Page 44 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

CULTURAL LIFE 31
Inspector signs in Greek. Wealthy Edessan families under the monarchy
had already acquired the habit of sending their sons to be educated in the
Greek-speaking lands to the west of the Euphrates, to Antioch or Beirut or
Alexandria, or to Greece. itself. The practice is perhaps reflected in the
'Hymn of the Soul' of the Acts of Thomas, which probably derives from a
Syriac source and was composed not later than the first century A.D. ; there
the prince is dispatched to seek his 'precious pearl* in Egypt. The Edessan
philosopher Bardaisan is said to have sent his son to attend the academies of
Athens, and it is held that he acquired there his competence in poetry and
music. This tradition is late, but it contains an element of probability. The
Edessan Book of the Laws of Countries demonstrates, in both its structure and
its argument, how deeply the school of Bardaisan was influenced by Greek
systems of philosophical exposition. Edessa was to win renown in Syriac-
speaking Mesopotamia as a centre of Greek learning.
Nevertheless, at the time of the monarchy, as also, indeed, later, Greek
civilization must have affected only a small section of the population of
Edessa. Bardaisan himself, like St. Ephraim a century and a half later, is
reputed to have had little or no first-hand knowledge of Greek. Hellenistic
conventions of law and civic organization and the Seleucid era were main-
tained at Edessa after the withdrawal of Seleucid power, but in this Edessa
was at one with the rest of Mesopotamia. In the struggle between Rome and
Parthia for authority over Mesopotamia, Edessa was usually on the side of
the latter. Seen from Rome, Abgar of Edessa was a Parthian, and this notion
continued well into Byzantine times when even Syriac poets describe Edessa
as 'Parthian' or 'daughter of the Parthians'. The titles of high officials of the
kingdom, pasgriba and nuhadra, were Iranian. As we shall observe later, the
dress of the menfolk of Edessa was also Iranian (though women, as elsewhere
in Mesopotamia, wore Roman costume). In the Edessan mosaics, human
figures are represented in the frontal mode that has been regarded as charac-
teristic of Iranian art. Adiabene, Edessa's ally, lay wholly within the Parthian
sphere; and Theodoret writes of Adiabene as 'belonging to the Parthians, but
now called Osrhoene'. We have noted that even in the vicinity of Abgar's
palace at Edessa was a 'tower of the Persians'. The river Gullab was still
called 'the river of the Medes' 250 years after the end of the monarchy.
Edessa's position on the 'silk road' to Nisibis, thence to India and the Far
East, must have brought traders from the East.1 Bardaisan is credited with an
account of the history and practices of the Indians, derived, it is held, from
an Indian embassy that passed through Osrhoene on a visit to Emperor
Elagabalus in about 218.

the Macedonian month name and the following * See p. 137 below, for Ammian's descrip-
proper name seem to point to a Palmyrene tion of the fair at Batnae in the fourth century,
origin. PI. 144.

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