Page 14 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

I

THE BEGINNINGS

N THE FOURTH CENTURY St. Ephraim the Syrian wrote, in his
commentary on Genesis, that Nimrod 'ruled in Erekh which is Orhay
(Edessa)'. He was recounting a legend that was widely credited in
I western Asia. Later writers went further. St. Isidore, for example,
maintained that Nimrod 'built Edessa, a city of Mesopotamia, after he had
migrated from Babylon, and ruled in it, which aforetime had been named
Erekh'. We need not take these learned theologians too literally. It was
customary in the Near East (and, indeed, in Europe also) for the proud
inhabitants of an ancient city to ascribe its foundation to a powerful figure of
mythology. The Biblical Nimrod was famed as a builder. His name is attached
to several pre-Islamic sites in present-day Turkey; only a giant, it is felt,
could have assembled the huge monuments of a remote pagan age.1
At Orhay, the choice of Nimrod as founder had much to commend itself
in later centuries. In Jewish and thereafter in Moslem tradition, Nimrod was
the foe of Abraham. The association of Nimrod with their city encouraged
the people of Orhay in the belief that the patriarch himself had dwelt there.
Forty kilometres to the south stood the pagan centre of Harran which claimed
Abraham as a resident and displayed to Christian pilgrims the places where
he had lived; and Harran's claim finds support in the Bible text. Other sites
in this region seem to be mentioned in the Bible—Paddan and, as personal
names, Serug, Terah and Nahor.2 Had not the celebrated Christian city of
Orhay a stronger title to one of the great fathers of monotheism ?
The names of Nimrod and Abraham cling to this city and its environs to
the present time. The mount on which stands the Citadel is commonly called
the 'throne of Nimrod'; the barren hills with the ruins of Deyr Yakup, once
a famous monastery, which lie to the south of the city walls are the 'hills of
Nimrod'. Two mosques beside the fish-pools, the modern bahklar, below the
Citadel are named after Abraham. The pools figure in local folk tales of
Nimrod. Nimrod, we are told, bound Abraham between the two great

1 By Jacob of Edessa and other Syriac the south of Harran; Terah and Nahor are
writers, Nimrod is identified as Ninus son of mentioned, in cognate forms, in cuneiform
Belus, the eponymous founder of Nineveh, records, the latter especially in texts from
2 Gen. 11:20 ff., cf. 24:10 ff., 28:2 ff. Serug Mari; Paddan continued to be used of a
is the name of (probably) the district in which locality near Harran during both Christian and
stood Batnae—the classical Anthemusia—to Moslem times.
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