Page 67 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

54 EDESSA UNDER THE KINGS

leaves in the hand of the figure of the deceased in the Family Portrait mosaic.
This is to be related to the scene of the Tripod mosaic where the deceased
extends a leaf towards a vase standing on a tripod and containing probably
holy water. We have here an exact parallel to a ritual of Palmyra in which
the deceased grasps a flower or a bunch of twigs. The action is illustrated in
yet greater detail in the tableaux of Dura Europos where the officiant, not
necessarily a priest, holds out a branch towards a vase of liquid standing
on a tripod, as in the Tripod mosaic. The deity, to whom the rite is
directed, is suggested by a relief and a statue of Atargatis at Hatra;1 in the
former the goddess holds a leaf in her right hand, in the latter in her left
hand.
Edessa, like Hierapolis and other cult-centres of the area, was celebrated
for a well of healing waters that was, as we shall see, a holy place in the
Christian period and later. Rites of incubation are performed there, indeed,
to the present day.2 Like Hierapolis, Edessa had its sacred fish. The statuettes
of tritons, now in the Urfa museum, recall the reliefs of figures, half women,
half fish, found at Membig (Mabbog) by travellers in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. A more certain analogy is to be seen in the two pools
of Edessa, which are, like the famous pools of Hierapolis, full of carp of remark-
able size and in astonishing numbers. Egeria, who examined them in,
probably, the fifth century, observed that she had 'never seen fish of such
size, so gleaming and succulent'. In the nineteenth century, the English
missionary Badger was told that the fish were never eaten by the Moslems of
Urfa—although, he adds, Christians often partook of 'the forbidden dainty,
the fish being easily secured in the streams which flow from the pond through
the gardens. They generally cook them with wine sauce, and declare them
excellent.'3 Still today the fish are treated as sacred, and are never caught.
They are fed with bread, and so tame are they that they will leap inches out
of the water to snatch at morsels of food.4
Remarkably enough, the same features are reflected in Aelian's description
of the pools at the source of the Khabur, and there too, we are provided with
an association with the cults of Hera at Hierapolis and Edessa. The pools of
the Khabur were, we are informed, sacred to Hera, and, like an echo of the
'leaping' river of Edessa, the Scirtos or Daisan, its shoals of fish are said to
leap (oKipTcoaiv). Has Aelian confused the source of the Khabur with the
source of the Balikh, that today has sacred fish and nearby springs with
healing properties? A source of the Balikh is named after the patriarch
1 On Hatra see also p. 60 below. 4 See photograph on PL 76. The pools were
2 Cf. p. 72 below. examined by Tavernier in 1644. He remarked
3 Niebuhr, who visited Urfa in 1766, also that they 'were so full of fish that if you throw
states that the fish were sometimes eaten in spite them in a little bread they will follow you from
of the veneration with which they were re- place to place as you walk by the side of the
garded; so, too, Buckingham in 1823. pond'.

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