Page 35 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

zz EDESSA UNDER THE KINGS

categories mentioned by name after the 'chiefs and freemen of the king and
commanders' in the account of the assembly summoned by Abgar to hear
Addai the Apostle. After the flood of 201, the artisans were instructed to
remove their booths from beside the river and they were allowed to erect
them only at the distance from the river that was prescribed by the surveyors
and the other experts of the municipality. Workmen, including, we may
assume, artisans, who sat in the colonnades and carried out their occupation
beside the river, were also forbidden to spend the night in this area during
the autumn and winter months when there was fear of unexpected flooding—
eloquent evidence of the paternalism of the king.
That there were slaves at Edessa under the monarchy, as afterwards, is
shown by a Syriac document, dated 243, found at Dura Europos. This is the
contract of sale of a slave girl, Amath-Sin, aged about 28 and purchased from
an Edessan woman by a man of Harran for the price of 700 denarii. The
Harranian may have bought her for resale. The seller disclaims responsi-
bility if the slave were to run away from her new owner, and possibly also
if she were to develop some defect, after a probationary period of six months—
a usual clause in contracts of this nature from early times.
Abgar decreed, after the flood of 201, that the taxes should be remitted
both 'of those who were inside the city and those who dwelt in the villages
and on farms'. These villages and farms lay in the agricultural country
around the city; and their inhabitants were bound to the population of the
city by ties of consanguinity and economic dependence—as in other regions
of the early Near East. Beyond the zone in which the villages stood, lived
the people of the uncultivated lands. They were at an intermediate stage in
the transition from nomadism to settled life. Close to the villages were the
semi-nomads, the 'Arab, who spent part of the year tending the fields, part
tending their flocks. Further afield were the pure nomads, the Beduins, who
were always on the move, living in tents, refusing to accept the authority of
the city and deriving their livelihood not only from cattle rearing but also
from highway robbery and pillage. It is these whom Greek and Roman
writers call Saracens; Syriac writers call them Tayyaye, from the Beduin
tribe Tayy, with whom they were most familiar.
The Beduins were no respecters of persons; they harried the half-settled
'Arab, as well as the caravans of merchants and city dwellers. It was pro-
bably, then, as much to defend the 'Arab as to protect the roads against the
Tayyaye that the office of Arabarchos, in Syriac shallita de'Arab, was
established at Edessa. A text of Dura Europos, dated A.D. 121-2 mentions
'a strategos of Mesopotamia and Parapotamia, and Arabarchos', who was
also collector of taxes and held Parthian rank. Cicero ridiculed Pompey by
describing him as an Arabarchos who acted both like a Parthian official and
a rough Arab chieftain. But the jurisdiction of the Arabarchos of Edessa

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