmid queen Hind of ra, who commissioned the celebrated inscription
engraved at the door of the chapel in her famous dayr in ra. She was a model for
those Ghassnid queens, her namesakes and possibly her blood relations, since the
Ghassnid Mriya was a Kindite princess before she became a Ghassnid queen, and
other Ghassnid kings may have married Kindite princesses. Just as the Ghassnids
had two Hinds so too did the Lakhmids, Hind al-Kubr and Hind al-Sughr, the
Elder and the Younger, and to each of the two a dayr, well described in the sources,
has been attributed.91 The Ghassnid queens may well have built more than one dayr:
amza al-Ifahn was a selective author, giving only specimens to illustrate what
each Ghassnid ruler had done.92 Another inspiration for the Ghassnids to build
adyr, possibly nunneries, must have come from Najrn, where Sons and Daughters
of the Covenant were martyred by their South Arabian persecutor, Ysuf.93
The location of the Ghassnid Dayr Hind has long been placed in the region
of Damascus called Bayt al-br by Yqt; more recently it has been pinpointed to
the south of Damascus, a tall (hillock) east of Germana.94
Salm
The name of this queen appears in the matronymic of a Ghassnid king in assns
poem on the Day of Uud, in a.d. 625.95 The Jewish mother of the Lakhmid
Mundir IV was also called Salm, but assns Ibn Salm was surely Ghassnid,
89 This monastery and its name are discussed in BASIC II.1, 32425.
90 On Ghassnid nunneries, see ibid., 198200.
91 On the two Lakhmid Hinds and their two monasteries, see Yqt, Mujam, II, 54143.
92 On amza, see BASIC II.1, 30641.
93 For these Sons and Daughters of the Covenant in Najrn, see Martyrs, 25055, 63, 49.
94 See M. Kurd Ali, Ghat Dimashq (Damascus, 1984), on Bayt al-br (197) and Germana
(164).
For further discussion of the monasteries of the Ghassnids, see the appendix to Chapter 3 in Part
III
titled The Monasteries of the Ghassnids.
95 The battle lost by the Prophet Muammad to the pagan Meccans; for the poem, see assn,
Dwn, I, 40, verse 10. Note the use of bb (door) for the Royal Court, used again in the plural,
abwb
(75, verse 30). The term acquired its royal acceptation in Ottoman times, when the Sultans
palace/court
was called al-Bb al-li, The Sublime Porte.
since verse 7 of the same poem refers to Jbiya, the Ghassnid capital in the Golan,
where his maternal uncle was an orator. In the verse in which the matronymic
appears, assn prides himself on his own intercession on behalf of two individu-
als, who consequently were liberated. Because assn was influential at the court
of the Ghassnids, his relatives, but not at that of the Lakhmids, Salm and her son
must be Ghassnid. Her name appears again in the matronymic Ibn Salm, the
son of Salm, in another poem similarly composed in the context of liberating
captives through his intercession.96
This son must be one of the later Ghassnid kings whom assn eulogized;97
nothing else is known about his mother, the Ghassnid queen.98 She does appear
in assns nostalgic ode on the Ghassnids, in the conventional opening lament
over the deserted abodes and mansions of the Ghassnids.99 There, she is remem-
bered in her own right as Salm, and not as the mother of a king.
A late Islamic source refers to a Salm the Ghassnid, to whom is attributed a
triplet of verses and a hemistich in which she laments the death of her father after
the loss of her brother.100 If authentic, and if this Salm is the Ghassnid queen
mentioned above, then the triplet suggests that she was also a poetess. The possibil-
ity brings to mind the daughter of the fifth-century federate Salid king, Dwd;
she, too, lamented the death of her father (at the battle of al-Qurnatayn).101
Maysn
Maysn appears in one of the verses of the Muallaqa, the so-called Suspended Ode
of the poet al-rith (fl. a.d. 556569).102 The verse, according to the medieval
commentator Bakri, involved a campaign by a Lakhmid who succeeded in cap-
turing the Ghassnid Maysn. She had been installed in a royal canopy, a qubba,
which the Lakhmid also captured and fixed in a place called al Alt.103
96 The dliyya, or rhyme in D; assn, Dwn, I, 49, verse 9.
97 Two of them are mentioned by name posthumously, Amr and ujr; see ibid., 308, verse 8.
98 Unless Ayn Salma, the Spring of Salma, in awrn was also named after her; the possibility
is
overlooked by R. Dussaud, Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et mdivale (Paris, 1927).
100 See Ab al-Baq Hibat Allah, al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, ed. S. Dardka and M. Khurayst
(Amman, 1984), I, 351.
101 See the manuscript Kitb al-Nasab al-Kabr, British Library Add. 22376, fol. 91v, discussed in
BAFIC, 308 and note 369, 434.
102 For the verse, see A. Tibrz, Sharh al-Qaid al-Ashr, ed. C. J. Lyall (1894; reprint,
Ridgewood,
N.J., 1965), 137, verse 60. For a translation of the Muallaqa into English, see Arberry, The Seven
Odes,
22227; for the relevant verse on Maysn, see 225.
103 On this Muallaqa, see T. Nldekes brilliant analysis in Fnf Moallaqat (Vienna, 18991901),
5284. He translates the relevant verse Als er die Zelte der Maisn auf Alh aufschlagen liess; da
war die
nchste Stelle ihres Gebiets Au (63, verse 42; see also his comments, 77 note 42). The
identification
This episode is noteworthy for various reasons. That Maysn was captured in a
qubba suggests that she was a woman of distinction, probably a Ghassnid princess.
Her presence in the Ghassnid army during the encounter confirms that Ghassnid
women accompanied the Ghassnid troops to provide moral support in war.
The name Maysn is attractive semantically and by association. It may be
related to msa, yamsu, to move gracefully, and so her name would evoke a
woman who walks gracefully. It also brings to mind the name of one of the women
of the Severan dynasty, the Arab Julia Maesasister of Julia Domna, wife of
Septimius Severus, and grandmother of the emperor Elagabalus (a.d. 218222);
Maesa is derived from the same verb, msa.104 More closely related to this Maysn
in the federate context was another Maysn, from the tribe of federate Kalb, who
was married to Muwiya, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, and became the
mother of his son and successor, Yazd. She, too, composed poetry; in well-known
verses, she jilted the caliph and returned to her people, Kalb, in the vicinity of
Palmyra, rejecting the stifling air of Damascus to live closer to nature.105
Fkhita
A Ghassnid princess named Fkhita was the daughter of the Ghassnid Ad,
whose maternal uncle was the famous Arethas (ibn Ab-Shamir).106 Her name
means the dove whose color is that of the moonlight. To her is attributed a cou-
plet of verses on her fathers death in an encounter with the Asad tribe, two of
whom killed him: I have not feared for Ad the spears of the one who ties a don-
key; / Rather, I feared for him the spears of the Jinn and you! O rith!107 In
light of the anxiety and concern expressed by the first-person verbs in the couplet,
the speaker must have been someone emotionally close to Ad, such as his daugh-
ter, Fkhita. The encounter took place near the Euphrates; hence its name, Yawm
al-Furt, the Battle-day of the Euphrates.108
of Maysn as Ghassnid by Bakri must now be accepted: Nldekes uncertainty about her identity
has
been dispelled by new research on the women of Ghassn. Nldeke mistranslated qubba as Zelte,
which
is an appropriate rendering of the Arabic khayma, tent, but not of qubba, a royal canopy. For
Bakri see
A. Bakri, Mu jam ma Ista jam, ed. M. Saqq (Cairo, 1949), III, 908.
104 On Julia Maesa, see RA, 3336.
105 On Maysn, wife of Muwiya, see Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, 195; for her
verses,
see Chapter 15, below.
106 Her mothers name remains unknown, but the account of her relationship to the famous Arethas
implies that the latter had a sister, married endogamously to another Ghassnid. This confirms the
poets
references to the pure blood of the Ghassnids, ghayr ashib, of which they apparently were proud.
For
the phrase, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 42, verse 8.
107 al-Ji z, Kitb al-ayawn, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo, 1943), VI, 219.
108 For an account of this encounter, see ibid., 21819; 218 note 6; and 219 notes 13, with
reference
to the account in Ifahn, al-Aghn, X, 61. See also the appendix Yawm al-Furt, the Battle-day
of the
Euphrates, below.
The one who ties a donkey refers to Tumir, the mother of the two mur-
derers of Fakhitas father, Ad, while rith is the famous Arethas. The couplet is
remarkable for the contempt it displays toward those who killed her father. They
were the sons of one who ties beasts of burden, not horses that charge in war; hence,
they did not deserve to kill her father, whom only the redoubtable Arethas or the
plague (thought to be the work of the Jinn) was worthy of overcoming.
The couplet reflects the emotions of a Ghassnid woman involved in war at a
distance, who does not express grief, which she proudly keeps to herself, but who
endures the vicissitudes of time.109 She also takes advantage of the opportunity to
sing the praises of the Ghassnid king Arethas (invoked in the apocopated form
ri, not as rith).
According to the extant sources, Fkhita is the only female member of the
royal house who composed poetry. The couplet recalls the single verse of federate
poetry in the fifth century that has survivedthat of the daughter of Dwd, the
king of the federated Salids, who expressed her contempt for the men who mur-
dered her father at the battle of al-Qurnatayn: Two of the lowest of the low have
hit you, the reprobate (khal) Ibn Amir and one of the riffraff, Mashjaa.110
It can be assumed that Fkhita, like the daughter of the Salid king Dwd,
must have written other poetry as well, but none has survived. The lost Akhbr
Mulk Ghassn must have contained many specimens of such poetry, composed by
members of the Ghassnid royal house.
A Ghassnid Queen and a Ghassnid Princess
Exiled in Sicily (a.d. 582602)
The preceding discussion of the fortunes of Ghassnid queens and princesses has
presented a succession of episodes that reflected the sunny side of their life in Oriens
and illustrated reverence shown to them through the use of matronymics by their
royal sons; chivalry, sometimes even romance, involving war; and their engagement
in philanthropia both Arab and Christian. But they were not strangers to adversity.
When relations soured between the central Byzantine Chalcedonian government
in Constantinople and the strongly Monophysite federate phylarchate in Oriens
during the reign of Maurice, late in the sixth century, the Ghassnid king Mundir
and his family were carried away from Oriens to Constantinople. After staying in
the capital for some time they were transferred to Sicily, where they spent twenty
years in exile before they were returned home in 602 at the intercession of Pope
109 The Ghassnids were praised for their readiness and ability to deal with the vicissitudes of time
and their fortitude in the face of adversity. This is expressed by their panegyrist al-Nbigha in his
most
famous epinician ode on them, the Biyya; see Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 48, verse 28.
110 See note 101, above; see also BAFIC, 25960, 434.
Gregory the Great.111 It was a sad episode in the life of the Ghassnid royal house,
because of both the duration of their exile and its distance from their home.
The primary source for this episode, the Syriac John of Ephesus, states that
the family consisted of Mundir, his queen, a princess, and two princes.112 A Syriac
chronicle documents their return in 602 but refers only to the king.113 The surviv-
ing Byzantine sources are silent on Mundir and the Ghassnid family in Sicily.
Al-Nad
ra and Layla
Ghassnid women are usually associated with war and with philanthropia, not
with romance. Yet two of them may be discussed in the latter new context: one in
the pre-Islamic period, named al-Nara, and another, Layla, who appears in the
early Islamic period.
Al-Nara
In his longest poem, assn addresses a woman by the name of al-Nara, whose
phantom visited him while he was traveling in the desert.114 The poem attracted
the attention of students of assns poetry, and it even puzzled them.115 The mys-
tery that surrounds the womans identity may be dispelled if we posit that she was a
Ghassnid princess; hence the peculiarities of this love poem. The following points
support this view.
1. Unlike his verses on other women,116 those on al-Nara are chaste, with
no sensual undertones; his need for care in expressing his sentiments suggests that
the woman in question was a royal personage.
2. Some terms and phrases in the poemincluding references to the palace
courtyard, to kings, and to the noble lineage117imply royalty.
3. In the verse that suggests most strongly the royal connection of al-Nara,
assn says to her, When you hove in sight in the court of the palace, on the
Day of the Exodus.118 The Arabic Yawm al-Khurj, the Day of Going Out,
sounds like a technical term or phrase used for a celebrationpossibly a religious
111 See BASIC I.1, 61822.
112 Ioannis Ephesini Historiae Ecclesiasticae Pars Tertia, Latin trans. E. W. Brooks, CSCO,
Scriptores
Syri, ser. 3, vol. 106 (Louvain, 1936), versio, p. 131.
113 See Chronicon Anonymum ad Annum Christi 1234 pertinens, ed. and trans. J. B. Chabot,
CSCO,
Scriptores Syri, ser. 3, vol. 14 (Louvain, 1937), versio, p. 172.
114 See assn, Dwn, I, 5254. Though assns poems tend to be short, this one consists of 44
verses.
115 For example M. T. Darwsh, in his excellent volume on assn, devotes three pages to discuss-
ing this poem and finally asks, Who was al-Nara? See his assn ibn Thbit, Maktabat al-Dirst
al-Adabiyya 43 (Cairo, n.d.), 27073.
116 There were eight of them: Shath, Layla, Um Amr, Amra, Suda, Lams, Zaynab, and al-
Nara.
117 For these references to royal associations, see assn, Dwn, I, 53, verses 28, 29, and 35.
118 assn, Dwn, I, 53, line 28.
feast, such as Easterduring which the congregation goes out of a church and cir-
cumambulates it, a custom observed until the present day in the Arab Christian
Orient.119 The occasion alluded to in the phrase Yawm al-Khurj may have been
either secular or religious. If secular, it may have been the celebration of a victory,
such as the Ghassnids achieved against the Lakhmids;120 more probably, the poet
refers to a religious occasion.121 The term is so used in the Koran, though in an
entirely different context.122
4. assn refers to their difference in social status: she is a woman of glori-
ous lineage,123 but he hastens to say that although he is not on the same rung of
the social ladder, he too comes from a noble family.124 assn was always proud
of his descent from the clan of Ban al-Najjr in Medina; so his suggestion that
al-Nara was perched on a higher level of social eminence strengthens the hypoth-
esis that she was a princess.
Relationships between Arab pre-Islamic poets and royalty are known to have
existed, such as that of al-Munakhkhal with one of the daughters of the Lakhmid
king al-Numn. Al-Nbigha also described the wife of the Lakhmid al-Numn,
and as a result almost fell from grace with him. The best-known and most cele-
brated of these romantic relations was that between the ran Christian poet
Ad ibn Zayd and Hind, the daughter of the Lakhmid king al-Numn. In Islamic
times the love of the foremost medieval Arab poet, Mutanabbi, for Khawla, the
sister of his patron, Sayf al-Dawla, the amdnid prince of Aleppo, was rightly
suspected.125
If al-Nara was indeed a Ghassnid princess with whom assn fell in love,
she would be the only Ghassnid princess for whom we have a description, brief
as it is, of her complexion and graceful figure.126 Also, an attractive new name is
added to the female Ghassnid onomasticon.127
119 It was on such religious occasionsa celebration of the liturgy in one of the churches of ra
that another poet, Ad ibn Zayd, the foremost Christian poet of ra, met Hind, the daughter of the
Lakhmid king al-Numn. For Ad ibn Zayd and Hind, see Nicholson, Literary History of the
Arabs,
4647.
120 For the Ghassnid celebration of the victory at the battle of Chalcis, see BASIC I.1, 24851.
121 See the appendix Yawm al-Khurj for a detailed discussion of this procession.
122 Koran, 50:42.
123 In verse 35, he speaks of the glory, majd, of her lineage.
124 Verses 4244. The classical statement of this sentiment appeared later in Islamic poetry, when
Mihyr expressed himself similarly in an identical amatory context. See Dwn Mihyr (Cairo,
1925), I, 64.
125 On al-Munakhkhal, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 183; on al-Nbigha and al-Numns wife al-Mutajar-
rida, see Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiir wa al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1966), I, 166, and Ifahn,
al-Aghn, II, 1079. On Mutanabbi, see M. M. Shkir, al-Mutanabbi (Cairo, 1978), I, 22550.
126 Verses 30, 34.
127 Nara evokes nara, a term applied to flowers and fruits meaning new, fresh and attractive,
and is also related to nur, gold, pure gold.
Layla
Much more is known about Layla than al-Nara. She is identified as the daugh-
ter of al-Jd ibn Raba, who commanded forces at Dmat al-Jandal together with
the Kindite Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik against the Muslim assault led by Khlid
ibn al-Wald in a.d. 633. abar does not explicitly say that Layla or her father was
a Ghassnid, but he notes that one of the contingents dispatched by Byzantium
for the defense of Dma was Ghassnid.128 The detailed account of Ifahn in
al-Aghn lays any doubt to rest: he clearly refers to al-Jds father as Ad (a good
Ghassnid name, unlike abars Raba), and calls him a royal personage and a
Ghassnid, thereby clinching the conclusion that Layla was indeed a Ghassnid
and princess.129
Ifahns account of the Conquest of Dma is confirmed by Baldur, who
also explicitly refers to al-Jd as a Ghassnid.130 Furthermore, he states that Layla
was captured in a ir of Ghassn. This technical federate military term was used,
inter alia, of military stations such as those manned by the Ghassnids on the fron-
tier facing the Arabian Peninsula, where a Ghassnid lady could also have been sta-
tioned to give moral support to the warriors.
Most important in Ifahns account is the reference to Laylas presence in
Jerusalem.131 Unlike Jalliq,132 the Holy City was not a place of pleasure and enter-
tainment; it was a pilgrimage destination. References to her in al-Aghn confirm
that she came to the Holy City as a pilgrim. Her future husband, Abd al-Ramn,
had seen her in what he called Bayt al-Maqdis,133 Jerusalem, and was smitten by her
beauty. He composed a triplet of verses in which he expressed his longing for her and
expressed a hope that fate would unite him with her during the next pilgrimage.134
This is a precious datum on the Ghassnids and their religiosity. It seems
highly unlikely that a Ghassnid princess belonging to the royal house would have
failed to make pilgrimage to the Holy City during Lent or Holy Week. Such can be
inferred from the royal houses devout Christianity and the Ghassnids proximity
to and role in defending the Holy Land. Yet al-Aghns account about Layla is the
only explicit reference in the exiguous surviving sources to a Ghassnid presence in
Jerusalem for the performance of the pilgrimage.
In addition to documenting the Ghassnid pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Ifahn
128 abar, Trikh, III, 37879.
129 Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 27374.
130 Balduri, Fut al-Buldn, ed. S. al-Munajjid (Cairo, 1956), I, 74.
131 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 274.
132 For Jalliq, see BASIC II.1, 10515.
133 Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 274.
134 Ibid., 273. For the triplet, see ibid. In this sentiment and its expression he anticipated the
famous
Umayyad poet Umar ibn Abi Raba, who would see Muslim women during the Muslim
pilgrimage and
then compose love poetry about them.
notes the style in which Ghassnid royalty traveled, even when performing their reli-
gious duty. He refers to the esteem in which Layla was held by a band of female atten-
dants who waited on her. Whenever one of them would stumble or swear, she would
invoke Laylas name through her patronymic, saying O Daughter of al-Jd.135
The rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of Oriens, Bild al-Shm, ended the
Byzantine presence in that diocese and brought about the fall of the Ghassnid
dynasty. The fortunes of Layla were naturally affected by this upheaval. During
the last days of the Ghassnid dynasty, Layla became involved with two promi-
nent Muslims: Khlid ibn al-Wald, the famous general, and Abd al-Ramn, the
son of the first Orthodox caliph, Ab Bakr. Her beauty attracted both, and they
appear in the sources as her husbands: the first after his conquest of Dma (633),
and the second after the Muslim conquest of Oriens (636).136 The two accounts
can be easily reconciled: Khlid may have divorced her or left her,137 enabling the
Ghassnid princess to join her people in Oriens, where she again fell captive.138
It was the caliph Omar who asked one of his commanders to deliver Layla to
Abd al-Ramn, since he knew of Abd al-Ramns emotional involvement with
her.139 She became his wife, so favored that his uxoriousness elicited the jealousy of
his other wives.140 But the two became estrangedmost likely, as Ifahn suggests,
because of her depression caused by what had befallen her royal family141and
after the intercession of his sister isha, the widow of the Prophet Muammad,
Abd al-Ramn sent her back to those of her own people, the Ghassn, who
remained in Bild al-Shm. The name of Layla was destined, through her name-
sake, to be celebrated in later Umayyad times. Layla and Qays became the most
famous romantic couple in Arabic literature, and consequently in Persian and
Turkish literaturethe medieval Islamic equivalent of Romeo and Juliet.
135 Ibid., 274. Ifahn states that at home in Ghassnland, she used to receive the red carpet treat-
ment: two golden pomegranates were thrown before her when she would go out (275).
136 See abar, Trikh, III, 379; Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 374; Ibn al-Athr, Usd al-Ghba
(Tehran,
1958), III, 305; and al-Asqalni, al-Iba fi Tamyz al aba (Cairo, n.d.), II, 4078.
137 That the victor of Yarmk had a weakness for women has been noted in the sources; witness
his marriage to the wife of Mlik ibn Nuwayra after the latter was killed in the Ridda War. His death
elicited from his brother, Mutammim, one of the best elegies in Arabic poetry; on Khlid, Mlik,
and
Mutammim, see M. ibn Sallm, abaqt Ful al-Shuar, ed. M. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1974), I, 203
9.
138 This capture of Layla for the second time at Dma, near Damascus, was described by M. J.
de Goeje: see his Mmoire sur la conqute de la Syrie, vol. 2 of Mmoires dhistoire et de
gographie ori-
entales, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1900), 1617. However, de Goeje incorrectly states that Abd al-Ramn
saw
Layla in Damascus (Damas, 17); Ibn al-Athr, in Usd al-Ghba, identifies the location as al-Shm
(III,
305), which in formal Arabic is always Oriens.
140 For their complaints, see Ibn al-Athr, Usd al-Ghba, III, 275.
141 Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 275. Exactly why and how the relationship ended is not clear.
Perhaps
the domestic situation became intolerable for her, either because the other wives were so jealous or
because as a Christian, accustomed to monogamy, the very idea of other wives made her
uncomfortable.
Umma
The last Ghassnid queen known to the sources was Umma, mentioned by
tim, the chief of the group ayyi; the poet traveled nine days to reach the
Ghassnid king in southern Oriens in order to plead for the liberation of members
of his tribe whom the Ghassnid had captured.142 In the course of his panegyric
on the king, he refers to his distinguished ancestry, going back to the two riths
and Umma.143 It is noteworthy that he gives precedence to Umma in the genea-
logical list and in such a way as to suggest that she was a well-known figure not
only among the Ghassnids but also among the Arabs of the Peninsula, of whom
tim, the poet, was one. Nothing else is known about her, but the reference to
her is a welcome addition to the Ghassnid onomasticon.
Two Ghassnid Princesses post Ghassn
Although the Ghassnids ceased to be foederati of Byzantium in Oriens after the
Byzantine defeat at the battle of Yarmk in a.d. 636, many of them remained
in Oriens and maintained a strong presence in the new Islamic world of Bild
al-Shm, the metropolitan province of the Arab Muslim Umayyad dynasty. Its
founder, Muwiya, was especially enlightened and open-minded in his assimila-
tion of Byzantine institutions in Oriens, and was especially well-disposed toward
the Christian Arabs, such as Ghassn and Kalb. From the latter group, he mar-
ried his Christian wife, Maysn, the mother of his son and successor, Yazd.
This Yazd was involved with two Ghassnid princesses. He was known to have
been a refined hedonista fact documented in his own poetry, still recited and
admired today.
First, he took as one of his wives the Ghassnid princess Umm Ramla.144
She was not a queen, however, since Islam rejected the concept of kingship, which
it replaced with the caliphate. So Yazd had both a Christian mother and wife.
Nothing else is known of Umm Ramla, but her daughter Ramla was remembered
by her father, Yazd, in one of his verses.145
142 For tim, the famous pre-Islamic poet and chief of the ayyi, see BASIC II.1, 24659.
143 Dwn Shir tim, ed. . Sulaymn (Cairo, 1990), 197, verse 4. It is not clear whether
Umma
was his mother or a more distant ancestress; in a fragment of al-Nbigha mentioned earlier, the
poets ref-
erence to a Hind is to an ancestress of the Ghassnid young man whose genealogy was being
presented;
see Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 166, verse 3.
144 Knowledge of Umm Ramla is owed to Balduri in his Ansb al-Ashrf, ed. I. Abbs (Beirut,
1979),
IV, part I, 290. Balduri gives only the name of her daughter Ramla, but she almost certainly was
royalty:
Yazd would have sought the legitimation provided by marrying a woman from a royal house (as his
father
had done). He also married a woman from another royal house, that of Kinda: the daughter of
uwayrith,
the brother of Ukaydir, the Kindite lord of Dma (see Balduri, Fut al-Buldn, I, 74).
145 Yazd was away from Damascus when his father, Muwiya, died. On his return, he heard
Ramla
A little more is known about his involvement with another Ghassnid prin-
cess: the daughter of Jabala, the last Ghassnid king. Yazd was trained as a crown
prince by his father, and one of his duties as a prospective successor and caliph was
to lead expeditions against the Byzantines in Anatolia. One of them culminated
in the famous siege of Constantinople in the spring of 669. It was on this occa-
sion that he became involved with the daughter of the Ghassnid Jabala. What
happened is best related in the words of the late Philip K. Hitti: In legend Yazd
distinguished himself for bravery and fortitude below the walls of Constantinople
and earned the title Fata al-Arab (the young champion or hero of the Arabs). The
Aghn relates that alternate shouts of jubilation were heard from two separate
tents as the Arabs or Byzantines made headway in the battle. On learning that one
tent was occupied by the daughter of the king of the Rm and the other by the
daughter of Jabalah ibn-al-Ayham, Yazd was spurred to extraordinary activity in
order to seize the Ghassnid kings daughter.146
Hitti makes clear the legendary element in the account.147 But there might be
a modicum of truth in it as well: the historicity of the siege conducted by the Arab
crown prince is beyond doubt, while descendants of Jabala were in evidence in
Anatolia and in Constantinople after the battle of the Yarmk. It is not altogether
impossible that those Ghassnids who were still smarting after the debacle at the
Yarmk did take part in the defense of the capital,148 especially as it was besieged
by congeners who had defeated them in 636. Nor is the reference to the tent occu-
pied by the princess alien to Arab practice on such occasions, as has been shown
above in the case of Maysn. The Byzantine tent of the king of the Rm may
have been a later embroidery, but the participation of Byzantine women in military
expeditions is not unknown, as mentioned above in the case of the empress Irene
Doukaina, who likewise was canopied.
mourning the death of his father, and he remembered her in the final verse of a five-line poem he
com-
posed on the occasion; see Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 143.
146 See P. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (New York, 1981), 201.
147 The truly legendary element in the account, not quoted here, ascribes to Yazd some exploits
against the gates of Constantinople and a plaque that was nailed there to commemorate them. These
details (clearly a later embroidery) rather than the presence of Jabalas daughter inclined not only
Hitti
but also Marius Canard to reject this account. Much more is now known about the Ghassnids than
when these distinguished scholars wrote; as this chapter has shown, the women of Ghassn did take
part
in warfare, as sometimes did their Byzantine counterparts as well. The later accretions that have
grown
over the original kernel of truth in some of the Islamic sources on the pre-Islamic period have long
cre-
ated a prejudice against using those sources, but the task of Quellenkritik is to get hold of that
kernel of
truth. For Canards views on this episode, see Les expditions des Arabes contre Constantinople
dans
lhistoire et dans la lgende, Journal Asiatique 208 (1926), 6970.
148 As Constantinople had been defended successfully in a.d. 378 by the troops of the federate Arab
queen Mavia against the Goths after another debacle, the battle of Adrianople; see BAFOC, 17583.
Appendix I
Elizabeth of Najrn
Elizabeth was not a Ghassnid; but as a martyress of Najrn, she was very inti-
mately related to the women of Ghassn, her relatives, who looked at the martyrs
of Najrn ca. 520 as their role models. Elizabeth is significant as well to under-
standing the problem of the female diaconate in the early church, for she represents
its Arab profile in late antiquity.
The Book of the imyarites is the most detailed account of the martyrdoms
at Najrn, but only the rubric of the chapter on Elizabeth has survived.1 The
Second Letter of Simeon of Bth-Arshm, however, gives an account of her mar-
tyrdom, which was a most grievous one.2 The Letter has also preserved important
data on her as a deaconess of the church of Najrn and the sister of Paul II, the
bishop of Najrn who was also martyred. Elizabeth became venerated as a saint
together with the rest of the martyrs of Najrn, and their feast is celebrated on
24 October.
1. The martyress. One of the remarkable features of the martyrdoms of
Najrn was the number of women who died for their faith, together with the range
of social classes to which they belonged;3 the most famous of them was the First
Lady of Najrn, Ruhm. Elizabeth had the ecclesiastical rank of deaconess and so
belonged to the hierarchy of the church of Najrn, which was also unique, as the
only pre-Islamic Arab Christian Church for which the hierarchy, together with
the names of the various clerics, is precisely known.4 Elizabeth was the only female
among them.
As has been repeatedly noted in this volume, the martyrdoms of Najrn had
enormous spiritual resonance for the pre-Islamic Christian Arabs, especially those
related to themthe Ghassnids. Those martyrs, male and female, became role
models for the Ghassnids. Elizabeth was distinguished by being the only Arab
woman of the pre-Islamic period who held an ecclesiastical rank and whose name
has survived. The queens and princesses of the royal house were, like their husbands
and fathers, interested in institutionalizing Arab Christianity through the endow-
ment and foundation of churches and monasteries, and the church of Najrn
specifically, the concrete example of Elizabethmust have been a model.
2. The deaconess. In the latter part of the twentieth century, questions of
womens roles in the church became pressing. Relevant here is the problem of
the diaconate.5 In one work on the subject, Phyllis Zagamo has contended that
1 See The Book of the Himyarites, ed. A. Moberg (Lund, 1924), cii, no. XVII.
2 See Martyrs, 4748.
3 See The Book of the Himyarites, cxxi.
4 See Martyrs, 64.
5 See R. Gryson, The Ministry of Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, Minn., 1976); P.
Zagano,
Appendix II
Yawm al-Khurj: The Day of the Exodus
The striking phrase Yawm al-Khurj, The Day of the Exodus, in Hassns love
poem on al-Nara repays careful analysis. As has already been noted above, it was
probably used in celebration of a religious occasion.
The Islamic Arabic sources speak of the procession that al-Numn, the
Lakhmid king of ra, used to organize together with his household. They would
go out on Sundays and feast days, dressed in festive clothes and carrying the cross,
to the monastery of Dayr al-Lujj, where they would celebrate the feast. They would
then go to a beauty spot in the vicinity of ra, where they would relax for the rest
of the day.1
1 See Abu al-Faraj al-Ifahn, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. J. al-Atiyya (London, 1991), 13940; on the
Ghassnids, the Lakhmids, and the rithids of Najrn, and their building of monasteries in
beautiful
spots, see 163. As a member of the Ghassnid royal house, whose Christianity was of longer
standing
and more deeply rooted than that of the Lakhmids, al-Nara would surely have participated in
similar
proceedings on religious occasions.
nothing in scripture, ecclesiastical history, or Christian theology argues against the
female diaconate, and therefore has concluded that the ordination of women for
the ministry of the diaconate is desirable, defensible, and necessary. The example of
Elizabeth of Najrn supports her case in two ways.
First, Elizabeth concretely illustrates the employment of women in the church
in late antiquity. Najrn was an Arab city, and Arab society was conservative in its
view of women and of relations between the sexes. Ruhm of Najrn prided herself
on wearing a veil to cover her face and prevent unwelcome attention and gazes.6
Church services and ceremonies involved activities, such as baptism by immersion,
that for women could not be performed by male clerics with propriety. On such
occasions a female deaconess could officiate more appropriately.
In addition, Elizabeth was likely ordained. According to the Second Letter of
Simeon of Bth-Arshm, Elizabeths brother Paul was consecrated bishop of Najrn
by Philoxenos of Mabboug (Hierapolis).7 If Philoxenos consecrated her brother for
the church of Najrn, the chances are that he also ordained Elizabeth as deaconess of
Najrn. Both that ordination and the consecration of Paul would have had particu-
lar significance, for the first bishop of Najrn (also consecrated by Philoxenos) had
been martyred in a persecution that preceded that of 520; it thus was important to
emphasize the legitimacy of the church of Najrn and reestablish it on a firm basis.
Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate in the Catholic Church
(New York,
2000); and V. Karras, Female Deacons in the Byzantine Church, Church History 73 (2004), 272
316.
6 See Martyrs, 57.
7 Ibid., 46.
In one of the accounts that describes such a going out on a religious occasion
singling out Palm Sundaythe word used for the procession is kharaja, the very
same verb from which khurj is derived.2 The phrase Yawm al-Khurj thus could
easily have been technical, used by the Christian Arabs of pre-Islamic times for
such occasions.3 If so, this poem of Hassn, composed before he became the poet
of Islam, will have preserved a welcome addition to the Christian Arab vocabulary
of those times.
A sort of Yawm al-Khurj was still observed until recently in the Holy
Land by Christian Arabs. Such a going out had as its destination Mount Tabor
and Mount Carmel for the Feast of Transfiguration and of Mar Elias (Elijah),
respectively. On both occasions the Christians of Nazareth and Haifa would go
out to these two mountains in Galilee to celebrate the feasts and afterward to
relax and picnic.4
2 See al-Umari, Maslik al-Abr fi Mamalik al-Amr, ed. A. Zaki Pasha (Cairo, 1924), I, 312.
3 It is especially appropriate for Palm Sunday, because that is the one dominical feast associated in
the Gospels with a procession (the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem from Bethany, followed by a
crowd
crying Hosanna and carrying branches; see Mark 11:811). Isml ibn Ammr, an eighth-
century
poet, uses the term Yawm al-Shnn, Palm Sunday; see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut,
1959),
XI, 346, verse 7.
4 Celebration of the Feast of Mar Elias by making al-Khurj from Nazareth to Elijahs shrine
is little practiced nowadays, but it has been recorded by Dr. Elias Srouji, a physician whose
Christian
Arab family used to observe the feast annually. For his detailed account of how it was celebrated
during
the British Mandate of Palestine, see E. S. Srouji, Cyclamens from Galilee: Memoir of a Physician
from
Nazareth (Lincoln, Neb., 2003), 1214.
Appendix III
Palm Sunday
Arabic has two terms for Palm Sunday, Yawm al-Shann and Yawm al-Sabsib.
The first, the common term for the feast day, is still used in the Arab Christian
Orient for Palm Sunday. It is an Arabicization of the Hebrew/Aramaic term
Hoshana, Save us,1 the phraserendered in English as Hosannathat the
crowd shouted during the procession from Bethany to Jerusalem on the Sunday
before the Crucifixion. The Hebrew/Aramaic verb became a noun, transferred first
to the branches carried by the crowd in the procession and then to the feast day
itself. It appears as a plural, the singular of which is shann or sann in the Arabic
lexica, which recognize it as a loanword.2
The second term, Yawm al-Sabsib, was used earlier than the first, in pre-
Islamic times. It is the one used by al-Nbigha, the panegyrist of the Ghassnids, in
1 See S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint, Hildesheim,
1962), 277.
2 See Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1979), III, 291.
his most famous ode on them,3 and is the indigenous native Arabic term for Palm
Sunday. It derives from the plural of sabsab, an Arabian tree from whose branches
arrows used to be made.4 Apparently this was considered an appropriate name for
the branches carried on Palm Sunday, and so the feast day came to be called Yawm
al-Sabsib, the Day of Sabsib. Al-Nbighas use of the phrase in connection with
the Ghassnids suggests that this was the term in Ghassnland for the feast day.
The term seems to have been known and used in ijz, in Mecca or Medina, since
the Prophet Muammad is said to have asked his community to give up celebrat-
ing Palm Sunday in favor of a Muslim feast.5
Apparently, after the rise of Islam the first term gained currency, as it is
attested in the verse of a Muslim poet who lived in the eighth century.6
3 See Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 47, verse 24.
4 See Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab, III, 235.
5 See Murtaa al-Zabd, Tj al-Ars, ed. A. Hrn (Kuwait, 1970), III, 41.
6 For the attestation of Yawm al-Shann in the verse of Ismil ibn Ammr, see Ab al-Faraj
Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1957), XI, 346, verse 7.
Appendix IV
The Education of a Ghassnid Princess
The federate Germanic kings and magistri militum of the Roman Occident did not
neglect the education of their daughters. Maria, who was the daughter of the Vandal
magister militum Stilicho and wife of the emperor Honorius, was well versed in
Greek and Latin literature. Pulcheria, the sister of Theodosius II and granddaughter
of the Frankish magister militum Bauto, was admired for her knowledge of Greek
and Latin. The daughter of the Ostrogoth Theodoric the Great, Amalaswintha,
was trilingual, fluent in Greek, Latin, and Gothic.1 Their example raises the ques-
tion of whether the counterparts of these Germanic federates in the Orient, such as
the Ghassnids, similarly nurtured the education of their daughters, who perhaps
were sent elsewhere in Oriens or to Constantinople to be educated.
The question is particularly pertinent in the sixth century, a time when liter-
ary art among the Arabs and at the court of the Ghassnids was at its climax; this
was the period of Imru al-Qays, the foremost pre-Islamic poet in Arabic,2 and the
Ghassnids were well integrated into Byzantine society, both as foederati and as
Christians. To serve Byzantium, their phylarchs must have been bilingual or per-
haps trilingual. The federates of the previous century counted among their rank a
notable woman poet, the daughter of the Salid king Dwd, who may have been
influenced by Eudocia, the ex-empress who herself wrote poetry.3 It is thus possible
1 See A. Goltz, Gelehrte Barbaren? in Gelehrte in der Antike: Alexander Demandt zum 65.
Geburtstag, ed. A. Goltz, A. Luther, and H. Schlange-Schningen (Kln, 2002), 297316.
2 On Imru al-Qays and the Ghassnids, see BASIC II.1, 25965.
3 See BAFIC, xxvii, 43638, 518.
that the Ghassnids, like their German counterparts, devoted considerable atten-
tion to the education of their daughters.
The sources confirm the presence of only one young federate Arab in
Constantinople: Muwiya (a son of the Kindite phylarch Qays, not a Ghassnid),
who presumably received some Byzantine education while spending time in the
capital.4 Nothing can be inferred from their silence about federate daughters; but
they make clear the female influence at play in the Byzantine state through the most
famous of all Byzantine empresses, Theodora, who was a friend of the Ghassnid phy-
larch Arethas and was even in his debt because he helped to revive Monophysitism,
her confession. Her well-known activities provide a relevant background for specu-
lating on whether young Ghassnid princesses ever visited Constantinople and were
familiar with the Roman Byzantine educational tradition.
The following data may be recovered from the surviving sources.
1. It seems plausible that the wife of the Ghassnid king Arethas accompa-
nied her husband to Constantinople for the ceremony promoting him to the patri-
ciate. As noted in Chapter 2, she had a role to play in that ceremony. Perhaps, after
seeing the splendors of the capital, the Ghassnid queen desired her daughter to
benefit from its cultural opportunities and from acquaintance with an empress
determined to help women promote Monophysite Christianity.
2. Even more relevant and more certain is the name Arabia, which was given
to the daughter of Justin II, the nephew of Justinian. Nomenclature is significant
and can reflect attitudes and relationships; I have argued elsewhere that this strik-
ingly un-Byzantine, un-Greek, and un-Christian name was given her as a result of
the warm relations that obtained between the Arab phylarchate-kingship of the
Ghassnids and the central government during the reign of Justinian.5 Though
corroborating texts or inscriptions have yet to be discovered, it is possible that the
female members of the family of the federate patricius Arethas were well-known
to the imperial family, and that a personal relationship arose based on their shared
Monophysitism. The name Arabia, given to the daughter of the heir to the throne,
may reflect the warmth of the friendship between the female members of the two
families, consequent on a female Ghassnid presence in the capital.
3. A clearer indication of some social contact between the Byzantine impe-
rial family and the royal Ghassnids during Arethas visit to Constantinople in the
540s derives from a statement by John of Ephesus: after Justin II became insane in
the 570s, his guardians would quiet him by saying, Arethas is coming for you.6
4 See BASIC I.1, 155, and above, Chapter 1, note 93.
5 See BASIC I.1, 31822 (note that her birth, not her marriage, must have occurred in the
mid-540s; see 319).
6 See BASIC I.1, 28788.
Justin II must have met and been impressed by Arethas under happier circum-
stances; it was possibly then that his daughter was born or was young enough to
take on a new name, Arabia.
It would be pleasant to think that alma, the most celebrated of all Ghassnid
princesses, or one of the two Hinds of the late sixth century did visit Constantinople,
but no evidence of such a visit survives. The only princess whose visit was recorded by
the extant sources is the daughter of the last Ghassnid king, Jabala, who with many
of his followers followed Heraclius to Anatolia. Though the story cannot be firmly
confirmed or rejected, it is said that during the Arab siege of Constantinople in
a.d. 669, which was conducted by Yazd, who would succeed Muwiya, the crown
prince strove hard to capture the tent that housed this princess.7
7 P. Hitti, History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine (London, 1951), 444.
Appendix V
Al-Jd, Laylas Father at Dma
In his account of the conquest of Dma, abar in his Trkh refers to al-Jd ibn
Raba as one of the two commanders of the federates of Byzantium who were
defending this fortress against Khlid ibn al-Wlid; the other commander was a
Kindite, Ukaydir ibn Abd al-Malik. Khlid had an encounter with al-Jd and
captured him. After Dma fell to Muslim arms, Khlid had al-Jd executed.
The women of Dma were taken captive and were offered for sale as prisoners
of war. Khlid bought the daughter of al-Jdi, who was apparently known for
her beauty.1
The account in abar presents some problems, one of which is the iden-
tity of Dma itself.2 Three locations of that name are known: one at the south-
ern end of Wd Sirn in northern Arabia, one in Lower Mesopotamia near
ra (suggested by references to ra and al-Anbr in the rest of the account after
the fall of Dma), and a third near Damascus. A more important question con-
cerns the identity of al-Jd. Was he the same Ghassnid whose daughter Layla
became the wife of Abd al-Ramn, son of the caliph, Ab-Bakr, after Oriens
was conquered by the Muslims, as discussed in the section in Chapter 2 on Layla?
It is practically certain that Dma was the famous Dmat al-Jandal,
which lay at the southern tip of Wd Sirn, and that the al-Jd involved in
this episode was Laylas father. Two strong pieces of evidence argue for these
identifications.
1 abar, Trkh, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1962), III, 37879. Note that he erroneously gives al-Jd
the patronymic Ibn Raba; he is given the good Ghassnid name Ad in Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-
Aghn
(Beirut, 1959), III, 273.
2 Another problem is the number of expeditions launched in different years to capture Dma; see
L. Veccia Vaglieri, Dmat al-Jandal, EI2, II, 62426.
First, that Dma was Dmat al-Jandal is supported by the sharing of the
command by al-Jd, the Ghassnid commander, and the Kindite Ukaydir. The
Ghassn and Kinda were allies; and as foederati of Byzantium, they would not
have been fighting in the Dma of Iraq. Furthermore, abar states that a number
of other Arab foederati of Byzantium in this pre-Islamic period took part in the
defense of Dma, including the Kalb, Tankhids, and Zokomids (Salids). They
likewise would not have been fighting in Iraq; conversely, they naturally would
have been defending Dma, an important fortress in Byzantiums Outer Shield,
against the nomads of the Arabian Peninsula.3
Second, that two men with the same uncommon name would both have
beautiful daughters who became the wives of prominent Muslims seems highly
unlikely.4 As explained in Chapter 2, Layla could easily have been the wife first of
Khlid ibn al-Wald and later of Abd al-Ramn, son of Ab Bakir.
3 The Dma near Damascus is out of the question, since its region (Oriens, Bild al-Shm) came
under attack by Muslims later, when this impressive number of federate contingents could not have
been
assembled for its defense. For the Outer Shield, see BAFOC, 47879; BAFIC, 47879.
4 The only other person known to me who had this name is the Arab Spanish grammarian of
Granada, Jd al-Mawrri, on whom see . Mons, Jd al-Mawrri, EI2, II, 57475. Judi is also
the
Koranic name of the mountain on which Noahs ark rested; see M. Streck, Djdi, EI2, II, 57374.
Since jd means generosity, a virtue for which the Ghassnids were celebrated, it could have been a
nick-
name he had earned, just as another Ghassnid was called Qtil al-J, the Killer of Famine (see
below
Chapter 4, with notes 56).
Appendix VI
Yawm al-Furt, the Battle-day of the Euphrates
There is some confusion in the sources concerning this encounter, Yawm al-Furt,
in which the Ghassnid princess Fkhita was involved. The best account is the one
in al-Aghn, which has Fkhita compose the couplet of verses, as recognized by the
able editor of Ji zs al-ayawn.1 But according to Ibn al-Athr, Yawm al-Furt
was an encounter between Shaybn and Taghlib, and a Shaybni recited a triplet
of verses.2 The confusion may be resolved by Ibn Habb, who says in al-Muabbar
that Raba ibn Hidhar of the Asad tribe led his group for the Ghassnid Ad,3 pre-
sumably as Ads allies. This action is confirmed by the triplet cited by Ibn al-Athr.
Though he attributed the lines to a Shaybni, they are more likely to have been said
by someone else (perhaps Raba, leader of the Asad). The third verse in the triplet
probably refers to the death of Ad, lamented by his daughter Fkhita: there the
phrase Gharb al-Shm, the Stranger from al-Shm, could describe Ad; moreover,
1 Namely, Abd al-Salm Hrn; see his edition of al-Jiz, Kitb al-ayawn (Cairo, 1963), VI,
218 note 6.
2 Ibn al-Athr, al-Kmil f al-trkh (Beirut, 1965), I, 64748. A variant of al-Furt is al-Qurt.
3 Ibn abb, Kitab al-Muabbar, ed. I. Lichtenstdter (1942; reprint, Beirut, n.d.), 247.
the second hemistich, which emphasizes that his relatives lived far away, tan
aqribuh, could easily be referring to Bild al-Shm, whence Ad came. The third
verse also mentions the dead mans liberation of prisoners of war, implying that he
was a man of influence, as the Ghassnid prince Ad would have been.
Difficulties remain in reconciling the various traditions of the prose accounts.
But in obedience to Nldekes Law, the definitive evidence is provided by contem-
porary Arabic poetry, represented in the triplet just analyzed, which surely refers
to a Ghassnid, Ad. The triplet must have been composed by someone in a group
who fought for the Ghassnids under d. And, as explained in Chapter 2, the
author must have been someone with a strong emotional bond to the dead man,
such as his daughter, Fkhita.
III
Prose Accounts on the Ghassnids
assn
I
n the reconstruction of the social history of Oriens during the Ghassnid
phylarchy undertaken in this volume, contemporary Arabic poetry has been the
principal source;1 among the poets, assnspecifically, his Dwnhas proved
to be the most helpful. The Arabic sources of later times, however, include a num-
ber of prose accounts that treat Ghassnid social life.2 These later sources have to be
used with great care, since in the process of transmission they have suffered inter-
polations, exaggerations, and embroideries. The goal is to reach the kernel of truth
that they undoubtedly contain, after they are stripped of their later accretions.
The authorship of these prose accounts is ascribed to assn himself, or
involves him, as is natural, since he frequented the Ghassnid court every year
and was intimately familiar with their life and history. This is true of none of the
other poets who visited the Ghassnids and eulogized them, with the exception of
al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, who is also a major source for their social life though less
important than assn.
assn was the poet laureate not only of the Ghassnids but also of the
Prophet Muammad during the last ten years of his life. assn survived the
death of the Prophet, in a.d. 632, living for another thirty years or so, until the
beginning of the caliphate of Muwiya. The death of the Prophet was a disaster
for the fortunes of assn, not recognized by those who have written on the poet.3
This fact is relevant to the authenticity of these prose accounts attributed to him
for the following reasons.
1. assn ceased to be the only poet of Islam after the conquest of Mecca in 630
1 In compliance with what I have elsewhere called Nldekes Law for writing the history of the
Arabs and of Arab-Byzantine relations before the rise of Islam; see BASIC II.1, xxvi.
2 The two principal sources are Abu al-Faraj al-Ifahns al-Aghn and Ibn Askirs Trkh
Madnat Dimashq. Both belonged to Bild al-Shm, and naturally paid particular attention to the
region and to the Ghassnids, who lived there for so long as foederati of Byzantium.
3 With the exception of M. T. Darwsh in assn ibn Thbit, Maktabat al-Dirst al-Adabiyya 43
(Cairo, n.d.), 2058.
119 Prose Accounts on the Ghassnids
and the eventual conversion to Islam of all the Meccan poets who had been his rivals,
at the head of whom was his archenemy and competitor Abdullh ibn al-Zibar.4
Thus assn lost his paramountcy as defender of Islam and poet laureate.
2. assns position would not have been so serious if the Prophet had not
died just two years after the conquest of Mecca. Muammads death deprived
assn of his patron and protector, leaving him isolated and marginalized.
3. After the decisive battle of the Yarmk in 636, the Oriens of the Ghassnids
and Byzantium became Arab Muslim territory. With the establishment of the
first Arab Muslim dynasty in Oriens (now Bild al-Shm) in Damascus in 661,
the region and Ghassnland were open to assn; he visited the founder of the
Umayyad state, Muwiya, who had made the Ghassnid capital, Jbiya, his own
capital for twenty years,5 and whose son and crown prince, Yazd, had married a
Ghassnid princess, Umm Ramla. So when assn visited Muwiya, he surely
must have felt he was visiting the familiar Ghassnland of his previous patrons,
especially now that he was patronless.
4. Although assn converted to Islam and became its eloquent spokesman,
he never forgot his affiliation with his Ghassnid relatives. He often remembered
them in the most laudatory terms and took pride in his consanguinity with them.
In fact, in one verse he combined secular pride in the Ghassnids with religious
pride in Islam.6
The preceding four points have made clear how and why assn poured
forth his sentiments on the Ghassnids, providing examples of emotion recol-
lected in tranquility and acting as a laudator temporis acti. And most of his surviv-
ing poetry on the Ghassnids was written during this period, not before their fall.
These are the odes that elicited the admiration of the classical critics, who thought
them better than his Islamic odes. They were set to music in later Islamic times
and some of them are still judged to be in the front rank of Arabic classical poetry.
Perhaps the rhyme in N, the nniyya, is the best of his poems that illustrates this
poetry of reminiscence. It is the only poem in which he mentioned the Yarmk,
the river by the fateful battle. After the prelude, he depicts the attractive scene
at the Ghassnid court, where the young Ghassnid maidens were weaving coral
wreaths in preparation for Palm Sunday.7
Most of his extant poems on the Ghassnids were written intermittently in
4 For assns nine rivals, see Ibn Sallm, Tabaqt al-Shuar, ed. M. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1974),
I, 23335.
5 When Muwiya became caliph in 661, he moved the capital to Damascus. assn had been
pro-Umayyad since the days of the Umayyad caliphate of Uthmn (646656), whom he elegized;
see Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 96.
7 See ibid., 255, verse 6.
the course of the thirty years or so after the death of the Prophet, when assn
was getting old and was possibly neglected. Then he was afflicted with blindness,
which made him reluctant to socialize. It was during this time that his own son,
also a poet, looked after him. As a poet looking after a father who was a poet,
Abd al-Ramn understood that the best therapy for his fathers many ailments,
physical and psychological, was to create situations that encouraged the old man
to remember his good old Ghassnid days. The most effective were occasions that
involved the recitation of his Ghassnid odes, set to music and sung by women. It
was then that assn described his life at the Ghassnid court in prose pieces, such
as the one involving Jabala.
No one has ever cast doubt on these Ghassnid poems, and the same stamp
of authenticity could easily attach to the prose compositions attributed to assn,
but only after later accretions added to them by storytellers (qus) and other
literary embroiderers have been eliminated. Just as there is no doubt about the
authorship or authenticity of the poem about the Yarmk, so must the prose piece
involving Jabala be treated as genuine. Indeed, the prose pieces are background for
some of the verses of assn that describe the dolce vita he had experienced at the
Ghassnid court.
In addition to these prose compositions from the Islamic period, and others
attributed to him about the Ghassnid court before the fall of the dynasty, some
artistic prose compositions of assn on the Ghassnids before their fall also need
to be seriously entertained as genuine.8 That a poet of assns caliber should have
left behind some prose composition of an artistic nature should not be surprising.
Literary history provides examples of poets who were also distinguished prose writ-
ers; in Arabic letters the figures of Ab al-Al al-Maarri in the Orient and Lisn
al-Dn ibn al-Khatb in Andalusia are splendid examples. This is a kind of Arabic
Kunstprosa, which is of special importance as a rare example of pre-Islamic and
early Islamic prose, of which only a few fragments have survived. It is noteworthy
that these prose pieces addressed to the Ghassnid kings are rhymed, a distinctive
feature of Arabic verse. Rhymed prose was one of the transitional stages between
prose and metered verse.9
assns status as the poet laureate of the Prophet Muammad and the
8 One example is the attractive long piece of rhyming prose, addressed to Jabala, in which assn
expresses why the Ghassnids were superior to their enemies, the Lakhmids; see Ifahn, al-
Aghn
(Beirut, 1958), XV, 12425, where the piece is popularly attributed to al-Nbigha but the author of
al-Aghn favors its attribution to assn. The question of attribution is not as important as
authenticity
or genuineness, which may be predicated of this composition. On sources that attribute prose
composi-
tions to assn, see Darwsh, assn ibn Thbit, 194 note 3.
9 The rhyming prose of the soothsayers, kuhhn, is considered such a stage by historians of pre-
Islamic poetry. The foremost neoclassical poet of modern Arabic poetry, Ahmad Shawqi, wrote in
praise
of rhyme and commended its use in prose by poets, and he followed his own advice.
defender of Islam in his post-Ghassnid poetry must be remembered when one
employs his prose as a source for Ghassnid social history. Sometimes this Islamic
ambience provides the framework within which his prose pieces are presented by
later Islamic authors. Hence the writings are given a certain twist, even as they
convey a kernel of the truth provided by assn. In one of the best-constructed of
these accounts, Jabala, his Ghassnid patron, is presented as one who had adopted
Islam but renounced it because he would not consent to being treated as the equal
of the simple Arab pastoralist who had trodden on his robe. Such twists in the
accounts are the product of later Islamic piety, and they cannot be taken seriously.
Even more important is the statement of a Muslim in Medina who heard assn
praising the Ghassnids and their hospitality; surprised at assns loyalty and
admiration for the Ghassnids, he exclaims: Why do you praise kings who were
infidels, and whom God has caused to perish?10 As has been noted in the preced-
ing volume, only a small amount of assns poetry on the Ghassnids in the pre-
Islamic period has survived.11 This outraged exclamation on the part of the pious
Muslim indicates how perceptions of assn, as the poet laureate of the Prophet
of Islam, were distorted in later times, when relations with Christians soured. The
bad feeling aroused by the Muslim-Byzantine conflict lasting so many centuries
disinclined later anthologists and collectors of his poetry to preserve his compo-
sitions on the infidels, and so they ignored most of them. However, the poems
were still extant when authors such as al-Ji z and al-Hamadn expressed their
admiration for assns poetry on the Ghassnids.12 They could have made that
judgment only on the basis of an extensive corpus of poems still available to them,
not on the basis of the few poems that have survived in assns Dwn. Such
must have been the situation when the well-known critic Ama (d. 828) said that
assns pre-Islamic poetry on the Ghassnids was much better than that written
in the Islamic period.13
Nihyat al-Arab
Of an entirely different nature is a work on the history of the Arabs and the
Persians before the rise of Islam that also involved an attempt at a synchronization
of the history of the two peoples: hence its title, Nihyat al-Arab fi Akhbr al-Furs
wa al-Arab.
The work is said to have been compiled by the famous philologist al-Ama
10 The account is preserved by Ibn Abd Rabbih in al-Iqd al-Farid, ed. A. Amn, I. Abyr, and
A. Hrn (Beirut, 1982), II, 62, verse 4.
12 Ibid., 28791.
13 On Ama and his remark, see Darwsh, assn ibn-Thbit, 503, and Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa
al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1966), I, 305.
for the Abbasid caliph Harn al-Rashd.14 In 1879, Theodor Nldeke, working
on a manuscript of it in Gotha, dismissed it as schwindelhafte (bogus).15 In 1900,
Edward G. Browne declared that the Sasanid part in this work appears to merit
more attention than is implied in the disparaging remarks of Professor Nldeke.16
The work was later noticed by Mario Grignaschi and was consulted more fre-
quently by M. J. Kister in 1980.17
There are four manuscripts of this work: one in Gotha, two in London,
and one in Cambridge.18 Nihyat al-Arab has been published in Iran;19 there is
apparently only one copy of the text in the United States, at Harvard Universitys
Widener Library. Its account of a Ghassnid wedding20 contains information not
to be found anywhere else in the sources, and may be briefly summarized as follows.
Al-Numn ibn Bashr al-Ansri21 relates that the caliph Ab Bakr (632634)
sent him to Heraclius to convert the emperor to Islam. Al-Numn traveled to
Antioch, where Heraclius was staying. Before he and his party met the emperor,
they lodged in a palace on the roof of which beautiful maidens were dancing; in
their midst was a beautiful woman with a duff, a tambourine, in her hand, who sang
and recited a couplet of verses. Al-Numn and his party declined a young mans
offer to join the wedding celebration and proceeded on their unsuccessful mission.
14 Its authorship is attributed to al-Ama the philologist (d. 828), on whom see B. Lewin,
al-Ama, EI2, I, 71719.
15 Nldeke, PAS, 475.
16 See E. G. Browne, Hand-list of the Muhammadan Manuscripts, Including All Those Written in
the
Arabic Character, Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1900), 241.
I share
Brownes view. He discussed this work further in Some Account of the Arabic Work Entitled
Nihyatu
l-irab . . ., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1899), 5153; (1900), 195209.
17 See M. Grignaschi, La Nihyatu-l-Arab fi A hbri-l-Furs wa-lArab, Bulletin des tudes
orientales
22 (1969), 1767, and La Nihyatu-l-Arab fi A hbri-l-Furs wa-lArab et les Siyaru Mulki-l-
Agam du
Ps. Ibn al-Muqaffa, Bulletin des tudes orientales 26 (1973), 83184; for M. J. Kisters notice of
the
London Manuscript at the British Museum, see Some Reports Concerning Mecca from Jhiliyya to
Islam, in Studies in Jhiliyya and Islam, Variorum Reprints (London, 1980), 6193.
18 Nldeke refers to the Gotha manuscript as Goth.A 1741 (PAS, 475). The two manuscripts in
London are British Library, Add. 18,505 and 23,298 (while reading the second, I noted that the leaf
in which the description of the wedding occurs is missing). The Cambridge manuscript number in
Brownes Hand-list is No. 1201. Nldeke (PAS) and Browne (Hand-list) read one word in the title
as
Irab; Gringaschi (La Nihyatu-l-Arab fi A hbri-l-Furs wa-lArab) reads it Arab, which rhymes
better
(and is indeed almost a homophone) with the second word, Arab. Each provided a reading of the
word,
which was unvocalized, without discussion.
19 Edited by Muammad Taq Dneshpazhuh, who used only the two MSS in the British Library
(Tehran, a.h. 1375 [195556]). In his introduction, he discusses the works authorship and refers to
its
Persian translation, Tajrub al-Umam fi Akhbr Mulk al-Arab wa al-Ajam, ed. R. Anzabinijd
and
Y. Kalantari (Tehran, n.d.).
20 On weddings in Byzantium, see W. Treadgold, The Bride-shows of the Byzantine Emperors,
Byzantion 49 (1979), 395413; see also L. Rydn, The Bride-shows at the Byzantine Court
History
or Fiction? Eranos 83 (1985), 17591.
21 See K. V. Zettersteen, al-Numn Ibn Bashr, EI2, VIII, 11819.
Some thirty years later, Muwiya, now the ruler of the region, sent al-Numn on
a mission to Antioch. He found the spot where he had met Heraclius desolate and
the palace in ruins. He met then a blind old woman whom he asked to identify
herself, which she did in a couplet of verses in which she said she was al-Dalf, the
daughter of Jarwal, who was a lord among the Ghassnids. Al-Numn reminisced
on his earlier visit, and the woman told him that the wedding he had witnessed
then was that of her sister, who was being married to her cousin, a Ghassnid, and
that the young man who had offered him hospitality was her own brother.22 If
authentic, this account provides valuable information on Ghassnid social life.
The maidens name is significant. Its consonantal skeleton, d-l-f, can support
one of three rootsd-l-f, z-l-f, or dh-l-f; the third reading is probably the correct
one.23 Dhalf, applied to a woman, refers to one who has a beautiful nose, small
and straight.24 Dhalf is also attested as a female proper name belonging to some
of the medieval qiyn (songstresses). It is a welcome addition to the onomasticon
of Ghassnid women, just as her fathers name, Jarwal,25 is to the onomasticon of
its men.
The description of the wedding party, however, is the most important part of
the account.
1. The bride and the bridegroom are cousins. Clearly the Ghassnids engaged
in endogamous marriages, since they were proud of the purity of their pedigree,
mentioned in the odes that eulogized them: the phrase ghayr ashib, not sullied
or adulterated by admixture with other blood, appears in their panegyrics.26 The
principle of kafa, equality in pedigree for contracting a marriage, was appar-
ently observed by the Ghassnids.27
2. Dancing was a feature of the celebrations that attended their wedding; this
is the only reference to dance in Ghassnid life.
3. The sister of the bride was leading the group; she appears both as an instru-
mentalist and vocalist. The entertainment was thus provided not by a professional
artist, a qayna, but by a family member, a sister singing at her siblings wedding.
4. Al-Dhalf uses a duff, an instrument well-known and popular in this
period and on such occasions.
5. Finally, al-Dhalf sang a couplet of verses. The impetus that the Ghassnids
imparted to Arabic poetry by their patronage has been explained in this volume.
22 Cambridge Manuscript, No. 1201, 115v; Nihyat al-Arab, ed. Dneshpazhuh, 23335.
23 But for the roots d-l-f and z-l-f, see Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1979), III, 405, 194
95.
24 Ibid., II, 467.
25 For Jarwal, meaning the rocky part of a mountain, see ibid., I, 411.
26 The phrase appears in the famous panegyric on the Ghassnids by al-Nbigha; see his Dwn
al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 42, verse 8.
27 On kafa, see J. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, 1964), 160 note 85.
But the verses sung by al-Dhalf were not formal, solemn eulogies on their kings
such as al-Nbigha or Alqama composed; rather, they were light verses, related to
entertainment and the social life of the Ghassnids. The author of the couplet is
unknown, but it may have been composed by al-Dhalf herself, or by one of her
relatives. The federates had women poets among them.28
The verses were apotropaic, as the princess wishes death upon those who envy
her house and do not wish them well. Such sentiments are not implausible. The
luxury and the splendor of the Ghassnid court must have elicited jealousy from
other Arabs, such as the Lakhmids and even the Meccans.29 So, the content of her
song corresponds with what is known about how the Ghassnids were perceived by
some contemporaries.
That this account is set in the region of Antioch should cause no surprise;
although Ghassnid power was centered in the south of Oriens, in the Provincia
Arabia and in Palaestina Secunda and Tertia, their influence extended to the north
and affected the whole of the region up to at least the Euphrates, after Justinian
created the archiphylarchia around a.d. 529. Furthermore, after the start of the
Muslim offensive against Oriens during the caliphate of Ab Bakr and the initial
Muslim successes, there was a major redeployment of Byzantine troops in Oriens;
it is quite possible that some of the Ghassnids who were fighting with Heraclius
were moved to the norththe region of Antioch.30
A final aspect that deserves comment is the Islamic framework within which
the account is set: namely, the dispatch of al-Numn to convert Heraclius to Islam.
This is surely a later Islamic pious embroidery. Indeed, the attribution of the account
to al-Numn ibn Bashr may be cited as one of these later pieties; he was too young to
be sent by Ab Bakr to convert Heraclius, but the account is ascribed to him in order
to enhance its credibility, since he was one of the Companions of the Prophet.
Such then is the account on the Ghassnids in Nihyat al-Arab. Notably, it is
free of fantastic or miraculous elements, which would have made it completely unre-
liable, although it contains inaccuracies such as its attribution to al-Numn ibn
Bashr. Even the dramatic manner of the maidens death at the end of the account
is not implausible. The reader has the choice of accepting Nldekes judgment on
Nihyat al-Arab or the more sympathetic assessment of Edward G. Browne.
28 For the poet daughter of Dwd, the fifth-century Arab federate king, see BAFIC, 434; see also
above, Chapter 2, note 101.
29 Even the Prophet Muammad, who was aware of the power of the Ghassnids, is said to have
exclaimed, O God, do away with the Ghassnid kingship. See Ibn Qutayba, Uyn al-Akhbr
(Cairo,
1963), IV, 71.
30 The move followed the incipient and unfinished thematization of Oriens after the Byzantine vic-
tory at the battle of Nineveh and the evacuation of Oriens by the Persians (see the five articles by
the
present writer in BALA I, 119280).
Appendix
Reynold Nicholson on the Ghassnid Royal Court
In the context of Chapter 3s Quellenkritik involving prose literature on the
Ghassnids, the views of a distinguished scholar of Arabic literature, Reynold
Nicholson, deserve to be noted. From the compositions attributed to assn, he
singled out the one in which the poet refers to a banquet given by the Ghassnid
king Jabala, when the qiyn (songstresses) from ra and Mecca sang for him.1
In Chapter 8, arguments have been advanced supporting the authenticity of the
account on the dispatch of qiyn to Jabala from ra and Mecca; two other points
may be added here.
First, the statement on the kings behavior, shunning all vulgarity or obscen-
ity in the course of that banquet,2 accords well with other poets allusions to the
Ghassnids chastity and decency,3 reflections of their Christian faith. And sec-
ond, the reference to snow/ice in the piece is not surprising, since the Ghassnids
lived so close to Mount Hermon, called in Arabic Jabal al-Thalj, the Mountain of
Snow. It was seen by assn and remembered by him in two of his poems.4
Applying his critical acumen, Nicholson accepted the historicity of the vari-
ous elements of the account, but doubted that it could have come from assn. The
distinguished scholar, however, wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century,
before the development of Byzantine studies and, more importantly, of research
on Arab-Byzantine relations, and so he was not clear about some aspects of that
relationship.
1. His main difficulty in accepting the attribution of the piece to assn
derived from his erroneous belief that Jabalas rule began in a.d. 6355that is, one
year before the battle of the Yarmk. He therefore concluded that assn could
not have met Jabala, since assn had accepted Islam long before Jabala acceded to
the kingship of Ghassn. Yet despite his reservations about the chronology and the
ascription of the passage in its present form to assn, Nicholson concluded that
this does not seriously affect its value as evidence.6
2. The last days of the Ghassnids and the reign of Jabala are now much bet-
ter understood than they were when Nicholson wrote. assns last visit to the
Ghassnids must be related to the terminus 614, when the Persians occupied
1 See R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London, 1969), 53 and note 4.
2 The Arabic text uses the strong words khan and arbada, which Nicholson discreetly translates,
I never knew him offend in speech or act.
3 For example, see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 47, verses 24, 27;
101, verse 4.
I, 137, verse 4; 308, verse 9.
5 Nicholson, Literary History of the Arabs, 52.
6 Ibid., 53 note 4.
Jerusalem and Oriens. Some Ghassnid kings are known to have had extended
reignsArethas reigned for forty years, 529569so Jabala could easily have
ruled long enough that assn might have visited him before 614.7
3. Although Jabala quite possibly could have been the Ghassnid king
involved in this prose piece ascribed to assn, it also could have been some other
Ghassnid king who reigned before a.d. 614. The names of the Ghassnid king
and his phylarchs between 600 and 614 are known from contemporary Arabic
panegyrics on them: al-rith, al-Numn, Amr, and ujr. In the transmission of
a prose account such as this one, the name of one Ghassnid king may have been
substituted for that of a phylarch, but such an error would not affect the substance
of the account.
4. It might be added in this connection that female singers are attested at
the Ghassnid court as early as the first half of the sixth century, during the reign
of Arethas, who presented a poet, armala, with two songstresses to convey his
gratitude.8
7 Ibn Khaldn gives the year of Jabalas death as that of Heracliusi.e., a.d. 640/641; see Trkh
(Beirut, 1956), II, 587.
8 See Ab al-Qsim al-midi, al-Mutalif wa al-Mukhtalif, ed. A. al-Sattr Farrj (Cairo, 1961),
235.
B. DAILY LIFE
IV
Food
F
ood played an important role in the social life of the Ghassnids, who had
belonged to a people whose ideal of mura comprised the twin virtues of hos-
pitality in peace and courage in war.1 The former was made real in food, especially
food offered to a stranger or guest. One of the fires that the Arabs lit was intended
to guide the wayfarer at night to where he could find food to satisfy his hunger; it
was called Nr al-Qir, the Fire of Hospitality.2
Their attachment to this virtue is clearly signaled even in their onomasticon.
Their eponymous ancestor was called Jafna, which means a large platter; and
they were often referred to as the Sons of Jafna (the Jafnids), Awld Jafna, or
the House of Jafna, l-Jafna. Thus, their very name reminded the Arabs of their
hospitality, which became proverbial both in poetry and in prose. It was immortal-
ized by their poet laureate assn. In a verse that became celebrated in the annals
of Arabic poetry, he says that their splendid hospitality even silenced their dogs:
their supposed guardians against suspicious strangers, the dogs became so accus-
tomed to the frequent visits of guests that they ceased to howl!3 In prose, too, the
saying Awqar li-al-ayf min Ban-Ghassn, More hospitable to the guest than
1 The pre-Islamic concept of mura included as many as seven elements, but the two main ones
were bravery in war and hospitality in peace, reflecting the division of the life of the pre-Islamic
pastoral-
ists between war and peace. Islam enlisted mura in its service; according to a famous hadith, l
dna
bil mura, religion cannot subsist without mura. On dn and mura, see I. Goldziher,
Muruwwa
and Din, in Muslim Studies, ed. S. M. Stern, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (London, 1967), I,
144 (especially 23 note 4, for the hadith); see also B. Fars, Mura, EI2, VII, 63638,
especially 637.
2 The pre-Islamic Arabs also applied the term jawd (plural ajwd) to individuals known for their
outstanding hospitality. For an enumeration of these ajwd in pre-Islamic time and on hospitality in
general, see Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1970), IV, 57584; for
the
fire of hospitality, see 582.
3 Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 74,
verse 12.
Ban-Ghassn, expressed their hospitality. Even as late as the tenth century, the
famous belle-lettrist Bad al-Zamn al-Hamadn echoed it; in a memorable pas-
sage in one of his Epistles, he puns on the name Jafna.4
One of their phylarchs, Imru al-Qays, was nicknamed Qtil al-J, the
Killer of Hunger or Famine,5 a sobriquet he acquired during a famine in which
he attended to the needs of his people. The epithet was preserved even in Greek
inscriptions that called him , as well as in an Arabic verse that the phy-
larch himself composed.6
I. Haute Cuisine
Food was important to all Arabs,7 and the Sons of the Large Platter, the
Ghassnids, must have enjoyed at their tables a high level of cuisine. This is attested
by the Arab authors who actually singled them out from all the Arabs for the high
standard that their culinary art had reached. Speaking of one succulent Ghassnid
dish, the tharda (discussed below), Thalibi (9611038) wrote: This group (the
Ghassnids) distinguished themselves among the Arabs for their specialization in
al-ayyibt, the delicious foods, and to them belonged the tharda, which is pro-
verbial. And about this dish the Arabs were united, declaring that there was no
tharda more delicious than theirs, neither in the food of the common people nor
of the elite, and so it served as a proverb for the most delicious of foods.8
Ghassnid cuisine may have been influenced by their origins in the Arabian
Peninsula, where they associated with the imyarites,9 and by later contacts with
the Palmyrene and the Nabataean Arabs, who accorded great importance to ban-
quets and feasts. Such expressions as Children of the Banquet, Companions
of the Banquet, and Chief of the Banquet speak for themselves.10 It is also
4 Hamadn, Rasil Ab al-Fadl Bad al-Zamn al-Hamadn (Cairo, 1898), 300301; see
BASIC II.1, 28991.
5 See Ibn azm, Jamharat Ansb al-Arab, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo, 1962), 372.
6 See Hishm al-Kalb, Jamharat al-Nasab, ed. N. asan (Beirut, 1986), 61819; for the Greek
inscription, published by Maurice Sartre, see BASIC I.1, 50912; BASIC II.1, 4446.
7 The importance of food in the life of the Arabs is reflected in the large number of dishes (twelve),
each of which had a name; see Ibn Abd Rabbih, al-Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn, I. Abyr, and A.
Hrn
(Beirut, 1982), VI, 29092. And likewise, banquets were given on twelve named occasions (292).
For
the list in English of these dishes and banquets, see G. J. H. van Gelder, Gods Banquet: Food in
Classical
Arabic Literature (New York, 2000), 16, 21. This is now the standard work on Arab food.
8 See Abd al-Malik al-Thalibi, Thimr al-Qulb fi al-Muf wa al-Mansb, ed. M. Ibrhm
(Cairo, 1965), 12223.
9 For food in imyarite South Arabia, see Ghidh, EI, II, 106061; for the food of the Arabs
of the Peninsula in pre-Islamic times, see 105760. The entries abkh (Cooking) and
Matbakh
(Kitchen, Cookhouse) by D. Waines may also be consulted, in EI2, X, 3032, and VI, 8079,
respectively.
10 For these expressions in Nabataean and Palmyrene inscriptions, see R. G. Hoyland, Arabia and
the Arabs (London, 2001), 136.
129 Food
possible that Arethas introduced to the Ghassnid court foods that he had tasted
at imperial banquets in Constantinople.11 Such banquets in later times attracted
the attention of a Muslim observer, who left a vivid and detailed description of
one of them.12
The fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who judged a particu-
lar people or society by what they ate and what they drank, dismissed the Arab
pastoralists of the fourth century as a people wholly unacquainted with grain and
wine.13 But the Ghassnids displayed a high level of cultural development in their
food and drink, recognized both by the poets who visited them and by the authors
of later Islamic times such as Thalibi. In particular, assn distinguished the
Ghassnid princesses from the Arab women of the Peninsula by noting that they
did not consume pastoralist food.14
II. Bread
Information on the Ghassnid diet is extremely limited. As bread was the staple
food of Byzantium, so it was for the Ghassnids. At the court, a major compo-
nent of the diet would have been uwwr, bread made of the finest white flour,
quite distinct from the bread made of coarse flour called khushkr.15 The Syriac
term uwwr,16 related to the root that means white, is attested in a piece of
rhyming prose addressed to one of the Ghassnid kingsa panegyric on him in
which the superiority of the food he eats is considered evidence for his superiority
over his rival, the Lakhmid king of ra.17 Coarser bread, paximadion, was dis-
tributed to the Ghassnid troops when they were on duty.18 awrn/Auranitis
and Bathaniyya/Bshn, where the Ghassnids were partly settled, were known as
cereal-growing regions in Oriens.
11 On Arethas in Constantinople, see BASIC I.1, 28288.
12 For Hrn ibn Yays description of the imperial Christmas banquet in Constantinople, see the
English version of the Arabic text in A. Dalby, Flavours of Byzantium (Trowbridge, Eng., 2003),
11819.
13 Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, XIV.vi.6. On Ammianus value system, see P. Tuffin and M.
McEvoy, Steak la Hun: Food and Drink, and Dietary Habits in Ammianus Marcellinus, in Feast,
Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ed. W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka, Byzantina
Australiensia
15 (Brisbane, 2005), 6984, especially 7980.
14 See assn, Dwan, I, 255, verse 8, translated in BASIC II.1, 295.
15 On khushkr, see van Gelder, Gods Banquet, 99, 120; it was probably baked in an oven called a
tannr. On bread among the Arabs generally, see C. Pellat, Khubz, EI2, V, 4143; in Byzantium,
see A.
Karpozilos and A. Kazhdan, Bread, ODB, I, 321. For uwwr as the bread of the Ghassnids,
see Ab
al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1957), XV, 124, verse 14.
16 See S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint, Hildesheim,
1962), 32.
17 For this piece of rhyming prose, see Ifahn, al-Aghn, XV, 12425.
18 For the simple baked loaves and the double-baked biscuit in Roman and Byzantine times, the
bucellatum and the paximadion/paximation, see J. Haldon, Feeding the Army: Food and Transport
in
Byzantium, ca. 6001100, in Mayer and Trzcionka, eds., Feast, Fast or Famine, 87.
Bread was accompanied by cheese, either jubn or a
ki, and by honey, asal, and

