Page 30 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

SOCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE 17
also adopted Latin names—Marcus, Marcia, Aurelius, Aurelia, Severus,
Antoninus, Augustina, to mention only a few. Some Jews of the city had
Hebrew names, Joseph and Samuel, others were called Seleucus, Gordian,
Ezad. But the texts of the time of the monarchy, and the period immediately
following, provide an overwhelming number of Syriac names; few names are
Nabataean.
It is probable that before the Aryu dynasty seized power, the city of Edessa,
like others in the Seleucid empire, was administered by two strategoi or
civic magistrates, who gave their names to the years. They are mentioned in a
document written shortly after the end of the kingdom and they appear not
infrequently in later texts, notably in the Edessan martyrologies. But we do
not find any reference to them in the sparse texts of the period of the Aryu
dynasty; we may infer that their office had been suppressed by those auto-
cratic monarchs.
The kings of Edessa did not, it should be observed, arrogate to themselves
absolute power. Like Arab tribal chieftains, they ruled through a council of
elders, possibly sheikhs, and including, no doubt, members of the royal
family. In one account the king's principal courtiers are styled the 'chiefs of
those who sat with bended knees'.1 Roman historians term the rulers of
Edessa phylarchs, and rightly so. Edessa at the end of the monarchy was still
divided, at least formally, into districts allocated to 9v/Xorf or clans; each was
administered by an archon.2
Yet, although he was, in theory, no more than the first among his peers, the
king of Edessa retained the outward tokens of power, as well as its substance,
firmly in his hands. His regnal year provided the official system of dating,
side by side with that of the Emperors. He resided in a 'great and beautiful
palace'—here the term for palace is Iranian—at the 'source of the springs'
which fed the famous fish-pools. The palace was destroyed in the floods of
A.D. 201, and rebuilt on the same spot some years later. After the kingdom
had come to an end, pilgrims to Edessa were shown the marble statues of the
kings and the fish-pools inside the palace buildings.3 Fearful of a recurrence
of the floods, Abgar the Great constructed a 'winter house as a royal dwelling'
(in one text called a 'castle') on the Citadel mount in, apparently, 2O5-6.4 His
nobles lived in mansions, that is in lesser state, in the proximity of the king's
residence. In death also the kings were shown deference. They were buried
1 Iranian nobles seem to have adopted a governor are described in the Doctrine of Addai
similar squatting posture. But this description as the 'chiefs and honoured men of [Abgar's]
of the Edessan nobles (in the Doctrine of Addai) kingdom', and this corresponds exactly with
is doubtful, since by a minor change in the text the -rrpciToi Kcd irporiiicbiasvot of Hellenistic
(via da for qa'da) we may read 'chiefs of those kingdoms. We should not, however, ignore the
who sat in the [king's] council'. Parthian and Arab influence, and the tribal
2 The view has been advanced that Abgar's structure of Edessa at this period.
court was organized on Hellenistic, rather than 3 See p. 33 below and PL loa.
on Oriental lines; Abgar's envoys to the Roman * PL 9a, 36.
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