Page 40 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

TOPOGRAPHY OF EDESSA 27
and there are superficial indications, among the ruins, that a row of buildings
on the mount lay to the south, in line with the columns. The columns are
identical in form and structure, but only approximately similar in size. They
appear to be free-standing. Their function, and that of the buildings around
them, in the second and third centuries is far from certain.1 It is strange that
only one carries an inscription referring to a statue; we would have expected
the statue of the queen to be accompanied, and no doubt preceded, by a
statue of the king. Perhaps they were part of a colonnade; there are grounds,
albeit somewhat slender, for maintaining that the building in which they
stood was a pagan temple.2
In recent years the cemeteries of Edessa have yielded useful information.
To the north-west, west, and south-west of the city, the foothills of the
great Anatolian plateau fall sharply to the plain. Here are cave-tombs—
'houses of eternity' they are called in Syriac, as also in Palmyrene—cut in the
rock to the number of perhaps a hundred. Three main cemetery areas were
in use at Edessa during the time of the monarchy, and the decades im-
mediately following. In the low hills west of the Citadel, beside the modern
village with the suggestive name of Kirk Magara, 'Forty caves', is a cluster
of burial places on either side of the wadis. Jews also were buried here, if one
may judge from the brief inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek; on one side of
the entrance to a tomb is carved also a five-branched candelabrum, or
menorah. Other tombs at Kirk Magara are pagan. One is decorated with the
relief of a funerary banquet and a Syriac inscription with the date A.D. 201-2,
the year of the flood at Edessa in the reign of Abgar the Great.3 This western
cemetery seems to have extended also northwards, towards the modern
Vadi Manci. In it was probably the resting-place in the fourth century of
St. Ephraim, laid at his own request among the poor and criminals, but soon
afterwards transferred to the tomb of the bishops of Edessa. Due south of
the Citadel, the cave of the Family Portrait mosaic, probably depicting a
noble family, lies in a southern cemetery which spreads westwards and, more
important, eastwards to the present Eyiip Mahallesi. The dates of mosaics in
this area range between A.D. 228 and 278, but one inscription has the date
208-9. A third cemetery is to be found beyond Justinian's dam to the north-
west of the walls. That this was less favoured than the other cemeteries in
pagan times, we may deduce from a comparison of the dress of the personages
of the Tripod mosaic with the more ornate costume of the Family Portrait
mosaic and the Funerary Couch mosaic in the southern area. Later, however,
with the triumph of Christianity at Edessa, the northern cemetery appears
to have become more popular. Here was built the shrine of the Confessors at
1 We must reject the elaborate theory that z Cf. p. 53 below; fort he text of the inscrip-
these columns represent Dioscoroi or twin tion see p. 19 above,
deities, as propounded by J. R. Harris, Cult 3 See p. 28 n. 4 below.
of the Heavenly Twins, 1906, and elsewhere.

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