also clarified butter, both of which are documented in contemporary poetry.19
Olives and olive oil also went with bread as part of the Ghassnid meal. The olive
tree grew in the regions where the Ghassnids were settled; indeed, Oriens was
the major area of olives and oil production for Byzantium until the Arab Muslim
Conquests.
III. Meat
A bread and meat broth called thardat Ghassn was highly prized among the
Arabs and acquired proverbial fame in the words of medieval authors such as
Thalibi (quoted above). According to some, the meat in the dish was brains
(viewed as particularly choice).20 Two distinguished personages sang its praises: a
hadith says that the Prophet Muammad likened his favorite wife isha to the
tharda, saying that she surpassed all other women just as the tharda excelled all
other delicacies.21 assn, his poet, also employed the tharda in a remarkable sim-
ile: The butter that appears on the sides of the tharda looks like the stars of the
Pleiades. Although the point of the simile is not clear to a modern observer, the
verse plainly implies that the tharda is a great delicacy.22
Reference to meat in thardat Ghassn raises the question of what other
kinds of meat were served at the Ghassnid table. A Syriac passage explicitly refers
to mutton and beef eaten during the encounter between a Monophysite Ghassnid
king, Arethas, and a Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, Ephraim, ca. a.d. 536.23
19 For these items, see M. Rodinson, Ghidh, EI2, II, 105761. For their appearance in the
poetry,
see assn, Dwn, I, 17, verse 6; 519 note 361. A ki is sometimes described as goat cheese,
sometimes as
sour-milk cheese. It is mentioned in the poetry of Imru al-Qays; see his Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm
(Cairo,
1958), 137. The Ghassnids, his maternal uncles, also had it. Honey was well known in the Arabian
Peninsula, where places famed for its production included if; see H. Lammens, La Cit arabe de
if la veille de lhgire, Mlanges de lUniversit Saint-Joseph 8, fasc. 4 (Beirut, 1922), 15354,
and
M. Lecker, if, EI2, X, 11516.
20 See Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1997), I, 476; Murtaa al-Zabd, Tj al-Ars, ed.
A. Hrn (Kuwait, 1970), VII, 46264; and An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed. E. W. Lane (London,
1863), Book I, part 1, 33435.
21 See van Gelder, Gods Banquet, 25.
22 Ibid., 1920. Both the Prophet and assn actually use the term thard, not tharda. For assn,
the choice may reflect metrical necessity; but the reading also brings to mind the great-grandfather
of
the Prophet, Hshim, who is credited in the sources with introducing thardsimply bread dipped
in some brothto Mecca. Over the following century, tharda was developed into the choice dish
described above. For Hshim and the thard, see the English version of the Sra of Ibn Hishm, The
Life
of Muhammad, trans. A. Guillaume (1955; reprint, Karachi, 1990), 58. For a fairly detailed
treatment of
thard/tharda, see Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam, VII, 57778.
23 See Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche jacobite dAntioche (11661199), ed. and trans.
J. B. Chabot (Paris, 1909), II, 24647, discussed in BASIC I.2, 74849.
131 Food
The same Syriac passage also mentions camel meat,24 which the Arab pastoralists
often ate in the Peninsula. Camel meat was forbidden to the Jews by the dietary
laws prescribed in Deuteronomy (14:7), but not to Christians. The reference to it
in the Syriac passage clearly suggests that it was offered to Patriarch Ephraim for a
special reason, with the full knowledge on the part of the Ghassnid king that the
patriarch would not partake of it. The Syriac passage reveals the tripartite ethnic
division in Oriens. The Semites of the region were divided into Jews, who could
not eat camel meat, and the Arabs and Arameans, who could but probably did not;
the third group, the members of the Graeco-Roman establishment, would not, but
their refusal was not based in any religious sanction or dietary law. The Ghassnid
Arabs in the limitrophe provided a kind of dietary bridge between the Graeco-
Roman establishment and the Arabs of the Peninsula.
In addition to sheep and cows, goats roamed the Ghassnid countryside and
formed part of the livestock that they raised, attested in the poetry composed on
them.25 The meats of these various animals were either boiled, as clearly implied in
the Syriac passage, or broiled, as indicated by Arabic verb shiw, used by the poets.26
The Ghassnids supplemented the meats provided by sheep, cattle, goats, and
camels with the game they bagged when they hunted. The limitrophe was contiguous
with the steppe land and deserts of North Arabia, where game was plentiful. And, as
has been discussed in Chapter 13, the hunt was one of the favorite Ghassnid sports,
pursued especially by the aristocracy. Of the many varieties of game they succeeded
in capturing, the gazelle, a type of antelope, was among the choicest.
A delicacy not explicitly linked to the Ghassnids is al-mara, a stew of
meat, cooked in sour milk.27 It is associated with Muwiya, the founder of the
Umayyad dynasty, and is sometimes called marat Muwiya.28 It is possible that
Muwiya encountered this delicacy in the capital of the Ghassnids, Jbiya, where
he lived for two decades as the governor of Oriens before he became caliph in 661.
Mara seems to have been a development or variation of the tharda, associated
with the Ghassnids.
24 Discussed in BASIC I.2, 75253.
26 See al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, ed. A. Rabb (Damascus, 1964), 37, verse 17; this verse also
characterizes the Ghassnids as l-Jafna.
27 van Gelder, Gods Banquet, p. 49; for a more detailed description, see Lane, Arabic-English
Lexicon, Book I, part 7, 2720, and G. Yver, al-Mara, EI2, V, 1010. This dish attained celebrity
by
being the subject of a maqma (a literary sance) by the brilliant Abbasid belle-lettrist al-Hamadn.
For
the translation of this maqma into German, French, Italian, and English, see van Gelders
bibliography.
28 The reference appears in the section titled Shaykh al-Mara, on the Companion of the
Prophet Ab Hurayra, in Abd al-Malik al-Thalibi, Thimr al-Qulb, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo,
1965),
112. It is also associated with Muwiya by al-Hamadn; see his Maqmat, ed. M. Abduh (Beirut,
1983), 101.
IV. Fruits
Though vegetables and legumes are not mentioned in the sources on the
Ghassnids, they must have been consumed. But fruits are mentioned, especially
apples and grapes. The fame of the first reached even al-Andalus, where one of the
regions major poets, Ibn Khafja, speaks of the apples of Lebanon.29 Grapes were
more important, however, since their juice produced winein Arabic, the daugh-
ter of the grapea beverage that played an important role in the social life of the
Ghassnids and is well documented in contemporary poetry. Moreover, it was hal-
lowed as a beverage of Christian association (as discussed in the following chapter).
Its dried formthe zabb, the raisin or currantmust also have been known and
eaten by the Ghassnids.30 And they must also have eaten mulberries, especially
after the introduction of the silkworm and the rise of the silk industry in Oriens
during the reign of Justinian. To these may certainly be added dates. The date palm
was almost the national tree of the Arabs, remembered in pre-Islamic poetry. The
Arabs depended on dates for their staple food, just as they depended on milk for
their beverage.31
Another fruit for which the region was known was the fig. The extant sources
have not preserved references to its appearance on the Ghassnid table, but indirect
reference to it and to olives has survived in the Koran (95:13). Fruits such as figs,
olives, and grapes were not grown in Mecca or its region, which the Koran (14:37)
describes as a valley devoid of plantation or vegetation. This was true of most of
ijz, with the exception of if and the Jewish oases. Thus Oriens, with its luxu-
riant orchards, had the edge over ijz in terms of crop production. The Arabs to
whom the Koran was addressed, including the Prophet Muammad, must have
become acquainted with such fruits in the southern part of Oriens, which their
caravans reached.32 Similarly, assn, the poet laureate of the Prophet, tasted the
apples of Oriens when he used to come from Yathrib/Medina in ijz and visit his
relatives, the Ghassnids, as their panegyrist.33
29 For Ibn Khafjas verse that mentions the apples of Lebanon, see Dwn (Beirut, 1961), 267,
verse
5. Apples are also mentioned by assn in a well-known poem whose first part treats the pre-
Islamic
Ghassnids in Oriens; see Dwn, I, 17, verse 7.
30 On zabb, see G. J. H. van Gelder, Zabb, EI2, XI, 36970.
31 Even when they reached al-Andalus, Spain, the Arabs remained nostalgic for dates and the date
palm. The Umayyad Abd al-Ramn al-Dkhil (d. 788), who reconquered Spain for the Umayyads
after
the dynasty fell in the Muslim Orient, remembered the date palm in a touching quatrain of verses;
see
R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London, 1969), 418.
32 See the appendix, Paradise in the Koran.
33 The contrast between the arid and relatively infertile Arabian Peninsula, including ijz, and the
fertile regions of Oriens, such as the Golan, Bshn, and Auranitis, where the Ghassnids were
partly
settled and where assn used to visit them, is nowhere more poignantly stated than in a triplet in
which
he refers to ijz as the nursling of hunger and misery. See assn, Dwn, I, 426, verse 2.
133 Food
V. Spices
Although food spices are not mentioned in the extant sources on the Ghassnid diet,
they must have been used. After all, spices were carried to the ancient and Byzantine
worlds by Arabian caravans, which the Ghassnids protected when they reached
their termini in Gaza and Bostra. Indirect evidence on spices at the Ghassnid table
may be sought in the Koran, where there are descriptions of the food of the elite,
of those in paradise, including ginger, zanjabl, and camphor, kfr.34 The natu-
ral presumption is that these were spices known to the Meccans whom the Koran
addresses. The use of spices would have been common in the Peninsula, but a
sophisticated use of them in meals and banquets probably came from Ghassnland
in Oriens. The Prophet Muammad is said in the sources to have accompanied his
uncle Ab lib on the latters journeys to Oriens as a caravaneer.35 So it is pos-
sible that some Meccans tasted Ghassnid spiced food in Oriens. Two hadith of
the Prophet support Meccan acquaintance with Ghassnid food. In addition to the
hadith on his wife isha mentioned above, in which he likens her to the tharda of
Ghassn, in another the Prophet tells his followers that Yawm shr, a Muslim
feast day, is better for them than the Christian Yawm al-Sabsib, Palm Sunday, men-
tioned by al-Nbigha in his most famous ode on the Ghassnids.36 The celebration
of Palm Sunday in Mecca or Medina is most likely to have been introduced by the
Ghassnids, devout observers and propagators of Monophysite Christianity. The
Prophets relations with them were quite close, and it is likely that in Ghassnland
he witnessed the celebration and the banquets associated with Palm Sunday.
VI. Fasting
To understand the Ghassnids relationship to food, it is necessary also to under-
stand the place of fasting in their lives. The Ghassnids wrote an important chap-
ter in the history of monasticism in Oriens, which has been elucidated in great
detail in the preceding volume of this series. As monasticism institutionalized the
earlier phase of Christian asceticism, which involved fasting and abstinence, it is
useful after discussing Ghassnid food to sketch briefly this other side of their rela-
tionship to food.
BASIC II.1 has explained the relationship of the Ghassnids to monasticism
as Arabs, as Monophysites, and as foederati of Byzantium, examining how each of
these dimensions of their identity contributed to their strong interest in the ascetic
life.37 A brief restatement follows.
34 See the appendix, Paradise in the Koran.
35 See Ibn Hishm, The Life of Muhammad, 79.
36 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verse 25. On this hadith, see Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab, III, 235.
37 Ibid., 164212, especially 17176.
1. As Arabs with whom the desert was always associated, the Ghassnids
welcomed and admired the anchorites and eremites who had chosen to live in the
deserts of the region.
2. As Monophysites whose doctrinal persuasion emphasized Christs divine
nature, the Ghassnids were naturally interested in the expression of that divinity,
one dimension of which was the renunciation of the world illustrated by his forty-
day fast. Asceticism as imitatio Christi became a Christian ideal, especially for the
Monophysites.
3. As foederati, the Ghassnids guarded the Byzantine frontier in Oriens
against the Persians, the Lakhmids, and the pastoralists of the Peninsula, fight-
ing as soldiers of the Cross. Near their military stations along the frontier, the
maslaas and ras, stood many a cell of the eremites and anchorites and possi-
bly some monasteries. Hence a strong bond formed between the foederati, athletes
of the body, and the monks, athletes of the spirit. Indeed, as mentioned above in
Chapter 2, after the battle of Chalcis in a.d. 554, a number of the Ghassnid war-
riors decided to stay with St. Symeon the Younger, who, they believed, had aided in
their victory.
It was, therefore, not surprising that the Arab attachment to asceticism and
fasting impressed Ademmeh, a Monophysite bishop who was spreading the
faith among the Arabs in Persian Mesopotamia. His Life contains the following
revealing paragraph on the Arabs:
And not only did they give their donations to the churches, the monasteries,
the poor, and the strangers, but they loved fasting and the ascetic life more than
any other Christians, and so much so that they started the holy fast of the Forty
Days (Lent) one week before all the other Christians. Many individuals among
them never tasted bread throughout the whole period of the fast, and this was
true not only of the men but also of numerous women. They were fired by zeal
for the orthodox faith, and each time the holy church was persecuted, that is,
when it was pursued by its enemies, (the Arabs) gave their necks (suffered mar-
tyrdom) for the church of Christ, particularly the chosen and numerous groups
among them, namely the Aquoulay, the Tanoukhy and the ouy.38
The Arab federates of Byzantium in Oriens were not behind those of Persia
in their attachment to monasticism and the ascetic life. The Tankhids of the
fourth century and the Salids of the fifth were both devoted to monasticism,
and many monasteries were associated with their names.39 One of their kings, the
38 PO 3 (Paris, 1909), 2829; the italics are mine.
39 On the Tankhids, see BAFOC, 41835, 55052; on the Salids, see BAFIC, 289301.
135 Food
Salid Dwd, actually renounced his kingship, became a monk, and gave his
name to a well-known monastery in Oriens, Dayr Dwd.40 But the Ghassnids of
the sixth century were the Arab federates whose association with monasticism and
the ascetic life was the most impressive. As often noted in this volume, they helped
revive the Monophysite church, dominated the Provincia Arabia at a time when it
contained at least 137 Monophysite monasteries, and felt an especially strong tie
to the Holy Land, to which their camps were adjacent and which they protected.
Given this background, it is certain that fasting was observed regularly and
strictly by the Ghassnids, although the sources are silent on this aspect of their
life. No Typika for Monophysite or Ghassnid monasteries in Oriens have sur-
vived; and the work that might have provided this informationnamely, Akhbr
Mulk Ghassnis not extant. However, it is certain that the Ghassnids, as
devoted Christians, observed the many fasts of the liturgical yearespecially the
Great Lent, the sole fasting period mentioned in the extant poetry composed for
the Ghassnids by al-Nbigha and assn.41 The reference in one of al-Nbighas
poems to Palm Sunday clearly and explicitly documents the celebration by the
Ghassnids of the feast, and the Ghassnids would have observed the Holy Week
fast until the following Easter Sunday. Easter itself is also explicitly mentioned by
assn, in a verse in which he writes Easter was approaching and describes the
Ghassnid maidens stringing coral as they were preparing the Easter wreaths.42
Surely this action was set at some time during the Tessarakoste, the Great Lent,
which they observed.
40 On Dwd, see BAFIC, 25762. The Salids owed to monks their conversion to Christianity;
see 25354.
41 Discussed in Chapter 14, Ghassnid Banquets, below.
Appendix
Paradise in the Koran
Unlike the Hebrew Bible of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians, the
Koran contains a detailed description of paradise, focused on the righteous who
live in it: their food, their drink, and the appointments of their abode. The origins
of the description of paradise in Islams Holy Book are not entirely clear. Persian
and Judaeo-Christian provenances have been suggested,1 but closer to the Meccans
as a possible source of inspiration than either were certain urban centers in West
Arabia, such as Najrn and if, both fertile oases where a relatively high degree
of urban life developed. if is referred to in Koran 34:31 as one of the two cities,
al-qaryatayn, the other being Mecca. Henri Lammens, who wrote perceptively on
1 For the views of Hubert Grimme and Tor Andrae on the Persian and the Judaeo-Christian
provenance of the Islamic Koranic paradise, see L. Gardet, Djanna, EI2, II, 44752, especially
448.
if, was the first to suggest a connection between it and the Koranic para-
dise.2 if could not compete, however, with the more advanced urban life that
obtained in Byzantine Oriens by the Ghassnids, with whom the Meccans had
close relations.3 It is therefore possible that Ghassnid banquets may have been to
some degree an inspiration for the Koranic paradise.
The description of Paradise in the Koran that appears in various suras may be
summarized as follows.4
(1) The righteous occupants recline on raised, lofty thrones, like couches,
surur, which have cushions, called arik and namriq; (2) under the couches
are carpets, called zarbi; (3) their clothes are of fine green silk and silk brocade,
dbja, sundus, istabraq; (4) they dine on fruits; (5) their beverages are mixed with
ginger and camphor; (6) they drink from gold and silver cups and eat from golden
plates; (7) the women are pure and wear bracelets of gold and silver; (8) young chil-
dren, wildn, serve them; (9) and under them flow streams of water.
The royal banquets of the Ghassnids could easily match this description
of the Koranic paradisal scene, though no detailed and accurate account of a
Ghassnid banquet has survived in the extant primary sources. However, judging
by their affluence and prosperity in Oriens, it can easily be concluded that their
banquets must have contained all or most of these constituents of the Koranic
paradisal scene. The survival of one such description in the source al-Aghn, as
reported by the Ghassnid poet laureate, assn, is detailed enough to include
many of these elements, when due allowance is made for the difference between
a heavenly and a terrestrial paradisal scene.5 Some of the commonalities between
the Koranic version of paradise and the Arabic sources, verse and prose, on the
Ghassnid banquets may now be listed, keyed to the list above.6
2 See H. Lammens, La Cit arabe de if la veille de lhgire, Mlanges de lUniversit Saint-
Joseph 8, fasc. 4 (Beirut, 1922), 139, 153; M. Lecker, if, EI2, X, 11516.
3 The very close relationship between Mecca and Ghassn will be treated at length in the next vol-
ume of my series, Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh Century. I will simply note here that a whole
clan in Mecca, Ban sad ibn Abd al-Uzz, were the alfs of Ghassn, their allies, and they
included
Muammads wife Khadja and her uncle Waraqa, whose importance in Muammads life and mis-
sion cannot be forgotten or ignored; on the alfs, see the detailed discussion in Jawd li, al-
Mufaal
fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1970), IV, 37088.
4 The relevant verses have been collected together by L. Kinberg in Paradise, in The
Encyclopaedia
of the Quran, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden, 2000), IV, 1220, and before her by Gardet in Djanna,
447.
5 For the prose account of assn, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1959), XVII,
1056; translated into English by R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint,
London,
1969), 53. A fragment of assns poetry that describes the scene in a tavern in Ghassnid Oriens
refers
inter alia to three elements of paradise mentioned in the Koran: numruq (singular of namriq),
zarbi,
and dbja; see al-Aghn, IV, 172. The appointments of the Ghassnid royal courts must have been
far
more elaborate and luxurious than those of a modest tavern in Oriens.
6 For the various elements, see Chapters 4, 5, and 14.
137 Food
1. Throne-like couches are common to both: surur (plural of sarr) are used.
3. The clothes are strikingly similar, green in color and made of fine silk and
brocade, dbj.
4. Though fruits are not mentioned in the prose accounts of Ghassnid ban-
quets, apples are mentioned in assn, and the region of Oriens was known for its
grapes and apples; so they undoubtedly would have been served.
5. Drinks are provided, especially the best wines, which produce no ill
effects.
6. Vessels and plates of gold and silver are common to both.
8. The banqueters are served by young children, the walid referred to by
al-Nbigha and assn, who present the symposiasts with attractive gifts.
9. Even the reference to gardens under which rivers flow in paradise, as
described in the Koran, may be related to Ghassnland, with its streams in the
Golan and around Damascus. These waters would have attracted the attention of
the Meccans, whose city was arid and infertile, as stated in the Koran itself; ijz
similarly was an arid region without rivers.7 Meccans may have been aware of the
description in Genesis (2:1014) of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden, but they
were certainly more familiar with the landscape of Ghassnland, which their cara-
vans visited annually.8
The difficulties of drawing conclusions from this comparison of the Koranic
text with the Arabic sources on the Ghassnids, both verse and prose, are obvious.
The Ghassnid paradisal scene is a composite, featuring elements drawn from both
secular and religious banquets. But this reflects the familiar problem of source sur-
vival, which the very close relationship that obtained between Ghassn and Mecca
helps to negotiate. It is on this relationship that the comparison of the two sets of
sources has rested.
7 For Mecca as a valley devoid of cultivation or vegetation, see Koran, 14:37; for ijz as the
nursling of hunger and misery, see Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New
Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 426, verse 2.
8 A final element of comparison is less obvious, and thus has been relegated to this footnote. The
Korans description of azwj muahhara, pure consorts for righteous men in paradise (2:25),
brings
to mind the ajsd muahhara of the Ghassnid kings described by al-Nbigha; see Dwn al-Nbigha
al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 101, verse 4. The same sentiment about the chaste
Ghassnids
is echoed in the phrase ayyibun hujuztuhum in the poets famous panegyric (47, verse 25). It is,
how-
ever, striking that the same termmuahhara, pure, purifiedis used of men at court and of
women
in paradise. It is possible that al-Nbigha found the Ghassnids chastity particularly appealing
because
of the contrast with the Lakhmids, their rivals in ra whom he also eulogized; the Lakhmid court
was
associated (rightly or wrongly) with some sexual scandals, from which the Ghassnid court
apparently
was singularly free. Hence it is not difficult to argue from the chastity of Ghassnid men to that of
their
women. Moreover, in his prose panegyric on the Ghassnid kings, al-Nbigha explicitly referred to
the
chastity of Ghassnid wives and mothers (al-Aghn, XV, 124, verses 910).
V
Drink
I. Water
M
ost of the Arabian Peninsula was and is arid, ensuring that access to water
the most important beverage in the life of the pre-Islamic peninsular
Arabswas of prime importance.1 A body of water, m (plural miyh), and the
mar, the pasture, grazing ground, essential for the Arab and his livestock, were
considered am, protected preserves, which belonged to a tribe or a group in
Arabia and were jealously guarded by them.2
Water had other functions for the Arabs, beyond the strictly utilitarian;
according to one view it was like perfume, used in the rituals over the making of
pacts and alliances.3 In pre-Islamic times, water acquired a symbolic meaning in
rituals of hospitality. When a stranger tasted the water of an Arab in his dwelling,
he immediately acquired the status of a guest. In Arab ethos and mores, the guest
becomes immune to harm or aggression, even if he is a prisoner of war.4
On the more mundane level of water as a staple beverage for foederati living
mostly in the arid part of Oriens, the water they drank may have sometimes been
flavored with fruit, as they lived not only in arid areas but also in those known for
their fruits, such as grapes and figs. But the extent of this practice is not clear from
the sources.5
1 On beverages in general, see J. Sadan, Mashrbt, EI2, VI, 7273. The article is relevant
despite
its focus on beverages in the Islamic period (some of which were survivals from the pre-Islamic
period).
On water, in particular, see E. Brunlich, Islamica, ed. A. Fischer (Leipzig, 1925), I, 4176, 288
343,
454528.
2 On am (plural of im), see the discussion in BASIC II.1, 5760.
3 T. Fahd, M, EI2, V, 860.
4 This custom persisted well into later Islamic times. Its most celebrated example was the encoun-
ter during the Crusades between Saladin and the two Frankish chiefs, Guy de Lusignan, the king of
Jerusalem, and Reginald of Chtillon, the prince of Kerak. After the Muslims resounding victory of
attin in a.d. 1187, the two fell captive to Saladin. The first, Guy, was spared after he drank water
that Saladin himself had given him, thereby ensuring that he had his amn, security or safety;
but
Reginald was not, since the water he drank was not given him by Saladin. See Ibn al-Athr, al-
Kmil f
al-Trkh (Beirut, 1966), XI, 537.
5 Flower-scented water (mazahr), and specifically rose-scented water (maward), was known to the
139 Drink
II. Milk
The second most important beverage of the peninsular Arabs was milk, particu-
larly camels milk. The peninsular Arab was sometimes rightly described as the
parasite of the camel, the regions most important animal, and its milk was one of
the blessings that the camel provided. Its nutritional value was appreciated, giv-
ing rise to many terms in Arabic that denote its properties and varieties. The basic
word for it was laban, milk, but later the distinction was made between sweet
milk (halb) and curdled milk (laban). Lactic products, especially cheese, were also
produced. It is certain that the Ghassnids continued to drink milk when they
emigrated from South Arabia and settled in Oriens in the limitrophe, a region not
unlike certain parts of the Peninsula in its aridity.
III. Wine, The Daughter of the Grape
Wine was also an important beverage for the Arabs of the Peninsula. The grape was
not native to Arabia;6 it was imported thither and grew in a few oases such as if
in southern ijz and Asr in northern Yaman. Of all the neighboring regions
known to the ArabsPersian Mesopotamia, Byzantine Oriens, and imyarite
YamanOriens was the most celebrated for its wines. Wine thus had great appeal
to the Arab foederati of Oriens, especially the Ghassnids, and the sources that
refer to Ghassnid social life indicate that it became a principal beverage.7 The par-
amountcy of Oriens as a wine-producing region is attested by Byzantine poetry,
such as Flavius Corippus panegyric on the accession of Justin II in a.d. 565. In
Book III of In Laudem Justini Augusti Minoris, Corippus describes the imperial
banquet in Constantinople and refers to the various places in Oriens famous for
their wines:
Meanwhile the happy emperor with his holy wife (85) had begun to par-
take of the blessed joys of the imperial table, the royal banquet and the sweet
gifts of Bacchus, which wild Sarepta and Gaza had created, and which lovely
Arabs. But the few extant sources on the social life of the Ghassnids do not mention them or such
fruit-
flavored water as lemonade, orangeade, tamarind water (made from the tamr hind, or Indian
date),
and licorice drink (made from ss).
6 The term for wine, khamr, is a loanword from Syriac/Aramaic; see S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen
Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint, Hildesheim, 1962), 16061.
7 The sources note Ghassnid partiality to the fine wines of Maqadd, a place that has not been
precisely located in the Provincia Arabia; on the wine called maqadd, see Yqt, Mujam al-Buldn
(Beirut, 1957), 165. These wines remained so popular in Umayyad times that the adjective
Maqadiyy
came to mean (good) wine. But neither Maqadd nor Maqaddiy is attested in the extant poetry
com-
posed for the Ghassnids. The terms survival in Umayyad poetry and in later prose sources,
identified
as a Ghassnid wine, supports the attempt to recover from such documents material for the social
life of
the Ghassnids, by whom the Umayyads were deeply influenced; see BASIC II.1, 37591, 4034.
Ascalon had given to her happy colonists; or what ancient Tyre and fer-
tile Africa send, (90) and what Meroe, Memphis and bright Cyprus have:
and what the ancient vines bear with their mature strength, which Ithacan
Ulysses planted with his own hands, . . . (95) and the draughts that the farmer
squeezed from the grapes of Methymna, fragrant, full of glassy Falernian.
The ancient gifts of the Palestinian Lyaeus were mingled in, white with the
colour of snow and light with bland taste. They poured dusky chrysattic
wines into the yellow metal, (100) produced by nature without need of liquid
honey, and blended in the gift of Garisaean Bacchus. Who will tell of all that
the world brings forth for her rulers, all the provinces that are subject to the
Roman Empire?8
The importance of Oriens as a wine-producing diocese is demonstrated by
the eight toponyms in the passage: four are in Oriens (Sarepta, Gaza, Ascalon, and
Tyre), and of those two (Gaza and Ascalon9) were in Palestine. Furthermore, the
Roman god of wine, Bacchus/Lyaeus, was referred to as Palestinian. He was the
patron of a Palestinian town, Bth-Shn, or Skythopolis, in Palaestina Secunda.
The Arabic sources on the Ghassnids provide a few additional names of places in
Oriens that were famous for their wines.10
Byzantium itself, with its imperial banquets,11 was another important influ-
ence in promoting wine drinking among the Ghassnids. Through their long ten-
ure as foederati, the Ghassnids assimilated much of the Byzantine way of life.
Wine was an important component of the imperial banquet, which the kings
of Ghassn as patricii attended when they visited Constantinople.12 Byzantine
connoisseurship of wine was known among the Arabs and was recorded in their
sources on wine.13
The Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century gave a new
impetus to the importance of wine in the consciousness of the newly Christianized
Arab foederati and Rhomaioi, as bread and wine came to be spiritualized. Jesus
8 For the panegyric, see Corippus, In Laudem Iustini Augusti Minoris, ed. and trans. Av. Cameron
(London, 1976), 104. See also the appendix Garisaean Bacchus, below.
9 On recent discoveries on wine production at Ascalon/Ashqelon, see P. Fabian and Y. Goren,
A Byzantine Warehouse and Anchorage South of Ashqelon, Atiqot 42 (2001), 21119.
10 These include al-Kurm (literally, the vineyards) and al-Khawbi (the wine casks); see
BASIC
II.1, 240, 241.
11 For Byzantine banquets, see Ph. Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos (Athens, 194857),
V,
194204, and M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium,
and
the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), passim (see index), especially 1045.
12 On these Ghassnid visits to Constantinople, see BASIC I.2, 73640, 80524.
13 See Ibn al-Mutazz, Kitb Ful al-Tamthl fi Tabshr al-Surr, ed. G. Qanzi and F. Ab-
Khadra (Damascus, 1989), 11718.
141 Drink
first miracle was the conversion of water into wine at Cana, and wine figured
prominently at the Last Supper. Consequently, wine became a crucial element in
the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist, which involved its transubstantiation
into the blood of Christ.14 Thus the vine, the mother of the grape, and the vine-
yard also have Christian associations.15
Such then was the ambience in which the Ghassnids flourished, in which
drinking wine was popular and widespread. Wines strong presence among the
Ghassnids can be traced in Ghassnid social life: at home, in the tavern, at fairs,
and at royal banquets. The present study of wine in Ghassnid society in Oriens
supplements what is known in the Byzantine sources on wine in the diocese and
inter alia it provides a list of new locations that were celebrated for their wines
in Oriens. In the strictly literary Arab context, it adds a new name to those pre-
Islamic poets such as al-Ash and Ad ibn Zayd who were known for their lyrics on
winenamely, assn, who composed verses inspired by the Byzantine scene in
Oriens. This study also clarifies the role of wine in the social life of the Umayyads,
who succeeded the Ghassnids as the new masters of Oriens.16
Wine in the Dwn of assn
assn was the principal poet who frequented the court of the Ghassnids.17 He
was in effect their poet laureate and was related to them in the larger context of
affiliation with the group Azd. Though more of his poetry has survived on their
social life than that of the other poets, it is only a fraction of what he must have
composed on the Ghassnids.18 His verses that treat their social life and wine in
particular may be divided into two groups: (1) clusters of verses embedded in the
structures of longer poems on more general themes and (2) individual verses that
appear in various contexts. He may have composed poems exclusively devoted to
wine (Bacchic poetry); if so, they, like many of his poems on the Ghassnids, have
not survived. Since he also became later the virtual poet laureate of the Prophet
Muammad, the later Muslim tradition was naturally more interested in preserv-
ing his poems on Islam and the Prophet.19 Historians of Arabic poetry consider his
contemporaries Ad ibn Zayd, the urban poet of ra, and al-Ash, who belonged
14 See Luke 22:1720. The Arabs who later accepted Islam viewed wine as a beverage to be
avoided,
since the Koran, after initial toleration, strictly prohibited it (5:92).
15 In biblical exegesis, the vineyard became a metaphor for the Christian Church, as Jesus was
iden-
tified with the vine; see John 15:1, 5.
16 On the strong Ghassnid presence in the Umayyad state, see BASIC II.1, 37591, 4034.
17 See Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1958), XV, 124, 132.
19 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XV, 130, where a Muslim takes exception to assns eulogizing the
Ghassnids, whom he considered infidels, kafara. The account may be apocryphal, but it
illustrates
attitudes in the new world in which assn found himself.
to the group Bakr in eastern Arabia, the pre-Islamic poets of wine;20 but assn
was certainly a third. He was a spiritual ancestor of the great Umayyad wine poet
al-Akhal, who, like assn, was Christian and was inspired by the wines and
vineyards of the same region, Bild al-Shm, formerly Byzantine Oriens.21
Wine apparently meant much to assn, and seems to have released his inhi-
bitions and fired his imagination. Though much of his poetry has been irretrievably
lost, enough has survived to make him the leading wine lyricist of the Ghassnids,
and his wine lyrics give an intimate glimpse of social life in Ghassnland. assns
verse reveals a wide range of references to various aspects of wine and its consump-
tion: the varieties of wine; its containers, vats and casks; vineyards; the tavern, the
nt or the na; the sq, the server of wine; the boon companion; the song-
stress; the praise of wine; the towns in Oriens whence the wine was exported; and
the foreign lexicon of his verse on wine.
The Clusters
1. In Poem 1, verses 610 are an elaborate simile involving a lady-love named
Shath, whose phantom inspires the comparison.22
Verse 6 refers to the wine as khaba,23 hidden, for a long time and thus
desirable (vintage). Its provenance is Capitolias, for which the Semitic Arabic/
Aramaic term Bayt Rs is used (also found in a verse by al-Nbigha, discussed
below). Reference is made to honey and water with which wine was mixed.
Wine is praised as the best of all beverages, al-ashribt; wine is also al-r,
presumably a beverage that induces comfort. Its effects on the one who drinks it
sometimes invite criticism; assn playfully shifts responsibility for whatever he
is accused of from himself to the wine. But in verse 10 he returns to its praise; it
makes its devotees feel royal as kings and invincible as lions.24
2. Poem 13 is the well-known ode in which assn praised the Ghassnids
after their demise, as a laudator temporis acti.25 It has ten verses on wine: a quartet
20 See A. Wensinsky and J. E. Bencheikh, Khamr and Khamriyya, EI2, IV, 99498, 9981009
respectively.
21 Al-Akhal could not acknowledge assns influence on him, since assn was one of the Anr,
the Helpers of Medina, who were opposed to his patron, the Umayyad Abd al-Malik; indeed, al-
Akhal
lampooned the Anr out of loyalty to his patron. See Shir al-Akhal, ed. A. Slhni (Beirut, 1969),
314;
in this sextet against the Anr, verse 6 specifically ridiculed assn.
22 Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 17.
23 A more meaningful term than saba. On both terms, see Fraenkel, Die aramischen
Fremdwrter,
15859, 169.
24 That the first ten verses of this poem are Ghassnid is made amply clear by the Ghassnid top-
onyms mentioned in the first verse. The second part of the poem, on the conquest of Mecca in a.d.
630,
is strictly Islamic. Hence, in view of the first parts focus on wine, prohibited by Islam, critics are
divided
on whether the parts are in fact two independent poems; see assn, Dwn, II, 5.
25 Ibid., I, 7475.
143 Drink
(1314, 1617), a quintet (2125), and a single verse, the last of the poem (33).
So, one-third of the poem is on wine. Four of these verses are set at the Ghassnid
court, while five verses describe the wine he drank in a tavern, nt.26
Verse 13 refers to the Ghassnid custom of offering wine mixed with water.
The toponym al-Bar appears in this verse, and possibly Barada, the river of
Damascus (the Abana of the Bible).27 Barada has also been read not as a proper
noun but as ice, bardan.
Significantly, in verse 14 wine is considered a diryq, an antidote, that coun-
teracts poison or disease. Here, the reference is to the medicinal use of wine; this is
one of the earliest appearances of the Greek loanword in Arabic.28
In verse 16 assn describes his journey from the area of Bar to his
Ghassnid host, with whom he reclines in a manzil, either a tavern or a banquet
hall, surrounded by pleasant companions. So here is a reference to a symposium of
some sort.
Verse 17 provides more detail on the drinking party: there was a songstress,
the musmia, who both sang and played an instrument, as well as a njd,29 a goblet
or the beaker of wine. Kurm in this verse may be either a toponym or a common
noun, meaning vineyards.
In the quintet on wine in the tavern, assn refers to wine as khamr, in the
nt; it is pure and ahb, reddish, in color. Wine is brought to him in a cup
(kas) by a server who is wearing either an earring or a girdle around the waist,
mutanaifun.
In verse 23, he asks the server to give him wine that has not been mixed with
water.
In verse 24, he goes on to say that the two varieties of wine, mixed and pure,
have been well pressed but asks the server to give him a glass, zujja,30 full of the
wine that is better at loosening his joints.31
26 A Syriac/Aramaic term; see Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 172.
27 Cf. Richard Lovelaces reference to a river in a similar context in To Althea, from Prison
(1649):
When flowing cups run swiftly round / with no allaying Thames.
28 The term is attested again in assn as diryqa; see Dwn, I, 106, verse 13. The Greek medi-
cal term thus entered Arabic in pre-Islamic times, either through Syriac in Bild al-Shm or through
Aramaic in Mesopotamia, since the poet al-Ash of Bakr uses it, probably transliterated directly
from
Greek, at the medical school of Jundshpr in Sasanid territory. The entire corpus of Greek medical
literature was translated into Arabic in Baghdad and Samarra in Abbasid times; see the present
writer
in Islam and Byzantium in the IXth Century: The Baghdad-Constantinople Dialogue, in Cultural
Contacts in Building a Universal Civilisation: Islamic Contributions, ed. E. Ihsanolu (Istanbul,
2005),
13958.
29 Another Syriac/Aramaic term in assns lexicon of wine; see Fraenkel, Die aramischen
Fremdwrter, 167.
30 A Syriac/Aramaic term; ibid., 64.
31 assns partiality for the variety of wine that loosens his joints is repeated in Dwn, I, 106,
In verse 25, he further describes the glass he desiresone in which the wine
dances in its bottom with whatever had been thrown into it, such as saffron, to
enhance its taste.
In the last verse (33) of this poem assn says that he drank wine with his
Ghassnid host in the morning (bkartu) in a glass cup, zujja, and that the wine
came from the best of vineyards, where the vines were possibly trellised, ahdal.
3. Poem 18 is a septet in which the poet describes a convivium that he attended
in ijz as a guest of a certain li ibn Il from the group Sulaym.32
Verse 5 describes the wine party, composed of attractive ladies, fair com-
plexioned and luxuriating in riy (plural of raya), literally a precious robe of
one piece.33
Verse 6 describes boon companions, nadma, also fair-complexioned and
generous.
Verse 7 describes the wine as kumayt; it was vintage wine that had been kept in
its cask for a long time (uttiqat) and it came from the country of the Nabataeans
in Byzantine terms, the Provincia Arabia. It is described as sulfa, that is, the best
and purest.
In verse 8 the poet lauds the host, li ibn Il,34 for spending money to buy
good wine.
Verse 9 returns to the songstresses (qiyn) who remained around him, playing
on their instruments (zift).
Verse 10 describes these songstresses circling to offer the cup (kas) of wine to
the drinking party (sharb); carpets, anm (plural of nama), covered the floor of
the room.
Finally, in verse 11, the host gives these songstresses away to assn and his
boon companions.
It is possible that the Ghassnids had similar convivia, models for those in
Arabian ijz.
4. Poem 23 is an octet that describes a drinking party in a tavern, nt.35
Verse 8 describes the wine as ahb, reddish. Its provenance is Bayt Rs
(Capitolias), and it was old wine that had been left for a long time, uttiqat, in
sealed casks (khitm).
verse 13. The relaxation induced by wine recalls the epithet Lyaeus, Greek , sometimes used
of the
Greek god of wine, Dionysus, in Greek and Latin poetryso Horace describes Teucers temples as
uda
Lyaeo, moist with wine; see Odes, I.vii.22.
32 assn, Dwn, I, 91, verses 511.
33 These presumably were the songstresses/hostesses at the convivium, referred to again in verses
10
and 11.
34 On li ibn Il, see assn, Dwn, II, 87.
35 Ibid., I, 1067, verses 815.
145 Drink
Verse 9 refers to the tavern where the wine had been kept year after year,
uttiqat.
Verse 10 refers to the custom of drinking wine two ways: sometimes undi-
luted and sometimes mixed with other beverages. The ambiance is also described;
the poet drinks in marble houses, buyt al-rukhm, in which wine-bibbers could
hear singing.
Verse 11 describes wines effect on the body.
Verse 12 refers to the cup, kas; if an old man drank from it five times, he
would feel like a young man.
Verse 13 mentions the wines provenance from Baysn, Bth-Shn (Skytho-
polis), the city of Dionysus himself, known for its vines and wines. Furthermore,
the poet chose it for its medicinal value as an antidote, diryqaits good effect on
his bones.36
Verses 14 and 15 return to the tavern. The waiter is described as a blond who
dons a burnus (a robe) and a long hat (qalansuwa), and whose belt is tightly tied
around his waist. He is also attentive to the needs of the guests, and quick to serve
them wine. He is the sqi, a familiar figure in later Islamic wine lyrics.
5. Poem 40 is also ascribed to the Umayyad poet al-Akhal, who is more
likely than assn to be its author. The custom of drinking wine in the morning
(al-sab) is referred to in verses 3 and 5.37
6. Poem 41 is a triplet in which the poet advises one who, as a result of exces-
sive drinking, is suffering from a headache.38 He facetiously tells him to drink
again, in view of the fact that transience is the fate of every good thing.
7. Poem 150 is a triplet embedded in a poem, definitely pre-Islamic, in which
the poet takes pride in his clan and in himself.39
Verse 9 relates how he went to the tavern for his morning drink (ab), in
order to quaff mixed wine.
Verse 10 describes the morning spent in the tavern together with boon com-
panions (nadmn): reclining on a pillow (mirfaqa), having fun (lahw), listening to
music and song (ism).
Verse 11 declares that the waiter would pour him wine from a full wineskin.
8. Poem 154 is a short poem describing his journey in ijz, which contains a
couplet on wine.40
The first line of the couplet (verse 7) refers to the ziq (the wineskin), the nufa
36 Dionysus, Bacchus, was the patron of Baysn/Bth-shn, one of the cities of the Decapolis. For
the term diryq/diryqa in the poetry of assn, see note 28, above.
38 Ibid., 141, verses 13.
39 Ibid., 3023, verses 911.
40 Ibid., 310, verses 78.
(the small quantity of wine that remained in it), and the qab (another term for
cup), all of which were ready for the poet.
The more significant second line says that he approached the wine in the
ziq; the verb used is shanantuha, which means either that he poured the wine and
drank it straight or that he mixed it with water before drinking it. All these terms
are of interest for the lexicon of wine lyrics in this pre-Islamic period.
assn also refers to wine as qahwa, the term also used in later Islamic times
for wine, and much later for coffee. The term is fairly rare in pre-Islamic poetry.41
It raises questions of whether coffee was really known to the Arabs in pre-Islamic
times, and whether the term is the Ethiopic kaffa orless likelyan Arabic word,
which lexicographers relate to the verb qah.
9. Poem 156 is a sextet, an independent wine lyric.42 According to the scho-
liast, the occasion was an encounter with the poet Ash, who accused assn of
being stingy, whereupon assn bought all the wine in the tavern and emptied it on
the floor.43 The sextet describes in detail the drinking party, the sharb, at the tavern.
Verse 1 introduces the drinking party at the tavern and lauds their generosity.
Verse 2 describes the effect of wine on assn and his group; when they
drank they felt like kings and sons of kings,44 a sentiment he had expressed before
(in Poem 1, verse 10). He refers to the ab, the morning drink, in a context of
generosity.
Verse 3 refers to himself and his group, and to the scent of musk and saffron
in the tavern.
Verse 4 mentions the appointments and furniture of the tavern: on its car-
pets (zarbi) were to be found shoes (nil), slippers (qassb), and expensive cloth
(ray).45
In verse 5, he amusingly describes the party that had drunk to satiety and
fallen asleep, as if they had died on the field of Yawm alma, the famous Ghassnid
victory over the Lakhmids.46 But he hastens to say that those who approach them
on the morrow and consort with them will praise their camaraderie.
41 The attestation of the term qahwa in Arabic pre-Islamic poetry has passed unnoticed in the litera-
ture on coffee; see C. van Arendonk, Kahwa, EI2, IV, 449. The term appears in other pre-
Islamic poets
such as Ash and Muraqqish al-Aghar.
43 The tavern at which the two poets met was either in Oriens or in Iraq, which al-Ash used to
visit
more frequently because it was closer to the homeland of his group, Bakr.
44 Perhaps an echo of his connection with the royal Ghassnid house, who were his relatives
through
their affiliation with the Azd group, to which assn belonged.
45 The ray is described as muaddad, having aud, which means upper arms. The epithet is vari-
ously explained by the lexicographers, not very satisfactorily. See An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed.
E. W.
Lane (London, 1874), Book I, part 5, 2073.
46 Another echo of the Ghassnid connections of assn.
147 Drink
Verse 6 describes the waiter, who wore an earring, naaf, and carried a dbaja,47
handkerchiefevidence of the tavern keepers or owners concern that the waiter
be correctly attired.
10. This last cluster, in Poem 266, consists of two couplets; each, according
to Ibn skir, was related to the Ghassnid context.48 Jabala, the last Ghassnid
king, asks assn to vilify wine so that he might be weaned from his addiction to
it. So, assn composes a couplet in which he inveighs against its vices. He says
it would be priceless were it not for three evils consequent on inebriation. Then
Jabala asks him to compose verses in praise of wine. assn comes to its defense,
saying that it chases away cares and griefs.
If accurate, this dialogue between assn and the last Ghassnid king could
provide some evidence for the authenticity of the picture of Jabala given in the
Arabic sources, as one fond of wine, and of his glittering court in which wine and
songstresses figure.
The Individual Verses
Individual verses in assns Dwn are also informative on wine in Ghassnland
and on the circles in which the poet moved. The following data may be gleaned
from these verses.
1. That good wine is old wine is expressed in a verse in which the terms atq
and mudm appear;49 the latter, after being attributively used, became a substan-
tive for wine.
2. Some names of the various winesqr, sulf, and khurtm50may be
added to the legion known from Islamic times.
3. Wine may be drunk pure and straight, irf, or mixed with other liquids,
mizj.51 Though their employment in the verse is metaphorical, the two terms are a
useful addition to the Arabic lexicon of wine in pre-Islamic times.
4. Containersakwb and akws (plurals of kb and kas, respectively)are
used at the Ghassnid court, where mixed wine was drunk.52 The plural akws is
unusual, and the verse suggests that in the Ghassnid symposion the cups were car-
ried around (fa fhim) by a sqi, the serving waiter.
47 Explained in this context as a mandl/mindl; assn, Dwn, II, 229. Dbj usually means silk
brocade, a Persian loanword in Arabic already used in pre-Islamic times. In this context it is
explained
as a kerchief, a mandl/mindl, used by the waiter to cover his mouth or nose and protect the wine
he was
pouring. For the function of the mandl at drinking parties, see F. Rosenthal, A Note on the
Mandl,
in Four Essays on Art and Literature in Islam (Leiden, 1971), especially 7883.
48 assn, Dwn, I, 442.
49 Ibid., 29, verse 2.
50 Ibid., 204, verse 4; 341, verse 2; 439, verse 2.
51 Ibid., 171, verse 1.
52 Ibid., 204, verse 4.
5. Moderation in drinking wine is recommended; the term used for alcohol-
ism is idmn.53
6. Drinking wine without becoming intoxicated became a virtue, a demon-
stration of affluence and generosity. The label sharrb khamr, being a wine-bibber,
was a moral tribute as lofty as courageous in war, since assn described the
chivalrous Ibn Mukaddam as blessed with both qualities.54
Four Other Poets on Wine
In addition to assn, other poets who composed for the Ghassnids should be
remembered in this context: to al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, al-Ash, and al-Nbigha
al-Jadi may be added Amr ibn Kulthm. Although his poem does not specifically
mention the Ghassnids, it provides information on wine in Oriens, in areas where
an Arab presence obtained, and implicitly refers to the Ghassnids.
Al-Nbigha al-Dubyn
The poet was a serious man;55 therefore, his Dwn (unlike assns) contains little
on wine. But in the famous mmiyya in which he lauds the Ghassnid king and
his army on the march, there is a valuable sextet of verses describing the wine in an
amatory context; the first triplet is on wine and the second describes the pure water
with which it was mixed.56
The first line in the sextet, verse 9, speaks of the wine of Bur/Bostra, the
casks or vats of which were well sealed and were transported by camels.57 The wine
is proleptically described as mixed, as was customary among the Arabs.
Verse 10 describes its casks (qill, plural of qulla)58 as transported from
Capitolias, a city of the Decapolis to which the poet gives its Arabic name, Bayt
Rs. The casks were transported to Luqmn,59 a word which has been explained as
either the name of a wine merchant or a toponym in the region. The poet adds that
the casks were transported to a sq, a fair, market.
In verse 11 the poet says that when the seals of the wine casks (khawtimuh)
53 Ibid., 340, verse 6.
54 Ibid., 410, verse 2.
55 A distinguished pre-Islamic poet, who belonged to the tribe of Dubyn and was an older contem-
porary of assn; see BASIC II.1, 22032, and GAS, II, 11013.
56 See Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 13132, verses 914.
57 The verse is informative on Bostra as a city associated with wine; in these pre-Islamic sources it
is
more often linked to swords, as it apparently contained a fabrica where swords were made.
58 For qulla as a Syriac term, see Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 170.
59 The reference to Luqmn is tantalizing. It is the name of a sura in the Koran (31), which
Koranic exegetes have interpreted as the Arabic version of Aiqr, the counselor of the Assyrian
king
Sennacherib; see B. Heller and A. Stillman, Lu kmn, EI2, V, 81113. Its appearance in the
verse does
not help solve the Koranic exegetical problem, but it does indicate that Luqmn was a familiar term
on
the eve of the rise of Islam.
149 Drink
are undone, their wine effervesces and is topped by foam (qumman).60 Further-
more, the wine is good old wine (mudm).
Al-Ash
Al-Ash, a major pre-Islamic poet who is considered one of the poets of the
Suspended Odes, visited the Ghassnids and tasted their wines.61 Since he was a
devotee of the daughter of the grape, as wine is described in Arabic poetry, he cer-
tainly enjoyed the wines of Oriens; as an eastern Arabian poet, he was more famil-
iar with the wines of ra and Iraq,62 which were not as good as those of Oriens.
One of his verses has preserved a reference to a variety of Byzantine wine
that he calls al-khandars, which he could have tasted in Oriens.63 It must also
have been known to the Ghassnids, his hosts, and to assn, in whose surviv-
ing poetry the term does not appear. Al-Ashs Dwn attests three toponyms in
Oriens: rishalim (Jerusalem), ims (Emesa), and Sarkhad (Salkhad).64 If he vis-
ited Salkhad, a place known for its wines, he would have sampled them; he evi-
dently tasted the wines of Palestine during his trip to Jerusalem, since he refers in
one of his verses to a Palestinian wine, filisiyyan;65 and he must have also drunk
wine in ims, a place mentioned by another poet, Imru al-Qays, who was known
for his drinking bouts.66 While assn uses the Syriac term nt for tavern,
60 The term qummaan, which may be a hapax legomenon (al-Nbigha, Dwn, 132 note 1), is
explained as the effervescing foam. On khtam as seal, see Fraenkel, Die aramischen
Fremdwrter, 252.
61 For al-Ash, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 13032, and BASIC II.1, 27278. The standard edition of
the Dwn is Gedichte von Ab Bar Maimn Ibn Qais al-A, ed. R. Geyer, Gibb Memorial
Series
(London, 1928).
62 Hence his wine lyrics were more influenced by Sasanid Persia and Lakhmid ra, as his vocabu-
lary shows. Many Persian terms entered Arabic as loanwords, mediated through him and other poets
who moved in that milieu, such as Ad ibn Zayd.
63 See Dwn al-Ash al-Kabr, ed. M. usayn (Cairo, n.d. [1950]), 173, verse 24 (an edition that
in a few cases usefully supplements the excellent standard edition of R. Geyer, cited above). Al-
khandars
has been considered a loanword in Arabic. Most commentators, including the medieval author
Jawlq,
consider it a Byzantine Greek term (rmiyya); see Ab Manr Jawlq, al-Muarrab min al-Kalm
al-Ajam al urf al-Mujam, ed. and annot. A. Shakir (reprint; Tehran, 1966), 12425.
Apparently
it is related to the Greek , which originally meant a grain or lump of salt, then gruel (oat-
meal boiled in milk), and finally wine; see Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 16364. The
edi-
tor of al-Muarrab contributed many footnotes on khandars; in one, Shakir quotes the lexicographer
al-Zabdi, who suggested in Shar al-Qams that it may be a Persian loanword (125 note 7). The
term
survived well into later Islamic times, and is attested in the tenth-century poetry of al-Mutanabbi;
see his
Dwn, ed. A. al-Barqq (Cairo, 1930), I, 362, verse 1. Perhaps al-khandars is a Persian term; al-
musr
(Greek , Latin mustarium) is attested in the poetry of al-Akhal, the poet laureate of the
Umayyads of Oriens/Bild al-Shm, ca. a.d. 700. For al-mustr, see T. Nldeke, ed., Delectus
Veterum
Carminum Arabicorum (1890; reprint, Wiesbaden, 1966), 54, verse 13, and Fraenkel, Die
aramischen
Fremdwrter, 163.
64 For his references to these cities, see BASIC II.1, 27278.
65 See Ash, Dwn, ed. Geyer, 160, verse 7, and BASIC II.1, 274 note 264.
66 For Imru al-Qays in ims, see BASIC II.1, 26364.
al-Ash uses also the Arabic term mashrabt, the noun of place from the verb
shariba (drink), when speaking of the taverns of Najrn.67
al-Nbigha al-Jadi
Like his namesake, al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, al-Nbigha al-Jadi, too, visited the
Ghassnids and left a cluster of verses in which he remembered their hospitality.68
The reference comes in his famous long poem that rhymes in R, the riyya, a text
with several versions.69 The cluster of verses is a sextet in which he speaks of his
boon companions at the court of Mundir, who could be Lakhmid or Ghassnid,
but in this context are likely to be Ghassnid.70 His companions are handsome
and attractive as the dannr, the dinars from the land of Caesar. Reference is
made to Najrn, which he frequents so often that he was afraid of being converted
to Christianity (a remark that demonstrates the importance of Najrn as a great
Christian center). The specifically Ghassnid dimension of the cluster comes in
verses 1214.
In verse 13 al-Nbigha states that the king of the house of Jafna, the eponym
of the Ghassnids, was his host.
He refers to the cup of wine he drank there; to the shiw, the broiled meat, he
ate; and to the expensive robes he was given as a present.71
Verse 14 states that he received Iraqi linen cloth from Oriens (Bild
al-Shm),72 as well as musk from Drn at the Ghassnid court.73
Amr ibn Kulthm
The so-called Suspended Ode of Amr ibn Kulthm74 is structurally exceptional in
that it opens with a wine lyric rather than a description of a deserted encampment,
67 See Ash, Dwn, ed. usayn, 173, verse 29.
68 For the poet al-Nbigha al-Jadi, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 24547. Citations to his Dwn are from
the
edition of A. Rabb, Shir al-Nbigha al-Jadi (Damascus, 1964); M. Nallinos edition (Rome,
1953)
was not available to me.
69 See al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, 3559, 6069, 7076.
70 Ibid., 6162, verses 914.
71 The robes he received at the Ghassnid court came from aramawt, known for its elegant cloth
even in Islamic times, as indicated in the poetry of the Umayyad poet Jarr. The Ghassnids had
close
relations with inhabitants of South Arabia, especially their relatives in Najrn.
72 The reference to fine cloth from Oriens may reflect the rise of the silk industry there during the
reign of Justinian, after the introduction of the silkworm. The political tensions between Byzantium
and
Persia did not affect trade relations; similarly, hostilities between the Ghassn and Lakhm,
inveterate
enemies, did not affect social and economic intercourse between ra in Lower Mesopotamia (Iraq)
and
Jbiya in Bild al-Shm (Oriens), especially after the fall of the Lakhmids ca. a.d. 600.
73 Drn was a town in Barayn, in eastern Arabia; at the time, Barayn included parts of the
Arabian mainland.
74 For the poet, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 12829. In BASIC II.1, 26872, Amr ibn Kulthm was dis-
cussed mainly in connection with the toponyms in his poem.
151 Drink
the conventional prelude of pre-Islamic odes. These opening verses may have been
a separate lyric, erroneously linked to the ode in the long process of transmission.75
In verse 1, the poet calls on the waitress/songstress to entertain him with
a drink in the morning (ab). He refers to the wines of Andarn, apparently
a famous wine-producing region, and uses the term an for the more common
kas (cup).
In verse 2 he asks for wine mixed with u, saffron; he likes it warm, sakhn,
presumably because the mornings on the steppe are cold.
Verse 3 names the places where he drank wine: Baalbak/Heliopolis, Damas-
cus, and Qarn. Arab communities had presumably lived in those cities since the
days of the Ituraean Arabs in the first century b.c.
In verse 4 he speaks of the progress of the cup, which was passed around a
group of partygoers starting from the right-hand side, presumably the auspicious
direction.
IV. The Tavern
The taverns that these Arab poets visited were centers of social life, as they were in
Oriens. Out of the fragmentary verse of assn and other Arab poets, it is thus
possible to reconstruct the ambience of the taverns that these poetswhether fed-
erate Ghassnid or Rhomaic Arabfrequented in Oriens. Their elements included
the following.
1. The waiter. Only the male server is described in the surviving poetry of
assn.76 He appears with an earring and a long hat or robe (burns) and an expen-
sive mandl, kerchief. assn notes that he has his hair cut behind his ear,77 his belt
tightly fastened around his waist. He is also alert and quick to respond to requests.
He is the sqi, the one who pours wine for the patrons in the tavern.
2. The songstress. Equally important was the musmia (from the root samia,
hear), who often was also an instrumentalist (zifa), playing a lute or a zither.78
No names of songstresses have survived, as did those of the qiyn (plural of qayna),
songstresses, in Mecca and Medina/Yathrib.79 assn must have seen song-
stresses in Medina and possibly in Mecca, but he naturally saw more of them in
the taverns of Byzantine Oriens, where both music and song were much more
75 See the perceptive remarks of T. Nldeke in Fnf Moallaqat (Vienna, 18991901), 1314. For
the text of the wine lyric, see al-Zawzani, Shar al-Muallaqt al-Sab (Beirut, 1963), 11819,
verses 17.
76 For descriptions of the waiter, see assn, Dwn, I, 75, verse 22; 1067, verses 1415; 313,
verse 6.
77 In Arabic, mutalaq al-dhifr; see ibid., 106, verse 14. The dhifr is the bone behind the ear.
78 For the musmia in assn, see Dwn, I, 75, verse 17; 426, verse 2. For the zifa, see 91, verse
9.
79 On the qiyn of Uaya ibn al-Julh in Medina, see C. Pellat, Kayna, EI2, IV, 820; for those
of
Ibn Judn in Mecca, the so-called jardatn, see ibid., 821.
developed.80 Tarab was the term used to describe the ecstatic state induced by song
in the tavern.
3. The boon companion. The nadm (plural nudam, nadma) was another
important member of the drinking party in the tavern. assn refers to these com-
panions in Arabia as well as in Oriens.81 He is careful to emphasize their quality,
as conducive to a more pleasurable experience in the tavern. Just as the waiter, sqi,
was regularly featured in pre-Islamic wine lyrics, so too was the nadm, both in
assns time and in the later Islamic period.
4. The importance of the tavern. Apparently Arabs of this period, whether in
Arabia or Oriens, frequented the tavern both in the morning and in the evening.
Therefore new technical terms were coined: drinking in the morning was called
the ab; in the evening, the ghabq.
5. The manner of serving wine. The wine in these taverns was drunk straight
or mixed.82 assn also specifies what was added: sometimes honey,83 sometimes
water or saffron or musk for a better bouquet. The mixing water was warm, as in
the wine Amr ibn Kulthm drank in various cities of Oriens he mentions (see
above). It may sometimes have been mixed with ice.84
6. Perfumes. Perfumes were perhaps used to make the ambience of the tavern
more seductive.85 The musk mentioned in assns verse may have been the sub-
stance extracted from the musk rose, not from gazelles.
7. Seating. It is uncertain whether these poets who frequented the taverns
sat on chairs or reclined on couches, as was common in the Roman convivium or
the Greek symposion. Two terms used by assnmirfaqa, pillow, and the verb
ittakaa, recline, place the elbow86suggest that they reclined. But the terms
are ambiguous, since mirfaqa may be the armrest of a chair, on which an elbow
might be placed (an action described with the verb ittakaa). assn also uses the
term jalasa, to sit on a chair.87
One verse of assn is remarkable for its inclusiveness.88 It combines three of
the elements listed above (numbers 2, 3, and 4) and expresses his notion of the per-
80 The prose accounts that describe entertainment at the Ghassnid courts such as that of Jabala are
not unauthentic, although they may have been embroidered.
81 For boon companions in Arabia, see assn, Dwn, I, 91, verse 6; in Oriens, 279, verse 9.
82 Ibid., 106, verse 10.
83 Ibid., 17, verse 6.
84 In a particular verse, barad may be a misreading of bardan, which inter alia can mean hail
in
this context, a form of ice with which the wine described as raq was mixed; ibid., 74, verse 13.
85 Or perhaps the patrons use of musk and saffron was responsible for the fragrance in the tavern,
as
in ibid., 312, verse 3.
86 For mirfaqa, see ibid., 303, verse 10; for ittakaa, 74, verse 16.
87 Ibid., 312, verse 3.
88 Ibid., 279, verse 9.
153 Drink
fect tavern experience. His lady, Shath, had wished he would shake off his intoxi-
cationpresumably incurred by quaffing one cup (kas) of wine after another. He
replies that what he desires, even hankers after, is camaraderie in the tavern, boon
companions (nadmn), and their conversation for his early morning drink, the
ab. During his later visit to the tavern for his evening drink, the ghabq, he
enjoys the conversation of his evening companion, al-musmir, especially when the
latter is also endowed with an appealing voice as a singer, gharid. The verse reveals
his hedonism.
V. The Vineyard
As a piece of cultivated land, the vineyard, karm, was highly valued in Oriens, as
was the olive grove. Its grapes were a prized fruit: when partially dried, they became
raisins; when squeezed, they produced juice; and when pressed and fermented, they
created wine. Ghassnland, especially in the Provincia Arabia and the Golan, was
blessed with vineyards, where the vine flourished as it still does to the present day,
especially in Lebanon and northern Jordan.
The term karm for vineyard is originally Syriac, as are many terms in Arabic.
It appears in the Dwn of assn both as a common noun and as a toponym,
al-Kurm (plural of karm), much as the common terms for fort and monastery,
qar and dayr, were transformed into proper nouns. The Byzantines apparently left
their vines untrellised,89 as the Ghassnids and other foederati in Oriens may also
have done. The Dwn of assn, however, applies to the vine or vineyard some
terms, such as ahdal,90 that suggest a shaded bower or arbor, an arsh, possibly trel-
lised or covered with a roof to protect the plants within it from the blazing sun.
The term as a nomen patientis is attested in the Koran, marsht.91 Presumably it
was used by the poets of the Ghassnids who visited Oriens and must have seen the
bowers and arbors of the Arabs in that diocese, but the term is not attested in the
surviving poetry of assn. The Ghassnid bowers/arbors may be added to the list
of elements that appear in the Koran as descriptions of paradise, possibly inspired
by what the Arabs of those days saw in federate Byzantine Oriens: hence the jannt
marshat, the bowered gardens of paradise.92
The Ghassnids came from a peninsula that was baked by the sun; hence the
bower or arbor in the vineyard must have been a most welcome retreat for them
89 See J. Nesbitt and A. Kazhdan, Vineyards, ODB, III, 2170.
90 assn, Dwn, I, 75, verse 33. When applied to branches, the adjective ahdal connotes dangling
or overhanging.
91 See Koran, 6:141. Marsht (plural of marsha) can be applied to gardens that have these
bowers.
92 One of the terms related to arsh, namely arsh, came to mean throne, and it is used in this
sense
throughout the Koran.
and for the poets who visited them from Arabia. The vineyard became pleasant
surroundings for drinking wine in the open air rather than within the walls of a
tavern. assn availed himself of this locale for drinking parties, as may be seen
from an analysis of the relevant part of his celebrated lmiyya, or rhyme in L, in
praise of the Ghassnids.93
Some of its verses refer to the urban tavern that assn used to frequent
(verses 2125), while others (1318) refer to drinking wine in the bower of the
vineyard. The description of the latter is more vivid.
He describes his journey to the Ghassnid rulers in whose royal com-
pany he drinks wine, for him the antidote of all cares. His explicit reference to
the Ghassnids in three verses (15, 18, 30) supports the prose sources where he
describes in detail the time he spent tasting the wine of the Ghassnid kings as
their boon companion (see Chapter 3, above).
Verses 16 and 17 clearly describe his journey: he leaves the district of the Bar
and then reaches the vineyard (which he specifies as located between al-Kurm
and al-Qasal), where he reclines, drinks his wine, and listens to the warblings of
the songstress, the musmia.
VI. The Wines of Federate Oriens
Out of the dwns of assn and other poets who have been discussed in detail,
it is now possible to draw some conclusions about wine and its history in federate
Oriens.
1. The poetry records that wine was produced in Bostra, Bayt Rs (Capitolias),
and Gaza. These are well-known cities of Oriens, and the first were in the Provincia
Arabia, the headquarters of the Ghassnids. Others are not well known to the
Byzantine sources, such as Maqadd, in Trans-Jordan, to whose wines the Ghassnids
were partial. Its wines remained popular even in Umayyad Islamic times, when
poets sang its praises. Salkhad/Sarkhad in the Provincia Arabia may also be added to
the list.94
Apparently the wines of Palestine were particularly well known and sought
after, as is clear from a passage of Corippus Latin panegyric on Justin II, discussed
at the beginning of this chapter. The poet speaks of two cities of Palestine, Gaza
and Ascalon, known for their wines, but more significantly he refers to the god of
wine, Dionysus, by his other name, Bacchus, as Palestinian. His use of the epithet
Palestinian, like that of his younger contemporary al-Ash, an Arab poet, could
93 assn, Dwn, I, 7475.
94 The philosopher-poet of Arabic medieval Islam, Abu al-Al al-Maarr, included in his work
the
names of places in Oriens where wine was produced, thus confirming some known in Byzantine
times
and others unknown, such as Adrit and Shibm; see his Rislat al-Ghufrn, ed. A. Abd al-
Ramn
(Cairo, 1963), 15059.
155 Drink
reflect the importance of the province as a whole in wine production and its expor-
tation abroad, including Constantinople, where Corippus finds it served at the
imperial banquet given by Justin II.
2. The poetry provides information on the containers that transported the
wine from these places of production to the markets and cities where it was in
demand, the qill (plural of qulla), the vats. To these may be added other vessels
of various sizes and functions, including the dann and antam, a green-colored jar.
Smaller in size were the ziq or njd, wineskins to be found in taverns, and ibrq,
the jug, flask.95 The term khbiya is especially interesting: it indicates that the wine
was hidden, kept for a long time, and its plural, khawb, gave rise to a toponym
and a monastery of that name. It is still in existence in Syria; presumably the place
was well known for its winepresses.96
3. Wine trade was important both in Byzantium and in the Diocese of Oriens.
Wine merchants were either vinarii, oinopolaithat is, wholesale merchantsor
caupones, kapeloi, the retailers who ran the taverns. There is only one possible ref-
erence to such an individual, Luqmn, in the poetry of al-Nbigha, if indeed the
word indicates not a toponym but a vinarius or a caupo (as discussed above). If so,
he probably was a vinarius, who would receive the large casks transported by the
camels from their place of production, Capitolias, and then would place them in
the market.
4. In the verse that has survived, many terms are used to refer to wine. Certain
authors in later Islamic times provide long lists of such terms, some of which no
doubt go back to pre-Islamic times.97 They may be found in the verse of assn
and the other poets who frequented the Ghassnids in Byzantine Oriens. Some of
the names refer to its color.
a. Two terms relating to color became in later Islamic times common words for
wine. Both al-ahb and al-kumayt usually connote a dark color with a dash of red.
b. Qahwa is attested in this period and in the later Islamic period as meaning
wine; only later did it come to mean coffee.
c. Mudm indicates that the wine is vintage, has been kept a long time;98 a
synonym also in use was muattaqa.
d. Sulf and raq are words attested in this period as terms for very good
wine; the latter even appears as a choice drink in the Koranic paradise.99
95 Khurm may be added to terms that meant a jug, though for some it meant wine; see assn,
Dwn, I, 439, verse 2, and II, 87, line 18; also Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 16465.
96 On al-Khawb, see BASIC II.1, 240.
97 See Ibn al-Sikkt, Kanz al-uff z fi Kitb Tahdhb al-Alf z, ed. L. Cheikho (Beirut, 1895),
211,
where thirty-three names for wine are given.
98 It is the nomen patientis from the verb adma, to make to last long.
99 Koran, 83:25; see also Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter, 158.
e. Khandars and musr also connoted wine. While the second is not attested
until the Umayyad period, its usage then was likely a continuation of its popularity
in the immediately preceding Ghassnid-Byzantine period.
f. Two very common terms are al-r and al-uqr, which will be discussed
shortly.
g. Finally, the generic term for wine, khamr, has remained in use to the pres-
ent day. It is the word employed in the Koran. Another term for wine was sharb.
Khammr was the word for the wine merchant and, more often, for the tavern
keeper.
5. The effect of wine on its devotees was noted by the poets and was given var-
ious names. In a dialogue with the Ghassnid king Jabala, the poet assn lists its
three vices and its three virtues.100 It induces a mood not unlike insanity, madness;
it leads to masra, which can mean to fell someone to the floor or ground, but in
this context probably means fall to the ground as a result of intoxication, having
lost ones rational faculty.101 Conversely, wine relieves the one who drinks it of his
sorrows; cares vanish.102 The three vices and three virtues discussed in this dialogue
were succinctly expressed by two native Arabic terms for wine: al-uqr, the wine
that silences or even kills the rational faculty, and al-r, the wine that induces
comfort in the one who drinks (probably a shortened form of ra, comfort).
The most pleasant state that the wine used to induce in assn and the other
poets was nashwa, ecstasy; it made them nashw (plural of nashwn), ecstatic.
As noted above, of particular interest in this lexicon of wine in Arabic is the
appearance of the term tiryq, diryq, diryqa, a medical expression meaning anti-
dote borrowed from Greek medical literature and indicating the Arabs familiar-
ity with it even in pre-Islamic times.
6. Reference has been made to various cities in Oriens where the poets of the
Ghassnids visited taverns, but to what strictly Ghassnid localities did they come
for their wine? The previous volume in this series has examined the Ghassnid
urban centers, especially two: Jbiya, the Ghassnid capital in the Golan, and
Jalliq, whose location remains in dispute.103 Taverns must have existed in the capi-
tal, but Jalliq is more likely to have been frequented by these poetsit is Jalliq that
is remembered in Umayyad times as the place visited in the seventh century by the
caliph Yazd, a hedonist, for his entertainment. He was married to a Ghassnid
princess, Umm Ramla, and the Ghassnid presence in the Umayyad state was
100 assn, Dwn, I, 442.
101 Roughly the same sentiment is expressed in a verse in one of his poems, in which he says that
when an old man drinks wine, he starts behaving like a child; ibid., 106, verse 12.
102 The third virtue is expressed by the term imtatuhprobably a corrupt reading, unless it
implies that wine dispels cares; ibid., 442, verse 4.
103 On Jbiya and Jalliq, see BASIC II.1, 96104, 10515.
157 Drink
strong. As important as Jalliq was another town, uwwrn,104 also frequented by
Yazd; it was there that the young Umayyad caliph died.
Taverns must often have been centers of social life in many Ghassnid local-
ities as they were in Oriens generally. As is well known, the Arabic sources are
much more informative on the Lakhmids of ra in Sasanid Persia than on the
Ghassnids of Jbiya in Byzantine Oriens. These sources provide much specific
information about the taverns of ra, including their names,105 and by analogy
taverns in Ghassnid Oriens were likely very similar. The surviving fragments from
the Dwn of assn depict a Ghassnland in which the tavern was a well-known
social center, prominently positioned in the layout of the Ghassnid town.
As has already been pointed out, wine had a special place in Christianity (unlike
Islam), which gave it much visibility. To this may be added the dimension of its asso-
ciation with monasteries, whose members cultivated vines and pressed grapes, giving
wine a place at monastic meals. As monasteries also became a reflection of Christian
philanthropia, its wines were offered to the stranger and the wayfarer. assn spent
a night at Dayr al-Khammn, the monastery of al-Khammn.106 Although he must
have tasted its wines, they are not mentioned in his extant poems. It is ironic that in
later Islamic times and because of the prohibition imposed on wine by the Muslim
Shara, conventual wine became the most important element that attracted Muslims
to Christian monasteries; thus the monastery was later perceived not as a place for
imitatio Christi but primarily as a venue for the consumption of wine.107
104 For its association with the Ghassnids, see BASIC I.1, 152. On Yazd, see G. R. Hawting,
Yazd
b. Muwiya, EI2, XI, 30911. On uwwrin/Evaria, where he used to spend time, see D. Sourdel,
uwwrn, EI2, III, 645.
105 For the taverns of ra and their names, see A. Abd al-Ghani, Trkh al-ra (Damascus,
1993),
7580.
106 For assn at Dayr al-Khammn, see his Dwn, I, 11617.
107 As may be seen from al-Shbushti, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. G. Awwd (Baghdad, 1966), passim.
Appendix
Garisaean Bacchus
The phrase Garisaean Bacchus appears in the passage from Corippus discussed in
Chapter 5, but Averil Cameron made no attempt to explain it in her 1976 edition,
and it has been left as of uncertain origin.1 In the same year, a German version of
Corippus with a commentary appeared; its author, Ulrich J. Stache, suggested that
the phrase means Bacchus of Mount Garizim in Samaria.2 Several points might be
adduced to support this view.
1 Corippus, In Laudem Iustini Augusti Minoris, III.102, ed. and trans. Av. Cameron (London,
1976), 184 note 102; for a translation of the passage, see p. 104.
2 See U. J. Stache, Flavius Cresconius Corippus, In Laudem Iustini Augusti Minoris: Kommentar
(Berlin, 1976), 400.
1. The vocalic sequence is identical with Mount Garizim as presented in such
Greek texts as Procopius.3
2. Mount Ephraim and Samaria were famous among the ancient Israelites for
their wines.4
3. The identification is consonant with the praises of Palestine as a wine-
producing area.
4. Of the two mountains of Samaria, Garizim was the one that was blessed.5
On the other hand, it is most unusual to connect wine with a mountain,
especially one linked in Byzantine times with the Samaritans, who often rebelled
and caused much trouble in the Holy Land. The mountain was associated with
Samaritan loca sancta and Christian shrines; it is doubtful that it ever became
known for its wines, let alone produced them in commercial quantities.
A possible alternative to Garizim is one of the cities of the Decapolis, Gerasa.
There are several points in its favor.
1. This city was located in the midst of the vine-growing area in Trans-Jordan.
2. Gerasa had a temple of Dionysus,6 which suggests that it was a city where
wine was popular or an important commodity for trade.
3. The vocalic sequence in Ge-ra-sa is not as close as in Garizim to Garisaean,
but the consonantal skeletong-r-sis identical. Besides, vocalic changes often
occur when a Semitic term is transliterated into another language, such as Greek.
For example, the name of a Jewish rabbi thought to have perhaps been a native of
Gerasa appears in Talmudic literature as Garsi,7 illustrating the same alteration of
vowels as in Corippus.
3 See Procopius, Buildings, V.vii.7, 16.
4 See J. Feliki, Vine, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, XX, 535.
5 See Deuteronomy 11:29.
6 Wine festivals were popular in a city where Dionysus, the god of wine, had a temple. It has been
suggested that the celebration of Christs miracle at Cana was a Christian adaptation of the former
pagan
wine festival held there; see B. Brenck, C. Jggi, and H. Meier, The Buildings under the Cathedral
of
Gerasa, Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 39 (1995), 21127.
7 See M. Avi-Yonah and S. Gibson, Gerasa, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, VII, 506.
VI
Clothes
A
s important as what they ate and drank is the clothing of the Ghassnids.
Dress, as social historians generally recognize, is a fundamental element in
the expression of self-identity. It reflects cultural and ethnic affiliation as well as
social and economic status, and is sometimes used to distinguish one people from
others. The ancient Romans, as a gens togata, distinguished themselves from the
Greeks, who were palliati, wearers of the pallium, and from the barbarians, bracati,
who wore trousers.
So too did the Arabs employ clothing in ancient times and in the medieval
and modern eras, especially after most of them adopted Islam.1 This is reflected in
the vast number of terms in Arabic for dress in all its various aspects,2 and in their
tenacious attachment to their characteristic attire even in the face of social and
political revolutions.
The Ghassnids were Arabs who had hailed from the Arabian Peninsula
1 On the retention by Muslims of certain elements of dress as an expression or even assertion
of identity, see the appendix, The Vestimentary System: Further Observations. Of particular note
is headgear, especially the imma, the turban, worn by men (nowadays mainly by Muslim ulam,
mullahs), and the ijb, the veil, worn by women.
2 Collected by S. Dghir for the pre-Islamic period alone; see his Madhhib al-usn (Beirut, 1998),
282 note 7. The best brief account of Arab dress is the entry by Y. K. Stillman (with N. A. Stillman),
Libs,
EI2, V, 73242 (on the pre-Islamic period, see 73233). It summarizes Y. K. Stillmans Arab Dress:
A
Short History: From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, edited after her death by N. A. Stillman
(Leiden,
2003), which contains an extensive bibliography as well as pictures of Arab dress. It also has an
account
of early studies on the subject (175ff.), beginning with the well-known works of R. Dozy,
Dictionnaire
dtaill des noms de vtements chez les Arabes (Amsterdam, 1845) and Supplment aux
dictionnaires arabes,
2 vols. (Leiden, 1881). Not included are a very specialized standard work on pre-Islamic Arab
dress, based
on attestations in Arabic poetry, Y. al-Jubouri, al-Malbis al-Arabiyya fi al-Ar al-Jhili (Beirut,
1989),
and M. al-Jaml, al-Libs fi Ar al-Rasl, Annals of the University of Kuwait, Monograph 91
(Kuwait,
1994). Because Arab dress during the lifetime of the Prophet Muammadal-Jamls themewas
largely
a continuation of that in pre-Islamic times, it contains much relevant material.
The most recent works on dress in general in late antiquity are a special issue (12) of Antiquit
Tardive, Tissus et vtements dans lantiquit tardive, ed. J.-M. Carri (Turnhout, 2004), with more
up-
to-date bibliography, and J. Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to
Twelfth-
Century Painting (New York, 2005), especially chapter 3.
from its most sedentary part, South Arabia. In Oriens they became both foederati
of Byzantium and also devotees of the Christian faith. Although they kept a
strong sense of Arab self-identity, they were inevitably influenced by Romanitas
and Christianity in their dress, as in many other aspects of their life. The problem
of source survival makes it difficult to determine what they retained of the Arab
dress that they brought with them from the Peninsula and what they adopted and
adapted in Oriens from the Byzantines and various other peoples. It is easier to
enumerate and discuss the influences upon them while they were in Oriens, though
the main sources on their social life, such as Akhbr Mulk Ghassn, have been
lost. Their congeners, the Rhomaic Arabs in Oriens, Palmyrenes and Nabataeans,
left behind them monuments that offer substantial visual representations of their
clothing.3 Nothing of this sort has survived from the Ghassnids. So the conclu-
sions in this chapter on the vestimentary systems of the Ghassnids will remain
partly inferential and partly evidential, relying on the few invaluable references to
them in the contemporary sources, mainly poetry.
I. Influences on Ghassnid Dress
The Arabian
After leaving the Arabian Peninsula, the Ghassnids continued to have close rela-
tions with the Arabs. Influences on their dress must have come from two main
sources: Najrn in South Arabia and ra on the Lower Euphrates.
Especially important in this context were their relations with Najrn, the city
peopled by their relatives and co-confessionalists, Monophysite Christians. South
Arabia had been a region of de luxe articles, which it exported to the Roman world
of the Mediterranean, and it remained prosperous in late antiquity. Najrn was the
main center of the textile industry and produced luxury cloth.4 Its garments were
also known all over the Peninsula and among the Arabs. They are referred to in the
sources, and they were in demand. One source lists about eighteen different types
of mens and womens robes for which Najrn was known, including the burd/
burda, the abara, the ulla, and the raya.5 Of these, the burda or burd became
the most famous in Islamic history: it became the most prized of Muammads
3 See R. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs (London, 2001), 133, 135, 143, 144.
4 On Najrn as a center of the textile industry, see L. Massignon, La Mubhala de Medine
et lhyperdule de Fatima, in Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut, 1963), I, 55072. Because
few
sources have survived, it is not clear whether the Najrnis were influenced in the manufacture of
their
textiles by the imyarites, in whose shadow they lived.
5 See Jubouri, al-Malbis, 3551, which discusses South Arabian and Najrni dress. For a descrip-
tion of the various items of Arab dress, see the glossary in Stillman, Libs, 74042. Various
authors
sometimes give slightly different descriptions of these items. Raya became a name given to Arab
women,
some of whom came from Najrn; because a certain Raya was the wife or mother of the first
Abbasid
caliph, the rithids of Najrn came to be known as al-Akhwl, the maternal uncles of the
Abbasids.
161 Clothes
relics, assumed by the caliphs on ceremonial occasions, after the Prophet threw
his burda on Kab ibn Zuhayr following the poets recital of a panegyric on him.6
Also famous was the ulla of Najrn, a two-piece costume composed of a robe and
an outer wrap. One condition of a treaty concluded between Muammad and a
Najrni delegation to Medina was that Najrn should deliver 2,000 ullas every
year to the Muslims.7 Surely these Najrni robes, highly prized and worn by dis-
tinguished Arabs in this period,8 were not unknown to the Ghassnids, though no
specific evidence on this point remains.
On a smaller scale than Najrn, ra was also an Arab urban center in which
the textile industry flourished. Because more poetry has survived on ra than
on Ghassnid Jbiya, some references to its textile industrysuch as one to the
weaver, the nassjare extant. Additionally, the poetry attests a number of luxuri-
ous garments associated with it and mentions cloth such as silk and linen. When
Khlid ibn al-Wald captured ra, one of the conditions of the peace treaty was
its contribution of a number of garments to the Muslims, namely, al-sj and al-
taylasan. Especially noteworthy were athwb al-ri, the robes of pleasure,
which the Lakhmids used to present to favored individuals, such as poets who
eulogized them.9 All these articles of clothing must have had their counterparts at
the Ghassnid court in Jbiya.
ra always maintained ties with Mecca and Najrn, which became closer
after the Persian occupation of South Arabia. The sources speak of the lama, the
caravan of silk and perfume, which traveled from ra to Mecca, and to Najrn in
South Arabia.10 They thus bring to mind the influence of the Sasanids, the over-
lords of the Lakhmids, who long monopolized the silk trade, since the route from
China passed through their territory.11
6 On Kab and the Burda, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 22930. According to one account, the provenance
of this Burda was Najrn; Jubouri, al-Malbis, 87. On the burda, presented by Yanna, the bishop
of
Ayla, to the Prophet Muammad, see al-Jaml, al-Libs fi Asr al-Rasl, 55.
7 On the treaty with Najrn and the ulla, see M. amdullh, Majmat al-Wathiq al-Siysiyya
(Beirut, 1987), 175.
8 On the Najrni robes worn by the Prophet Muammad, see al-Jaml, al-Libs fi Asr al-Rasl,
5090. On his death, the Prophet was shrouded in the Najrni robes (67, 93).
9 For all this material on ra, see Y. R. Ghunayma, al-ra (Baghdad, 1936), 8485.
10 On the lama, see Ibn Hishm, Srat al-Nabiyy, ed. M. Abd al-amd (Cairo, 1937), I, 199; for
the correct etymology of this term, see S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen
(1886;
reprint, Hildesheim, 1962), 17677. On arb al-Fijr, the Sacrilegious War, caused by this lama,
see
J. W. Fck, Fidjr, EI2, II, 88384.
11 Persian influence is reflected in technical terms found even in the Koran, such as sundus and
istabraq for fine silk and silk brocade; see A. Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary of the Quran (1938;
reprint,
Leiden, 2007), 17980, 5860. Sundus and istabraq were the garments worn by the righteous in the
Koranic paradise. For the possibility that the depiction of paradise in the Koran may have been
influ-
enced by what the Arabs of Mecca saw in Oriens and at the Ghassnid court, see the appendix
Paradise
in the Koran, above.
The Arabs of late antiquity, especially the sixth century, whether urbanites
or pastoralists, were in close touch with one another, especially through the many
fairs, aswq, which spread throughout the vast Arab areas; hence products such
as textiles and garments were traded across the region. Robes from Hierapolis,
Manbij, in Syria were known in Medina, since the Prophet Muammad asked spe-
cifically for a manbijniyya, a robe made in Manbij.12 Robes from aramawt in
the distant south were available at the court of the Ghassnids in Oriens, as may
be gathered from a verse of al-Nbigha al-Jadi, whose description of the liberal-
ity of the Ghassnid dynasty included the gift to him of a adramiyy, a robe from
aramawt.13 The poet umayd ibn Thawr, who belonged to the tribe of mir,
which lived far to the south of the Ghassnids, alluded to their white robes in one
of his similes, which implied his acquaintance with their fabrics.14
Byzantine
The Byzantine influence was more important than the Sasanid Persian influ-
ence.15 After all, the Ghassnids were foederati of Byzantium, living close to the
Byzantines. This influence found expression in various ways.
1. One emanated from the Ghassnids congeners, the Rhomaic Arabs of the
diocese: Byzantinized Nabataean and Palmyrene Arabs. The two Nabataean cities
of Bostra and Petra were both accessible to the Ghassnids.
2. Another must have come from the Graeco-Roman communities living in
the Decapolis, which geographically was within the two Ghassnid provinces of
Arabia and Palaestina Secunda.
3. After the introduction of the silkworm, mulberry trees proliferated
in Oriens and sericulture flourished, as did silk production in centers such as
Tyre and Berytus, not far from the Ghassnids. It is natural to think that the
The Arab groups who moved in the orbit of Sasanid Persia were naturally influenced by the domi-
nant culture of their overlords. That this influence included Persian clothing can be inferred from a
verse
by assn addressing a delegation of Tamm, which came to the Prophet in Medina and accepted
Islam.
He accused them of dressing like the Ajim, the non-Arabsin this case, the Persians; see
Dwn
assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 110, verse 12.
The
relevance of this pattern of influence to Byzantiums influence on its own allies, the Ghassnids, in
mat-
ters of dress is obvious.
12 On the manbijniyya worn by the Prophet, see Stillman, Arab Dress, 13, and Jubouri, al-Malbis,
128.
13 See al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, ed. A. Rabb (Damascus, 1964), 61, verse 13.
14 Quoted by Bakri in his Mujam (Cairo, 1951), IV, 1134.
15 On Byzantine dress, see Ph. Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos (Athens, 194857), II,
2, 559; VI, 26794; and N. evenko, Costume, ODB, I, 53840. The excellence of Byzantine
tex-
tiles was proverbial, according to the Arabic sources; see Abd al-Malik al-Thalibi, Thimr al-
Qulb,
ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1965), 525, 535. Because of their high prestige, Byzantine garments
sometimes
functioned as imperial gifts to promote diplomatic ties with foreign potentates.
163 Clothes
Ghassnids were beneficiaries of this proximity to the silks and other textiles of
the diocese.16
4. Finally came influence from Constantinople, resulting from gifts presented
to the supreme Ghassnid phylarchs and kings by the Byzantine emperor on their
visits to the capital.17
II. The Ghassnid Vestimentary System
The scanty evidence on Ghassnid dress is set within three venues: the court, the
battlefield, and the tavern, with its songstresses and waiters. The tavern has already
been discussed above, in Chapter 5, Drink. Most of the discussion will there-
fore focus on the Ghassnid king Arethas and his son Mundir of the sixth century,
especially the former. Contemporary poetry, the principal source, will be assessed
in light of the relevant Byzantine sources, which are informative on certain aspects
of the Ghassnid vestimentary system that have never been examined before. The
Ghassnid leader will be discussed in various contexts: as king at Jbiya, as patricius
in Constantinople, and as phylarch, commander in chief, on the battlefield. His
garb on each occasion and in each venue reflects identities that sum up the com-
plex personality of the Ghassnid as a federate of the new Christian Roman Empire,
Byzantium.
The King
In documenting the conferment of the basileia on the Ghassnid Arethas in
a.d. 529, Procopius omits any description of the attendant ceremony.18 Some
details can be recovered, however, from his two accounts of similar ceremonies,
in Constantinople and in the provinces, in which he describes the insignia and
the costumes worn by the barbarian kings on whom the basileia was conferred;
another account is provided by Malalas. Nevertheless, precisely what garb was pre-
sented to the Ghassnid kings Arethas and Mundir remains unclear.
After Justinians suspension of the Armenian pentarchy, Procopius gives the
following description of the insignia of the Armenian king:
It is worthwhile to describe these insignia, for they will never again be seen
by man. There is a cloak made of wool, not such as is produced by sheep, but
gathered from the sea. Pinnos the creature is called on which this wool grows.
And the part where the purple should have been, that is, where the insertion
16 If the textiles of Manbij reached the Prophet Muammad in Medina, they certainly reached the
Ghassnids in Oriens (see note 12).
17 The garments received by the Ghassnid king Mundir in Constantinople, a gift of the emperor
Tiberius, are discussed later in this chapter.
18 Procopius, History, I.xvii.47.
of purple cloth is usually made, is overlaid with gold. The cloak was fastened
by a golden brooch in the middle of which was a precious stone from which
hung three sapphires by loose golden chains. There was a tunic of silk adorned
in every part with decorations of gold which they are wont to call plumia. The
boots were of red color and reached to the knee, of the sort which only the
Roman emperor and the Persian king are permitted to wear.19
Elsewhere, he describes the royal wardrobe presented to the Mauri chiefs:
Now these symbols are a stuff of silver covered with gold, and a silver cap
not covering the whole head, but like a crown and held in place on all sides
by bands of silvera kind of white cloak gathered by a golden brooch on
the right shoulder in the form of a Thessalian cape, and a white tunic with
embroidery, and a gilded boot.20
Malalas gives the following description of the coronation of the king of
the Laz:
As soon as his father Damnazes died, he immediately traveled to the emperor
Justin in Byzantion, put himself at his disposal and asked to be proclaimed
emperor of the Laz. He was received by the emperor, baptized, and having
become a Christian, married a Roman wife named Valeriana, the grand-
daughter of Nomos the patrician, and he took her back with him to his own
country. He had been crowned by Justin, the emperor of the Romans, and
had put on a Roman imperial crown and a white cloak of pure silk. Instead
of the purple border it had the gold imperial border; in its middle was a true
purple portrait medallion with a likeness of the emperor Justin. He also
wore a white tunic, a paragaudion, with gold imperial embroideries, equally
including the likeness of the emperor. The shoes that he wore he had brought
from his own country, and they were studded with pearls in Persian fashion.
Likewise his belt was decorated with pearls. He received many gifts from the
emperor Justin, as did his wife Valeriana.21
The title awarded to the Ghassnid ruler or chief by his own people was nei-
ther patricius nor phylarch but king, malik. This title, established beyond doubt
19 Idem, Buildings, III.i.1723.
20 Idem, History, III.xxv.48.
21 John Malalas, Chronographia, ed. L. Dindorf (Bonn, 1835), 41213; here translated by
E. Jeffreys, M. Jeffreys, and R. Scott as The Chronicle of John Malalas (Melbourne [and Sydney],
1986),
23334.
165 Clothes
by Procopius,22 is confirmed by the contemporary poetry of assn and of later
poets who continued this authentic tradition, but the strongest evidence is sup-
plied by contemporary epigraphythe Usays inscription carved by one of Arethas
commanders, Ibn al-Mughra, who refers to him around a.d. 530 as al-malik, the
king.23 There is also no doubt that the Ghassnid Arethas was dressed as a king on
important occasions in Ghassnland, since the poet laureate of later times under-
scores his own eminent position among his Ghassnid patrons by noting that he
used to sit not far from their crowned head.24
Only the headgear of the Ghassnid king is explicitly mentioned in non-
Byzantine contemporary sources on the Ghassnids. In the first three-quarters of
the century, he wore not the royal crown of the Byzantine autokrator, the diadem
(), but the circlet, possibly the equivalent of Greek (a diminu-
tive of ) assumed by Tzath, the king of the Laz. The Ghassnids may have
worn something that resembled the royal headgear of a contemporary Semitic
ruler, the Negus of Ethiopia; his was called both a and a .25 The
Ghassnid circlet was in Arabic an ikll, in Syriac a klla.26 The Arab Labd, one of
the pre-Islamic poets of the Suspended Odes, referred to the kharazt, the beads or
jewels, with which the Ghassnid crown was studded.27
Thus, during the long reign of Arethas from 529 to 569, the Ghassnid
headgear was a circlet. After his death, during the reign of his son al-Mundir, the
Ghassnid crown became more impressive: in the words of the contemporary
source John of Ephesus, the klla was replaced by a tg, a crown (Arabic tj), to
express the appreciation of the emperor Tiberius of the Ghassnid king on the lat-
ters visit to Constantinople.28 This was the crown seen by the later poets of the
Ghassnids, such as assn; hence he hailed the Ghassnid king as du al-tj,
the crown holder, a term employed by later Islamic poets such as Ab Nuws to
describe the Ghassnid rulers.29
The importance of the insignia of the Ghassnid king is reflected in the
events that followed the abduction of their king Mundir by Magnus, and Mundirs
dispatch to Constantinople. His sons revolted and successfully demanded that the
22 Procopius, History, I.xvii.48.
23 That his father, Jabala, was also officially king is vouched for by the conclusion of the Letter of
Simeon of Bth-Arshm, who visited King Jabala around a.d. 520, when he invoked his aid for the
mar-
tyrs of Najrn; see Martyrs, 63; on the Usays inscription, see BASIC I.1, 11724.
25 For these four Greek terms, see BASIC I.1, 105 6 note 221.
26 On the klla, ikll, see ibid., 105, 402, 518.
27 Labd ibn Rabah, Die Gedichte des Labd, ed. C. Brockelmann (Leiden, 1891), 42, verse 50.
See
BASIC I.1, 106 note 222.
28 BASIC I.1, 399400.
29 See Dwn Ab Nws, ed. A. al-Ghazl (Beirut, 1982), 160, a poem written ca. a.d. 800.
symbols of their fathers basileia be surrendered by the governor of the Provincia
Arabia, at whose capital, Bostra, these symbols were deposited.30
Two other items of the royal wardrobe are indirectly referred to in the con-
temporary Arabic sources: their robes and their shoes or boots. Briefly touched
upon in the Arabic poetry that eulogized the Ghassnids, these are depicted
in detail in the Byzantine sources that report on the kings and chiefs of the
Armenians, the Mauri, and the Laz, as well as in the sources that describe the dress
of the patricius, the title conferred on Arethas and his son Mundir.
Robes
A triplet of verses in the most famous of all panegyrics on the Ghassnids is a mine
of information on the royal wardrobe, despite its brevity.31
In this panegyric on the Ghassnid king Amr (ca. a.d. 600), al-Nbigha
speaks of the robes of irj, aksiyat al-irj,32 which were hung on trestles
(al-mashjib) when the Ghassnid kings would receive visitors on Palm Sunday.
The term irj, according to the lexicographers, meant expensive red silk. This is
consonant with the popularity of the color red for royal dress and with the descrip-
tion of the sagion, the red robe of the official promoted to the patriciate. Another
term for red silk, khazz, is also used in this connection. In his description of the
robes of the Lazic king quoted above, Malalas speaks of his paragaudion as a white
tunicpossibly a mistake, since both the Greek lexicon and the lexicographers
who glossed pre-Islamic Arabic poetry (where the term appears in the form barjad)
interpret it as a purple-colored garment.33
White robes were part of the royal wardrobe. Most descriptions of the dress
of the client kings or chiefs in Procopius and Malalas emphasize the white tunic.
White robes were well known at the Ghassnid court, worn by their princesses34
and presented by Ghassnid kings as gifts to distinguished visitors and poets who
eulogized them. Sometimes, these white robes were perfumed, rayan rdian.35
30 See BASIC I.1, 469. This episode indicates clearly that the Ghassnids had a residence in Bostra,
in which they deposited these symbols of their basileia, perhaps to be assumed on important
occasions
held in the capital of the provincia of which Arethas and later Mundir were phylarchs.
32 Ibid., verse 26.
33 See LSJ, s.v. paragaudion; on barjad in the poetry of the pre-Islamic poet Tarafa, see Jubouri,
al-Malbis, 79. The significance of the color red in Byzantium and among the foederati is not clear.
The
Byzantine autokrator wore red boots, but his robes were purple. The Ghassnid client-kings and
phy-
larchs may have wanted to avoid purple lest they seem to be inappropriately encroaching on the
imperial
dignity, as expressed in that color.
34 On ray, white robes, used by Ghassnid princesses, see assn, Dwn, I, 255, verse 7; they are
discussed later in this chapter.
35 Although it was tim, the sayyid of the group ayyi, who visited the court of the Ghassnids
and composed poetry on them, it was another member of the ayyi that remembered their royal
gifts to
167 Clothes
These presents clearly resemble the imperial gifts that were showered on client-kings
such as the Lazic Tzath and his wife Valeriana, as well as on federates in Oriens,
such as those given the Ghassnid Mundir in a.d. 580 by the emperor Tiberius,
described in detail by John of Ephesus.36 The Gothic historian John of Biclar is
likewise informative on the gifts of barbaria that Mundir brought with him from
Oriens for Tiberius.37 He does not name these gifts, but they may have included
expensive garments or cloth from Najrn that were accessible to the Ghassnids.
In return, Tiberius gave him a number of gifts, including magnificent garments
for which Byzantium was known; perhaps Mundir had brought with him a simi-
lar kind of gift,38 deluxe garments, and the emperor wanted to reciprocate in kind.
A further note on the royal federate clothing comes from al-Nbigha. In the
third verse of the triplet devoted to the Ghassnids clothes, mentioned above, he
refers to the sleeves, ardn, of their robes. They were pure white, khliat al-ardn, but
the upper extremity of the sleeve near the shoulder was green, khudr al-mankib.39
The color green attained great significance for Muslims; it became and still remains
the distinctive color of Shiite Islam. It already had received scriptural authority in
the Koran itself. In three suras, the blessed are described as clothed in green gar-
ments of fine silk and brocade, and as reclining on green cushions.40 The appeal of
the color green to the Arabs, dwellers in an arid area, is readily understandable, as
it suggests well-watered oases. The Ghassnids, Arabs living in a mostly arid area of
Oriens, would naturally have responded positively to the color green; it is not clear
whether the color had any religious symbolism for them as Christians.41
Among the descriptions of life of the Ghassnids at court is an account by
assn of how they changed their robes seasonally: During winter aloes-wood
those who came to their court. He was Thurmula ibn Shuath, who in the third verse of a triplet
remarked
on the Ghassnids gold (certainly gold coins, denarii, solidi); platters, jifn; and expensive cloth,
ray,
further described as fragrant, rdi; see Dwn Shir tim at-i, ed. . S. Jaml (Cairo, 1980),
325.
36 John of Ephesus, Ioannis Ephesini Historiae Ecclesiasticae Pars Tertia, Latin trans. E. W.
Brooks,
CSCO, Scriptores Syri 106, ser. 3, III (Louvain, 1936), 164; see BASIC I.1, 399400.
37 John of Biclar, Chronicum, ed. T. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores
Antiquissimi, XI 1, Chronica Minora 2 (Berlin, 1893), 214; see BASIC I.1, 384.
39 The scholiasts explained khliat al-ardn as white, pure white; for their commentary on this
verse, see Dwn al-Nbigha, ed. S. Fayal (Beirut, 1968), 63 note 27.
40 Koran, 76:21; 18:31; 55:76.
41 See A. Cutler, Color, ODB, I, 48283. The Islamic veneration of the color green may have
been
Ghassnid in inspiration. Al-Nbighas verse mentioning green as favored by the Ghassnids was
writ-
ten before the suras of the Koran that extol this color. In addition, in the first hemistich of the verse
he
uses the term nam, worldly blissa word that appears some twenty times in the Koran in the
phrase
Jannat al-Nam, the Paradise of Bliss; see al-Mujam al-Mufahras li alf z al-Quran al-Karm,
ed.
M. Abd al-Bqi (Cairo, n.d.), s.v. Jannt. Perhaps the Ghassnids similarly associated green with
the life
of the blessed in the other world, in which case the sleeve described by the poet might represent the
addi-
tion of green to a color (white) already linked to Christian martyrs.
was burned in [the kings] apartments, while in summer he cooled himself with
snow. Both he and his courtiers wore light robes, arranged with more regard to
comfort than ceremony, in the hot weather, and white furs, called fanak, or the like
in the cold season.42 On fanak, Reynold Nicholson has the following note: The
fanak is properly a kind of white stoat or weasel found in Abyssinia and northern
Africa, but the name is also applied by Muhammadans to other furs. He adds that
although the account may not contain the poet laureates ipsissima verba, this does
not seriously affect its value as evidence.43
Shoes/Boots
The shoes or boots of the Ghassnids attracted the attention of the poets who
eulogized them and the scholiasts who annotated pre-Islamic poetry. They were
included in the list of items that the barbarian kings were given or allowed to
wear, and they were red, the same color as the boots of Byzantine emperors. The
Arab poets noted that the boots of the Ghassnids had thin soles, riqq al-nil,44
interpreted by the scholiast as meaning that the shoes were designed for treading
on soft or smooth floors or ground, not for traversing the hard terrain of desert and
steppe. What is more, the Ghassnids were prosperous enough to throw away their
shoes when they needed resoling, a process that would make the soles thick.45
Expensive clothes were not only worn by the Ghassnids but also used as
gifts for distinguished visitors. They were sometimes referred to as athwb al-ri,
the robes of satisfaction or pleasure, though the more common name for a pre-
sentation garment or robe was khila (plural khila). Sometimes they were given to
express the Ghassnid patrons extreme satisfaction for a panegyric or some special
service rendered; in such a case the dynast would throw his own robe on the hon-
orand as a special favor.
Such Ghassnid gifts are attested in the prose account of the poet laureate,
assn, which Nicholson cited to illustrate the gaiety of Jabalas court. The rel-
evant part may be quoted here: and, by God, I was never in his company but he
gave me the robe which he was wearing on that day, and many of his friends were
thus honoured. He treated the rude with forbearance; he laughed without reserve
and lavished his gifts before they were sought.46 The verses of the poet al-Nbigha
42 Translated by R. Nicholson, with comments, in A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint,
London, 1969), 53 and notes 24.
43 Ibid., note 3. See also F. Vir, Fanak, EI2, II, 775.
44 See al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 47, verse 25.
45 See Jubouri, al-Malbis, 318; quoting al-Ji z, Al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo,
1960), III, 107. The importance that Arabs accorded shoes is reflected in the many pages devoted to
them
by Jubouri (31735).
46 Translated in Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 53.
169 Clothes
al-Jadi also enumerated various gifts from the Ghassnid dynast: inter alia, robes
from aramawt, linen from Iraq, and ray from Oriens.47
The Patricius
The Ghassnid kings were also patricii, as is attested in inscriptions for both Arethas
and Mundir.48 The garb of patricii during the ceremony of investiture is described
in two chapters of De Ceremoniis by Constantine VII Prophyrogenitus, the first of
which is devoted to the promotion of the military to that status.49 During the cer-
emony, the patricius appeared wearing a purple robe, , and then a
red robe, .50
Those who were promoted to the rank of patricius received the acclamations
of the demes. After describing these acclamations, Constantine mentions those
who dine with the patricius; among them were the demarchoi, who wear a robe
called which may be the Arab aba.51 Supporting that provenance is the
renown of Arabian textiles, which Byzantium imported.52 In a.d. 580, as noted
above, the Ghassnid Mundir brought with him to Constantinople some gifts for
the emperor, Tiberius, including some garments from Arabia, or barbaria. Could
one of these have been an aba?
The Phylarch
As foederati, who fought regularly alongside the Byzantine army of the Orient, the
Ghassnids were almost certainly dressed like the Byzantine troops. They were
trained to fight in the Roman manner, as shown by the short obituary notice on
Jabala,53 the father of the famous Arethas, who died fighting for Byzantium against
the Persians at the battle of Thannris in a.d. 528.
The Ghassnid contingent in the army of the Orient was mainly composed of
47 See al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, 6162, verses 1314.
48 See BASIC I.1, 260, 490, 495.
49 For the Greek text and its French rendition, see Constantine VII, Le livre des crmonies, ed.
and
trans. A. Vogt (Paris, 1939), II, chapters 56, 57 (in Reiskes numbering 47, 48), pp. 4450, 5160.
50 Ibid., chapter 56, pp. 48, 49. The color red, which figures prominently in federate Ghassnid
dress, is considered the most striking of all colors; see A. B. Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire,
Espionage,
and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York, 2005).
51 Constantine VII, Le livre des crmonies, chapter 57, p. 60 and note 1. Errors of transcription are
common, particularly in reproducing faithfully the ayn and the hamza; hence aba could easily
have
become abdia.
52 On the vogue of Oriental garments at court, see evenko, Costume, 537, quoting N. P.
Kondakov, Les costumes orientaux la cour byzantine, Byzantion 1 (1924), 749.
53 Armis Romanorum multum exercitatus erat; see Zacharia Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica,
ed. E. W. Brooks, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3 (Paris, 1924), VI, 64. The sayf, sword, the
weapon of
which the Arabs were proud and which elicited from them so many complimentary tributes, was a
Greek
loanword, . And the tactical unit in the army, kurds, derived from Latin cohors, cohortis.
cavalry. The military uniform and armor of the supreme phylarch and king, as well
as those of the rank and file, may be visualized from contemporary illustrations of
Byzantine uniforms in works on military history in the sixth century.54 The bat-
tle dress of the Ghassnid troops may not have been an exact replica of what the
Byzantines wore, but it could have been similar to it.
Just as the contemporary sources, especially poetry on the Ghassnids, have
preserved some evidence for civilian costume, so has contemporary poetry pre-
served some verses on their military outfits. They have survived in two odes: one by
al-Nbigha and the other by Alqama, a poet from northeast Arabia, who belonged
to the group Tamm and who traveled to the Ghassnid court to plead for the
release of his brother, who had been captured by the Ghassnids in battle.55
Al-Nbighas ode simply describes the swords and spears of the Ghassnids,56
but the verses have attained celebrity in the annals of Arabic poetry owing to the
portrayal of their swords: its most celebrated verse was quoted by none other than
the amdnid Sayf al-Dawla, after a great victory scored by his troops during the
epic Arab-Byzantine conflict in the tenth century.57
Alqamas ode is unique among all panegyrics on the Ghassnids, as a fairly
detailed ekphrasis of the celebrated Arethas leading his troops at the battle of Chalcis,
or Yawm alma, in a.d. 554.58 The most relevant portion is a sextet of verses
describing the king, mounted on the famed equus caballus, the Arabian horse.59
1. Verse 25 of the ode describes Arethas as a horseman. In giving the name
of his famous horse, al-Jawn, it provides another way to name him: he is Fris
al-Jawn, the Rider of al-Jawn.
2. Verse 26 describes him spurring his horse forward until the white patches
on the horses knees vanish, obscured either by the blood of the enemy or by the
press of their ranks. He takes this action while striking his opponent hard with his
sword. His adversaries wore helmets (bay) and also cuirasses that enveloped their
chests and backs.
3. Verse 27 supplies evidence for the armor of the commander in chief of the
Ghassnid foederati, as a cataphract. As is well known, cataphracts were deployed
54 E.g., see G. Ravegnani, Soldati di Bisanzio in et guistinianea (Rome, 1988), Figures I, III, and
IV,
which respectively represent a Byzantine general, a magister militum, a rank Arethas held de facto;
a cav-
alryman with his lance, such as constituted most of the Ghassnid contingent in the army of the
Orient;
and a rank-and-file soldier in the Byzantine army.
55 On the two poets, see Sezgin, GAS, II, 11013, 12022.
56 See al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 43, verse 14; 44, verses 17, 22.
57 Ibid., 44, verse 19; for its citation by Sayf al-Dawla, see al-Mutanabbi, Dwn, ed. A. al-
Barqq
(Cairo, 1930), II, 286 and note 4. This incident is discussed further in Poetry, Chapter 7 in Part
III.
58 On the battle, see BASIC I.1, 24051.
59 See al-Alam al-Shantamar, Dwn Alqama al-Fal, ed. D. al-Khab and I. aqql (Aleppo,
1969), 4345, verses 2530.
171 Clothes
in the Roman/Byzantine army in response to the rise of the Sasanids and the threat
that their cataphracts posed. Rome had to adopt body armor to counter its eastern
adversary more effectively. This verse mentions two sarbl (plural of sirbal),60 coats
of mail, that the Ghassnid commander wore while he was fighting. This immedi-
ately suggests the cataphract, who wore a protective coat of varied length and a sur-
coat that protected him from the blows or thrusts of lances. The sixth verse in this
sextet, discussed below, addresses the material of which the coats were made.
After describing Arethas two layers of protective armor, the coat and the sur-
coat of mail, the poet says that the king carried two choice swords, aql suyf,
which he names Mikhdam and Rasb, indicating that both were very sharp. Just as
the horse had a name, so did the two swords, reflecting the importance which the
fighters attached to their armor, especially the sword. For Arabs the swordsman
was braver than the spearman, because his weapon is shorter; hence the swords
wielder proved his courage in coming close to his adversary.61 Just as the swords
of the Ghassnids in the ode of al-Nbigha resonated in later Islamic times, in the
tenth century, so did these two swords in Alqamas poem. The life of one of them
was much longer, since the Prophet Muammad gave it to his son-in-law Ali and
it came to be known, because of its proverbial efficacy, as Du al-Faqr, the Sword
of the Vertebrae.62
4. Verse 30 describes the coats of mail of the rank and file of the Ghassnid
army, who are said to be wearing abdn al-hadd, coats of iron, which emit a
sound like the rustling of dry leaves when the south wind blows on them. The term
for the sound is almost onomatopoetic, takhashkhash. The phrase coats of iron
clearly indicates that their coats were made of iron rings or chains.
Queens and Princesses
As is true of male Ghassnids, the sources are interested mainly in members of the
royal house. The queens and the princesses are mentioned sporadically, and very
briefly.63
60 A Persian loanword, which appears even in the Koran; see Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary of the
Quran, 16869, and E. Yarshater, The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, in The Persian
Presence
in the Islamic World, ed. R. G. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh (Cambridge, 1991), 53. Naturally, the
allies of Persia whom the Ghassnids fought also wore two coats of mail; in his ode on the
Ghassnids,
al-Nbigha al-Dubyn called the double-breastplate al-salqiyy al-muaf nasjuh; Dwn, ed.
Ibrhm,
46, verse 21.
61 In one of his epinician odes on Sayf al-Dawla, Mutanabbi said that the Muslim hero so despised
spears that he threw them away; see Dwn, II, 275, verse 4.
62 For the fateful history of the two swords, see the discussion below in Chapter 11, Votive and
Victory Offerings.
63 On female dress in this period, see M. Harlow, Female Dress, ThirdSixth Century: The
Messages in the Media? in Carri, ed., Tissus et vtements dans lantiquit tardive, 20315.
1. The queens. The wife of the Ghassnid king was certainly a queen. Her
Christian counterpart, Hind, the wife of the Lakhmid Mundir, was called queen,
malaka, in a famous inscription.64 The clothes worn by these federate queens are
nowhere described in the scant extant sources. The only article that can be safely
inferred from other solid sources is the veil, naf or khimr or burqu. The Lakhmid
queen al-Mutajarrida, the wife of the last Lakhmid king, al-Numn, was described
by al-Nbigha in an ode entirely devoted to her. But of the odes thirty-four verses,
only two refer to dress items, namely, her veil (naf) and her necklace.65
These items were consonant with the Byzantine style of female dress, which
included the wearing of the maphorion as a head covering. It was also consonant
with the mores of a Bible-centric society like the Christian Roman Empire of
Byzantium, which followed St. Pauls recommendation that women should wear
a veil during church services.66 The queens of so strongly Monophysite a confes-
sion as the Ghassnids would also have obeyed Pauls injunction. Although his rec-
ommendations involve only the hair, the Ghassnid queens most likely also veiled
their face. This can be inferred from the practice at the Lakhmid court, reflected
in a verse of al-Nbigha where the context makes clear that the queen had her face
covered before her veil fell off.67 Apparently aristocratic Arab women normally
covered their faces with the khimr or naf or burqu, a practice evident in the
speech that Ruhm, the chief female martyr of Najrn, delivered before her death.68
The Ghassnid queens were the relatives of Ruhm who shared her devotion to
Monophysite Christianity, and they must have looked to her as a role model.
2. The princesses. The sources do provide information on the dress of the
Ghassnid princesses. In one of his odes, when he was in a nostalgic mood remem-
bering his Ghassnid patrons, assn refers to the young Ghassnid maidens
weaving coral wreaths for the celebration of Easter; in a single verse he describes
them as draped in ray (plural of raya), white garments, and also in majsid
kattn, linen robes.69
64 See the present writer in The Authenticity of Pre-Islamic Poetry: The Linguistic Dimension,
al-Abth 44 (1996), 11.
65 See al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 91, verse 10; 93, verse 17.
66 I Corinthians 11:56, 13.
67 See al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, Dwn, ed. Ibrhm, 9, verses 1718.
68 See Martyrs, 5758. The practice among Arab women of wearing veils that covered the face is
confirmed by another verse that mentions the qin of a urra, a free Arab woman (not a slave); see
al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, 72, verse 15.
69 assn, Dwn, I, 255, verse 7. This verse, which has already been discussed in various con-
texts, undoubtedly involves Ghassnid princesses. They are referred to as walid (the plural of
walda),
daughters, in verse 6, and the use of the term majsid for robes confirms their royal character. A
cou-
plet of verses by a pre-Islamic poet makes clear that they were robes worn by affluent women,
luxuriating
in fine clothes; see Jubouri, al-Malbis, 82.
173 Clothes
Appendix
The Vestimentary System: Further Observations
1. The first dynasty in Islamic history, the Umayyad, had for its metropolitan
province the Oriens of Byzantium and of the Ghassnids. Before the inception
of his caliphate in a.d. 661, the founder, Muwiya, had made Jbiya, the capi-
tal of the Ghassnids, his own capital for some twenty years. And during his
forty years of rule in Bild al-Shm as amr and caliph, the Ghassnids and other
foederati had a strong presence in Bild al-Shm and in the Umayyad state.1
Furthermore, Muwiya was the first Arab ruler to openly depart from the old
modest and conservative dress recommended in Islam, assuming the more luxu-
rious dress he found available in the ex-Byzantine Diocese of Oriens, now Bild
al-Shm. Consequently, the sources for Umayyad history are rich in data on the
pre-Umayyad period of Bild al-Shm, including its dress and textiles. Particularly
useful is Arabic poetry composed for the Umayyads, such as the verses of al-Akhal
and Ubayd Allah ibn Qays al-Ruqayyt, in which such terms as sariq (Gr. )
for silk occurs. The dwns of Arabic poetry are indeed a mine of information for
the history of the dynasty,2 including the history of pre-Islamic Arab dress, which
Umayyad dress continued in many important ways. Needless to say, the identifica-
tion of the Byzantine element in, and influence on, Arab Ghassnid dress as more
significant than the Persian will revive interest in the argumentpresented as
early as 1952 by Ernst Khnel and Louisa Bellingerthat the Umayyad tirz, the
textile workshops in the Umayyad period, were related to the Byzantine gynaecea
in Oriens.3
2. Of the various kinds of textiles and fabrics, silk, arr,4 had a privileged
position, reflected in the many terms that designated it. Some were Greek loan-
words, including sariq from , mustaka from metaxa (by metathesis), and
siyars from , the proper noun for Chinese or Indians. These were the terms
known to the pre-Islamic and Umayyad poets. But the fortunes of silk experienced
a setback with the rise of Islam.5 While Byzantine Christianity embraced silk, both
in its ecclesia and its imperium, and emperors used it extensively in their dress and
as imperial gifts, Islam frowned on it and the Muhammadan traditions are replete
1 See A. Shboul and A. Walmsley, Identity and Self-Image in Syria-Palestine in the Transition
from Byzantine to Early Islamic Rule: Arab Christians and Muslims, Mediterranean Archaeology
11
(1998), 25587.
2 See . Agha and T. Khlidi, Poetry and Identity in the Umayyad Age, al-Abath 5051 (2003),
55120.
3 See E. Khnel and L. Bellinger, Catalogue of Dated irz Fabrics: Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid
(Washington, D.C., 1952). See also Y. K. Stillman and P. Sanders, irz, EI2, X, 53438.
4 The etymology of the most common word for silk in Arabic, arr, is still uncertain.
5 For silk in Islam, see N. Seedengaard, arr, EI2, III, 20921.
with warnings against its use by Muslims. The blessed in the Koranic paradise are
described as dressed in fine silks, however.6
3. Poetry was important as a means of spreading publicity and propaganda
for the Ghassnids in Oriens and in the Arabian Peninsula. The panegyrics were
probably recited in an odeum specifically constructed for poetry recitation and
other similar functions.7 This practice raises the question of whether the poets
wore a special outfit during their recitations. In the days of al-Ji z of the ninth
century, the poets used to wear a special kind of dress, such as red silk. He also
describes a poet who dressed in the style of those who belonged to the past, ziyy
al-mn; he used to don a black robe, burd, both in summer and in winter.8 This
term al-mn, those of the past, could refer to the pre-Islamic period; thus the
Ghassnid poet may have worn an outfit that was appropriate to the occasion.
4. Another question pertains to Ghassnid identity and the extent to which
Byzantine dress affected it. Although the Ghassnids Arab identity remained
strong, they were naturally influenced by Byzantine dress in two important areas
of their Byzantine experience: as patricii and as phylarchoi on the battlefield.
Especially significant was the sagion draped over them when they received the
patriciate.9
Nevertheless, the Ghassnids undoubtedly wore Arab clothes when they dealt
with the Arabs both of Oriensother foederatiand of the Arabian Peninsula.
The Arab vestimentary system suited the climate and terrain of the arid region in
Oriens and in Arabia Pastoralis.
5. The various items in the vestimentary system of the pre-Islamic Arabs may
be consulted in works on this subject.10 Here, two distinctively Arab items will be
briefly noticed.
Because of the hot and dry climate of the Arabian Peninsula, the two most
important items for the Arabs were their headgear, which protected their heads
from the scorching sun, and footwear, which protected their feet from the hot
ground. The two items gave rise to two sayings: al-amim tijn al-Arab, the tur-
bans are the crowns of the Arabs, and al-nil khalkhl al-rijl, shoes are the
anklets of men. The importance of these two items is reflected in the space given
6 Koran, 76:21; 18:31; 55:76. See also the appendix to Chapter 4, above.
7 On the possibility of an odeum in Jbiya or Jalliq, see the discussion in Part III, Chapter 3,
Architecture and Decorative Art.
8 See al-Ji z, al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo, 1960), III, 115, describing poets of
his day as dressing al-muqattat, which the editor glosses as attire made of red silk material, khazz
(115 note 7).
9 See the section The Patricius in the chapter above.
10 See Y. K. Stillman with N. A. Stillman, Libs, EI2, V, 73235 (the portion dealing with pre-
Islamic attire); the Ghassnids must have worn some of the items discussed in this entry. The
chapter on
clothes in this volume has discussed only evidence in contemporary poetry and in some prose
works.
175 Clothes
to their treatment in works on Arab dress. One such work allocates eighteen pages
to the discussion of footwear, and no less than fifty-seven to the turban, imma.11
The Ghassnid king must have worn a turban when he dealt with his people in
Oriens and with others in the Arabian Peninsula, and perhaps when he visited
Constantinople. As a headdress, and when elaborately folded, the imma was
striking and it imparted dignity to the wearer. In the case of Arethas, the imama
would have enhanced the remarkable impression he made on those who saw him,
as noted by John of Ephesus when Arethas visited the capital.12
Headgear has remained the distinctive feature of Arab dress, whether in the
form of the kfiyya and the iql, the scarf and the ringed cord that goes around
it,13 or the imma. The latter has become associated with the Ulam, Muslim
scholars and clerics. For Muslims it was considered the badge of Islam, sm
al-Islam, and a divider between unbelief and belief, jiz bayna al-kufr wa
al-mn.14 In medieval times, the imma was also worn by secular Arabs, who
took pride in making a distinction between it and the crown of the non-Muslim
rulers, which they despised. This sentiment was well expressed in one of the verses
of Mutanabbi, which praised Sayf al-Dawla, who wore an imma, and scorned his
Byzantine adversary, who wore a crown.15
Their headgear has also remained a distinctive feature of the vestimentary sys-
tem of the Arab Muslim women. As has been explained in the chapter on clothes,
Arab aristocratic women in pre-Islamic times wore veils that covered their hair
and often their faces. With its conservative attitude toward dress, especially for
women, Islam favored the veil, though veiling the face is not explicitly prescribed
in the Koran. The practice remains widespread to the present day and, as noted in
Chapter 2, has become a source of tension in Western secular societies.
11 Y. Jubouri, al-Malbis al-Arabiyya fi al-Ar al-Jhili (Beirut, 1989), 31735, 196253.
12 On the impression Arethas made, see BASIC I.1, 28788.
13 A new lease on life has been given to the kfiyya and the iql by the sudden emergence into
prom-
inencedriven by oil wealthof the states of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf; those living in
the
West have therefore become familiar with the distinctively Arab headgear that the rulers and
citizens of
all these states still wear.
14 See Y. K. Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History; From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed.
N. A. Stillman (Leiden, 2003), 138.
15 See al-Mutanabbi, Dwn, ed. A. al-Barqq (Cairo, 1930), II, 239, verse 3.
VII
Medicine
B
ecause of their constant engagement in warfare, the Ghassnids necessarily had
to deal with wounds not only to their soldiers but also to the horses that they
rode into battle, which were often hurt by the spears of their foes.1 They also had
to cope with the bubonic plague, an outbreak of which in the sixth century caused
many fatalities everywhere. It did not spare Oriens or the army of the Ghassnids.
Secular medicine must have been known among the pre-Islamic federates. Greek
medical terms that became Arabic loanwords documented during this period
such as diryq (antidote), Greek , in the poetry of their panegyrist
assn, and bayr, Greek , for veterinarian2attest to this knowledge.
The birth of the Byzantine hospital has been dated to the sixth century, which
also witnessed the floruit of the cult of the Anargyroi, the silverless doctors in
whose cult the grace of God was glorified as more efficacious than the skill of the
physicians. The emperor himself was cured from what seemed like a fatal illness
by two of the most famous Anargyroi, Cosmas and Damian.3 They received impe-
rial patronage in Constantinople; churches dedicated to them proliferated every-
where; and the plague that broke out only enhanced their prestige and popularity.
At the same time, care of the sick and injured was an important aspect of Christian
philanthropiaperhaps inspired by the ministry of Christ, whose miracles made
him a physician.4
1 Noted by their panegyrist al-Nbigha; see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dhubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm
(Cairo, 1977), 43, 15. The Ghassnids were mainly horsemen and the Ghassnid cavalry was a
valuable
asset to the Byzantine army of the Orient. Hence the condition of their horses was as important as
that
of their riders. The verse of al-Nbigha states that some of their horses during the encounter were
bleed-
ing (dami) and others had wounds that already were being attended to (jlib), and the latter implies
the
work of veterinarians.
2 For Greek loanwords in Arabic, see D. Gutas, Greek Loanwords, in Encyclopedia of Arabic
Language and Linguistics, ed. K. Versteegh (Leiden, 2005), I, 198202. On diryq, see Chapter 5,
note 28; on as a Greek loanword in Arabic, bayr, see Chapter 12, especially note 6.
3 See Procopius, Buildings, I.vi.58.
4 As was one of the four evangelists, Luke. Of course, another aspect of their philanthropia con-
nected with waging war was the need to look after the many widows and orphans left in the wake of
battle.
177 Medicine
Theology and Medicine
The sixth century witnessed the impingement of theology on the theory and practice
of medicine, evinced in the hostility of Christian medicine to its secular counter-
part, as expressed in hagiography.5 In this development the Monophysite move-
ment, to which the Ghassnids belonged, was heavily involved. The Monophysites
sponsored the spoudaioi (also called philoponoi)6 who worked in diakoniai, chari-
table institutions that emphasized Christian philanthropia; in contrast, the hos-
pitals, xenones, sponsored by their opponents, the Chalcedonians, relied on the
ancient Greek medical authorities, Galen and Hippocrates, and stressed medical
treatment and care. The support of the Monophysites found its outstanding expres-
sion during the patriarchate of the Monophysite Paul of Antioch (a.d. 564581),7
who became one of the leaders of those spoudaioi and supported the movement in
Antioch and in Constantinople, founding new diakoniai. The tensions between
diakoniai and xenones were exaggerated in hagiography; in practice, however, the
two were not so starkly opposed. The relationship between the hospitals and
the Anargyroi shrines was so close that the miracle-tale writers often pictured the
doctor-saints as though they were xenon physicians;8 and Justinian himself, who
according to one source was cured by the two saints, Cosmas and Damian, also
introduced the followers of the ancient pagan physicians, the archiatroi, into the
Christian xenones.9
The Ghassnids were involved in this tension between the two camps of
Christian and secular physicians, especially since their king was not only a fervent
Monophysite but also a staunch supporter of the patriarch Paul, who founded the
diakoniai. Besides, the two outstanding saints among the Anargyroi were Arabs,
like the Ghassnids, and their tombs were not far away, in Cyrrhos.10
But the sources are silent on the Ghassnid attitude toward the question of
medical care, with the exception of one revelatory passage in a hagiographic work
of the late sixth century. According to the Syriac Life of James (the Monophysite
Jacob Baradaeus), the Ghassnid troops were plagued by some ailment, described
by the hagiographer as insanity; Arethas crossed the Euphrates to consult a holy
5 See T. S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire (1985; reprint, Baltimore,
1997), 56, 63, 65.
6 Ibid., 131.
7 On Paul, see BASIC I.2, 8025.
8 Miller, Birth of the Hospital, p. 65
9 On Justinian and the archiatroi, see the many pages cited in the index of ibid., s.v. Justinian and
the archiatroi.
10 It was in Palaestina Secundawhere the capital of the Ghassnids, Jbiya, was locatedthat
Christ miraculously cured the woman who had an issue of blood. There, too, the Old Testament
patri-
arch Job, one of the heroes of the Ghassnids, was afflicted with boils; he sought no secular
medicine but
trusted in God, who cured him.
man, Jacob, who gave him some advice that involved the release of another holy
man whom the phylarch had captured. On his return, Arethas found that his
troops had already recovered, and so he fulfilled Jacobs request: he freed the holy
man from his captivity.11
The elucidation of the tension between the two groups involved in medi-
cal care and the position of the Monophysites and the Ghassnids in this tension
can shed much light on this passage in The Life of James, about whose authenticity
doubts have been raised. The visit of the phylarch, Arethas, to the holy man, Jacob,
no longer seems to be an embroidery or a later accretion, since it is perfectly conso-
nant with what has been established as the Monophysite attitude toward medical
treatment. Furthermore, the insanity of the Ghassnid troops can be easily related
to a symptom of the plague described in detail by Procopius.12 Far from being an
unreliable account of what happened to some of the Ghassnid foederati in the
sixth century, the passage becomes a valuable piece of evidence for the incidence of
the plague among the foederati and the Monophysite reaction to its treatment.
Faithful as Arethas was to the Monophysite position on medical care, it is
likely that he also sought help for his troops from those with medical training.13
This leads back to the general question of the Ghassnids and their involvement in
medical practice. They must have had recourse to physicians both as foederati, who
were subject to wounds and ailments, and as devout Christians who would have
been involved in medical care as an expression of their Christian philanthropia.
Their involvement may be presented as follows.
1. The Ghassnids inherited pre-Islamic Arab knowledge, demonstrated in
the appearance of the word for doctor, abb, in the poetry of this period.14
2. Their rivals, the Lakhmids, availed themselves of the medical skill
emanating from the school of Jundshpr in Persia, which relied heavily on
Hellenistic medicine.15 The Ghassnids would have not lagged behind their rivals
in this respect.
11 PO 19, pp. 23334. On this passage in Life of James, called The Spurious Life of James, see
BASIC I.2, 76970. Nldeke has argued that it was written by John of Ephesus himself but was
later
reworked by another author sometime after his death (see GF, 20 note 2).
12 Procopius, History, II.xxii.2021; see BASIC I.2, 770 note 120.
13 The Ghassnid phylarch would have availed himself of the services not only of Ghassnid
women
but also of the depotatoi in the Byzantine army, who helped unhorsed or wounded soldiers, and
possi-
bly also the physicians, the therapeutai, who accompanied the army; see E. McGeer, Medical
Services,
Military, ODB, II, 1327.
14 The term abb appears in an ode of Alqama, a panegyrist of the Ghassnids, in the sense of one
who is knowledgeable, but the references to the ailments of women and how he can cure them as
abb
suggests a medical connotation; see al-Alam al-Shantamar, Dwn Alqama al-Fal, ed. D. al-
Khab
and I. aqql (Aleppo, 1969), 35, verse 8. The plural aibb appears in the poetry of the iran poet
Ad
ibn Zayd; see his Dwn, ed. M. al-Muaybid (Baghdad, 1965), 122, verse 6.
15 For Jundshpr, see C. Huart and A. Sayl, Gondeshpr, EI2, II, 11920.
179 Medicine
3. Even in ijz, the sources attest the existence of two doctors, al-rith
ibn Kalada and his son, al-Nar ibn al-rith. The latter was related to the
Prophet Muammad, and the former is said to have attended the Persian school in
Jundshpr. These two may not have qualified exactly as doctors, but they appar-
ently had some scientific knowledge that they applied in ijz.16
4. Living in Oriens, the Ghassnids were close to the Hellenistic centers of
Greek medicine, the most important of which was Alexandria. So it is quite pos-
sible that they also availed themselves of what the medical profession in Byzantine
Oriens had to offer.
As faithful Monophysites, they must also have had faith in the Anargyroi.
Especially popular were the two saints, Cosmas and DamianArabs who were
buried in Cyrrhos, one of the cities of their diocese, Oriens.
The sources also note that women helped attend to the sick during mili-
tary encounters.17 The lack of information on what women did during peacetime
does not militate against the conclusion that they acted similarly then. Women in
Byzantium took part in looking after patients, and sometimes all the nurses were
women.18 So it is safe to assume that Ghassnid women did participate in nursing,
possibly supervised by the princesses or the queen.
The question arises whether the Ghassnids constructed any building for
medical care. The sources are also silent on this; but in view of the Ghassnids hav-
ing been avid builders of a variety of structures,19 they probably constructed build-
ings designed for the sick, perhaps dispensaries rather than hospitals. Nor do the
sources supply any names of pre-Islamic figures in medicine in the diocese, although
in later Abbasid and Andalusian times Arabs were to make substantial advances on
the medical knowledge that they had inherited from Galen and Hippocrates. But
in early Umayyad times one Arab physician stands out: Ibn Uthl, the private and
personal physician of Muwiya, caliph in Oriens (661680).
16 For both doctors, see C. Pellat, al-rith B. Kalada, EI2, supplement (1980), 35455, and
al-
Nar ibn-al-rith, EI2, VII, 87273. The doubts cast on riths visit to Persia and his attendance
at the medical school in Jundshpr are unjustified; see A. Sayili, ibb, EI2, II, 111920. Both
came
from if, which had close relations with ra in Iraq, as did Mecca (with which both were associ-
ated as physicians). Arabs from these two ijzi cities were to be found in ra, in Persian territory.
rith thus could easily have gone to Jundshpr and acquired some scientific knowledge of
medicine.
Accounts of al-Nar, who used to tell the Meccans that stories of Rustam and Isfandiyr are more
attrac-
tive than the Koran, clearly imply some knowledge of Persica, derived from ra and Sasanid
Persia.
Questions about his relationship to al-rith are irrelevant to his ties to ra and to the Sasanid
Persian
influence on his medical knowledge; see M. A. ibn Abi-Uaybia, Uyn al-Anb fi abaqt al-
Aibb,
ed. . al-Najjr (Cairo, 2001), I, 395 (and on al-rith ibn Kalada, see 38695).
17 See Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1970), IV, 620.
18 See Miller, Birth of the Hospital, 214.
19 See BASIC II.1, 14956, 183200, 30631.
Ibn Uthl, an Early Umayyad Physician
Ibn Uthl was the most distinguished of the medical practitioners of the early
Umayyad period, and it can be argued that he continued whatever medical tradi-
tion existed among the federates in pre-Islamic Oriens. The foremost medieval his-
torian of Arab and Islamic medicine, Ibn Abi-Uaybia, is relatively expansive on
him and his expertise, and from the notice on him the following may be deduced.20
1. He was undoubtedly an Arab. His name, whether vocalized Uthl or
Athl, is definitely Arab, with various significations (Arabian tree, utensil); when
vocalized Uthl, it means honor, glory.21 A Muslim by that name, Ab-Athl,
fought at the battle of the Yarmk.22
2. The chances are that Ibn Uthl was not a Rhomaic Arab but belonged
to the federates. The former were assimilated into the Graeco-Roman society in
Oriens, and they would have assumed other names, without the patronymic that
Ibn Uthl adopted.
3. As early as a.d. 661 or thereabouts, Muwiya took Ibn Uthl on as his
private physician, when he became caliph and moved to Damascus. Ibn Uthl
thus was clearly born in pre-Islamic Oriens in the last days of the Byzantine and
Ghassnid presence.
4. The historian stresses that Muwiya had great respect for him. He deferred
to the physicians judgment, and used to converse with him during the day and at
night, a sure sign of his competence.
5. Especially important was Ibn Uthls knowledge and expertise in toxicol-
ogy. Muwiya could not always exercise his proverbial ilm (control of his emo-
tions), and so he used to resort to disposing of his enemies quietly. He availed
himself of the expertise of Ibn Uthl for that purpose. For example, when Muwiya
decided to change the office of the caliphate to a dynastic successiongrooming
his own son, Yazd, for itAbd al-Ramn, the son of the famous general Khlid
ibn al-Wald, posed a threat to his plans. He then called on Ibn Uthl to dispose of
Abd al-Ramn, which the physician did.23
6. Ibn Uthl was killed by Khlid ibn al-Muhjir, a relative of Abd al-Ramn,
an act that greatly displeased Muwiya, who had Khlid ibn al-Muhjir arrested.
The caliph would have killed him, if Ibn Uthl had been a Muslim; instead he
20 See Ibn Abi-Uaybia, Uyn al-Anb fi Tabaqt al-Aibb, I, 4014. On the author, see
I. Vernet, Ibn Abi-Uaybia, EI2, III, 69394.
21 See An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed. E. W. Lane (London, 1863), Book I, part 1, 21. This Arabic
lexeme in one of its significations, vessels, utensil, has survived in the world of science to the
present
in the term aludel (al-uthl): the succession of bottle-shaped pots used as condensers in sublimation
processes.
22 See Ibn skir, Trkh Madnat Dimashq, ed. U. al-Amraw (Beirut, 1995), XI, 399400.
23 See Ibn Abi-Uaybia, Uyn al-Anb, 402.
181 Medicine
fined Khlids clan, Makhzm, 12 thousand dirhams as blood money.24 Ibn Uthl,
a Christian, never converted to Islam.
It was probably after the death of Ibn Uthl that Muwiya retained as his
personal physician Ab akam, also a Christian Arab, whose son, akam, and
grandson, s, were likewise medical practitioners and Damascenes.25 Al-ajjj
ibn Ysuf, the governor of Iraq for the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, also had a
personal physician, Tiydhuq, whose name was an Arabicized form of Theodorus
or Theodosius.26 They all reflect the strong Nachleben of Byzantine medicine of
pre-Islamic Oriens, both Rhomaic and federate, in the Umayyad state.
24 Ibid., 4023.
25 On Ab akam; his son, akam; and his grandson, s, see ibid., 40510.
26 Ibid., 41014.
C. RITUALS, ENTERTAINMENT, AND LEISURE ACTIVITIES
VIII
Music and Song
I. The Sources
T
he history of music and song among the Arabs in pre-Islamic times owes much
to Henry G. Farmer, who discussed it in his well-known volume A History of
Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century, published in 1929; it has remained a fun-
damental work on the subject.1 In 1960, the pre-Islamic period was given a spe-
cialized, extensive treatment by Nir al-Din al-Asad in al-Qiyn wa al-Ghin fi
al-Shir al-Jhili, based on primary sourcesnamely, contemporary pre-Islamic
poetry.2 This work was continued by Sharbl Dghir, who took up the theme from
a lexicographical perspective and provided new insights on the subject;3 never-
theless, al-Asads publication has remained the principal work on music and song
for the pre-Islamic period. It was, however, too specialized, as it emphasized two
themes: al-qiyn, the songstresses, to whose names, careers, and influence most of
his book is devoted, and the poet al-Ash, to whom al-Asad devoted the remain-
der of the book. The poet belonged to the tribe of Bakr, in northeastern Arabia,
who wandered in various places in the Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent, but his
main inspiration was from the East, especially ra in Sasanid Persias sphere of
1 See H. G. Farmer, A History of Arabian Music to the XIIIth Century (1929; reprint, London,
1973). The first nineteen pages are devoted to the pre-Islamic period.
2 See N. al-Asad, al-Qiyn wa al-Ghin fi al-Shir al-Jhili (1960; reprint, Beirut, 1988), which
devotes some three hundred pages to the pre-Islamic period. Al-Asads book was briefly noticed in
A. Shiloah, Music in the Pre-Islamic Period as Reflected in Arabic Writings of the First Islamic
Centuries, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 7 (1986), 10910. Although Shiloah implicitly
expresses reservations about al-Asads work and about the reliability of the sources for music in the
pre-
Islamic period, al-Asad himself emphasized his dependence on contemporary pre-Islamic poetry,
such as
relying on the Dwn of Ash when writing on Ash.
3 In Madhhib al-usn (Beirut, 1998), S. Dghir takes a lexicographical approach to the various
forms of Arab art and aesthetics; for his views on music and song, see 11165.
183 Music and Song
influence. However, little attention has been given to the history of the two arts,
music and song, in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, in Byzantine Oriens, or
to the major poet of the Ghassnidsassn.
This chapter makes good the omission; its discussion of music and song
among the Arab foederati of Byzantium in the western half of the Fertile Crescent
in Byzantine Oriens is based mainly on the contemporary poetry of assn. The
writer emerges as a major pre-Islamic poet of music and song, inspired by Byzantine
Oriens and the urban ambience of Ghassnland, and as the counterpart of al-Ash
in Sasanid Persia.4
As the Arabic works of later times, especially the Abbasid, have been con-
sidered not entirely reliable, the discussion in this section of the two arts in pre-
Islamic times avoids drawing too heavily on the later sources. Thus, it primarily
examines the best contemporary pre-Islamic source, the poetry of assn himself.
In addition, prose works that mention the Ghassnids cannot be entirely ignored.
They will be examined for their kernels of truth, and the details that appear to be
embroidered will be ignored.5 The scanty information provided by the fragmentary
extant sources may also be supplemented with some data on music and song from
ra of the Lakhmids, under the influence of Sasanid Persia, and with data on
social life under the Umayyads of Bild al-Shm, who were heirs to the Ghassnid
and Byzantine legacy.
Music played an important role in Arabs secular and religious life, as well
as during their battle-days.6 Secular music and song, both at the court of the
Ghassnids and at the tavern, will be discussed in the following pages, based on the
few references in the Dwn of assn.
II. Instrumental Music
Music accompanied the Arabs from the cradle to the grave, from the lullaby to the
elegy. . . . Indeed, the cultivation of music by the Arabs in all its branches reduces
to insignificant the recognition of the art in the history of any other country.7
Thus concluded the distinguished historian of Arabic music Henry F. Farmer after
4 A comprehensive history of music and song in the pre-Islamic period must do justice to the
three or four main urban centers of the Arabs in this period: Jbiya in the Golan, Jalliq in Phoenicia
Libanensis, ra in Iraq, and Najrn in Asr. There the arts must have flourished at a relatively
advanced
and sophisticated level, as these centers moved in the wider orbits of cultural dominance:
Byzantium,
Sasanid Persia, and imyarite Yaman. The last has received the least research.
5 See the discussion of prose works in Chapter 3.
6 See al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 14953.
7 H. G. Farmer, Music, in The Legacy of Islam, ed. T. Arnold and A. Guillaume (London, 1931),
358.
studying the impressive number of books and manuscripts in Arabic on this art.8
Exaggerated as the statement seems to be, the substantial element of truth in it can-
not be denied. The historian was, of course, primarily thinking of Arab music in
Islamic times, when it indeed flourished.9 But for the pre-Islamic period, the pic-
ture is different. Attached as the pre-Islamic Arabs were to music and song, their
own contribution to it is far from clear, owing to the scarcity of surviving sources.
Those that are extant point to foreign influences that shaped the music, from
Persia, Byzantium, imyar,10 and possibly Ethiopia. Music in this pre-Islamic
period could have developed and matured only in the urban Arab centers of the
Ghassnids, the Lakhmids, and the rithids: that is, in Jbiya and Jalliq, ra,
and Najrn, whence it spread into other urban centers such as if, Mecca, and
Medina in western Arabia. The first is the concern of this chapterthe Ghassnids
in Byzantine Federate Oriens.
For social life in federate Byzantine Oriens, the poetry of assn is our only
reliable source; but it is practically silent on the subject of musical instruments,
which are only implied in his reference to the songstress and the instrumentalist.
One of the prose accounts ascribed to him, however, describes a musical party at
the court of the Ghassnid king, Jabala,11 and refers to one musical instrument,
the barbat, and to entertainers hailing from Byzantium; from Persia through ra,
the Lakhmid capital; and even from Mecca. There is no doubt that music flour-
ished at the Ghassnid court in Oriens and in Ghassnland, where the Ghassnids
inherited the musical tradition of the Rhomaic Arabs of Petra and Palmyra;12 nat-
urally, they were influenced by the music of Byzantium and of Arab centers such as
ra. As for the musical instruments, these must have been the same as were used
in other urban centers with which the Ghassnids were in contact, such as ra
(especially after the fall of its Lakhmid masters around a.d. 600).13 The poets who
8 Elsewhere Farmer states: Music and song were with the Arabs from the lullaby at the cradle to
the elegy at the bier (History of Arabian Music, 17). Farmers transports were modified by the
reserva-
tions of D. S. Margoliouth (see vi).
9 A zenith of the Arabic contribution to literature on music and song was reached in the tenth
century in Aleppo at the court of the amdnid prince Sayf al-Dawla, where two great figures in
this
field met and were colleagues: Ab Nar al-Frbi, the great philosopher of whose musicological
works
only Kitb al-Msq al-Kabr has survived, and Ifahn, the author of al-Aghn, which illustrates
the
employment of poetry in song that is discussed by al-Frbi in Kitb al-Msq.
10 On the little-researched music in imyar, see Farmer, History of Arabian Music, 23, 15.
11 For the account, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1959), XVII, 1056.
12 On music and musical instruments among the Nabataean and Palmyrene Arabs, see Farmer,
History of Arabian Music, 5.
13 Hence it was possible for Iys ibn Qaba to send Jabala songstresses from ra, as indicated in
assns account (Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 1056). Iys ruled ra after the Lakhmids were
deposed
by Chosroes Parvz. He belonged to the tribe of ayyi, friendly to the Ghassnids; its poet and
sayyid,
tim, had visited the Ghassnids and eulogized them; see BASIC II.1, 24659.
185 Music and Song
roamed those regions in northeastern Arabia and in Lower Mesopotamia, close
to ra, preserved in their verse the names of the musical instruments common
among the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period. The most important of these poets was
al-Ash, who hailed from the region and whose poetry has been thoroughly stud-
ied for its importance to this aspect of Arab social life.14
The instruments used by the pre-Islamic Arabs mentioned in what has sur-
vived of pre-Islamic poetry, especially that of al-Ash, may be listed as follows:
mizhar, lute; kirn, lute; duff, tambourine; nqs, clapper; jaljil (plural of juljul),
bells; muwattar, stringed instrument, played with the thumb; mizmr, reed pipe;
mizafa, psaltery; qussba, flute; sanj, harp; and unbr, bandore.
Among all these instruments, the d held primacy. Originally it was a
mizhar, a stringed instrument with a leather belly, replaced by wood through
Persian influence. The sources state that it was introduced to Mecca by the poet-
minstrel al-Nar ibn al-rith, a Meccan who had traded with the rans. The
lute had many names: mizhar, kirn, barbat, muwattar, and simply d. The names
themselves of some of these instruments reflect foreign influences on Arab music;
for example, barbat is considered Persian, and kirn Syriac/Aramaic-Hebrew.15
III. Song
Songstresses
Among the Ghassnids, the songstress rather than the male singer was the princi-
pal performer. An exception may be the musmir, the nighttime companion, who
in the poetry of assn is referred to as garid, an epithet that could imply singing,
but the reference remains a hapax legomenon.16 Perhaps more important is the one
who recited Arabic poetry in this pre-Islamic period, the munshid, but the manner
of this recitation has not been determined. The singing of verse will be discussed
later in this volume in a different context.
In the Dwn of assn, the most common appellation of the songstress is
15 On the names of these instruments, see ibid., 1069, and the still valuable discussion of Farmer,
History of Arabian Music, 61516 and notes. Al-Asad ferreted out the names of these instruments
from
pre-Islamic verses, which he conveniently quotes. He claims that he corrected Farmer on unbr,
since he
found it attested in pre-Islamic poetry (1078), but Farmer had vouched for its Arabic pre-Islamic
origin
in History (5, 76). On the etymology of barba and kirn, see Farmer, History, 1516, 16 notes 1 and
2. For al-Nar ibn al-rith, see C. Pellat, al-Nar ibn al-rith, EI2, VII, 87273. Barbat
became
a loanword in Greek, , and is accepted as probably such in LSJ, s.v. For mizafah, see
Farmer,
History, 3, 16, 76; apparently, it was a sort of psaltery, or barbiton.
I, 279, verse 7. Since the same verse mentions the nadmn (boon companion), the musmir/gharid
may
be a different individual, especially in light of assns reference to the adth, conversation, of
the
nadmn but the awt, voice, of al-musmir, al-gharid. Be that as it may, the overwhelming
majority of
singers in pre-Islamic Arabia were women.
the term musmialiterally, the one who lets her voice be heard. The musmia
is a vocal performer and sometimes also an instrumentalist. She appears in the
Dwn in three different contexts, and only the first two are Ghassnid: (1) at the
royal court, (2) in the local tavern, and (3) in private homes.17 Although the sqi
appears in this poetry as the one who serves wine to the tavern patrons, the song-
stress sometimes performs that function when she is not singing.
The Dwn of assn does not describe how the songstress was dressed,
but the poets of eastern Arabia did, and the woman singer in Ghassnland must
also have dressed similarly. The same is true of the jewelry she must have worn,
also described in the poetry of the bards, and of her movements, which may have
amounted to a dance.18 But Arabic poetry had to wait some three centuries before
a musmia was featured in a poem exclusively devoted to her, in which the poet por-
trayed her figure, her face, her musical performance, and her voicenamely, Ibn
al-Rmis famous ode on the songstress Wad.19 Whether assn had composed
similar odes remains unknown, since only a fraction of his poetry on that period
has survived. But it is clear from the fragments of assn and from other poets
who mentioned the musmia in Arabia and in the Lakhmid capital, ra, that the
songstress became the most important single figure providing entertainment in the
social life of the Arabs.
In addition to musmia, the native Arabic term for the songstress, other labels
were also coined, such as djina, mudjina, ad, ada, and jarda. Musmia,
which was sometimes used for the instrumental performer, was the most common,
and lasted into the Islamic period. But it finally gave way to another term that
became dominant in Umayyad and Abbasid times: namely, qayna (plural qiyn).
While musmia was an Arabic term derived from a root s-m-, meaning
hear, which easily and immediately suggested her function, qayna was an old
Semitic term, introduced in the pre-Islamic period, whose root meaning has been
lost. The songstress was an entertainer whose popularity increased in Umayyad
times, reaching a climax in the Abbasid period, when she very often emerged as a
talented poetess.
It was these qiyn who are found in the prose sources that describe the social
life of the Arabs, including the Ghassnids. According to the detailed studies of
these qiyn in pre-Islamic Arabia, they were found in at least three major cities of
western Arabia: in Najrn, Mecca, and Yathrib/Medina. Their names are known,
17 One poem by assn is devoted to describing a drinking party in the private home of a certain
lih ibn Ilt in ijz; female instrumentalists performed, and probably also sang (ibid., 91).
18 See the verses of arafa, of the tribe Bakr in eastern Arabia, in al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 58, 64, and
also
al-Ashs verse.
19 For Ibn al-Rmis 58-verse ode on the songstress Wad, see A. Motoyoshi, Sensibility and
Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rmis Singing Slave-Girl, Journal of Arabic Literature 32 (2001), 129.
187 Music and Song
as are the names of their patronswealthy and influential members of those com-
munities who could afford to hire these qiyn to entertain their guests, including
the poets, who described these songstresses in their odes.20 South Arabia also had
plenty of them, though they remained mostly anonymous; so did Eastern Arabia
and of course ra in Lower Mesopotamia, the principal urban center of the
Arabs in this period. Thus the statement that the Ghassnid king Jabala presented
at a banquet five qiyn from ra and others from Mecca should be considered
trustworthy. ra was apparently on good terms with the Ghassnids after the
fall ca. a.d. 600 of the Lakhmid House of Nar. And Mecca had very important
commercial relations with the Ghassnids, as did Yathrib/Medina and, of course,
Najrn. The same account (discussed below) refers to five qiyn of Jabala who sang
for him in al-Rmiyya, Greek. wi al-Funn, which preserves a list of the names
of songstresses, mentions Jabalas qiyn but does not give their names. Since they
are anonymous, it is not clear whether they were Arab; the fact that they sang in
Greek might suggest that they were not.
A number of questions are raised by the appearance of these pre-Islamic
songstresses.
1. Were they Arab, or were they foreign? The only explicit and detailed refer-
ence to them is in assns account of the court of Jabala. Five of these songstresses
were Rmiyyt, that is, Byzantines who sang in Rmiyy (Greek). Jabala, the
Ghassnid phylarchs, and the ranking officers in the phylarchia no doubt under-
stood the Greek of the songstresses. Even if some did not understand, they would
have enjoyed the voices and tunes in much the same way that operas today are
heard and enjoyed by those who do not comprehend their original language.
The account then refers to five songstresses who sang in the style of ahl
al-ra, the people or inhabitants of ra, a description that provides no informa-
tion on their identity. But since ra was in the Persian orbit, especially influenced
by such material aspects of Persian culture as food, song, and music, some of them
may have been Persian or Persian-speaking.
The Arab identity of the third group of songstresses who used to come to
the Ghassnid court is explicitly stated by assn, who says that Jabala and the
Ghassnid court used to receive Arab songstresses from Mecca and other Arab
places. Other songstresses might have been Rhomaic Arabs, from Nabataea or
Palmyrena. One Arabic source suggests that a Ghassnid woman did sing on one
occasion, although she was not a professional songstress.21 If authentic, the account
20 Only one work pays some attention to pre-Islamic qiyn; an eleventh-century author who lived
in Fatimid Egypt wrote the Jmi al-Funn wa Salw al-Mazn, which contains a discussion on
pre-
Islamic qiyn; see al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 26572. The qiyn of Ifahn are later Islamic songstresses.
21 See al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 271 on the qiyn of Jabala. The author, Ibn Tan, says their qiyn were
known as songstresses in Islamic times; it is a pity that he does not give their names.
would reveal the only songstress associated with the Ghassnids known by her
name, Dhalf.22
2. Where in Oriens did assn and others find the taverns which they
patronized, and in which they drank their wine and heard the song of the
musmia? As has been indicated earlier, the songstresses could be heard in pri-
vate homes, in local taverns, and at the royal court. The sources are completely
silent on the first venue and provide some insight into the third. But the second is
the most desired destination: the local tavern, nt, which poets such as assn
frequented, where he caroused, and which he described in his poetry. The pre-
ceding volume established a large number of localities associated with the seden-
tary Ghassnids in Oriens; the following places (all discussed in more detail in
BASIC II.1) may be singled out as likely to have had taverns where song was heard.
To these may be added locations in Byzantine Oriens where a strong Arab pres-
ence dated to the second and third centuries, when the Nabataean and Palmyrene
political entities flourished.
a. Byzantine cities, whose wines were tasted by poets such as Imru al-Qays,
Amr ibn Kulthm, and al-Ash: Emesa (ims), Damascus (Dimashq), Bostra
(Bur), Heliopolis (Baalbak), Epiphania (ama), Larissa (Shayzar), Andron/
al-Andarn, Salkhad (Sarkhad), and Tdif.
b. Locations more closely associated with the Ghassnids and visited by Imru
al-Qays: Usays and Adrit. assn, whose relations to the Ghassnids were closer
than those of Imru al-Qays, visited and referred to more Ghassnid locations:
al-Khammn, al-Khawbi, al-Buay, Dma, Bils, Drayy, and al-Qurayyt. To
these may be added a location named in Umayyad poetry: Maqadd.
c. The two capitals of the GhassnidsJbiya and Jalliq. They deserve special
mention, for they were the sites of royal entertainments. Jalliq seems to have been
the venue for the more sophisticated and highly developed songs, as described in
assns account of Jabalas feasts, rather than Jbiya. The Monophysite Ghassnid
kings, both serious-minded and enthusiastic about song, were apparently too con-
servative to allow such secular entertainment to be held in their official capital, but
they allowed it to be offered in the unofficial one, Jalliq.
3. Given the considerable development of song among the Ghassnids, was
there a venue other than the tavern that was especially devoted to it and similar
forms of performance?
For sacred music and song, there is no doubt that the church and the con-
ventual chapel in the monastery performed that function. The picture for secular
song is not as clear. Did classical practicesthe singing in theaters by the chorus
22 For Dhalf, see the discussion of Nihyat al-Arab in Chapter 3.
189 Music and Song
of Greek tragedy, and the performance of song in odeionscontinue in Byzantine
times, and did the Ghassnids avail themselves of such venues?
Again, the Dwn of assn is the best source. Verses in it suggest that song,
as part of a royal entertainment, was performed either in a special hall reserved for
it in the palace or in a special building, some sort of odeion. In one of his verses,
assn says that after drinking wine, his party was entertained by song in buyt
al-rukhm, houses of marble.23 The phrase suggests that song was performed
not in a nondescript local tavern constructed of ordinary stones or brick but in an
architecturally attractive building made of marble. In another verse, he refers to
such a venue for entertainment as bunyn raf, a high-towering building.24 So
the Ghassnids may have presented song and other related entertainments in a spe-
cial building.25
4. How original were Arab music and song in the pre-Islamic period? Cultural
historians of the period have pointed to foreign influences. assn himself sug-
gested three influences at the court of Jabala.
a. The Byzantine influence was represented by the five songstresses who sang
in Greek and used barbit (plural of barbat), wooden-bellied stringed instruments.
The women probably came from one of the cities of Oriens, where the arts flour-
ished. Greek was the official language of the administration in Oriens, and the
Ghassnid kings and phylarchs undoubtedly understood it.
b. As noted earlier, ra, under Iys ibn Qaba of the ayyi group, sent
Jabala five songstresses. Whether they were Arab or Persian is not clear from the
account; they could have been either, or perhaps a mixed group.
c. The dispatch of songstresses from the flourishing urban center of Mecca is
more noteworthy. The sources refer to entertainment in Mecca in which Abdallh
ibn Judn is involved.26
But did the Arab federates of Oriens, represented by the Ghassnids in the
sixth century, contribute to the development of Arab song as they contributed to
other areas of cultural development? The sources are silent on this, making any
answer highly tentative. Some observations might be ventured, however.
The Ghassnids predecessors in Oriens, the Nabataeans and the Palmyrenes,
were not strangers to music and song, and their traditions naturally survived in
this region. Just as the Ghassnids availed themselves of the skills of these Rhomaic
Arabs in hydrology,27 they could easily have adopted and adapted their musical
24 Ibid., 316, verse 8.
25 The possibility of an odeion in Ghassnland is discussed in more detail in Part III, Chapter 3.
26 For Abdallh ibn Judn, see C. Pellat, Abdallh ibn Judn, EI2, I, 4445, and Farmer,
History
of Arabian Music, 11.
traditions, with influences mainly from Byzantium. And it should be remembered
in this connection that the Ghassnids had hailed from the most sedentary part
of Arabia, Arabia Felix in the south, which must have had a developed tradition of
music and song. Even in later times, the sources speak of the two styles of song that
emanated from South Arabia, the imyari and the anafi.28
To sum up: the qiyn were an important feature of Ghassnid social life,
especially for entertainment. The scene in Jabalas Ghassnid court at which ten
qiyn were performing cannot have been the exception but must have been the
rulewitness a reference to them during the reign of Arethas. One of the sources
relates that al-Mundir, the Lakhmid king of ra, asked the poet armala to
compose a lampoon against Arethas. The poet, who happened to be related to the
Ghassnids, refused to do so. In appreciation of the poets loyalty, Arethas gave
him two qiyn.29
Qiyn in assns Dwn
Perhaps the anonymity of prose accounts on the qiyn associated with the
Ghassnids may be circumvented by suggesting that the women whom assn
mentions in his Dwn may have been qiyn whom he saw in the taverns he fre-
quented in Arabia and in Ghassnland. What commends this view is his reference
to them in erotic and sensuous terms. assn mentions in his verse eight women:
Shath, al-Nara, Layla, Umm Amr, Amra, Sud, Lams, and Zaynab. He mar-
ried two of these eight, Shath and Amra; some of the remaining sixwith the
exception of al-Nara, to whom a whole poem is addressed and who is appreciated
in the poem for her aristocratic pedigree30may have been mentioned because
they were songstresses.
The sources refer to a songstress named Srn, who belonged to assn.
It is possible that she was the sister of Mriya,31 who was sent to the Prophet
Muammad from Egypt in response to his letter to the so-called al-Muqawqis. The
Prophet gave her to assn and she bore him his son, Abd al-Ramn. It is also
28 Farmer, History of Arabian Music, 3.
29 For this informative episode, see the tenth-century philologist Ab al-Qsim al-midi,
al-Mutalif wa al-Mukhtalif, ed. A. al-Sattr Farrj (Cairo, 1961), 235. The account of the episode
in
al-midi indicates that the qayna was also a musmia. The poet was related to the Ghassnids
through
his mother; the Ghassnid Qtil al-J, who appears in one of his Greek inscriptions as Kathelogos,
was
his great-grandfather. The two qiyn may have been Samaritan war captives, whom Arethas
acquired
after he quelled the Samaritan revolt of a.d. 529; see BASIC I.1, 9295. When another poet, Shihb
ibn
al-Ayyif, was asked by Mundir to lampoon Arethas, he composed a most scurrilous couplet; see
Abd
al-Qdir al-Baghddi, Khiznat al-Adab, ed. A. al-Salm Hrn (Cairo, 1982), X, 8993.
30 On al-Nara, see Chapter 2.
31 So considered by Ibn Khurddhbih, in al-Mukhtr min Kitb al-Lahw wa al-Malhi, ed. I. A.
Khalfah (Beirut, 1961), 35; also in al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 9293, where she is described as a qayna.
191 Music and Song
possible that the qayna who sang for assn had a different name and that this
Srn belonged instead to a certain al-adrami who had two songstresses, one of
whom was called Srn.
The songstress could easily degenerate into a prostitute in Arabia as well as
in Byzantium, where many female entertainers of various sorts also engaged in
prostitution; the trade in the Peninsula in female slaves flourished in this period.32
The study of Arab-Byzantine relations in this period could shed some light on this
aspect of social life in federate Oriens, on which assn and his verse are infor-
mative. It is in his Dwn that the word for prostitutenot the indigenous word,
baghiyy, but mmis, a loanword from Greekappears four times, the earliest attes-
tations of the term in Arabic.33
Music and Song in ra
In one of the striking chapters in abars History (ca. 915), the fundamental work
on Arab-Sasanid relations, which relies on excellent sources, the author describes
the time spent by the Persian crown prince Bahrm, the son of Shah Yazdgard/
Yazdajird, among the Arabs of ra for his education.34 Drawing on abar (and
Musdi), Farmer summarized Bahrms residence in ra as follows: It was to
al-ra that Bahrm Gr (430438), the Persian monarch, was sent, as a prince,
to be educated. Here, he was taught music, among other Arab accomplishments.
When he ascended to the throne, one of his first edicts was to improve the status of
musicians at the Persian court.35
This account shows the influence of pre-Islamic Arab music and song on a
Persian, underscoring their important role among the Arabs and in the purely
urban Arab center of ra (which surely influenced the Ghassnids). The Persian
influence on Arabic music and song around a.d. 600 is attested in the contem-
porary poetry of al-Ash, whose lexicon includes a large number of Persian loan-
words; but the chapter in abar on Bahrm makes clear that the Arabs of ra
cultivated at a high level the two arts of song and music, which affected a Persian
crown prince and his formation. This impact was tantamount to a reversal, or at
least a modification, of the usual direction of cultural radiation, from Persia and
the Persians to Arabia and the Arabs. It is, therefore, necessary to examine this
outburst of creativity among the pre-Islamic Arabs in music and song. It will be
32 For slavery and prostitution in pre-Islamic Arabia, see al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 3442.
33 See the appendix below, and in Arabic.
34 For the account of abar on Bahrm, see the English version by C. E. Bosworth, The History of
Tabari, vol. 1, The Ssnids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen (Albany, 1999), 82106; for
the
relevant part on the Arabs, see 8293.
35 Farmer, History of Arabian Music, 45.
argued that some development of these two arts in particular among the Arabs of
this period should cause no surprise.
The Lakhmids of ra were the masters of the most important Arab urban
center of pre-Islamic times. The dynasty had come from South Arabia, where a
high level of civilized sedentary life had developed for centuries. One can easily
imagine that in a city such as ra, where an ambience of urban life had lasted for
three centuries, the two arts would have flowered to the point that it could provide
a suitable education for a Persian crown prince.
The best support for this sudden surge of cultural activity comes from an
examination of the Arab creative outburst in the field of poetry in this very peri-
od.36 A group of pastoralists created a highly complex metrical system that is
unique among the verse systems of the world, consisting of fifteen or sixteen dif-
ferent meters, with many variations, and a corpus of poetry was subsequently com-
posed by tens and possibly hundreds of poets all over Arabia.37 The pinnacle of
their creation was the qasda, the polythematic ode that subsequently became the
model of medieval Islamic poetry for centuries.38
With this extraordinary chapter in the cultural history of the pre-Islamic
Arabs in mind, one can visualize their writing a similar, if less impressive, chap-
ter in music in the fifth century. The comparison is appropriate, since the two
arts are so closely related. They are allied in other literary traditions, such as the
Greek, which featured poetry sung or recited by special rhapsodes. The connec-
tion between the two arts in Arabic is not only analogous to that in Greek but
can be predicated a fortiori in view of the complex metrical structure of Arabic
verse, in which each poem is both mono-metered and mono-rhymed. And so, when
simply recited aloud, it already sounds melodious. This conclusion is confirmed
by the distinguished tenth-century philosopher al-Frbi in his massive magnum
opus, Kitb al-Msq al-Kabr, which explains in great detail the relationship that
obtained between poetry and music.39 After reading his work, one has no difficulty
36 The salience of poetry was well brought out by that distinguished connoisseur of Arabic poetry,
the
late Sir Hamilton Gibb, who stated that companies of poets sprang up all over northern Arabia
and that
in the various meters was expressed that astonishing outburst of poetic talent spreading within a
few years
or decades among all the tribes of Arabic speech from Mesopotamia through Najd and the ijz
down
into the wild ranges of Asir, and finally into Yemen (Arabic Literature, 2nd ed. [Oxford, 1963],
13, 15).
37 The medieval scholar and critic Ibn Qutayba explained his selectiveness in presenting the poets
he chose to discuss by noting that the corpus of Arabic poetry was so vast that it was impossible to
do
justice to one single tribe; see his al-Shir wa al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1966), I, 60. The
same
sentiment is expressed by Ibn Sallm in abaqt Ful al-Shuar, ed. M. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1974),
I. 3. For these strictly pre-Islamic poets, see the many dwns of the various tribes in N. al-Asad,
Madir
al-Shir al-Jhili (Beirut, 1988), 54347.
38 The qada became the model in Persian and Turkish poetry as well.
39 See Ab Nar al-Frbi, Kitb al-Msq al-Kabr, ed. G. Khashaba and M. al-ifn (Cairo,
1967), 6774.
193 Music and Song
seeing how those who created the very rhythmical music of Arabic poetry could
also create the instrumental music that accompanied the recitation of this poetry;
indeed, the technical vocabulary of Arabic music is related to Arabic meters, as
may be seen in Frbis work and in Ifahns Kitb al-Aghn. That Arabic poetry
in pre-Islamic times used to be set to music and sung adds further weight to this
conclusion. Thus the poetic outburst among the pre-Islamic Arabs supports the
view that there was a corresponding outburst of musical talent expressed through
the tunes related to the sixteen meters.40
This creative outburst in music and song in the fifth century remains anony-
mous, though we know the names of the poets Ibn izm and, of course, Imru
al-Qays. It may have been a gradual development for which many were responsi-
ble, or it may have been due to a single figure, such as Romanus the Melode in
Byzantium, a native of Emesa. Romanus is a major figure in Byzantine hymnogra-
phy, alleged to have composed one thousand hymns and to be responsible for devel-
oping the kontakion.
Reference to Romanus the Melode brings the discussion back to Oriens and
the Ghassnids. The precious information on music and song in the ra of the
Lakhmids was miraculously saved from oblivion by the merest chancethe his-
torian abar was a Persian who was naturally interested in preserving from the
sources what interested him as a Persian. Hence his account of the Ghassnids
is negligible, especially when compared to his copious and full report on the
Lakhmids.41 One may well wonder whether among the Ghassnids there arose one
not unlike the Melode.
Music and Song in Najrn
The main source on Arab song, Ifahn, states that the poet al-Ash used to visit
Najrn, where he would hear song, described as Rmi, Byzantine.42 This raises
questions regarding the extent to which song in the Arab city of Najrn was native
or was adventitious, coming from Byzantium and elsewhere, and about the close-
ness of Ghassnid-Najrnite cultural relations in the field of music and song.
40 One who should knownamely, Isq bin Ibrhim al-Mawili (a.d. 767850), the greatest
musician of his timegave expression to this view when he stated that rhythm, q, in music is
what
meter is in poetry. He divided rhythm into eight categories and gave two of them the names of
meters,
ramal and hazaj; see Ibn Khurddhbih, Kitb al-Lahw, 55. Isq, who was very well versed in
Arabic
poetry (favoring the ancients over his contemporaries) and even composed poetry himself (54), was
in a
good position to render such judgments; on him, see J. W. Fck, Is k al-Mawil, EI2, IV,
11011. For
the ethos of each Arabic meter, see the original work of A. al-ayyib, al-Murshid il Fahm Ashr
al-Arab
wa inatih, 3 vols. (Beirut, 1970).
41 Demonstrating his lack of interest in the western part of the Islamic world, he gave the Arab
conquest of Spain only a few lines.
42 Quoted by al-Asad, al-Qiyn, 133.
The sources also refer to two styles of music that obtained in the region of
South Arabia; the imyari and the anafi.43 There thus was a native tradition of
music and song in the affluent region of Yaman, South Arabia, which, it is natural
to suppose, was known in Najrn, an Arab city in the orbit of imyarite South
Arabia. The vita of St. Gregentius depicts a society in which singers, instrumen-
talists, actors, and dancers flourished, as is clear from the strict code of behavior
imposed on the imyarites by the author of that work.44
But Najrn was a caravan city, which established relations with the outside
world of Ethiopia, with ra, and with the Ghassnids. It is therefore natural to
assume that possible influences from these directions reached Najrn in music and
song. The sources do not take note of influence emanating from Ethiopia and ra,
though it must have existed, given the very close relations Najrn had with both.
Only the influence from Byzantium, Rm, is explicitly stated.
Byzantine influence on Najrn was no doubt mediated through the
Ghassnids in Oriens, as both Ghassnids and Najrnites belonged to the Azd
group. The Ghassnids originally hailed from Yaman and had stayed in Najrn
during their trek through western Arabia before they reached the Roman limes.
Relations remained close: as already noted, it was to Jbiya under the Ghassnid
king Jabala that the Najrnites sent appeals for help against the persecution insti-
tuted by Ysuf, the king of South Arabia, ca. a.d. 520. And it was to Najrn that
the Ghassnids headed after relations with Byzantium soured during the reign
of Maurice, later in the century.45 The estrangement with Byzantium did not last
long; and once the Ghassnid phylarchy was resuscitated and reestablished, the
social life of the Ghassnid court was revived. Around 600, at the court of the
Ghassnid king al-rith al-Jafni, the Byzantine influence on Najrn through
the Ghassnids was explicitly recognized.46 In light of the friendly encounters
between Najrn of the rithids and Jbiya of the Ghassnids, it is easy to see
that the two cities and the two groups had close cultural relations, represented by
such elements as music and song. So, when Byzantine song in Najrn is mentioned,
surely its mediators from Byzantium to Najrn were the Ghassnids. Hence
43 See Farmer, History of Arabian Music, 3, 5, quoting al-Masdi. It is not at all clear what these
styles in singing were. The name imyari implies a link to the imyarites, the non-Arab inhabitants
of
South Arabia; anafi could suggest the Arabs.
44 Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Bishop of Taphar, ed. and trans. A. Berger (Berlin, 2006),
431.
Though its authenticity has been questioned, for some scholars this Life has to a certain point
passed the
test of Quellenkritik; for the latest on this question, see Bergers comments, 8291. For the
argument of
its essential authenticity, see A. N. Papathanasiou, (Athens, 1991).
45 For these two contacts, see Martyrs, 62, 63, and BASIC I.1, 54348.
46 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XII, 1113, which describes the visit of the Najrnite Yazd ibn Abd
al-Madan to the Ghassnid court, during which he eulogized the Ghassnid king and was
handsomely
rewarded.
195 Music and Song
Byzantine influence in music on the Ghassnids themselves is confirmed by the
reference to it at Najrn.
Sacred Music and Songs of Mourning
Psalmody and hymnography formed an important part in the celebration of
the liturgy, following the recommendation of St. Paul,47 and they prevailed over
instrumental music, frowned upon by the Church Fathers. And so it was among
the Christian Arabs in the three centuries before the rise of Islam.
The case for an Arabic version of parts of the Bible in this period has been
made elsewhere in this series;48 the case for an Arabic liturgy is even stronger, as
evidenced by the clearly liturgical expressions in the famous Dayr Hind inscrip-
tion of ca. a.d. 560.49 The indefatigable Jesuit priest Louis Cheikho hunted for
echoes in Arabic poetry and prose of the celebration of the liturgy among the pre-
Islamic Arabs, and garnered many references. Terms for liturgical chanting that
he culled from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, such as rajjaa, haynama, zamzama,
sabbaa, and jaara, speak for themselves.50 The development of sacred songs
among the pre-Islamic Arabs has to be sought principally in the three urban cen-
ters of Arab Christianity, ra, Najrn, and Jbiya. And it is to the last, Jbiya and
its Ghassnids, and to the Arab federates in general, that the discussion must turn.
Sacred song must have flourished among the federates of Byzantium,51 espe-
cially the Ghassnids. They were devoted to their Monophysite faith, and they
lived in an Oriens that witnessed in Emesa the birth of Romanus the Melode (dis-
cussed above). In the following century, Damascus witnessed the birth of John of
Damascus, the last of the Church Fathers in the Orient and a distinguished hym-
nographer himself, who perfected the kanon.52 So, the sacred song heard in feder-
ate churches and monasteries must have been influenced greatly by the explosion of
hymnography in Byzantium in these times.
Extant contemporary sources on the Ghassnids are silent on their sacred
song and the possible contribution of their poets to hymnography.53 The sole
47 Ephesians 5:1819; Colossians 3:16.
48 See BAFOC, 43543; BAFIC, 42229.
al-Abth 44 (1996), 11.
50 See L. Cheikho, al-Nasrniyya wa dbuha bayna Arab al-Jhiliyya (Beirut, 1923), II, 35960.
51 Even as early as the fourth century, when the federate Arab queen warred against the Arian
emperor Valens in defense of the Nicene Creed and victory poems celebrated her victory; see
BAFOC,
27477, 44042, 44446.
52 On the Arab origin of John of Damascus, see the present writer in The Arab Christian
Tradition, in Christianity: A History in the Middle East, ed. H. Badr (Beirut, 2005), 23132 and
note
19, citing Fr. J. Narallah, Saint Jean de Damas: Son poque, sa vie, son oeuvre (Harissa, Lebanon,
1950).
53 Hymns sung in Ghassnid churches may have been translated from Syriac or Greek or may have
been original compositions by their own poets, such as those written in the nineteenth century, when
reference to hymns is represented in a faint and distant echo in a single verse of the
poet assn, where he refers to the chanting of prayers in the monastery of Fq
in the Golan Heights or in Dayr al-Khammn in the Bathaniyya/Bshn.54 Later
Arabic sources, however, on the Ghassnids relatives, the Arabs of Najrn, pre-
serve some evidence relevant to Christian Arab hymnography in the sixth century.
It comes from the invaluable work of the Yamamite historian al-Hamdn (d. 945)
and deserves a detailed examination.55
In his invaluable ifat Jazrat al-Arab, Hamdn records certain unique fea-
tures of South Arabia, including The places of mourning over the dead; he lists
seven of them.56 He reports that in one of these places, Khaywn, the practice was
that a deceased notable is lamented until another of the same rank dies, and then
mourning is addressed to the latter. He further says that women sing in light verse
to express their grief and while so doing they cry aloud. The men, however, mourn
in tunes that are sung responsively with those of the women.57
It seems likely that this practice and style of mourning are related to the mar-
tyrdoms of Najrn in the sixth century. Hamdn says this practice is unique to
South Arabia, which is where those martyrdoms took place. They were unique
both in when they took placeafter the Peace of the Church in a.d. 313, which
ended the persecution of Christian martyrsand in their number.58
Hamdns discussion thus appears to represent a remarkable survival of a
Christian rite of the distant past, involving principally the rithids of Najrn.
These owed the Ghassnids of Oriens, their relatives, the Monophysite version of
their faith and liturgy, about which the sources on the Ghassnids themselves say
almost nothing. In view of all these considerations, a detailed analysis of this pas-
sage in Hamdn is called for; such analysis strengthens the conclusion that it does
indeed strongly evoke the martyrdoms of Najrn, which continued to resonate
through the centuries to the time of Hamdn in the tenth.
1. It was very natural for the Arabs of South Arabia, especially of Najrn,
where most of the persecutions and the martyrdoms occurred,59 to lament their
the Bible was translated anew into Arabic by the Protestant missionaries in Lebanon associated with
the
American University in Beirut (see hymnals of the period). See Part III, Chapter 7, note 45.
54 See assn, Dwn, I, 116, verse 1; 256, line 7 (on prayers).
55 For al-asn al-Hamdn, see O. Lfgren, Hamdani, EI2, III, 12425.
56 Al-asn al-Hamdn, ifat Jazrat al-Arab, ed. M. al-Akwa (Riyadh, 1974), 34465.
57 Ibid., 365. I dealt with this passage briefly in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 73.
Since then I have come to the conclusion that this practice and style of mourning are related to the
martyrdoms of Najrn.
58 The Book of the Himyarites, ed. A. Moberg (Lund, 1924), cxvicxvii, cxxicxxii. These pages
enu-
merate only the 300 martyrs of Najrn.
59 That Najrn bore the brunt of the persecutions and the martyrdoms is clear from a look at the
table of contents of the Book of the Himyarites, ciciv.
197 Music and Song
dead. Lamenting and elegizing the dead was part of the Arab mores, and marthi,
elegies, were a highly developed subdivision of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, which
produced some of the best elegies in the entire corpus of that poetry.60 The Arabs
of Najrn had their own school of poets,61 and they surely would not have deprived
their own dead of threnodies in the aftermath of the war of religion that raged in
that region in the sixth century.62 After these martyrdoms, South Arabia became
a sort of a holy land because the martyrs blood was spilled in many and various
parts of the country, but Najrn became the center of Arab Christian pilgrimage.
Reflecting the memory of the martyrs in the liturgy was consonant with lamenting
the dead more Arabico, and so this unique expression of mourning in South Arabia
represents the confluence of the two currentsthe Arab and the Christian.63
2. The toponyms enumerated in the Hamdn passage point in the same
direction, and some of them can be checked with the primary document for South
Arabia, The Book of the imyarites. The Book makes clear that the three main
centers of the persecutions were Najrn, Marib, and Hajaren (in aramawt).64
Hamdn mentions five cities: Najrn, Khaywn, Sada, al-Jawf, and Marib. So,
two of the toponyms that appear in the Book are also named by Hamdn. The
Book, however, does not necessarily include all the places that witnessed the mar-
tyrdoms; it focuses on the three main centers, ranging from Najrn in the north,
to Marib in the middle, and to Hajaren in the southeast. Around these three cen-
ters may be grouped the others mentioned by Hamdn, such as Khaywn and
60 The Andalusian author Ibn Abd Rabbih devoted almost a hundred pages to marathi and con-
solations in his classic work, al-Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn, A. I. Abyr, and A. Hrn (Beirut,
1982),
III,228311. These elegies belong mostly to the Islamic period, but they continue an Arabic
tradition
that went back to pre-Islamic times (and some pre-Islamic elegies are included). The standard work
on mourning among the Arabs now is N. M. El-Cheikh, Mourning and the Role of the Nia, in
Identidades Marginales, ed. C. de la Puente (Madrid, 2003), 395412.
61 For this dwn, collected by al-Sukkari and al-midi, see N. al-Asad, Madir al-Shir al-Jhili
(1956; reprint, Beirut, 1988), 543, 546. One of the poets of the school of Najrn, Abd Yagth,
elegized
himself before his death in a poem that he recited; it is one of the most famous elegies in the history
of
Arabic poetry (see Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVI, 328). Abd Yagth and his poetry elicited the
admiration of
al-Ji z, that ninth-century connoisseur of Arabic poetry; see his al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, ed. A.
Hrn
(Cairo, 1961), II, 268; IV, 45. As Abd Yaguth elegized himself, so did Ruhm/Ruhayma, the most
promi-
nent woman martyr of Najrn; what she said has been preserved in Syriac (see Martyrs, 5758).
62 Especially as others in various parts of Christendom mourned and remembered the martyrs of
Najrn; they include Jacob of Sarj, who wrote a letter of consolation after the first persecution; the
anonymous writer of the laudes Nagranae in the Martyrium Arethae; and John Psaltes, who wrote a
hymn on the martyrs. For the letter of Jacob of Sarj and the Hymn of Ioannes Psaltes, see R.
Schrter,
Trostschreiben Jacobs von Sarg an die himyaritischen Christen, Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenlndischen Gesellschaft 31 (1877), 306405. On the Laudes Nagranae, see Martyrs, 21112.
63 Islam discouraged mourning but the practice has survived in various parts of the Muslim world.
Its most outstanding example is the mourning that continues in Shiite communities throughout the
Muslim world over usayn the son of Ali, who fell at the battle of Karbal in a.d. 680.
64 See The Book of the Himyarites, ciciv.
Sada in the orbit of Najrn, and others as well in the region of Madij.65 But
Najrn remains the primary focus. Perhaps the practice of mourning initiated for
these sixth-century martyrs spread in later Islamic times to become the mode of
remembering Islamic figures who died or were killed in the neighboring regions.
Christian monuments became Muslim ones in South Arabia; one example is the
monastery or Church of St. Sergius in Tarm (aramawt), which became the
mosque of Sarjs.66
3. In addition to listing toponyms that point in the direction of the sixth-
century martyrs, the passage gives a detailed description of how both the women
and the men of these places in South Arabia customarily expressed their mourning
through the responsive singing of tunes, lun. This style in singing, the tarjit in
Arabic, certainly brings to mind the antiphonal singing in the church during the
celebration of the liturgy, when a choir of men sings alternately with a choir of boys
or women; this practice is definitely not an Arab custom and suggests Christian
influence. South Arabia in its entirety became a very Muslim country in the ninth
century, and the presence of such a Christian element surely points to a period, the
sixth century, when the country had been Christian; at the same time, the promi-
nence given to mourning suggests the most important event in the Christian his-
tory of the region, namely, the martyrdoms at Najrn.67
Hamdn discusses the mourning, the niya, in general in these locales, and
says that women mourn in light verse, shir khaff, to tunes that they themselves
compose. Then follows a statement that could suggest some responsive singing
among the women, who also lament aloud, yaina.68
That mourning was performed in Arabia by women was not surprising,
as they perform this function in many societies; the Near East even witnessed
65 For these toponyms, see A. Jamme, Sabaean Inscriptions from Maram Bilqs (Mrib)
(Baltimore,
1962), Plate G. The region of the Madij group, one of these seven toponyms, was near Najrn,
since
some genealogists believed that the rithids of Najrn belong to Madij. The name of a village in
the
region of Najrn, al-Ahr (plural of hir), the pure ones, which suggests a place associated with
the
martyrs, is described as being a part of the land of Khatham, ar Khatham; see Bakri, Mujam
(Cairo,
1951), II, 562.
66 On Masjid Sarjs, see Shahd, Byzantium in South Arabia, 8487. Since writing that article,
which discussed whether the Arabic Sarjs represents George or Sergius, I have concluded that it is
more
likely to be Sergius and that this demonstrates the influence of the Byzantinized Ghassnids: St.
Sergius
was their saint and the saint of the army of the Orient.
67 It is not clear why Khaywn in particular is singled out for this extraordinary style in mourn-
ing. However, the practice reflects the importance of mourning as a way of keeping the memory of
the
deceased alive in the consciousness of the townsfolk, which in turn could go back to the special
venera-
tion for martyrs, who had given their most precious lives for their ideals.
68 Hamdn uses the verb yatakhlasnahu, they steal, pilfer [the light verse] among themselves,
and his meaning is somewhat obscure. The root kh-l-s, used in the tafala form, endows the
derivative
with reciprocity, suggesting that each female mourner who composes some verses jealously guards
them
as her own, but cannot help her colleagues hearing and using them.
199 Music and Song
professional female mourners, hired by the bereaved to sing and sometimes to cry
for their dead.69 It is noteworthy, however, that in South Arabia they mourned over
the dead in metrical compositions. This is consonant with the fact that some ele-
gies in Arabicand some of the bestwere composed by women; the most famous
female elegist in this pre-Islamic period was al-Khans.70 It is also noteworthy that
the women of South Arabia set these elegiac verses to music.
After mentioning the female mourners, Hamdn states that the men have
their own tunes, different from those of the women, which are used in wonderfully
responsive singing that involved both the men and the women.71 The description
confirms the argument for the antiphonal nature of mourning in these locations.
Hamdns last statement on male mourners refers to them as mawli, that is,
non-Arabs who were affiliated with an Arab group and so became their clients.72
Their involvement suggests foreign influence in this style of mourning. The con-
tinuation of the practice by these non-Arab mourners in Islamic times is indeed
a remarkable instance of the persistence of a heritage rooted in the distant past,
echoes of which are, apparently, audible in present-day Yaman.73
Antiphonal singing came from abroad, and in the context of sixth-century
Christian Arabia could only have come from the region of Christian cultural dom-
inancenamely, Byzantium in the north, which was mediated to South Arabia
principally through the Ghassnids. An explicit statement on Byzantine influence
in Najrn comes from Ifahn; in Kitb al-Aghn, he describes the visit of the
pre-Islamic poet al-Ash to Najrn and its rulers, who would entertain him inter
alia with al-ghin al-Rmi, Rhomaic Byzantine singing.74 Though this song was
undoubtedly not sacred but secular,75 it does document the Byzantine influence. If
this secular song penetrated South Arabia, a fortiori sacred song did too, since this
was the century of the flowering of Christianity in South Arabia. Evidence for the
prevalence of such song is provided by the Laws of St. Gregentius. This draconian
code, said to have been imposed on South Arabia by a bishop sent from Byzantium,
prohibited all sorts of secular entertainment and instead recommended religious
69 The Arabs did not equate all expressions of grief, declaring that the grief of the mourning
bereaved
mother is different from that of the hired mourner; see Ibn Abd Rabbih, al-Iqd al-Fard, II, 228.
70 Al-Khans belonged to the pre-Islamic period but lived long enough to convert to Islam; on her,
see Sezgin, GAS, II, 31114.
71 The statements end in Arabic: wa li al-rijl min al-mawli lun ghayr dhlika ajbat al-tarj
bayn al-rijl wa al-nis; Hamdn, ifat Jazrat al-Arab, 365.
72 For mawli, see P. Crone, Mawli, EI2, VI, 87487.
73 According to the twentieth-century editor of Hamdn, M. al-Akwa; see ifat Jazrat al-Arab,
365 note 2.
75 The music was of two kinds, as noted aboveanafi and imyaribut little is known about
them; see Farmer, A History of Arabian Music, 3, 15, and see above, note 43.
entertainmentpsalmody and hymnography.76 It clearly illustrates the influence
of the Byzantine north, which dispatched a bishop to Christianize the country
after military victory was achieved.
To the victory of Christianity in South Arabia, Byzantium contributed
much, and in the years that followed it continued to contribute to the arts of peace,
both secular and religious,77 often through the Ghassnids. It is, therefore, natu-
ral to assume that in addition to the secular Rhomaic song explicitly referred to by
Ifahn, sacred song, supported by the Laws of Gregentius, also penetrated Najrn
and South Arabia in general, a conclusion drawn by inference from examination of
the passage in Hamdns ifat Jazrat al-Arab.
The Ghassnids were not only a professional military group but also enthu-
siastic Monophysites. Their patron saint was none other than Sergius, the soldier
who had died as a martyr some three centuries before. Death on the battlefield was
a fate they faced and expected, and their reaction to it was shaped by both Arab
and Christian influences. This may be illustrated by a recollection of some of the
events in their history, and more specifically by the career of the famous Arethas.
1. At the battle of Qinnasrn, Arethas son, Jabala, was killed. His father bur-
ied him in a martyrion in Qinnasrn/Chalcis.78 Elegies no doubt were written and
recited on that occasion as was customary on the death of warriors in pre-Islamic
Arabia, perhaps in this case compounded with Christian sentiments and prayers
for the dead.
2. Such must have been the case when the redoubtable warrior Arethas him-
self died in a.d. 569. Decades after his death, Labd, one of the poets of the so-
called Suspended Odes, could still refer to it simply by mentioning the Day of
Jalliq, where he apparently died and was buried.79 His death must have inspired
elegies as his life did panegyrics, and they were probably set to music and sung.80
Alqamas celebrated panegyric on him was sung to the Ghassnid king by the
poet himself.81
3. Even more revealing is a verse in the panegyric of assn, written in the
Islamic period after the fall of the dynasty: it refers to the Ghassnids as sitting or
76 The code suppresses such performances as those of zither players, lyre players, and dancers and
imposes punishments on them, and it recommends psalmody; see section 35 of the code in PG
LXXXVI,
cols. 600661 (it again recommends psalmody in section 38, col. 661). For an English translation,
see Gregentios, Life and Works, 430, 431.
77 See Shahd, Byzantium in South Arabia.
79 Labd, Dwn, ed. I. Abbs (Kuwait, 1962), 266, verses 4952; for a discussion of this remem-
brance of the death of Arethas, see BASIC II.1, 27880.
80 See Ab Nar al-Frbi, Kitb al-Msq al-Kabr, 73.
1969), 3349.
201 Music and Song
going around the tomb of Arethas, son of Mriya.82 The verse attracted the atten-
tion of the medieval scholiasts, who were not as well informed on the Ghassnids
as they were on the Lakhmids.83 Though assn did not become the poet laure-
ate of the Ghassnids until some two or three decades after Arethas death and
his burial in Jalliq or Jbiya, the poet could still speak of the Ghassnids around
his tomb. Recognizing that the deceased might be mourned long after his burial
(a practice observed in Najrn by Hamdn) helps us to understand this verse.
The Ghassnids kept the memory of the celebrated warrior alive by mourning
him even years after his death. Moreover, his tomb must have been a mausoleum
that became a pilgrimage or visitation center for the Ghassnids, and thus a site
noticed by the poet.
The only document on the Ghassnids that is clearly and explicitly a lament
on one of their kings is the ode of al-Nbigha on the death of al-Numn,84 which
occurred in obscure circumstances (probably his fall on the battlefield); it may have
been chanted as a lament. Although the ode belongs to secular poetry, its finale
expresses a Christian sentiment that allies it to what was usually said on such occa-
sions during Christian funerals,85 emphasizing resurrection and life after death.
The ode qualifies as an epitaphios logos, a funeral oration.
82 The sons of Jafna [the Ghassnids] are around the tomb of their father; assn, Dwn, I, 74,
verse 11.
83 One such scholiast thought that the poet did not say much in praise of the Ghassnids in compos-
ing that verse, and so he did not see its point. Another suggested that the verse implied that they
were not
pastoralists but sedentary urbanites. See Ibn Askir, Mujam al-Shuar min Trkh Madnat
Dimashq,
ed. H. Farfr and S. Faam (Beirut, 1999), II, 172.
84 For the ode, see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 11522. The ode
touched even the dour Nldeke; see GF, 3839.
85 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 12122, verses 2530. The sentiment was understood as Christian by Ab-
Ubayda (see S. Fayals edition of the Dwn [Beirut, 1968], 120 note 31) and by Nldeke (GF, 38
note
3). The expression echoes the words of Jesus before raising Lazarus (John 21:25). The term
muallhu,
those who prayed for him at the funeral (verse 25), confirms the interpretation of the sentiment as
Christian.
Appendix
and in Arabic
The Arabic term for prostitution is bagh, and its practitioner is a baghiyy. But
Arabic has another term for the latter, namely, mmis, a term that the medieval
lexicographers somewhat desperately tried to explain as related to the Arabic root
w-m-s, rub off.1 Impressive as the work of the medieval lexicographers was, its
weakness resided in their limited knowledge: they were monolingual, ignorant of
Syriac or Greek. Their efforts to etymologize and explain mmis, prostitute, within
the autogenous framework of Arabic illustrate this shortcoming. The provenance
1 See ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1997), VI, 494.
is clearly foreign, deriving from Greek on phonetic and other grounds. Tracing the
route taken by the term into Arabic is a fruitful exercise, since it sheds light not
only on the contribution of Byzantine Greek to Arabic lexicography but also on
social life among the Arabs of Oriens in this pre-Islamic period.
The principal form of entertainment in antiquity ceased to exist in Byzantine
times; the theater of classical Greece degenerated into pantomime and mime
(farce), and the latter degenerated further when it became licentious and vulgar.2
The church reluctantly tolerated chariot races but not mimes, whose low status is
evidenced by the fact that the term , related to mime, denoted prostitute.3
Surely this is the term that passed into pre-Islamic Arabic as mmis: though as
often happens the vocalic sequence was altered in transliteration, the terms skel-
eton, its three consonants, was preserved.4
Mimes were performed in the Graeco-Roman urban centers of Oriens despite
the opposition of the church; through these venues, especially the cities of the
Decapolis, the word passed into pre-Islamic Arabic.5 Surprisingly, the locus
classicus for its attestations in this period is the Dwn of assn, the panegyrist of
the Ghassnids: mimes ran counter to their Arabic ethos and mores as well as the
ideals and prohibitions of their Christian faith. The seeming contradiction may be
resolved by remembering that assn was a hedonist who loved wine and song, as
is clear from his Dwn; he probably watched a performance of mime in one of the
cities of the Decapolis. He would have heard the term there or learned it from the
Rhomaic Arabs, who may have already naturalized into Arabic as mmis, as
they had naturalized theatron as teiatra.6
The Arabic lexica do not cite attestations of the term mmis. Hence the
value of the Dwn of assn, the poet who probably mediated the passage of the
term from the mimes of Oriens to the Arabic poetic koine and popularized it else-
where. In Yathrib, his native city, he composed verses in which he used the term
many times.7
2 On the theater and mime in Byzantine times, see A. Karpozilos, Theater, ODB, III, 2031, and
A. Kazhdan, Mime, ODB, II, 1375, with their bibliographies.
3 See E. A. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from b.c. 146 to
a.d. 1100), 2nd ed. (1914; reprint, New York, 2005), II, 760. In classical Greek, the term meant
actress;
see LSJ, s.v. Its slide in Greek to the meaning prostitute is easy to follow: the were often
buffoons
() and were less respectable than the serious actors, the (to use the terms of
Aristotles
Poetics, I.1), and female actors () were commonly believed to be involved in prostitution.
4 Similarly, the Latin Gallica, the name of the legion, became Arabic Gillac, the camp of the legion;
5 The Nabataean Arabs had taken kindly to the theater, and the remains of Petra, their capital,
preserved specimens of it; see A. Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia (Leiden,
1995),
67.
6 Ibid., 6.
203 Music and Song
Another verse in the Dwn of assn is crucial because it both demonstrates
the Greek origin of the Arabic term mmis and reveals another loanword from
Greek that passed into Arabic, namely, , actor. In lampooning and variously
taunting a group in South Arabia, assn calls them the maymis of Gaza (plu-
ral of maymas), which the lexicographers distinguished from mmis and which
according to them means a person who elicits from others laughteran Arabic
amplification of the term jester, a comic actor such as was cast in a mime.8 Gaza
was a terminus of the spice route that Arab traders coming from western Arabia
traversed. It was a city in which the Arabs had a presence since ancient times, and
in the sixth century it contained both mimes and brothels.9
I, 189, verse 4; 263, verse 3; 343, verse 4; 440, verse 4. The plural for mmis appears in three
differ-
ent morphological forms; this variation could suggest that the loanword was a recent borrowing,
and
assn was experimenting in finding a plural for it.
8 Ibid., 360, verse 3; for the scholium that supplies the meaning jesters, see II, 256 note 190.
The scholiast guessed correctly, distinguishing maymas from the almost homophonous term mmis,
prostitute.
9 See G. Downey, Gaza in the Early Sixth Century (Norman, Okla., 1963), 43, 142. Choricius,
Gazas rhetorician, wrote his Apologia Mimorum in defence of mimes.
IX
Dance
D
ance is a kind of entertainment that is hardly documented in the extant
sources on the Ghassnids. This is not altogether surprising, in view of the
Ghassnids conservatism in accepting and allowing performances that could
smack of indecency. Nevertheless, some form of dance surely did exist in Ghassnid
and federate society, as it did in Byzantium in one form or another.1
The Ghassnids interest in dance must have started while they were still in
South Arabia, where dance was no doubt known as a form of entertainment. Early
in the sixth century it is documented in the Laws attributed to Saint Gregentius,
who like the Byzantine Church Fathers rejected dance and imposed strict penalties
on its practitioners.2 Even without the testimony of these laws, which some view
as spurious,3 South Arabia was familiar with dance; a bronze statue has survived
that attractively renders a South Arabian dancer.4 In addition to imyarite South
Arabia, a possible source of influence was Ethiopia, whose inhabitants were known
in ancient and medieval times for their love of dance, attested early in the seventh
century.5 Christian Ethiopia did have dealings with the Arabswith Najrn,
Jbiya, and the Ghassnids, all Monophysitesespecially during and after the fifty
1 For dance in Byzantium, see Ph. Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos (Athens, 194857),
V, 20644, and A. Karpozilos, Dance, ODB, I, 582.
2 See Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar, ed. and trans. A. Berger (Berlin,
2006), 430, 431, where dance and dancers are mentioned four times. In addition to being banished
from
social life, dancers were liable to be whipped and consigned to a years hard labor if they were
caught
performing.
3 See Chapter 8, note 44.
4 For this bronze statue, found in
Zafr, the capital of the imyarites of South Arabia, see

