Page 73 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

60 EDESSA UNDER THE KINGS

Zeus. At Hatra, a small kingdom about eighty kilometres south of Mosul,
inscriptions, in a derivative of Aramaic script and contemporary with the
kingdom of Edessa, indicate that, there too, the divinity that was invoked
most frequently was Be'elshamin. He was the 'great god' and 'king'. But
near Hatra, we find also an inscription to a local deity Marilaha; and coins
from Hatra carry the legend 'Sin Marilaha'. Was Sin here elevated to a
supreme role, or was he identified with a central deity Be'elshamin ?
The pagans of Edessa knew the deity Be'elshamin, for his name is found
among the proper names of the mosaics. Sin, the moon god, also played an
important role in the planet worship of the city. But it is not profitable to
speculate upon the precise identity of a godhead Marilaha. Cults appeared,
merged, and disappeared in this region of the East and at this period. We
cannot seek to resolve the disorder into a tidy pantheon in which each deity
is allotted his particular sphere, with peculiar attributes and functions. It is
sufficient to observe that the general atmosphere over a large area of northern
Mesopotamia and Syria during the first centuries of the Christian era
favoured the conception of a single godhead, whether he stood alone above all
other deities, or whether he was attended by lesser deities and merely primus
inter pares. At Harran, Be'elshamin was worshipped as 'chief of the gods'
certainly as late as the fifth century, but probably for considerably longer.
The pagans there, the so-called Sabians, worshipped the seven planets, like
the pagans of Edessa. But, as we have already observed, they believed that the
planets, the habitation of deities or themselves deities, were no more than
the agents of a Supreme Being who had delegated to them the administration
of the universe. The qualities of this single divinity were beyond human powers
to describe; he was too great and too remote to require the worship of man.1
Indeed, we find a trend towards the system in which one deity stood at the
peak of the pantheon much earlier at Harran. Already in the sixth century
B.C. in the inscriptions of Nabonidus, king of Babylon, at Harran, the chief
god is raised to the status of a universal deity above all the other gods. He is
addressed as 'king of the gods', and 'greatest of the gods and goddesses'.
It has been suggested that it was the influence of the Jews at Edessa that
paved the way for the triumph of Christianity there, and there is weighty
evidence for this view. But friendship and sympathy alone do not win
converts to a new religion; indeed, it was the belief, in this area and at this
time, in a single divinity of cosmic proportions that must already have provided
1 We may recall in this context that the jianif, although, it should be observed, some
Koran uses the term fyanif of a person who modern scholars doubt a direct semantic con-
professed monotheism before the appearance of nection between the two words)—and Harran
Judaism and Christianity—before, that is, was the home of Abraham. Hanif is, in some
Moses and Jesus; in the opinion of Muhammad measure, a synonym of 'Sabian'. The sacred
the true fianif was Abraham. Harran at the book of the 'Sabians' was the 'volume of the
time of Muhammad had long been the centre Hanifites'; they offered to the sun and moon
of the Syriac hanpe (tumpe is cognate with the 'greater and lesser incense of the Hanifites'.

www.knanayology.org