W. Phillips, Qatabn and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of
Arabia
(New York, 1955), 305.
5 The sources for the life of the Prophet Muammad contain descriptions of the Absh
(Abyssinians) dancing before isha, the wife of the Prophet; and his own cousin Jafar, when he
returned from Ethiopia about a.d. 630 after the first Muslim emigration (hijra) to it, started to dance
in his presence. See N. al-Asad, al-Qiyn wa al-Ghin fi al-Shir al-Jhili (1960; reprint, Beirut,
1988),
13435.
205 Dance
years that Ethiopians were present in the Arabian Peninsula, following the victory
of their Negus over the imyarite king Ysuf ca. a.d. 525.
But the main influence on the Ghassnids regarding dance must have been
Byzantine Oriens. As foederati of Byzantium for a century and a half, they must
also have been influenced by Byzantinized Arab Rhomaioi of former Nabataea and
Palmyrena.
Unfortunately, the sources reveal next to nothing on dance. The poets of
Arabia are interested in the qiyn as instrumentalists and vocalists, rather than
as dancers,6 and the same is true of assns verse. The term for dance, raqs, does
appear in his poetry, however, in a description of the wine at the bottom of his
cup.7 There is no extant reference to the attire of Arab dancers in Oriens, but danc-
ers in East Arabia are apparently described as wearing a long dress.8
As dance survived in Byzantine society at certain feasts and some occasions,
especially weddings, so it must have persisted among the Ghassnids. Chapter 3 has
analyzed the account of a Ghassnid wedding in the region of Antioch. It explic-
itly describes a group of maidens dancing in a circle, in the midst of which the
Ghassnid princess Dhalf was singing. Unlike prose compositions such as
assns on the court of Jabala, this account is of uncertain authenticity, but it pro-
vides the only reference to dance among the Ghassnids. One is therefore reduced
to seeking the Byzantine influence indirectly from the social life of the major
Arab Rhomaic city, Bostra, the capital of the Nabataean Arabs before its annexa-
tion by Trajan in a.d. 106. That city and others close to the Ghassnids, such as
Gerasa, were venues for theatrical performances, such as the Maiumas festivities,
against which Justinian issued legislation (apparently not strictly enforced).9 These
included mimes and pantomimes of varying degrees of lewdness, with which the
Ghassnids may have gained some familiarity. Taverns were probably also common
venues for dance, performed by songstresses.
As has been argued in the appendix to Chapter 8, the Arabic word mmis,
prostitute, derived from the Greek ; and , women acting in mimes,
6 Ash may refer to dancers in one of his verses; see ibid., 233, verse 8. Another possible source
is a quartet of verses by arafa; see ibid., 64, well translated by R. G. Hoyland in Arabia and the
Arabs
(London, 2001), 134.
I, 75, verse 25. He applies the term murqit (plural of murqia), the nomen agentis of the verb to
dance,
to camels (316, verse 9).
8 The dancers in Ashs verse (see note 6) wear long dresses that reach the floor.
9 For the Maiumas festivities, Justinians legislation against them, and their popularity in various
cities of Oriens from Antioch to Gaza, see A. Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia
Arabia
(Leiden, 1995), 11 note 33. See also G. Greatrex and J. W. Watt, One, Two, or Three Feasts? OC
83
(1999), 121, especially 8ff.
performed in Bostra.10 Some of the federate Arabs must have watched them, and
their poet laureate was one of the early transmitters of the term mmis to Arabic.11
assn, the bon vivant, must have seen these mimes at which dancers performed
with some sensual latitude.
10 See Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia, 5355.
11 As noted in the appendix, the term mmis is attested many times in assns Dwn, I; see 263,
verse 3; 343, verses 4, 9, 11; 440, verse 4.
X
Victory Celebrations
T
he political and military history of the peninsular Arabs turned largely
around the ayym,1 the battle-days of the Arabs, in which mounted horse-
men participated. Memories of these ayym were preserved in later collections
in prose accounts of the battles, but more importantly in contemporary poetry
composed on the encounters, which constituted part of the celebrations that fol-
lowed the victory. One of these ayym of pre-Islamic Arabia was Yawm Khazza,
when a confederation of northern Arabs, usually called Adannis, fought against
the southern Arabs, usually called Qanis. Those of the north were led by the
two Christian groups of Taghlib and Bakr, and the victory was described by a
Taghlibite, Amr ibn Kulthm, in a passage of his so-called Suspended Ode,
Muallaqa.2 It described some specific details of the battle, such as the lighting of
the Fire of War announcing the impending encounter and the placement of the
forces: Taghlib on the right wing and Bakr on the left. The simple life of the pas-
toral Arabs and the harsh climate of Arabia Pastoralis allowed its inhabitants few
pleasures and forms of entertainment. The celebration of battlefield victories was
one of their major forms of entertainment, which was mixed with pride in their
achievement.
The Arab federates of Byzantium in this late antique periodTankhids,
Salids, and Ghassnidshad been peninsular Arabs before they became foe-
derati. After their change in status, their victory celebrationslike many other
aspects of their social lifewere strongly influenced by those of an empire in
which such celebrations reflected imperial ideology.3 For a better understanding of
federate victory celebrations in Oriens, it is necessary to preface the discussion with
a few words on imperial celebrations in this period.
1 See E. Mittwoch, Ayym, EI2, I, 79394.
2 The passage is translated in A. J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature
(London and New York, 1957), 207, verses 2134.
3 Much light has been shed on these celebrations by Michael McCormick in his volume on the sub-
ject, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval
West
(Cambridge, 1986).
The Christian Roman Empire inherited from the earlier pagan principate
many features that it continued, adapted, and modified. Hundreds of triumphal
arches were erected the length and breadth of the empire to symbolize imperial
victories during the principate, and trophies were also erected, sometimes invok-
ing religion with such figures as Jupiter Victor and Juno Victrix. Commemorations
of victory penetrated the Roman calendar: the first princeps, Augustus, ordered
that his great victory of 31 b.c. at Actium be celebrated in the various provinces.4
The Christian Roman Empire inherited many of these manifestations of victory
and emphasized some of its own.5 Just as Augustus was instrumental in promot-
ing these imperial celebrations, so too Constantine, the first Christian emperor,
actively promoted Christian ones.6 Triumphal arches, so popular during the prin-
cipate, fell out of favor,7 and the involvement of religion in the imperial victory cel-
ebrations grew.8 The Christian Church prayed for the victory and for the emperor
as he formally set out to begin the campaign, his profectio; during the battle, the
liturgy of war was celebrated;9 and after the victory, the church also prayed for
the arrival home of the victorious emperor, his adventus. All this was repeated in
the provinces. The emperors were especially desirous to mount victory celebrations
in provinces such as Oriens, as a way of cementing the bonds between the cen-
tral government in Constantinople and its far-flung subjects in distant provinces.10
And these provinces felt the impact of victory celebrations, especially during the
reign of Justinian,11 who gave an impetus to these celebrations with his penchant
for imperial propaganda and publicity; witness the splendid victory celebration for
the successful conclusion of his wars against the Vandals, described by Procopius in
colorful detail, which involved the emperor himself; the vanquished Vandal king,
Gelimer; and the victorious general, Belisarius.12
As one of the dioceses of the empire, Oriens responded sympathetically to
imperial victory celebrations. The residents own conception of such observances,
inherited from their peninsular Arab past, must have been enhanced and enriched
by those of the empire with which they were now closely associated.13 In the
4 See ibid., 1134.
5 On these celebrations in late antiquity in Byzantium, see ibid., 35130.
6 On Constantine and victory celebrations, see ibid., 100ff.; on banquets as an element in
Constantines victory celebration of his Vicennalia, see 1045.
7 On arches during the principate, see ibid., 25; in late antiquity, 97.
8 For the great role of the church in victory celebrations, see ibid., 10011.
9 For the liturgy of war during the Byzantine military campaigns and the religious sentiments of
the author, see Maurice, Maurices Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy, trans. G.
T.
Dennis (Philadelphia, 1984), especially 8, 9, 33, 65, 77.
10 For celebration of these victories in the provinces, see McCormick, Eternal Victory, 23159.
11 Ibid., 6468.
12 Procopius, History, IV.ix.116.
13 It is not easy to disentangle the Byzantine and Arab ways of celebration. The same problem
faced
209 Victory Celebrations
celebration of such victories, the federate cavalry must have played a major role. It
was the instrument of victory in the battles that they fought for Byzantium, and
their most valuable contribution to the Byzantine war machine.
The victory celebrations of the Ghassnids are the best attested among the
Arab foederati, for their sources are more abundant; but a brief survey of previous
Arab federate celebrations, which the Ghassnids continued and developed, will
help to elucidate their practice.
I. Fourth-Century Celebrations
Traces of such celebrations among the Arab federates are detectable as early as
the fourth century, when Mavia, the Arab federate queen, won two wars: one
against the imperial army of Valens in Oriens and another, shortly thereafter,
when a contingent of her mounted federates successfully defeated the Goths, and
also defended Constantinople after the disaster of Adrianople in a.d. 378.14 The
poets sang her victories in epinician odes that rang through Arab Oriens and even
reached the ears of the ecclesiastical historian Sozomen in southern Palestine.15
In the sequel to the revolt, Mavia clinched her victory with a favorable treaty
with Rome.16 The necessarily brief account of the ecclesiastical historians did not
accommodate such details as a victory celebration, but one relevant datum has
been preservednamely, the marriage of the victorious queens daughter to the
Byzantine master of horse, Victor, who was involved in the war waged by Mavia
and the peace she concluded.17 Surely the nuptials were duly celebrated after the
conclusion of the war and before Victors return to Constantinople to take part
in the Gothic war, and must have included a wedding banquet.18 Thus, this mar-
riagenot unlike that of alma, the daughter of the Ghassnid king Arethas,
to the warrior who won her hand after performing so well in the battle of Yawm
alma19added a romantic element to the victory celebration.
Mavias second victory, even more spectacular than the first, was achieved
in Europe, near Constantinople, against the Goths and in defense of the capital.
researchers examining Byzantine and Germanic elements in the Roman Occident; see McCormick,
Eternal Victory, 6 note 17.
14 On Mavia and her exploits in these wars against and for the empire, see BAFOC, 13883.
15 Ibid., 152 note 54.
16 Ibid., 15258.
17 Ibid., 15864.
18 A marriage between an Arab princess and a Byzantine magister equitum must have combined
elements of both Arab and Byzantine weddings. According to McCormick, The institution of
imperial
banquets was an important classical legacy to Late Antique society (Eternal Victory, 105), and the
vic-
tory celebrations in late antiquity, started by Constantine, included a magnificent state banquet of
the
kind he threw during the celebration of his Vicennalia (104).
19 See Chapter 2 , above.
Furthermore, the performance of the cuneus, the contingent of horsemen she con-
tributed, was eulogized in detail by Zosimus, who could not have been accused of
partiality to the Saracens of Mavia: he was no friend of barbarian ethnic groups,
and made no secret of his antipathies.20 He credited the Arab contingent with
three virtues: the unconquerable thrust of the long pikes with which they trans-
fixed their adversaries, the speed and agility of their horses, and the riders skill in
fighting on horseback.21 These details explain the fame of Mavias equus caballus,
whose virtues must also have been demonstrated in her first war against Valens, but
on which the ecclesiastical historians are silent.
The celebrations for this victory must have resembled those for the first,
minus the romantic element of the wedding. But they must have featured the other
elements expected on such occasions: (1) a parade of the Arabian horses, since they
performed so well in the Gothic war; (2) a banquet; (3) poetry composed to com-
memorate the victory, as it had been when Mavia won the war against the emperor
Valens; and (4) most probably, a religious ceremony.
These celebrations were sponsored by a Christian queen who fought for the
Nicene faith; after the peace, she sent her mounted contingent to fight the Goths in
successful defense of the Christian Empire and the God-guarded city. It is practically
certain that a religious ceremony, offering thanks for the Christian victory and for
the safe return of the contingent, was part of the celebration. This was the century
opened by Constantine, whose rule encouraged the renaissance of victory celebra-
tion and the churchs involvement in itwhich led to the ultimate Christianization
of these celebrations, as Michael McCormick has argued.22 Imitatio imperii took
place in victory celebrations, such as Mavias, in the provinces.23
II. Fifth-Century Celebrations
The paucity of the sources for the fifth century in the history of Byzantine-
Persian relations is well known, and is explained by the relatively peaceful rela-
tions that obtained between the two world powers. The same holds true for
the sources on the Arab foederati, since they are usually mentioned in the con-
text of the Byzantine-Persian conflicts. An exception to the calm was the war
of a.d. 420421, the more important of the two wars that occurred during the
reign of Theodosius II.24 It was a Byzantine victory that inflicted heavy casual-
ties on the Persians and their Arab allies, thousands of whom were drowned in
20 See RA, 11322.
21 See Zosimus, Historia Nova, ed. L. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1887), IV.22.
22 McCormick, Eternal Victory, 101, 9, 100111.
23 Ibid., 255.
24 For these wars, see BAFIC, 2540.
the Euphrates.25 While writing on this war, the ecclesiastical historian Sozomen
said that the Saracen allies of Byzantium proved themselves formidable to the
Persians and their allies.26
As has been explained in a previous volume, these allies were the Salids,
the new foederati of Byzantium in the fifth century, who had been converted to
Christianity after their chiefs wife was cured of her sterility by a Christian monk.27
Even after the Muslim conquest of Oriens, when the Muslim commander, Ab
Ubayda, found them in their encampment near Chalcis/Qinnasrn and asked
them to adopt Islam, they refused and remained Christians.28
In September of 421, the announcement was made in Constantinople of an
important victory over the Persians. Although the details of the victory celebra-
tions have not survived, it has been cogently argued that they did take place, and
even that anniversary games were instituted by Theodosius II to commemorate the
imperial victory.29 It is likely that the Salids, zealous Christians and formidable
warriors in the Persian war, would also have celebrated the victory to which they
had contributed. Details are missing, as they are for the Byzantine celebrations in
Constantinople, but they can be inferred by analogy from the aftermath of an inter-
Arab war that flared up within the Salid phylarchate in Oriens, when one Arab
federate group fueled an insurgency against the Salids and actually succeeded in
killing their king, Dwd.30 A surviving triplet of verses clearly expresses the pride
of the winning party in the contesthere, the Kalb and Namir tribal groups.31 The
verses by themselves do not prove a celebration, but in view of the established fact
that victories were usually followed by a celebration at which poetry was recited,
one can argue that the two tribes held a victory celebration and the verses are its
sole remnant.
More significant than the victory of these two tribal groups over the
Salid Dwd was that of Ghassn over the Salids, which resulted in the fall
of the Salids as the principal foederati of Byzantium in the fifth century. The
Ghassnids victory over the Salids was also expressed in some poetry, which
may likewise have been occasioned by a celebration, since this was a major military
25 Ibid., 28, 30, 32.
26 Ibid., 32 and note 43; see Sozomen, Historia Eccelesiastica, ed. J. Bidez, Griechischen
christlichen
Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte 50 (Berlin, 1960), VI.xxxviii.
27 BAFIC, 8.
28 Balduri, Fut al-Buldn, ed. S. al-Munajjid (Cairo, 1956), I, 172.
29 See McCormick, Eternal Victory, 58.
30 See BAFIC, 25762.
31 For the verses, see Yqt, Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 1957), IV, 331. On the two regicides, from
two powerful tribal groups, Kalb and al-Namir ibn-Wabara, see BAFIC, 25859, 30910.
encounter that marked the end of one phylarchate in the Orient and the rise of
anotherthat of the Ghassnids.
III. Ghassnid Celebrations
As noted often in this volume, the Ghassnids of the sixth century were the most
powerful of all the foederati in the service of Byzantium. Furthermore, their
century, the sixth, witnessed, after the previous long lull, the outbreak of the
Persian wars and their continuance in the reign of every emperor until that of
Heraclius in the seventh century. Hence it is possible to discuss Ghassnid vic-
tory celebrations in a more meaningful way than was possible for their federate
predecessors. The reign of Arethas (529569) coincided with that of Justinian,
the great propagandist of the invincibility of the imperium Romanum and its
aniktos, the autokrator. During his reign, community participation in vic-
tory celebrations was cultivated through such means as public rejoicing, gaudia
publica.32 All these elements influenced the Ghassnids, who had close relations
with Byzantium, and so they present the best chance of gaining insight into cel-
ebrations conducted in Oriens by the provincials. Furthermore, the Ghassnids
lived in an Oriens in which manifestations of victory celebrations were visible.
Triumphal arches erected during the principate were in cities all around them,
though during late antiquity fewer were constructed.33 But trophy monuments
could still be seen.
The Reign of Arethas
The Battle of Daras
Victory celebrations were started by Justinian quite early after his accession.
In a.d. 530, Belisarius, who had been recently appointed magister militum per
Orientem, won his spurs at the battle of Daras and the emperor celebrated this vic-
tory in Constantinople.34 Justinians bronze equestrian statue was one of its mani-
festations.35 The Ghassnid Arethas, too, had just been promoted to the supreme
32 For the gaudia publica and the laetitiae publicae, which reached the provincials in late antiquity,
see McCormick, Eternal Victory, 234.
33 Ibid., 25.
34 Ibid., 64.
35 Ibid. To the equestrian statue as a manifestation of victory celebrations may be added the
church of St. Sergius and Bacchus, since Sergius was perceived as the palladium of Byzantium
against
Persia. See the present writer in The Church of Sts. Sergios and Bakhos in Constantinople: Some
New
Perspectives, in Byzantium: State and Society, N. Oikonomides Memorial Volume , ed. A.
Abramea,
A. Laiou, and E. Chrysos (Athens, 2003), 46780. This was an article in which I suggested an
alternative
to Cyril Mangos view on the church as one built by Theodora rather than Justinian in order to acco-
modate the Monophysites of Constantinople. In a personal letter Mango was sympathetic to this
view,
but B. Croke expressed dissent from C. Mango and myself in an article, Justinian, Theodora, and
the
Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, DOP 60 (2006), 2563. In n. 140, p. 53, the author states
that
phylarchate in Oriens after distinguishing himself in the punitive expedition
that Byzantium had mounted against its inveterate enemy, the Lakhmid Mundir.
He similarly won his spurs at the battle of Daras, which was entirely a cavalry
engagement,36 in which the Ghassnid horse must have done well and contributed
to the victory of Belisarius.37
The Ghassnids with their equus caballus were employed as foederati pro-
tecting Oriens against the Persians and the Lakhmids. The battle of Daras was
typical of engagements that protected Oriens,38 and the Ghassnids must have par-
ticipated in its provincial victory celebration. The Nabataean Arabs of Bostra cel-
ebrated the victory of Augustus at Actium through the Actia Dousaria.39 Surely
the Ghassnids would have marked the victory of Daras, since unlike the Bostran
Arabs, they actually participated in the battle being celebrated.
The victory celebrations of the battle of Daras in 530 set the tone for the
subsequent Ghassnid victory celebrations as the sequels to their victorious cam-
paigns. These lasted for some thirty years more during the reign of Arethas, but
came to an end in 561 with the peace treaty that Byzantium concluded with Persia
and that Arethas and the Ghassnids scrupulously observed till the end of his reign
in 569. Of all these battles and subsequent victory celebrations, that of the battle of
Chalcis in a.d. 554 was the most memorable.
The Battle of Chalcis
The victory of Chalcis/Qinnasrn, attained against the Lakhmid Mundir, and its
celebrations are well attested.
The relatively abundant sources, all contemporary and authentic, relate to
three different traditionsGreek, Syriac, and Arabiccomplementary to one
another: the Vita of St. Simeon the Younger; the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian,
war with Persia did not break out until AD 530 and he refers to G. Greatrex, Rome and Persia at
War,
502532. See also p. 348, below.
36 See J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (1889; reprint, New York, 1958), 8485.
Justinians statue was equestrian possibly to reflect the fact that Daras was a cavalry engagement.
37 All this was obscured by Procopius in his account of the battle of Daras; see BASIC I.1, 13134.
38 For recent thoughts on Daras see Shahd, The Church of Sts. Sergios and Bakhos, 47072;
idem, The Last Sasanid-Byzantine Conflict in the Seventh Century: The Causes of Its Outbreak,
in Convegno internazionale La Persia e Bisanzio, (Rome, 2004), Appendix 2, p. 244; and K.
Karapli,
Daras: A City-Fortress in Upper Mesopotamia, in , ed.
F. Evangelatou-Notara and T. Maniate-Kokkine (Athens, 2005), 13760.
39 For the Actia Dousaria in Bostra, see M. Sartre, Bostra, des origines lIslam (Paris, 1985), 156
58.
For insightful comments on the Actia Dousaria, see G. W. Bowersock in Roman Arabia
(Cambridge,
Mass., 1983), 12122, and idem, The Cult and Representation of Dusares in Roman Arabia, in
Petra
and the Caravan Cities: Proceedings of the Symposium Organised at Petra in September 1985 by
the
Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and the Iconographic Lexicon of Classical Mythology (LIMC)
with
the Financial Support of UNESCO, ed. F. Zayadine (Amman, 1990), 33.
quoting earlier Syriac documents; and the panegyric of Alqama on Arethas, the
victor of Chalcis.40
It was natural that such rich source material should be available on the bat-
tle, since it was the greatest military encounter between the Ghassnids and the
Lakhmids. Because the foederati served as proxies to the two world powers, it was
both inter-Arab and Byzantine-Sasanid. Moreover, this decisive battle saw not only
the crushing defeat of the Lakhmids but also the death of their king, Mundir, who
had terrorized Oriens for fifty years.
The Arabian equus caballus, found in the contingents of the federates on
both sides of the Persian-Byzantine conflict, receives its due share of attention in
accounts of the battle in both Greek and Arabic. The Greek source praises the
Lakhmid horse, while the Arabic ode of Alqama does justice to the Ghassnid.
The Ghassnid foederati, who were zealous Christians, conducted their wars
against both the Persians and the Lakhmids as soldiers of the cross, fighting fire
worshippers and pagans respectively. This can be inferred from what is known
about them and from the liturgy of war celebrated in Byzantine battles, reflected so
clearly in the Strategikon ascribed to Maurice.41 That they fought as Christians at
the battle of Chalcis is confirmed by the Greek Vita of St. Simeon. Also explicitly
confirmed for that battle, in contrast to the inferential evidence for other victory
celebrations in this period, is the victory bulletin clearly mentioned in the Vita.42
As foederati of Byzantium, the Ghassnids were well integrated into Byzantine
society in Oriens, living as they did among the Arab Rhomaioi of Nabataea and
Palmyrena, and having been converted to Christianity. Hence their assimilation
of much from Byzantium, including the way that the empire conducted its mili-
tary campaigns and the victory celebrations that followed Byzantine victories. It
is thus appropriate to describe both the campaign that culminated in the battle of
Chalcis and its victory celebrations in Byzantine terms, in addition to whatever the
Ghassnids had retained of their Arab heritage with regard to victory celebrations.
1. The profectio bellica, or military departure.43 News reached Jbiya that
Mundir had crossed the frontier and was near Chalcis in the north. Arethas, the
40 For the Vita and the Chronicle, see BASIC I.1, 24151. For Alqamas verse, discussed above in
Chapter 6, see al-Alam al-Shantamar, Dwn Alqama al-Fal, ed. D. al-Khab and I. aqql
(Aleppo,
1969), 4345.
41 See Maurice, Maurices Strategikon, 89, 33, 65, 77, for, inter alia, the blessing of the flags and
the
cry Nobiscum Deus during the battle. For the attribution of the Strategikon to the magister
militum,
Justinianus, see BASIC I.1, 56871.
42 See P. van den Ven, ed., La vie ancienne de S. Symon Stylite le Jeune (521592), Subsidia
hagio-
graphica 52 (Brussels, 1962), I, 165, sec. 187; discussed in BASIC I.1, 24849.
43 For the profectio bellica, see the index of McCormick, Eternal Victory, s.v., and BASIC I.1, 250
51. For a description of it in the tenth century, see McCormick, 249.
Ghassnid phylarch, prepared to advance against him. The long march from Jbiya
in the south, in Palaestina Secunda, to distant Chalcis in the north, especially in
anticipation of a bloody and dangerous encounter with the formidable Lakhmid
adversary, must have started with a profectio in Jbiya, in the Golan, the grazing
ground where the Ghassnid horse was reared and kept. When al-Nbigha, the
panegyrist of the Ghassnids, described in one of his odes the Ghassnid king
leading his cavalry from the Golan for a campaign in the south of Oriens,44 he was
expressing what the people in Jbiya actually saw at the start of each campaign: the
ceremonial march of their horses from the place where they were kept, ready for
combat elsewhere in defense of Oriens. In this case Arethas was leaving the capital
to take the field against Mundir.
2. The liturgy of war. The battle of Chalcis was joined and fought (according
to the poet al-Nbigha) for two days.45 The Ghassnids fought in true Christian
manner, as the Strategikon amply documented, with, inter alia, the blessing of the
flags and the cry of Nobiscum Deus.46 In addition to these Byzantine formulas,
the Ghassnids customarily invoked their patron saint, Sergius, and two figures
from the Bible: Job and Jesus.47 In the particular case of the battle of Chalcis, the
Ghassnids invoked another saint, St. Simeon the Younger, who was still living as
a stylite on his column, not far from the scene of the battle, on Mons Admirabilis,
near Antioch. The Ghassnids firmly believed that he extended aid to them
during the battle and thereby decided its outcome in their favor.48 The federate
Ghassnid victory at Chalcis against Mundir was thus a Byzantine victory, which
elicited victory celebrations in Jbiya. It had attractive features, which are worth
presenting.
a. As in all Ghassnid encounters, the horse played the main role. The Greek
source, the Vita of St. Simeon, describes the devastating effect of the charge of the
Lakhmid cavalry under Mundir;49 it was only when they met their match in the
Ghassnids, commanded by the famous Arethas, that Mundir was vanquished and
killed. The Arabic source, a contemporary poet, composed an ode on the battle of
Chalcis that contained an attractive ekphrasis of Arethas conduct, mounted on
his horse, al-Jawn, and carrying two swords, Mikhdam and Rasb. The Ghassnid
44 See Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 50, verse 4, in which the
horses are described as munala, shod, in preparation for the campaign.
45 Ibid., 206, verse 4.
46 See note 41.
47 al-Nbigha, Dwn, 53, verse 16; out of metrical necessity, Jesus is spelled s rather than Yasu.
49 Van den Ven, ed., La Vie ancienne, I, 164, sec. 186; see BASIC I.1, 24748.
king appears more Byzantino as a cataphract, on horseback and wearing two coats
of mail.50
b. Of the members of his family who accompanied Arethas, one is mentioned
by name: Jabala, his firstborn, who laid down his life in the course of the battle. It
is consonant with the Christianity of Arethas that he should have carried back the
body for burial in a martyrium at Chalcis.51
c. The most Arab aspect of the battle of Chalcis was the participation in it
of the princess alma. The presence of women, who perfumed the warriors and
helped them put on their armor,52 represented the Arab contribution to the con-
duct of operations in military encounters.
As noted above, according to the Greek source, the Vita of Simeon, after the
successful conclusion of the battle a victory bulletin, , was sent to Antioch,
the seat of the magister militum; probably another was sent to Jbiya, the capital of
the victor of Chalcis.
3. The adventus.53 The return of the victorious commander to his capital
surely was followed by celebrations, more Arabico and also more Byzantino.
In true Byzantine and Christian manner, there must have been a church ser-
vice of thanksgiving to all the warriors who contributed to the victorious outcome.
A memorial mass must also have been celebrated for Jabala, who fell a martyr at
the battle. A church or a monastery may possibly have been built for some saint
who helped, such as Sergius, much as Justinian had built the Church of Sergios in
Constantinople as a palladium for Byzantium in the war against Persia.54
In secular and Arab fashion, the victory celebration might have included the
following.
a. Since the cavalry played an important part in the victory, there must have
been a horse parade for displaying those valiant animalsespecially al-Jawn, the
horse of the commander in chief, which served him so well during the encounter.
b. Surely a banquet, walma, must have been prepared and served to celebrate
the victory. In the case of Queen Mavias victory celebrations, the wedding of her
daughter to the magister equitum, Victor, was an added attraction to the celebra-
tion, no doubt accompanied by a sumptuous banquet that befitted the status of the
distinguished couple. At the battle of Chalcis, the princess alma was involved
50 See al-Alam al-Shantamar, Dwn Alqama al-Fal, 4344, verses 2528. The ekphrasis is an
eloquent defense of Ghassnid loyalty to the empire, which enlisted them as foederati, defenders of
Oriens, especially against the Lakhmid Mundir.
52 As discussed in Chapter 2.
53 On the adventus, see the many references to it in the index of McCormick, Eternal Victory, s.v.;
see also BASIC I.1, 251.
54 See Shahd, The Church of Sts. Sergios and Bakhos.
in a romantic relationship with one of the warriors; the promised marriage of the
two may have been celebrated in a wedding and a banquet as part of the victory
celebrations.
c. Most important was the recitation of poetry in the rajaz meter, the short
poems related to battle in pre-Islamic Arabia. In the case of this particular engage-
ment, in addition an ode on Arethas victory at Chalcis was featured, with its well-
known ekphrasis of Arethas in action, noted above. This may have been recited at
the parade grounds, but probably it was recited as well in more formal surround-
ings such as an odeion, which would have provided a venue for the many poets
seeking the patronage of the Ghassnids who composed panegyrics and for the
orators who had various reasons to address the Ghassnid kings.55
The Reign of Mundir
The reign of the Ghassnid Arethas came to an end in a.d. 569 and was followed
by that of an even more formidable Ghassnid warrior kinghis son Mundir,
whose training to succeed him had begun after Arethas visit to the capital in 563
to arrange for the succession. Mundirs brilliant campaigns against the Lakhmids
were noted by the primary Syriac source, John of Ephesus, not by the Greek
authors, who were hostile to him on doctrinal grounds.56
Victory celebrations no doubt took place throughout the career of this
Ghassnid, who never lost a battle. The Arabic sources on his reign have been lost,
with the exception of a few references, but he was well attested by John of Ephesus
Ecclesiastical History. It is by blending the two sets of sources, the Arabic and the
Syriac, that victory celebrations during his reign may be discussed.
Ayn Ubgh: a.d. 570
Mundir opened his career as Ghassnid king and successor of his father, Arethas,
with a smashing victory over the Lakhmids in 570, known in Arabic as Ayn
Ubgh. The victory, though not its name, was noted in the Syriac sources,57 but it
was Arabic contemporary poetry composed on both sidesthe Lakhmids on their
defeat, the Ghassnids on their victorythat remembered the victor.
One poem, consisting of nine verses, has survived, written by a Ghassnid
who took part in the battle and prided himself on the victory; it has been analyzed
55 On possible Ghassnid odeions, see Part III, Chapter 3.
56 Ernst Stein and Theodor Nldeke, a Byzantinist and an Orientalist, were two distinguished
scholars who did him justice (see BASIC I.1, 425). Stein considered Mundir one of the most distin-
guished generals of Byzantium; see his Studien zur Geschichte des byzantinischen Reiches
vornehmlich
unter den Kaisern Justinus II und Tiberius Constantinus (Stuttgart, 1919), 9596.
57 For these Syriac sources and the campaign, see BASIC I.1, 34046.
earlier in this volume in a different context.58 On the Lakhmid side, a touching
couplet was composed by a woman lamenting the death of her father or broth-
er.59 The battle was also mentioned by the Ghassnid panegyrist al-Nbigha thirty
years later, together with Yawm alma, and the poet clearly implied that it was as
important as the latter.60
Most significant in the description of the battle is the statement of a Syriac
source. In addition to giving a precise date for the battle, May 570, which coincided
with Ascension Day, it declares that the Lord helped Mundir, he defeated Qabs,
and the Cross triumphed.61 In the perception of the Syriac authors to whose reli-
gious denomination the Ghassnid Mundir belonged, it was a Christian victory
and what is more, on Ascension Day! Such a happy coincidence must have called
for a celebration in Jbiya.
ra: a.d. 575
Monophysite Ghassnid relations with Chalcedonian Constantinople soured in
a.d. 573, on doctrinal grounds. But they were normalized in 575 after the Ghassnid
king Mundir met the magister militum, Justinianus, at the church of St. Sergius in
Rufa.62 Immediately thereafter, Mundir mounted his lightning campaign against
the Lakhmids and captured their capital, ra. It was an astounding victory, which
reverberated in Byzantium and Persia itself and was well-described by John of
Ephesus: And he was extolled by all men. The two powers [Persia and Byzantium]
also regarded with astonishment and admiration his spiritedness and courage and
the victories he had achieved.63 Even the Arab poet of the Persian foederati, the
Lakhmids, extolled the Ghassnid kings victory and his capture of ra, while repri-
manding the Lakhmid for being away, relaxing, while his capital was being occupied
and set on fire by the victorious Ghassnid king.64
During the thirty years or so between the exile of Mundir to Sicily, ca. 580,65
and the Persian occupation of Oriens, ca. 610, Arabic poetry by both al-Nbigha
58 Discussed in Chapter 2 in connection with Ibn al-Ral; for the poem and its poet, see
M. Muhammad al-Marzubni, Mujam al-Shuar, ed. A. al-Sattr Farrj (Cairo, 1960), 86.
59 Quoted by G. Rothstein in Die Dynastie der La
hmiden in al-ira (Berlin, 1899), 85.

60 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 206, verse 4.
61 Et auxiliatus est Dominus Mundaro, et devicit Qabus et Crux triumphavit; see Chronicon
Maroniticum, trans. J. B. Chabot, Chronica Minora, pars secunda, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3,
vol. 4
(Paris, 1904), 111, lines 1415.
62 See BASIC I.1, 37378.
63 Ioannis Ephesini Historiae Ecclesiasticae Pars Tertia, Latin trans. E. W. Brooks, CSCO,
Scriptores
Syri, ser. 3, vol. 106 (Louvain, 1936), 271. For John of Ephesus Syriac description of the campaign
in its
entirety, see BASIC I.1, 381.
64 On the couplet of Ad ibn Zayd that compares Mundir and his capture of ra to a falcon, see
Ad ibn Zayd, Dwn, ed. A. Muaybid (Baghdad, 1965), 11415.
65 For the exile of Mundir in the early 580s, see BASIC I.1, 53840.
and assn alluded to Ghassnid campaigns and victories;66 it is difficult, how-
ever, to identify the sites of these victories or their dates. For the next two decades,
while the Persian-Byzantine conflict continued during the reign of Heraclius, there
were of course no Ghassnid victories. It is only with the final victory of Heraclius
over the Persians that the Ghassnids were remembered in a triumphal context.
After Nineveh, a.d. 628
The victory bulletin of the emperor Heraclius after his defeat of the Persians at
Nineveh in a.d. 628, addressed to the Senate in Constantinople, referred to the
Saracens67that is, the Ghassnids, who had withdrawn with the Byzantine army
into Anatolia after the Persian occupation of Oriens. They must have celebrated
their return and their contribution to the victory of Heraclius, as they assumed an
even more prominent presence in the defense of Oriens; but because the sources
on these few years before the fateful battle of the Yarmk in 636 are almost non-
existent, no record has survived of celebrations, either marking their own return
to Oriens or echoing the celebration of the great victory in Constantinople. The
defeat of Byzantium by the Persians and their conquest of Jerusalem in 614 was
mentioned in Arabian Mecca in a chapter of the Koran on the Rm, Byzantines,
that assures the faithful in Mecca that Byzantium will redeem the defeat, and win
the final victory.68 When news of this victory reached the Muslim Arabs in Medina
in 628, they rejoiced, and one of the faithful had even wagered on the prospective
victory.69 If the Arabs of Mecca, not involved directly in the Byzantine-Sassanid
conflict, noted the victory of Nineveh and expressed their satisfaction, a fortiori
the Ghassnids, who took part in the campaigns that resulted in that victory, must
surely have celebrated.
In a previous chapter, an important landmark in the Ghassnid ecclesiasti-
cal calendar was noted, namely, Yawm al-Khurj, the Day of the Exodus, either on
Palm Sunday or Easter Sunday. To this may now be added Yawm al-Nar, Victory
Day, which marked each Ghassnid victory. Perhaps the two most important ones,
those of Yawm alma and Ayn Ubgh, were celebrated annually.70
66 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 42, verses 810; assn, Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb
Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 308, verses 910.
67 Chronicon Paschale, ed. L. Dindorf (Bonn, 1832), I, 15556; see BASIC I.1, 64243.
68 Koran, 30:16.
69 This wager has been noted by McCormick (Eternal Victory, 2), citing A. Shboul, Byzantium
and the Arabs: The Image of the Byzantines as Mirrored in Arabic Literature, in Byzantine Papers,
ed. E. Jeffreys, M. Jeffreys, and A. Moffatt (Canberra, 1981), 4748 with notes 32, 33.
70 Their mention together by al-Nbigha, decades after their occurrence, could suggest an annual
observance of the two victories; see Dwn, 206, verse 4. That both victories were precisely dated
would
also support an annual observanceand because Yawm Ubgh happened to fall on Ascension Day,
it
could be celebrated as both a religious and a secular holiday.
XI
Votive and Victory Offerings
R
elated to victory celebrations was the custom of offering symbols of military
victories to shrines, reflecting the gratitude of the Ghassnid victors to the
saint whom they invoked for aid during their military encounters. Contemporary
Arabic poetry on the Ghassnids describes one such offering, while the later Islamic
sources preserve traces of two others. These sources do not explicitly identify the
objects they mention as victory symbols, but they arguably can be interpreted as
such, especially when set against the background of the Byzantine practice of offer-
ing such victory symbols to shrines. Ghassnid history itself provides such a back-
ground during the career of Mundir. Before he mounted his lightning offensive
against the capital of the Lakhmids, ra, Mundir called on God for help. After
the spectacular victory that delivered the Lakhmid capital into his hands, he dedi-
cated the abundant booty he seized to the churches and the monasteries.1 The his-
torian does not specify the nature of Mundirs dedicatory offerings, but since he
carried away from ra horses and possibly camels, these probably were included.
So the practice of the dedication of victory symbols to Christian structures is
established for the Ghassnids; it will be further supported by reference to specific
offerings from the Byzantine world.
I. Sergiopolis/Ru sfa: Extra Muros
In a panegyric on the Ghassnid king al-Numn, the poet al-Nbigha refers in one
of the verses to a herd of camels outside the walls of Sergiopolis, roaming near its
cross.2 These camels are described as muabbalathat is, according to the medieval
1 For the campaign of Mundir against ra, see BASIC I.1, 37884; on the dedication of the
booty, see 379, 381. The dedication of camels and their consecration to deities was apparently a
well-
known practice among the Arabs (e.g., for the consecration of a camel to God, see Koran, 7:73, 77);
dedi-
cation of animals to God and their sacrifice are an essential part of the Islamic hajj (Koran, 5:2, 97);
see
also BASIC II.1, 120 note 171.
2 See Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 52, verse 10. The term for
herds, anm, could refer to camels or cows; in this context it most likely means camels.
Sergiopolis is
called in Arabic both Rufa and al-Zawr (see BASIC I.1, 11921), and the cross was probably set
up
over its gate.
221 Votive and Victory Offerings
lexicographer, choice camels, kept only for breeding purposes and never employed
as beasts of burden.3 Such choice camels, allowed to roam around Sergiopolis,
which the Ghassnids protected, were surely victory symbols dedicated by the
Ghassnid king, whose praetorium still stands outside its walls. The following
arguments may be adduced in support of this conclusion.
1. The verse comes in an epinician ode celebrating the victory of the Ghassnid
king al-Numn over two tribal groups, Asad and Fazra. In the same ode, a verse
clearly indicates that the Ghassnid forces invoked biblical figures, Jesus and Job,
Ayyb.4 So, the ode combines the invocation of religious figures and the victory
made possible by that invocation; hence, a victory offering, as Mundir had made
after his defeat of the Lakhmids and the occupation of ra, was the natural sequel.
2. The point of dedicating the camels to the saint may be related to geogra-
phy: the city, isolated in the desert, arid region of Euphratensis, could have been
provisioned only through caravans of camels. In fact, a medallion of an Arabic
camel driver has survived that testifies to the existence of such caravans.5 The cam-
els may have taken part in the campaign of the Ghassnid king, and so could have
belonged to his army or to that of his adversaries; in the latter case, they would have
been spoils of war, dedicated to the patron Ghassnid saint.6
3. Analogies from the Byzantine world are not wanting. In a.d. 880, the Arabs
had attacked the port of Methone in their attempt to invade the Peloponnese. The
Byzantine admiral eventually defeated the invaders, burning many of their ships
and capturing others. These were dedicated to the church at Methone. So presum-
ably the ships that would have attacked Methone became its spoils.7 The camels
may have performed a similar function at Sergiopolis. Closer to the animal king-
dom of camels, in 753, during the spring festival, a Paphlagonian peasant dedicated
a cow to the chancel screen of the church of St. Theodore.8
II. The Two Ghassnid Swords, Mikhdam and Rasb
The two famous swords have been mentioned in the discussion of the Ghassnid
victory of Chalcis/Yawm alma in 554. An early Islamic source, Hishm
3 The term muabbala is unusual, and the monolingual medieval lexicographers may have fallen
short in discovering its signification. In Syriac, the word abl means a monk who devoted or
consecrated
himself to God, and the Syriac term abl is attested in Arabic; for this sense of muabbala, see
BASIC,
II.1, 120 note 169.
4 For Fazra and Asad, see al-Nbigha, Dwn, 49; for the biblical figures, see 53, verse 16. On Job/
Ayyb and the Ghassnids, see the appendix.
5 On the medallion, see BASIC I.1, 507.
6 In a verse, Sergius may be invoked between Jesus and Ayyb; see BASIC II.1, 120 note 170.
7 For the defeat of the Arab fleet in a.d. 881 by Nasar and his gift of ships to the church of Methone,
see Theophanes Continuatus, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn, 1838), 304.
8 For St. Theodore and his miracles, see Acta sanctorum (Brussels, 1925), Nov., IV, 4955.
al-Kalb, relates that these swords were found in one of the two pagan shrines of
Arabiadedicated either to al-Fals, the idol that belonged to the ayyi tribe, or to
Manh, the idol of al-Khazraj of Medina/Yathrib. Ali, the cousin of the Prophet
Muammad and the future caliph, was sent by Muammad to smash these idols;
he brought the two swords back to the Prophet, who gave him one of them. It
became known as Dhu al-Faqr, the famous sword of Ali.9
It is unclear how the two swords, which were unsheathed at the battle of
Chalcis by the Christian Ghassnid king Arethas, ended up in a pagan shrine of
Arabia. One plausible scenario is that they were dedicated after the victory to a
Christian shrine such as that of the military saint, Sergius, whom the Ghassnids
invoked in their battles.10 Much confusion reigned in Oriens after the defeat of
the Byzantines and the Ghassnids in a.d. 614 by the Persians, who then occu-
pied Oriens for some fifteen years. Perhaps during this period the shrine at Rufa/
Sergiopolis was raided, and after being seized by some Arab pastoralists the two
swords found their way to one of the pagan shrines.11
A more plausible explanation is suggested by a statement in Baldur that
Arethas himself sent them as a victory offering to al-Qals, to the church (Greek
ekklsia) built by Abraha, the Christian ruler of South Arabia in this period in
San.12 The statement in Baldur has the ring of authenticity, because he explic-
itly states that the two swords were sent as a votive offering, using the correct tech-
nical term: and he vowed (nadara) that if he were to be victorious over his enemy
[in the battle] he would send them [the two swords] as a gift to al-Qals.13 The dis-
patch of the two swords to al-Qals also makes sense in view of the intimate rela-
tions between the Ghassnids and South Arabia, the region of their relatives, the
9 For Alis mission to the two idols, see Hishm ibn al-Kalb, The Book of Idols, trans. N. Faris
(Princeton, 1952), 1314, 5253. For another account of the sword, see E. Mittwoch, Dhul Fa
kr,
EI2, II, 233.
10 For the Barbarikon at Rufa/Sergiopolis, at which gifts to St. Sergius were stored, see E. K.
Fowden, The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley, 1999), 65 note 28.
11 Another scenario could be related to the group al-Aws, who fought with Arethas at the battle of
Chalcis. They came from Medina/Yathrib in ijz, a circumstance that might explain why the
shrine
of Manh near Medina had the two swords. As Hishm explains, Khazraj was a label applied to
both
the Arab tribes of Medina, al-Aws as well as al-Khazraj; see Hishm, The Book of Idols, 13. For the
Aws at
the battle of Chalcis, see al-Alam al-Shantamar, Dwn Alqama al-Fal, ed. D. al-Khab and I.
aqql
(Aleppo, 1969), 48, verse 32.
12 See Baldur, Ansb al-Ashrf, ed. M. amdullh (Cairo, 1959), I, 522. The reading al-Qals
appears twice (notes 3, 4), following the Istanbul MS, on which the edition of Baldur depended.
Of
significance here are the vow and particularly the reference to al-Qals, which provide evidence for
the
role played by South Arabia, the region of the great Arabian martyropolis Najrn, in the
consciousness
of the Christian Arabs of pre-Islamic times. On the location of al-Qals and San in South Arabia,
and
on the possibility that the church in San had within its precincts some relics of St. Arethas, see
the
present writer in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 8183.
13 Baldur, Ansb al-Ashrf, I, 522.
martyrs of Najrn, whose chief saint, Arethas, was the namesake of the Ghassnid
warrior king Arethas.
The dedication of swords at religious shrines is not unknown in other parts of
the Byzantine world. A soldier, after scoring a victory in a military encounter, com-
monly dedicated his sword to a military saint, Theodore.14 And in Islam, spoils of
war were often dedicated at mosques.15
The mystique of these Ghassnid swords continued in Islamic times, and
Dhu al-Faqr became the most famous Islamic sword, reputedly resting now in
Istanbul in Topkapi Saray. A Byzantine source mentions this sword in the tenth
century during the reign of Nicephorus Phocas. Leo the Deacon relates that dur-
ing an encounter with the Muslims in Oriens, it was acquired by the Byzantines.
Nikephoros dispatched an embassy to the Fatimid ruler in Tunisia with the view
of ransoming the patricius Niketas, who had been captured by the Fatimids. His
offer of the sword of Muammad in exchange for the patricius was accepted, and
al-Muizz released his captive.16
III. The Two Earrings of Mriya
The Islamic sources also report that two earrings of the Ghassnid queen Mriya,
the mother of Arethas, were dedicated by her to the Kaba in Mecca.17 This may
sound strange, but it should be remembered that religion in pre-Islamic Mecca,
including the pilgrimage,18 was syncretistic: in its pantheon, Allah, the biblical
God, was represented, and the Kaba contained a picture of Mary and Jesus.19 Thus
the dedication of the two earrings to the Kaba ceases to sound so incredible.
14 See A. Sigalas,
, 1 (1924), 295339.
15 See C. Foss, Byzantine Responses to Turkish Attacks: Some Sites of Asia Minor, in Aetos:
Studies in Honour of Cyril Mango Presented to Him on April 14, 1998, ed. I. evenko and I.
Hutter
(Stuttgart, 1998), 15471, Plates XXXIVXXXVII, nos. 915.
16 On this Byzantine-Fatimid episode, see The History of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military
Expansion in the Tenth Century, trans. A.-M. Talbot and D. F. Sullivan (Washington, D.C., 2005),
12627 (note 5 discusses what may be an Arab-Muslim version of the episode involving the sword).
For
more on the fortunes of this sword and the involvement of the Fatimids, see P. E. Walker,
Purloined
Symbols of the Past: The Theft of Souvenirs and Sacred Relics in the Rivalry between the Abbasids
and Fatimids, in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung,
ed.
F. Daftary and J. W. Meri (London, 2003), 36487.
17 See Amad ibn Muammad al-Maydni, Majma al-Amthl, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1978), I,
411.
18 For Mawqif al-Narni, the station of the Christians was one of the stations on the pre-Islamic
pilgrimage route to Mount Araft. It appears as Wd Muassir or Ban Muassir in the majim of
Yqt and Bakri, s.vv.
19 See M. Azraqi, Akhbr Makka, ed. R. Malas (Mecca, 1965), I, 165. On the conquest of Mecca
in
a.d. 630, the Prophet Muammad moved the many idols out of the Kaba, and he protected the
pictures
of Mary and Jesus from destruction; see ibid. and Ibn Hishm, Life of Muhammad, trans. A.
Guillaume
(1955; reprint, Karachi, 1990), 552.
The Ghassnids were zealous propagators of the Christian faith in Arabia,
and their bishop Theodore, whose episcopate lasted from 540 to 570, had ijz
under his jurisdiction.20 The Ghassnids had as allies in Mecca the clan of Ban
Asad ibn Abd al-Uzz,21 one member of which was the Christian Waraqathe
uncle of Khadja, the wife of the Prophet Muammad. It is thus not altogether
impossible that the Ghassnid queen whose name was Mriya/Mary sent her two
earrings to the Kaba, which housed a picture of her namesake, the Virgin Mary.
These two earrings are described as being as large as the eggs of a pigeon. They
gave rise to the proverbial sayingKhudhu wa law bi-Qurtay Mriya, Take it
(buy it), even though it costs as much as the two earrings of Mriya22uttered
when a commodity is expensive but worth buying at any price. Because these two
earrings had a history in later Islamic times, they give rise to two questions: what
was the provenance of these two earrings, and what is the truth about their fate in
post-Ghassnid Islamic times?
The Provenance of the Earrings
The Ghassnid kings traveled to Constantinople on various occasions, especially
when they were endowed with the patriciate or kingship. Their wives could accom-
pany them on these journeys. The wife of the prospective patrician had a func-
tion to perform during the ceremony of promotion. On such occasions, royal gifts
were extended to the spouse of the honorand, as has been documented in at least
in two cases (discussed below). Both Arethas and his son Mundir are attested as
having been in Constantinople;23 the sources are silent on whether Jabala visited
Constantinople, where his wife Mriya might have acquired these famous earrings
as a gift.
A passage in the Syriac text of Zacharia, which illuminates so much on Jabala,
may provide the key to the answer.24 In the obituary notice on him, Zacharia says
in the Latin version of the notice that Jabala was bellicosus et sapiens, armis
Romanis multum exercitatus est, and et in locis diversis pugnis illustris factus
erat. This sheds light on the career of Jabala, so ignored by the Greek sources such
as Procopius, who was no friend of the Ghassnids. It can easily be concluded
from this notice that Jabala became a faithful ally of the Byzantines, as shown by
his assimilation of Byzantine military tactics and by his fighting for their cause
20 On Theodore, see BASIC I.2, 77174.
21 On this clan, see al-Zubayr ibn-Bakkar, Jamharat Nasab Quraysh wa Akhbruh, ed. M. Shkir
(Cairo, 1961), 42538. Its relations with the Ghassnids will be treated in detail in the next volume
of
this series, Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh Century.
22 See al-Maydni, Majma al-Amthl, I, 41011.
23 BASIC I.1, 28288, 38489.
24 Ibid., 65.
in various engagements in which he distinguished himself. The Syriac source also
referred to him as Afar/Afar, which has been correctly interpreted to mean
that he also became Flavius25another sign of his loyalty to the Byzantine auto-
kratores, who since Constantine claimed to be the second Flavians. The title was
most probably conferred on him rather than assumed by him, reflecting the con-
fidence reposed in him by the central government. The crowning sign of his loy-
alty was his death at the battle of Thannris, fighting for Byzantium. Under such
circumstances, it seems quite possible that he was asked to visit Constantinople,
where he was honored.26 This provides the background for the hypothesized visit
of his wife Mriya, a woman who the Byzantine intelligence service knew came
from a powerful and influential group, Kinda.
The hypothesis of a visit by Jabala and Mriya to Constantinople sets the
stage for understanding the possible provenance of the two earrings that became
so famous. At this time, late in the 520s, Justinian was ruling as well as reigning,
after the death of his elderly uncle, Justin, in 527. Alternatively, the visit may have
taken place toward the end of Justins reign, when Justinian and Theodora were the
de facto rulers.
The imperial gifts of Theodora to various female personages were an effec-
tive instrument of Byzantine diplomacy. The sources present analogies that sup-
port the proposition that the two earrings of Mriya emanated from her: (1) when
the queen of the Iberians appeared with her husband in Constantinople in 534,
Theodora gave her all kinds of jewelry decorated with pearls;27 (2) when the queen
of the Sabir Huns, Boa, came to Constantinople, she was given gifts that included
raiment, silver vessels, and money;28 and (3) gifts were also given to Valeriana, the
wife of the Lazic king, Tzath.29
Byzantine imperial gifts were sometimes given to the recipient not in
25 For the identification of Afar/Afar with Flavius, see Martyrs, 27376; BASIC I.1, 6667. The
title Flavius (Yellow), translated into Arabic as Asfar, was applied to the Ghassnid ruler Jabala, the
father of Arethas, and it became a generic name for the Rhomaioi: Ban al-Asfar, the Children of
the
Yellow One. On Ban al-Asfar, see I. Goldziher, Afar, EI2, I, 68788. See also Martyrs, 273
375,
where, in 1971, I entertained various interpretations for the Syriac term Afar, applied to the
Ghassnid
king Jabala in a.d. 528. Since then it has become clear that Afar was none other than Flavius/Afar.
26 Jabala was referred to as king in the two incontestable authentic Syriac sourcesZacharia and
the Letter of Simeon of Bth-Arshm, for which see BASIC I.1, 66 note 4; Martyrs, 63. It is not
clear
from the scant sources whether he was also patricius. Although obscured by the pitiable remnants of
the
sources, the principal facts of his reign were salvaged and put together from the Syriac sources with
help
from the Greek in BASIC I.1, 4849.
27 ;
Theophanes,
Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor (1883; reprint, Hildesheim, 1963), I, 216.
28
; John Malalas, Chronographia, ed. L. Dindorf

(Bonn,
1835), 431.
29 Ibid., 413; Malalas does not specify what gifts Tzath and his wife received from Justinian.
Constantinople but at his or her place of residence, as was done with the gift of
Theodora to the wife of the Persian king in Ctesiphon.30 This example clearly
indicates that the recipient did not have to be in Constantinople. Thus the two
earrings could easily have reached Mriya in Oriens. The analogy with the gift to
the Persian queen is especially apposite. That gift was understandable, addressed,
as it was, to her counterpart, the queen of the other superpower, Sasanid
Persia. Mriya, on the other hand, came from a small federate entity, a vassal of
Byzantium; but she would have had spiritual kinship with Theodora, since she
was the wife of the chief federate figure in Oriens, Jabala, a Monophysite and
a faithful servant of Byzantium in wars with Persia. Hence, the importance of
enlisting the powerful federate queen in the service of Theodoras causethe res-
urrection of the Monophysite church in Oriens. It is worth noting that this par-
ticular empress, Theodora, boasted of jewelry that included earrings visible to the
present day in the famous mosaic at San Vitale. Both earrings, those of Theodora
and those of Mriya, became famous: while Theodoras can still be seen, Mriyas
have disappeared.
The Fate of the Earrings
The two earrings were well known in later Islamic times. The sources state that
they ended up in the possession of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwn
(a.d. 685705), who gave them to his daughter, Fima, on the occasion of her
marriage to Umar ibn Abd al-Azz, the future Umayyad caliph (717719).31 It is
difficult not to accept the authenticity of this account and its sequel.32 Before the
earrings came into the possession of Abd al-Malik, the Ghassnid queen, accord-
ing to the sources, had presented them as an offering to the Kaba.33 A question
thus arises of which Kaba is meant: the one in Mecca or the one in Najrn.
In support of the Kaba of Mecca, the following may be adduced. There was
a strong Ghassnid presence in Mecca represented by Khuza, the lords of Mecca
before Quraysh; as Azdites, they were the relatives of the Ghassnids. In addition,
30 Both Justinian and Theodora sent gifts to the Persian king and queen:
, (ibid., 467).
Theodora corresponded with foreign queens: for the letter to the Persian queen, see John of
Ephesus, Life of Simon the Bishop, in Lives of the Eastern Saints, ed. E. W. Brooks, PO 17
(Paris,
1923), 157, lines 58 of the Syrian text. She also wrote to the queen of Gothic Italy; see C. Foss,
The
Empress Theodora, Byzantion 72 (2002), 151.
31 See J. ibn Nubta, Sar al-Uyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1964), 43536.
32 The specific details of the story enhance its plausibility: on the orders of her ascetic and
conscien-
tious husband, she returned the two earrings to the state treasury when he became caliph; and after
his
death, out of respect for his wishes, she rejected the suggestion of his more hedonistic successor,
Yazd,
that she take them back (ibid.).
33 See al-Maydni, Majma al-Amthl, I, 411.
the clan of Ban-Asad to whom belonged Waraqa ibn Nawfal, the Christian uncle
of Khadja, the first wife of the Prophet Muammad, were the allies (ulaf) of
the Ghassnids in Mecca. These were enthusiastic Christians who tried to spread
the faith in the Arabian Peninsula. It is possible that traces of Christianity in
Meccanotably the images of Jesus and Mary in the Kaba; Masjid Maryam (the
mosques of Mary), not far from Mecca; and Mawqif al-Narn, the station of the
Christians, one of the stations of the pre-Islamic pilgrimage route34were associ-
ated with them. So, the presentation of the earrings would have been highly appro-
priate within this context, and an act of piety consonant with the practice of votive
offerings among the Christians of the early church.
It is equally likely that the earrings were offered to the Kaba of Najrn,
the famous Christian martyrium erected in the wake of the martyrdoms of
ca. a.d. 520. Najrn became the Arabian martyropolis in the Arabian Peninsula;
and the Ghassnids were the relatives of the Arabs of Najrn, the rithids, who
endured those persecutions. Especially relevant was the fact that at least one hun-
dred of those martyred in Najrn were women.35 As often noted in this volume,
relations between the Ghassnids of Oriens and the rithids of Najrn had been
close ever since the Najrnites came to the Ghassnid king Jabala, invoking his
aid against Ysuf, the king of South Arabia who started the persecutions and was
responsible for the martyrdoms.36 It should also be remembered that in the 680s,
after their quarrel with the emperor Maurice, some of the Ghassnids emigrated
to South Arabia, no doubt mainly to Najrn, the city of their relatives.37 A gift by
a Ghassnid queen to the Kaba of Najrn, a city of martyresses, would have been
very fitting and in harmony with the dedication by the Ghassnid king of his two
swords, Mikhdam and Rasb, also to a Christian shrine.
Islam inherited many of the relics of the pre-Islamic period. As already noted
in this chapter, after the conquest of Mecca by the Prophet Muammad in 630,
the idols in the Kaba were smashed, but the graphic representations of Mary and
Jesus were spared; at the same time, the two swords of the Ghassnid Arethas came
into the possession of the Prophet. It is, therefore, quite possible that the two ear-
rings from the Kaba either of Mecca or of Najrn fell into the hands of Muslims.
34 See the present writer in BAFIC, 39092; BASIC I.2, 997; and Islam and Oriens Christianus:
Makka 610622 ad, in The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, ed. E. Grypeou,
M. Swanson, and D. Thomas (Leiden, 2006), 1213. The strong presence of the Virgin Mary in
Mecca,
represented by her image in the Kaba and by Masjid Maryam, would have made it an attractive
destina-
tion to receive earrings from a Ghassnid queen who was her namesake.
35 See the present writer in The Martyrdom of Early Arab Christians: Sixth Century Najrn,
in The First One Hundred Years: A Centennial Anthology Celebrating Antiochian Orthodoxy in
North
America, ed. G. S. Corey et al. (Englewood, N.J., 1995), 180.
36 See Martyrs, passim.
37 See BASIC I.1, 54647.
The Umayyads, in turn, when they were established in Oriens as the first dynasty
in Islam, started to acquire relics: for example, Muwiya acquired the burda, the
mantle, belonging to the Prophet and given by him to the poet Kab.38 So the
account of how the two earrings found their way into Abd al-Maliks hands is per-
fectly credible.
38 For the burda and other relics in Islamic history, see P. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed.
(New York, 1981), 186 and note 2.
Appendix
The Ghassnids and the Old Testament:
Job/Ayyb
In their military encounters, the Ghassnids invoked religious figures for assis-
tance against the fire-worshipping Persians and the pagan Lakhmids, as did the
regular Byzantine troops of Byzantium, the Christian Roman Empire, who even
celebrated a liturgy of war before going into battle. It was not unusual that they
should invoke God or St. Sergius, their patron saint and that of the army of the
Orient. More surprising was the Ghassnids invocation of the figure of Job, which
has survived in the best of contemporary sources: the Arabic ode of al-Nbigha,
their panegyrist.1
Job, Ayyb in Arabic, the well-known Old Testament figure who epitomized
the concept of patient suffering, was very much alive among the Semites of Bild
al-Shm, especially those in the region of the strongest Ghassnid presence, the
northern part of the Provincia Arabia and in Palaestina Secunda. The village of
Dayr Ayyb evidenced that presence toponymically, as did the sq that used to be
held there and that the traders of Arabia and Mecca used to frequent.2 And it was
to them and their congeners who engaged in trade along the via odorifera that the
Koran was addressed, which contains a passage on Job/Ayyb, on the rock over
which he sat, and on the spring of water that was supposed to have cured him of his
ulcers.3 The name itself, so Arabic-sounding, was assumed by some Arabs in the pre-
Islamic era.
But Jobs special place in the life of the Ghassnids calls for an explanation.
The Ghassnids were foederati, employed to fight the wars of Byzantium in the
Orient and to defend the Holy Land, around the boundaries of which they were
settled. One of the military virtues of warriors was abr, endurance during mili-
tary encounters, and the Ghassnids were especially celebrated for it. This concept
1 See Dwn al-Nbigha, ed. S. Fayal (Beirut, 1968), 53, verse 16.
2 On Dayr Ayyb and its sq, see I. M. ammr, Aswq al- Arab (Beirut, 1979), 19697; see also
above, Part I, Chapter 4. There is another toponym, Heptapegon, which has his name, on the shore
of
the Sea of Galilee. Its curative water is said to have rid Job of his skin sores. Hence the name; for
this, see
E. S. Srouji, Cyclamens from Galilee: Memoirs of a Physician from Nazareth (Lincoln, Neb.,
2003), 211.
3 For Job/Ayyb in the Koran, see A. Jeffery, Ayyb, EI2, I, 79596.
of abr, sometimes referred to as ifz, was sung by the panegyrist.4 It was such a
distinctive feature of Ghassnid military prowess that a unit or group among them
was called al-ubur/al-ubr (plural of bir or abr), those who endure.5 This
appellation, together with the Ghassnid invocation of Ayyb, Job, on the battle-
field, suggests that an elite Ghassnid unit identified itself with Job as the biblical
figure who suffered patiently through many trials. Indeed, the Arabic term ubr or
ubur was apparently transliterated into Greek, soborenoi, in one of the inscriptions
of the region.6
The name Ayyb acquired some currency after the rise of Islam, owing to its
appearance in the Koran as the name of the biblical figure. Its most famous attesta-
tion is the name Ab-Ayyb al-Anri, the companion of the Prophet Muammad,
who died near the walls of Constantinople during the caliphate of Muwiya and
whose name survives in the well-known district in Constantinople/Istanbul, Eyp.
4 Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 308,
verses 13, 17. For the concept, so well described by H. Lammens, see his LIslam: Croyances et
institutions
(Beirut, 1943), 16: La plus incontestable qualit du Bdouinencore un fruit de son
individualisme
cest son sabr. . . . Cest une qualit positive supposant une tension nergique et continue. . . . Cest
une
tnacit indomptable lutter contre la nature ennemie, contre les lments implacables, contre les
fauves
du dsert, et surtout contre les hommes.
5 For this group or unit among the Ghassnids, see Ibn Abd Rabbih, al Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn,
I. Abyr, and A. Hrn (Cairo, 1949), III, 387.
6 For the inscription, see H. MacAdam, Studies in the History of the Roman Province of Arabia:
The
Northern Sector, BAR 295 (Oxford, 1986), 128 note 18. Other Arabic appellations were
transliterated
into Greek; for example, Ktil al-J appears in a Ghassnid inscription as K() (see BASIC
I.1,
50912, and BASIC II.1, 45). Remarkably, this appellation for the Ghassnids survived after the fall
of
the dynasty in the poetry of al-Akhal, the poet laureate of the caliph Abd al-Malik, ca. a.d. 700; he
spe-
cifically mentions ubr of Ghassn in his most famous ode on the caliph. For a translation of the
entire
ode into English, see S. P. Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and
Ceremony in
the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 8997; for the verse in Arabic, see 296 note 55.
XII
The Horse
M
uch of Ghassnid life, social and professional, revolved around the horse.
The horse was the Ghassnids main contribution to the Byzantine army
of the Orient, and their cavalry always performed well in battles against the
Persiansnotably, at Daras in a.d. 530 and at Callinicum in 531.1 This was
the famed Arabian that won the victories of the early Islamic Conquests and so
became renowned in medieval times.2 The horse was equally important in pre-
Islamic times, although not so well known or celebrated. Procopius obscured its
significance when he projected his false image of its riders.
I. The Horse in War and Peace
As the camel was essential to the Arabs in Arabia Pastoralis in the Peninsula, so was
the horse to the foederati of Byzantium in Oriens, in peace as well as war. When
they were not riding it as cataphracts in the army of the Orient, they rode it during
leisure and recreational activities. The Ghassnids shared with the Byzantines their
love and interest in horses both in war and in peace, and they benefited from the
military skills that Byzantium could teach them. As early as the fourth century,
the cavalry of the federate Arab queen Mavia charged in a cuneus, or wedge forma-
tion, which helped save Constantinople from the Goths. Horse and horseman in
the cuneus were Arab. As noted in Chapter 10, the Byzantine historian Zosimus
went out of his way to attribute the Arab victory over the Goths to the skill of
their horsemen.3 The Arab foederati continued to benefit from the Byzantine
1 Daras was an entirely cavalry engagement that must have involved the horse of the Arab
foederati;
it was the first victory won by Belisarius as magister militum per Orientem. The testimony of
Malalas is
clear on the contribution of the Ghassnids under Arethas at Callinicum, in a.d. 531, who kept
fighting
after others had fled. Procopius obscured and falsified the role of the Ghassnids in both
engagements;
see BASIC I.1, 13142.
2 Before the horse won its victories in Islamic battles, it had been eulogized in the Koran itself in
five suras (51, 73, 77, 79, 100). In 38:3033, the Israelite king Solomon is presented as a lover of
horses.
3 For the performance and quality of the Arab horse and horsemen at Adrianople, see BAFOC,
17881.
231 The Horse
advances in warfare and in the use of the horse. In his obituary on the Ghassnid
king Jabala, the sources, Zacharia and Malalas, say that he fought in the Roman
manner for Byzantium and he died when his mount stumbled and fatally unhorsed
him at the battle of Thannris in 528.4
It is not an exaggeration to say that the equus caballus reached its finest form
in pre-Islamic times in Ghassnland. The Arab warhorse, which benefited from the
Byzantine experience of its rider, was also kept fit by Graeco-Roman expertise in
two important areas, which also show Byzantine influence.
Medically, that expertise was directed not only toward human beings but
also toward animals, especially horses5hence the rise of hippology and hippia-
try, the diagnosis and treatment of horse diseases. The Greek influence is reflected
in the term , which entered Arabic as the loanwords bayr, the veteri-
nary surgeon, and bayara, hippiatry. Bayr still survives in modern Arabic as a
family name.6
Another term underscores the debt of Arabic and the Arab federates to the
Roman military establishment, namely, iabl, a loanword in Arabic from Latin
stabulum, stable.7 The royal stables of the Ghassnids were one of the most
important structures in the Ghassnid townscape. They entailed much expen-
diture, as accounts from the early Islamic period make clear; the Muslim Arabs
modeled their stables in part on those of Byzantium, as mediated through the
Ghassnids. The hierarchy of personnel responsible for their stables had three lev-
els: ib al-iabl, the stable master, the most important officer; the ghulm, the
stable boy in charge of such manual chores as cleaning, at the lowest rung; and
between the two the groom, the sis.8 The Ghassnid royal stables probably had
the same organization.
Since the extant sources on the Ghassnids yield little on the stables, evidence
from sources for their contemporaries, the Lakhmids of ra, is very helpful, as is
that from sources on the Umayyads.
In the ra of the Lakhmids, the man in charge of the stables of King Mundir
(a.d. 505554) was Ab Dud al-Iydi, a celebrated poet of pre-Islamic Arabia
4 See BASIC I.1, 6466, 7679.
5 See A. McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources, Compilation, and
Transmission of the Hippiatrica (Oxford, 2007).
6 On the bayr, the veterinary surgeon, see M. Plessner, Bayr, EI2, I, 1149; on bayr as a loan-
word in Arabic, see S. Fraenkel, Die aramischen Fremdwrter im Arabischen (1886; reprint,
Hildesheim,
1962), 265.
7 On the term and the structure iabl in Arab and early Islamic times, see F. Vir, Iabl, EI2, IV,
21316; on the term as a loanword in Arabic, see Fraenkel, Die Aramischen Fremdwrter, 12324.
Vir
is aware of the role of the Ghassnids in transmitting the term to Arabic and influencing the
appearance
of stables among the Arabs (214).
8 See Vir, Iabl, 21516.
who was well-known for his odes in praise of the Arabian horse.9 Such a talent in a
stable master was no doubt rare.
It is possible that in Damascus there were Ghassnid royal stables that the
Umayyads inherited, as has been argued by Franois Vir.10 The earliest phase
of the development of Islamic Damascus was under the first Umayyad caliph
Muwiya, who began his rule in 661. He built his residence, al-Khar, near the
old Ghassnid royal residence. Alongside it was Dr al-Khayl, the House of the
Horsesthe stables of the Ghassnids. These must have been built after Heraclius
victory at Nineveh, and the return of Oriens to Byzantine rule. In the five years or
so after Nineveh, the Ghassnids were given even more power and influence in the
new military reorganization of Oriens; hence their strong presence in Damascus
and its jund, the military circumscription.11
It is therefore certain that the stable formed an important element in the
layout of the Ghassnids camp and town, since the horse was their most valued
possession.12 Future excavations in and near Jbiya in the Golan should reveal the
layout of the city, the Ghassnid capital, in a region ideal for grazing the horses.
The sites of such structures remain unknown, as are the names of the stable mas-
ters of the Ghassnids. The only name extant of a Ghassnid in charge of a facility
not unlike a stable is that of al-Ghirf al-Ghassni, who was in charge of the hunt,
especially falconry, for the last Umayyad caliphs. He later saw service under the
Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, for whom he wrote a treatise on falconry, Kitb awri
al-ayr.13
Although the Arabian horse attained its fame for its strength and beauty
in the early Islamic period, apparently it had a similar reputation in pre-Islamic
times as well. The sources state that the Tobiad Hyrcanus (220175 b.c.) in
Trans-Jordan sent Ptolemy, king of Egypt, two white Arabian chariot horses as a
special gift.14
9 On Ab-Dud al-Iydi, see C. Pellat, Ab-Dud, EI2, I, 11516; Sezgin, GAS, II, 16769; and
G. von Grnebaum, Abu-Dud al-Iydi: Collection of Fragments, Wiener Zeitschrift fr die
Kunde des
Morgenlandes 51 (194851), 83105, 24982.
10 See Vir, Iabl, 214.
11 On the Ghassnids and Damascus, see BALA I, 119280.
12 When the poet tim came from Arabia to visit the Ghassnid king in southern Oriens late
in the sixth century, he referred in his poem to iyar (plural of ra), enclosures, within which the
Ghassnid horses or camels were kept. It is not clear, however, whether these iyar were open
paddocks or
covered stables. For tims visit, see BASIC II.1, 24649.
13 On al-Ghirf al-Ghassni, see the following chapter, The Hunt.
14 On the gift of Hyrcanus to the Ptolemies, expressed in the phrase
in P. Cair. Zenon I.59075, see E. Will and F. Zayadine, Iraq al-Amir: Le chteau du tobiade Hyrcan,
Bibliothque archologique et historique 132 (Paris, 1991), 11 (deux attelages arabes blancs). In a
letter to
the author, Leslie MacCoull has suggested the English version two white Arabian chariot horses.
233 The Horse
II. Contemporary Sources
From their Arab and Arabian background in the Peninsula and from their experi-
ence in Byzantine Oriens, the Ghassnids inherited expertise regarding the horse,
used in war as the mount of their cavalry and in peace as the instrument of their
recreational activities, such as races and the hunt.
1. The reservoir of horses they kept in Arabia, where horses were bred and
kept in special reserves called am (plural of im), is illustrated by one such
im in ijz, referred to in a verse of al-Nbigha.15 The region to which the horses
from Arabia were brought and left to graze was the Golan. It is mentioned by both
assn and al-Nbigha, the Ghassnid panegyrists. Such am were the cradles
of the famed equus caballus, which proved its mettle in the battle for Byzantium in
pre-Islamic times and against it in Islamic times.
2. Ghatafn, one of the tribes of the Outer Shield, specialized in horse breed-
ing in these horse reserves in Arabia.16 It was to one of its subdivisions, Dubyn,
that al-Nbigha belonged, and the close relationship of his tribe to horse breeding
could explain the warm welcome he received from the Ghassnids.17
3. Procopius refers to one of Arethas sons who was pasturing his horses when
he was captured by the Lakhmid Mundir in the 540s.18 Noteworthy in the account
is that the pasturing was not left to an attendant but was done by the prince him-
self, evidence that he enjoyed watching his horses graze.
4. Of the names of Ghassnid horses only four have survived: (a) al-Jawn, the
horse of Arethas; (b) Mawdd, the horse of Ziyd ibn al-rith; (c) Khasf, the
horse of Mlik ibn Amr (apparently a popular name, applied to more than one
horse); and (d) al-Zaytiyya, the mare of Labd ibn Amr. All of these riders were
sometimes identified by the name of their horse (e.g., Arethas was known as Fris
al-Jawn, the Rider of al-Jawn).19
5. A Ghassnid panegyrist, the poet Alqama, who came from northeast-
ern Arabia, the sphere of influence of the Lakhmids, described a Ghassnid
horse and its rider, King Arethas, in a remarkable set of verses. Both horse and
rider fought the Lakhmid foes all day until sunset: the king is referred to by the
name of his horse, as Fris al-Jawn, the Rider of al-Jawn. The horses ujl, the
15 For the im, see al-Nbigha, Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 75,
verse 1, and BASIC II.1, 23132. For the am in general, see BASIC II.1, 5759.
16 On the Ghaafn, the im, and horses in Arabia, see F. Vir, Khayl, EI2, IV, 114. See also
BASIC II.1, 53; on the Outer Shield, 5457.
18 Procopius, History, II.xxvii.1214.
19 See Ali ibn Hudhayl, albat al-Fursn wa Shir al-Shujn, ed. M. asan (Cairo, 1951), 161;
Hishm al-Kalb, Kitb Nasab al-Khayl, ed. G. Levi della Vida (Leiden, 1928), 34; Muammad ibn
al-Arbi, Kitb Asm Khayl al-Arab wa Ansbih wa Dhikr Fursnih, ed. M. Sultni
(Damascus,
1981), 116, 227.
white patches on his knees, are noted.20 Horses that demonstrated their speed
and endurance in war would also be used by the Ghassnids on the maydn, the
race course.
6. More detailed are the descriptions by al-Nbigha of the Ghassnid horse
in two celebrated odes. The first is on the Ghassnid king Amr;21 the second is on
another Ghassnid king, Numn. The Ghassnid horses start their march from
the Golan and are described in three verses that allude to their endurance and
their speed.22
7. Another panegyrist of the Ghassnids, assn, refers to two kings of the
Ghassnids as frisay khaylin, two riders of horses. Later, in the 620s, he became
attached to the Prophet Muammad, while the Ghassnids were away in Anatolia
during the Persian occupation of Oriens. In a poem from his Islamic period, he
refers to rihn, betting or wagering on horses, a practice surely also known in
Ghassnland.23
III. Horse Racing
The Arabs prized their horses as their most valuable possession and expressed their
love in terms that suggested that horses were members of their households and
should be treated as such.24 Sometimes they were even more partial to their horses
than to their children. They demonstrated this love in various ways, all displayed
by the Ghassnids even before they became foederati of Byzantium. The following
is a brief enumeration of the various aspects of Arab devotion to their horses even
before they entered the maydn, the race course; many of these aspects are typi-
cally Arab.
1. The well-known Arab partiality to purity of blood and descent found
expression in the many works composed on genealogy, and it applied to their horses
as well. Their anxiety to keep the blood of the horse pure through mating with the
right sire, the fal, the stallion, led to works on the genealogy of horses.25
2. For the Arab, the beauty of the horse consisted inter alia of the white
star on its forehead and the white patches on its knees and legs. A horse endowed
20 For Alqamas ode and its description of al-Jawn and his rider, see al-Alam al-Shantamar,
Dwn
Alqama al-Fal, ed. D. al-Khab and I. aqql (Aleppo, 1969), 4344.
21 al-Nbigha, Dwn, 43, verses 16, 15; 44, verse 16.
22 Ibid., 5051, verses 47.
23 For frisay khaylin in assn, see Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial
New
Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 308, verse 11; for rihn, see 153, verse 7.
24 See Ibn Hudhayl, ilyat al-Fursn, 177.
25 See, for instance, Hishm al-Kalb, Kitb Nasab al-Khayl, and Muammad ibn al-Arbi, Kitb
Asm Khayl.
235 The Horse
with such beauty spots was called agharr and muajjal,26 respectively, and these
complimentary terms were often applied to human beings in panegyrics.27
3. Power was also associated with the horse; the collective term for horses,
khayl, is etymologically related to ayl, power. So is horse itself, in.
4. Moral qualities were also predicated of the horse, as reflected in such terms
as karm and jawd (generous or noble), human characteristics transferred and
applied to horses.
5. As already observed, distinguished personages who were also horsemen
were identified sometimes not by their own name, patronymic, or tecnonymic but
by their association with the horse. Such a personage would be called the Rider of
[his horses name].28
6. The names of horses that distinguished themselves for their power, beauty,
and speed were recorded and remembered. As noted above, the Ghassnid horse
had its share in this equine onomasticon.
A uniquely Arab naming practice is related to racing: when race horses
competed in a group, usually of ten, called alba, each was given a name indicat-
ing its place in the result of the race. For example, the winner was called al-Sbiq,
the runner-up al-Mualli.29 Much excitement attended the race as each faction
in the crowd shouted in encouragement of its own horse, a mood captured in
Arabic poetry.
The enthusiasm that attended the race carried over to other activities associated
with it: the victory of the horse and its rider was saluted with a poemusually in the
rajaz meter,30 the same as that used for the hunt; on such occasions betting was pop-
ular.31 No doubt a meal, possibly a banquet, was prepared after the end of the race.
The surviving sources, however, provide little information on the Ghassnid
sibq, horse race, beyond fragments that mention the names of horses and their
riders. It is thus necessary to turn to sources on the subject for the pre-Islamic, the
Muhammadan, and the Umayyad periods. The first two describe the sibq scene of
Arab societies contemporary with the Ghassnids and related to them in various
ways; the Umayyads flourished in Oriens immediately after the Ghassnids.
1. The most revealing account on the importance of horse races among the
pre-Islamic Arabs is related to a lengthy war between two peninsular Arab groups,
Abs and Dubyn, occasioned by a horse race whose outcome was sharply disputed.
26 Ibn Hudhayl, ilyat al-Fursn, 8690.
27 See, e.g., Dwn Ab Tammm, ed. M. Azzm (Cairo, 1964), III, 100.
28 See note 19.
29 Ibn Hudhayl, ilyat al-Fursn, 14446.
30 See . Awn, al-Wald ibn-Yazd (Beirut, 1981), 26869.
31 Ibid., 265.
The war took its name from the stallion and mare who raced, and is therefore called
the War of Dis and al-Ghabr.32
2. Even closer to the Ghassnids in time and place are horses and horse races
during the twenty-two years of Muammads ministry as a prophet, 610632.
Abundant sources have been carefully collected on the Prophets love for, and the
names of, his various horses, and on his approval and encouragement of races.33
Above all, horses are remembered in the Koran itself, in oaths involving them and
in passages on their worth in military encounters.34
3. But the closest to the Ghassnids was the sibq of the Umayyads. Of all the
Umayyad caliphs, Hishm (a.d. 724743) is the one for whom the descriptions
of horse races are most abundant. He is especially relevant for the Ghassnid sub-
strate in this aspect of Umayyad social life, since it was at the old Ghassnid site,
Rufa/Sergiopolis, that his horse races took place.35 He was so fond of horses and
horse racing that he is said on a single occasion to have had more than a thousand
horses run, for which purpose he widened the race course.36 The following data
may be gathered from references to Hishms horse races.
a. Rufa emerges as one of the sites for Ghassnid horse races. Already in
pre-Islamic times, Arabic verse refers to a federate sharak, the road that surrounded
Rufa, as a clear wide road, lib,37 presumably wide enough to accommodate a
large number of horses.
b. The group of horses prepared for each race was called a alba. The term
probably survives in the Umayyad structure in Jordan usually referred to as Qar
al-allabt; if so, its proper name should be Qar al-albt (plural of alba).
c. The reign of Hishm documents the composition and recitation of poems
in the rajaz meter that celebrate the winning horse, its rider, and its owner, a prac-
tice no doubt prevalent in Ghassnid times as well.38
32 See R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London, 1969), 6162, and the
longer and more detailed account in J. A. Bellamy, Dis, EI2, Supplement 12 (1980), 17779.
33 On the horses of the Prophet, and on his interest in horse racing, see Ibn Hudhayl, ilyat
al-Fursn, 151, 14142, respectively.
34 Koran, 100:15.
35 For the Ghassnid substrate in Umayyad history and for Sergiopolis/Rufa as a Ghassnid site,
see BASIC II.1, 37291, 11533, respectively.
36 See Awn, al-Wald ibn-Yazd, 26769.
37 See al-Mufaal al-abb, al-Mufaaliyyt, ed. A. Shkir and A. Hrn (Cairo, 1943), II, 6,
verse 15. On Sharak, see BASIC, II.1, 11618, where I argued that the path around
Rufa/Sergiopolis
was used for a religious awf, circumambulation, around the city; but it could also have served as a
race
track, a function made clearer in Umayyad times.
38 For the various rajaz poems recited on the Umayyad sibq, conducted under the auspices of
Hishm, see Awn, al-Wald ibn-Yazd, 26869. One of the most attractive pre-Islamic poems on
horse racing was composed by the famous al-Khans who belonged to the tribe of Sulaym in ijz.
The
237 The Horse
IV. Horse Parades
Of the many occasions for which Arabian horses were paraded, the race and the
victory celebration were perhaps the most important. But the parade itself must
sometimes have been the main attraction, demonstrating the Arabs attachment to
the horse, their admiration of it, and the part it played in their social life. In early
Islamic times such parades are known to have existed, even when the resources of
the Muslim Arabs became so vast that they could have undertaken events that were
far more grand. The resources of the pre-Islamic Arabs (including the Ghassnids)
were relatively modest, and so they must have engaged in such social activities as
parades as one of their few affordable entertainments.
As happens so often in studies of pre-Islamic times, lack of evidence makes it
necessary to turn to sources from early Islamic times, such as those describing horse
parades during the caliphate of the Abbasid al-Manr (754775), and before him
parades of the Umayyads, Muwiya (661680) and Hishm (724743).39 Closer
to the Ghassnids in time and place is an allusion in the Koran to a parade; this
reference, to the Israelite king Solomon, could have been intelligible to the Meccan
Arabs during the Prophets ministry in Mecca (610622) only if they were familiar
with parades.
Verse 31 of sura 38 reads When steeds were displayed in the evening before
him, and verse 33 reads bring them back to me and he started stroking their legs
and necks.40 Verse 31 contains the crucial verb uria, was paraded, displayed,
from which the verbal noun ar, parade or display, is derived. The parade was
clearly known to the Arabs, including the Arabs of Mecca to whom the Koran was
first addressed.
The Ghassnids, to whom as foederati the horse was so important, no doubt
had their horse parades. To landmarks on their social calendar such as Yawm
al-Nar (victory) and Yawm al-alba (races) may be added Yawm al-Ar, the day
of horse parades. On such an occasion some rajaz poetry in praise of the horses was
possibly recited.41
sextet of verses describes a race in which the horses of her father and brother were competing and
details
its stages, including the cheers and exclamations (hutf) of the spectators; see Dwn al-Khans,
ed. K.
al-Bustni (Beirut, 1986), 6.
39 On parades and parade grounds during the caliphate of al-Manr, see Vir, Iabl, 215. For
parades during the caliphate of Muwiya and Hishm, see respectively M. al-Jaziri, Nukhbat Iqd
al-Jiyd fi al-fint al-Jiyd (Damascus, 1985), 15, and Awn, al-Wald ibn-Yazd, 26768.
40 This pampering of horses is also reported about the Prophet Muammad, whose love for horses
is
established in the sources; see al-Jaziri, Nukhbat Iqd al-Jiyd, 14.
41 The abundance of poetry in praise of the horse may be seen in the many pages devoted to it;
ibid.,
10185.
XIII
The Hunt
B
efore they became foederati of Byzantium, the Ghassnids had hunted exten-
sively in the Peninsulaespecially in South Arabia, where hunting was
very much developed, as it was in Arabia Pastoralis in the northern part of the
Peninsula. It was especially important not only as sport but to provide sustenance
in a region of the world lacking in rivers and fertile expanses. The best indication of
the importance of hunting in pre-Islamic Arab peninsular life was its appearance
as a motif in the Arabic polythematic ode, the qasda.1
After the Ghassnids became allies of Byzantium, the hunt remained one of
their chief preoccupations; their new status even enhanced their involvement in it
and its importance for them. Since they were now settled in the arid eastern por-
tion of the diocese, they lived near an area where game animals for sustenance were
found in abundance. The hunt also grew more popular as a form of entertainment,
as other forms of sport were unavailable. In Ghassnid society, like others, it was the
sport of the military aristocracy. The hunt was also important to the Ghassnids
as professional soldiers. Since hunting entailed riding horses; using weapons, espe-
cially spears and arrows; and facing hostile and sometimes ferocious opponents,
such as lions and tigers, which apparently still existed in Oriens, it functioned as
military training for them in peacetime and kept them fit for combat duties. Their
overlords, the Byzantine autokratores, were also enamored of the hunt as a pastime:2
three of themTheodosius II, Basil I, and John IIdied while hunting.
Contemporary sources on the Ghassnid hunt are scant and fragmentary, but
they are significant, supported by authentic later sources.
1. Three of their kings are described as falcons: one of them, Ibn Salm, was
1 The theme is found in many of the qasdas of pre-Islamic poetry, but its most frequent and out-
standing appearance is in the Dwn of Imru al-Qays, the foremost poet of that period, on whom
see
Sezgin, GAS, II, 12226.
2 On the hunt in Byzantine times, see A. Karpozilos, Hunting, ODB, II, 958. Hunting in the
Near East has been dealt with extensively in G. Fowden, Desert Kites: Ethnography, Archaeology
and Art, in The Roman and Byzantine Near East, II, JRA Supplementary series 31(Ann Arbor,
Mich.,
1999), 10736.
239 The Hunt
eulogized by assn; another was the famous Mundir, described as a a
kr, a large
lanner falcon, that soared high and then swooped down on ra and burned it; a
third was Ab Karib, whose sobriquet was qam (eagle). Their standard in bat-
tle was called al-Uqb,3 variously interpreted as the kite or eagle. Their panegyrist
al-Nbigha describes a hunting scene in one of his poems (though not a specifically
Ghassnid one).4
2. Graphic art supports the importance of the hunt in Ghassnid times in the
Provincia Arabia, wherein lay their headquarters. A church in Madaba contains
a mosaic that displays a figure holding a falcon in his hand ready for the hunt. In
Jabal Usays (a hundred kilometers southeast of Damascus) there is a rock drawing
of men hunting with bow and arrow.5
3. Although the extant poetry on the Ghassnids has not preserved any
description of them conducting a hunt or a chase, their ally and relative the
Kindite prince Imru al-Qays gave prominence to the hunt in his Dwn. In his
most famous poem, the so-called Suspended Ode, he devotes some eighteen verses
to the hunt, describing his horse, the pounce on a flock of ewes, and the cooks
preparation of the meal.6
Circumstantial evidence, both substantial and significant, demonstrates the
central position that the hunt and the chase had in Ghassnid social life.
1. Of all the Umayyad caliphs who ruled Bild al-Shm, Yazd I represents
the best link between the Umayyad and the Ghassnid periods. First, as an early
Umayyad dynast he was very close in time to the Ghassnids; there are extensive
accounts of the hunt and other forms of entertainments and sports that became
popular during his caliphate.7 Second, he was the son of a Christian Arab woman
from Kalb, former allies of Byzantium, and the husband of a Ghassnid. Third,
he lived for a time in the bdiya, the steppe land of Kalb, under the tutelage of his
fiercely independent mother, who preferred the open air of the desert to the sti-
fling air of Damascus.8 And it was there, as Philip Hitti notes, that the youthful
3 See the poem by the Ghassnid Ibn al-Ral in Muhammad al-Marzubni, Mujam al-Shuar,
ed. A. al-Sattr Farrj (Cairo, 1960), 86, verse 9.
5 In the Madaba church, the falcon (on the hand of one of the companions of Hippolytus) appears
in the mosaic in the Hippolytus Hall. The mosaic is in the lower level of the church, which
apparently
belonged to a house over which the sixth-century church was built; see M. Piccirillo, Madaba: Le
chiese e
i mosaici (Milan, 1989), 51. For the rock drawing in Jabal Usays, see R. G. Hoyland, Arabia and the
Arabs
(London, 2001), 190 note a.
6 Imru al-Qays, Dwn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1958), 1923, verses 4766.
7 See the work of . Awn, al-Wald ibn Yazd (Beirut, 1981), 176282, which provides more
extensive documentation of these activities during the reign of Wald II.
8 Sentiments she expressed in a celebrated poem; see R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs
(1907; reprint, London, 1969), 19596 (included below in Chapter 15). Maysn is briefly discussed
above, in connection with the Ghassni Maysn, in Chapter 2.
crown-prince became habituated to the chase, hard-riding, wine-imbibing, and
verse-making for which he earned the sobriquets Yazd of the Fuhd (Yazd of
the Cheetahs) and Yazd al-Khumr (Yazd of the Wines). He was the first who
trained the cheetah to ride on the croup of a horse . . . and assigned to each of his
hunting dogs a special slave.9 During his caliphate (680683) the hunt became a
state-sponsored sport indulged in by the head of the state himself, a reflection of
the importance that hunting would acquire during the Umayyad caliphate. In this
respect Yazd departed from the practice of his father Muwiya, founder of the
dynasty, who was a serious man with no time for such diversions.
Before their elevation to the caliphate, the Umayyads had been a clan in
Mecca, engaged in trading enterprises. Their zest for the hunt must have arisen in
Bild al-Shm when they became its masters, acquired from those who had engaged
in it in that region, such as the Ghassnids and other Arab allies of Byzantium in
Oriens. All this argues that the popularity of the hunt in Umayyad times was a
continuation of Ghassnid traditions.
2. Explicit involvement in the hunt by the Ghassnids is attested in the
Umayyad period, during which they maintained a strong presence in the Umayyad
state. One of them, al-Ghirf al-Ghassni, was the chief master of the hunt for
two of the last Umayyad caliphs, Hishm (724743) and Wald II (743744), and
lived long enough to serve al-Mahdi, the caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, which sup-
planted the Umayyad. Al-Ghirf composed for him a work on falconry.10
The professional involvement of a Ghassnid in hunting at the Umayyad
courts suggests that the tradition of intense interest in the activity went back to
Ghassnid times. Furthermore, al-Ghirf says in his book that one of the kings
of Kinda was the first to use the a
kr in falconry. Kinda and Ghassn were sister

groups; the two intermarried, and expertise in a skill such as hunting with falcons
could easily have passed from the one to the other. Kindas foremost poet, Imru
al-Qays, composed brilliantly on his horse and also acknowledged the Ghassnids,
whom he visited as his maternal uncles. Al-Ghirf could also be cited as some-
one who illustrates the influence of Byzantium on the Ghassnids hunting and
their knowledge of the use of animals in hunting, especially the cheetah; it has
been suggested that from the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, a team of anon-
ymous translators, possibly bilingual Ghassnids, had put into Arabic some of
Aristotles writing, in particular his History of the Animals.11 This is not unlikely,
9 P. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (New York, 1981), 195, 228.
10 On al-Ghirf al-Ghassni, see D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic
Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbsid Society (2nd4th/8th10th Centuries)
(London,
1998), 74 and note 26. For his treatise on falconry, see Al-Ghirf, Kitb awri al-ayr (Frankfurt,
1986).
11 See F. Vir, Fahd, EI2, II, 240.
241 The Hunt
and al-Ghirfs treatise on falconry thus might have benefited from what he
had learned from Aristotle through his Byzantine connection.12 The Byzantines
evinced greater interest in hawking, which they (like the Ghassnids and the Arabs
of Kinda) viewed as the sport of the ruling class.13
3. Some evidence for the Ghassnid hunt is also available in the reign of the
Abbasid al-Mamn (813833), grandson of al-Mahdi. Ifahn in his al-Aghn
states that when al-Mamn visited Bild al-Shm he went hunting in the region
that extended from Damascus to Mount Hermon14the Jabal al-Thalj of assn,
the panegyrist of the Ghassnids. In Byzantine administrative terms, this region
included Palaestina Secunda and the Golan, where the Ghassnids had their
capital, Jbiya. The statement in al-Aghn reveals that this region was a hunt-
ing ground; and if the Abbasid caliph who came from distant Baghdad chose to
hunt in that region, it must have been a hunting ground in earlier times when the
Ghassnids were settled there as the foederati of Byzantium.
Circumstantial evidence on the Ghassnid hunt in Byzantine Oriens is pro-
vided by a book written in the twelfth century, during the period of the Crusades,
on the hunting scene in Bild al-Shm. It is Kitb al-Itibr by the Muslim Arab
author Usma ibn Munqidh,15 who was born in 1095, four years before Jerusalem
fell to the Crusaders, and who died in 1188, a year after its recapture by Saladin. As
a courtier and man of letters, Usma was close to the Zangids and the Ayybids.
He belonged to a princely family of Shayzar, which had a passion for hunting.
According to him, he spent seventy of his ninety-three years in public service but
his entire life in hunting. Thus, his memoirs on the hunt are most valuable in this
Ghassnid context. The Munqidh family to which he belonged were the military
aristocracy in the region; they were settled in Bild al-Shm and divided their time
between war against the Crusaders and the hunt, in which falconry figured as the
12 The name Ghirf means falcon in Arabic, and as a personal name in the Ghassnid onomas-
ticon meant high-born, lordthereby providing further evidence of the importance of this
raptor
in the social life of the Ghassnids. Al-Ghirf al-Ghassnis name may now be added to the list of
royal
Ghassnids given above (Ibn Salm, Mundir, and Ab Karib) to whom the term falcon was applied.
On
ghirf, see An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed. E. W. Lane (London, 1877), Book I, part 6, 2270.
13 On hawking in Byzantium, see A. Karpozilos, Hawking, ODB, II, 9034. In discussing
the practice of hawking in Byzantine history, Karpozilos refers to the Oneirokritikon of Achmet Ben
Sirin, the dream interpreter of Caliph al-Mamn; see M. Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream
Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources (Leiden, 2002). The role of
hawk-
ing in the Ghassnid hunt makes it necessary to revise the statement that for the Arabs, hawking
only
assumed importance with them after the great Muslim conquests, which brought them in contact
with
the Persians and the Byzantines (F. Vir, Bayzara, EI2, I, 1152).
14 See Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1955), IV, 355.
15 See Usma ibn Munqidh, Kitb al-Itibr, ed. Q. al-Smarri (Riyadh, 1987), translated by
P. K. Hitti as An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of
Usmah
Ibn-Munqidh (New York, 1929).
most important of all methods of hunting. So, mutatis mutandis, much of what he
says in his book on the hunt is applicable to the Ghassnids.
1. The importance given to falconry in Bild al-Shm is striking. Much of the
portion of Usmas book that deals with hunting is devoted to falconry with the
bz (goshawk), for which he had a special keeper, called the bzyr. Its importance
is underscored in the book in many ways.
a. One princeShihb al-Dn, ruler of amwas so attached to his bz
that when the bird died, his master gave him the full honors of Muslim obsequies,
with recitation from the Koran, a coffin, and sepulture in a grave.16
b. The bz was so much a favorite of Usmas father that he had a small stone
structure made for the purpose of catching the bz. This ingenious contrivance
proved successful, and the number of falcons in his fathers possession multiplied.17
c. Even more striking is his statement that his father was so enamored
of the bz that he sent some of his followers to bring him buzt (plural of bz)
from Constantinople, which they did; he then used the birds in his hunt.18 If a
twelfth-century Muslim could establish contact with Constantinople during the
Crusades, surely the Ghassnids, as foederati of Byzantium in the sixth century,
could and must have done the same. The likelihood that such connections pertain-
ing to hunting existed lends greater credibility to the suggestion that some of the
Ghassnids even translated Greek books on animals.
2. In the vicinity of Shayzar, lions and tigers were still to be found, a fact
that implies that they were present there in Ghassnid times. The existence of
these animals of prey confirms the challenges that awaited the Ghassnids during
the hunt.19
3. The relationship of the hunt to war is noted by Usma; hence its relevance
to the Ghassnids and the hunt. He says that his father divided his time between
war on the one hand and the hunt on the other. Furthermore, his preparations
for a hunting expedition resembled those he made for a military campaign.20 The
Ghassnids of Jbiya, much more than the Munqidhs of Shayzar, were professional
fighters, and thus they took the hunt more seriously as practice for war than did
the Munqidhs.
4. The Munqidhs hunted as a family. According to Usma, the hunting party
16 See Usma ibn Munqidh, Kitb al-Itibr, 219.
17 Ibid., 2078.
18 Ibid., 207.
19 Ibid., 12529, 13133. The Cynegetica of Oppian (4.11246, 354424; quoted by Fowden,
Desert Kites, 131) confirms the existence of lions in Oriens along the Euphrates as late as the
third
century. For the Cynegetica, see in Oppian, Colluthus, Tryphiodorus, ed. and trans. A. W. Mair,
Loeb
Classical Library (London and New York, 1928). For Alexanders partiality to hunting lions, see
P. Carteledge, Alexander the Great (Woodstock, N.Y., 2004), 22225.
20 See Usma ibn Munqidh, Kitb al-Itibr, 209.
243 The Hunt
included his father and his fathers four sons, with no fewer than forty riders and
a multitude of servants, attendants, birds, beasts of prey, and instruments.21 The
Ghassnids waged their wars against the Lakhmids as a family, as John of Ephesus
has indicated for the campaign of a.d. 570;22 surely they did likewise while hunt-
ing, a far pleasanter pursuit. The importance of the hunt in the region is further
demonstrated by its treatment during the Crusades; despite hostilities between the
Muslims and the Crusaders, agreements were entered into so that hunting parties
might be free from danger of attack.23
In addition to the book of Usma, other works contain accounts that draw
attention to the hunt in the region of the Ghassnids. The fame of Bild al-Shm
for hunting with the falcon reached distant Sicily in the thirteenth century, then
under one of the two baptized sultans of Sicily, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen
(a.d. 12151250). In the words of Philip Hitti, Frederick brought from Syria
skilled falconers, watched them train the birds and tried to ascertain by sealing the
hawks eyes whether they could find food by smell. He had his interpreter-astrolo-
ger Theodore (Thdhuri), a Jacobite Christian from Antioch, translate an Arabic
treatise on falconry. This translation together with another from Persian became
the basis of Fredericks work on falconry, the first modern natural history.24
The Norman kings interest in Syrian falconry reflects the importance of the
sport in Oriens and suggests its significance for the Ghassnids, who hunted in
that region. It also illustrates the impact on the West of practices from the East
during the Norman period, which was receptive to Arab influences.25
The importance of the hunt in the Umayyad period, linked to its importance
in the Ghassnid, is also reflected in the rise of a new genre in Arabic poetry. The
hunt had been one theme among many in the Arabic pre-Islamic qasda, as in the
polythematic ode of al-Nbigha mentioned above; but in the Umayyad period, the
hunt found its poetic expression in the ardiyyathe cynegetic or hunt poem
whose invention is credited to a poet of the middle Umayyad period, al-Shmardal
ibn Shark (d. after 728).26 With him, the hunt poem appeared fully dissociated
from the qasda, as a monothematic, self-contained poem written in a characteris-
tic meter, the rajaz. Moreover, the ardiyya became a complex poem consisting of
three parts: they focus, in turn, on the departure of the hunter with his horse in the
early morning, the enumeration of the animals hunted and killed, and finally the
21 Ibid., 2089.
22 See Ioannis Ephesini Historiae Ecclesiasticae Pars Tertia, Latin trans. E. W. Brooks, CSCO,
Scriptores Syri, ser. 3, vol. 106 (Louvain, 1936), 217.
23 Hitti, History of the Arabs, 643.
24 Ibid., 610.
25 For more on these influences, see ibid., 61214.
26 See T. Seidensticker, al-Shmardal ibn-Shark, EI2, IX, 282.
preparation of the game for the meal. The hunt poem thus is significant, not only
because it marks a new genre in the history of Arabic poetry,27 but also because it
provides valuable data in its description of the phases of the hunt. In addition to
detailing the various kinds of animals and birds of prey used by the hunters, it spec-
ifies the wide range of game hunted and bagged: The hunting animals are dogs
and cheetahs, and as trained birds of prey are named the hawk (bz, zurra
k), the
saker or lanner (a
kr), the peregrine (shhn), the merlin (yuyu), the eagle (ukb)
and the sparrowhawk (bshik). The quarry are antelopes, hares, foxes, cranes, bus-
tards (ubr), francolins, geese and other birds.28 Allusions to the hunt in the
traditional qasda provided no such valuable enumerations.29
A final point to be discussed is the existence of structural elements related to
the hunt: the hunting lodges and game reserves that the Umayyads undoubtedly
had, and that the Ghassnids almost certainly also had.
1. The hunting lodge. The hunt was a complex operation, involving hunt-
ers, attendants, horses, beasts, birds of prey, and weapons. It is difficult to believe
that the Ghassnids did not build structures appropriate to the hunt. The famous
Umayyad structure Quayr Amra, situated at the entrance of Wd Sirn, is the
most celebrated example of such an Arab hunting lodge, with its baths, halls, and
frescoes depicting hunting scenes.30 As no Ghassnid hunting lodge has survived,
Quayr Amra may give an idea of how a Ghassnid hunting lodge looked; simi-
lar Ghassnid hunting lodgeson a much more modest scale and without sexu-
ally explicit decorationsmay have existed in pre-Islamic times. The Umayyads
assimilated much of the Ghassnid tradition, which likely included the custom of
building lodges for their hunting parties. Given the strands of continuity that ran
from Ghassnid to Umayyad times, it is possible that Quayr Amra was originally
a modest Ghassnid structure that was later occupied by the new masters of the
Near East, who Umayyadized and enlarged the original building. The following
may be adduced to support the argument for traces of a Ghassnid pre-Islamic sub-
strate and presence in it.
27 Idem, ardiyya, EI2, X, 22324. This new genre was to find its greatest master in Ab Nuws
in the early Abbasid period.
28 M. Ullmann, Rajaz, EI2, VIII, 377.
29 Hunting was to find its full expression in the work of the tenth-century poet Kushjim, in
Kitb al-Mayid wa al-Marid, ed. A. alas (Cairo, 1954), and even a fuller expression in the
work
of Ibn Mangli; see his Kitb Uns al-Mal fi Wahsh al-Fal, ed. F. Vir (Paris, 1984). For a study of
the ardiyyt, the Arabic cynegetica, in Abbasid times, see G. R. Smith, Hunting Poetry
(ardiyyt),
in Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. J. Ashtiany et al., Cambridge History of Arabic Literature
(Cambridge,
1990), 16784.
30 The standard work on this much-discussed structure, which includes an extensive and compre-
hensive bibliography, is G. Fowden, Quayr Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique
Syria
(Berkeley, 2004).
245 The Hunt
a. Wd Sirn was one of the gateways to Oriens from Arabia Pastoralis, and
as foederati of Byzantium, the Ghassnids protected it and guarded it as part of
their presidial function.31 It is therefore unlikely that with their passion for hunt-
ing, they would have failed to erect a lodge at such a spot, which offered ample
opportunities for indulging in the pleasures of the chase.
b. Relevant analogies for a Ghassnid substrate are provided by Umayyad
structures such as Qar al-ayr al-Gharb and those in Rufa (Sergiopolis), which
point in the direction of a possible original Ghassnid establishment at Quayr
Amra. Qar al-ayr presents an especially strong case.32
c. The Ghassnid substrate in Qar al-ayr al-Gharb, the Umayyad palace
southwest of Palmyra, is supported by Greek inscriptions;33 they explicitly associ-
ate it with the Ghassnids by referring to Arethas as a patricius in welcoming him
to the original establishment. No such inscription attests to the possible Ghassnid
provenance of Quayr Amra, but there is significant circumstantial evidence.
Arabic became the language of the dwn in the Umayyad state in the reign
of Abd al-Malik (685705). Yet Quayr Amra has some Greek words and some
Christian elements in its graphic art.34 These features date it more appropriately to
the Ghassnid Byzantine period, when both Greek culture and Christianity flour-
ished in Oriens; the Ghassnids were both zealous Christians and conversant with
Greek, which they used in their monumental inscriptions. Greek words such as
and possibly C are especially relevant in view of the fact that Quayr
Amra is attributed to Wald II (743744)that is, long after the Arabicization of
the dwn.35
Quayr Amra may or may not have originally been a Ghassnid structure,
but there is no doubt that the Ghassnids availed themselves of hunting lodges.
Since these have disappeared, Quayr Amra provides the student of this aspect of
Ghassnid social life with the sole concrete example of what Ghassnid hunting
lodges might have looked likeminus many of the decorative frescoes to which
the sensual Umayyad caliph was partial. Their structure would have been more
modest in scale, since the Ghassnids, powerful and affluent as they had been,
could not compete with the Umayyads and their vast empire.
2. The ir, the pleasure garden.36 The park or game reserve attached to the
31 See BASIC II.1, 3551; for Wd Sirn, see 439, Map X.
32 See ibid., 20611, and the index, s.v.
33 See BASIC I.1, 25861.
34 See Fowden, Quayr Amra, 13840, 19295, 26572.
35 Garth Fowden (Quayr Amra) has displayed impressive erudition in his intelligent argument for
the Greek and Christian elements in Quayr Amra as Umayyad; but the more natural explanation is
that they belong to a pre-Islamic Byzantine past.
36 ir is sometimes used interchangeably with ayr, but should be distinguished from hira, the
military encampment, and ra, the enclosure for cows. See BAFOC, 49098.
palaces and castles of the Umayyads and the Abbasids was an attractive feature of
their urban and social life. Traces of it have survived, especially at Umayyad complexes
such as Qar al-ayr al-Gharb, Qar al-ayr al-Sharqi, and Khirbat al-Mafjar.37
The Ghassnids lived close to nature, and they must have kept animals and
birds, such as gazelles and doves, that had been captured alive during the hunt
with nets or traps. These must have been kept in enclosures, known from their
later designations as irs. This is very likely another aspect of Umayyad social
life continued from a Ghassnid practice. The Ghassnids, it must be remem-
bered, had hailed from South Arabia, a highly sedentary region where the
imyarites may have had these irs. A verse in an ode of Imru al-Qays (whose
group, Kinda, resided in South Arabia) refers to what may have been a ir in
that region. While describing some of his women, he says that they looked like
the gazelles of the sand in the mansions of the Qayls (as the South Arabian
members of the aristocracy were called).38 It is uncertain, however, whether
the Ghassnids remembered the conditions in South Arabia after they left that
region. Perhaps they modeled their game reserves on those that may have existed
in Byzantine Oriens in some cities of the Decapolis, thereby taking a leaf out of
the Graeco-Roman notebook.39
37 See J. Sourdel-Thomine, ir, EI2, II, 71. The most detailed work on the ir is that of
F. qn, al-ir (Amman, 1979).
38 The poet seems to refer to a deer park; see Imru al-Qays, Dwn, 379, verse 32, where he calls
the
women najib. In the version of the Dwn attributed to Alam al-Shantamar, the term used for
women
is awnis; see Ashr al-Shuar al-Sitta al-Jhiliyyn, ed. M. Khafji (Beirut, 1992), 49, verse 32.
For
Qayl as the civil and military leader of a grouping (shab) in the Sabaean social organization, see A.
F. L.
Beeston, Kayl, EI2, IV, 81819.
The hunt in South Arabia, whence the Ghassnids had hailed before they became foederati of
Byzantium, had cultic associations, and the inscriptions reflect the connection between the hunt
and divine blessings; see Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 94, and R. B. Serjeant, South Arabian
Hunt
(London, 1976).
39 In a recent article, Nancy evenko has divided such reserves into three categories: game parks,
menageries, and animal parks. Although she focuses on the Middle Byzantine period, the article is
use-
ful and relevant in this context; see Wild Animals, in Byzantine Garden Culture, ed. A.
Littlewood,
H. Maguire, and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, D.C., 2002), 6986. For references to game
reserves in the Islamic world in Baghdad and in Andalusian al-Zahr, see 7677, 8081.
Appendix
Traps and Snares
As hunters and fowlers, the Ghassnids no doubt availed themselves of traps
and snares for catching animals and birds that they wanted to bag alive, some of
which they took to their game reserves.1 Such methods of catching quarry have
1 These traps and snares were categorized as (1) shabak, nets; (2) snares with draw nets, ibla,
ubla; and (3) the covered pit trap, u kna, ughwiyya, mughawwt, wadjra, dafna. See F. Vir,
ayd,
EI2, IX, 98.
247 The Hunt
not received much attention, and practically nothing is known about them in
Ghassnid times. Garth Fowden has done justice to them in a long article that
deserves close examination here.2 He has argued that the traps used included not
just perishable devices, such as nets, but also solid stone structures. Fowden based
his argument on the accounts of modern travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in the Near East, such as the indefatigable Czech scholar Alois Musil,
and of very recent writers on these snares and traps, such as the late Jibril Jabbr.
Fowden has done the field a great service by his research into this aspect of the
hunt. The following are some observations on this important article.
1. In his discussion of the morphology of the Arabic term for traps, mayid,
Fowden pointed out that it derives from the verb da, to hunt, to catch.3 It
serves as the plural of two different terms in Arabic, each related to the verb da.
As the plural of miyd or mayada, it means only trap, snare, since it is cast
in the morphological pattern peculiar to the noun of instrument.4 However, it
can also be the plural of mad, the noun of place, meaning the place of the hunt,
where the hunters congregatethe hunting lodge.5
It is therefore not always clear which meaning the term mayid conveys
in a given context. To guard against such confusion, a careful author would use
another term for lodge: namely, mutaayyad, which is derived from tasayyada, the
increased form of the verb da. Thus Usma, the author of Kitb al-Itibr, states
that his father had two such lodges, mutaayyadayn.6 So when an Arab author uses
the term mayid, it is important to be clear about which of the two significations
he intends.7
Similar confusion could occur interpreting such related terms as ra, ayr,
and ir, derivatives of the verb ra. Elsewhere, I have elucidated ra, the mili-
tary camp, as etymologically distinct from dir but semantically allied to it as a
military term, with the plurals iyar, iyr, and rn.8 These are distinct from
ir, the game reserve, which sometimes is called ayr. All these terms except
dir derive from the same verb, but they traveled along different semantic routes.
2 G. Fowden, Desert Kites: Ethnography, Archaeology, and Art, in The Roman and Byzantine
Near East, II, JRA Supplementary series 31 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999), 10736.
3 Ibid., 127.
4 The terminal t marbta definitely makes it a noun of instrument.
5 A third form for trap, mayad, also has the plural mayid. For all this, see An Arabic-English
Lexicon, comp. E. W. Lane (London, 1872), Book I, Part 4, 221.
6 See Usma ibn Munqidh, Kitb al-Itibr, ed. Q. al-Smarri (Riyadh, 1987), 146, 206, 208.
7 Ibn Khaldn contributed to the possible confusion in interpreting mayad, when he applied the
term to the game reserve of the Hafid al-Mustanir (a.d. 12491277), in Bizerte in North Africa;
see
F. Vir, Bayzara, EI2, I, 1152. For mayad as an instrument of hunting, see Arabic-English
Lexicon,
Book I, Part 4, 221.
8 See BAFOC, 49098.
2. There is no doubt that in modern times, when European travelers visited
the Near East, stone structures were used as mayid in both senses. Whether this
was the case in late antiquity in Oriens is still an open question. Some of these
structures do go back to ancient times, but their purpose is not clear. The dedicated
Jesuit priest Antoine Poidebard, who made use of aerial photography, ventured
the proposition that these structureswhich he called Saracen enclosures
were built by the ancient Romans and that Arab pastoralists used them for the
defense of Oriens.9 Under this interpretation, their function was not cynegetic but
military.
I found the conclusions of Poidebard attractive, especially as I have been
dealing with the contribution of the Arab foederati (whom he called partisans
nomades)! Elucidating their role in the defense of Oriens, I suggested that these
Saracen enclosures he spoke of were the ras and dirs of the federate Arabs,
their military stations and camps along the frontier.10 Poidebard described the
structures as enclosures encircled with walls, the salients of which were forti-
fied with round towers. His description seemed to link them to a defense sys-
tem against the nomads rather than to lodges for chasing gazelles! I ventured
these conclusions on the Saracen enclosures only tentatively some twenty years
ago, with the caveat If these enclosures turn out to be what Poidebard thought
they were.11
Fowden rejected Poidebards conclusions and by association also my sup-
port of them, conditional and contingent as it was.12 His argument is detailed,
ingenious, and full of insights, but the claim that ancient stone structures were
mayid, traps, remains inferential, not evidential. He himself concludes by say-
ing that our explicit ancient evidence . . . involves perishable types of trap, while
our explicit modern evidence . . . mostly concerns permanent stone structures.13
Retroactive reasoning is legitimate and convincing when the two periods are so
close as to suggest continuitybut not in such a case as this, when some fifteen
centuries gape, separating such massive public works14 of ancient times or late
antiquity from their use as mayid in modern times.
The difference in the conclusions of Poidebard and Fowden may be traced to
the different approaches of the two scholars; the former had done extensive research
9 A. Poidebard, La trace de Rome dans le dsert de Syrie: Le limes de Trajan la conqute arabe;
recherches ariennes (19251932) (Paris, 1934), 19196.
10 BAFOC, 48385.
11 Ibid., 485.
12 Fowden, Desert Kites, 114.
13 Ibid., 134.
14 Ibid., 113.
249 The Hunt
on the Roman defense system, manifest in such works as La trace de Rome dans le
dsert de Syrie, while the latter had been dealing with the hunt, which played such
a conspicuous role in Quayr Amraon which he was already focusing when he
was writing his article.15
15 Fowden devotes seven pages of his article (ibid., 12734) to the hunting lodge that was the
subject
of his sizable book published five years later, Quayr Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late
Antique
Syria (Berkeley, 2004). My share in this controversy has been to elucidate the role of the Arab
foederati
in the defense of Oriens (see BAFOC, 48385, on Saracen enclosures), which has been treated in
the
many volumes of this series that correct Poidebards misconception that the foederati were nomads
(see
especially BASIC II.1).
XIV
Ghassnid Banquets
A
s noted in Chapter 4, Food, all Arab societies, even the pastoral, accorded
food great importance and attention, reflected in the names for their many
dishes and for the many different feasts and banquets they held on various occa-
sions.1 Sedentary Arab groupssuch as the Ghassnidsnaturally reached higher
levels of the culinary art than did the pastoralists, preparing the more elaborate
banquets required by the demands of civic life and its complex social structure.
The Ghassnids were Arabs, Christians, and foederati of Byzantium; the feasts and
festivals of the Byzantines can shed light on those of the Ghassnids both secular
and religious.2
Of all the forms of entertainment given by the Ghassnids, the banquet was
the most significant. Although they reached an advanced level of sophistication
as they led their sedentary life in Oriens, their capacity to mount entertainments
was limited compared to that of their overlords in Constantinople. Because of
these limitations, the Ghassnids gave special attention to their banquets, which
not only were the most satisfying form of entertainment to the guests but also
expressed one of the two elements in the Arab ideal of virtue, enhanced by the
spiritual tone that Christianity imparted to banquets as connected with the feasts
and festivals of the liturgical year. Because of the scantiness of the extant sources,
however, circumstantial evidence and inferential reasoning must be used as neces-
sary to reconstruct Ghassnid banquets.
I. Secular Banquets
As Arabs, the Ghassnids must have given banquets on many occasions, such as
weddings, funerals, and births, usually in honor of a son. The wedding banquet was
called a nik. Before the wedding was the engagement banquet, when the hand of
1 For the dishes and the banquets of the Arabs in pre-Islamic times, with about twelve names for
each, see Ibn Abd Rabbih, al-Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn, I. Abyr, and A. Hrn (Beirut, 1982),
VI,
29092; for the English version of their names, see G. J. H. van Gelder, Gods Banquet: Food in
Classical
Arabic Literature (New York, 2000), 16, 21.
2 On Byzantine feasts, see R. Taft, Feast, ODB, II, 78182, with its bibliography.
251 Ghassnid Banquets
the maiden was asked for. The party of the prospective bridegroom would ask their
spokesman to deliver a speech, called a khutba; the same term was applied to the
engagement ceremony itself and its attendant banquet.3
Only a Syriac source, Michael the Syrian, refers to such a secular banquet,
in this case given on the occasion of the visit of the Chalcedonian patriarch of
Antioch to Arethas, the Monophysite Ghassnid king. Information on the types
of food that might be gleaned from such a source has already been examined in
Chapter 4; it also suggests that the participants sat on chairs, not couches.4
In light of the dearth of source material, one must rely on inferential and
analogical reasoning from the Byzantine scene to which the Ghassnids belonged
to suggest another type of banquet: that held after a military victory, celebrated
by the Byzantines5 and surely by the Ghassnids as well. The Byzantines also gave
banquets in conjunction with the consecration of churches, and the Ghassnids
must have done the same; they would have had many occasions to do so, since they
were responsible for the surge in church building after their king, Arethas, revived
the Monophysite church around a.d. 540. Such a banquet must have been given
by Magnus, the Roman curator and commerciarius who invited the Ghassnid
king Mundir to the consecration of a church at uwwrn, Evariaan invitation
that proved disastrous, since the Ghassnid king was treacherously betrayed dur-
ing his visit.6
II. Religious Feasts
The liturgical calendar gives a clear picture of the feasts that the Christian
Ghassnids must have observed. Only two will be noted here.
Christmas was one of the two main dates of the Christian calendar and must
have been accorded special importance by both the Byzantines and the Ghassnids.
The Byzantine celebration of Christmas attracted the attention of even the Muslim
Arab Hrn ibn Yay, who attended it in Constantinople and left an Arabic
description of the Christmas banquet.7 As noted above, Arabs marked childbirth
3 For a detailed account of the khutba and the nik, see Jawd Ali, al-Mufaal fi Trkh al-Arab
qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1970), IV, 64450. Other characteristically Arab feasts were given on the
birth
of a filly or the emergence of a poet among them; see Ibn Rashq al-Qayrawni, al-Umda f
Maasin
al-Shir, ed. M. A. al-amd (Cairo, 1955), 65.
4 See Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche jacobite dAntioche (11661199), ed. and trans. J.
B.
Chabot (Paris, 1901), II, 24748; mention of the table at which the phylarch and the patriarch were
hav-
ing their meal implies use of chairs.
5 See M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the
Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), 6468.
6 See BASIC I.1, 45561.
7 For the English version of Hrns Arabic description, see A. Dalby, Flavours of Byzantium
(Trowbridge, Eng., 2003), 11819.
with a banquet, which was followed by another banquet when the child reached
the age of seven; these occasions were named al-khurs and al-aqqa, respectively.8
It is not difficult to imagine the gusto with which the Ghassnids must have cele-
brated the most famous of all childbirths, that of Jesus himself, in Bethlehemnot
far from their phylarchal presence in Arabia or Palaestina Tertia.
Even more important in the Christian Orient was Easter, which reminded
the Ghassnids of the bereavements that as Arabs they used to mark with banquets
named al-walma.9 So, they must have celebrated the most significant of all deaths,
the Crucifixion, with great care and enthusiasm. Again, in reconstructing the tone
of their celebration and what it meant to them, it must be remembered that they
were the guardians of the Holy Land. The importance of Easter and its domini-
cal feast is reflected in contemporary Arabic poetry on the Ghassnids, which
recorded details about Easter rather than Christmas, as discussed below.
III. Ghassnid Receptions and Banquets in Arabic Literature
The Arabic sources are more informative than the Syriac on the feasts of the
Ghassnids, both in contemporary poetry and in later Islamic prose literature.
The two major poets of the Ghassnids, al-Nbigha and assn, described
the celebration of Easter at their court. The first refers to it on Palm Sunday by
its correct name in Arabic, Yawm al-Sabsib, and relates how the members of the
royal family would receive fragrant flowers from the young maidens/princesses.10
assn mentions the approach of Easter, which he calls by its correctly Arabicized
name, F-i--, the Arabic equivalent of the Greek Pascha. He describes the elegant
coral wreaths that the Ghassnid maidens/princesses were stringing.11
Neither poet described the food; such descriptions were apparently viewed as
inappropriate, just as the food at Graeco-Roman banquets was regarded beneath
literary considerations.12 One poet, however, did refer to the shiw, broiled
meat, that was served, and mutton and beef were mentioned in the Syriac source.13
Surely the choicest of all must have been the celebrated dish called thardat
Ghassn, and with it the bread of the highest quality, the white uwwr.14 The
8 See Ibn Rashq al-Qayrawni, al-Umda, 292.
9 See Jawd Ali, Mufaal, IV, 685.
10 For the relevant verses, see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 47,
verses 25, 26.
I, 255, verse 6.
12 S. Malmberg, Visualising Hierarchy at Imperial Banquets, in Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and
Drink in Byzantium, ed. W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka, Byzantina Australiensia 15 (Brisbane, 2005),
14.
13 See al-Nbigha al-Jadi, Dwn, ed. A. Rabb (Damascus, 1964), 37, verse 17; Michael the
Syrian, cited in note 4.
14 Both are discussed above in Chapter 4, Food.
253 Ghassnid Banquets
food at such banquets must have included many other dishes as well, well known
at Byzantine banquets.
Two of the later sources, written in Islamic times, are much more expansive
on banquets. In one account, assn described his visit to the Ghassnid court of
Jabala, surrounded by singing girls, while he was still in the service of Byzantium
in Oriens. This is the more reliable of the two accounts, despite some inaccuracies
that must have crept in during the process of transmission. But it contains no refer-
ence to food.15
The other is a description of the court of Jabala in Constantinople, where he
settled for a while, after the Muslim victory in Oriens.16 The narrator was an emis-
sary whom the caliph Omar is supposed to have sent to Jabala in Constantinople.
Though the long account is full of glaring inaccuracies, it is relevant because it men-
tions food served on silver and gold plates, which the Muslim emissary refused to
eat; he insisted on being served on ordinary plates, since the Prophet Muammad
had warned against using gold and silver cups and plates.17 The Ghassnid king was
only imitating the Byzantine autokratores, who did dine from such plates.18
Another account involving assn refers to etiquette at the royal table: the
jib, the chamberlain, warns him not to start eating before the king asks him to
do so. And assn is counseled to eat only in moderation, not extravagantly, since
such restraint would commend him to the king.19
The sources also mention the garb worn by Ghassnid kings at such banquets
and on such occasions.
The poet al-Nbigha, in his celebrated ode on the Ghassnids, states that
their robes were of red silk (irj) and were hung on pegs (mashjib). Another robe
was pure white at the sleeves (ardn) and green around its shoulders (mankib).20
15 See R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London, 1969), 54. The Arabic
original may be found in Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII (Beirut, 1959), 1056. Nicholsons
footnote rightly vouches for the value of the account as evidence. His reservations on assn and
Jabala
are not justified, however; writing in the early twentieth century, he did not know that assn was a
contemporary of Jabala, to whose house he was attached while Jabala was still the Byzantine
phylarch
and ally of Byzantium in the first two or three decades of the seventh century.
16 For this account, see Ibn Abd Rabbih, al-Iqd al-Fard, ed. A. Amn, I. Abyr, and A. Hrn
(Beirut, 1982), II, 5662.
17 See Jawd Ali, Mufaal, VII, 565.
18 See Dalby, Flavours of Byzantium, 118.
19 See Ifahn, Aghn, XI, 34. On etiquette in the Roman world, see Malmberg, Visualising
Hierarchy at Imperial Banquets, 1124, especially 1415. Dietary moderation was considered a
virtue in the Graeco-Roman world, admired in Julian, Constantius, and Valentinian by Ammianus
Marcellinus; for their temperantia, see P. Tuffin and M. McEvoy, Steak la Hun: Food, Drink, and
Dietary Habits in Ammianus Marcellinus, in Mayer and Trzcionka, eds., Feast, Fast or Famine,
7475.
20 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verses 2627; these robes are discussed in detail in Chapter 6,
Clothes.
assn provides more details, both in his prose piece describing a reception
at the court of Jabala and in his poetry. In the latter, as noted above, he says that
the Ghassnid king wore light clothes in summer and so did his courtiers, while
in winter he wore fur called fanak. The summer robe was called al-fil, worn by
throwing a portion of ones garment over his left shoulder, and drawing its extrem-
ity under his right arm, and tying the two extremities together in a knot upon his
bosom.21 And poets such as assn called the Ghassnid king du-al-tj, he of
the crown,22 suggesting that kings must have worn the crown, the symbol of their
sovereignty, on formal occasions and at banquets.
The Arabic sources are silent on the seating arrangement at these banquets.
As noted above, the Syriac source, Michael the Syrian, speaks of a table at the
Ghassnid court on the occasion of Arethas entertainment of Ephraim, the patri-
arch of Antioch. In addition, certain passages of the Koran refer to surur (plural
of sarr), the throne-like seats of rulers; to the kursi, the chair; and to couches with
cushions, wasid,23 all of which must have been seen by the Meccan Arabs of the
time of the Prophet Muammad (a contemporary of Jabala), most probably at the
court of the Ghassnids. They must also have been known to the Umayyad Arabs,24
who inherited the legacy of the Ghassnids. In a description of a scene from early
Abbasid times, when the first Abbasid caliph was trying to decide the fate of cap-
tured Umayyads, the throne, chair, and cushions appear; it is clear, moreover, that
those reclining on cushions were inferior in status to those sitting on chairs.25
Admission to the Ghassnid court for prospective guests was regulated and
monitored. The jib, chamberlain, controlled access, and he often counseled the
guests on etiquette to be observed at audiences and banquets.
21 For the English version of this prose piece, see Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 53,
with
notes 23. His reading in note 2, yatafaalu, is correct; it points to the robe, al-fil.
23 These passages are discussed in more detail in Paradise in the Koran, the appendix to Chapter
4.
24 References to the kursi and the maqra, the thronelike chair and the enclosure reserved for the
Umayyad caliph, Muwiya, as well as to the table at which the ktib or secretary sat, appear in
Masdi,
Murj al-Dhahab wa-Madin al-Jawhar, ed. C. Pellat (Beirut, 1970), III, 220, 221, 222.
25 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, IV, 346.
XV
Recreation in the Countryside: Tabaddi
O
ne of the most important aspects of social life among the Ghassnids was
tabaddigoing out to spend some time in the countryside, the steppe, the
bdiya. The term is related to badw, nomads, but tabaddi has no conceptual rela-
tion to nomadism and did not imply a reversion to it.1 It meant spending some time
in the bdiya for recreation, an amusement indulged in only by those Ghassnids
who could afford it, including the Ghassnid royal house. It was the pastime of a
sedentary aristocracy, much as the English aristocracy had their country houses,
the Russians their dachas, the Italians their villegiatura, and the Spaniards their
haciendas.2 As is true for other aspects of Ghassnid social life, data on it can
be assembled directly from the little surviving evidence and indirectly from the
abundant and detailed sources on the Lakhmids of ra and the Umayyads of
Damascus.
I. Sources on the Lakhmids and Umayyads
The Lakhmids of ra were Arabs from the same region of South Arabia as the
Ghassnids and became client kings of Sasanid Persia, serving it as the Ghassnids
did Byzantium. They provided a shield for the western Persian frontier against
pastoralist invasions from the Arabian Peninsula, near whose steppes they lived.
Hence the Lakhmid tabaddi resembled the Ghassnid,3 and it is best illustrated
in the life of a member of a noble family of ra. Ad ibn Zayd, an Ayybid, was
a statesman and the foremost poet in ra; as the ktib, the chief of the bureau
1 Nomadism was taarrub, going the way of the Arb, the nomads, of which even the Prophet
Muammad was censorious. In the Koran the nomads, al-Arb, are often harshly castigated; see,
e.g., 9:97.
2 The pursuit is best captured by the Italian loanword villeggiatura, a noun derived from the verb
villeggiare (Arabic tabadd), to live at a country villa. On Arab tabaddi, see Jawd Ali, al-
Mufaal fi
Trkh al-Arab qabl al-Islam (Beirut, 1970), IV, 680.
3 See the account, perhaps slightly embroidered, in Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1971),
II, 114. The Lakhmid king was relaxing during one of these villeggiaturas when the Ghassnid
captured
ra and burned it (negligence for which Ad, the poet of ra, chided the Lakhmid king); see
Nldeke,
GF, 2728.
of Arab affairs in the Sasanid chancery, who commuted between Ctesiphon and
ra, he was close to both the king of the Lakhmid dynasty and the Sasanid King
of Kings. The sources are informative on how this very urban personage from
Lakhmid ra used to spend his time in the bdiya, riding, hunting, carous-
ing, and composing poetry.4 These were also the pursuits of the Ghassnids dur-
ing their tabaddi. The Persian crown prince, Bahrm Gr, too, loved the bdiya
and acted similarly when he went Arabian and spent some time in the bdiya,
as the ward of the Lakhmid king Mundir, in the fifth century; he even composed
Arabic poetry.5
Even more abundant and detailed are the sources on the Umayyad caliphs,
who had at their disposal vastly greater resources than the Ghassnids for indulg-
ing in tabaddi in all its activities of riding, hunting, banqueting, and carousing.
Moreover, the Umayyad tabaddi is particularly relevant and informative for the
Ghassnid tabaddi, because the Umayyads lived in Bild al-Shm, in the same
region as the Ghassnids; ruled it immediately after the Ghassnids; and occu-
pied many other sites and buildings erected by them. The Ghassnid presence was
very strong in the Umayyad state, as was that of other federates of Byzantium, such
as Kalb. The founder of the dynasty, Muwiya, married a woman from Kalb; she
became the mother of his successor, Yazd, who also married a Ghassnid princess.6
Hence the strands of continuity that ran between the Umayyad and the Ghassnid
periods are clear.
Four of the Umayyad caliphsYazd I (680683), Yazd II (720724),
Hishm (724743), and Wald II (743744)were especially given to tabaddi.
The reign of Yazd I is the closest link, genealogically and chronologically,
between the two tabaddis, the Ghassnid and the Umayyad. His mother, Maysn,
had already set the tone when she renounced her husband and chose the life of
the steppe near Palmyra, instead of Damascus. Her feelings are well expressed in a
poem she wrote:
A tent with rustling breezes cool
Delights me more than palace high,
And more the cloak of simple wool
Than robes in which I learned to sigh.
4 Ifahn, al-Aghn, II, 87, where the term mabd (plural mabdi), as well as bdiya, is used as
the equivalent of the English steppe. On Ad and his recreational pursuits, see also M. al-
Hshimi,
Ad al-Shir al-Mubtakir (Aleppo, 1964). Even when he was in Damascus or near it on an
embassy to
Byzantium, he felt nostalgic for the bdiya near ra; see Ifahn, al-Aghn, II, 36, verse 1, and
BASIC
I.1, 47882.
5 On Bahrm in ra, see Chapter 8, above.
6 See BASIC II.1, 475391; on Muwiyas wife Maysn, see Chapter 2, above.
257 Recreation in the Countryside: Tabaddi
The crust I ate beside my tent
Was more than this fine bread to me;
The winds voice where the hill-path went
Was more than tambourine can be.
And more than purr of friendly cat
I love the watch-dogs bark to hear;
And more than any lubbard fat
I love a Bedouin cavalier.7
Yazd I worked hard and played hard, and his activities show how the
Ghassnids spent tabaddi: riding, hunting, banqueting, and composing poetry. He
died while he was at uwwrin (Evaria), a place associated with the Ghassnids,
and was buried there.8
The links to the Ghassnid past with respect to tabaddi are also clear in the
reign of Yazd II, who spent much of his time in the open spaces of Trans-Jordan,
the chief province of the Ghassnids, on or near Ghassnid sites; Hishm, too, left
clear traces of his tabaddi in such places as Rufa/Sergiopolis and Qar al-ayr
al-Gharb, both associated with the Ghassnids. But it was the caliphate of the
libertine Wald II that gives the clearest picture of the extravagance to which
tabaddi could lead, although his licentiousness may have been exaggerated by
Abbasid historians.9
II. Sources on the Ghassnids
The wealth of evidence that can be extracted from the sources on the Lakhmid
and Umayyad tabaddi contrasts with the paucity of the extant sources on the
Ghassnids that speak of tabaddi. Surprisingly enough, the only contemporary
source that provides a glimpse of Ghassnid tabaddi comes from the Byzantine
historian who obscured the history of the Ghassnids and projected a false image
of them, Procopius of Caesarea.10 In his account of the Ghassnid-Lakhmid war,
which the two federates waged against each other independently of their Byzantine
and Persian overlords, Procopius says that the Lakhmid Mundir succeeded in cap-
turing a son of the Ghassnid Arethas while he was pasturing his horses,11 thus
suggesting that he was engaged in a favorite princely pastime.
7 Translated by R. Nicholson in A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint, London, 1969), 195.
9 On Wald IIs tabaddi, see . Awn, al-Wald Ibn-Yazd (Beirut, 1981), 27279. For Hishms,
see 169, 26669.
10 See BALA II, 965.
11 Procopius, History, II.xxviii.13.
Another statement, from a later Arabic source, speaks of a Ghassnid king
who built in the barriya, the wild, a large structure in which he enjoyed him-
self.12 The reference to the barriya suggests a type of tabaddi that involved some
permanent structures rather than ephemeral tents or pavilions.
The various activities indulged in by the Umayyads and the Lakhmids of ra
may suggest those of the Ghassnid tabaddi, but with some important differences. In
Umayyad times, the whole limitrophe had ceased to exist as a defensive frontier, pro-
tected against the pastoralists and the Sasanids by castles since the Muslim conquests
of Oriens and Mesopotamia had united the Fertile Crescent under one rule. So it
became a pleasure zone for some of the caliphs, who drew on the vast resources of the
Islamic empire to finance their luxurious living. The Ghassnids, as foederati, natu-
rally were commensurately more subdued in their pursuit of the activities of tabaddi,
which more closely resembled those of the Lakhmid rulers and such aristocratic fig-
ures as Ad of ra (who, moreover, was a Christian,13 like the Ghassnids). The
Ghassnids were even more reserved than such personages as Ad, since their kings
had set the tone for decent behavior, praised by the poets. Thus the motivation of the
Ghassnid tabaddi was not solely pleasure, as it was during the Umayyad period for
some rulers as Wald II; it was also pursued for reasons of healtha natural desire on
the part of urban dwellers to go out to the open spaces of the countryside, the limi-
trophe with its salubrious air, which was even more attractive in light of the plagues
that broke out in Oriens during the sixth century.14
The favorite period of going out for tabaddi was the spring, Rab, the Arabs
favorite season, which gave its name to the terms murtaba and mutarabba, the
place of staying in the spring. Such murtabas were either temporarytents and
pavilionsor more solid structures; in surviving Umayyad examples of the latter,
such as Caliph Hishms in Rufa/Sergiopolis and in Qar al-ayr al-Gharbi, the
pre-Islamic Ghassnid substrate is evident. The ir, the game park, which char-
acteristically was an annex to Umayyad15 and Abbasid structures, must have also
graced those of the Ghassnids. Their activities during tabaddi consisted of riding
on horseback, hunting, and feasting on the game they had bagged. And in view of
the partiality of the pre-Islamic Arabs for poetry, listening to the munshid or rwi,
the rhapsode or reciter of poetry, may also have formed part of the entertainment
during this villeggiatura.16
12 Ab al-Fid (12731331) in Mukhtaar Akhbr al-Bashar (Baghdad, n.d.), I, 73. See also
BASIC
II.1, 35253.
13 On his Christianity, see al-Hshimi, Ad al-Shir al-Mubtakir, 5761.
14 On plagues in Oriens, see BASIC II.1, 23536, 29192, 298300.
15 For Hishms ir in Rufa, see Awn, al-Wald Ibn-Yazd, 274.
16 On poetry and the Ghassnids, see Part III, Chapter 7.
III
Cultural History
I
The Ghassnid Limitrophe
P
art II of this volume, on social history, has treated Ghassnid culture gener-
ally, which is related to the subject of this part: culture as the pursuit of higher
forms of urban life and activities such as art, poetry, and architecture. This chap-
ter is related even more closely to the previous volume in this series, BASIC II.1,
which treated the monuments and toponymy of Ghassnlandthe venues of
their cultural life. That volume revealed the Ghassnids as urbanites, a sedentary
group from Arabia Felix, which the classical authors distinctly distinguished from
Arabia Pastoralis, and also showed them to be philoktistai, great promoters of the
urbanization of that portion of Oriens in which they were settled, namely the limi-
trophe. The conclusions of BASIC II.1 thus provide fundamental information on
the space that the Ghassnids occupied in Oriens and on the various urban centers
they founded or rebuilt. For the Ghassnids, it is in and around cities and towns
that culture has to be sought, as it was in the case of the Graeco-Roman world.
I. The Space of Ghassnid Culture
If chronology is the spinal column for history, so is space for cultural history
especially for a group such as the Ghassnids, whom the Byzantine Greek sources
erroneously labeled Saracens, associated with pastoralism, who lacked a clearly
defined habitat within which their culture can be discussed. The Ghassnid
Lebensraum, however, as BASIC II.1 demonstrated, was the clear arc that extended
from the Euphrates to Sinai, plus the transverse wedge consisting of Auranitis,
Trachonitis, Batanaea, and Gaulanitis. This was the area that conveniently may be
called Ghassnland in Oriens.
When the Ghassnids settled in the limitrophe in the sixth century, that east-
ernmost portion of the Diocese of Oriens had already gone through many phases.
It had experienced a certain amount of nomadization and absence of law and order
after the fall of the powerful Arab urban center of Palmyra, which had controlled
it vigorously and effectively. The Strata Diocletiana, a road that formed a defensive
line, contributed to the restoration of control, but it could succeed only partially,
since the nomadic threat to Oriens persisted and was even heightened by the policy
of the Lakhmids of ra, who systematically harassed Oriens. It was only after the
institution of the Arab phylarchia in the reign of Constantine I (a.d. 306337)
that a more effective way of dealing with the nomadic threat emerged.1 The dan-
ger posed by the nomads was met sporadically during the period of the Tankhids
and the Salid foederati in the fourth and the fifth centuries, since their power
was limited.
In 529 Justinian put the Ghassnids in charge of all of the limitrophe for the
first time. So it was only with the advent of the Ghassnids and their empower-
ment in the sixth century that the limitrophe was united from the Euphrates to
Sinai under one archiphylarchia, which reasserted imperial control of the region.
Against this background of a united, efficiently run limitrophe, the Ghassnids as
a sedentary frontier society accomplished a great deal. The region had suffered some
considerable neglect, and they reclaimed part of it where the desert had encroached
on the town and reinvigorated it as a zone receptive to the extensive work of urban-
ization, in part by increasing its capacity to sustain new settlements after they used
their hydraulic expertise to discover sources of water.2 It was within the confines of
this vast arc that Ghassnid cultural life unfolded and developed in the urban cen-
ters and rural centers that they built in the transverse wedge and the limitrophe.
This culture that arose in the sixth century was a new chapter in the history
of the Arabs and of Oriens. It was sharply different from the previous stage of Arab
culture in the Roman period, that of the Nabataeans of Petra and the Palmyrenes of
Tadmur, and it also differed from the later culture of the Umayyads of Damascus
and Ramla in the seventh and eighth centuries. Whereas the former was pagan
Arab and the latter was Muslim Arab, the culture of the Byzantine period was dis-
tinguished by being Christian Arab. It represented the intermediate stage in the
three-phase spiritual journey of the Arabs from paganism to the Christian version
of monotheism and finally to Islam. It was the first and last time in the course of
two millennia that there evolved a mature Christian Arab culture.3 This culture of
the Ghassnids was not only Christian but also strongly Arab in character, and thus
it imparted to Oriens a strong Arab presence that had hitherto been absent. The
Nabateans and the Palmyrenes used Greek, Latin, and Syriac almost exclusively in
conducting their affairs, employing Arabic in dealing with their congeners in the
Arabian Peninsula, with whom they had important trade and other relations, and
perhaps to some extent in their domestic life. Hence it was possible for historians
and cultural analysts of Oriens to call the diocese bicultural, both Graeco-Roman
1 For the Roman period, see RA.
3 In its Monophysite ecclesiastical aspect, see BASIC I.2.
263 The Ghassnid Limitrophe
and Aramaic-Syriac.4 With their strong Arab identity, the Ghassnids stamped the
limitrophe with the language, ethos, and mores of the Arabs, thereby imparting to
Oriens a new cultural constituent and making it a tricultural diocese through the
Arabization of the limitrophe and its transverse wedge.
II. Ghassnid Culture and Oriens
It is generally recognized that Oriens in the sixth century was a flourishing dio-
cese of the Pars Orientalis. Its prosperity is reflected in various ways, including
the artistic explosion in its various provinces represented by buildings of various
types, particularly churches and all the arts related to monumental architecture. Its
economic life was also vigorous, especially as the century witnessed the dominant
trade route shift from the Mesopotamian to the West Arabian, the via odorifera,
as a result of the recurrent outbreaks of war with the Persians throughout the sixth
century.
The region could continue to thrive only if it remained secure, defended
against the invasions and raids of the nomads from the Arabian Peninsula. Rome
had constructed defensive lines, the Limes Arabicus and the Strata Diocletiana,
but it was Byzantium that solved the problem definitively. And it is in this respect
that the Ghassnids contributed to the economic welfare of Oriens, which under-
pinned its cultural prosperity. Together with the Roman army stationed under
the various duces, the Ghassnids effected the defense and protection of the dio-
cese even more efficiently than the regular Roman stratitai, since they were more
familiar than the Roman army with the military style of their congeners in the
Arabian Peninsula; for that reason, Justinian decided in a.d. 529 to turn over to
them the duties of the limitanei who previously had undertaken that burden.
The Ghassnids achieved new cultural heights in Oriens, a Byzantine diocese
within which they lived for a century and a half. Their culture was very much like
their social life, deeply influenced by Byzantium in its three aspects: the Roman,
the Hellenic, and the Christian.
All three elements of Byzantinism under whose influence Ghassnid culture
grew and developed were urban. The Graeco-Roman world developed a civiliza-
tion that was inconceivable outside the polis. And so did Christianity, which origi-
nated in a highly urban region, earlier developed feverishly by Herod the Great and
his sons; its establishments of church and monastery functioned not in movable
tents but in fixed structures in cities and towns. Hence the quest in BASIC II.1 for
urban and rural centers by ferreting out towns and villagesmostly the latter
that the Ghassnids established. Though these have now mostly disappeared for
4 See F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 b.c.a.d. 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), and my review
of it in Catholic Historical Review 81 (1995), 25152.
various reasons, their names have survived both in the literary sources and in the
toponymy of the region, reflected in two basic terms that are evocative reminders
of the Christian character of the region in late antiquity.
Qar, the first term, from the Latin castrum/castra, reflected the Roman influ-
ence in Byzantinism: it is the legionary military fort/camp, which developed later
(especially after the Ghassnids took over the duties of the limitanei) into station-
ary units, mostly villages. Philip Hitti, a historian of the Arabs who belonged to the
Christian Arab community of Oriens, Bild al-Shm, referred to three hundred
villages in Auranitis;5 though the figure may be exaggerated, it nevertheless reflects
the density with which the Ghassnids urbanized and ruralized the region.6
Dayr, monastery, the second term, reflects the influence of Christianity
on the growth of urban life in Oriens under the Ghassnids, who were zealous
Monophysite Christians. Many villages in former Ghassnland are still called by
names in which Dayr appears as the first part of a construct (ifa); sometimes it
stands alone as al-Dayr.7
The recovery of these toponyms in the limitrophe was achieved by setting the
literary sources against the topography, archaeology, and cartography of the region;
in this process the latter validated the former, not unlike the way, to use an expres-
sion of biblical scholars, the spade confirmed the Bible.8 This method revealed
the extensive range of Ghassnid culture in Oriens.
The toponymy of the Umayyad period also fruitfully contributes to the pro-
cess of recovering the Ghassnid past. The former Ghassnid limitrophe became
the bdiya in which the Umayyads, as devoted to building as the Ghassnids,
erected many structures. It is worth noting that they are credited with establish-
ing no cities in Oriens other than Ramla in Palestine,9 which the caliph Sulayman
(715717)seeking to run his empire from a new capitalfounded for purely
political reasons. The implication is that the limitrophe had already been so thor-
oughly urbanized by the Ghassnids that there was no need for the Umayyads
to found more settlements. They may in fact have developed some new sites, but
5 P. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (St. Martins Press, New York, 1970), 8081. See also
below
On the Archaeology of the Limitrophe, an appendix to Chapter 3.
6 On ruralization, see BASIC II.1, xxxv.
7 For qar and dayr as elements in the toponymy of Oriens, see R. Dussaud, Topographie historique
de la Syrie antique et mdivale (Paris, 1927), passim.
8 A reviewer took exception to this dictum in his review of BASIC II.1. I was and am aware of its
limitations; but while it is not true in all circumstances, it is a valid generalization (despite the legiti-
mate suspicions of scholars concerning such matters as, inter alia, the chronology of the Exodus and
the conquest of Canaan). For a recent work on this controversial question, see The Future of
Biblical
Archaeology: Reassessing Methodologies and Assumptions, ed. J. K. Hoffmeier and A. R. Millard
(Grand
Rapids, Mich., 2004). It supports the historical-critical approach of W. F. Albright and G. E. Wright.
9 To Ramla may be added Anjar (Ayn al-Jarr), supposedly built by the Umayyad Wald I.
very few. Many or perhaps most of the Umayyad sites thus have strong Ghassnid
substrates,10 a conclusion supported by tangible evidence in Rufa/Sergiopolis
and Qar al-ayr al-Gharb. So, Ghassnid towns and structures, most of which
have disappeared after the lapse of so many centuries, may now be partially recov-
ered, not only through a toponymy that involves the two terms qar and dayr but
more visibly through surviving Umayyad structures.
The Ghassnid contribution to the rise and development of a mature Chris-
tian culture in Oriens, which was represented by the establishment of urban
centers and the construction of buildings of various types, invites comparison
with the Edomite Arabs, who in the first two centuries of Roman rule (begin-
ning in 63 b.c.) engaged in feverish cultural activity in the same region. Just as
the Ghassnids were influenced by Christianity after their conversion, so were
the Edomites by Judaism, despite a frequent failure to heed its strictures on cer-
tain aspects of Graeco-Roman culture. However, both peoples and dynasties, the
Edomite Herods and the Ghassnid Jafnids, distinguished themselves as philo-
ktistai, although the achievements of the former are more striking.11 And no
Ghassnid or any other Arab dynasty or client king could equal or rival the son of
Antipater, the Herod the Great.12
Nevertheless, the Ghassnid contribution to the rise and development of a
mature Christian culture remains unique in the history of the Arabs. This vol-
ume, together with the preceding ones on the Ghassnids, has recovered from
near oblivion a culture that flourished in the shadow of the protective shield that
Byzantium provided and enjoyed a short but sweet afterlife during the tolerant rule
of the Umayyads in Oriens, now Muslim Bild al-Shm.
This brief sketch of the limitrophe that the Ghassnids so thoroughly urban-
ized and ruralized provides the background necessary to discuss the new kind of
Arab city owed to the Ghassnids and to describe its urban landscape and life at
the higher levels of culture.
References in the few surviving sources enable one to conclude that at least
four Ghassnid cities or towns were prominent urban centers: Jbiya, Jalliq, Rufa/
Sergiopolis, and uwwrn.13 The first two were capitals of the Ghassnids;
Jalliq offered opportunities for entertainment, witness its having become a favor-
ite spot for the Umayyad Yazdas was uwwrn, the site of his death. Rufa
10 The question of how many of these Umayyad establishments were originally Ghassnid can be
answered only by archaeologists.
11 Those that have persisted to the present day include the city of Tiberias at the sea of Galilea, built
by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great.
12 See A. H. M. Jones, The Herods of Judaea (Oxford, 1938); the most recent publication in this
area
is D. W. Roller, The Building Program of Herod the Great (Berkeley, 1998).
13 Of these four, uwwrn is the least known; for all of them, see the index of BASIC II.1, s.vv.
apparently was mainly known as the place for horse races, especially popular dur-
ing the caliphate of the Umayyad Hishm.
Of these four, there is no doubt that Jbiya was the principal Ghassnid
city. The caliph Umar came to it from Medina to work out the administration of
the newly conquered Oriens; and Muwiya lived in Jbiya for some twenty years
(until his accession to the caliphate in a.d. 661), while serving as governor of
Bild al-Shm. The city retained its importance after the capital was transferred
to Damascus and also after the Marwnid branch of the Umayyad dynasty came
to power in 683; moreover, it was in Jbiya that the famous ajnd, circumscrip-
tions or military districts, of the Umayyads received their aiyt, their stipends.
So the following description of the Ghassnid city and its urban landscape applies
primarily to Jbiya. Because the site remains unexcavated, it is impossible to draw
a satisfactory plan of the city; one can only discuss the amenities and necessities of
urban life that existed there.14
These towns were the venues where the higher forms of Ghassnid culture
such as art and poetry developed; they became for the Ghassnids what the poleis
had been for the Graeco-Romans. But they were also themselves contributions to
culture as Christian urban centersa new phenomenon in the unfolding of urban
history in the Arab Near East.
A comparison of Jbiya with another important urban Arab center of the
period, ra, is revelatory in this context. The Arabic and Syriac sources on ra
enable the student of urban topography to give a fairly clear and detailed account
of the city, whereas a lack of information makes a similar description of Jbiya
impossible. The sources on ra are extant because such Muslim historians of
Abbasid times as abar and Baldur were Persians, naturally interested in ra
because it was a client-state of Sasanid Persia. But they had little or no interest in
the Ghassnids of Jbiya, the clients of Byzantium. So, until now it is ra that has
been presented as a pre-Islamic Arab urban center with a strong Christian charac-
ter.15 Yet ra was not a Christian city in the sense that Jbiya was. Almost all its
kings were pagans, and somenotably Numn and his son Mundirwere stri-
dently anti-Christian; it was only during the reign of its last king that ra officially
adopted Christianity. Jbiya, in contrast, was a Christian city from its foundation,
14 For the historical geography of Jbiya, see ibid., 96104.
15 See . A. al-Ali, Maniqat al-ra, Majallat Kulliyat al-db (1962), 128, in which al-Ali
examined the landscape of ra and the region in its vicinity and supplied a map. Although its
Christian
character is not his primary interest, he is aware of the importance of that character and of the many
monasteries in the region. D. Talbot Rice conducted excavations in ra (The Oxford Excavations
at
ra, Ars Islamica 1 [1934], 5173), and recently a Japanese team has excavated the site, but their
publi-
cations are unavailable to me.
and its mature Christian culture developed under the influence of a Christian
empire, Byzantium. Yet little about it has survived; the observations in this part
have been pieced together in various ways, gleaned indirectly from various sources.
There is a pressing need to excavate the site to gain knowledge of the urban land-
scape; an article by Jean-Pierre Sodini has demonstrated the importance of archae-
ology for research into Oriens generally,16 and thus specifically into Ghassnland.
The serendipity that revealed a glimpse of Ghassnid art in the Nitil church augurs
well for excavations of the major urban center of Ghassnland, Jbiya, and of other
centers as well.
16 See J.-P. Sodini, La contribution de larchologie la connaissance du monde byzantin (IVe
VII
sicles), DOP 47 (1993), 13984.
II
The Ghassnid Sedentary Presence
I
t was within the limitrophe and the transverse wedge that the Ghassnids had
their sedentary unitssettlement, village, town, and city.1 Just as the limitrophe
itself suffered severe blows first with the demise of the dynasty in a.d. 636 at the
battle of the Yarmk and again in 750 with the fall of the Umayyads, so too the
various towns and villages of the Ghassnids declined into ruins. Of these urban
and rural establishments, certain ones stand out in the sources; to the two capi-
tals, Jbiya and Jalliq, others such as Rufa and uwwrn (Evaria) may be added,
though known more from Umayyad than from Ghassnid sources. All these urban
centers flourished in the century or so of Umayyad rule, but it was Jalliq that lasted
well into the Islamic period, possibly because it was associated with entertainment,
while the official capital, Jbiya, had a more serious ambience.
Despite the fragmentary available information on Ghassnid urban life, a
fairly true, albeit not very detailed, picture of it can be constructed when refer-
ences in contemporary sources are collected and then examined, interpreted, and
set against the background of what is known about the urban culture of Oriens in
the sixth century. The urban landscape of the Ghassnids must be related to their
identity as foederati of Byzantium, as Monophysite Christians, and as Arabs. And
1 On the rise of village communities and villages in Oriens and Ghassanland, in the wake of the
decline of urban centers in this period, see the classic work of G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la
Syrie
du nord: Le massif du Blus lpoque romaine, 3 vols. (Paris, 195358), in addition to C. Strube,
Die
Toten Stdte: Stadt und Land in Nordsyrien whrend der Sptantike (Mainz, 1996); G. Tate, Les
campagnes de la Syrie du nord du IIe au VIIe sicle: Un exemple dexpansion dmographique et
conomique
dans les campagnes la fin de lantiquit (Paris, 1992); J. Shereshevski, Byzantine Urban
Settlements
in the Negev Desert (Beer-sheva, 1991); and H. I. MacAdam, Settlement and Settlement Patterns
in
Northern and Central Trans-Jordan, in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vol. 2, Land
Use
and Settlement Patterns, ed. G. R. D. King and A. Cameron (Princeton, 1994), 4993. On villages in
the
Orontes valley in Oriens, see C. Foss, Life in City and Country, in The Oxford History of
Byzantium,
ed. C. Mango (Oxford, 2002), 7195, especially 9195.
This chapter complements Hugh Kennedys classic article, From Polis to Madina: Urban Change
in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria, Past and Present 106 (1985), 127, which was published
long
before my volumes on the Ghassnids started to appear in 1995 and hence devotes little coverage to
fed-
erate and Ghassnid towns and cities.
269 The Ghassnid Sedentary Presence
as noted in Part II, the element of Byzantinism that most strongly influenced them
was Christianity. It was also what distinguished them and their towns both from
the earlier pagan Nabataeans and Palmyrenes, with their Petra and Tadmur, and
also from the later Muslim Umayyads, with their Damascus and Ramla.
The Ghassnids Arab background is manifest in the physical arrangement of
their settlements in the following ways.
1. The Ghassnids, both as cavalry in the army of the Orient and as hunters,
were highly dependent on horses. So they must have had space for them in their
towns. The maydn (race course) and its alba (groups of race horses) are discussed
above (see Part II, Chapter 12).
2. Since hospitality was one of the twin pillars of their mura, or virtus, they
must have had guesthouses for the visitors who came to them, especially those
from the Arabian Peninsula. The Christian concept of philanthropia, which found
expression in the rise of xenodocheia,2 must have merged with the Arab concept
of hospitality.
3. Most relevant and important in this urban landscape would have been a
special hall to showcase the favorite art among the Arabs, poetry. An odeum or
its equivalent for the recitation of poetry undoubtedly formed part of the urban
Ghassnid landscape (discussed below in Chapter 3).
The Graeco-Roman influence is reflected in a number of elements.
1. As an archphylarch, the Ghassnid king must have had the equivalent
of the praetorium of the Roman commander, such as the one that has survived
outside the walls of Rufa/Sergiopolis. The poet Imru al-Qays, who visited the
Ghassnids, traveled by the state post, the bard or veredi,3 to which he referred in
his poetry; so presumably there was a station for this means of transportation.4
2. Because their horses formed an important part of their contribution to the
Byzantine army of the Orient, the stable, stabulum (a term that has survived in
the Arabic iabl),5 must have been part of the urban landscape. Also present must
have been all that pertains to horses and their equipment, such as saddleries.
3. The Ghassnid town surely accepted the public baths of the Graeco-Roman
world, in their primary function and not as centers for social activities or mixed
2 These xenodocheia should be distinguished from pandocheia, inns, at which the guests paid for
their food and lodgings. On xenodocheia, see Part II, Chapter 2.
3 For the veredi/bard in the poetry of Imru al-Qays, see I. Mumayyiz, Imru al-Qays and
Byzantium, Journal of Arabic Literature 36.2 (2005), 150.
4 The post was obviously important as well for correspondence; that of the Ghassnid kings was
stamped by a seal. For the seal of the Ghassnid Jabala, see the present writer in Sigillography in
the
Service of History: New Light, in Novum Millennium: Studies on Byzantine History and Culture,
Dedicated to Paul Speck, ed. C. Sode and S. Takcs (Aldershot, Eng., 2001), 36977.
5 See F. Vir, Iabl, EI2, IV, 21316.
bathing. In addition to being an essential part of the urban scene, the bath was also
a feature of the hunting lodges at their country retreats.
4. Water had been a principal concern of the Arab Ghassnids in their pen-
insular period, and so it remained after they settled in a relatively arid region. The
Graeco-Roman nymphaeum may well have formed part of the urban landscape in
such towns as Jbiya and Jalliq.6 Judging from their popularity in Umayyad times,
ponds and pools may also have formed part of the Ghassnid landscape.
5. The tavern, nt (discussed in Part II, Chapter 5), was a very important
part of the urban landscape. Although addiction to wine was frowned upon by
Christianity, the tavern was tolerated. It was the scene of Ghassnid popular enter-
tainment, which included poetry recitals, song, and dance.
Whether the Ghassnid town had the broad colonnaded streets of the
Hellenistic and Roman cities is not known. But in view of the importance of vic-
tory celebrations to a warrior society such as the Ghassnids, it probably did have
the victory arches of Graeco-Roman tradition. That their towns may have been
walled can be inferred from a verse of one of their poets, assn, who refers to the
gate of Jalliq, thereby implying that the town had a wall, a i.7
Perhaps more important than what the Ghassnids adopted was what they
rejected. As Christians, they refused to adopt many of the establishments and ameni-
ties that adorned the old Greek and Roman poleis, such as theaters where mimes and
pantomimes were performed. In place of these characteristic features of the pagan
polis, the Ghassnid urban landscape was distinguished by Christian landmarks.
1. Most notable were churches (whose architecture is discussed in the fol-
lowing chapter). With the reestablishment of the Monophysite church around
a.d. 540, largely due to the intervention of the Ghassnid king Arethas, churches
were restored and built anew. As their capital, Jbiya no doubt had many churches in
addition to the cathedral church, the seat of its chief hierarch, Bishop Theodore.
In 569 a letter, concerning the Tritheistic heresy, was addressed to the priests and
presbyters of the churches in the Provincia Arabia by two Monophysite hierarchs.
The letter has survived but the reply of the clerics has not. However, 137 archi-
mandrites answered a previous letter, and an equal number of priests must have
6 Such drinking and washing facilities, the mashraba, assumed even greater significance in later
Islamic times, in view of the importance of ablution before each of the five daily prayers. On the
aesthetic
and recreational aspects of nymphaea, see F. Glaser, Fountains and Nymphaea, in Handbook of
Ancient
Water Technology, ed. . Wikander, Technology and Change in History 2 (Leiden, 2000), 41352.
7 Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), II, 279,
verse 1; for the more natural and appropriate reading bb, gate, instead of batn, see 280 note 1.
And
though it is not certain that Jalliq was a walled town, many towns of Oriens, exposed to the threat of
the
nomads, did have walls. The sources specifically identify Dma and Tadmur (Palmyra) as walled
Arab
towns in the region; see abar, Trkh, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1962), III, 378. Damascus was also a
walled city (see abar, 435).
been addressed in the second letter. A considerable proportion of their churches
must have been concentrated in Jbiya.8 That Jalliq, too, had many churches is clear
from the reference to its biya (plural of ba, church) in the poetry of Yazd, the
Umayyad crown prince who used to visit it.9
These churches in various spots of Ghassnland may be categorized as follows.
a. Ordinary churches, not related to any personage and not necessarily built
over relics, such as Bat Ghassn mentioned in the Arabic sources.10
b. The episcopal church, such as that of Jbiya, presumably the cathedral
church of the chief Ghassnid hierarch.
c. Martyria, built over relicsmost often over those of Najrnites, the mar-
tyred relatives of the Ghassnids, such as those at Mirn and Mayr.
d. Churches that served as pilgrimage centers, possibly such as that in
Maajja.
e. Votive churches, such as that in Najrn in Trachonitis (the namesake of the
South Arabian Najrn).11
2. The surviving letter signed by 137 archimandrites of monasteries from the
Provincia Arabia indicates that Jbiya must have had many monasteries, one of
whichthe monastery of St. Sergius, Bth Mr Sargisis explicitly documented.12
The Arab and Ghassnid partiality to the monastic life was well known to the
writers of the period, and monasteries must have been built in various parts of
Ghassnland.
3. In this period, baptisteries may have been built separately from the main
church, in view of the importance of this sacrament (heightened by the proximity
of the Ghassnids to the Jordan river). If so, these separate structures would have
been found in Jbiya and other Ghassnid towns.
4. The expression of Christian philanthropia has already been instanced in
the case of the guesthouse, which combined Arab and Christian hospitality. In
addition, medical care units both for humans and animals must have existed in the
Ghassnid town, as suggested by medical terms in Arabic found in the dwns of
contemporary poets.13
8 On this second letter, see BASIC I.2, 81417, and BASIC II.1, 148; on the first letter, see BASIC
I.2, 80914, 82438.
9 For the churches of Jalliq in Yazds poetry, see BASIC II.1, 109.
10 For Bat Ghassn, see ibid., 15051.
11 For a fuller treatment of this quinary categorization of churches in Ghassnland, with examples
illustrating each category, see the present writer in Ghassnid Religious Architecture, in Mmorial
Monseigneur Joseph Nasrallah, ed. P. Canivet and J.-P. Rey-Coquais (Damascus, 2006), 11538.
12 See T. Nldeke, Zur Topographie und Geschichte des Damascenischen Gebietes und der
aurngegend, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlndischen Gesellschaft 29 (1876), 436.
13 As noted earlier in this volume, diryq appears twice in the Dwn of assn: I, 74, verse 14;
106,
verse 13.
The power and affluence of the Ghassnids imply the existence of a palace
or a mansion worthy of the archphylarch. References in prose sources to their
entertainment and reception of visitors suggest that the Ghassnids had palaces,
a conclusion supported by the term qar used in that sense in one of the odes of
assn.14 In addition, he mentions tall Ghassnid buildings, and mansions of mar-
ble.15 How monumental these structures were is difficult to tell. But from the evi-
dence of a church they built at Nitil and of the praetorium outside the walls of
Rufa, one can conclude that these structures must have been palatial. The church
at Nitil in the region of Madaba raises the question of whether the famous mansion
in the same region called al-Mushatt (Mshatta), which is anepigraphic, was built
by the Ghassnids (as Rudolph Brnnow had originally suggested).16 Mushatt as
it stands now, with its mosque, is certainly an Umayyad structure. But it may have
been built over a much less impressive Ghassnid structure.
Two other elements in Ghassnid settlements are tombs and gardens, each
discussed in more detail below.
Tombs
References in the odes of al-Nbigha and assn suggest that the Ghassnids were
buried not in modest graves but in elaborate tombs, possibly in mausolea when
the deceased was the chief archphylarch. Cemeteries in this Christian period were
no longer outside the cities but inside them; they must have formed part of the
Ghassnid urban space, though their precise location is not clear.
In his most famous ode, the rhyme in B or biyya, al-Nbigha refers to two
Ghassnid towns as burial places for two Ghassnid kings.17 The first is Jalliq, one
of the two capitals of the Ghassnids, and the other is ayd.18 Three localities
had the latter name, and it has been argued that the poet was alluding to ayd
in the Golan,19 or possibly the biblical Bth-Sayd. The language of the references
suggests that they were landmarks of which the Ghassnids were proudmost
probably mausolea.
While al-Nbigha in the biyya simply twice mentions the burial, in another
ode, a lmiyya or rhyme in L, he is more expansive.20 The Ghassnid king to whom
14 Ibid., 53, verse 28.
15 Ibid., 106, verse 10.
16 R. E. Brnnow and A. v. Domaszewski, eds., Die Provincia Arabia auf grund zweier in den
Jahren
1897 und 1898 unternommenen Reisen und der Berichte frherer Reisender (Strassburg, 1909), III,
17475. See also BASIC I.1, 526 note 9.
18 Discussed at length in BASIC II.1, 22628.
19 For this ayd, see R. Dussaud, Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et mdivale (Paris,
1927),
Map I, D3, and al-Mujam al-Jughrfi li al-Qur al-Arabi al Sri, ed. M. las (Damascus, 1992),
IV, 165.
20 Al-Nbigha devotes five verses to it; Dwn, 121, verses 2529.
he refers by name, al-Numn, is buried in the Golan between two towns, Tubn
and Jsim.21 Yet despite the three toponyms, al-Numns precise burial site is left
tantalizingly unclear.22 The poet further wishes that the spot continue to have aro-
matics and fragrant flowers around it. This could imply that the tomb was sur-
rounded by a garden. If so, then gardens constituted an element in the construction
of Ghassnid tombs and mausolea, and would have been included in those built
within the limits of cities such as Jalliq and ayd.
assns ode has only one verse on the tomb of the Ghassnid king Arethas,
son of Mriya.23 It suggests that the tomb was a most unusual one, which became a
Ghassnid landmark and in effect a pilgrimage center for the Ghassnids. The first
hemistich of the verse reads: The Sons of Jafna [the Ghassnids, his descendants]
are around the tomb of their father. assn composed this ode when he was visit-
ing Oriens after its conquest by Islam and was reminiscing about the good old days
at the Ghassnid court. Those who were going around it were not Arethas literal
sons but rather Ghassnids who were paying tribute to their king, who had died in
a.d. 569.24
All this suggests that the tomb was more like a mausoleuma centralized
domed structure that accommodated visitors and his relatives long after his death.
He was probably buried in a sarcophagus (the use of which is discussed below), but
there was certainly an elaborate tombstone reciting his many achievements, not
unlike the epitaph of Imru al-Qays provided by the Namra inscription in the
fourth century.25 The place of his burial is not clear. A fragment by Labd, a con-
temporary poet who had knowledge of the Ghassnids, mentioned the day of his
death, Yawm Jalliq, the Day of Jalliq.26 Perhaps he was buried in Jalliq, where he
died: in hot countries, to avoid putrefaction burial customarily occurs the day after
death (unless the body is embalmed). But the ode of al-Nbigha clearly suggests
that the elegized king, al-Numn, was transported from the place of his death back
21 Tubn is a better reading than Busr, as Nldeke cogently argued in GF, 40 note 1. For Jsim and
Tubn, see Maps IV and V respectively in BASIC II.1, 427, 429.
22 This unspecified place lay between two towns that each contained a Monophysite monastery
associated with the Ghassnid king Arethas, as has been noted in BASIC II.1, 22829. So there may
have been some religious significance in the choice of that spot.
24 One medieval scholiast, unaware that it was a mausoleum, expressed his surprise that the poet
found it necessary to refer to Arethas tomb surrounded by his descendants, and questioned the point
of the reference. Another lauded the poet for the statement, which he understood as a reference to
the Ghassnids as a sedentary group (which they were) and not roaming pastoralists; see Ibn Rashq
al-Qayrawni, al-Umda f Maasin al-Shir, ed. M. A. al-amd (Cairo, 1955), I, 31920.
25 This inscription was studied in detail in BAFOC, 3153, and it appears as the frontispiece of that
volume.
26 See Labd, Dwn, ed. I. Abbs (Kuwait, 1962), 266, verses 4952, discussed in BASIC II.1,
27880.
to Gaulanitis; so perhaps Arethas, too, was embalmed and carried back to Jbiya,
the more fitting capital for his burial.
In addition to the two poets allusions to towns where Ghassnid kings were
buried, the prose sources refer to other burial sites. Jabala, the son of Arethas,
was buried in a martyrion at Qinnasrn/Chalcis after dying at the famous battle
in a.d. 554.27 A late prose writer speaks of al-Bar, identified near Kiswa, as the
burial place of the Ghassnid Jafna.28 Nevertheless, the Golan was without ques-
tion the main burial place for the dynasty, and their most famous kings must have
been buried in Jbiya.
As for the location of the tombs or mausolea of the Ghassnid royal house,
most were attached to churches. This had been customary for emperors since the
days of Constantine, whose tomb was attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles.
The Ghassnid kings who visited Constantinople must have seen it and that of
Justinian, and tried to imitate this imperial burial practice. The Ghassnid church
at Nitil supports this inference in a most concrete fashion. The Ghassnid phylarch
Thalaba was buried in the churchs subterranean vaulted chamber, the hypogeum
(where his mortal remains are still apparently preserved).29 If a simple phylarch
was honored by burial within the church, such prominent leaders as those elegized
in the two odes must have been similarly honored. Furthermore, that Thalabas
burial place was marked by an epitaph on the phylarch30 suggests that the much
more famous phylarchs, such as Arethas, must have been honored with inscrip-
tions detailing their reigns.
Sarcophagi were used in this period for celebrated personages, and the
Ghassnid kings no doubt were buried in them. Support for this hypothesis is
provided by the early Abbasid author al-Jiz, who associates sarcophagi with the
Ghassnids.31 The term he uses is nawwis (plural of nws), transliterated from
the Greek rather than the more correct term, .32
It may be stated with certainty that tombs and mausolea were landmarks
in the Ghassnid landscape or townscape. Within the Ghassnid city or town,
the royal tomb or mausoleum would have been an important landmark, whether
28 See Ibn Sad al-Andalusi, Nashwat al-arab, ed. N. A. al-Ramn (Amman, 1982), I, 208. The
reliability of this statement remains to be shown, since it came from a very late writer. Al-Bar is
identi-
fied as Khn al-Sha, west of Kiswa; see BASIC II.1, 241.
29 See M. Piccirillo, The Church of Saint Sergius at Nitl: A Centre of Christian Arabs in the
Steppe at the Gate of Madaba, Lib.ann. 51 (2001), 27880, and the present writer, The Sixth-
Century
Church Complex at Nitl, Jordan: The Ghassnid Dimension, ibid., 28592, especially 29091.
30 For the inscription, see the finispiece of BASIC II.1.
31 See al-Jiz, Rasil al-Jiz, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo, 1964), II, 292.
32 The choice of reflects the law of phonetic facility in Arabic.
attached to a church or not. Apparently it was built in the midst of a garden, possi-
bly visited by loyal Ghassnids on the anniversary of the death of the archphylarch
and king buried in it. On the tomb, or on the sarcophagus itself, the epitaph for
each Ghassnid would have been inscribed. These tombs could be set against the
background of Byzantine funereal and burial practices of the sixth century.33
The Garden
One might expect a palace or royal mansion to have a garden and a game preserve,
a adqa and a ir. In a prose composition attributed to al-Nbigha, the panegyr-
ist refers to the beauty of the Ghassnids gardens.34 Adding credence to this state-
ment is a comment by the author of the Book of Monasteries, who mentions that
their ecclesiastical structures are located near trees and gardens.35
References to flowers in contemporary poetry on the Ghassnids are many,
suggesting that the garden occupied a space in the Ghassnid cityscapea con-
clusion that could receive support from one prose account written in late Islamic
times and another that purports to be composed for a Ghassnid king (hence a
contemporary document). These two prose sources apply the terms riy (gardens)
and hadiq (plural of adqa) to the Ghassnids gardens. This was yet another
area in which Byzantium influenced the Ghassnids, for gardens were essential
to Byzantine horticulture.36 The chances then are that Ghassnid mansions and
houses did have gardens, as did their monasteries. A number of references gleaned
from the sources support the argument that gardens were an element in Ghassnid
structures, both secular and religious.
1. Monasteries were woven into the fabric of the urban scene in Ghassnland
cities as well as countryside. Orchards were an essential part of the monastery,
whether urban or rural, as attested by a well-known passage in Ifahns special-
ized work on monasteries. He states that in choosing where to build a monastery,
the Ghassnids and other Christian Arabs such as those of ra and Najrn looked
for sites that abounded in trees, gardens (riy), and streamlets.37 The Garden of
33 See A. Sartre, Tombeaux antiques de Syrie du Sud, Syria 60 (1983), 8399, and idem,
Larchitecture funraire en Syrie, in Archologie et histoire de la Syrie, vol. 2, La Syrie de
lpoque
achmnide lavnement de lIslam, ed. J.-M. Dentzer and W. Orthmann (Saarsbrcken, 1989),
423
46. More generally, see J. Kyriakakis, Byzantine Burial Customs, Greek Orthodox Theological
Review
19 (1974), 3772, and A. Rush, Death and Burial in Christian Antiquity (Washington, D.C., 1941).
34 For this prose piece by al-Nbigha, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn (Beirut, 1958), XV, 124.
35 Abu al-Faraj Ifahn, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. J. al-Atiyya (London, 1991), 163.
36 See A. Kazhdan, Gardens, ODB, II, 822.
37 See Ifahn, Kitb al-Diyrt, 163. On the similar approach in Byzantium, see A.-M. Talbot,
Byzantine Monastic Horticulture: The Textual Evidence, in Byzantine Garden Culture, ed. A.
Little-
wood, H. Maguire, and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, D.C., 2002), 3767.
Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane, associated with Jesus in the Gospels, would
have inspired a society so devoted to its Christianity.38
2. That gardens were attached to Ghassnid secular structures, their man-
sions and houses, is demonstrated in a prose piece addressed to one of their kings
by al-Nbigha, who says that the Ghassnid king had the most attractive and
appealing of gardens.39 These apparently had not only fruits but also flowers, to
which the poet refers in his famous ode on the Ghassnids; he describes the scene
on Palm Sunday, when the Ghassnid rulers would be greeted by their maidens
with rayn, fragrant flowers.40 In his elegy on al-Numn, the same poet prays that
rayn may continue to grace the Ghassnid kings tomb and wishes that two fra-
grant Arabian flowers called awdhn and awf may also grace it.41
The Ghassnids association with flowers is further confirmed by a prose piece
by assn, who in early Islamic times often reminisced on Ghassnid entertain-
ment of their guests; he once described how the Ghassnid king Jabala would sit
on a couch under which were scattered leaves of myrtle and jasmine and all sorts of
fragrant flowers.42 The cumulative effect of these references is striking and under-
scores the importance of flowers in Ghassnid life.
38 The only extant reference to a garden in a Christian city and a strictly Christian context involves
Najrn, the Arabian martyropolis. According to the sources, a Church to the Holy Martyrs and the
Glorious Arethas was built there on a site that had previously bloomed as a luxuriant garden; see
the
present writer in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 27.
39 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XV, 124, verses 1112.
40 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verses 2526.
41 Ibid., 121, verses 2728.
III
Architecture and Decorative Art
T
he hiatus in the Arab artistic presence between the Nabataeans and the
Palmyrenes of the Roman period (first century b.c.third century a.d.) and
the Umayyads in the early Islamic period (seventh century a.d.) can be bridged
by the federate artistic presence in this proto-Byzantine period, especially by the
Ghassnids. This chapter aims at examining the remains of that presence in sixth-
century Oriens.
Fortunately, a number of monuments of diverse character enable that pres-
ence to be examined. Ghassnid secular military architecture is represented by
the praetorium of Mundir, outside the walls of Sergiopolis;1 secular civil architec-
ture, by a house in Hayyat;2 monastic religious architecture, by the tower at Qar
al-ayr al-Gharb;3 and church religious architecture, by the church at Nitil in
Trans-Jordan.4 A fifth architectural form, the odeion, has not survived, but the
final section of this chapter argues that it must have existed.
The various ethnic groups in Oriens ChristianusArmenian, Georgian,
Aramaean, Copt, and Ethiopianresponded to the new faith by enlisting all
forms of art in its service. Each of these peoples developed a distinctive expression
of Christian art; likewise, the Nabataeans of Petra and the Palmyrenes of Tadmur,5
1 See BASIC I.1, 5015, 129; BASIC II.1, 12933. Another example of military architecture is
al-Burj (the Tower) of umayr; see BASIC I.1, 495501.
2 See BASIC I.1, 48994. Hayyat lies to the north of Philippopolis (Shahb); see Map VII in
BASIC II.2, 433. For the house in late antique Oriens, see the relevant part of C. Castel, M. al-
Maqdissi
and F. Villeneuve, eds., Les maisons dans la Syrie antique du IIIe millnaire aux dbuts de lIslam,
Actes
du Colloque international, Damas, 1992 (Beirut, 1997). The mansion called al-Mushatt in the
region
of Madaba may also, in its substrate, represent Ghassnid secular civil architecture; see Chapter 2
above,
with note 15.
3 See BASIC I.1, 25861; BASIC II.1, 20511. The tower is the frontispiece of BASIC I.1.
4 See M. Piccirillo, The Church of Saint Sergius at Nitl: A Centre of Christian Arabs in the
Steppe at the Gate of Madaba, Lib.ann 51 (2001), 26784. The frontispiece and finispiece of
BASIC
II.1, as well as the volumes four color plates, all reflect various facets of this church.
5 On Petra and the Nabataeans, see S. G. Schmid, The Nabataeans, in The Archaeology of Jordan,
ed. B. MacDonald, R. Adams, and P. Bienkowski (Sheffield, 2001), 367404, especially 4034; on
Palmyra, see The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. E. M. Meyers (New
York,
as well as the Umayyads of Damascus, developed an art and architecture peculiar
to themselves. So, did the Ghassnid Arabs, in the same region, do the same? The
question is appropriate, since the Ghassnids served Byzantium a long time and
their floruit in the sixth century coincided with the explosion of Christian art in
the capital and the provinces, including the Oriens of the Ghassnids.
The state of surviving manuscripts precludes any definitive answer to this
question, but a number of observations may be made. The Arabic sources of the
later period singled out the Ghassnids of all pre-Islamic dynasties, presenting
them as lovers of buildingwhat a Greek author would have called ;
thus amza (d. 961) credited them with a large number of structures of various
types.6 But he could not comment on the structures artistic character, since he
had not seen them; he was simply quoting earlier Ghassnid sources, such as the
no longer extant Akhbr Mulk Ghassn,7 which had probably listed these struc-
tures. Another Muslim author, Ifahn, the author of the monumental al-Aghn,
referred to the art and architecture of the Ghassnids, as well as to that of the
Lakhmids of ra and the Balriths of Najrn. In a surviving passage from what
must have been an invaluable source on Christian structures in the Byzantine
period, Kitb al-Diyrt, he mentions the following features of their religious
structures, the biya (plural of ba, church): (1) their extreme height; (2) appoint-
ments made of gold and silver; (3) sutr, screens and curtains of brocade; (4) mural
mosaics; and (5) golden ceilings.8 Ifahn lived in Aleppo during the renais-
sance of the amdnids under Sayf al-Dawla; he both had seen the buildings he
described and read the verses of the poets who had visited these churches. So, the
statements of amza and Ifahn indicate that the Ghassnids did contribute to
the artistic life of Oriens. And in the artistic development of Christian structures,
Ghassnids of Jbiya surely had an edge over the Lakhmids, since they themselves
were Christian and lived in the shadow not of Persia but of Byzantium, a Christian
empire that itself surpassed Persias achievements in art and architecture.
Of these four Ghassnid monuments listed above, the tower of Qar al-ayr
al-Gharb illustrates the first observation by Ifahn, on the height of Ghassnid
buildings; the church of Nitil, the only surviving Ghassnid structure in which
1997), IV, 23844. Two issues of Aram are devoted to the Nabataeans of Petra and the Palmyrenes
of
Tadmur; see The Nabataeans, 2.12 (1990) and Palmyra: History and Archaeology, 7.1 (1995). See
also
C. E. Bosworth, Tadmur, EI2, X, 7980; J. Taylor, Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans
(London, 2001).
6 See amza al-Ifahn, Trkh Sin Mulk al-Ar wa al-Anbiy, ed. Y. Maskni (Beirut, 1961),
98106; amza is discussed more generally in BASIC II.1, 30641.
8 See Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. J. al-Aiyya (London, 1991), 16364. In his con-
temporary poetry, assn documents some of these features, such as the height of their buildings;
see
Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft, Gibb Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 316,
verse 8.
279 Architecture and Decorative Art
some artistic features have survived, illustrates his fourth observation, on mosaics.
So, one can conclude that Ifahns passage contains some measure of truth. Some
individual points can be made about three of the monuments.
1. The praetorium of Mundir at Rufa/Sergiopolis. This structure may be
analyzed within the context of military architectural monuments of sixth-cen-
tury Byzantine Oriens, an approach supported by the discussion in BASIC II.1
of its various functions during the phylarchate of Mundir in the second half of
the sixth century. An architectural historian has recently challenged the view (first
presented by Jean Sauvaget) that the structure was a praetorium, reverting to the
older position that it was a church, but two arguments can be raised here in favor of
the newer orthodoxy.9 First, Mundir was a pious, enthusiastic Christian; he would
not, in order to blazon forth his own glory, have engraved a slogan from the hip-
podrome 10in the holiest part of a church, the apse. Second,
Rufa was well-supplied with churches within its walls; it and its saint needed not
another church but a praetorium as protection from the pastoralists who used to
raid such Christian shrines, attracted by their treasures.
2. The monastery tower of Qar al-ayr al-Gharb. This tower is impressive in
its height and in the strength of its masonry, and it dominates what must have been
an extensive settlement in sixth-century Oriens. In the preceding volume, BASIC
II.1, it was set within the larger context of Ghassnid religious architecture.11
In this context it is enough to draw attention to two features. First, the height
and the strength of the tower clearly imply that Ghassnid structures were impres-
sively monumental. Second, the Umayyad occupation of former Ghassnid sites,
such as this one, has sometimes obscured the original structure beyond recogni-
tion. However, the tower remains an outstanding example of the Ghassnid sub-
strate in later Umayyad structures.
3. The church at Nitil. The remains of Ghassnid structures such as the prae-
torium at Rufa and the tower at Qar al-ayr allow only a superficial survey of
the possible Ghassnid contribution to the art and architecture of the period and
the region. Although they have survived, one is dilapidated and the other stands
in splendid isolation. Scarcely any other Ghassnid building has survived except
as a toponym and possible site. This circumstance explains the importance of the
9 See J. Sauvaget, Les Ghassnides et Sergiopolis, Byzantion 14 (1939), 11530followed
by C. Mango, Byzantine Architecture (New York, 1976), 9495, and challenged by G. Brands, Der
sogenannte Audienzsaal des Mundir in Resafa, Damaszener Mitteilungen 10 (1998), 21135. See
the
present writer in the festschrift for T. Mathews, forthcoming.
10 See BASIC I.1, 5012, and note 350.
11 On Qar al-ayr al-Gharb, see BASIC II.1, 20311; on Ghassnid religious architecture, see
143219. The long discussion there focuses mainly on identifying and listing the churches and
monas-
teries related to the Ghassnids, which have survived mostly as toponyms rather than actual
structures.
For their possible influence in the Roman Occident and the Islamic Orient, see 21315.
church at Nitil: though it is in ruins, its plan is traceable and some of its mosaics
have survived. It remains the sole example of a Ghassnid church, and so to recover
the appearance of their churches one must draw on literary evidence. Such efforts
will not diminish the value to the researcher of the church of Nitil, which should
be a touchstone for testing the validity of the conclusions derived from other
sources.12
Ghassnid Churches
As frequently noted in this volume, the most significant fact in the religious life
of the Ghassnids was the martyrdom of their relatives in Najrn ca. a.d. 520.
It profoundly influenced their thought and action, and the translation of the
relics of these martyrs to Oriens affected the form of Ghassnid churches. This
translation occasioned the rise of pilgrimage centers in Najrn and Maajja in
Trachonitis, where the relics were deposited. Even more importantly, it encouraged
the Ghassnids to include a reliquary or martyrion in their churches, which would
gain added sanctity from the relics of their recently martyred relatives. Indeed, the
excavation of the church at Nitil has revealed that a reliquary or martyrion had a
place in its architectural plan.13 Should more Ghassnid churches be discovered,
they are likely to contain a martyrion as an important element in their architecture.
Their other distinguishing features remain unknown, since to date no
Ghassnid church other than the church of Nitil has been discovered or exca-
vated. But in view of the importance of religion in the life of the Ghassnids, many
churches must have been built during the episcopate of Theodore. One can therefore
hypothesize that Jbiya, their capital, had a more impressive church than the one in
Nitil. This church in Jbiya was probably the seat of their newly appointed bishop,
Theodore, and thus was something of a cathedral church.14 Its architectural fea-
tures, which must have reflected those of a sixth-century Byzantine cathedral (possi-
bly nuanced to suggest a partiality to Arab architecture), remain unknown.15 Three
12 Long before the church at Nitil was excavated, I wrote an article suggesting that the form of
Ghassnid churches might have reflected the Ghassnids background as Arabs and Monophysites.
The
dome would have reminded them of the qubba, a conical tentlike structure used by the Arabs on
impor-
tant occasions, while the ambulatory would have reflected the importance of circumambulation in
the
religious life of the Arabs. For these features and others, see my Ghassnid Religious
Architecture, in
Mmorial Monseigneur Joseph Nasrallah, ed. P. Canivet and J.-P. Rey-Coquais (Damascus, 2006),
11538.
13 See Piccirillo, The Church of Saint Sergius at Nitl, 278. For a picture of the martyrion, see
ibid.,
photo no. 28. To the martyrion of the church at Nitil may be added that of arrn (Trachonitis),
dedi-
cated to St. John by the Ghassnid phylarch Sharl. For its being a martyrion in the literal sense
and
not just an ecclesia, see BASIC I.1, 33031.
15 Rudolf Brnnow, who visited Jbiya more than a century ago, after recovering a sculpture from
its ruins vouched for its former magnificent buildings; see I. Mitteilungen, ZDPV 19 (1896), 18
(dis-
cussed in BASIC II.1, 1034).
pieces of evidence confirm that the church at Nitil, attractive as it was, did not com-
pare to other, more architecturally advanced, Ghassnid churches.
1. Ifahn, as cited above, refers in specific detail to the beauty of the
Ghassnid churches. He notes their height, the mosaics on their walls, and the gold
and silver of their appointments and ceilings. It is natural to assume that a cathe-
dral church in the Ghassnid capital had all these features.
2. Yqt mentions one particular church, the votive church at Najrn in
Trachonitis, a Ghassnid-related foundation. Impressed by it, he eloquently calls
attention to its splendor and describes it as great, beautiful, built upon marble
columns and decorated with mosaics.16 Columns, an element not included in
Ifahns general characterization, may thus be added to the speculative recon-
struction of the church of Jbiya.
3. Conclusions can also be drawn by analogy from the cathedral of Bostra,17
which is so close to Jbiya, geographically and otherwise, that it could have been
the model for the principal Ghassnid church there. This cathedral was of special
interest to the Monophysites and to the Ghassnids in particular, since Bostra had
been the capital of the Nabataean Arabs and now was the capital of the provincia
with which the Ghassnid archphylarch had close connections. In addition, it
was the repository of the insignia of the Ghassnid king.18 In a.d. 512 the cathe-
dral was consecrated with great pomp during the reign of the Monophysitically
inclined Anastasius.19 In attendance were celebrated Monophysite figures,
such as the soon-to-be patriarch of Antioch, Severus; Philoxenos of Mabboug;
and most likely Jabala, the then Ghassnid king and phylarchhis presence is
especially probable in light of the cathedrals dedication to Saints Sergius and
Bacchus, the first of whom was the patron saint of the Ghassnids. It was there
in November 513 that Severus the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch was conse-
crated, when he delivered his cathedral homily denouncing Chalcedon and the
Tome of Leo.20
The cathedral of Bostra was domed, strongly suggesting that the cathedral
of Jbiya likewise had a dome. This leads the argument back to the question of what
other features this church in Jbiya could have had that reflected the Ghassnids
16 For the quotation from Yqt, see Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 1957), IV, 758, and the present
writer, Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33 (1979), 79.
17 For the cathedral of Bostra, see G. G. Guidi, Problemi di recostruzione della chiesa tetraconca
dei SS. Sergio, Bacco, e Leonzio a Bosra, in La Siria Araba da Roma a Bisanzio, ed. R. F.
Campanata
(Ravenna, 1989), 13370; R. F. Campanata, Bosra; chiesa dei SS. Sergio, Bacco e Leonzio; I
nuovi
ritrovamenti (19881989), in La Syrie de Byzance lIslam: VIIeVIIIe sicles, ed. P. Canivet and
J. P.
Rey-Coquais (Damascus, 1992), 17378.
20 Ibid.
character as both Arab and Christian. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, it is
possible to say that it probably had a dome, a martyrion, and an ambulatory.21
The deion/Odeum
The importance of poetry in the life of the Ghassnids both as an instrument of pol-
icy and as a form of entertainment strongly suggests that a special venue was nec-
essary for its performance. As demonstrated in BASIC II.1, the Ghassnids were
great builders of many structures related to the various aspects of their lives as Arabs,
Monophysites, and foederati. It would therefore be surprising if there was not in their
urban landscape a structure especially designed for poetry recitals, particularly since
it would also have been used for oratory and for the performance of some types of
music, sometimes accompanying the recitals of poems.22 Such a structure would have
been necessary, in view of the importance accorded by the Arabs to the art of poetry
recitation, which they called inshd.23 Although its nature is not entirely clear, it evi-
dently was an art highly prized, and the reciter, the munshid, must have been a per-
forming artist who resembled the Homeridae and the rhapsodes of classical Greece.24
In those days when the culture was largely oral, such performances must have taken
place frequently, encouraged by the poet himself and welcomed by an audience that
appreciated poetry recitals, an Arab partiality that has persisted to the present day.25
The importance of providing the poet or the orator with an appropriate
setting was recognized by the peninsular Arabs. The famous Christian orator
Quss ibn Sida delivered his speechheard by the prophet Muammadwhile
mounted on a camel.26 A red leather dome used to be set up for the poet al-Nbigha
21 For the inclusion of an ambulatory, see note 12, above.
22 For example, the Ghassnid king Arethas insisted that he would listen to a panegyric by the
poet Alqama only when the latter chanted it; see Ab Nar al-Frbi, Kitb al-Msq al-Kabr, ed.
G.
Khashaba and M. al-ifn (Cairo, 1967), 73.
23 An attempt to recover the secrets of inshd was made in recent times; see the work of the
Franciscan Father Auguste Vicini, translated into Arabic by I. Salim and I. usayni as Fann Inshd
al-Shir al-Arabi (Jerusalem, 1945); see also D. F. Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The
Ethnography
of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca, 1995). Platos dialogue Ion (ca. 390 b.c.)
pro-
vides a wealth of information on similar recitation in classical Greece; see B. Gentili, Poetry and Its
Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century (Baltimore, 1988).
24 Much attention has been given to riwya and rw, usually considered the transmitter of pre-
Islamic poetry, but not to the munshid and to inshd, the artistic recitation of poetry. The verb from
which
rw is derived, raw or rawiya, primarily signifies not to transmit but to drink to satiety, though
the
terms rw and munshid could be used interchangeably and the rw is often the munshid. When the
poet
had an unattractive voice (as did the Abbsid poet Ab-Tammm) or a weak voice (as did Ahmad
Shawqi,
in modern times), a munshid recited his poetry. On rw, see R. Jacobi, Rwi, EI2, VIII, 46646.
25 Whereas the Greeks perfected other forms of artistic expression such as drama, the Arabs had
only poetry; hence the intensity of their interest in it and response to it as entertainment, and their
need
to provide an appropriate venue for its recitation.
26 For Quss mounted on a camel, see al-Ji z, al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo,
1961),
I, 3089. On the delivery of speeches by pre-Islamic Arab orators, who sometimes leaned on a bow,
see 370.
in the fair of Uk z, near Mecca, to judge the relative worth of poems presented
to him.27 The Prophet himself let assn, his poet laureate, recite poetry at the
mosque in Medina,28 sometimes from the pulpit. Whatever structures Byzantium
had for artistic performances of poetry and music must have strongly influenced
the Ghassnids. It is therefore necessary to sketch briefly the rise and develop-
ment of the deion in late antiquity, before its adoption by the Ghassnids.29
In fifth-century Athens, Pericles erected at the foot of the Acropolis the first
deion, a rectangular roofed structure for musical performances; and Herodes
Atticus reprised the work of Pericles in the second century a.d. After being a sepa-
rate structure in Athens, the deion became part of a complex of two structures: the
theatron proper and the deion, distinguished from the theatron by being smaller
and roofed.30
The Oriens of the Ghassnids contained a remarkable number of theaters,
favored by the Rhomaic Arabs long before the Ghassnids; many were built in
the Nabataean towns and cities, such as Petra and Bostra (the two capitals), and
in Elusa in the Negev.31 Before them, the great Herod, representing the Edomite
Arabs,32 filled his domain with Graeco-Roman structurestheaters among them.
In the Byzantine world of late antiquity, there was a reaction against the theater
and other pagan entertainments. Church Fathers and imperial legislation frowned
on them33especially on the mime, the bawdy farce to which the comedy of classi-
cal Greece had degenerated.
The Ghassnids were settled in a region in Oriens dotted with towns in which
many theaters were to be seen,34 some of which still presented mimes. The Maiumas
festival was still being celebrated in Oriens in the fifth century.35 The Ghassnids
27 On Nbigha at Uk z, see Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo,
1966),
I, 16768.
28 On assns recitation of his poetry in the Medina mosque, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn
(Beirut, 1955), IV, 148.
29 Theaters have received more attention than odeia in scholarship on this early Byzantine period;
the ODB has no entry titled odeum.
30 On this history, see the long footnote in A. Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia
Arabia (Leiden, 1995), 85 note 187; see also 85 note 185.
31 That theatron became teiatra in Nabataean also indicates how common the buildings were
(ibid., 7).
32 On the Arabness of the Edomites, see the present writer in BAFIC, 24043, further treated in
The Ethnic Origin of the Edomites, a paper delivered at the Tenth International Conference on the
History and Archaeology of Jordan, held in Washington, D.C., in May 2007 (forthcoming in
ADAJ).
33 See A. Karpozilos, Theater, ODB, III, 2031.
34 These included Bostra and Petra in the Provincia Arabia, Elusa in Palestina Tertia, and cities of
the Decapolis close to the Ghassnids such as Pella, Skythopolis, and Gerasa; all are discussed in
Segal,
Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia Arabia.
35 For this festival, orgiastic and licentious in nature, see Maiumas, in Paulys Real-Encyclopdie
der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. A. F. von Pauly and G. Wissowa (Stuttgart, 1930), XIV, cols.
61012.
rejected the theater or whatever survived of its performance in the sixth century;
as good Monophysites, they viewed the mime and the theater as un-Christian. But
they embraced the deion as a venue for poetry recitals, oratory, and music, conso-
nant with their ethos and mores as Arabs. These contrary attitudes must have been
reflected architecturally in the separation of the odeuma venue for the perfor-
mance of their favorite art, poetryfrom the theater.36
The case for the existence of a Ghassnid odeum, or some structure that was
used as an odeum, rests mostly on references in the verses of assn. These refer-
ences in his Dwn may first be set against the general background of entertain-
ment venues in Ghassnland.
The tavern was a place where poetry could be heard, sung by the songstress,
the qayna, to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, such as the mizhar.
Another venue was offered by the three fairs held in Ghassnland, at Dayr
Ayyb, Adrit, and Bostra; they, like the pan-Arab sq of Uk z near Mecca,
featured cultural activities as well as commercial transactions.37 The tavern and
the fair, however, were frequented by the common people and thus must be dis-
tinguished from the royal Ghassnid odeia; for both types of location, assn is
the principal source.
In one couplet, assn commends the union of song and poetry.38 Song is the
mimr of poetry, the venue where it should be recited, just as the mimr is the site
where horses are trained and their strength is developed. More crucial evidence of an
deion/odeum in Ghassnland is a verse which says that after drinking wine in the
tavern, he would then listen to song in buyt al-rukhm, marble mansions.39
36 Although there are references to deia as independent structures in Italy, Greece, and Cyrenaica,
those in the cities surrounding the Ghassnids in the Provincia Arabia and in the Near East in
general
do not seem to have been separated from theatra. The Ghassnids either separated the two
themselves or
copied deia that had already been detached, as more suitable on Christian doctrinal grounds. For
the
deion in Italy, Greece, and Cyrenaica, see Segal, Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincia
Arabia, 85
note 187, which also discusses the thirty theaters in the Provincia Arabia and Palestine that
apparently
contained an deion; on the latter point, see also A. Retzleff, Near Eastern Theaters in Late
Antiquity,
Phoenix 57 (2003), 11538. For an deion in Gerasa, see A. Retzleff and A. M. Mjely, Seat
Inscriptions
in the Odeum at Gerasa, Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 335 (2004), 3747.
37 On the fairs, see above, Part I, Chapter 4.
38 assn, Dwn, I, 420. The second verse in the couplet suggests that setting verse to music and
singing it is the true test of its quality, just as fire separates false from true silver.
39 Ibid., 106, verse 10. Although assn specifically refers not to poetry but to song, the singing of
poetry is implied in the verb nughann. assn was a poet and he would have been interested in
hear-
ing poetry, especially his own, sung in these deia. He had already expressed his view that poetry is
best
recited and heard when sung.
The description in al-Aghn of the Ghassnid king in a relaxed mood watching dancers more
likely referred to an occasion in an deion rather than the palace (given the image of the Ghassnids
as
seriously devout Christians); see R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint,
London,
1969), 53, and Ifahn, al-Aghn, XVII, 105.
assn was the poet who most frequently visited the Ghassnids from the
Arabian Peninsula, since he was also their kinsman. He moved between Jbiya in
Oriens and Yathrib/Medina in ijz, living one year here and one year there.40 His
poems on the Ghassnids must have been recited in an appropriate venue while he
was in Oriens, either the palace or the odeum; the latter would attract a large audi-
ence, especially since the poetry was accompanied by music. Buyt al-rukhm must
have been such a venue.
The phrase shows that these venues were monumental buildings in whose
construction marble was used. The technical term for the structure (nowadays
called lah) in the Arabic of that period is not clear. The poet may have used the
plural, mansions, out of a metrical necessity; if so, the popular name of the build-
ing might have been the singular Bayt al-Rukhm. It is unusual to refer to a struc-
ture by the stone with which it was built rather than by its function; on the other
hand, the name Marble House might have reflected the admiration of the struc-
ture by visitors or the Ghassnids themselves.
It was only natural that the Ghassnids should have had a structure especially
designed for the recitation of poetry, speeches, and song; the Ghassnid kings
were themselves connoisseurs of poetry and some of them composed it. The case of
Arethas and Alqama may now be recalled: the king insisted that he would hear the
panegyric on his victory only when it was chanted by the poet.41 It is impossible to
believe that on such an occasion, the performance occurred anywhere but the most
appropriate place, such as a poetry recital hallan odeum.
40 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XI, 132.
41 See note 22, above.
Appendix I
On the Archaeology of the Limitrophe
Although this volume deals with culture and not archaeology, it is dependent on
the previous volume, BASIC II.1, which offered archaeologists a road map for
Ghassnid sites. This appendix presents some further observations on these sites.
1. The principal Arabic source that alerted scholars to the Ghassnids as
lovers of building is the indispensable Chronicles of amza al-Ifahn, treated in
great detail in the preceding volume.1 The most extensive account of Ghassnid
sites, however, may be found in an article that lists about twenty in the vicinity of
Damascus alone; and Philip Hitti, the distinguished historian of the Arabs and
Islam, states that traces of no fewer than three hundred villages associated with the
Ghassnids can be found in Auranitis.2 The figures put forth by these two authors
2 M. Khurayst, Dawr Ghassn f al-ayt al-mmah, in Proceedings of the Third Symposium:
are surely exaggerated, but they rest on a kernel of truth: the extensive urbaniza-
tion performed by the Ghassnids in the limitrophe. But it is not always clear
whether the site was an original Ghassnid foundation or one that was rebuilt or
restored. Sometimes the Ghassnids mere presence in a certain location such as
Bura, where they might have built a structure, earns a mention. It is also possible
that the reference may be to Ghassnids who settled in a particular place after the
Muslim Conquest of Oriens. Without excavation and archaeological research, the
status of many of these toponyms will necessarily remain undefined. They there-
fore should not be the first resort for archaeologists looking for Ghassnid sites.
2. Toponyms of a different kind are more reliable, coming as they do from
sources that have been cleared by what I have called Nldekes Law for reconstruct-
ing pre-Islamic Arab historythat is, they are found in Greek, Latin, and Syriac
texts and contemporary Arabic poetry. Toponyms from the last two sources are the
most useful.
a. The string of toponyms included in the odes of the poets who visited the
Ghassnid courts is invaluable. They referred to these toponyms from personal
knowledge. assn and al-Nbigha, and to a lesser degree tim and Ash, are
the main poets.3
b. The list of 137 monasteries in the letter of the Monophysite archimandrites
addressed to the Ghassnid king Arethas is an invaluable source on the ecclesias-
tical structures.4 These monasteries should be the subject of a monograph, with
map and commentary, to update Nldekes celebrated article on them, and the few
Ghassnid monasteries included deserve a detailed and careful study. The value of
such research is made clear by an investigation of one of the monasteries on this list,
Maajja in western Trachonitis. The account of it in the Geographical Dictionary
of the Arab Syrian Republic, published in 1992, confirms that Maajja was indeed
a monastic site and thus suggests that exciting remains from the Byzantine period
may be recovered there.5
Epigraphy, both Greek and Arabic, is a highly reliable source for identifying
Ghassnid sites. The bilingual arrn inscription in Trachonitis pinpoints arran
as a Ghassnid site, just as an inscription in Arabic does for Usays, later occupied
and developed by the Umayyads.6 This makes Trachonitis possibly an important
The Fourth International Conference on the History of Bild al-Shm during the Umayyad Period,
ed. M. A.
Bakht (Amman, 1989), 191217; P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, 10th ed. (New York, 1970), 80
81.
3 Ibid., 22087.
4 BASIC I.2, 82438; BASIC II.1, 18384.
5 See al-Mujam al-Jughrfi li al-Qur al-Arabi al-Sri, ed. M. las (Damascus, 1992), V, 167,
which refers to the remains of temples, churches, palaces or mansions, cemeteries, cisterns, canals,
pools,
and wine presses.
6 For arrn and Usays, see BASIC I.1, 32531, 11724.
sector of Ghassnland for sites associated with the martyrs of Najrn, the relatives
of the Ghassnids; there the second Najrn, the namesake of the South Arabian
original, was also located.7
3. The Umayyad period is also relevant to this quest for Ghassnid sites. It
has been maintained earlier that the Umayyads took over the Ghassnid establish-
ment of structures in the limitrophe. Thus a new approach to the examination of
Umayyad sites is required, one that seeks a Ghassnid substrate in them. Finding
those substrates will not be easy, since the affluent and powerful Umayyads, as
the new masters of the region, sometimes developed them beyond recognition.
Yet Ghassnid substrates have persisted in sites such as Rufa/Sergiopolis, Qar
al-ayr al-Gharb, and Usays. And one Ghassnid city in its entirety, Jalliq, sur-
vived into Umayyad times and was much frequented by the Umayyad crown prince
himself, Yazd, son of Muwiya.
4. A Ghassnid site has been recovered unexpectedly in the Madaba region in
Trans-Jordannamely, Nitil, where a church was first discovered by Alois Musil
almost a century ago, and has been recently excavated by Fr. Michele Piccirillo.
This is a most important find of a definitely Ghassnid church, in which some
mosaics and the plan of the church have survived. That Nitil is not included in any
of the lists of Ghassnid structures demonstrates that despite their detail, these
lists are not exhaustive. So the limitrophe may have within it more sites that will
surprise those who choose to excavate.
7 For Najrn in Trachonitis, see the present writer in Byzantium in South Arabia, DOP 33
(1979), 7879. Apparently it was still flourishing around a.d. 1000 when Ab-mid al-Antki, an
expatriate Syrian poet living in Egypt, expressed his longing for it in a poem quoted by Zaki
Mubrak;
see his Abqariyat al-Sharf al-Raiyy (Cairo, 1940), I, 111, verse 6.
Appendix II
The Monasteries of the Ghassnids
This is a complex of three monasteries in the vicinity of Damascus, described in
the Geographical Dictionary of the Arab Syrian Republic.1 In 1994 I visited every
Ghassnid site from the Euphrates to the Sinai Peninsula but missed these three
monasteries, since the recently published volume was then unknown to me. In the
previous volume, I described the complex as follows:
Under the title Al-Ghassni, the new Geographical Dictionary of the Arab
Syrian Republic includes an entry in which three structures are described
as monasteries and are attributed to the Ghassnids. They are 30 km east of
al-Nashshbiyya, which is about 15 km east of Damascus. The three monas-
teries are 2 km apart. Of the northern one there remain traces of halls, rooms,
1 See al-Mujam al-Jughrfi li al-Qur al-Arabi al Sri, ed. M. las (Damascus, 1992), IV, 438.
towers, and two cisterns. The middle monastery is square and consists of two
stories; east of it are the remains of what must have been a storeroom, while
to its west there is a cemetery. The southern monastery is not described, but a
photograph of it is provided.2
It is clear from the description that the monasteries constituted a major
Ghassnid monastic complex. The question arises as to whether it was constructed
by either Amr ibn Jafna or al-Ayham, Ghassnid kings to whom amza al-Ifahn,
the authority on Ghassnid structures, ascribes the building of six monaster-
ies.3 Only one of the six attributed to Amr, Dayr Hund, is near Damascus, like
the three monasteries of the complex; but it is too close to Damascus, in its very
Ghta,4 to match the description of their location. It is thus likely that these mon-
asteries are not among those mentioned by amza, whose list is selective, not com-
prehensive.5 The scholar who wrote the Geographical Dictionary entry clearly had
at his disposal data that enabled him to attribute the complex to the Ghassnid
king: he must have found the name Ghassnid (Ghassni) engraved somewhere in
one or more of its monasteries.
Apparently the Ghassnid builder or builders of the complex had left one or
more inscriptions, much as Hind, the Lakhmid queen of ra, had engraved in
her monastery an inscription that shed much light on Arab Christianity in ra.6
The inscription or inscriptions referring to the founder as a Ghassnid might be in
Greek or Arabic, as Ghassnids used both languages for their inscriptions.7 If in
Arabic, they would be especially valuable, since so few Arabic Ghassnid inscrip-
tions have survived.
In view of the prospect of recovering new Ghassnid inscriptions, I vis-
ited the complex on 4 August 2001. Through the kindness of the Department of
Antiquities in Damascus, one of its officers, Mr. Muammad Mari, accompanied
me and my wife to the complex, which we found to be in ruins. Ab-Turki, the
local guide who helped us find our way through the difficult terrain, told us that in
the 1980s, the complex experienced some damage, and its furnishings and appoint-
ments were shipped away to an unknown destination. One can only hope that they
have not been irretrievably lost.
2 BASIC II.1, 195. My description was based on the entry in al-Mujam cited in the preceding note.
3 amza al-Ifahn, Trkh Sin Mulk al-Ar wa al-Anbiy, ed. Y. Maskni (Beirut, 1961), 99,
101; see BASIC II.1, 32425, 33233.
4 See M. Kurd Ali, Ghat Dimashq (1952; reprint, Damascus, 1984).
al-Abth 44 (1996), 11.
7 See, for example, the arrn inscription, published in W. H. Waddington, Inscriptions grecques
et latines de la Syrie (1870; reprint, Rome, 1968), 561, no. 2464; discussed in BASIC I.1, 32531.
Appendix III
Al-Jawhara al-Nafsa
Whether there was a strictly Monophysite style of art and architecture reflect-
ing a theological position and a related liturgy is not clear. One treatise that deals
with Coptic Christianity, including architectural features of Coptic churches, is
al-Jawhara al-Nafsa. The Copts were Monophysites, but this treatise may reflect
only the Coptic version of Monophysitism and not speak for all Monophysites,
including those in Byzantine Oriens, such as the Ghassnids. During the reign of
Mundir, the influence of the Ghassnid Monophysites extended beyond Oriens
into Egypt itself.1
The treatise, which discusses various ecclesiastical matters pertaining to the
Coptic church in Egypt, was written by the thirteenth-century Coptic scholar
Yhann ibn Zakariyya, better known as Ibn Sabb.2 It has been translated
into French by Jean Prier, with the title La perle prcieuse: Traitant des sciences
ecclsiastiques, and both the Arabic text and the French version were published in
Patrologia Orientalis. Only the three relevant chapters will be cited here.
1. Chapter XXVII, De la construction dune glise; de sa ressemblance avec
le Tabernacle,3 has the following pertinent data.
a. The Holy Apostles recommended the erection of churches anywhere and
everywhere for the worship of God, and enjoined certain specifications.
b. Churches should be oriented toward the east.
c. The side of the church oriented toward the east should be constructed in
the course of twenty-one days of the Coptic month of Baouneh.
d. The dimensions of the church should be fixed: twenty-four cubits in length
(matching the number of the prophets) and twelve cubits in width (matching the
number of the apostles).
e. It should have three gates, reflecting the number of the Holy Trinity: one
for men, one for women, and one for those who secretly bring votive offerings.
f. It should be domed, with two cupolasan external one resembling the
Tabernacle of Moses called the Holy, and an internal one called the Holy of Holies.
2. Chapter LV, Des Lampes et des Oeufs dautruche placs entre elles,4 has
the following data.
2 Ibn Sabb, La perle prcieuse: Traitant des sciences ecclsiastiques (chapitres ILVI), ed. and
trans.
J. Prier, PO 16 (Paris, 1922), 591760.
3 Ibid., 65860.
4 Ibid., 75354. It is interesting to note that the chapter on the various kinds of incense employed
in the Monophysite Coptic church contains a prohibition against the use of amber/ambergris, on the
grounds that it comes from the excrement of a savage sea animal (748). In contrast, the Nestorians
in
Dayr Hind in ra did use it; see Umar, Maslik al-Abr, ed. A. Zak Pasha (Cairo, 1924), I, 323.
a. The terrestrial church should be most beautifully fashioned.
b. Its lamps or lanterns should be lit during mass, because the church is really
a terrestrial heaven and the lamps are its stars.
c. The lamps of the east and the iskana5 should be always lit, day and night.
d. They should be lit both to preclude the need to bring an alien fire within
the church and to fulfill the injunction in the Torah that the Tabernacle contain
lamps kept always lit.
e. These lamps should be lit by olive oil.
3. Chapter LVI, Des images et de ceux qui y sont reprsents,6 has the fol-
lowing data.
a. The church should have icons or images painted in colors and modeled after
the martyrs and the saints.
b. The underlying rationale for including this art is the legendary exchange
between Christ and Abgar, the king of Edessa, that resulted in Christs sending the
Edessan king a picture of himself.
c. Another reason is the icon of the Virgin Mary with her child that the evan-
gelist Luke is believed to have painted; she told him before her Dormition and
Assumption to paint her picture lest she should be forgotten, and the painting met
with her approval.
d. Clean, new mats should also be laid over the floor of the church so that those
who prostrate themselves in worship can avoid soiling their foreheads with dust.
5 The iskana is explained by Prier as la partie du temple spare par le voile, (La perle
prcieuse, 750 note 1).
6 Ibid., 75556.
IV
The Monastery as a Cultural Center
T
he previous volume in this series has dealt with the problem of identifying the
monasteries of the Ghassnids.1 Inter alia it drew attention to the partiality
of the Arabs in general to monasticism, showing their contribution to the rise of
many monasteries in Oriens and beyond in the western part of Arabia.2
Of all the venues of cultural life in the Ghassnid city, the monastery was
undoubtedly the most important.3 By the sixth century, the monastery had
emerged not only as a place for imitatio Christi but also as a cultural center, where
the monks were engaged in intellectual and literary pursuits.
Early Centers of Learning
A very informative and detailed account by Arthur Vbus of the function of the
Syriac monasteries of Oriens as educational centers is especially relevant in this
context.4 It treats the golden age of Syriac literature, roughly the period of the Arab
foederati in the three centuries before the rise of Islam, presenting Edessa as the
spiritual capital of the Semitic Oriens Christianus. Vbus discusses the monas-
tery as a center that promoted the rise of the library, study groups, and the instruc-
tion of children and adults.5 Its residents undertook such pursuits as transcribing
and reproducing manuscripts; translating Greek thought, secular and ecclesiasti-
cal, into Syriac; and producing original creative literary works. There was also a
1 For the list of these monasteries, see BASIC II.1, 18395.
2 Ibid., 16471.
3 On the monastery as the greatest monument of the Syrian countryside, see C. Foss, Life in City
and Country, in The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. C. Mango (Oxford, 2002), 95.
4 See A. Vbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, vol. 2, Early Monasticism in
Mesopota-
mia and Syria, CSCO Subsidia 17 (Louvain, 1960), 388414.
5 Learning flourished in this period at the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, the two great Semitic
Christian centers of Oriens Christianus. For the school of Nisibis with its library, see A. Vbus,
History
of the School of Nisibis, CSCO 266, Subsidia 26 (Louvain, 1965). For more recent treatments of
the two
centers, see J. W. Drijvers, The School of Edessa: Greek Learning and Local Culture, and G. J.
Reinink,
Edessa grew dim and Nisibis shone forth: The School of Nisibis at the Transition of the Sixth
Seventh
Century, both in Centres of Learning, ed. J. W. Drijvers and A. A. MacDonald (Leiden, 1995), 49
62,
7790.
missionary side to the activity of monasteries, as they propagated their work
in other monasteries in Armenia and Syria, stimulating them to do likewise.6
The great figure in this golden period of Syriac literature was the fourth-century
Ephrem in Edessa, whose work was translated into Greek and whose metrical com-
positions, the madrsh, influenced hymnography through Romanus the Melode
when the latter composed his kontakia.
The Arab monasteries of Ghassnid Oriens surely could not have escaped the
influence of the School of Edessa. The Ghassnid monks were even closer to Ephrem
and Syriac Christianity than were the Armenians. Their archphylarchs and kings,
such as Arethas, were active in the Syriac Monophysite church, and he remained a
close friend of, and co-worker with, the chief Syriac hierarch of that church, Jacob
Baradaeus, for some thirty years. These years witnessed the Arab Monophysite
renaissance under the joint leadership of the archphylarch Arethas and the arch-
hierarch Theodore. Although the extant sources are scanty and uninformative on
cultural achievements in the Ghassnid monasteries, they surely resembled those of
the Syriac monasteries, on which the sources are more informative.7
Against this background of the educational function of the Syriac monas-
teries in Oriens, that of the Ghassnid may now be set. This educational func-
tion must have been considerable, as an examination of the Arab monasteries of
this pre-Islamic periodespecially in the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent, in
ra, and in Lakhmid territorywill make clear. Its importance is reflected in
the number of monasteries that survived well into Islamic times and in the many
volumes written on them, of which only Kitb al-Diyrt of al-Shabshti is
still extant.8
More illuminating about intellectual life in these monasteries is information
provided by Hishm on those of ra. In addition to authoring a monograph on its
monasteries, Kitb al-Diyrt, Hishm made clear that the monasteries were the
repositories of books, documents, and inscriptions on the history of ra and the
pre-Islamic Arabs, on the basis of which he was able to reconstruct that history.9 In
6 On the impact of the Syriac monastery in Armenia and, more pertinently to the Ghassnids in
Syria, see Vbus, Early Monasticism, 393, 425. The mission of Syriac monasticism in Armenia
(35359)
may offer insight into activities in Arab monasteries in Ghassnid Oriens. Vbus refers to
translations
made by Armenian monks of Syriac literature into Armenian, and likewise monks in the Ghassnid
monasteries must have translated texts into Arabic, heightening the Syriac influence on the last
stage of
the development of the Arabic script in pre-Islamic times (discussed in Chapter 5, below).
7 One of the pursuits in these Syriac monasteries was the writing of histories of saints and their
own founders (ibid., 401). Ghassnid monks probably wrote histories of the Najrn martyrs,
especially
Saints Arethas and Ruhm; the founders of the monasteries included Ghassnid kings.
8 See al-Shbushti, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. G. Awwd (Baghdad, 1966). The other book on monas-
teries, Ifahns Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. J. al-Atiyya (London, 1991), has been reconstructed from
extant
fragments.
9 On Hishm and the kutub/asfr of ra, see BAFOC, 34966, especially 35557. Some relevant
293 The Monastery as a Cultural Center
turn, the distinguished German scholar Theodor Nldeke used Hishm to work
out the history of the Sasanids and of Lakhmid-Sasanid relations.10
Because the later Muslim historians abar and Baldur were primarily
interested in the Lakhmids, owing to their Persian connection, they wrote next to
nothing on the monasteries of Ghassnid Oriens. The Muslim historian al-Dahab
(d. 1348) enumerated in his monumental Trkh al-Islam (The History of Islam)
what he called the genres of history, funn al-trkh. One of the forty-nine genres
was trkh al-ruhbn wa uli al-awmi, the history of monks and those of the
monasteries.11 This history no doubt included valuable information on monks
and their activities. It is noteworthy that the Muslim historian was interested not
in the churches and their priests but in monasteries and in monks, a sure sign that
it was the dayr, the monastery, that was the cultural center of Christianity.
Despite the lack of resources for reconstructing the cultural life of the
Ghassnid monastery in Oriens, it is possible to reach some significant conclusions
based on the following observations.
The Ghassnids were the rivals of the Lakhmids, and each tried to outdo the
other in various areas. One of these areas of healthy competition was the cultural
work of the monks, which in the monasteries of ra resulted in kutub and asfr
(books and tomes);12 the natural presumption is that the same result obtained in
the monasteries of the Lakhmids rivalsthe Ghassnids.
This presumption is especially strong in view of the fact that the Ghassnids,
unlike most of the Lakhmids,13 were enthusiastic Christians who sponsored
monastic institutions. One would therefore expect their monks to engage in the
same intellectual pursuits with at least as much intensity.
Around a.d. 540 a special bishop, Theodore, was consecrated as the bishop
of the resuscitated Monophysite Ghassnid church, a role he performed for at least
thirty years. Before his elevation to the episcopate he had been a monk, and one
might reasonably speculate that he was responsible for founding many or most of
material is also provided in F. Rosenthal, On the Semitic Root S/ P.R and Arabic Safar,
Travel,
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 24 (2000), 421, especially 79, 1314.
10 See the copious notes and appendices in T. Nldeke, trans., Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur
Zeit der Sasaniden (1879; reprint, Graz, 1973). abars work is now available with an English
trans-
lation and copious annotation by C. E. Bosworth; see The History of Tabari, vol. 1, The Ssnids,
the
Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen (Albany, 1999).
11 On al-Dahab and his work, see BASIC II.1, 15859.
12 For the kutub and asfr of the Hra monasteries, see note 9, above; on sifr (singular of asfr),
see Ibn Man zr, Lisn al-Arab (Beirut, 1979), III, 295, and An Arabic-English Lexicon, ed. E. W.
Lane
(London, 1972), Part I, book 4, 1971.
13 Christianity penetrated the Lakhmid royal house in the second half of the sixth century. Hind,
the wife of the famous Mundir (son of Numn), was a devout Christian; her son, King Amr, was
accord-
ing to her inscription also Christian (Yqt, Mujam al-Buldan [Beirut, 1956], II, 542) and so was
the
last Lakhmid, al-Numn.
the 137 monasteries whose archimandrites wrote a letter to the Ghassnid king
Arethas in 569.14
After the reestablishment of Monophysitism around a.d. 540, that church
experienced a feverish burst of cultural rebuilding, manifested both concretely, in
the monasteries that sprang up in the Provincia Arabia, and theologically, in seri-
ous discussions and often controversies, culminating in the Tritheistic heresy of
Eugenius and Conon.15 In these controversies, the Ghassnid phylarch played a
major role, and his own troops were also involved.16 It is natural to suppose that the
monks of these newly restored monasteries were highly involved in these theologi-
cal disputes and related matters. They would have reflected upon them, discussed
them in the quiet of their monasteries, and written about them.
As has been maintained in all the BASIC volumes, the Ghassnids were
strongly aware of their Arab identity; they were responsible for Arabizing the limi-
trophe in Oriens. In this identification, their attachment to the Arabic language
was the dominant factor. And in Ghassnid monasteries, with their Arab monks,
Arabic was used in whatever pursuits, literary and theological, they undertook. So
the discussion of the cultural life of the Ghassnid monastery, based on the obser-
vations just made, will focus on the following elements (explored in Chapter 5):
(1) The employment of the Arabic language in discussions of the theological ques-
tions that rocked the Monophysite church and involved the royal house of the
Ghassnids and its troops, and the engagement of Arab monks in literary pursuits
such as translation work, like that of their Aramaic brethren, who were translating
so actively from Greek into Syriac in this period. (2) The impetus that the monks
gave to the development of the Arabic script, now in its final stages of emancipa-
tion from the old Nabataean script; it was influenced by Syriac, from which the
Arab monks must have made some translations.
Religious Studies and Pursuits
Previous volumes of this series have identified the strictly Arab Ghassnid monas-
teries. One of them was actually called the Monastery of the Ghassnids,17 and
the natural presumption is that its inhabitants were Arabs who took the monastic
garb. Some Ghassnid soldiers, after their victory in the battle of Chalcis in a.d.
554, chose to stay with St. Symeon in the religious life, believing that he had come
to their rescue during the battle.18
The pursuits of these Arab monks at the Monastery of the Ghassnids and
14 On Theodore, see BASIC I.2, 755, 771, 778; BASIC II.1, 17683.
15 See BASIC I.2, 80538.
16 Ibid., 818.
17 See BASIC II.1, 183; on Ghassnid monasteries, more generally, see 18394.
18 See BASIC I.1, 247; BASIC I.2, 77879.
295 The Monastery as a Cultural Center
other Ghassnid monasteries are not stated explicitly in any of the sources, but a
number of activities seem plausible.
The resuscitation of their church by their own king, Arethas, and the contro-
versies that raged in the next thirty years or so between them and the Chalcedonians,
as well as within the Monophysite church itself,19 must have been major concerns of
these Arab monks. Surely the new Arab Monophysite church needed a liturgy for
conducting its service, reflecting the new situation in which the church found itself.
The monasteries would have prepared one for the Arab worshippers.
Portions of the Bible must have been included in the liturgy, and thus, as pre-
vious volumes maintained, the Gospel and the Psalms must already have been avail-
able in Arabic.20 But it is not impossible that a new translation of these books of the
Bible was undertaken during this renaissance of the Monophysite church.21 That
the Ghassnids had an Arabic version of the Gospel is confirmed by the Dwn of
al-Nbigha. In a celebrated ode he refers to their majallat (scroll),22 which medi-
eval commentators rightly understood to be the injl, the Gospel. Whether this
was an old Arabic version available to the Ghassnids or a new one created after
a.d. 540 by an industrious monk is not clear.23
Literary and intellectual activities must have been pursued in the Ghassnid
monastery, especially during the supremacy of a highly literate dynasty under the
long secular and ecclesiastical leadership of Arethas and Theodore. This was the
period when Greek thought was conveyed to the Semitic world through its trans-
lation into Syriac, the culturally dominant language among the Semitic peoples.
Whatever translations the Arab monks in Ghassnid monasteries might have
undertaken, they were done from Syriac, the lingua franca of Oriens Christianus,
a matter of considerable importance in determining what was translated; but as
none of these texts has survived, the translations are now more important for their
influence on the development of the Arabic script and for what can be deduced
about the route that its development took.
The Arab monks undoubtedly were aware of the intense theological con-
troversies convulsing the church. As noted above, the Ghassnid phylarch was
19 See BASIC I.2, 92535.
20 See BAFOC, 43543; BAFIC, 42229.
21 Translations of the Bible have been frequently undertaken. The translation of the Gospel from
Syriac into Arabic in the early Umayyad period was done at the special request of Amr ibn al-,
who
wanted a new version that was free from what Islam did not accept about Christ; for the encounter
between Amr and the Syriac Patriarch John I, see F. Nau, Un colloque du Patriarche Jean avec
lmir
des Agarens, Journal Asiatique, ser. 11, 5 (1915), 25779.
23 The question of whether an Arabic version of the Bible in its entirety existed in this pre-Islamic
period is still sub judice. I shall attend to it in a future monograph, treating this verse in al-Nbigha
particularly the tantalizing phrase dht al-ilh (literally, of God, divine)in great detail.
involved in these; indeed, at the conference on the Tritheistic movement in
Constantinople in 569, Arethas presided and used theological language.24 The
Ghassnid king knew Syriac and Greek since he had to deal with the central gov-
ernment in Constantinople and with the hierarchs of Monophysitism who were
Syriac-speaking. It seems likely that the Arab monks of the Ghassnid monaster-
ies were engaged in writing on the theological controversies for the benefit both
of the royal house and of the rank and file of the Ghassnid army. In addition, the
same verse of al-Nbigha that provides evidence of an Arabic Ghassnid Gospel, as
already discussed, suggests even more strongly the existence of theological Arabic.
The poet describes their religion, dn, as qawm, straight,25 clearly a technical
term reflecting the theological self-image of the Ghassnids. Nldeke was the first
to note that the use of qawm in this verse was not a literary locution but an Arabic
substitute for a technical theological Greek term, . So, in his Latin annota-
tion of al-Nbighas ode, he translated the poets statement on their dn as qawm:
Religio eorum est .26 Surely this was the term used by the Monophysite
Ghassnids themselves to describe their straight orthodox faith, and the chances
are good that it was coined by monks of one of the libraries of the Ghassnid
monasteries.
The existence of an Arabic Ghassnid Gospel and some Arabic theologi-
cal texts has been predicated on the basis of two lexemes in contemporary Arabic
poetry, majallat and qawm, but the evidence provided by al-Nbighas verse gains
weight when set against the historical background of foederati whose ordinary sol-
diers as well as rulers were enthusiastic Christians. The existence of both is much
easier to prove in the areas of ra and Najrn, for which sources are available, but
in a chapter that aims at assessing the Ghassnid cultural contribution, the support
from al-Nbigha is crucial.
24 Arethas spoke of Trinitas Deorum; see Documenta ad Origines Monophysitarum Illustrandas,
ed. J. B. Chabot, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 2, vol. 37 (Louvain, 1933), 137. In an earlier
conference
held in Constantinople, he also used the theological term quaternitas in his dialogue with Ephraim;
see
Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche jacobite dAntioche (11661199), ed. and trans. J. B.
Chabot
(Paris, 1899), II, 24647, discussed in BASIC I.2, 74850.
25 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verse 24.
26 Delectus Veterum Carminarum Arabicarum, ed. T. Nldeke (1890; reprint, Wiesbaden, 1961), 96
note 22.
V
The Arabic Script
T
he Arabic script is one of the major writing systems of the world, now sacred
to more than a billion inhabitants of this globethe Muslims. It became the
Islamic art par excellence since Islam, like Judaism, rejects representational art; and
so to a great extent the artistic talents of Islams adherents were channeled into per-
fecting it as a major art form, with the result that it is considered one of the most
beautiful forms of writing in existence.1 The roots of this script, however, go back
to pre-Islamic times. This chapter examines the role of the Ghassnids in its devel-
opment, and explores the possibility that its calligraphic expression, too, may be
rooted in pre-Islamic times and reflect Ghassnid involvement.
The Development of the Naskhi Style
It is generally recognized that the main center of the development of Arabic script
was ra, in Lakhmid territory; the style there derived from a Syriac parent script,
the Estrangela, which gave Arabic its Satranjli, later known as Kfic.2 The western
part of the Fertile Crescent also shared in this development of the Arabic script. In
fact the extant Arabic inscriptions of pre-Islamic times were found not in the east-
ern part of the Fertile Crescent but in Oriens.3 The earliest and the most impor-
tant Arabic inscription of pre-Islamic times, the Namra inscription of a.d. 328,
written in the Nabataean script, belonged to Oriens.4 Inscriptions from the sixth
century are written in a different style, in an Arabic script now differentiated from
the Nabataean.5
1 See S. Ory, Calligraphy, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden, 2001),
I, 27885.
2 On the development of the Arabic script, see A. Grohmann, Arabische Palographie (Vienna,
1971), II, 733; J. Sourdel-Thomine, Kha, EI2, IV, 111322; and B. Grndler, Arabic Script,
in
Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, I, 13544.
3 See Grohmann, Arabische Palographie, II, 1617.
4 This inscription, the epitaph of Imru al-Qays, is discussed in BAFOC, 3161, and a facsimile of
it is that volumes frontispiece. See also BALA I, 168.
5 These are the Zabad, Usays, and arrn inscriptions; see BASIC I.1, 11724, 32531.
Although no inscriptions have so far been discovered for the fifth century,
it was obviously a period of development for the Arabic script. These changes
occurred during the supremacy of the Salids, the foederati of the fifth century.6
The distinguished Austrian papyrologist and epigrapher Adolf Grohmann has
suggested that the style of the Arabic script, later called Naskhi, was developed
in the western part of the Fertile Crescent.7 The volume on the Salids, taking
up Grohmanns fruitful suggestions, explained the role of these foederati in bridg-
ing the gap between the Namra inscription of the fourth century and the newly
developed Arabic of the sixth-century inscriptions, while these present volumes on
the Ghassnids of the sixth century have prepared the way for understanding the
final federate development of this script.
The two most important surviving sixth-century inscriptions are Ghassnid.
One is secular: the Usays inscription of 529, written by Ibn al-Mughra, a mili-
tary commander detailed by the Ghassnid king Arethas to take charge of a fort.
The other is contextually ecclesiastical, though written by a Ghassnid phylarch; it
was carved in a church dedicated to St. John in arrn in Trachonitis.8 The two
inscriptions evidence the involvement of the Ghassnids in the development of
this Arabic script, involvement that is explained by two main factors. First, sixth-
century Oriens contained energetic kings and bishops who were aware of their
Arab identity; especially influential were Arethas and Theodore, who controlled
federate Oriens between 540 and 570. Even more relevant to the development
of the script is the spread of monasticism and the proliferation of monasteries in
the Oriens of the Ghassnids. The same monks who were actively producing texts
must have been chiefly responsible for the final development in pre-Islamic Arabic
script, the style that later came to be called the Naskhi.
These monks in Ghassnid monasteries who were involved in the study of
ecclesiastical literature and in translation possessed texts written in Syriac, the
prestigious lingua franca of Semitic Oriens Christianus. It is natural to suppose
that when these Arab monks expressed themselves in Arabic, they were influ-
enced by the much more developed Syriac scriptthe script of the Peshitta, of
St. Ephrems oeuvre, and of other Syriac texts. The likelihood of this influence
strengthens the argument that this style of the Arabic script developed in Oriens
not from Nabataean but from the Syriac version of Aramaic.9
6 See BAFIC, 41519.
7 For the views of Grohmann, see Arabische Palographie, II, 2830.
8 For the two inscriptions, see BASIC I.1, 11724, 32531.
9 Its development recalls the similar development of the other style, the Satranjli in ra, the
Estrangela, which, according to one etymology, now the regnant, is related to Injl, the Gospel, and
not to the proposed by Assemani, and followed by some other scholars. This conclusion
sup-
ports members of the French school, who have argued for the derivation of the Arabic script not
from
299 The Arabic Script
The Development of Calligraphy
Arabic calligraphy is associated with Islam, and there is no doubt that it flowered
and was perfected in the Islamic period, when Muslims were eager to make highly
visible the word of God.10 Yet its roots may be traced to pre-Islamic times. In that
period, too, religion was crucial to the development of calligraphy: Christianity
stimulated and inspired efforts to make the Arabic script not only functional but
also attractive, to glorify the word of God. This section explores the possibility that
Arabic calligraphy had its roots among the Ghassnid foederati.
Just as the term qawm in the Dwn of al-Nbigha (discussed in Chapter 4)
indicates the rise of a theological literature, so another surviving term suggests that
the pre-Islamic period witnessed the beginning of Arabic calligraphy. In the south-
ern sacristy of the church of St. George on Mount Nebo in the Madaba region is
a mosaic, datable to a.d. 536 (see frontispiece). It contains the name of the bene-
factor in Greek, , and to its left is a Semitic phrase that has been correctly
read as bi-salm, in peace or with peace.11 This phrase has often been discussed,
as scholars have sought to identify its language and the variety of its script.12
Although the phrase stands alone, it has great significance and deserves a thorough
treatment, since it represents the first attested appearance of the Arabic script in its
calligraphic expression; other examples that no doubt existed have been lost, along
with almost all Christian Arab monuments.
Supporting the Arabic character of the term is the ethnography of central
Trans-Jordan and the Madaba region.13
Nabataean but from Syriac; see, e.g., F. Briquel-Chatonnet, De laramen larabe: Quelques
rflexions
sur la gense de lcriture arabe, in Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient, ed. F. Droche and F.
Richard
(Paris, 1997), 13649; cf. Grndler, Arabic Script.
10 For Islamic calligraphy, see A. Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York, 1984),
with its bibliography on Islamic calligraphy (161 note 5), and S. S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy
(Edinburgh,
2006).
11 For the mosaic and its inscription, see S. J. Saller and B. Bagatti, The Town of Nebo (Khirbet
el-Mekhayyat) with a Brief Survey of Other Ancient Christian Monuments in Transjordan,
Publications
of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum 7 (Jerusalem, 1949), 171. The authors rightly understood
that
is a proper name in the vocative but did not see that the name is Saul (the original name of
the
apostle Paul).
12 For the phrase as Arabic, see E. A. Knauf, Bemerkungen zur frhen Geschichte der arabischen
Orthographie, Orientalia 53 (1984), 45658. Moreover, the crucial (second) consonant in the
phrase is
not a shn, which appears in varieties of Aramaic, but a sn, as appropriate for Arabic. Paleographic
oddi-
ties such as lam aliph, which looks like the two sides of an isosceles triangle, is explicable by the
medium:
the phrase bi-salm is not written with a pen on some writing material but appears in a mosaic
composed
of various hard cubes. The mosaicist may also have taken liberties in expressing the lam aliph,
perhaps
wishing to emphasize symmetry.
The leading Arabist/Semiticist of the twentieth century, on whom the mantle of Nldeke fell, the
late Professor Franz Rosenthal, gave his support to these arguments for the Arabness of the phrase
in a
personal letter to the author, dated 6 March 1987.
13 On the Arabness of the region, see BAFIC, 32224.
1. Its inhabitants were the Arabs of Nabataea before Nabataea was annexed
by Trajan in a.d. 106.
2. The Greek and Roman elements in Trans-Jordan were to be found mostly
in the various cities of the Decapolis, not in Madaba (and thus not in Mount Nebo).
3. The Arabness of this particular Madaba region is vouched for as early as the
second century b.c.: I Maccabees calls its inhabitants the Bani Jambri (Amr).14
4. The Madaba region had formed part of the phylarchate of the Salids, the
Arab foederati in the fifth century. This was now territory of the Ghassnids, whose
headquarters were in the Provincia Arabia, which included the Madaba region.
5. That this is not an argument from the general to the particular is made
plain by an examination of the mosaics of Madaba. Their many inscriptions have
preserved the names of donors and patrons of these works of art, and they clearly
reflect a Rhomaic Christian Arab society; though it adopted biblical and Graeco-
Roman names of saints, many of the names have retained their indubitably Arab
character.15
As an expression of Arabic calligraphy, bi-salm sheds new light on Arabic
calligraphy in the Islamic period and suggests its pre-Islamic roots. Two of the
questions raised by this inscription are the incipience of pre-Islamic Arabic callig-
raphy and the role of the Ghassnids, if any, in it.
1. The Rhomaic Christianized Arabs and the foederati were living in a region
that witnessed an explosion of Christian art in the sixth century, and this progres-
sion from functional script to decorative calligraphy was a natural manifestation of
a general artistic vibrancy, especially as both Syriac and Greek scripts were develop-
ing calligraphically to express Gods word.16
2. The area in which bi-salm was found had been part of the Nabataean
kingdom, annexed in a.d. 106 by the Romans, when Nabataea became Arabia
Provincia. In the sixth century, the Ghassnids established a strong presence in
14 For the sons of Jambri, see I Maccabees 9:3542 in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed.
B. Metzger and R. Murphy (New York, 1991), 208 AP. For the sons of Jambri as an Arab
Nabataean
group, see ibid., note to 9:35.
15 For one of these Arab mosaicists, the son of Zayd/Zada, see BAFIC, 323 and note 9. Fr.
Michele
Piccirillo sent me the MS of a short article, titled Jordan Mosaicists, which identifies at least four
in
this period who are recognizably Arab: Soel, Naum, Obed, and Salaman.
Arab benefactors of churches are clearly evidenced by such names as Ouadia, Baricha, Soleos, and
Robab in one of the churches of this region; in an inscription in the same church appear Arab names
such
as Soleos, Casiseos, Abdalaos, and Obedos. See M. Piccirillo and I. Alliata, Umm al-Rass,
Mayfaah I:
Gli scavi del complesso di Santo Stefano (Jerusalem, 1994), 243, 259.
16 Syriac calligraphy is more important than Greek for the Arab monks of Ghassnid monasteries,
who had before them mostly Syriac texts when they were engaged in translation into Arabic. That
the
names of twenty Syriac calligraphers of the fifth to seventh centuries are known suggests that the
supply
of those texts was relatively plentiful; for their names, see I. Baroum, al-Lulu al-Manthr
(Aleppo,
1987), 485.
301 The Arabic Script
the region and became a new Arab demographic layer. So who is responsible for
bi-salm, the Nabataean Arabs or the Ghassnid foederati?
a. After the Edict of Caracalla in a.d. 212, the Nabataean Arabs became
Rhomaioi and were thoroughly assimilated into Graeco-Roman civilization.17 The
language in which they wrote was Aramaic/Syriac, not Arabic, which they kept
using in their daily life; Arabic appeared only fitfully in their inscriptions, which
were written in Aramaic.18 Hence they would have had little interest in developing
the Arabic script from the functional to the decorative. But it could have been a
concern of the foederati, who were strongly aware of their Arab identity and relied
on Arabic for their literary language as well as some of their inscriptions. As noted
above, it was Ghassnid monks who were engaged in pursuits that could have led
to this development in the script. These monks were conversant with Syriac and
probably with Greek, and familiar with illuminated manuscripts of Gospels and
Psalters calligraphically written. These might have inspired them to write the
new Arabic script in a new artistic idiom; in so doing, they might have converted
the Arabic script from the functional to the artistic, the calligraphic, as an act of
piety. It is relevant to recall in this context that bi-salm appears in an ecclesiasti-
cal venue, the church of St. George on Mount Nebo. The artistic presence of the
Ghassnids in this very region of Madaba is now established, following the exca-
vation of the sixth-century Ghassnid church at Nitil. Enough of its mosaics have
survived to suggest that the Ghassnids were building in the style of Byzantine
church architecture in Oriens in the sixth century.
b. How did Ghassnid calligraphy reach the church of Mount Nebo, which
though in the Provincia Arabia, the headquarters of the Ghassnids, was outside
their phylarchal and federate presence? It was built or endowed by some inhabit-
ants of the provinciathe Nabataean Romaic Arabs. There is no great difficulty
in understanding this process of cultural transference from the foederati to the
Rhomaioi. Both were Arabs, and their affinity was an important fact in the life of
the Ghassnids. It ensured that in Oriens federate-Rhomaic relations were friendly,
unlike federate-Roman relations in the Occident, where tensions existed between
the Germanic federate newcomers and the established peoples of the Roman
Occident, Roman and other. The Ghassnids meshed smoothly with Nabataean
17 As an example of their thorough assimilation, three Nabataean Arabs may be mentioned.
They assumed Greek names, became sophists, and lived in Athens. For Heliodorus, Callinicus, and
Genethlios, see RA, xxii note 9.
18 Aramaic/Syriac was the language of the Nabataean Rhomaioi in their inscriptions and com-
munications. Arabic remained, of course, the language they used in their daily life and in dealing
with
their congeners, who would visit from the Arabian Peninsula. P. K. Hitti described them well:
Arabic
in speech, Aramaic in writing, Semitic in religion (History of Syria, Including Lebanon and
Palestine
[London, 1951], 38384); Greek can be added to his list.
society, as is well documented by the Petra Papyrus, which describes the Ghassnid
phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, Ab Karib, brother of Arethas, as the arbiter chosen
to settle a dispute in Sadaqa.19
It is therefore quite possible that the achievement of the Ghassnid monks
became known to their congeners, the Nabataean Arabs. In this case of the church
of St. George, the benefactor who endowed the church and had bi-salm engraved
calligraphically in the sacristy of the church must have been a Nabataean Arab, who
conversed in Arabic frequently; perhaps nostalgia for his native tongue explains
his desire that the salutation addressed to him be expressed in Arabic, much as
his Nabataean forebears were accustomed to insert Arabic words and phrases in
their non-Arabic inscriptions. Perhaps even the Arabicization of the limitrophe by
the Ghassnids, and its becoming a venue for the recitation of Arabic poetry, may
have revived in the Nabataean Rhomaioi their love for their native language and
caused one of them, Saola, to have an Arabic phrase engraved in the church that
he endowed.
***
Bi-salm concludes the series of three Arabic hapax legomena, following majallat
(scroll) and qawm (straight). The first two were culled from contemporary poetry
composed on the Ghassnids and the third from contemporary epigraphy; all illus-
trate Nldekes Law for the scientific reconstruction of the history of the Arabs
before the rise of Islam. The first suggested the existence of an Arabic Gospel of the
Ghassnids, the second indicated that some Arabic theological works were com-
posed in the libraries of their monasteries, and the third revealed the beginning of
Arabic calligraphy among the Arabs of sixth-century Oriens, Rhomaioi as well as
foederati.
These three terms, in splendid isolation, could not by themselves have yielded
the conclusions on the contributions of Ghassnid culture just enumerated. But
when set against the background of the rise of monasticism in Ghassnland, the
number of Ghassnid monasteries, and their vibrant, activist Christianity, the
three terms become evidence for the reality of these three facets of Ghassnid cul-
ture, a chapter in Arab cultural history that, far too long, has remained unknown.
19 See above, Part II, Chapter 1, note 2.
VI
Chivalry: The Birth of an Ideal
C
hivalry was hardly a household word in ancient Greece and Rome, but it was
a vital part of culture in Europe, in the Middle Ages. Its original provenance
has been a matter of dispute. It certainly appeared in Arabia in pre-Islamic times,
especially in the sixth century; some have maintained that the European version of
it can be traced to the Arabs in Spain, a view contested by others.1 The relation of
Arab chivalry to the Europeans is not the concern of this volume, but its relation
to the Ghassnids is.
The components of chivalry were present in pre-Islamic Arabia before its
mature appearance in the sixth century. Its base was Arabic mura in its various
dimensions, which included bravery in war, hospitality, respect for women and for
honor, and protection of the weak and the orphan.2 When the Arab warrior, who
was possessed of all those qualities of mura, mounted the horse after its advent
in Arabia, chivalry was born. As the rider became a fris, a knight as the term
was understood later in Europe,3 the horse became an essential component in chiv-
alry, to which it gave its name in Arabic, fursiyya,4 as it did in French (chevalerie),
Spanish (caballera), Italian (cavalleria), and German (Rittertum). This horse that
made chivalry possible was not so well known outside pre-Islamic Arabia; it was
the Muslim Conquests of the seventh century that made the Arabian famous, after
it was enlisted in the service of Islam.5
Arabia knew many of these pre-Islamic fursn, knights, by name, but the
lord of them all was Antaracalled Antara of the fawris, the knightswho
not only embodied in his person all the components of chivalry but also became a
1 See W. B. Ghali, La tradition chevaleresque des Arabes (Paris, 1919).
2 For a complete enumeration of these dimensions, see B. Lewis, C. Pellat, and J. Schacht, Fris,
EI2, II, 800.
3 Pre-Islamic Arabia never had orders of chivalry comparable to the Knights Hospitallers or the
Knights Templars, however. The futuwwa of later Islamic times, as organized by the caliph al-Nir
(11811223), may be considered the nearest approximation to those European orders; see C. Cahen,
Futuwwa, EI2, II, 96165, especially 964.
4 On Arab fursiyya, see N. H. al-Qaysi, al-Fursiyya fi al-Shir al-Jhili (Baghdad, 1964).
5 And it was hallowed in the Koran; see sura 100.
distinguished poet.6 His odes, in which his chivalry is displayed, address both his
lady love, Abla, and his horse; he engages the latter in something like a dialogue,
elevating it to the status of a human being.7 Antara became the paragon of Arab
chivalry in the sixth century.
The Ghassnids were Arabs who hailed from the Peninsula in which chiv-
alry had been born. As Arabs they were possessed of the various components of
chivalry, but in the sixth century they imparted to it something new: namely, a
militant spirit of Christianity. Some two centuries earlier, Constantine had mil-
itarized the image of Christ by adding the Christogram to his labarum (impe-
rial standard) and having the cross painted on the shields of his legionaries. The
Byzantine army had chaplains, and there was a liturgy of war. The Ghassnids were
soldiers in the service of Byzantium. Although Christianity affected all aspects of
their life, it did so in a very special way in their wars, particularly those waged
against the Persians and their inveterate enemies, the Lakhmids. The Ghassnid
wars against these pagans were a veritable militia Christi, fought by milites Christi.
This Christian dimension to their wars is reflected not only in their participa-
tion in the campaigns of the Byzantine imperial army, during which religious ser-
vices were regularly held, but also in the special way in which they would invoke
Christ and Job in combat.8 This dimension was perceived by the Syriac Christian
sources, which recorded the victory of the Ghassnids with the words crux vicit.
Thus Ghassnid chivalry developed in the sixth century and was spiritualized by
Christianity, a process that brought it close to the Christian version of chivalry in
medieval Europe.
Of all the military encounters of the Ghassnids, the famous battle of Chalcis
in a.d. 554, their greatest victory against the Lakhmids, represents Ghassnid
chivalry at its best. It had the warrior Arethas, a miles Christi; his horse, al-Jawn;
his two swords, Mikhdam and Rasb; and above all the romantic figure of the
princess alma, whose hand was won by the warrior who acquitted himself well
in fighting for the Ghassnid cause.9
The Ghassnids commitment to Christian chivalry, as one of the ideals that
6 For Antara, see The Black Knight, translated in J. A. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First
Chapter
in Arabic Literature (London and New York, 1957), 14878, and C. Dover, The Black Knight,
Phylon
15 (1954), 4157, 17793. Some argue that Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers in the sixth
century
and so a contemporary of Antaras, was the first poet of chivalry; see Av. Cameron, The
Theotokos in
Sixth-Century Constantinople, Journal of Theological Studies 29 (1978), 105 note 6.
7 The long internecine war which Antara fought, and in which his famous horse often figures,
was caused by a race that went wrong between a horse, Dis, and a mare, Ghabr (mentioned in
Part
II, Chapter 12; see note 32 there). For the dialogue with his horse, see his ode in Arberry, The
Seven
Odes, 183.
8 Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 53, verse 16.
9 For Yawm alma, see Part II, Chapter 2.
305 Chivalry: The Birth of an Ideal
they developed and tried to live up to, especially in their wars, has hitherto been
an unknown chapter in the history of this concept. It had no connection with the
later development of chivalry in western Europe, however. The European version
either developed independently or was rooted in that of the Arabs in Spain. The
latter was a chivalry that had already been Islamicized; it was related to jihd, the
wars of the Crescent, not those of the Cross.
VII
Poetry
E
xcessive attention to the role of the Ghassnids in the history of the Persian
Wars and the Monophysite movement has thrown into relative obscurity
their place in the history of Arabic poetrya regrettable circumstance, since it is
their contribution to Arabic poetry that has been the most enduring. The poetry
with which they are associated and which they partly inspired has survived in
the literary consciousness of Arabs as part of their literary tradition. This chap-
ter will analyze the role of the Ghassnids in the history of Arabic poetry and
its significance for the Byzantinist and for the Arabist, examining a role that the
Ghassnids played for 150 years.1 The interpretation of that role involves the expli-
cation of the ways in which poetry served the Ghassnids, the many ways in which
the Ghassnids served poetry, and the contribution of poetry to the cultural life of
sixth-century Oriens.
Even before they crossed the Roman frontier into Oriens and entered the
service of Byzantium, the Ghassnids as Arabs had been involved in poetry, for
poetry was the central facet of their cultural life. A well-known medieval critic
fully explained this involvement:
When there appeared a poet in a family of Arabs, the other tribes round
about would gather together to that family and wish them joy of their good
luck. Feasts would be got ready, the women of the tribe would join together in
bands playing upon lutes as they were wont to do at bridals, and the men and
boys would congratulate one another. For a poet was a defence to the honour
of them all, a weapon to ward off insults from their good name, and a means
of perpetuating their good deeds and of establishing their fame forever. They
1 One sign of their involvement in poetry is that even around a.d. 630, after the Prophet
Muammads expedition to Tabk, the Ghassnids tried to defend Byzantium against the rising tide
of Islam by sending a message to the poet Kab ibn Mlik in Medina, attempting to lure him away
from
his support for the Prophet and the Islamic cause. See Dwn Kab ibn Mlik al-Anr, ed. S. al-
n
(Baghdad, 1966), 66.
307 Poetry
used not to wish one another joy but for three thingsthe birth of a boy, the
coming to light of a poet, and the foaling of a noble mare.2
The Ghassnids belonged to the large group of the Azd, Arabs who had lived
in the Arabian South before they spread out into various parts of the Peninsula,
which they dominated. South Arabia was the abode of many other groups who
contributed substantially to Arabic poetryespecially Kinda, which produced
Imru al-Qays (d. 541), the foremost poet of pre-Islamic Arabia. The century of
Ghassns floruit, the sixth, witnessed the explosion of Arabic pre-Islamic poetry,3
much of which has survived. The new foederati of Byzantium thus entered the ser-
vice of Byzantium carrying with them the Arabic poetic tradition, which was part
of their peninsular heritage.
Oriens, the abode of the Ghassnids for a century and a half, had seen earlier
foederati, the Tankhids of the fourth century and the Salids of the fifth, and in
both centuries Arabic poetry was heard in Oriens. In the fourth century, the Arabs
of Queen Mavia composed odes to celebrate her victory over the emperor Valens,4
while the fifth century witnessed a court poet in the entourage of the Salid king
Dwd.5 Of the poetry associated with the Salids, only four lines have survived:
a triplet composed by the regicides who killed Dwd and one single verse from
the response of Dwds daughter to those regicides.6
Such was the state of Arabic federate poetry in Oriens in the two centuries
before the coming of the Ghassnids. The scantiness of the survivals from this fed-
erate poetry makes it difficult to draw conclusions on its nature and range, but
it is fair to say that the fifth century, with the rise of the function or office of a
federate court poet for the Salids and the appearance of a woman poet who
belonged to the royal house, showed development over the fourth. Moreover, it
is in the sixth century, with the advent of the Ghassnids, that Arabic poetry in
Oriens can be said to have shown a strong presence, which it maintained until the
fall of the dynasty. This is consonant with the general state of Arabic poetry, which
matured and proliferated in the sixth century in almost all parts of the Arabian
Peninsula. The poetry is audible in the Ghassnids first victorious encounter with
2 Ibn Rashq al-Qayrawni, in al-Umda f Maasin al-Shir, ed. M. A. al-amd (Cairo, 1955);
quoted in Suyi, al-Muzhir f Ulm al-Lugha wa Anwih (Bulq, a.h. 1282 [1865]), ed. M. Jd
al-Mawl, A. al-Bajwi, and M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1971), II, 236, and translated by Sir Charles Lyall
in the
introduction to his Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry: Chiefly Pre-Islamic, with an
Introduction and
Notes (1885; reprint, New York, 1930), 17.
3 This outpouring of poetry resembled that in Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c.
See M. Schmidt, The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (New York, 2005).
4 See BAFOC, 55254.
5 See BAFIC, 43336.
6 Ibid., 43638; see also Part II, Chapter 2, with notes 101, 110.
Sal. Because they had their own poets to memorialize their achievements, they
did not need poets to come from the Arabian Peninsula to sing their praises. The
earliest poetry composed by a Ghassnid is associated with Jidh, who helped spark
the Ghassnid-Salid conflict around a.d. 500. A poem of his has survived in
which he entertains his jinn (spirits) and conducts a dialogue with them.7 From the
reign of Jabala, in the first quarter of the sixth century, a sextet of verses has sur-
vived, composed by a poet of Medina named al-Ranq.8 But it was in the reign of the
famous Arethas (a.d. 529569) that poetry began to flourish, reaching its climax
around a.d. 600, in the last decades of the dynasty.9
I. Poetrys Service to the Ghassnids
Oriens witnessed a flowering of poetry under the Ghassnids, who were its patrons
and promoters. What were the circumstances and conditions that caused it, and in
what ways did this poetry serve the cause and interests of the dynasty?
1. One of the main assignments of the Ghassnids as foederati of Byzantium
was to protect Oriens against the inroads of the pastoralists in the Arabian
Peninsula. This they did on the battlefield when their armies crushed the invad-
ers. But it was also important to deter future raids by making known the pres-
tige of their arms. In those days, the best medium of propaganda among the Arabs
was poetry, which was quickly transmitted throughout the Peninsula by various
means, including the aswq, the fairs. Hence the value of poetry as a deterrent, well
expressed by the Maghribi Ibn Rashq, a medieval scholar of Arabic poetry: The
Arabs needed to sing about their nobility of character, the purity of their blood
and to recall their good battle-days and far-away abodes, their brave horsemen and
compliant steeds, in order to incite themselves to nobility and direct their sons to
good character . . . to perpetuate memorable deeds, strengthen their honor, guard
the tribe and to inspire the awe of other tribes since others would not advance against
them out of fear of their poet.10
7 The appearance of jinn in the thirteen-line poem may incline critics to doubt its authenticity, but
Arab poets did continue to refer to jinn even in late Islamic times; for the poem, see R. al-Malf,
Shuar
al-Malifa (Beirut, 1962), 9. On Jidh, see BAFIC, 28586.
8 See al-Malf, Shuar al-Malifa, 89. Nldeke doubted the authenticity of these verses (GF,
78),
but recent research on Jabala and the early Ghassnids suggests that they may in fact be authentic.
On iden-
tifying the Ab-Jubayla of the sextet with Jabala, the Ghassnid king and phylarch, see BASIC I.1,
49.
9 No poetry has survived for the reign of Mundir (a.d. 569582), possibly owing to the periods
intense political, military, and especially religious tensions. Similarly, the Iranians during the period
of the
Safavids were more interested in religion than in poetry; see E. G. Browne, A History of Persian
Literature
in Modern Times: a.d. 15001924, vol. 4 of A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1930), 2430.
10 Quoted and translated by S. Stetkevych, in The Abbasid Poet Interprets History: Three
Qasdahs by Ab Tammam, Journal of Arabic Literature 10 (1979), 49. The italics are mine.
309 Poetry
The court of the Ghassnids was a center of attraction to poets, who converged
on it in great numbers from all parts of the Arabian Peninsulawestern (especially
ijz and Yaman), central (Najd), and eastern (discussed below). Of all these poets,
those who frequented the fair of Uk z were the most important, since Uk z was a
pan-Arab sq where poetry tournaments were held (for a time judged by one of the
main panegyrists of the Ghassnids, al-Nbigha).11
2. Especially important were those poets who came from eastern Arabia, the
sphere of Lakhmid influence; some had deserted the Lakhmids for Ghassnid
Jbiya.12 The rivalry between Lakhmids and Ghassnids found expression in a spe-
cial genre of poetry called munfart, strife poems: a poet would laud one of the
two royal houses in response to another poets praise of the other, usually employing
the same meter and rhyme. Some surviving examples are represented by specimens
of prose literature, mentioned below in the chapter on oratory.13 Sometimes the
verse fell to rather low levels, as when a poet at the court of the Lakhmid Mundir,
the famous contemporary of the Ghassnid Arethas, composed a quintet of rajaz
verse denouncing Arethas as a regicide of his father, Jabala14a plainly slander-
ous accusation, since Jabala died at the battle of Thannris in a.d. 528 fighting for
Byzantium, as the Greek and Syriac sources attest.
Among those who deserted the Lakhmids for the Ghassnid court was a poet
of the Muallaqt, the Suspended Odes, Amr ibn Kulthm. He and other poets
gave the Ghassnids the edge over their Lakhmid rivals, whose dynasty fell around
602, making the Ghassnid triumph complete.15
3. In addition to the peninsular pastoral groups and the Lakhmids of ra,
the poetry that advertised the military prestige of the Ghassnids was also recited
among the other foederati of Oriens, especially those whom the Ghassnids had
toppled, such as the Salids and their predecessors, the Tankhids. When the
emperor Justinian in 529 put all the Arab federate groups in Oriens under the
command of Arethas, the other federates could not have been thrilled by his
decision. Although the Ghassnids were able to control these other federates,
11 See Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1966), I, 16768. For the
poetry of assn at Uk z, threatening an adversary, see Dwn assn ibn Thbit, ed. W. Araft,
Gibb
Memorial New Series 25 (London, 1971), I, 153, verse 3.
12 Christian poets of eastern Arabia were naturally attracted to the Ghassnids, especially as some
of the Lakhmid kings, such as the famous Mundir, were violently anti-Christian.
13 For a munfara in prose at the court of the Ghassnids, see Ab al-Faraj Ifahn, al-Aghn
(Beirut, 1958), XII, 1112.
14 See Abd al-Qdir al-Baghddi, Khiznat al-Adab, ed. A. al-Salm Hrn (Cairo, 1982),
X, 8993.
15 See G. Rothstein, Die Dynastie der La
hmiden in al-ira: Ein Versuch zur arabisch-persischen

Geschichte zur Zeit der Sasaniden (Berlin, 1899), 11819.
their discontent on occasion revealed itself.16 So, a poetry that described the
prowess of the Ghassnids could deter their potential rebelliousness as well.
4. Poetry was also an important feature of Ghassnid victory celebrations,
both after a horse race and after a military encounter on the battlefield.17 In the
case of the former, short poems were composed in a special meter, the rajaz; the
latter were marked by longer poems in other meters. The most memorable of these
victory celebrations were those for the battle of Chalcis, because it witnessed the
death of their great adversary, the Lakhmid Mundir, who for fifty years had posed
a threat to Oriens and to the Ghassnids.
5. Poetry also had a social function, at times celebrating the various aspects of
everyday life discussed earlier in this volume. Many odes must have been composed
on such occasions as births, baptisms, weddings, and deaths. Of these, two have
survived: the lmiyya by al-Nbigha, an elegy on the Ghassnid king Numn, and
a quatrain on a Ghassnid youth, also by al-Nbigha.18
6. A final service that poetry rendered the Ghassnids is that it recorded the
war that the Ghassnids waged in Arabia to impose the Pax Romana on its turbu-
lent tribes.19 In so doing, they spared Oriens the invasions of the Arabian pastoral-
ists, and thereby enabled it to flourish in the sixth century. This contribution of the
Ghassnids, preserved in poetry, supplies additional evidence that they were not a
pastoral group but a sedentary, urban one, which also contributed to the welfare of
Oriens by urbanizing the limitrophe.
On these aspects of Ghassnid history, Arabic poetry provides information
found nowhere in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources, both enabling medieval
Arab authors to understand the truth about the Ghassnids society as urban, not
pastoral, and providing modern historians, Arabist and Byzantinist alike, with the
data needed to write the history of this dynasty.
16 Non-Ghassnid federate coolness toward the Ghassnids was suspected during the battle of
Callinicum in a.d. 531 (see BALA I, 25), as well as in the attempt of one Ghassnid to control two
tribal
federate groups in Oriens by sowing dissension between them (see Nldeke, GF, 52 note 1).
17 The most spectacular example occurred in Abbasid times, during the reign of Hrn al-Rashd:
when he returned from his Anatolian campaign against Heraclea, eight poets recited poetry
celebrating
his victory; see al-l, Kitb al-Awrq, ed. H. Dunne (Cairo, n.d.), 75, 80.
18 On these two poems, see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed. M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 11522,
166. The first moved even the dour Nldeke; see GF, 3839.
19 Perhaps a Pax Ghassanica may have developed, when Arethas brought to an end the internecine
strife between two subdivisions of the powerful tribal group of ayyi called Jadla and al-Gawth,
an
achievement remembered in prose and in poetry; see Dwn al-rith ibn illiza, ed. U. al-abb
(Beirut, 1994), 88, no. 16, verse 5. For the best account of the Ghassnids war in Arabia, see N. A.
al-Ramn, Fi Ayym Ghassn Maa al-Alif Fi al-Shir al-Jhili, Majallat: Majma al Lughat
al-Arabiyya al-Urdunn 30 (1986), 97146.
311 Poetry
II. The Ghassnids Service to Poetry
The efflorescence of Arabic poetry during the Ghassnid period in Oriens was due
to their patronage. It is, therefore, necessary to examine the ways in which they
contributed to that efflorescence and how they promoted that art.
The Institutionalization of Poetry
The Ghassnid patronage of poetry found expression in a number of services, some
of which may be called technical.
1. Pre-Islamic peninsular poetry had not been a profession. The pastoral poet
was a tribesman, and composing poetry was only the artistic dimension of his life,
for which his tribe did not pay him. Although Zuhayr, a poet of the Muallaqt,
attached himself to an Arabian chief, Harim ibn Sinn, who had managed to
end the internecine tribal Bass War, and thereby benefited materially from the
latters liberality, he was the exception.20 But when the Ghassnids (and also the
Lakhmids) opened their courts to peninsular poets, who received from them hand-
some rewards (often in Byzantine denarii), poetry became a profession,21 and poets
thenceforth expected and received remuneration for their verse.22
2. The rise of the poet laureate attached to the court was also a new phenom-
enon.23 The first recorded court poet was the Iydi Abd al-s, at the fifth-century
Salid court of King Dwd; but Arab literary consciousness retains merely his
name, since none of his poetry has survived. It is, however, the Ghassnids whose
name is associated with court poets, two of whom were al-Nbigha and assn.
Al-Nbighas relation to the Lakhmids suggests that he may not have been tech-
nically the Ghassnids court poet.24 assn, in contrast, stayed with them much
longer and indeed was their relative; so he may be considered their true court poet.
20 See L. Bettini, Zuhayr, EI2, XI, 55658.
21 See H. A. R. Gibb, Arabic Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1963), 1819.
22 Alan Cameron has shown that poets in the late antique period began to expect remuneration
and became traveling professionals; see his Wandering Poets: A Literary Movement in Byzantine
Egypt, in Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World (London, 1985), article I, 470509.
For the same phenomenon at the Byzantine court of a later age, see M. D. Lauxtermann, Byzantine
Poetry from Pisides to Geometres, Wiener Byzantinistische Studien, 24/1 (Vienna, 2003), 36; he
sug-
gests that professional poets expected, even begged, to be paid for their services from the twelfth
cen-
tury onward.
23 The first true court poet of Byzantium was George of Pisidia, who was the poet laureate for
Heraclius; see W. Hrandner, Court Poetry: Questions of Motifs, Structure and Function, in
Rhetoric
in Byzantium, ed. E. Jeffreys, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 11 (Aldershot, Eng.,
2003),
76, where he also endorses the view of Lauxtermann on this point (76 note 4). On the poet laureate
of
the fifth-century Arab federate king Dwd, see BAFIC, 261.
24 But one verse in an ode addressed to the Lakhmids suggests that he had a special relationship
with the Ghassnids; see Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 73, verse 6.
He also functioned later as the poet laureate of the Prophet Muammad for a
decade during his Medinan period (a.d. 622632).
3. The third service that the Ghassnids rendered poetry was their contri-
bution to the rise of an appropriate venue worthy of poetry recitalsnamely the
deion/odeum. In his Dwn, assn apparently makes a specific reference to an
odeum, the buyt al-rukhm, houses/mansions of marble, in which he could
hear song and poetry.25
New Subjects of Poetry
Other contributions were even more important and substantive. When the
Ghassnids gave the peninsular Arab poets the chance to visit their court and
eulogize them, they also offered a first glimpse of an outside superior civilization,
that of Byzantium, and thus enabled the poets to incorporate into the texture of
pre-Islamic poetry new tones and motifsa particularly important consideration
for poetry like that of the pre-Islamic Arabs, whose simplicity of life in Arabia
Pastoralis had conduced to a certain exiguity in poetic themes. The poetry com-
posed for the Ghassnids derived not only from the Arabian scene but also from
vibrant new developments outside the Peninsula; it thus represents the first stage in
the thematic evolution of Arabic poetry and the expansion of its expressive range
from its constricted pastoral surroundings to the breadth of the Arab imperium in
later Muslim times.
The scene that inspired the peninsular poet was now urban Ghassnland and
the even more sophisticated urban scene of Byzantine Oriens, with its Decapolis
and cities. The three well-known components of Byzantine civilizationthe
Roman, Christian, and Hellenicoffered inspiration to the Arab peninsular
poets, who also were stirred by a fourth component, the Syriac-Aramaic, emanat-
ing from the Semitic sector of the multicultural Byzantine Oriens.
1. The phrase the urbanization of Arabic poetry perhaps best describes
what the Arab poet expressed in his poems after his experience in Oriens. Poets
such as assn rarely allude to the Arabian scene with its desert elements of tents
and pegs, referring instead to the urban landscape: the terms qar and qastal
(palace or castle), haykal (temple), and dayr (monastery) appear in their lexicon.
Within the Ghassnid town, they mention the tavern (nt, na), wine, song,
and drinking parties. Within the Ghassnid house or mansion, clothes and fur-
niture are described; the princesses do not busy themselves with such desert veg-
etation as the colocynth, but instead weave coral wreaths as they prepare for Palm
Sunday and Easter.
25 assn, Dwn, I, 106, verse 10; on the odeum and the evidence for it in assns poetry, see the
discussion above in Chapter 3.
313 Poetry
2. The sources do not neglect the Roman component of Byzantinism, as
their description of the Ghassnid army makes clear: no longer primitive raid-
ers of Arabia Pastoralis, the Ghassnids deployed a jaysh, an army composed of
katib, divisions, led by commanders who fought in the Roman manner. All this
is reflected in the panegyrics composed on the Ghassnids.26
3. Hellenism is the least prominent of the components of Byzantinism. This
was the age in which Hellene and pagan were used interchangeably and rejected
with equal force by the Christian Roman Empire. It is the century that witnessed
Justinians closing of the Academy in Athens in a.d. 529.27 However, Greek science
was not forgotten or frowned upon; it has survived in loanwords in Arabic such as
diryq/tiryq for antidote () and bayr () for veterinarian. And
in spite of disapproval by the church, mimes continued to be performed in Oriens,
as two loanwords in the Dwn of assn attest: maymas () for actor and
mumis () for prostitute.28
An attempt has been made to see direct Hellenistic influence on Arabic
poetry, as in the case of al-Muraqqish the Elder, a poet who visited the Ghassnids
and was said to have died of love.29 One might wish to think that Hellenism was
the provenance of this kind of love, but it is difficult to trace the route taken by this
influence to reach the pastoralist poet of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Yet Hellenism did not fail to leave a remarkable impress on the Arabic poetry
of this period. On one of his visits to the Ghassnids, al-Nbigha seems to have
gone by Palmyra, possibly when he was visiting his patrons in Rufa/Sergiopolis.30
Palmyra inspired him to refer to its legendary builder, Solomon, and to admire its
colonnaded streets.31 More intriguingly, Palmyra may be connected to al-Nbighas
devoting a lengthy poem of thirty-five verses to a detailed, almost anatomical,
description of a womans body.32 It was said to have been a panegyric on a queen
the wife of his patron, al-Numn, the king of the Lakhmids of ra. The king was
1969), 3348; al-Nbigha, Dwn, 4048.
27 See Al. Cameron, The Last Days of the Academy in Athens, in Literature and Society in the
Early Byzantine World, article XIII, 730.
28 For what may be the earliest references to these Greek terms, see assn, Dwn, I, 74, verse 14;
106, verse 13; see also the appendix to Part II, Chapter 8, above.
29 G. E. von Grnebaum, Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation (Chicago, 1953),
31314.
30 Palmyra was a station on the way to Sergiopolis, which al-Nbigha did visit, as his verse
referring
to a cross set up on its walls makes clear; see Dwn, 52, verse 10.
31 See ibid., 20, verse 22; 21, verse 23. Legend has it that Palmyra/Tadmur was built by Solomon
and
this was known to the pre-Islamic Arabs; see C. E. Bosworth, Tadmur, EI2, X, 7980. A. Arazi
has
added that knowledge of the legend would have spread through the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period
who
had converted to Judaism; see his al-Nbigha al-Dhubyni, EI2, VII, 84042.
32 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 8997.
not thrilled to have his wife so intimately described and the description alienated
him from the poet, who had to flee ra.33
The prosopographical accuracy of this episode is not relevant here; what
matters is the surprising description of a womans body.34 It has been cogently
argued that its inspiration was Palmyra, Dura/Europos, or some other Graeco-
Roman city in Oriens, where the poet saw a copy of the famous nude statue of
Aphrodite of Cnidus, sculpted by Praxiteles in the fourth century b.c.35 One
could extend this hypothesis further to suggest that the poem in fact was
mostly or entirely on the statue of Aphrodite rather than on al-Mutajarrida, the
Lakhmid queen.36 The key point is the possibility that the statue of the famous
Athenian sculptor inspired a poet of pre-Islamic Arabia, and that the resulting
poem was to some degree an ekphrasis of the statue. The ninth century was to
see an unambiguous instance of such an ekphrasis of a Graeco-Roman work of
art: the ode of Butr on the mosaic depicting the Persian victory at the battle
of Antioch in 540, which the Abbasid poet found in the ruins of the palace of
Chosroes in Ctesiphon.37
The possibility of ekphrasis of Praxiteles statue of Aphrodite by the Arab
poet al-Nbigha, even after the lapse of a millennium between the two artists, sug-
gests the persistence of the Hellenic heritage in Oriens.38
4. Of all the components of Byzantinism, Christianity proved to be the most
influential, as it was with all the peoples who adopted Christianity through what
has been called Byzantiums mission civilisatrice. Their conversion entailed the rise
and development of Christian literatures among such peoples as the Slavs, the
Armenians, the Copts, and the Ethiopians. And so it was in the case of the Arabs.
The existence of a substantial corpus of Christian Ghassnid verse is vouched for
by the distinguished ninth-century author al-Ji z, who specifically referred to
33 See Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiir wa al-Shuar, I, 166.
34 For a similarly surprising description in a funeral oration, see Appendix II.
35 A. Maydni, Ayn al-Nbigha, Madha Raat (Damascus, 1984).
36 Evidence within the poem supporting such an argument includes the description of her as a
statue of marble, placed on a pedestal (al-Nbigha, Dwn, 91, verse 16), and the mention of her
veil
having fallen from her body so that she covered herself with her hand (verse 17). The reference to
her
complexion as yellow or golden (verse 11) also suggests a statue, since statues at the time were
colored;
see K. Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, 1956), 128. Moreover, it seems
implausible
that al-Nbigha would risk seriously offending the king who was his patron by writing such verses
on the
queen. Another possibility is that the graphic close of the poem was added later; such additions
some-
times occurred in the transmission of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, a process that might also explain
the
name given to the Lakhmid queen: al-Mutajarrida, the one who has taken off her clothes.
37 For a translation of the ode, see A. J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge,
1965), 75; see the discussion in BASIC I.1, 23536.
38 See G. W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1990).
315 Poetry
their well-known Christian poems.39 Most of this poetry has not survived, but a
fruitful examination of the remnants is possible.40 This examination of poetry that
has survived makes possible speculation about the poetry that has been lost.
a. The Ghassnids lived in the shadow of a Christian empire, in an age when
hymnography was the principal original creative component of Byzantine litera-
ture.41 In the sixth century, their diocese produced the great Byzantine hymnog-
rapher Romanus the Melode, born to Jewish parents in the neighboring city of
Emesa, which had had a strong Arab character since the days of the empresses
of the Severan dynasty in the third century.42 Arabic no doubt was the language
of the Arab Ghassnid church in Oriens, used in its liturgy, lectionary, Gospel,
and Psalmsall necessary and indispensable to the service.43 It is difficult to
believe that Christian hymns were not sung in Ghassnid churches, both transla-
tions and originals composed in Arabic. New hymns often accompany Christian
revival movements, such as occurred in the nineteenth century in Arab Christian
Lebanon, when the American mission sponsored the publication of a new Arabic
Protestant version of the Bible.44
The Arabic hymns sung in Ghassnid churches, like the various other compo-
nents of the church service, have been lost. The pitiable remains of this poetic tradi-
tion have survived only indirectly and allusively in a single verse by assn. In the
nniyya or rhyme in N, while reminiscing on his old days among the Ghassnids,
he refers to alawt al-Mash, prayers addressed to Christ; to the invocation of
the priest, al-qisss; and to the monks, ruhbn, in the monastery, dayr.45
b. Poetry of an entirely different kind must have been inspired by the phe-
nomenal rise of monasticism in Oriens, and by the Ghassnids great interest in
39 See Ji z, Rasil al-Ji z, ed. A. Hrn (Cairo, 1965), III, 312.
40 The Jesuit priest Louis Cheikho collected a large number of references to this literature; his
work is a mine of information for those who wish to pursue the problem of a Christian literature in
pre-Islamic Arabia. He did not subject what he had gathered to strict criticism, however, since his
main
interest was to collect the references: see his al-Narniyya wa Adbuh bayna Arab al-Jhiliyya, 2
vols.
(Beirut, 191223). For the state of the problem, see BAFIC, 42249.
41 See E. Jeffreys, Hymnography, ODB, II, 96061. The basic work is E. Wellesz, A History of
Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford, 1961); see also K. Metsakes,

(Thessalonike, 1971).
42 On Romanus, see B. Baldwin, Romanos, the Melode, ODB, III, 18078. On the visit around
a.d. 540 of the poet Imru al-Qays to Emesa, where he consorted with some of its Arab inhabitants,
see
BASIC II.1, 263.
43 See BAFOC, 43543; BAFIC, 42230, 449, 450.
44 The nineteenth-century man of letters Nf al-Yzij wrote many hymns for the church service,
as did others; see the often-reprinted hymnal prepared jointly by various Christian missions and
groups
from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, Mazmr wa Tasb wa Aghni Riyya (Beirut,
1913).
45 See assn, Dwn, I, 256, line 7. The dayr may have been that of Fq, referred to earlier in the
poem (line 3).
monasteries. The Syriac contemporary document of 137 subscriptions of monastic
archimandrites to the Ghassnid king Arethas has been mentioned several times
in this volume. It was also suggested in earlier volumes that the foundation of
these monasteries was probably related to the appointment of Theodore as bishop
of the Ghassnid and Arab church in Monophysite Oriens.46 The devotion of the
Arabs to monastic life has also been noted by Syriac writers.47 The appearance of
this new structure, the monastery, in the Ghassnid landscape must have elicited
some response from the poets of the period, as it did in the Islamic period, when
a whole genre of Arabic poetry related to the monasteries came into existence.48 It
is true that the poets of the Islamic period were interested only in the amenities
of the monasterywine and hospitality; one would not expect Muslim poets to
reflect the institutions Christian message. But Christian poets of the sixth century
would have reacted differently to the monastery and its ascetic ideal. No poetry of
this kind has survived, however. The verse of assn quoted in the preceding para-
graph could be invoked again in this context as expressing the Christian sentiment
that the monastery evoked in a poet better known as a hedonist.
c. A kind of poetry called Udr, related to the group Udra, expressed chaste
and nonsensual sentiments of love that may be conveniently described as Platonic;
though it flourished in early Islamic times, its roots no doubt go back to this pre-
Islamic period. A discussion in BAFIC related it to the rise among the Arabs of
the virtues of chastity as an ideal of Christianity, with the Virgin Mary serving
as their role model.49 Because the Monophysite Ghassnids greatly venerated the
Virgin Marywho to them even more than to the Dyophysite Chalcedonians was
Theotokos, since the term emphasized the divine rather than the human in Christ
it is natural to expect that some of this chaste poetry might have been composed by
or for the Ghassnids. But no poems reflecting this kind of love have survived; only
echoes and traces of remain in contemporary prose and poetry, in the form
of single words or phrases. Such are the references in al-Nbigha to Ghassnid
chastity in a sexual context, ayyibun ujuztuhum, zoned in chastity, and their
freedom from the usual sins, itham, that plague humans of lesser moral fiber.50 The
former elicited the admiration of the distinguished medieval critic Ibn Qutayba,
who declared it the finest statement on chastity in the whole corpus of Arabic
poetry.51
46 See BASIC I.2, 77374, 82438, 85060; BASIC II.1, 17695.
47 See the Syriac vita of Ademmeh, PO 3 (Paris, 1909), 1551; discussed in BASIC II.1, 17782.
48 For this poetry, see Ifahn, Kitb al-Diyrt, ed. J. al-Aiyya (London, 1991).
49 See BAFIC, 44349, 45355.
50 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 47, verse 25; 101, verse 4 (which also includes a reference to their bodies
purifiedthat is, from sin).
51 Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa al-Shuar, I, 163.
317 Poetry
A quintet of verses, however, was luckily preserved in the invaluable Geo-
graphical Dictionary of Yqt;52 it expresses a combination of monastic poetry
and Udr poetry, since it unites the two together. The quintet was composed and
recited by a female resident of Dayr Bura, the monastery of Bostra, in the mid-
dle of the ninth century. Its monks were Arabs whose affiliation was described
as Ban al-dir, ultimately related to the group Udra, the very group associ-
ated with this kind of Platonic love poetry. So, if two centuries after the demise
of the Ghassnid dynasty, poems of conventual provenance and Platonic senti-
ment were composed in Bild al-Shm, then surely such poetry must have been
composed in the Oriens of the sixth century, at the heyday of the Ghassnid
dynasty, celebrated for its partiality to monastic life and the Christian ideal
of chastity.
Influences on the Arabian Ode
A discussion of Byzantinisms influence on the themes of Arabic poetry would not
be complete without considering its effect on the structure of the Arabic ode.
The qasda, the polythematic ode, was a major achievement of the poets of
pre-Islamic Arabia. It was a mono-metered, mono-rhymed longish poem contain-
ing a fixed set of themes. It begins with the halt at the deserted encampment of
the departed tribe, a section that includes an amatory passage on the beloved, also
departed. Then follows a description of the desert scene in Arabia Deserta, both
the mount, horse or camel, and the fauna and flora of the landscape. It may end
with some reflections on life or with the praise of the group to which the poet
belonged.53 It was traditional to follow rigorously this canonical sequence of
themes,54 leading to a considerable amount of repetition and imitation. Some of
the poets in the late pre-Islamic period lamented the fact that they were replicating
what their camels were doing, namely, chewing the cud.55
1. The prelude of the qasda was its most important and distinctive compo-
nent, perfected by the masters of Arabic pre-Islamic poetry. The Ghassnid poets,
however, finding themselves now in a highly urban environment, apparently did
not feel it necessary to avail themselves of this prelude with its pastoralist associa-
tions. Al-Nbigha completely omits it from his finest ode, the biyya or rhyme in
B on the Ghassnids;56 so did assn, who explicitly states that he prefers urban
52 Yqt, Mujam al-Buldn (Beirut, 1956), II, 500501; the quintet is discussed in BAFIC,
44749.
53 On the qasda, see F. Krenkow and G. Lecomte, Kasida, EI2, IV, 71314; the same entry
traces
its later development in other Islamic literaturesPersian, Turkish, and Urdu.
54 See Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa al-Shuar, I, 7677.
55 A sentiment expressed by Antara and Zuhayr; see Sezgin, GAS, II, 11315, 11820.
56 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 4048.
life with its amenities to the mounts he used to ride,57 thereby anticipating the
urbanization of Arabic poetry in later Islamic times.
2. When the Ghassnid poets did follow tradition and include a prelude in
their qasda, they generally avoided the preludes constituents, such as tents, pegs,
and dung; instead they introduced new elements derived from the urban scene in
Oriens. One of the attractive features of the pastoral prelude had been the string
of place-names at which the beloved stopped or lingered, a device that added both
realism and musicality to the ode. But names such as al-Abl and Thahmad were
hardly intelligible to the urban society of Oriens, and so a new toponymic necklace
of well-known places was introduced, featuring towns and cities familiar to the
Arabs of Oriens such as Jsim, Jalliq (Gallica), Jbiya, Drayy, Sakk, Bils, and
Dma. Two of them attained celebrityamt and Shayzar, the Semitic names
of Macedonian-era Epiphaneia and Larissa (both in Syria), which became known
even to the poets of faraway Andalusia.58
3. The deserted encampment in the pastoral landscape of the pre-Islamic ode
gave way when the poets of the Ghassnids saw the splendid all, decayed and
fragmented remains of such Arab metropolises as Petra and Palmyra, both on the
way to Jbiya, Jalliq, and Ghassnid Rufa. Only echoes have survived of their
compositions on these urban centers. In one celebrated ode, al-Nbigha described
the large slabs of stone of which Palmyra was built as well as the columns still
standing in its streets.59
The all theme was also used by assn, but in a different way. The poet lau-
reate of the Ghassnids came to visit Ghassnland after the demise of the dynasty,
and he stood over the remains of a city he had known in his youth and whose fate
he poignantly lamented.60 In so doing, he initiated a new type of Arabic poetry,
elegies on fallen dynasties and kingdoms; the last in this Classical Arabic genre
were the odes on the fall of Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, to the conquistadors.
4. While the monastery attracted the Ghassnid poets, they were drawn
even more strongly to an important constituent of the urban scenenamely, the
tavern, with which assn became most closely associated. As he devoted some
of his poems exclusively to wine, the polythematic ode contracted to address a
single theme.61 Hence assn must be considered one of the poets who initiated
57 assn, Dwn, I, 316, verses 69; elsewhere he begins a poem by declaring that neither the
traces of the deserted encampment nor the departure of the tribe moves or stirs him (106, verse 1).
58 On amt and Shayzar, see BASIC II.1, 264. The two toponyms appeared in a passage of the
Caesar Ode of Imru al-Qays that attracted the attention of the literary critic Abd al-Qdir al-
Baghddi,
who offered a fine analysis in Khiznat al-Adab, I, 32935.
59 See al-Nbigha, Dwn, 2021, verses 2227.
60 assn, Dwn, I, 7475, 19495, 316.
61 Also disentangled from the complex qasda was the monothematic love poem; see, for example,
assns attractive poem on al-Nara (Dwn, I, 5254), discussed in Part II, Chapter 2.
319 Poetry
the khamriya, the wine lyric,62 a genre whose longevity in Islamic times is espe-
cially remarkable in view of the prohibition against alcohol in Islamic law.
5. Finally, although the old ideals of mura with its twin virtues of cour-
age in war and hospitality in peace remained in force, there appeared a new set of
Christian ideals such as chastity, with which the Arab pre-Islamic poet had not
been familiar. The poet who gave this new Christian dimension its best expres-
sion was al-Nbigha, in his celebrated biyya, which ends with the following
sextet of verses:
Theirs is a liberal nature that God gave
To no men else; their virtues never fail.
Their home the Holy Land: their faith upright:
They hope to prosper if good deeds avail.
Zoned in fair wise and delicately shod,
They keep the Feast of Palms, when maidens pale,
Whose scarlet silken robes on trestles hang,
Greet them with odorous boughs and bid them hail.
Long lapped in ease tho bred to war, their limbs
Green shouldered vestments, white-sleeved, richly veil.63
III. Byzantium in Arabic Poetry
Ever since Meleager of Gadara had left Tyre and settled on the island of Cos
sometime in the first century b.c., the literary and cultural life of Oriens lacked
high-quality secular poetry, though literary artists continued to compose toler-
able verse.64 The Ghassnids, whose court attracted Arabian poets, brought back
poetry to Oriens, with the Provincia Arabia as its center. It was not a classical or
an indigenous tradition revived, but an exotic flower transplanted from outside
the limits of the imperium, from the world of Arabian paganism. At the same
time, it underwent considerable transformation in Oriens; Byzantium in Arabic
poetry would be a convenient rubric for some of the poetry composed for the
Ghassnids. For this reason it is relevant to the cultural analyst of Oriens, who rec-
ognizes the important distinction between the Greek and Syriac elements in the
ethnic and cultural constitution of the area and who thus conceives of the region
62 See J. E. Bencheikh, Khamriyya, EI2, IV, 9981009.
63 Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 4648; trans. R. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907; reprint,
London, 1969), 54. Though the version has some inaccuracies, it is adequate to illustrate Ghassnid
Christianity.
64 For Meleager and Antipater, see Al. Cameron, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford,
1996), 952 and 111. For Philodemus, see P. Treves and D. Obbink, ibid., 116566. For specimens of
these poets, see P. K. Hitti, History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine (London, 1951), 259
61.
in bicultural terms.65 This biculturalism must now be reexamined as the role of
the Ghassnids in Oriens is recognized. A new strand, Arabic poetry, enters into
the texture of the cultural life of Oriens, both allied to Syriac in the wider Semitic
context and distinct from it in various ways. In the enumeration of the cultural
centers of Oriens, the historian gives prominence to Gaza in Palestine, Beirut in
Phoenik, Antioch in Syria Prima, and Edessa in Osroene. This map of the cul-
tural landscape in Oriens is necessarily modified when the Provincia Arabia and
Palestina Secunda are recognized as cultural centers of Arabic poetry to be added
to the four provinces of the diocese already listed.
Arabic poetry composed for the Ghassnids in the sixth century did not
affect Byzantine literary art in Oriens or elsewhere, unlike that of the sister lan-
guage Syriac; for example, the Syriac metrical hymns of Ephrem influenced those
of Romanus the Melode. So the two Semitic peoples, the Aramaeans and the Jews,
represented by Ephrem and Romanus, contributed much to Byzantine cultural life
directly through sacred song.66
Because no sacred poetry or hymns that may have been composed for the
Ghassnids have survived, it is not possible to gauge how Syriac works may have
affected this form of Arabic poetry. The detectable connections seem to be lim-
ited to the poetic lexicon, which has been noted in the case of al-Nbigha.67 More
substantial lexical influence can be found in the dwns of two poets, Umayya ibn
Abi al-alt and Ad ibn Zayd, who flourished in if in Arabia and in ra of the
Lakhmids, respectively; if, in western Arabia, was within the sphere of influ-
ence of the Ghassnids and their overlord, Byzantium.68
Although Arabic poetry did not affect literary art in pre-Islamic non-Arab
Oriens, it did so in Umayyad times, which witnessed a flowering of Arabic poetry
and song in Bild al-Shm, exemplified by the relationship of the Umayyad court
poet, the Christian al-Akhal, to al-Nbigha.69 It may even have influenced
Byzantine verse through the Arab John of Damascus, the Church Father who was
also a distinguished hymnographer and musician. Before he took the monastic
garb at St. Sabas, he had been the boon companion of Yazd, the Umayyad caliph
who was also a poet.70 The extent to which John of Damascus was influenced by
65 See F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 B.C. to a.d. 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), reviewed by
the present writer in Catholic Historical Review 81 (1995), 25152.
66 For B. Baldwin the Jewish background of Romanus is not certain; see his Romanos, the
Melode
in ODB, III, 1807.
67 See F. A. Bustni, al-Nbigha al-Dhubyni, al-Rawi 30 (Beirut, 1931), p. KB note 2. Not all
the
words cited there are loans from Syriac.
68 See F. Gabrieli, Ad B. Zayd, EI2, I, 196; J. E. Montgomery, Umayya B. Ab l-alt, EI2, X,
839.
69 On Akhal, see S. Ghzi, al-Akhal (Cairo, 1979), 21721.
70 See J. Narallah, Saint Jean de Damas: Son poque, sa vie, son oeuvre (Harissa, Lebanon, 1950),
6669, 15051.
321 Poetry
the explosion of Arabic Umayyad poetry and song around him is not clear, but that
it had some impact seems plausible.
In considering the contribution of the Semitic peoples of Oriens to its cul-
tural life, a return to Romanus is appropriate. Although he became a Christian
saint and spent his years as hymnographer in Constantinople, whither he went
during the reign of the emperor Anastasius (491518), he was born in Emesa
(ims), a city whose strong Arab character must still have been present in the sixth
century, as the visit of the poet Imru al-Qays to it around 540 suggests. The two
sister Semitic peoples of Oriens have thus contributed two major metrical forms
to world literature. Romanus perfected the kontakion, while Imru al-Qays and
after him al-Nbigha perfected the qasda, both forms that have enjoyed remark-
able longevity in the annals of Byzantine and Arabic literature respectively. The
Nativity kontakion of Romanus, which begins
(Today the Virgin brings into the world the one Transcendent, beyond all
being), is still sung annually every Christmas in the churches of the Orthodox;
the Suspended Ode of Imru al-Qays, a qasda with the splendid opening verse
Halt! Let us shed tears in memory of a departed love and her abode, is still in the
front rank of Arabic poetry. And no less enduring is the anastasis hymn of John of
Damascus, which resonates in Orthodox Churches on every Easter Day:
. . . (Christ has risen from the dead . . .).
IV. Poetry at the Byzantine Court
The Ghassnids were not the only foederati of Byzantium at whose court poetry
flourished. That art was well known and welcomed at the courts of other bar-
barian groups and foederati in the Roman Occident, such as the Franks and the
Vandals. The rulers and kings of these other groups received panegryrics from
poets, as the Ghassnids did, and so did the basileus in Constantinople.71
Arabic Poetry in Byzantium in Late Antiquity
While the poetry composed for the other foederati of the Occident is well known
to Byzantinists and has often been regarded as part of Byzantine literature in late
antiquity, that composed for the Ghassnids is virtually unknown. It has never
appeared in a history of Byzantine literature, for very good reasons. In this world
of late antiquity, which privileged Greek and Latin, a language such as Arabic
must have been viewed as an alien tongue of a barbarian group whose image
71 Scholars believe that poetry became established at the imperial court during the reign of
Theodosius II; on poets of the fifth century during his reign and that of Zeno and of Anastasius, see
Al. Cameron, The Empress and the Poet: Paganism and Politics at the Court of Theodosius II, in
Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World, article III, 270, 28182.
in Byzantine historiography was somewhat tarnished. Furthermore, Arabic had
no relation to any of the three constituent elements of Byzantinism; in contrast,
its sister cognate Semitic language Syriac/Aramaic was the language of Christ
himself, and was thus esteemed within the Bible-centered empire of Byzantium.
Indeed, Syriac became within that Christian empire the lingua franca of Oriens
Christianus; through figures such as St. Ephrem, it even influenced Byzantine
hymnography.
Viewing Arabic from a biblical perspective, the Byzantines saw it as the lan-
guage of the Hagarenoi and the Ishmaelites, both pejorative labels related respec-
tively to Hagar, the maid of Sarah, and to Ishmael, the son of Hagar and Abraham,
whose descendants, the Arabs, were outside Gods promise and covenant. Even in a
secular context, Strabo had criticized Arabic as a language difficult to pronounce.72
It was, therefore, natural that the Byzantines of late antiquity, particularly in the
sixth century, should have failed to associate poetry with the Arabs. The people
were known to them as Sarakenoi, a term that, through Ammianus and others,
allied them to the hostile pastoralists, and often identified them with a people
whom Procopius and his school accused of treachery to the Roman cause.73
Arabic Poetry in Byzantium after Yarmk (636)
The very same battle, Yarmk, that caused the downfall of both Byzantium and the
Ghassnids in Oriens also brought about a revolution in the fortunes and status of
Arabic and its speakersnot the Christian Ghassnids but the Muslim Arabs of
the Peninsula. From this time onward, Arabic poetry has close connections with
Byzantium; it is no longer peripheral as it had been in a distant province of the
empire, namely, Arabia in Oriens. Arabic becomes the language of the Islamic
caliphate, which superseded Sasanid Iran as Byzantiums enemy. Previously, it had
been the limited concern of the empires Office of the Barbarians, which dealt with
foederati and with the Arabian Peninsula. Now, it is the official language of a vast
empire, and Constantinople takes it seriously.
Arabic became the linguistic medium of all the poetry that was composed
by Muslims on the Arab-Byzantine conflict in Umayyad and Abbasid times, and
imperial Byzantium became aware of it. The emperor Nicephorus I (802811),
himself of Arab origin, expressed interest in the poetry of Ab al-Athiya, the poet
72 Strabo, Geography, XVI.iv.18. The Arabs countered by calling non-Arabs Ajam, dumb,
because
they were unable to pronounce Arabic correctly. The term already appears in the poetry of al-
Nbigha;
see Dwn, 122, verse 30. For Ajam, whose way of speaking was incomprehensible and obscure,
see
F. Gabrieli, Adjam, EI2, I, 205.
73 See BALA II, 965. For Procopius and his school, represented by Agathias, Menander, Evagrius,
and Theophylact, see BASIC II.1, 5.
323 Poetry
of asceticism, zuhd, in Baghdad.74 Even more important was what happened in the
tenth century during the Byzantine reconquista. This was the period of the epic
Arab-Byzantine conflict, which featured Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces
on the Byzantine side, and the amdnid Sayf al-Dawla and his chivalrous brother,
Ab Firs, knight and poet, on the Arab. The period witnessed also the floruit of
the foremost Arab poet of medieval Islam, al-Mutanabbi, the poet of Islamic jihd
against the Byzantines. Consequently, the amdnids of Aleppo and their poet
laureate, al-Mutanabbi, figure prominently in the Arab-Byzantine relationship.
1. Nicephorus Phocas expressed a negative response to a verse composed by
al-Mutanabbi.75 He sent a long comminatory poem to al-Mu, the Abbasid caliph
in Baghdad. It elicited a reply composed in the same meter and rhyme.76 It was a
remarkable demonstration of a munfara, a strife poem, a form that (as noted ear-
lier in this chapter) was common among the Arabs.
2. The brother of Sayf al-Dawla, the poet Ab Firs, was taken prisoner, and
he languished for some years in Constantinople (962966); during that period he
composed his Rmiyyt.77
All this is related to the poetry composed for the Ghassnids before the fall of
the dynasty. The stay of Ab Firs in Constantinople, though as a prisoner, evokes the
visit of Imru al-Qays to Justinian, around a.d. 540, an incident that the amdnid
poet no doubt recalled.78 More important and relevant here was the association
of another poet of the Ghassnids, al-Nbigha, with the events of this late period.
During a campaign against the Byzantines, and accompanied by al-Mutanabbi, Sayf
74 See N. M. El-Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 95. El-Cheikh
doubts the Arab origin of Nicephorus, but there is good evidence for it, and Bury and Vasiliev
accepted
it, following the Oriental sources. See J. B. Bury, Eastern Roman Empire (London, 1912), 8, and A.
A.
Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire (Madison, Wis., 1952), 271.
75 Ferreted out and discussed by G. J. van Gelder, Camels on Eyelids and the Bafflement of an
Emperor: A Line of al-Mutanabbi Translated into Greek, in Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of
the
International Comparative Literature Association, Mnchen 1988, III, Space and Boundaries in
Literature
(Continuation), ed. R. Bauer and D. Fokkema (Munich, 1990), 44651. In this article, the Arabic
source
cited in reference to Nicephorus and Mutanabbis verse is the eleventh-century man of letters Ibn
Sinn
al-Khafji; see his Sirr al-Faa (Cairo, 1952), 4849. More recently, Marc Lauxtermann came to
the
rescue of Mutanabbi and explained away the negative response of Nicephorus in his Byzantine
Poetry
from Pisides to Geometres, 1920.
76 The poem was no doubt composed for Nicephorus by someone in the Arabic-speaking commu-
nity in Constantinople, clear evidence that Arabic was established as an important foreign language
in
Constantinople and that Arabic verse had its practitioners in the capital. For the two poems, see G.
E.
von Grnebaum, Eine poetische Polemik zwischen Byzanz und Baghdad im X. Jahrhundert, in
Studia
Arabica, Analecta Orientalia 14 (Rome, 1937), 4364. In fact, not one but two (or perhaps even
more)
replies were composed to Nicephorus poem, in an exchange I shall discuss in a future publication.
77 On Ab Firs, see H. A. R. Gibb, Ab-Firs, EI2, I, 11920.
78 On this visit, see the present writer in The Last Days of Imru al-Qays: Anatolia, in Tradition
and Modernity in Arabic Literature, ed. I. J. Boullata and T. DeYoung (Fayetteville, Ark., 1997),
20718.
al-Dawla sent one of his divisions on a raiding expedition that was carried out suc-
cessfully. When he rejoined the division, one of its warriors unsheathed and dis-
played his sword, bloodied and blunted from the encounter. Sayf al-Dawla admired
it and recited a well-known couplet from the celebrated epinician ode of al-Nbigha
on the Ghassnids: One fault they have: their swords are blunt of edge/Through
constant beating on their foemens mail. Al-Mutanabbi watched him recite the cou-
plet, then he extemporized a quatrain in which he expressed his admiration for the
couplet of the pre-Islamic Ghassnid poet, lauded the amdnid prince, said that
he understood the place of the poet in the estimation of Sayf al-Dawla, and consid-
ered al-Nbigha a happy man for having been remembered by Sayf al-Dawla (a con-
noisseur of Arabic poetry) on such an occasion so long after his death.79
That the amdnid prince chose a couplet from al-Nbighas famous ode
on the Ghassnids in celebrating his victory makes plain that poetry in praise of
the Ghassnids was very much alive in the consciousness of later Arab dynasties
especially those who ruled in the same regioneven three centuries after the
demise of the Ghassnids. It was ironic that a couplet in an epinician ode com-
posed for a Christian Ghassnid king fighting for Byzantium was now used by a
Muslim prince fighting against Byzantium; the odes of al-Nbigha were clearly still
alive in the tenth century.
This long chapter on poetry at the Ghassnid court has targeted a gap in the
cultural history of Oriens in the proto-Byzantine period. In addition to filling
that gap, the chapter is a prolegomenon for a better understanding of the fortunes
of Arabic poetry in the new context of the Arab-Byzantine literary relationship
in Islamic times, during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. The involvement of
Nicephorus Phocas of the tenth century in Arabic poetry appears no longer as an
isolated aberration but as a link in a long chain of Arabic poetry written in the
course of these centuries, some of which was composed in Constantinople. The
tracing of the strands of continuity has extended them retrospectively back three
centuries before the rise of Islam through a federate Arab literary tradition, the
culmination of which was the poetry on the Ghassnids in sixth-century Oriens.
79 See Dwn al-Mutanabbi, ed. A. al-Barqq (Cairo, 1930), II, 286 note 8. The English version
of
al-Nbighas verse on the Ghassnids is that of Sir Charles Lyall, quoted by Nicholson, Literary
History
of the Arabs, 54.
Appendix
Poetry at the Court of the Occidental Foederati:
The Vandals
Poetry composed for a group of foederati in a language such as Arabic naturally
remained unknown to members of the Byzantine literary world, outside a narrow
325 Poetry
circle in Ghassnland and possibly a few in Petra and Palmyra. By contrast, the
poetry composed for the other barbarian groups of Byzantium in the Roman
Occident was well known.
The Vandals provide a useful comparison in this context because of their
involvement with the Arabs.1 The Arab foederati of Byzantium in the fifth century,
the Salids, were enlisted by Emperor Leo I (457474) for his Vandal War.2 It was
in its aftermath that the Vandals were recognized as foederati in Africa in 474.
1. Like the Arabs, the Vandals are technically foederati,3 although some
important differences obtained between the two peoples in this regard.
2. As Arians and Monophysites, respectively, the Vandals and Arabs both
were heretics or at least non-orthodox from the point of view of Chalcedonian
Byzantium.
3. Both Vandals and Arabs became patrons of poets who eulogized them. Of
these Vandal poets, Florentinus may be singled out; he eulogized Tharasamund
(497523), a descendant of the founder of the dynasty, Gaiseric.4
Unlike the Ghassnids, the Vandals did not have a tradition of poetry in a
native language through which praise could be expressed.5 Hence it was in Latin,
the language of the Roman Empire, that poetry was composed for the Vandals; in
contrast, Arabic, the language of Ghassnid poetry, was understood and appreci-
ated only by the Arabs of federate and Rhomaic Oriens.
1 On the Vandals and poetry, see J. W. George, Vandal Poets in Their Context, in Vandals,
Romans, and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique Africa, ed. A. H. Merrills (Aldershot,
Eng.,
2004), 13343. See also Y. Hen, Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture in the Early
Medieval
West (Basingstoke, England and New York, 2007).
2 See BAFIC, 9196.
3 The Ghassnids, like the other Arab allies in the preceding two centuries, are called tech-
nically in Greek and foederati in Latin. For the Latin term, see Novella XXIV in the
Codex Theodosianus for the fifth-century Arab foederati, Theodosiani libri XVI cum
constitutionibus
Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes, ed. T. Mommsen and P. M. Meyer,
2nd ed.
(Berlin, 1954), II, 6164. Sometimes they are referred to as o, as in Procopius, History,
I.xvii.46.
See also the discussion of terminology in the Preface, above.
4 On Florentinus and his poem on the Vandal king Tharasamund, see F. Clover, Felix Karthago,
in Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity, ed. F. M. Clover and R. S. Humphreys (Madison,
Wis.,
1989), 15154.
5 Vandals are not often associated with praise, for their image has been tarnished by the term
vandalism, but they also contributed the attractive name al-Andalus/Andalusia! For a defense of
the
Vandals against their identification as vandals, see George, Vandal Poets in Their Context, 142
43.
VIII
The Poets
T
he previous chapter has examined the importance of poetry to the Ghassnids
and their own services to it, notably through mediating the influence of
Byzantinism in Oriens, which enhanced Ghassnid urbanism. As the principal
poets who visited the Ghassnids in Oriens have already been discussed at some
length in a previous volume in this series,1 a brief enumeration of them will be
given in this section to demonstrate both the power of that courts gravitational
pull and the extent of its influence on the verse of the poets who visited it. Because
this volume treats the poetry only within the general concept of culture, its purely
literary value will not be discussed.
Some fourteen poets wended their way to the Ghassnid court in Jbiya and
Jalliq.2 These can be divided and categorized, so as to reflect their own importance
as well as that of their Ghassnid patrons.
1. Five of themImru al-Qays, al-Nbigha, Amr ibn Kulthm, Labd, and
Maymn al-Ashare among the foremost poets of Arabia; their poems were
included in the so-called Suspended Odes of pre-Islamic poetry.3
2. Some of these poets, such as Amr ibn Kulthm and al-Mutalammis,
chose to leave the Lakhmids for their rivals, the Ghassnids. Such desertions were
1 See BASIC II.1, 22080; there, the discussion focused on the toponyms that the odes of these
poets provided, which are crucial for understanding the urban character of the Ghassnid
phylarchate.
2 The number becomes fifteen if al-Ranq, the poet of Medina who composed the sextet on Jabala,
is included. Cf. the fifteen poets of the Vandals, discussed in J. George, Vandal Poets in their
Context,
in Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique Africa, ed. A. H. Merrills
(Aldershot,
Eng., 2004), 13839. A sixteenth poet may now be added, a Ghassnid of the Royal House, namely,
al-Shay zam Ibn al-arith. A poem of eleven verses in the rajaz metre is attributed to him. The
poem is
very informative on the Ghassnids: it contains military terms in Arabic which evidence their
advanced
military techniques; it refers to the Ghassnid king relaxing during his retirement in the countryside,
and uses the terms for Arabic villeggiatura, such as mutabaddiyan and tabad, which the extant
sources
on the Ghassnids have hardly ever preserved. For the poet and his verses, see Ab-Ali al-Qli,
Dhayl
al-Amli wa al-Nawdir (Cairo, 2000), 17980.
3 This was a collection of seven or ten odes, gathered together in the Umayyad period; see J. A.
Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London and New York, 1957).
327 The Poets
both flattering to the Ghassnids and indicative of the great drawing power of
their court.
3. Some were Christians, and their arrival at Oriens suggests that the Christ-
ian ity of the Ghassnids, not only their affluence and liberality, was an attraction.
4. Some were relatives of the Ghassnids, such as assn ibn Thbit and
Yazd ibn Abd al-Madn, the sayyid (chief) of Najrn and a descendant of its
martyrs. Both poets came from well-established urban groups in western Arabia,
and their visits to the Ghassnids to pay homage and compose eulogies reflect
the great prestige of the Ghassnids among their congeners in the Arabian
Peninsula.
As indicated in the previous chapter, some of these poets were themselves
Ghassnids, hailing from Oriens; among them were Ad ibn al-Ral. Although
the Ghassnids apparently did not produce an especially distinguished poet, some
of them could compose tolerable verse. More important than the aesthetic value of
their poetry is its influence in making the Ghassnids connoisseurs and promoters
of poetry. But the significance of poetry at the Ghassnid court is that it attracted
poets from all parts of the vast Peninsula: western Arabia (assn and, from
Najrn, Yazd ibn Abd al-Madn), midcentral Arabia (tim and al-Nbigha,
the foremost poet of his generation), and eastern Arabia (Amr ibn Kulthm and
al-Mutalammis); hence it might justly be said that in the sixth century practically
everybody who was anybody in Arabic poetry in the Peninsula paid homage to the
Ghassnids and experienced their liberality.
The Ghassnid poets are shadowy figures, from whose poetry only a verse or a
couplet has survived; the exception, Ad ibn al-Ral, has two surviving fragments.
One of those poets is Arethas, the Ghassnid king during the reign of Justinian;
another is Qtil al-J; a third is Salm, a woman; and two anonymous poets are
also attested. The poetry ascribed to the Ghassnid Jidh is still sub judice, but if it
is proved authentic, Jidh will emerge as the earliest Ghassnid poet (ca. a.d. 500).4
These poets raise the question of whether the dynasty, like the Lakhmids, had
a dwn of the poetry composed in their honor; no such collection is extant.5
4 For Ibn al-Ral, see Muhammad al-Marzubni, Mujam al-Shuar, ed. A. al-Sattr Farrj
(Cairo, 1960), 86; and Ibn Durayd, al-Ishtiqq, ed. A. al-Salm Hrn (Cairo, 1958), 486, with
note 3 for more sources on the poet. For Arethas/rith, see Ab al-Baq Hibat Allah, al-Manqib
al-Mazyadiyya, ed. S. Daradka and M. Khurayst (Amman, 1984), II, 377; for Qtil al-J, see
Hishm
al-Kalb, Jamharat al-Nasab, ed. N. Hasan (Beirut, 1986), 61819; for Salm al-Ghassniyya, to
whom
is ascribed a heptad of rajaz verses in a bukiyya, a threnody, see al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, I,
351. For
anonymous Ghassnid poets, see, for instance, Ji z, Rasil al-Ji z, ed. A. al-Salm Hrn
(Cairo,
1964), I, 209. For Jidh as possibly the earliest of all Ghassnid poets, see Chapter 7, above.
5 On the Lakhmid dwn, see Ibn Sallm, abaqt Ful al-Shuar, ed. M. M. Shkir (Cairo,
1974), I, 25.
The Fourteen Poets
The fourteen poets who converged on the Ghassnid court from all parts of the
Arabian Peninsula may be listed as follows.6
1. Imru al-Qays, the foremost poet of pre-Islamic Arabia, was related to the
Ghassnids, whom he refers to as his maternal uncles. One of his two best poems,
the Caesar Ode, was inspired by Oriens, and according to one source was associ-
ated with his involvement with the Ghassnids; so was the Muallaqa, the most
famous of all the Suspended Odes.7
2. assn ibn Thbit was the Ghassnids relative and poet laureate, the
source of much information about Ghassnid social life. Most of his extant poems
on the Ghassnids were written in the Islamic period, after the fall of the dynasty;
he composed them as a laudator temporis acti.8
3. Al-Nbigha, the foremost poet of the last phase in the development of
Arabic pre-Islamic poetry around a.d. 600, was so close to the Ghassnids that
he was in effect a second poet laureate. To him is owed precious references to their
Christianity and to their campaigns. And as argued in the previous chapter, a
unique ode in his Dwn may be an ekphrasis on a statue of Aphrodite, which he
would have seen in Palmyra or some other urban center in Oriens.9
4. Alqama was a major poet of the Tamm group in eastern Arabia. He wrote
a celebrated epinician in praise of the Ghassnid Arethas, whom he eulogized in
order to set free his brother. It has the only detailed description in Arabic verse of
a Ghassnid king directing a battlein this case, the decisive battle of Chalcis, in
which Arethas fought as a Byzantine cataphract.10
5. tim was the chief of the Christian group ayyi, which had close rela-
tions with the Lakhmids. He too came to liberate some of his people whom the
Ghassnid king had captured. The Syriac writers used the name of his group as
the generic name of the Arabs, ayy, thereby demonstrating the importance of
the ayyi in pre-Islamic times.11
6. Amr ibn Kulthm was the sayyid of Taghlib, the powerful tribal group
in northeastern Arabia, famous as a warrior and as the composer of one of the
Suspended Odes. He left the Lakhmids and joined the Ghassnids in Oriens.12
7. Al-Ash was the surname of Maymn ibn Qays, who belonged to a
6 Eight of these poets are discussed in detail in the companion to this volume, BASIC II.1;
documentation to them will be given by cross-reference to it.
8 See ibid., 23246.
9 See ibid., 22132.
10 See Alqama, Dwn, ed. D. al-Khab and I. aqql (Aleppo, 1969), 3349; see also Sezgin,
GAS,
II, 12022 who has argued persuasively for the contemporaneity of Alqama and Imru al-Qays.
12 See ibid., 26872.
329 The Poets
subdivision of the powerful tribe of Bakr, which moved in the orbit of ra. A
major itinerant poet of pre-Islamic Arabia, he was called Sannajat al-Arab, the
Cymbalist of the Arabs and Arabia. He too was one of the poets of the Muallaqt
or Suspended Odes, and visited the Ghassnids not only in the Provincia Arabia
but also in Palestine.13
Those named above are some of the foremost poets of Arabia. Others, less
highly esteemed by the Arab literary critics,14 may be listed as follows.
8. Al-Muraqqish the Elder belonged to a subdivision of the large and power-
ful group Bakr, which moved in the orbit of ra and its Lakhmids. He, too, came
over to the Ghassnid Arethas and, according to one source, became the kings
secretary. He was a warrior who fought in the Bass War, and was considered one
of the ushshq, the famous lovers in Arabic poetry who died of love (welche sterben
wenn sie lieben).15
9. Al-Mutalammis also belonged to a subdivision of Bakr, left the Lakhmids
of ra, and joined the Ghassnids together with his son, Abd al-Mannn, who
likewise was a poet. He and his son are associated with Bostra, a circumstance that
strengthens the view that the metropolis of the Provincia Arabia was accessible to
the Ghassnids.16
10. Like the two previous poets, al-Musayyab ibn Alas came from northeast-
ern Arabia. Al-Ash was his maternal uncle. He came over to the Ghassnids, and
his poetry was reminiscent of al-Nbighas in its reference to their morals.17
11. Ab-Zubayd from the tribe of ayyi is explicitly described by the sources
as a Christian, who retained his faith even after the rise of Islam. The caliph Omar
employed him to collect the taxes, adaqt, of his group, but references in the
sources suggest that he was a contemporary of Arethas.18
12. Labd is one of two poets of the group mir associated with the
Ghassnids. One of his poems recorded the death of Arethas in specific terms, sug-
gesting that he witnessed it. So he must be viewed as one of the poets who visited
the Ghassnids.19
13 See ibid., 27278.
14 In Arabic literary criticism, poets were often evaluated by layers, abaqat; see Ibn Sallm,
abaqt
Ful al-Shuar, a work that emphasizes the concept of layers in its very title.
15 See C. Pellat, Mura k kish, EI2, VII, 6034; Sezgin, GAS, II, 15354; BAFIC, 455. For
Heines
Asra, see BAFIC, 45556.
17 See Sezgin, GAS, II, 17677, and Ibn Sad al-Andalusi, Nashwat al-arab, ed. N. Abd al-
Ramn
(Amman, 1982), II, 657.
18 For Ab-Zubayd, who is known by this tecnonymic rather than by his name, armala, see
Sezgin, GAS, II, 16162.
19 See BASIC II.1, 27882. Some prose sources place Labd with the Ghassnids at the battle of
Yawm alma. See Ibn Qutayba, al-Shir wa al-Shuar, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo, 1966), I, 274.
13. The other poet who belonged to mir is al-Nbigha al-Jadi. The refer-
ences to the Ghassnids in his poetry are clear, as he enjoyed their hospitality. He
was a Mukhadram, a poet who was born before the rise of Islam but lived well into
the Islamic period. He was considered one of the muammarn, those endowed
with extraordinary longevity.20
14. Finally, there was Yazd ibn Abd al-Madn, the lord of Najrn, who was
related to the Ghassnids.21
Epilogue
The Ghassnids may have produced no distinguished pre-Islamic poets, but their
descendants did, especially in medieval al-Andalus. Even in recent times, in the
Mamlk community of Egypt, which claimed descent from the Ghassnids, was
born the major neoclassical poet al-Brdi (d. 1904). More recently still, the Arab
Christian family of the Maloufs of Zale in Lebanon, who similarly claim descent
from the Ghassnids, produced a number of distinguished poets; the foremost
of them was Fawzi al-Malf (d. 1930), whose work has been translated into five
European languages.22
20 See Sezgin, GAS, II, 24547; A. Arazi, al-Nbigha al-Djadi, EI2, VII, 84243.
22 For the poets of the Malf family, see R. al-Malf, Shuar al-Malifa (Beirut, 1962). In his
introduction, the author tries to document the Ghassnid descent of the Malfs and cites the names
of
distinguished Ghassnid poets in medieval times (9). For the epic poem of Fawzi, Al bis al-r,
trans-
lated into five European languages, see 4041.
IX
Oratory
J
ust as rhetoric was important and central in late antique literature,1 so it was
among the Arabs before the rise of Islam. Far less of pre-Islamic prose literature
than poetry has survived; only a few fragments remain, some of which are suspect.
Oratory represented the artistic arm of that prose. The khatb, or orator, attained a
very special position in pre-Islamic society, equaling and sometimes even surpass-
ing that of the poet. Public speaking had perhaps an even more important function
than poetry, since it was needed on various social, political, and military occasions.
The Arabic sources describe in some detail the ideal orator and the venue of his
oratory, even noting the staff or bow that he sometimes held in his hand. Certain
tribes, such as Iyd and Tamm, attained fame for producing the best orators.2 To
the former belonged Quss ibn Sida, the most famous orator of pre-Islamic times,
who was also the bishop of Najrn. He used to come to the fair of Uk z, near
Mecca, and preach there; the Prophet Muammad admired him and remembered
his speech, which has been preserved and which is considered authentic.3
I. References to Ghassnid Oratory
As Arabs, the Ghassnids felt oratory to be important in all aspects of their life.
Only a few extant oratorical compositions as well as a few significant references to
that art remain to be examined in this context. The sources refer to the Ghassnids
1 On rhetoric in Byzantium and late antiquity, see G. Kennedy, The Classical Tradition in
Rhetoric, in Byzantium and the Classical Tradition: University of Birmingham Thirteenth Spring
Symposium of Byzantine Studies 1979, ed. M. Mullett and R. Scott (Birmingham, Eng., 1981), 20
34;
H. Hunger, The Classical Tradition in Byzantine Literature: The Importance of Rhetoric, in ibid.,
3547; and Rhetoric in Byzantium, ed. E. Jeffreys, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies
11
(Aldershot, Eng., 2003).
2 The locus classicus for all that pertains to Arabic oratory in pre-Islamic times is the detailed
account in the ninth-century Abbasid author al-Ji z, in his al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, ed. A. Hrn
(Cairo, 1960), I, 306410; see also J. Pedersen, Khab, EI2, IV, 110911, especially 110910.
3 On Quss, see al-Ji z, al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, I, 3089; C. Pellat, Kuss, ibn-Sida, EI2,
V, 52829. Because his entry predates basic studies on Najrn and its Christianity, which began
with the
publication of The Martyrs of Najrn, Pellats conclusion that Quss has no relation to Najrn is
based on
faulty assumptions and should be rejected.
themselves as great orators, and associate them with manbir, pulpits,4 but nothing
has survived of strictly Ghassnid oratory. Like its poetry, Ghassnid oratory fol-
lowed the native Arabic tradition, which was strong and very well developed. But
Byzantine influence on Ghassnid oratoryfor example, in speeches delivered on
the accession of a Ghassnid king or on his deathcannot be entirely ruled out.
Evidently Arab oratory was known to the Byzantines; thus Choricius of Gaza speaks
of the clear-voiced orator of the Arabs, .5 Moreover, in
section 25 of his Laudatio Summi, Choricius mentions a student who came from
the Provincia Arabia to study with him and whose father was very well known in
the province, . It is tempting to think that the father was the
famous Ghassnid Arethas, and that the young man was one of his many sons.6 As has
become clear in this volume, Arethas was not only a doughty warrior but also a prince
of peace, interested in the humanities: he was a connoisseur of poetry and apparently
composed some himself. The career of Arethas son Mundir, who succeeded him in
a.d. 569, could reflect an education acquired in Gaza. He probably used Greek, the
lingua franca of Byzantium, in corresponding with Justinianus, the magister militum
in Oriens,7 and in addressing a large Monophysite gathering, composed of individu-
als from various ethnic groups, in Constantinople in the early 580s.8
II. Influences on Ghassnid Oratory
One foreign influence on Ghassnid oratory that must have asserted itself was
church homilies, inspired by Christianityspecifically, by Syriac Christianity, in
view of the Ghassnids intimate relations with the Monophysite Syriac church.
But nothing of this religious oratory has survived.
Yet though Ghassnid speeches that display the influence of Christianity
have not survived, speeches of other Christian Arabs have. The oration of Quss,
the bishop of Najrn, has already been mentioned, but closer to the Ghassnids
4 The term used is manbir (plural of minbar); see J. Pedersen, Minbar, EI2, VII, 7376. The
asso-
ciation of the Ghassnids with manbir is mentioned both by Amr ibn Madi Karib, in a dialogue
with
the orthodox caliph Omar, and in an eighth-century poem by al-Anri, a contemporary of Bashshr
ibn Burd. Both were proud of the Ghassnids, with whom they shared an ancestral homeland,
Yaman.
Because the two statements come from later Islamic times, their attribution may be called into ques-
tion, but in any case they reflect the late Islamic perception of the Ghassnids. For the two
statements,
see al-Jiz, al-Bayn wa al-Tabyn, I, 371; III, 117.
5 Choricii Gazaei opera, ed. R. Frster and E. Richsteig (Leipzig, 1929), 79; discussed in BASIC
I.1,
18990.
6 See above, Part II, Chapter 1, notes 9091.
7 See BASIC I.1, 37378.
8 See BASIC I.2, 900908. As an orator in Greek and in Constantinople, he had for ancestors
in the spirit the three Nabataean Arab rhetors and sophists of the third century who assumed the
Greek names Heliodorus, Callinicus (who taught rhetoric in Athens itself), and Genethlius; see G.
W.
Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 13536.
333 Oratory
are two speeches written by the rithids of Najrn, their martyred relatives,
around a.d. 520.
In his speech before he was martyred, al-rith ibn Kab, the chief of the city,
refers to Christ some seven times. He also expresses Arab sentiments, declaring that
he received his wounds on his breast (that is, while facing the enemy and charging)
and not on his back (while fleeing the battlefield as a coward). In so saying, rith,
the martial saint, succeeds in integrating the Arab ethos within the Christian.9
The speech of Ruhm/Ruhayma bint Azma, the leading woman of Najrn,
is slightly longer and breathes the spirit of Christianity even more strongly than
that of rith. She more frequently names Christ, presented as the spiritual bride-
groom for whose sake she prefers death to the renunciation of his name.10
In a number of respects, these two speeches are unique in the whole corpus of
Arabic pre-Islamic prose literature.
1. The authenticity of this literature is often suspect, since many questions
have been raised on the long process of its transmission down to the authors of later
Islamic times, who included it in their works. But no such reservations apply to
these two speeches: they were recorded in primary contemporary sources, based on
eyewitness reports.11
2. The speeches resonate with Christian sentiments, and thus suggest the
existence of a Christian Arabic literature before the rise of Islam.12
3. The two speeches were preserved not in their original Arabic but in Syriac,
the lingua franca of Oriens Christianus in this period.13
4. Stylistically the two speeches are the unadorned prose of lay members of
the community, not of literati or clerics like Quss, whose speech is certainly artis-
tic in its use of rhyme and some verse. Almost all extant pre-Islamic prose litera-
ture, especially speeches that have survived, is couched not in plain but in highly
stylized Arabic.14
9 For the speech of al-rith, see Martyrs, 5051.
10 For the speech of Ruhm/Ruhayma, see ibid., 5758.
11 Simeon based his account on what he had heard at Jbiya from the refugees who came from
Najrn. The phrase Those who came from Najrn have said or recounted occurs some eleven
times in
the course of the Letter; see Martyrs, 44, 50, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64.
12 The Jesuit Father Louis Cheikho spent a lifetime collecting traces and echoes of this literature in
his al-Narniyya wa dbuh bayna Arab al-Jhiliyya, 2 vols. (Beirut, 191223). For the debate
on this
literature between Georg Graf and Anton Baumstark, including more recent contributions, see
BAFOC,
43543; BAFIC, 42252.
13 In Islamic times, Arabic superseded Syriac as the lingua franca of Oriens Christianus. The pres-
ervation of these two speeches represents a major contribution of Syriac to Arabic pre-Islamic
literature;
see the present writer in The Syriac Sources for the History of the Arabs before the Rise of Islam,
Orientalia Christiana Analecta 256 (1998), 32331.
14 A cogent argument for the existence of Arabic artistic prose, nathr fanni, has been made by
Z. Mubrak, al-Nathr al-Fann fi al-Qarn al-Rbi (Cairo, 1932), I, 34, 56.
The relevance of these two speeches to Ghassnid Christian oratory and
prose in general is obvious. It was to the Ghassnid king Jabala, the father of
Arethas, that some surviving inhabitants of Najrn came after the martyrdoms of
ca. 520. They sought to invoke his aid as their relative against the imyarite king
who had persecuted them. Among the letters they carried were these two speeches
of rith and Ruhm, which were read to Jabala at Jbiya in Arabic. As has been
pointed out, the Ghassnids looked upon their Najrnite relatives as role models,
and as a result, a strong Najrnite presence developed in Ghassnland, exempli-
fied by Najrn in Trachonitis and its votive church and by such pilgrimage sites as
Maajja.15 The Jbiya-Najrn axis clearly emerged around 520 and remained strong
throughout the sixth century; at its end, sources attest the visit to the court of the
Ghassnids by the distinguished Najrnite Yazd ibn Abd al-Madn.16 Cultural
and other exchanges, including relics of martyrs, must have been brisk between the
two Christian centers; these two speeches are the earliest, nonmaterial examples
of that traffic. Their sentiments must have resonated among the Ghassnids, espe-
cially in their churches during celebrations of the feast day of the martyrs. It is not
difficult to imagine their impact on the Ghassnid converts to Christianity, whose
enthusiasm was much enhanced by the martyrdom of their relatives in South
Arabian Najrn.
III. Speeches of Ghassnid Poets
Although no religious prose compositions of Ghassnid provenance have survived,
some secular ones have, associated with their poets.
assn is responsible for the most important of all references to Ghassnid
oratoryboth what he says in his odes and what is attributed to him in prose. In
one of his unquestionably authentic poems, he says that his maternal uncle, khl,
was the orator who apparently headed a delegation from Medina to the Jbiya of the
Ghassnids. assn then mentions his father as an orator who decisively spoke on a
certain occasion in Medina, and finally he refers to himself as interceding with the
Ghassnid Ibn Salm for the liberation of three individuals, whom he names.17 The
verses make clear that the poet also prided himself on being an orator, in a family of
orators.18 In addition, the verse demonstrates the close relationship of assn to his
patronsit had begun with his uncle, in the previous generation. More importantly,
15 On Najrn and Maajja, see BASIC II.1, 15152; BASIC I.2, 828.
I, 40, verses 7, 8, 1011.
18 Compare a verse in which he taunts the tribe of Muzayna for not having produced an orator;
ibid., p. 175, poem no. 69, verse 1.
335 Oratory
it represents the court of the Ghassnids as one to which chiefs from Arabia would
come as orators to present their cases before the Ghassnid kings.
A speech has survived, purportedly addressed by assn to the Ghassnid
king, that enumerates the virtues of the Ghassnids in a contest between them
and their rivals, the Lakhmids of ra. assn delivered the speech in rhymed
prose; then the Ghassnid asked him to turn it into verse, which he did.19 If
the account is authentic (and there is no good reason to doubt that assn
could compose rhymed prose),20 it suggests that rivalry between the royal houses
of Ghassn and Lakhm was an incentive for the composition of both verse
and prose.
Another, longer speech, purportedly delivered by al-Nbigha, is also in
rhyming prose. It is more detailed and more informative on the social and cul-
tural life of the Ghassnids.21 Its occasion was the liberation of some members of
the tribal group Dubyn (to which al-Nbigha belonged), whom the Ghassnid
king had captured. Most of the speech recounts the virtues of the Ghassnid
king, but at the end al-Nbigha praises him by comparing him favorably to the
Lakhmids.
A speech delivered by al-Nbigha might well have attained a celebrity, just
as his poems did; it is quite likely that assn, his younger contemporary, heard
of it. assn might have expanded and then turned into verse only the part on
the rivalry of the two royal houses. The speech is an extremely eloquent and origi-
nal piece of Arabic prose composition, and tradition is probably right to ascribe
its composition to the distinguished poet. Its eloquence and intelligence resembles
that which informed his Itidhriya, a poem composed on a similar occasion, when
al-Nbigha presented a request that he hoped the king would grant.22
A hypercritical approach to such prose documents from pre-Islamic times
may induce doubt about the authenticity of this speech or its attribution. But pre-
cise attribution is not as important as its authenticity, and the likelihood of the lat-
ter seems high. Most important in it are the terms the poet uses, which shed a great
deal of light on the social life of the Ghassnids as a highly urban society.
19 For the speech and the poem, see ibid., 489; a fuller version is provided in the older edition by
A. Barqqi, Shar Dwn assn (Cairo, 1929), 18182. In Ifahn, al-Aghn, XV, 12425, it is
al-Nbigha who is credited with the speech.
20 The foremost neoclassical poet of modern Arabic verse, Amad Shawq (d. 1932), composed
much rhyming prose and called it the other poetry of the Arabic language, Shir al-Arabiyya al-
Thni;
see al-Saj, in al-Mawsa al-Shawqiyya, ed. I. al-Abyri (Beirut, 1998), VI, 112, line 1.
21 See Ifahn, al-Aghn, XV, 12425.
22 He asked the Lakhmid king for pardon after some enemies had slandered him; see al-Nbigha,
Dwn, 2939.
Appendix
Michael Psellos:
The on His Daughter
The funeral oration of Psellos on his daughter Styliane is one of the most famous
in Byzantine literature.1 Although its author follows the rules
determining the structure of such orations, a section that describes the physical
beauty of Styliane raises questions of propriety.2 The description brings to mind
the poem of al-Nbigha traditionally viewed as an ode on al-Mutajarrida, the
Lakhmid queen and wife of al-Numn, his patron (discussed in Chapter 7).
One would not expect an author such as Psellos, who had worn the monas-
tic habit for some time and was writing as a Rhomaios of the Christian empire, to
mention and indeed dwell on breasts and thighs in an oration on his daughter.3 But
apparently he was carried away by his desire to praise his daughters beauty by com-
paring her with Aphrodite. That Psellos was inspired by the statue of Aphrodite of
Cnidus, to which he explicitly refers,4 links his oration to the qasda of al-Nbigha
on the Lakhmid queen. The direct evidence that Praxiteles masterpiece inspired
Psellos in composing his eleventh-century oration strongly supports the inference
discussed in Chapter 7 that the same statue inspired the Arab poet; such inspira-
tion is in fact more appropriate for one describing a beautiful living queen than a
father writing about a dead daughter.
In addition to the statue of Aphrodite, Psellos refers to the Song of Songs
when describing his daughters lips, neck, and stature.5 In this case, Psellos invoked
his ancestor in the spirit, Solomon,6 to whom is ascribed the Song of Songs; perhaps
the appearance of such sensual and sensuous imagery in the Bible itself encouraged
Psellos to use similar language.
The explicit reference in Psellos to Solomon and his Song of Songs raises the
question of whether the Arab poet, too, was also inspired by the Song of Songs,
since his sextet of verses on the Ghassnids, it has been argued above, was inspired
by scripture.7 This is related to the still open question of whether the Bible in its
entirety had an Arabic version before the advent of Islam. It appears likely that at
least portions of the Bible were translated, such as one or more of the Gospels and
1 For the oration, see Bibliotheca Graeca Medii Aevi, ed. C. N. Sathas, vol. 5, Pselli Miscellanea
(1876; reprint, Athens, 1976), 6273; for a translation with commentary, see Michael Psellos,
Mothers
and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos, ed. and trans. A.
Kaldellis
(Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), 11138.
2 See Bibliotheca Graeca Medii Aevi, V, 6873.
3 Ibid., 72.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 70, 71, 73; see Song of Songs 3:3, 4:4, and 7:8 (verses identified by Kaldellis).
6 Ibid., 70.
7 See the closing lines of al-Nbighas biyya, the rhyme in B, discussed in Chapter 7 (with note
64).
337 Oratory
the Psalms.8 Of all the books of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs would have
appealed the most to a poetry-loving people such as the Arabs, and it may have
been known to them in an Arabic version.
The Song of Songs would have been very fitting as a source of inspira-
tion to an Arab poet such as al-Nbigha. Like his ode, and unlike the statue of
Praxiteles, it is a work of literary art; moreover, it contains many references to
Lebanon, a region well known to al-Nbigha from his visits to the Ghassnids
in nearby Jbiya. Its two erotic protagoniststhe Shulamite and a king, the
Israelite Solomon9recall al-Mutajarrida and her husband, the Lakhmid king
al-Numn, in al-Nbighas ode. So, the possible influence of the Song of Songs on
al-Nbighas poem may illustrate the rise and development of a Christian Arabic
poetry, inspired by the Bible.
Thus the ode of al-Nbigha may represent the influence of not one but quite
possibly two elements of Byzantinism on Arabic poetry: Christianity through its
sacred book and the Hellenism of classical Greece through Praxiteles. In addition,
the examination of Psellos oration has shown the fruitfulness of the compara-
tive approach in studying an Arabic ode, since that approach has drawn attention
to the Song of Songs as a potential second source of inspiration and, through its
explicit reference to Aphrodite of Cnidus, has strengthened the case, drawn only
inferentially from the poem itself, for the influence of Hellenism.10
8 An argument for this position is presented in BAFOC, 43543; BAFIC, 42230.
9 Solomon was in al-Nbighas thoughts when he wrote his ode asking for forgiveness from the
Lakhmid king al-Numn: in it, he alluded to Solomon as the builder of Palmyra, according to the
legend
familiar to many pre-Islamic Arabs (see above, Chapter 7, note 31).
10 I should like to thank my colleague, Eustratios Papaioannou, warmly for drawing my attention to
Psellos elegy on his daughter.
X
The Ghassnid Identity
I
t is now possible, drawing on the evidence provided by the volumes that make up
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, to present a clearer picture of the
Ghassnids than ever before. Before they became foederati of Byzantium toward
the end of the fifth century, the Ghassnids had lived in the highly sedentary south
of the Arabian Peninsula. After their wanderings in western Arabia on their way
to the north, they lived in urban centers such as Najrn and Medina/Yathrib, then
finally settled in the highly urban Byzantine Diocese of Oriens.
Of all the foederati of Byzantium from the fourth to the seventh centuries,
they were the strongest and longest lasting. For a century and a half, they fell under
the powerful threefold influence of Byzantinism: Roman political and military
institutions, the Christian faith, and Hellenic culture. In their professional, social,
cultural, and spiritual life, the Ghassnids response was broad and sometimes
intense. Unlike the Germanic tribes who were foederati in the Roman Occident,
they were related, ethnically and linguistically, to the large Arab component in the
demographic landscape of Oriens: namely, their predecessors in the limitrophe, the
Arabs of Petra and Palmyra, who had lived in Oriens before it was annexed by Rome
and even before Alexander conquered the region, and who became Rhomaioi after
the promulgation of the Edict of Caracalla in a.d. 212. Thus the Ghassnid Arabs,
though newcomers, were not utter aliens in their new environment; they were living
among congeners, and all spoke the same language in their everyday lives.
This volume concludes by assessing the effect on the Ghassnids of their long
residence in Oriens, under the powerful influence of Byzantium. Were they assimi-
lated, integrated, or acculturated as they moved in the orbit of Byzantium, drifting
away from their Arab peninsular moorings and losing their identity as Arabs? To
answer this question, each of the three components of Byzantinism is considered.
The Roman Component
As foederati of Byzantium, the Ghassnids primary function was military, and
they assimilated much of the Roman military system. As Arab peninsular war-
riors, they had fought in lines, uff, in individual combat and had employed classic
339 The Ghassnid Identity
Arab tacticsthe charge (karr) and, when necessary, the retreat (farr). Now they
were organized in and fought as units, like the Roman army formations: they
became a jaysh, an army, structured by katba (division; plural katib).1 The
cuneus or wedge had been well known to the foederati since the days of Queen
Mavia in the fourth century. The Ghassnids became cataphracts and their horses
were also mailed. In battle, they invoked new patrons such as Jesus, the Roman
Sergius and other Christian saints, and Job.2 When Arethas father, Jabala, died in
a.d. 528, the short obituary notice observed that he had much experience in the
use of Roman arms.3 This assimilation is reflected in the Latin and Greek terms
acquired from the Byzantine military establishment that at different times entered
the Arabic language: these included castrum, strata, , miliarium, veredus,
and stabulum, which became qar, sir, zukhruf, ml, bard, and iabl.4
Byzantium also integrated the Ghassnid military aristocracy into its struc-
ture, as reflected in the titles and honors it conferred on their commanders.
1. In the cursus honorum, the titles clarissimus, spectabilis, and gloriosis-
simus (and its variants) were conferred on the officers of various ranks in the
Ghassnid army.
2. The honor patricius, most prestigious though not related to any office, was
also granted.5
3. The title basileus/, malik, was conferred with its insignia.6
4. Flavius, the nomen gentilicium, was also bestowed on certain members of
the Ghassnid aristocracy.7
The last three titles are particularly significant for an analysis of the problem
of identity.
1 Procopius, too, when referring to the contingent of the Ghassnids at the battle of Callinicum,
refers to their army, ; History, I.xvii.7. The term jarrr, commander of a thousand, was
most
probably a translation of Greek . Kards could have derived from cohors or exercitus.
2 For these new military patrons of the Ghassnids, see Dwn al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, ed.
M. Ibrhm (Cairo, 1977), 53, verse 16; cf. the old pagan slogans in war: labbayka rabba Ghassn!
rjilih wa al-fursnat your service, Lord of Ghassn! their infantry and their cavalry.
3 Zacharia of Mytilene, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. E. W. Brooks, CSCO, Scriptores Syri, ser. 3,
vol. 5 (Paris, 24), 64.
4 For other Latin terms that entered Arabic in this pre-Islamic period, see the present writer in
Latin Loan Words, in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. K. Versteegh
(Leiden,
2008), III, 68. The was the painter who polished the shields of the Roman soldiers; see
G. Bowersock, A Report on Arabia Provincia, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 230, and
BAFIC,
477 note 74.
5 For the sequence of the three titles and for patricius, see BALA II, 11537.
6 See BASIC I.1, 10917.
7 See ibid., 50910, and BALA I, 7879. This imperial gentilicium was officially conferred and
not personally assumed by those who bore it, and so it was conceived long ago by Nldeke (GF,
15). For
Flavius as a status designation, see J. Keenan, The Names Flavius and Aurelius as Status
Designations in
Later Roman Egypt, Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 11 (1973), 3384; 13 (1974), 283
304.
a. The title associated with the patriciate was almost a tecnonym, since the
patricius was called Pater Augusti. It related the Arab incumbent of that honor to a
group of individuals, the patricii, who belonged to various non-Arab ethnic groups
in the empire whose affiliations lay outside the circle of his clan (Jafnid) and his
tribal group (Ghassn).
b. The flattering title Flavius connected the honor directly to the family of the
emperor, the second Flavians, the house to which the Byzantine emperors started
to relate themselves in the reign of Constantine. With regard to lineage, it was even
more telling than patricius. The term affiliated the Ghassnid ruler most clearly
and explicitly not with his own clan or tribe but with an alien personage who was
not an Arab.
The titulature of the Ghassnid king no longer had the patronymic or tec-
nonymic so characteristic of the Ghassnids; it came closer to the tria nomina
of the Roman world, although that nomenclature was in decline in late antiq-
uity. It represented a dramatic transformation, especially since Arabs such as the
Ghassnids tended to conceive of the world as bimorphicArab and non-Arab,
Ajam (literally, Dumb).
c. The title of king, basileus, functioned similarly. It connected the Ghassnids
to a group of barbarian rulers, also given that title. These formed what has been
termed the family of kings around the Byzantine ruler, who was himself not king
but autokrator, imperator, until the reign of Heraclius; then, in a.d. 629, the short
title , King Trusting in Christ, replaced the long one.8
The Christian Component
Of the three components of Byzantinism, it was Christianity that proved to be the
most influential in the life and the history of the Ghassnids. And of all the Arab
groups before the rise of Islam who converted to that faith, it was the Ghassnids
whose lives were most fully permeated by Christianity.
The importance of Christianity to them was reflected in their services to
it: they revived Monophysitism around a.d. 540; they protected the Holy Land;
they spread Christianity in the Arab area of Oriens and northern Arabia, espe-
cially during the long episcopate of Theodore; they erected churches and mon-
asteries; their king presided over church councils; and their social life was so
profoundly suffused by their faith that poets such as al-Nbigha and assn,
from distant parts of the Arabian Peninsula, noted its effect on their character.
Christianity also provided them with two new role models: the holy man and the
8 See the present writer in The Iranian Factor in Byzantium during the Reign of Heraclius, DOP
26 (1972), 295320.
ascetic. Ecclesiastical writers now gave their rulers such titles as Christophilos,
Eusebes (Christ-loving and pious).9
The Christianized Arabs benefited in two ways from St. Pauls emphasis on
the universalism of Christianity and on removing the barriers between Jew and
Gentile, Greek and barbarian.
First, the cloud of biblical opprobrium under which they lived as Ishmaelites
and Hagarenesthat is, descendants not of Sarah but of her maidservant, Hagar,
who bore Ishmaelwas lifted. Influential saints in the Jordan valley, such as
St. Euthymius, helped the Ishmaelites enter into the new fold of Christianity.10
Second, Christianity enlarged the breadth of their affiliation. Before their
conversion to Christianity, they viewed themselves as positioned within three
concentric circles: their house, the Jafnids; within their clan, the Ghassnid;
surrounded by the large tribal group, the Azd, their blood relations. They were
proud of this strictly Arab, peninsular lineage, which was sung by their poets.11
Now a new, non-Arab, dimension of affiliation was added. They became not only
Christian Arabsthat is, a group of Christians within the wide group of ethnic
Arabs who adopted Christianitybut Arab Christians, a group of Arabs within
the still wider and all-embracing circle of the Christian oikoumene, which encom-
passed the whole of the Mediterranean world. The Ghassnid place in this large
Christian affiliation is best revealed in the career of Arethas and his son, Mundir.
The former presided over a church council of the Monophysite movement, when
that confession was troubled by the Tritheistic heresy of Eugenius and Conon; the
second presided in Constantinople over representatives of the entire Monophysite
world, from Egypt as well as Oriens.12
The Hellenic Component
The Oriens to which the Ghassnids belonged had been a Seleucid territory for
some three centuries before it fell under Romes rule with the settlement of Pompey
in 63 b.c. It thus had a strong Greek substrate, which persisted throughout the
seven centuries of the Roman and the Byzantine periods. Greek received an impe-
tus when the empire moved from Rome to Constantinople and was Christianized:
the sacred book was a Bible composed of a Greek version of the Old Testament
(the Septuagint) and the Greek New Testament, and the Church Fathers wrote
in Greek.
9 For this ecclesiastical title, see BASIC I.2, 81014, 816.
10 For the many references to St. Euthymius and the Arabs, see the index of BAFIC, s.v.
Euthymius.
11 Al-Nbigha (and not just assn, their relative) refers to the Ghassnids descent from Amr ibn
Amir; see Dwn, 42, verse 9.
12 See BASIC I.2, 80524, 900908.
So the Ghassnids, as foederati of Byzantium in Oriens, were not strang-
ers to the Greek language. The Greek communities of the Seleucid period con-
tinued to live in Oriens; the closest political entity to the Ghassnids was the
Greek Decapolis, with which they had very close relations. But as Semites, they
were closer both ethnically and linguistically to the Aramaeans in Oriens and
Mesopotamia, who spoke Syriac/Aramaic. And it was an Arab king, Abgar the
Great, who made Edessa the spiritual capital of the Semitic Christian Orient, the
counterpart of Antioch for Graeco-Roman Oriens. Nevertheless, there is clear evi-
dence that Greek played a role in the social and cultural life of the Ghassnids.
Despite their strong sense of Arab identity and the fact that the Arabic script
appears for the first time in Oriens among the Ghassnids in the Usays inscription,
almost all their inscriptions are in Greek. These are found in the reign of Arethas;
of Mundir, his son; and of Numn, his grandson.13 Greek even appears on the seal
of the last Ghassnid king, Jabala ibn al-Ayham, before the fall of Oriens to Islam.14
This was understandable; Greek was the language of the culturally dominant, and
in the mostly non-Arab portion of Oriens it was much better known than Arabic.
Because the rulers relied on inscriptions on monuments to disseminate informa-
tion, Greek was the right language to use to achieve their purpose.15
Although the pagan aspects of the classical heritage of Greece were sharply
condemned by the church, Greek science and medicine retained their prestige and
remained indispensable. Hence the appearance of Greek terms, naturalized in and
incorporated into Arabic; three discussed in this volume are diryq, antidote,
from ; mumis, prostitute, from ; and bayar, veterinarian, from
.
The Arab Foundation
The Ghassnids strong sense of Arab identity is reflected in various ways, which
may be summarized as follows.
1. Their lineage. This involved the house they belonged to, Jafnids; the clan,
Ghassn; and the larger tribal group, Azd. They were aware and proud of these
affiliations.
The Ghassnids were often called the Sons of Jafna, Awld Jafna, and the
13 See BASIC I.1, 25861, 489512, 505. The arran inscription is in both Arabic and Greek
(32531).
14 See the present writer in Sigillography in the Service of History: New Light, in Novum
Millennium: Studies on Byzantine History and Culture, Dedicated to Paul Speck, ed. C. Sode and
S. Takcs (Aldershot, Eng., 2001), 36977.
15 Even Shpr I, the son of the founder of the Sasanid state and archenemy of Rome, found it
necessary to give a Greek version of his Res Gestae in the famous trilingual inscription; see R. Frye,
The
History of Ancient Iran, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 3 (Munich, 1984), 37173, and
BALA
III, 299301.
king or prince was called the son of Jafna, Ibn Jafna. The term usra, family, is
used by a poet to refer collectively to the royal Ghassnid house, demonstrating
that outsiders perceived the Ghassnids strong family ties.16 Al-Nbigha, one of
their principal panegyrists, enumerated almost all the important members of the
dynasty and presented them as a family in a quartet of verses.17
The clan, Ghassn, is not mentioned as often as Jafnid, but when it does
appear it is as an expression of a sense of pride.18 Thus it appears in one of assns
poems as Y La Ghassn, a war cry shouted during one of their battles with the
Persians that displayed their celebrated endurance, abr.19 In another poem, he
named both the clan and the larger group, Azd, thereby expressing his own and the
Ghassnids pride in both.20
2. Their onomasticon. Whereas the Arab groups who preceded them, such
as the Ituraeans, the Nabataeans, and the Edomites, had assumed Graeco-Roman
names and been almost fully assimilated by the Graeco-Roman establishment,
the Ghassnids scrupulously kept their names Arab: rith, Jabala, al-Mundir,
al-Numn, Amr, ujr, and so on. So too did Ghassnid women, with such names
as Hind, Layla, and alma; the exception, Mriya (after the Virgin Mary), was
assumed for obvious reasons.
Their sobriquets likewise were Arab, often reflecting their Arab ethos
particularly hospitalitysuch as Qtil al-J, the Killer of Hunger, and Ma
al-Sam, Water of Heaven.21 Other Arabic nicknames included al-Araj, the
Lame; al-Ayham, the Irresistibly Courageous; al-Afar, the Yellow (Arabic
for Flavius); and Qam, Eagle. Even when they set up a Greek inscription,
they simply transliterated the Arabic name: thus Qtil al-J became ,
Kathelogos.
The Ghassnid self-confidence demonstrated in their retention of a strictly
Arab onomasticon must have been enhanced and flattered in the latter half of
the sixth century, when no less a personage than the daughter of Justin II and his
wife Sophia was given the name Arabia. This surprising choice for a Byzantine
16 See Abd al-Abra, Dwn, ed. T. Asad (Kuwait, 1989), 56, verse 4.
17 For this quartet, see Al-Nbigha, Dwn, 166; for its analysis and translation into German,
see Nldeke, GF, 3334, verses 14.
18 It appears at the end of Simeon of Bth-Arshms Letter on the martyrs of Najrn (see Martyrs,
xxxi, 63) and in the name of a monastery (see BASIC I.2, 83335).
I, 308, verse 13.
20 Ibid., 183, verse 2.
21 For these two Ghassnid sobriquets and their connotations, see Hishm al-Kalb, Jamharat
al-Nasab, ed. N. asan (Beirut, 1987), 616, 61819.
princess demonstrated the influence that the Ghassnids wielded in imperial cir-
cles and reflects the early inclination of Justin II and Sophia to Monophysitism.22
3. Their location. The Arabness of the Ghassnids must have been kept alive
by their having settled in the limitrophe, adjoining the Arabian Peninsula; they
therefore lived next to the great ethnic reservoir of Arabs and Arabic-speaking
groups with whom they had to deal in peace and in war, whether conducting puni-
tive expeditions or defending the frontier against marauding pastoralists. Their
responsibility to fight the Unknown Wars23 in the Peninsula helped keep alive
their sense of ethnic and linguistic identity.
The Ghassnids had also some important contacts with the Outer Shield:
Arab tribes beyond the frontier who were on friendly terms with Byzantium.
Thus, the Ghassnids never lost their connection with the Arabs and the Arabic
language.
4. Their script. Script has always been a badge of identity. The epitaph of the
most distinguished federate Arab figure in the fourth century, Imru al-Qays, was
engraved by foederati in Arabic, expressed in the alphabet of the Nabataean Arabs,
which was the Aramaic-based script then prevalent in Oriens. No federate inscrip-
tions have turned up so far for the Salids of the fifth century. But with the advent
of the Ghassnids, the Arabicization of the script of federate inscriptions appeared
for the first time in the Zabad and Usays inscriptions. In these two inscriptions,
especially in the Usays inscription, a new Arabic script suggestive of the later naskhi
style is used, clearly differentiated from the Nabataean script; it can easily be inter-
preted as an expression of the Ghassnid Arab identity. And if, as seems likely, the
Ghassnids inspired the translation (or retranslation) into Arabic of the Gospels
and other portions of the Bible rather than depending on a Syriac or a Greek ver-
sion, those translations also would have been an expression of their Arab identity.
5. Their sponsorship of poetry. Perhaps most important, the court of the
Ghassnids was a great venue for Arabic poetry; there were recited some splendid
panegyrics, which still stand in the front rank of Arabic poetry. This poetry bla-
zoned forth their virtues in war and in peace. Poetry was then the most effective
means of propaganda, used to protect and enhance the image and prestige of the
Ghassnids in the Arabian Peninsula. This reliance on poetry kept them close to
the Arabic language, a closeness that became even more intimate when they them-
selves produced some poets, such as Ad ibn al-Ral.24 And a number of their
22 See BASIC I.1, 39093.
23 Major military operations were conducted by the Ghassnids in the service of Byzantium,
nowhere mentioned in the Byzantine sources but documented in detail in the contemporary poetry
hence their description as the Unknown Wars.

24 For the verse composed by one of their chiefs, Qtil al-J, the Killer of Hunger, see Hishm
al-Kalb, Jamharat al-Nasab, 619.
kings and phylarchsincluding Arethas, as his encounter with the poet Alqama
revealswere connoisseurs of Arabic poetry.
6. Their perception by others. The Ghassnids self-awareness as Arabs must
have been bolstered by the official Byzantine practice of always referring to them as
Saraceni/Sarakenoi,25 even though the highest Byzantine titles, such as patricii and
gloriosissimi, were bestowed on their rulers. But those rulers, like the rank and file
of the Ghassnids, remained for the Byzantines Saracens. Moreover, they lacked
the legal status of Roman citizens, cives or Rhomaioi. Although civitas may have
been extended to their kings and to distinguished members of the royal house, the
rest remained only foederati.
The Arab-Byzantine Ghassnid Identity
The interaction of four elements outlined above created a new Ghassnid iden-
tity, which may be described as Arab-Byzantine. It was richer, inclusive, and mul-
tifaceted, and was the result of a century and a half of life spent in the service of
Byzantium as foederati fighting its wars and as Christians following the teachings
and ideals of their faith. This may be illustrated in one area where these elements
interacted.
In their function as foederati for the empire, the Ghassnid exercised one of
the twin virtues of their Arab muracourage and endurance in battle. This was
professionalized and sophisticated by the Roman element when the Ghassnids
were trained to fight in the Roman manner. The new Arab warrior, Romano-Arab,
was then affected in the performance of his duty by the most powerful component
of Byzantinism, namely, Christianity. The wars that the Ghassnids were fighting
were now spiritualized and made more meaningful by being harnessed to the ideals
of their religious faith, as they undertook religious war in defense of the Christian
Roman Empire and its Holy Land in Oriens against Persians and Lakhmid Arabs.
In short, the Ghassnids now fought as milites Christi,26 whom they invoked in
their battle cries as they did saints such as Sergius, their Roman patron saint.
Christianity also spiritualized whatever chivalry the Ghassnids possessed
in war and peace. The seeds of chivalry were sown in the pre-Islamic Arabian
Peninsula, and its most outstanding representative was the black Abyssinian knight
25 For a very interesting account of the employment of this term in later Islamic times, see
A. Savvides, Some Notes on the Terms Agarenoi, Ismaelitai, and Sarakenoi in Byzantine Sources,
Byzantion 67 (1997), 8996; see also the present writer in RA, 12341, and more recently in I.
Shahd,
Saracens, EI2, IX, 2728.
26 See A. von Harnack, Militia Christi: Die christliche Religion und der Soldatenstand in den ersten
drei Jahrhunderten (Tbingen, 1905; reprint, Darmstadt, 1963), still a standard work on the subject.
The introduction to the English translation offers some useful observations on the views of the
author;
see Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries, trans. and
intro.
D. M. Gracie (Philadelphia, 1981).
Antara; but his was a secular form of chivalry untouched by any religious sentiment
(or so it seems in what has survived of his poetry). In the case of the Ghassnids, the
spiritual dimension was imparted by Christianity. And so the Arab miles Christi in
the Orient, represented by the Ghassnid, foreshadowed in a modest way his coun-
terpart, the chivalrous miles Christi of medieval western Europe.
The retention and cultivation by the Ghassnids of a strong Arab identity as
the foundation of their new inclusive Arab-Byzantine status had important con-
sequences for the limitrophe in Oriens and for Oriens in its entirety. The Arab
Rhomaioi of Oriens, Nabataean and Palmyrene, had been assimilated by the
Graeco-Roman establishment, and their Arab identity slowly eroded. The foederati
of the Byzantine Oriens, who were newcomers from the Arabian Peninsula, infused
fresh Arab blood into the limitrophe and thereby revived the strong Arab presence
in Oriens, which had been almost extinguished by the gradual Romanization of
the Arabs of the region following the Edict of Caracalla. Unlike the Nabataeans
and Palmyrenes, the great majority of the foederati remained legally noncitizens.
The foederati, especially the Ghassnids, effected the Arabization of the limi-
trophe, as illustrated most clearly by the emergence of their court as a great venue
for Arabic poetry. This Ghassnid achievement influenced Oriens both in the
Byzantine period and after the Muslim Conquest. They first made Oriens a tricul-
tural region, consisting of Graeco-Roman, Aramaic-Syriac, and Arab sectors. In so
doing, the Ghassnids also prepared the way for the future and greater Arabization
of the region after it was conquered by the Muslims in the 630s and the Umayyad
dynasty was established in Oriens, now Arab Muslim Bild al-Shm.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century
In some sixty pages, 138201, I opened in great detail the dossier of the Arab
Queen Mavia and her extraordinary career. Since then a torrent of studies has
appeared on Mavia and in some of them it has been maintained that Mavia con-
verted to Christianity after her victory over the emperor Valens. This is a view that
cannot be accepted, since it reflects an erroneous view of the state of Arab Federate
religious life in the fourth century. The rebuttal of this view will take too much
space; hence I limit myself to expressing my dissent and to saying that my article on
this point will be written in due course.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century
At pp. 54043 I made a few observations, following Michael Avi-Yonah, that the
Edomites to whom the Herods of Judaea belonged were an Arab people, and I
had considered them such in RA. Since then, I have become convinced that they
were indeed Arabs. My conclusions were expressed in an article titled The Ethnic
Origin of the Edomites, which will appear soon in ADAJ, the Annual of the
Department of Antiquities in Jordan.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century I.1
On pp. 31822, I drew attention to the curious and most unusual name for a
member of the imperial family, namely Arabia, which the daughter of Justin II
and Sophia had. I suggested that since the Ghassnid Arabs and their king,
Arethas, were in the good graces of the empress Theodora, as good Monophysites,
as were Justin II and his wife, Sophia, before they changed and came over to the
Chalcedonian position, the assumption of the name Arabia was intelligible in this
context, as an expression of pro-Ghassnid sympathy on the part of some members
of the imperial family.
Since then, a new light has come from the Anecdota of Procopius on Theodora
and the Arabs. In XVII, 1423, he discusses a lover of Theodora (before she
became empress) to whom she bore a son, John, but whom she did not want. The
father then took him away to Arabia. The sentence in the Anecdota in which Arabia
occurs reads, , which the translator of
Procopius, H. B. Dewing, rendered, He went his way to Arabia, whither he was
bound. Whither he was bound does not make much sense to me as a transla-
tion of the Greek. The crucial word in the sentence is , the pluperfect of the
verb in the middle voice. Our colleague Stratis Papaioannou surely is right when he
translated the clause as whence he came, from where he came, i.e., from Arabia.
This makes the lover an Arab, either from Arabia in Egypt, mentioned in Egerias
account of her visit, or the provincia Arabia, a welcome datum to the relation of
Theodora to Arabia and to the name of Justin IIs daughter.
For marriage at line 16 of p. 319 on Arabia, read birth.
As early as 1919, E. Stein in his Studies lamented the fact that Byzantinists
did not pay enough attention to the oriental sources, in this case, the Syriac; see
BASIC I.1, p. 449. More recently, Peter Brown, the father of late antiquity, has
vigorously stated the case for the importance of these sources; see my BALA, II,
p. XVIII. The Persian War did not start in AD 530. The incontestable Syriac
sources record its earlier outbreak; as early as 528, Byzantium lost the Battle of
Thannuris, in which Belisarius took part as the Byzantine commander; see BASIC
I.1, 7679 and also the chapter The First Persian War (527532), pp. 6282.
Apparently Croke (Justinian, Theodora, and the Church of Saints Sergius and
Bachhus, DOP 60 [2006]: 2563) missed that detailed discussion of this war.
Furthermore, his view on the inception of the First Persian War of Justinians reign
is derivative, emanating from G. Greatrex, whom he cites. On p. 51, n. 131, Croke
also refers to the suppression of the name Bacchus and suggests a new explanation,
different from mine, expressed in my article, pp. 478-479. I leave it to the reader of
the two articles to decide which the more plausible explanation is.
Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century II.1
At pp. 26768 I discussed the poet al-Mutalammis, who deserted the Lakhmids
and came over to the Ghassnids, together with his son Abd al-Mannn. In note
231, p. 268 I suggested that the theophoric name Abd al-Mannn was Islamic
and that Mannn was one of the many names of God in the Qurn, the so-called
al-Asm al-usn. This was an error since Mannn does not appear as one of
these, which come to 99, although the concept of mann, gracious giving, is impor-
tant in the Qurn as one of Gods attributes. So Abd-al-Mannn is a Christian
theophoric name to be added to others, which the Christians assumed in pre-
Islamic times, such as Abd al-Mas and Abd-Allh. For al-Asm al-usn, see
L. Gardet in EI2, I, 71417.
One of the many good reviews of BASIC II.1 was that of H. Gaube in BZ 99,
no. 2 (2006): 69193. The review is positive and it has described in detail the con-
tents and the structure of the volume in such a way as to arouse the interest of the
prospective reader, to whom, however, the following observations are addressed:
349 Addenda et Corrigenda
a. The sedentariness of the Ghassnids has the consensus of all medieval Arab
sources and has been explained in great detail in BASIC II.1, 120. The Ghassnids
crossed the threshold of sedantariness, which cannot be doubted by a strange refer-
ence in Gaubes review to Makka, which inter alia does not have to be a Paris or a
Vienna to be a city. Prachtvolle on Jabiyas buildings is not my description as Gaube
suggests, but that of R. Brnnow, his Landsmann, who visited it toward the end of
the nineteenth century (ibid. 1034).
b. Hamza and his list of Ghassnid buildings. Nldeke was puzzled by Hamzas
list but that was before Alois Musil, and more recently P. Michele Piccirillo, dis-
covered Ghassnid structures. Ernst Herzfeld made the important contribution of
discovering Hamzas source, Akhbr Mulk Ghassn (which Nldeke incompre-
hensibly missed) and so he rehabilitated Hamza and established him as a reliable
source of the Ghassnids, for which see BASIC II.1, 34245. Gaube must have
missed pp. 34345, crucial for rehabilitating amza.
c. Brnnow vouched for the Ghassnid origin of Mushatta. I revived his view
only because of the discovery of a Ghassnid church in the same region, that of
Madaba. I also added that Mushatta may have only a Ghassnid substrate, as many
Umayyad structures undoubtedly have. Mushatta is anepigraphic and, so, who
built it is still an open question.
d. Ghassnid social and cultural history does not depend only on Ghassnid
structures, as Gaube seems to think. But these are not irrelevant and are indeed
helpful. Their history depends on authentic contemporary literary sources, mainly
poetry, as has been illustrated in this present volume, BASIC II.2, in great detail.
uwwarn/Evaria was discussed many times in both BASIC I.1 and 2, but more
significantly in BASIC II.1 (index, p. 462), which has presented the archaeologist
with a roadmap of Ghassnid and Umayyad sites to be excavated. Since the appear-
ance of BASIC II.1 in 2002, uwwarn, nowadays called Hawarine, has been
excavated; see W. Khoury, Hawarine: Primiers rsultats, campagnes 20032004,
in Mlanges Jean-Pierre Sodini, Travaux et Mmoires 15 (2005), 299316.
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Index
Maps and illustrations are indicated by page
numbers in bold type.
Abbsids, 183
Abd al-Malik, 70, 228, 229, 245
Abd al-Ramn, 106, 107, 116, 120, 180, 190
Abd Yagth, 197n.61
Abdullh ibn al-Zibara: competitor to
assn, 119
Abgarids, 71
Abgar the Great, 66, 342; adoption of
Christianity, 71
Abraha: Christian ruler of South Arabia, 222;
and Sabaic Dam inscription, 44
Abraham, 78
Ab al-Athiya, 322
Ab Bakr, 124; sent to convert emperor to
Islam, 122
Ab Dud al-Iydi, 231
Ab Firs, 323
Ab akam, 181
Ab Karib, 23, 24, 41, 49, 55, 239, 302;
appointed by Justinian, 25, 27; brother
of Arethas, 31n.66; as co-equal with
Arethas, 44; involvement in spice route
prior to his phylarch appointment, 44;
phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, 8, 20, 30,
43; pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai, 69; role in
Byzantine economy, 29; threat from
Arabia, 43
Ab Nuws, 244n.27
Ab lib: uncle to Muammad, 37, 133
Ab Ubayda, 211
Ab-Zubayd, 329n.18
Academy in Athens: closing of, 313
Ad, 102, 103, 116, 117
Ad ibn Zayd, 141
Adrit, 31n.66, 37, 55, 188; nodal point of
north-south communications, 39; noted
for its wine, 38n.24
Aru, 23n.34
Adlis, 11
Aelius Gallus, 15
al-Aghn, 278; see also al-Ifahn
agriculture, 45
Ademmeh, 70, 71, 134
isha, 107, 133; favorite wife of Muammad,
130
al-Ajln, Mlik ibn, 22
al-Akhal, 69, 70, 145, 173, 320; invocation in
the poetry of, 70n.45; poet laureate, 229,
36n.12; Umayyad wine poet, 142
al-Alt, 101
Alexandria: center of Greek medicine, 179
Alids, 69
allies. See foederati
Alqama, 22, 200; major poet of Tamm group,
328
amber: prohibition against use of, 289n.4
Ammianus Marcelinus, historian, 129
Amorkesos, 29, 57
amphitheaters, 63
Amr Ibn al-A, 295n.21
Anargyroi, 176, 179; see also Cosmas, Damian
anastasis, 321
Anastasius, emperor, 15, 29, 281
Anatolia, 56, 115
Anatolian-Balkan state, 56
al-Anri, Ab-Ayyb: companion to
Muammad, 229
Antara: as black Abyssinian knight, 345;
paragon of Arab chivalry, 3034
antidote, 143, 145, 156, 180
Apgar. See Abgar the Great
Aphrodite of Cnidus, 337
Arab Conquests, 56
Arabia, 10, 19, 24, 25, 33, 3435; becomes
Christian country, 20, 29; Ethiopian
conquest of, 52; familiarity with dance,
204; greater part was desert, 47;
376 Index
Arabia (continued)
home of the Kinda, 307; as land of
precious metals, 47; leather making
flourished in, 51; Persian conquest
and occupation, 53; seven places of
mourning the dead, 196; styles of music
and song, 194; and textiles, 51, 169;
united by Islam, 56; wealth of, 4751.
See also Provincia Arabia
Arabia (Justinians niece), 86; name given to
daughter of Justin II, 114, 115
Arabian Peninsula: division of, 47; nomadic
threat from, 7, 116; strife caused by
economic competition, 52
Arabian tribes, 42
Arabic language, 29496; Greek terms found
in, 342; language of Islamic caliphate,
322; linguistic medium of all Muslim
poetry, 322; supersedes Syriac as lingua
franca of Christian Oriens, 333; under-
stood only by Arabs of federate and
Rhomaic Oriens, 325; viewed as alien
tongue, 321; viewed from a biblical
perspective, 322
Arabic script: as badge of identity, 344;
development of, 295, 297; in its
calligraphic expression, 299; a major
writing system, 296
Arabs, 134, 162, 343; attack on port of
Methone, 221; and control of silk and
spice routes, 56; date palm as national
tree of, 132; devotion to horses, 234;
devotion to monastic life, 316; impor-
tance of children to, 77; lamenting and
elegizing the dead as part of mores of,
197; and literary arts, 113; social life
of, 186; three virtues of Mavias warrior
contingent, 210
Aramaic: Syriac version of, 298
Aratius, 30, 49
archaeology: importance of, xiii, 45, 40, 50
arches, 212, 270
architecture: and columns, 281; and martyri-
ons, 280; religious, 27779; secular civil,
277; see also hunting lodges, palaces
Ardabr, 71
Arethas, 8, 2027 passim, 37, 41, 55, 130,
223, 327; and Arab Monophysite
Renaissance, 292; children of, partici-
pated in battle, 95; circumambulating
tomb of, 201; commander in chief on
battlefield, 169; disputed identity of, 93;
embalmed and carried back to Jbiya,
274; and food, 129; forty-year reign
of, 126; as king of Ghassnids, 163;
knew Syriac and Greek, 296; leader
left unnamed by Choricius, 78n.91; as
martyr, 67, 64n.10; Monophysitism
revival, 114, 270, 295, 341; name Mary
appears in matronymic of, 67; patricius
in Constantinople, 163; poetry began
to flourish in reign of, 308; received
lions share of power, 43; threw away
spears, 171; tomb of, 201, 273; uncle of
Ad, 102; wife of, accompanied him to
Constantinople, 114
Ascalon: known for wines, 154
Ascension: as dominical feast day, 64; and spe-
cial reason for Ghassnid celebration, 65
ascetic: and asceticism, 134; as role model, 341
al-Aghar, Muraqqish, 146n.41
al-Ash, Maymn, 69, 141, 146, 146n.41, 182,
185, 188, 193; foremost poet of Arabia,
326; poet of Suspended Odes, 14950;
surname of Maymn ibn Qays, 328
Asr: as Switzerland of Peninsula, 50
Ama, 121
assimilation, 301, 339; three Nabataean Arabs
and, 301n.17
all, 318
Augustus: victory at Actium, 213
Aws group, 21, 222n.11
Axum, 11
Ayla, 16, 18, 28, 30; importance of, 31;
involvement of Ghassnids in, 30;
prosperous in Mamlk period, 31n.67
Ayn Ubgh, 21718
Aynna: gold mine below Tabk, 49
ayym. See wars
Ayyb. See Job
Azd group, 20, 21, 146n.44, 194, 226, 343;
as blood relations, 341; and Ghassnids,
52, 307; spread across western Arabia, 52
Azraq, 27
Azza, Kuthayyir, 35
Bhila (tribal group), 57, 58
Bara, 37, 39
Bahrm: education of, 191
Bakr group, 207
Balduri, 108, 293
banquets, 63n.8, 252; on childbirths, 25152;
and consecration of churches, 251;
and Constantines victory celebration,
377 Index
208n.6; Easter, 252; engagement, 250;
etiquette observed at, 254; following
military victory, 251; imperial, 209n.18;
kings wore crown at, 254; secular, 251;
state, 209n.18; wedding, 250
Ban-Asad (clan), 21, 54, 224; considered
Ghassnids as allies, 55
Ban al-Nar, 38, 38n.28
Ban al-Najjr: and assn, 105
Ban-Qayla, 21
Ban Sulaym, 49; sold merchandise of
Lakhmids at fair of Uk z, 49
baptism, 75; and female deaconesses, 111; as
substitute for circumcision, 80
baptisteries, 271
Baradaeus, Jacob, 292
barbat (musical instrument), 184, 185
Barauma, 68
al-Brdi, 330
battles. See wars
Bauto, 113
Belisarius, 14
Ben Sirin, Achmet, 241n.13
The Best Account of the Persians and the Arabs,
121
biculturalism, 320
Bild al-Shm, 108, 116, 142, 241, 346,
118n.2; strong presence of Ghassnids
in, 173. See also Oriens
bint Azma, Ruhayma. See Ruhm
bitumen, 32
Boa (queen), 225
Book of Monasteries, 275
The Book of the imyarites: and centers of
persecution, 197; detailed account of
martyrdoms at Najrn, 110
Bostra, 18, 19, 23, 24, 27, 34, 55, 162; associ-
ated with wine, 148n.57; cathedral was
domed, 281; founded by Nabataean
Arabs, 36; and international goods from
Abyssinia, South Arabia, and India, 36;
key city and capital of Provincia Arabia,
36; length of fair, 37; most important
market, 36; as repository for insignia of
Ghassnid king, 281; and swords, 37, 98,
148n.57; and tax collection, 30
bread, 12930; accompanied by cheese or
honey, 130
burial practices, 275
al-Burj: inscription at, 70
Byzantine-Persian War: renewal of, 15
Byzantium: Christian Arabs in, 262; and
cityscapes, 63; components of, 312,
314; cultural life and sacred song, 320;
domination of western Arabia, 52;
and Ghassnids, 6, 263; importance of
Oriens to economic life of, 11; interest in
Arabian gold, 47; rivalry with Persia, 11
Caesarea: Samaritans and, 8
calligraphy: development of, 299302; religion
crucial to development of, 299
camels, 282; for breeding purposes, 221; cara-
vans of, 221; milk of, 139; regions most
important animal, 139
canopy: setting for perfuming of warriors, 97
Capitolias, 39
Caracalla, 31
caravans (lama), 22, 54, 23n.30; and leather
and textiles, 23; passed through inhos-
pitable and dangerous regions, 22; and
spices, 133; see also trade routes
cataphracts, 17071, 216, 230, 339
cemeteries: inside cities, 272
Ceylon, 10, 11
Chalcedon, Council of, 67
Chalcedonians: and Monophysite
Christianity, 295
chastity, 319
childbirth: celebrated with feast, 87
children and childhood, 75, 76; childbirth and
banquets, 77; and education, 77; shown
by parents to guests, 75n.74
China, 10
chivalry, 3035; adding Christogram to
labarum, 304; militant spirit of
Christianity, 304
Choricius of Gaza, 332; Arethas sent son to
study with, 78; mentions operation
against Saracens, 48
Chosroes Anshravn, 53
Chosroes Parvz, 56, 184
Christian art, 277, 300
Christian chivalry, 304
Christian component in culture, 34041
Christian shrines: raided by pastoralists, 279
Christian Topography (Cosmas Indicopleustes),
10
Christianity, 160; conversion of Salids to,
135n.40; Coptic, 289; as element of
Byzantine culture most strongly affect-
ing foederati, 269; elevated status of
women, 84; Ghassnids converted to,
62; institutionalizing Arab, 110;
378 Index
Christianity (continued)
as most powerful component of
Byzantinism, 345; and physicians,
177; promotion of Monophysite, 114;
provides two new role models, 340;
social life of, 63; as state religion, 90;
strong attachment to, 94; and Tritheistic
heresy, 294; urban centers of, 195
Christmas: as dominical feast day, 64
Chrysostom, John: urges parents to name chil-
dren after saints, 76
churches, 7, 270; and Arabic Ghassnid Gospel,
296; church of St. George, 299, 301, 302;
circumambulation of, 105; construction
of, 251, 289; Coptic, 28990; domed
with two cupolas, 289; and exchange
between Christ and Abgar, 290; financed
and subsidized by Ghassnids, 9; as
fixed structures, 263; gates, 289; and
Ghassnids, 64, 67; icon of Virgin Mary,
martyrs, and saints, 290; identifying
and listing Ghassnid-related, 279n.11;
iskana should remain lit, 290; and lamps,
290; of Najrn, 110; at Nitil, 272, 274,
27781, 287, 301; oriented toward
east, 289; and sacred music, 188; of St.
Theodore, 221; in Trachonitis, 84; types
of, 271; votive, 271
circumambulation, 69, 280n.12
circumcision, 79; abandoned in favor of
baptism, 73; in Ethiopia, 80; rejected
by St. Paul, 79
cloth industry, 54
clothes, 15975; used as gifts by Ghassnids,
168
clothing: footwear, 166, 168, 174; headgear, 159,
165, 172, 174, 175; information about,
from monuments, 160; military, 170;
robes, 16668; veils, 172. See also silk
coats of iron, 171
coffee, 146
Colonia Ulpia Traiana, 6
color green: significance to Shiite Islam, 167
color red: considered most striking by
Ghassnids, 169
Companions of the Prophet, 124
Constantine, 50; assumption of title Arabicus,
48
Constantinople, 7; imperial banquets at, 129;
influence on Ghassnid queens, 85;
Monophysite conference in, 78; siege
of, 109
convivium, 144
copper, 45, 46
copper mines, 46
Corippus, Flavius, poet, 139, 155, 157
Cosmas, St., 176, 177, 179; grave of, 71; patron
saint of medicine, 67; see also Damian
cowhides, 51
cultural history: and Christian urban centers,
266; influenced by Byzantium in three
aspects, 263; and space, 261
Cyrrhos: pilgrimage site, 71
Cyrus, 52
al-Dkhil, Abd al-Ramn, 132n.31
al-Dalf, 123
Damascus: capital moved to, 119, 266
Damian, St., 176, 177, 179; grave of, 71; patron
saint of medicine, 67; see also Cosmas
dance, 2046, 270; as form of entertainment,
204; of musmia, 186; punishments for
dancers, 204n.2; and sensual freedom,
206; and wearing of long dress, 205
Darb Zubayda (pilgrimage route), 92
date palms: carried by Arab traders to Oriens,
51
dates: as staple food, 132
al-Dawla, Sayf, 98, 170, 171, 184; and raiding
expedition, 32324
Dwd, Salid king, 82; daughter of, 101;
death of, 211
Day of Sabbath, 113
Day of the Exodus, 219
Dayr Ayyb, 34, 36, 55; and Jobs name, 68;
place of pilgrimage, 39n.29
Dayr Bostra, 37
Dayr Dwd, 135
Dayr Hind: monastery built by queen, 89
Dayr al-Labwa: built by a woman, 89
deaconess, 111
Dead Sea, 32
death: as Resurrection, 73
Demetrios, St.: feast day of, 36
Dera, 38
The Description of Arabia (al-Hamdn), 57
Dhalf (princess), 79, 123, 188, 205
Dh al-Faqr (sword), 222, 223
Dh al-Majz, 36
al-Dn, Shihb, 242
Diodorus Siculus, historian, 47
Dwn, poetic, 121, 238, 239, 245
dress: large number of Arabic terms for, 159;
and self-identity, 159; see also clothing
379 Index
Dma (Dmat al-Jandal), 10, 26, 27; capture
of, 15; defense of, 116; fairs at, 35, 55;
identity of, 115; important strategic site
for Byzantium, 34
earrings, 22328
Easter, 64, 65
ecclesiastical structures. See architecture,
churches, and monasteries
Eden: four rivers of, 137
Edessa: pilgrimage site, 71; school of, 291n.5;
as spiritual capital of Semitic Christian
Orient, 342
Edict of Caracalla, 24, 61, 301, 346
education: daughters of rulers sent to capital
for, 86; of a Ghassnid princess,
11315; princesses sent to Oriens or
Constantinople for, 113
Egeria, 68, 91
Egypt: Persian occupation of, 56; see also
Christianity, Coptic
Eilat. See Ayla
Elagabalus, 102
Elizabeth of Najrn: as a martyr, 110; only
female among deacons, 110
Elusa, 24
Emesa (ims): birthplace of Romanus, 195,
321
endurance (abr), 36, 22829, 343
entertainment: celebration of battlefield
victories, 207
Ephesus, Council of, 67
Ephraim, 130
Ephrem, St.: influenced hymnography, 292,
322
epigraphy: and identification of Ghassnid
sites, 286
Epiphany: and baptism, 66; baptism of Christ
in Jordan River, 64n.13; as dominical
feast day, 64
equestrianism, 77; see also horses
Ethiopia, 20, 21, 23, 29, 31, 54; Abgars fame
reached, 71; circumcision survived
among communities of, 80; conquest
and occupation of South Arabia, 52,
55; imyar falls to, 44; participation in
maritime commerce, 33; and purchase of
silk in Ceylon or India, 19
Eudocia, 91, 113
Eugenius and Conon: Tritheistic heresy of, 294
Euthymius, St., 7, 341
Fadak: Arabian oasis of, 50
fairs (aswq) or fair (sq), xiv, 11, 3340,
33n.2, 50, 162; control of, 53; as element
of Islamic cities, 40; as good publicity,
39; local, 40; means of transmitting
poetry, 308; shows surge of economic
life, 33; as site of Byzantine-Persian
rivalry, 35; as unifying force for
language, ethos, and mores, 39n.34
Fkhita, 117; Ghassnid princess, 102, 116;
sole female composer of poetry in royal
house, 103
falcons, 23849; appear in mosaic in
Hippolytus Hall, 239; see also hawking
al-Fals, 222
al-Frbi, Ab Nar, 184
Feast of the Martyrs of Najrn, 84, 90
Feast of the Transfiguration, 112
feasts: celebration of, 64; Christmas, 251;
dominical, 65; Marian, 67; religious,
25152; sanctoral, 67; see also individual
feasts
female children: change in attitude toward
birth of, 76
female deaconesses: and baptism by immersion,
111
Flavius: flattering title of, 340
Florentinus: eulogized Thrasamund, 325
flowers: importance of, in Ghassnid life, 276
foederati, 6, 9, 14, 25, 35, 41, 46, 118n.2, 262,
325, 345; as enthusiastic Christians,
64, 214, 296; great majority remained
legally noncitizens, 346; nonmilitary
duties of, 6; paramilitary duties of,
42; physical proximity to Holy Land,
63; and pilgrimage to Sergiopolis, 71;
as soldiers of the Cross, 134; taxed
Meccans, 49; under the threefold
influence of Byzantinism, 338; use of
term, xviixix; women as, 86; see also
banquets, bread, meat
food, 12737; camel meat, 131; and fasting,
13335; and fruits, 132; importance of,
to Arabs, 128; served on plates of silver
and gold, 253; spices, 133; vegetables,
132
food offering, 127
fortitude. See endurance
Fortunatus, Venantius: first poet of chivalry,
304n.6
Fowden, Garth, 247, 248
380 Index
frankincense: indispensable for Christian rites,
25; as significant export, 44; symbol of
pagan worship, 44; trade route for, 33,
228, 263
Fck, J. W., 23
funerals: Christian, 201; see also mourning
Gaiseric, dynasty of, 325
game parks and reserves, 244, 246, 258, 275;
three categories of, 246n.39; see also
hunting
gardens, 272, 275; attached to secular
structures, 275; occupied a space in
Ghassnid cityscapes, 275; pleasure,
and social life, 24546
garments: as gifts for foreign potentates, 162
Gaza, 1618, 19, 24, 28, 332; contained both
mimes and brothels, 203; known for
wines, 154; as terminus of spice route,
36, 203
Gelimer: Vandal king, 208
Geographical Dictionary (Yqt), 317
George of Pisidia: first true court poet,
311n.23
Gerasa, 158
Ghassn: close relation to Mecca, 136n.3;
landscapes of, 137
al-Ghassni, al-Ghirf, 232, 240
Ghassnid banquets: comparison to Koranic
version of paradise, 136
Ghassnid buildings: height of, 278
Ghassanid culture: focused around cities
and towns, 261; monasteries as most
important venue of, 291
Ghassnid kings, 74; accommodate travelers
to court, 88; building or repair of
aqueducts, 88; and poetry, 77, 285;
regalia for, kept in Bostra, 37; sexual
purity of, 72; and urbanization of
Oriens, 88n.32; wives of, 85; wore light
clothes in summer and fur in winter, 254
Ghassnid princesses, 172, 252
Ghassnid queens, 84, 85, 86, 100; and
building of monasteries, 67n.30,
89; establishment of nunneries, 90;
influence of Constantinople on, 85;
and Mriya, 83; role models for, 83;
significance of, 99; and veils, 172
Ghassnid royal court, 125
Ghassnid social life, 62; Christianity affected
every aspect of, 73
Ghassnid weddings, 122
Ghassnids, 30, 34, 36, 83n.13, 178, 338,
345; allies with Kinda, 116; and
Byzantium, 7, 8, 52, 61; and caravans,
22, 23; chastity and decency, 125; and
Christianity (Monophysite), 8, 90, 91,
200, 224, 228, 265, 293, 327, 340; as
clan, 341; contributions to economy
of Oriens, 45; cuisine, 128; did not
circumcise children, 80; and dress, 14,
15, 163; and education of daughters,
114; fall of dynasty, 107; and food,
135, 136; and horses, 131, 176, 231,
269; hospitality, 88, 123, 269; interest
in dance, 204; and international trade
routes, 9, 10; and invocation of religious
figures, 221; involvement in medical
practice, 178; involvement in Red Sea
trade, 29; involvement with Iotabe,
29; lacked interest in chariot races, 63;
and Lakhmids, 12, 52, 105, 309; and
literature, 120, 124, 269; lived close
to nature, 246; as lovers of building,
264, 285; and military, 8, 64, 88, 102,
103n.109, 105n.120, 211, 212, 338, 339;
originated from Arabian Peninsula,
20; power extended by Justinian, 20;
provided security, 8, 9, 10, 14; proximity
to silk production centers, 163; pure
blood of, 102n.106; relations with
Arabs, 20, 22; royal house making
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 69; ruler
awarded title of king, 164; settled in
limitrophe, 344; social life of, 62, 123,
127; strong sense of Arab identity, 342;
as tax collectors, 34, 37, 41; towns and
villages turn to ruins, 268; tripartite
character of, 62; two major influences
on, 62; urban centers, 265
Ghassnland: Christian landmarks, 270;
defined, 261; entertainment venues in,
284
Ghirf, 241n.12
Goitein, Shlomo, 38n.27
Golan, 101, 234; grazing grounds for horses,
233; as hunting ground, 241
gold, 47, 50; Arabia well known for, 48
Gospel: Arabic version of, 295
governors mansion, 40
Great Lent, 135
Gregentius, St., 194
Gregory the Great, Pope: intercedes on behalf
of Mundir, 1034
381 Index
Hdirat al-Bar, 31
aramawt, 44; known for elegant cloth,
150n.71
hagiography, 177
Hajaren: and martyrs, 197
hajj: one of five pillars of Islamic faith, 68
hjja (female pilgrim), 91
alma, 86, 9498, 304; identity, name,
and participation in battle, 95; lives
in literary consciousness, 98; most
celebrated of Ghassnid princesses, 94,
115; and perfuming of warriors, 94, 216;
and romantic element, 97
Hamadni, Bad al-Zamn, 128; and celebrity
of meat stew, 131n.27
al-Hamdn, 47, 49, 53, 58, 70, 121, 196; and
martyrdom, 196-97
amza al-Ifahn, 193, 278, 285
arb al-Fijr. See wars: Sacrilegious War
al-rith ibn Kab: chief martyr of Najrn, 76;
martial saint, 333; speech preserved in
Syriac, not Arabic, 333
al-rith al-Jafni, 194
rithids of Najrn: two speeches by, 333
armala, 126
Hshim, 24
assn ibn Thbit, 1415, 30, 89, 154, 183,
219, 312, 327; affiliated with Azd group,
141; blindness, 120; and description of
scene in tavern, 136n.35; difference in
social status, 105; Dwn, 141, 147, 189,
202, 203; familiarity with Ghassn life
and history, 118; and hedonism, 152,
202; intercedes for others, 101, 334;
most important orator, 334; and name
of Ghassnid town, 67; negative effect of
Muammads death on, 11819; never
forgot Ghassnid relatives, 119; nine
rivals of, 119; and Palm Sunday, 65; as
poet laureate, 45, 118, 12021, 127, 136,
141, 168, 312, 328; and poetry, 104, 112,
119, 120, 311; refers to Mt. Hermon,
66; on robes as gifts, 168; and wine,
141, 14248, 156; and women, 75, 90,
104n.116, 190
tim, 232; chief of the Christian group
ayyi, 328
Hawzin, 22
hawking, 241n.13; as sport of ruling class, 241;
see also falcons
awrn, 36, 38
Heck, Gene W., 4, 47, 49, 50; see also Precious
Metals of West Arabia
Helen: Constantines mother, 68
Heptapolis, 24
Heraclius, emperor, 15, 38, 54, 56, 115, 124;
in Antioch, 12223; defeats Persians at
Nineveh, 219
Herodes Atticus, 283
Herod the Great, 263, 265; and theaters, 283
ijz, 8, 10, 25, 40, 53; Jewish communities in
oases of, 52; lack of vegetation, 132; and
oases, 50; rich in gold, 48; three fairs
of, 36
imyarites, 20, 21, 33, 128
Hind (Ghassnid princess), 99
Hind (Lakhmid queen), 86, 105; building
of monasteries, 84, 85; commissioned
inscription above door, 100; daughter
of last Lakhmid king of ra, 91;
Hippalus: discovered secret of monsoons, 29
hippiatry, 231
hippodromes, 63
hippology, 231
ra, 13, 17, 23, 26, 35, 53n.5, 184, 21819;
capital of Lakhmids in Mesopotamia,
84; connection with Mecca, 54; data
on music and song from, 184; as most
important pre-Islamic Arab urban
center, 192, 195; and strident anti-
Christianity, 266; and textiles, 161;
ties with Mecca and Najrn, 161
Hishm, caliph, 236
Holy Land, 52; made up of three Palestines, 69
holy man: as role model, 340
Holy Mandylion, 71
homilies, 332
Honorius, emperor, 113
horse parades: day of, 237
horse races: importance of, 235
horses, 176; and beauty, 23435; betting
on, 234, 235; horsemen identified by
association with their, 235; importance
of, 215, 230, 232, 233; moral qualities
of, 235; names of, 233; power of, 235;
and riding parties, 21n.24; works on
genealogy of, 234
hospices, 88
hospitality, 88, 271; and failure of dogs to bark
at guests, 88n.33, 127
hospitals: relationship to shrines, 177
382 Index
hunting, 23849; animals used in, 244; and
divine blessings, 246n.38; as entertain-
ment, 238; as state-sponsored sport, 240
hunting lodges, 244, 245, 247, 249; and baths,
270
uwwrn, 157; as prominent urban center,
265; site of Yazds death, 265
hymnography, 195, 200, 292, 32122; as prin-
cipal original creative component of
Byzantine literature, 315; see also John
of Damascus, Romanus the Melode
Hyrcanus, 232
Ibn Abd al-Madn, 327, 330, 334
Ibn Abd Rabbih, 197n.60
Ibn Abi al-alt, 320
Ibn Abi-Uaybia, 180
Ibn Alas, al-Musayyab, 329
Ibn mir, 103
Ibn al-Athr, 116
Ibn Habb, 116
Ibn al-rith, al-Nar, 185; related to
Muammad, 179
Ibn idhar, Raba, 116
Ibn izm, 193
Ibn Il, lih: female instrumentalists
performed in home of, 186n.17
Ibn Im, 57
Ibn al-Inba, Amr, 54, 55
Ibn Kalada, al-rith: attended school in
Jundshpr, 179
Ibn Khafja, 132
Ibn Khurddbeh, 53n.2
Ibn Kulthm, Amr, 148, 150, 188, 309; left
Lakhmid, 326; one of the foremost
poets of Arabia, 326; sayyid of Taghlib,
328; and Suspended Ode, 207
Ibn Mlik, Kab, 306
Ibn Mangli, 244
Ibn Mriya, Arethas, 76, 82; matronymic of
Arethas, 76n.81
Ibn Marwn, Abd al-Malik, 226
Ibn al-Mughra, 22, 165, 298
Ibn Mukaddam, 148
Ibn Munqidh, Usma, 241
Ibn Nawfal, Waraqa, 227
Ibn Qaba, Iys, 184
Ibn Qays al-Ruqayyt, Ubayd Allh, 173
Ibn Qutayba, 316
Ibn Raba, al-Jd, 106
Ibn al-Ral, Ad, 327, 344
Ibn Rashq, 308
Ibn Ruba, Yanna, 31
Ibn al-Rmi, 186
Ibn Sida, Quss, 282; most famous orator
in pre-Islamic society, 331
Ibn Salm: liberating captives through
intercession, 101
Ibn Shark, al-Shmardal, 243
Ibn Thawr, umayd, 23, 162, 21n.24
Ibn Uthl (Ibn Athl): killed by Khlid ibn
al-Muhjir, 180; knowledge and expertise
in toxicology, 180; never converted to
Islam, 181; physician to Muwiya, 179;
as Umayyad physician, 180
Ibn al-Wald, Khlid, 106, 115; bought the
daughter of al-Jd, 115; capture of
ra, 161; captures Dma, 15; Layla as
possible first wife of, 116; and weakness
for women, 107n.137
Ibn Yay, Hrn, 251
Ibn Ysuf, al-ajjj, 181
Ibn Zakariyya, Yhann, 289
Ibn Zayd, Ad, 105, 105n.119, 141, 255, 320,
Ibn Zuhayr, Kab, 161
ijza, 23
Imru al-Qays, 38, 78, 89, 113, 128, 239, 273,
344; campaign against Najrn, 48;
foremost poet of pre-Islamic Arabia,
238, 240, 307, 326, 328; and goat
cheese, 130; perfected qada, 321;
traveled by state post, 269; visit to
Emesa, 321; wines of, tasted by, 188
Indicopleustes, Cosmas, 10, 11
Inner Arabia, 50; no longer thought of as
empty and barren, 50
Inner Shield, 41
insanity, 177, 178
inscriptions on buildings, 288; see also individ-
ual inscription locales
insignia: importance of, 165
instrumental music, 18485; accompanied
recitation of poetry, 192; frowned upon
by Church Fathers, 195
Iotabe, 10, 29; and taxes, 29, 30
al-Ifahn, Ab al-Faraj, on beauty of
Ghassnid churches, 281; see also
al-Aghn
Ishmaelites, 341
Islam: and the caliphate, 108; discouragement
of mourning, 197n.63; and prohibition
against alcohol, 319; and rejection of
kingship, 108; and rejection of represen-
tational art, 296; and relics, 227
383 Index
Jabala, last Ghassnid king, 21, 29, 32, 64, 115,
147, 184, 216, 224, 253, 333; addiction
to wine, 147; consecration of cathedral
at Bostra, 281; refugees sought aid from,
84; rule of, 125
Jabala, king (father of Arethas), 125, 342
Jabala, son of Arethas: buried in martyrion
in Chalcis, 200, 274; died in battle of
Chalcis, 73, 87
Jbiya, 21, 32, 40, 156, 266; capital of
Ghassnids, 173, 188; cathedral most
likely had a dome, a martyrion, and an
ambulatory, 28182; Christian city
from its foundation, 266; Ghassnid
capital in Golan, 101; as prominent
urban center, 195, 265
Jbiya-Najrn axis, 334
Jafna, 127; buried at al-Bar, 274
Jafnids: house of, 341
al-Ji z, 121, 31415
Jalliq, 272, 287; associated with entertain-
ment, 268; capital of Ghassnids, 188;
frequented by poets, 156; as prominent
urban center, 265
al-Jandal, Dmat, 115
Jarwal, 123
al-Jawhara al-Nafsa, 289
al-Jawn: horse of Arethas, 170
Jerusalem, 16, 17, 18, 28; crowd shouting
Hosanna from Bethany to, 112n.3;
Persian occupation of, 126; pilgrim-
age to, 69, 106; as spiritual capital of
Christianity, 8
Jethro: clan of, 45
Jidh: and earliest poetry composed by a
Ghassnid, 308
Jinn, 103
Job (Ayyb, Old Testament figure), 68, 228
John of Damascus, 321; as hymnographer, 320
John of Ephesus, 104, 114, 218
John of Epiphania, 53n.3
Josephus: confirms circumcision among Arabs,
79
al-J, Qtil, 327
Judaism, 68, 80, 265, 297; imyarite adoption
of, 20
Judm, 37, 41, 42, 51
al-Jd: execution of, 115; identity of, 115;
Laylas father, 115; sharing of command,
116
Julian of Antioch, 15, 70
Jundshpr, 178
Justin I, emperor, 32, 6576
Justinian, emperor, 14, 25, 29, 30, 50, 225;
Arab and Arabian policy, 43, 48, 55;
bronze equestrian statue of, 212; creates
new Arab phylarchate under Arethas,
43; gave impetus to celebrations, 208;
reorganized Arab federate power in
Oriens, 27; revival of western route, 15;
and state monopolies, 12
Kalb, 25, 35, 102; former allies of Byzantium,
239; influence of, 27
Kawd, 15
Kenites, 45
Khadja, 136n.3, 227; first wife of
Muammad, 21, 37; ran caravans, 55
al-Khafji, Ibn Sinn, 323n.75
al-Khans: converted to Islam, 199; poem on
horse racing, 236
Khawla, 105
Khaybar: Arabian oasis of, 50
Khaywn: extraordinary style of mourning,
198n.67
Khazraj group, 21
Khuza, 21, 226
Kinna, 22, 35
Kinda (family), 35, 78; allies with Ghassnids,
116; Mriya as princess from tribe of, 93
kirn, 185
kommerkiarioi, 14n.12; contribution to
Byzantine economy, 42
Koran, 105, 228, 237; and description of para-
dise, 13537, 153; Hecks conclusions
supported by, 50n.22; and Noahs ark,
116; and silk clothing, 174; veneration
of Mary shown in, 76
Kuraysh, 23
Kushjim, 244
Labd, 93, 97, 273, 329; one of the foremost
poets of Arabia, 326; a poet of the
Suspended Odes, 200
Lakhmids, 12, 2223, 43, 178, 25558;
all powerful in eastern Arabia, 52;
Christianity and royal house of, 293;
as client of Persia, 52; control of Oman,
52; defeat of, 12, 150n.72; rivalry with
Ghassnids, 62, 309; as threat, 78;
treaty with Ghassnids, 12
languages, ignorance of: Greek, 201; Syriac,
201
384 Index
languages, knowledge of: Arabic, 78; Gothic,
113; Greek, 7778, 113; instruction
available in schools of Oriens, 79; Latin,
77, 78, 113
Laws of St. Gregentius, 90, 199, 200, 204
Layl, 69; and Abd al-Ramn, 106, 107;
captured for second time, 107n.138;
daughter of al-Jd ibn Raba, 106;
Ghassnid princess, 91; held in esteem
by female attendants, 107; and Khlid
ibn al-Wald, 107; possible remarriage of,
116; presence in Jerusalem, 106; received
red-carpet treatment, 107n.135; stirs up
warriors, 96
Layl and Qays: most famous romantic couple
in Arabic literature, 107
leather, 54; as most important native export
item, 51
Lebanon, 337
Legio III Cyrenaica, 27, 46
Leo I, emperor, 29, 50; appoints Amorkesos
phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, 48;
criticized for inviting Amorkesos to
Constantinople, 57
Leuke Kome, 11, 28, 29
limitanei. See troops, frontier
limitrophe, 344; ceased to exist, 258
liturgy of war, 304
livestock, 45
loca sancta, 69, 88; centers of pilgrimage,
69; fair of Oriens as, 36; visible from
military stations, 63
Luqmn, 39
lutes: names for, 185; see also d
Mdaba Mosaic map: includes scene depicting
ships, 32
Madaba region, 300
Madhij, 20
Madin Ban-Sulaym, 49
Maesa, Julia, 102
Magnus, 251; abducts Mundir, 165
Maajja: a toponym meaning Pilgrimage
Center, 72
al-Mahdi, 232
Miya: chose martyrdom, 90
Maiumas festival, 90; celebrated in Oriens,
283; orgiastic and licentious, 283n.35
Majanna, 36
Makhzm, 181
Malchus, historian, 41
Maloufs of Zale, 330
al-Malf, Fawzi, 330
al-Mamn, 241
manbir, 332, 332n.4
Manh, 222
al-Manqib al-Mazyadiyya, 41
Manbij, 162
al-Mannn, Abd, 329
Mansiones Parthicae, 11
Maqadd, 188
maqm, 36
Marcellinus, Ammianus, 129
Mr Elias, 112
Mare Mortuum (Dead Sea), 32
Maria, 113
Marib, 44; and martyrs, 197
maritime route, 2732, 28, 43; Ghassnids as
warden of, 55
Mriya, 9294, 223, 226; first Ghassnid
queen, 92; importance of, 92-93; from
Kinda group, 93, 225; mother
of Arethas, 67, 74n.71, 84
Marj alma, 98
marriage: becomes a sacrament, 73;
endogamous, 79, 123; political, 79
martyrdoms: three main centers of, 197
martyria, 200, 271, 274; in churches, 280
Martyrium Arethae, 32
Mary: as childs name, 76
Mary (mother of Jesus), 67; in Koran, 76; name
has survived in many monasteries, 67; see
also Theotokos, Virgin Mary
Marzubni, 98
al-Marzqi, 38
Mashjaa, 103
matrilineality, 83
Maurice, emperor, 21, 53, 55, 103, 214
mausolea, 272, 273; attached to churches, 274;
as landmarks, 274
Mavia, Arab queen, 82; challenged Valens, 83,
97; composed odes celebrating her vic-
tory over Valens, 307; and composition
of Arabic poetry, 79; defeated Goths,
209; led troops in defeating Valens, 86
al-Mawili, Isq ibn Ibrhim: greatest musi-
cian of his time, 193
Maysn, 1012, 108; captured in a canopy,
102; verse written by, 25657
meat, 13031; and stew, 131
Mecca, 17, 20, 22, 26, 35, 135; birth and rise
of Islam in, 56; and Byzantine-Persian
rivalry, 54; close relation to Ghassn,
136n.3; connection with ra, 54;
385 Index
devoid of vegetation, 132; Ghassnid
presence in, 21; as main caravan city in
western Arabia, 15, 20, 21, 33, 37, 44,
56; and qiyn, 186; and spice route, 54;
and taxation, 49
medicine, 17681
Medina, 17, 20, 26, 35, 52; Arabian oasis of,
50; Ban al-Nar community expelled
from, 38; and Byzantine-Persian rivalry,
54; caravan station, 20, 22; created by
Muammad, 57; development of Islam,
56; and Ghassnids, 22; as important
station of spice route, 53; Jewish inhabit-
ants noted for ironsmithing and jewelry
making, 22; mosque, 283; poetry in,
308; prosperity of, 39; and qiyn, 186
Meleager of Gadara, 319
Mesopotamian trade route, 10, 1215
Michael the Syrian, 213, 251, 254
Midianites, 45
Mikhdam, 98, 304; see also swords
military departure, 21415
mimes, 283; low status of, 202; opposed by
church, 202; viewed as un-Christian by
Monophysites, 284
monasteries, 7, 271, 28788; building of,
111n.1; at Constantinople, 100; and
creation of literary works, 291; as
cultural centers of Christianity, 293;
Dayr Bura, 317; Dayr Hund, 100;
Dayr al-Lujj, 111; and development of
Arabic script, 292n.6; as educational
centers, 291; and Ghassnids, 9, 69,
31516; and libraries, 291, 292; list of
one hundred thirty-seven, 286; pre-
Islamic construction of, 89; proliferation
of, 298; St. Sergius, 198; translating
Greek thought into Syriac, 291; as
venue for consumption of wine, 157; see
also Dayr al-Labwa, dayr Ayyb, Dayr
Bostra, Dayr Dwd, Dayr Hind
monasticism, 134; spread of, 298; as way of
life, 89
monks, 301; and books and tomes, 293; and
conversion to Christianity, 135n.40; and
development of Arabic script, 294; and
translation work, 294
Monophysite church, 133, 160, 264, 292,
343; dominated Provincia Arabia,
135; Ghassnids as ecclesiastical
protectors of, 64, 77; and liturgy, 295;
rebelled against orthodoxy, 68; rejected
non-Arab names for children, 76;
resuscitation of, 75, 85, 86; suppression
by Justin I, 7576
monsoons, 29
monumental buildings, 285
monuments: military architectural, 279
mosaics, 279, 299, 300; from church at Nitil,
280, 287; in floor of Church of St.
George (Mt. Nebo), 2; and inscription
of Arab names, 300n.15; and mosaicists,
300n.15; at Madaba, 32; of Persian
victory at Antioch, 314
Mountain of Snow: referred to by assn, 66
Mount Carmel, 112
Mount Ephraim, 158
Mount Garizim, 157
Mount Hermon, 125; and Christs transfigura-
tion, 66
Mount Nebo, 2, 299302
Mount Sinai: Ab Karib undertakes pilgrim-
age to, 69
Mount Tabor, 112; and Christs transfigura-
tion, 66
mourners: hiring of professional female, 199
mourning: antiphonal nature of, 199; and
metrical compositions, 199; as way
of keeping alive the memory of the
deceased, 198n.67; see also funerals
Muwiya, 69, 70, 78, 108, 118, 123, 179, 229;
first ruler to depart from conservative
dress, 173; and meat stew, 131; took Ibn
Uthl on as private physician, 180; and
Umayyad state, 119, 173, 232
Muwiya, son of the Kindite phylarch Qays, 114
Muammad, 22, 39, 254; asks for robe made
in Manbij, 162; as caravan leader of spice
route, 5657, 133; and dance, 204n.5;
death of, 118, 119, 161n.8; elegy on, 89;
encouraged horse races, 236; assn as
poet laureate of, 118; and knowledge of
geography, 57; nocturnal journey, 70;
and recitation of poetry in mosque in
Medina, 283
al-Muizz: released patricius Niketas in
exchange for sword of Muammad, 223
Mundir (Ghassnid), 7, 8, 21, 58, 85, 87,
95n.64, 239; abducted by Magnus, 165;
addressed Monophysite conference
using Greek, 77; capture and exile to
Sicily of, 53, 69, 75, 103; captures ra,
218; death of, 214, 310; educated in
Gaza, 332; gave booty to churches and
386 Index
Mundir (Ghassnid) (continued)
monasteries, 220; never lost a battle,
217; praetorium of, 277, 279; reign of,
217; returns in year 602, 104; victory
over Lakhmids, 66
Mundir (Lakhmid), 95; violently anti-
Christian, 309n.12
Munqidhs: hunted as family, 242
al-Muraqqish the Elder, 313; became kings
secretary, 329
mura, ethos, 127, 319, 345; listing of aspects
of, 303; role of horses in, 303
music: relationship with poetry, 192; sacred,
195; women set elegiac verses to, 199.
See also instrumental music, songstresses
musical instruments: in use by pre-Islamic
Arabs, 185. See also instrumental
music, d
Muslim Conquest, 346; and horses, 303
musmia: serves patrons with wine, 186; venues
of performance, 186; vocal performer,
186
al-Mutajarrida, 314, 337
al-Mutalammis, 329; left Lakhmids, 326
Mutammim: wrote one of the best elegies in
Arabic poetry, 107n.137
Mutanabbi, 105, 175, 323
Nabataeans, 40, 61, 277; assimilated into
Graeco-Roman civilization, 301; settle-
ments listed, 24; wrote in Aramaic/
Syriac, 301
al-Nbigha al-Dubyn, 39, 73, 84, 99, 118,
218, 239, 317; compared to assn, 311;
elegy on Numn, 87, 201, 276; impor-
tance as poet, 319, 326, 328; intimately
described wife of king, 314; ode shows
influence of Christianity and Hellenism,
337; odes still alive in tenth century,
324; as older contemporary of assn,
148n.55; and Palm Sunday, 65; saluted
virtues of Ghassnids, 7273; and Song
of Songs as inspiration, 337; speech in
rhyming prose, 335
al-Nbigha al-Jadi, 162; afraid of being
converted to Christianity, 150; a
Mukhadram, 330
al-Nara: complexion and graceful fig-
ure, 105; evocations of, 105n.127; as
Ghassnid princess, 104; assns verses
on, are chaste, 104; phantom of, visits
assn, 104; phrases imply royalty, 104
Najd: trade routes of, 23
Najrn, 17, 20, 53n.5, 72; Byzantine influence
in, 199; caravan city, 20, 194; legitimacy
of the church of, 111; major caravan
hub, 21; and martyrs, 21, 64, 67, 84, 85,
87, 89, 196, 197, 198, 227, 280; most
important urban Arab center, 21; music
and song in, 19395; noted for leather
work, 21; and qiyn, 186; ruled by
Balrith, 20; and textiles, 51; as urban
center of Arab Christianity, 195; and
urban life, 135
Najrn in the Trachonitis, 72
Namra inscription, 48; most important
Arabic inscription, 297
Naskhi style: developed in western part of
Fertile Crescent, 298; development of,
29798
Negus, 19; South Arabian campaign, 31
Nicephorus I, 322
Nicephorus Phocas, 98, 223, 323, 324
Nicholson, Reynold, 125
Nicomedia, 7
Nisibis: school of, 291n.5
Nitil, 5; church at, 9, 272, 274, 27779, 280
81, 287, 301
Noahs ark, 116
Nldeke, Theodor, 122, 293
nomads, 7, 45, 64; danger posed by, 26263;
see also pastoralists
Numn, 73, 85, 91, 123, 313, 337; buried in
the Golan, 272; last Lakhmid king, 54;
legendary account of the conversion of
Heraclius to Islam, 124; name common
to both Lakhmids and Ghassnids, 58;
sought release of father, 75; war over
caravan dispatched by Lakhmids, 22
nunneries, 89; Dayr Hund, 100
oases: breeding grounds of livestock, 51; at
if, 139
Occidentalis, 7
odeia, 277, 282-85, 312; as venue for poetry
recitals, 284
olive trees, 130
Oman, 52
onomasticon, 58, 76, 77, 343
Ophir, 47
oratory, 33137; held special position in pre-
Islamic society, 331
orchards, 275
387 Index
Oriens, 6, 3640, 41, 119, 263, 307; and
agriculture, 51, 129, 132, 139, 140,
150n.72, 162; and archaeology, 267;
confluence of trade routes, 10; cultural
landscape of, 320; as a dyarchy, 43; and
economy, 55, 263; and Ghassnids,
25, 61, 184, 308; and Greek language,
189, 34142; lacked high-quality
secular poetry, 319; Muammad sends
military expedition against, 57; and
need for security, 7; Persian occupation
of, 56, 126; plagues in, 258; rise in
monasticism, 315; and Silk Road, 10;
social life of Arabs, 202; three threats
to, 7; urban centers and construction of
buildings, 265. See also Bild al-Shm
Orient, army of: Ghassnid contingent mostly
cavalry, 16970
Orthodox Chalcedonian Palestine, 69
overlords: died while hunting, 238
palaces, 272; see also names of individual sites
Palaestina Prima, 23, 24
Palaestina Secunda, 8; Mt. Tabor and
Mt. Hermon visible from Ghassnid
centers in, 66
Palaestina Tertia, 24, 33, 37; Ab Karib
attended to caravan needs in, 25;
Amorkesos takes possession of Iotabe
prior to appointment as phylarch, 29;
caravans needed protection inside, 20;
and defense of Christian Holy Land, 8;
and economic interests of empire, 55;
enlargement of, 44; frontier stations
as taxing point, 41; as overland route,
15, 19; and port of Ayla, 10; southern
boundary of, 23; two seaports of, 2728
Palestine: becomes holy land, 8
Palm Grove, 19
Palm Sunday, 65, 112, 113, 119, 135, 252; cel-
ebration of, introduced by Ghassnids,
133; as dominical feast day, 64; and feast
associated with a procession, 112n.3;
Ghassnid kings would receive visitors
on, 166; greeted with fragrant flowers,
275; Muammad asks followers to cease
celebrating, 65n.14, 113, 133; two terms
for, 11213
Palmyra, 83, 184, 313; fall of, 261; as station on
the way to Sergiopolis, 313n.30
Palmyrenes, 61, 277
Parembole, 7
Pars Orientalis, 7
pastoralists: and creation of complex metrical
system in poetry, 192; see also nomads
patricii: garb of, during ceremony of investi-
ture, 169; Ghassnid kings as, 169
patronymics, 76; combined with tecnonymics,
77n.84
Peace of the Church, 64, 196
peace treaty of 561: military character of sec-
ond clause of, 12
perfume (lama), 23n.30; alma and, 216;
and Hind scenting warriors, 99; in tav-
ern, 152; and white robes, 166Pericles:
and first odeion, 283
Periplus Maris Erythraei, 11
Persia, 8, 12, 19, 35, 43; domination of eastern
Arabia, 52; had formidable opponents in
Saracens, 211; influence on Arabic music
and song, 191; occupied Oriens for fif-
teen years, 222; possessed Christian Holy
Land, 52; rivalry with Byzantium, 11
Persian War, 38
Petra, 18, 23, 162, 184
Philoxenos of Mabboug, 111; consecration of
cathedral at Bostra, 281
Phoinikn, 19, 23, 25
phylarchs, 20, 23, 41, 16971; bilingual
or trilingual, 113; left the service of
Byzantium, 21; see also individual
phylarchs
physicians: secular, 177; tension between two
groups of, 178
pilgrimage centers, 271, 273; in Najrn, 280;
see also Edessa, Jerusalem, Sergiopolis,
Telanissos
pilgrimages: attained wide vogue, 88; and
construction of hospices and hostels,
92; Ghassnids performed, 68; large
number of Arabic words related to, 69;
to Maajja, 280, 334; and maps to Holy
Land, 92; to Mount Arafat, 223n.18;
other sites, 70; role of Helen
in establishing, 91
plagues, 71; bubonic, 176; among foederati, 178
poetry, 206, 236, 292, 307, 311; Arab creative
outburst in, 192, 321; Byzantine
influence on structure of Arabic ode,
317; central facet of Ghassnid cultural
life, 306; elegies on fallen dynasties
and kingdoms, 197n.61, 318; and
Ghassnid campaigns and victories,
219, 310; importance of, 282;
388 Index
poetry (continued)
as medium of propaganda, 308, 344;
and patronage, 311; as a profession, 311;
relationship of poet to royalty, 105;
relationship with music, 19293, 284;
social function of, 310; two lexemes
in contemporary Arabic, 296; see also
hymnography, qasda
poetry recitals, 270, 282
poetry tournaments, 309
poets: professionals expected payment,
311n.22
Poidebard, Antoine, 248-49
Praxiteles, 314; and Hellenism, 337
The Precious Metals of West Arabia (Heck), 4;
contains maps of Arabia and its trade
routes, 50
Procopius, historian, 48, 87, 165, 178, 257;
at battle of Callinicum, 339n.1; on
battle of Daras, 213n.37; on insignia of
Armenian king, 16364; quoted, 19
Promised Land, 52
prostitution, 90, 191
Provincia Arabia, 8, 10, 19, 2324, 25, 30, 33,
239; construction of 137 monasteries
in, 9, 135; excavation of churches in, 9;
headquarters of Ghassnids, 154
psalmody, 195, 200
Psellos, Michael: compares daughter to
Aphrodite, 336; funeral oration of, for
daughter, 336
Ptolemy, geographer, 11, 232
public speaking: more important than poetry,
331; see also oratory
Pulcheria, empress, 113
Qalat Simn. See Telanissos
al-Qals, 222, 222n.12
al-Qalqashandi: quoted, 50n.23
qada, 238, 243, 321; as model of medieval
Islamic poetry, 192; polythematic ode,
317; prelude of, 317; and string of place
names, 318
Qar: as military fort or camp, 264
Qar al-ayr al-Gharb, 245, 257, 265; tower
of, 278, 279
Qayls: South Arabian aristocracy, 246
Qaynuq, 40
Qinnasrn. See Chalcis
qiyn, 186; important feature of Ghassnid
social life, 190; sung in Greek, 187
qubba, 280n.12
Queen of Sheba, 47
Quraysh, tribe, 22
Quray za, 38n.28
Quayr Amra (hunting lodge), 244, 245, 249
Quayy, 21; seized Mecca, 21; took over
custodianship of Kaba, 21
Rar (silver mine), 53
rajaz, 310
al-Ral, 98
al-Ranq, 326n.2; poet of Medina, 308
al-Rashd, Hrn, caliph, 88, 92, 122, 310n.17
Rasb, 98, 304; see also swords
Red Sea, 10; as alternative route for interna-
tional trade, 33; as Byzantine lake, 31; as
Christian lake, 52
Rhaithou, 11
Rhomaic Christianized Arabs, 300
Rhomaioi, 69, 24, 61, 301
rhymed prose, 120, 335
robes, 16668, 253; see also clothing
Roha. See Edessa
Romanus the Melode, 292, 315; alleged
composer of a thousand hymns, 193;
as hymnographer, 321; perfected
kontakion, 321
Royal Kinda, 74
royalty: relationship to poets, 105
Ruhm: chief female martyr, 64n.10, 84, 172,
197n.61; as martyr of Najrn, 67; speech
breathes the spirit of Christianity, 333;
speech preserved in Syriac, not Arabic,
333
Rufa. See Sergiopolis
Sabaic Dam inscription, 44
Sabas, St., 320; monastery of, 320
saints: invoked for aid, 220; see also individual
saints
Salids, 25, 309; as foederati, 262; kills
Dwd, 211; as predecessors of
Ghassnids, 61
Salm, 100101, 23839, 327
salt, 32; source of, 27
Samaritans, 8
San: products sold and bought at, 54
sarcophagi, 273, 274
Sasnid kings, 52; see also Chosroes
Anshravn, Chosroes Parvz
ayd, 272
security concerns, 9; nomadic threat, 7;
protection of caravans, 10, 20, 22, 23;
389 Index
reign of King Mundir, 78; threat from
Sasnid Persia, 8; threats from nomadic
raids, 263
Sergiopolis, 71, 220, 221, 257, 265; and horse
racing, 236, 266; most important pil-
grimage center after Jerusalem, 70; path
around, used for circumambulation,
236; and praetorium of Mundir, 277,
279; as prominent urban center, 265
Sergius, St., 36, 68, 71, 228; and Bacchus, 212;
becomes mosque, 198; military saint, 70,
200, 198n.66, 222, 345,
sericulture, 14, 162; see also silk
Severa, Marcia Otacilia, 83
Severan dynasty, 83
Severus of Antioch, 281
Sharhil, 280n.13
Shaybn: encounter with Taghlib, 116
al-Shay zam Ibn al-arith, 326n.2
Shayzar: and lions and tigers, 242
Shulamite, in Song of Songs, 337
silk, 173; embraced by Christianity but
frowned upon by Islam, 173; privileged
position among textiles and fabrics, 173;
red, 166
silk industry: becomes state monopoly, 14; two
stages of, in Oriens, 14
Silk Road, 12n.7; two routes of, 10
silk robes, 15
silkworms, 162; and silk industry, 132
silver, 47, 50; and mines, 53
Simeon of Bth-Arshm, 110
singing: antiphonal, 198, 199; responsive,
198; Rhomaic Byzantine, 199; see also
psalmody
Srn (songstress), 190, 191
Skythopolis: Samaritans and, 8
solidus: Constantines new gold, 48
Solomon, King, 47, 237, 313, 336, 337; as
builder of Palmyra, 337n.9
Song of Songs, 336, 337
songs, 270; mourning, 195; sacred, 195
songstresses, 18591; dance performed by,
205; providing entertainment for the
social life of Arabs, 186; questions raised
by, 187
Sozomen (ecclesiastical historian), 30, 68, 84,
209, 211
spice route, 15, 24, 25, 30, 31, 36, 37, 43;
Byzantine-Persian rivalry in two sta-
tions of, 54; control of, changes, 55;
and Ghassnids, 44, 55, 56; last leg of,
24, 203; as most important of the four
routes, 44; and Muammad, 57; reign of
Justinian and, 53
stables: part of urban landscape, 269; person-
nel of, 231; and saddleries, 269
stations: along Darb Zubayda, 92
Stilicho, 113
Strabo, 50, 322
strife poems, 309, 323
Suspended Odes, 96, 200, 207, 239, 309, 321,
326
Sword of the Vertebrae, 171
swords (safi), 37; dedicated to Theodore,
223; importance of, 171; Mikhdam and
Rasb, 98, 22123, 304
Symeon Stylites the Elder, 71
Symeon the Younger, St., 71, 89, 134, 213
Syriac, 320, 333; lingua franca of Semitic
Oriens, 295, 298, 322
Syriac/Aramaic: language of Christ, 322
tabaddi (stay in countryside), 255, 256;
activities engaged in during, 257; in
Ghassnland, 257; permanent struc-
tures, 258; see also villeggiaturas
Tabar, historian, 193, 293
Tabernacle of Moses, 11
Tabk, 1618, 19, 49
Tabkiyya, 8
Taghlib: encounter with Shaybn, 116
Taghlib group, 207
if, 22; Arabian oasis of, 50; connection to
Koranic paradise, 136; and urban life,
135
Tall Qaswa, 72
Tamm, 25
Tankhids, 309; foederati, 262; as predecessors
of Ghassnids, 61
taverns, 152, 156, 270, 318; and boon
companion, 152; and camaraderie, 152;
centers of social life, 63, 151; elements
of, 15153; and entertainment, 151, 205;
location of, 188; perfumes and ambience,
152; seating, 152; and waiters, 151
taxation, 31n.66, 53; collection of taxes by
Ghassnids, 30, 4142, 41n.2, 55
tax-dodging, 12, 14
ayyi, 184; strife between factions ended by
Arethas, 310n.19
tecnonymics, 77, 340; combined with patro-
nymics, 77n.84
Telanissos: pilgrimage site, 71
390 Index
Thalibi, 129
Thalaba: buried in hypogeum, 274
bint Thalaba, afiyya, 91; used to wear a
veil, 92
theaters, 63, 283; Church Fathers frowned
on, 283; degeneration into farce, 202;
separation of odeium from, 284; venues
for performance, 205
Theodora, empress, 86, 90, 100, 225, 226; built
homes for fallen women, 85, 100; friend
of Arethas, 114; making grants for
monasteries, 89
Theodore, 270, 280; and Arab Monophysite
Renaissance, 292; consecrated as bishop,
293
Theodore, translator of treatise on falconry, 243
Theodosius, 11, 181
Theodosius II, 113, 210-11, 238; establishment
of poetry, 321n.71
theological literature: rise of a, 299
Theotokos, 67, 84, 94; see also Mary (mother
of Jesus)
Thessalonike: fair at, 36
thief (li), 14n.11
Third Cyrenaica: legionaries of, 25
Tiberius II, emperor, 75; gives white robes to
Mundir as gift, 167
Timna: copper mines of, 25
Tiydhuq, 181
tombs, 27275; attached to churches, 274; as
landmarks, 274
toponyms, 197, 286
trade routes, 932, 57; change in, 24; control
of western, 53; intra-Arabian, 53n.5;
Mesopotamian, 10, 1215, 13; overland
Arabic route (via odorifera), 33, 228,
263; protection of, 10; stations, 11, 53;
three western, 55; see also caravans,
frankincense, spice route
Transfiguration: and closeness to Mount Tabor
and Mount Hermon, 66; as dominical
feast day, 64
traps and snares, 24649
troops, frontier (limitanei), xviii, xix, 7, 27, 30,
26364
Tumir: the one who ties a donkey, 103
turbans, 159
Tzimisces, John, emperor, 323
Ubgh, Ayn, 98
Udhru. See Aru
d (musical instrument), 185
Udr: poetry type that expressed chaste senti-
ments of love, 316
Ukaydir Ibn Abd al-Malik, 15, 115
Uk z, 22, 23, 36; as most important Arab fair,
33, 54
Umma: Ghassnid queen, 108
Umar Ibn Abi Raba: love poetry of,
106n.134
Umayyad sites: and Ghassnid substrate, 287
Umayyads, 14, 69, 70, 25558; acquisition
of relics, 228; caliphs, 256; Christian
elements in graphic arts, 245; first
dynasty in Islamic history, 173;
structures of, 265
Umm Ramla, 108, 156; wife of Yazd, 119
al-Uqb (the Falcon), 98, 98n.61, 239
Usays, 188
Uthmn ibn al-uwayrith, 21
Valens: Arian emperor, 67; victory over, 79; see
also Mavia
Valeriana, 225
Vandals, 208, 32425; as foederati, 325; as her-
etics, 325
Vandal War, 48
veils, 92, 159
vestimentary system, 17375; see also clothing
veterinarians, 176; see also hippiatry
victory celebrations: Christianization of, 210;
elements of, 210; in fifth century, 210;
in fourth century, 20910; involvement
of religion in, 208; in Oriens, 207; and
triumphal arches, 208
Victory Day, 219
villeggiaturas, 255n.3, 326n.2; entertainment
during, 258
vineyards, 45, 153; Christian associations, 141
Virgin Mary, 76, 94, 227n.34; as role model,
316; see also Mary (mother of Jesus)
wd: as gateway for caravans, 27; as narrow
passageway, 25; protected by two
fortresses, 27
Wd Araba, 24; and copper, 25, 45
Wd alma, 98
Wd al-Qur: Arabian oasis of, 50
Wd Sirn, 8, 10, 26, 27n.48; gateway to
Orient, 245; historical geography of, 27;
location of great fair, 27, 35
Wd Sirn route, 25, 55
Wald II, 257
Waraqa, 136n.3
391 Index
war, liturgy of, 21517
War of Fijr. See wars: Sacrilegious War
wars: between Abs and Dubyn, 235; Bass
War, 311, 329; battle of Adrianople,
109n.148; battle of Adrit, 38; battle of
Antioch, 314; battle of Callinicum, 8,
230, 310n.16, 339n.1; battle of Chalcis,
8, 22, 86, 89, 97, 98, 105n.120, 134,
170, 213, 214, 215, 216, 222, 294, 304,
310, 328; battle of Dara, 212, 213, 230;
battle of Dh Qr, 92; battle of Karbal,
197n.63; battle of Khazza, 207; battle
of Nakhla, 22; battle of Nineveh, 124;
battle of Qinnasrn, 200; battle of
al-Qurnatayn, 103; battle of Thannris,
169, 225, 231; battle of Uud, 97; battle
of Yarmk, 57, 64, 97, 108, 119, 125,
180, 219; battle of Yawm alma, 209,
329n.19; conquest of Dma, 106, 107,
115; conquest of Oriens, 107; Gothic
war, 209; liturgy of, 228, 21517; Ridda
War, 107n.137; Sacrilegious War, 22, 54
wars (plant): essential for dyeing, 51
water: flavored with fruit, 138; like perfume,
138; ponds and pools, 270
West-Arabian Route, 10, 1525, 16, 18
western Arabia: agriculture in, 51; becomes
Christian, 52. See also Arabia
widows and orphans, 176
wine, 139, 141, 148, 154; association with
monasteries, 157; effect on devotees,
156; elements added to, 152; and litur-
gical celebration, 141; prohibited by
Koran, 141, 319; spiritualization of, 140;
terms used in referring to, 155; see also
vineyards
wine festivals, 158n.6
wine lyrics, 142, 319
wine vats, 155
women, 91, 96, 110, 198, 314; assisted men in
war, 86, 95, 97, 99, 104, 109, 109n.147,
179; and composition of elegies, 199;
dress was modest and decorous, 97; as
foederati, 86; in Ghassn, 81117; and
hospitality, 87; and martyrs in Najrn,
227; mourned death of Numn, 87;
and nursing, 179; in peacetime, 8690;
and pilgrimages, 91, 92; provided food,
86; religious roles of, 84, 110, 111; role
in Arab history, 83; and social wel-
fare, 82, 87, 88; status of, elevated by
Christianity, 84
Wondrous Mountain: gravesite of Symeon the
Younger, 71
wounds, 176
wreaths, 75, 172; see also Palm Sunday
xenodocheia, 88, 89, 269
Yqt, 72, 281; and Geographical Dictionary,
317
Yathrib. See Medina
Yazd, 55, 69, 102, 287, 320; and Christian
connections, 70; conducts siege of
Constantinople, 109, 115; heard Ramla
mourning the death of Yazds father,
108n.145; led expedition against
Byzantines in Anatolia, 109; married
Umm Ramla, 119; a refined hedonist,
108, 156
Yazd I, 256; represents best link between
Umayyad and Ghassnid periods, 239
Yazd II: time spent in open spaces, 257
Ysuf, 21, 100, 205; persecution by, 194;
responsible for martyrdom in Najrn,
227
Zacharia, 224
Zagw dynasty (Ethiopia), 71
Zenobia of Palmyra, 83
Zinb, 41
Zoghar, 27, 32
Zosimus, historian, 210
Zubayda bint-Jafar: built aqueduct to Mecca,
88; built Darb Zubayda, 92
Zuhayr, 311

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BYZANTIUM

28 He was even able co overwhelm the overbearing and domineering Damian.

Qa~r al-I:Iayr (Heliorama)

ki, and by honey, asal, and

Zafr, the capital of the imyarites of South Arabia, see

hmiden in al-ira (Berlin, 1899), 85.

; John Malalas, Chronographia, ed. L. Dindorf

kr in falconry. Kinda and Ghassn were sister

hmiden in al-ira: Ein Versuch zur arabisch-persischen

hence their description as the Unknown Wars.

Nar ibn-al-rith. EI2, VII, 87273.

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