This was only partially vindicated. On the strong side, the narrative and storytelling really took off in these episodes. Samson’s one man war against the Philistines, the manhunt for his capture, and his death in a collapsing Philistine temple were exceeded in thrilling drama only by the tragedy of Saul’s rise to power and descent into madness. Saul and Samson (played by Francis Magee and Nonso Anozie) gave the series something it lacked up to this point: Complex, internally conflicted, morally ambiguous characters.

Philistines battle with Egyptians in a relief scene on Rameses III’s mortuary temple in Medinet Habu,

The series gets some plaudits for its accurate depiction of the Philistines, who are shown as suitably Aegean in appearance, with accurate dress, leather cuirasses, feathered headress helmets, and long broadswords. Most of our knowledge of Philistine battle dress comes from the Medinet Habu reliefs of Rameses III, and the costume designers for this show did their homework in this regard. The series also gave a nod to scholars who translate kidon in 1 Samuel 17:6 as an Egyptian khopesh (sickle-sword) by showing Goliath armed with a large version of that weapon.

The geography of the episodes was also much improved. While not exact matches, Jerusalem was shown on a hillside, Jericho was shown in the Rift Valley at the foot of hills, and Saul’s war in southern Israel actually looks like southern Israel. The one obvious goof in this regard are the external shots of Saul’s hometown of Gibeah, which is shown situated at the foot of a massive cliff in the series. Ancient Gibeah was actually on a hilltop, with expansive 360-degree views of the surrounding territory.

Tell el-Full, the site of ancient Gibeah. An unfinished palace formerly belonging to King Hussein of Jordan sits atop the site.

Yet, the series continued to make a large number of basic factual errors which directly contradict history, archaeology and the biblical text. The Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle is repeatedly violated by Joshua and David seeking to pray before the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, in the opening scene of Episode 3 the Ark is sitting in the open, shaded from the sun by a tarp. The characters continue to

write in block Hebrew script (500 years too early), Delilah is paid to betray Samson with silver coins (also 500 years too early), the Philistine temple has proto-Ionic column caps (an Israelite phenomenon) and (my favorite) a Canaanite soldier is seen fighting Joshua in hand-to-hand combat while wearing a Roman lorica segmentata cuirass.

What is much more baffling is the presence of cavalry throughout both episodes both in battle and as messengers. Chariots were common in Late Bronze and Iron Age I warfare, but we have no evidence of mounted cavalry in the Near East until Tukulti-Ninurta II introduced them into the Assyrian army in the early 9th century BC.[1] Even then, Assyrian cavalry had no spurs or saddles (although these may have been necessary in the film for safety reasons). For the wars between the Israelites and Philistines in the 11th century BC, cavalry comes three centuries too early. Donkeys were the transport animal of choice. Chariots would have been the only use for horses, which were extremely expensive and hard to care for.

In a previous article on Mary I used the term “Protestant Midrash” to describe interpretations of the Biblical text which have no explicit textual basis are not historically supported, but have entered into tradition anyways because they teach a desirable moral lesson. The Bible is full of this.

The most obvious example is the series’ treatment of Samson. Much of the plot revolves around Samson’s marriage to a Philistine woman, her murder, and his subsequent relationship with Delilah. In the book of Judges, Samson’s father disapproves of his marriage, asking “Is there no woman among the daughters of your relatives, or among all our people, that you go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?”[2] His father in law then gives his wife to a Philistine husband, and she is later murdered by a Philistine mob.

Clearly, tension between the Aegean Philistines and semitic Israelites led to both communities disapproving of intermarriage. The Bible then tries to translate this into terms understandable to the modern viewer by keeping the Philistines Greek but casting an Afro-British actor as Samson. This takes the moral lesson out of the world of the Iron Age southern Levant and into the cultural language of our modern world, in order to teach a lesson about racism.

While admirable in intent, this ahistorical method of storytelling misses a much bigger story that is lurking under the surface of the Biblical text, waiting to be unearthed by historical scholarship.

David’s companion Uriah appears as a major character throughout episode 4, loyally fighting alongside David until David has him killed and takes his wife. But look closely at Uriah’s identity in 2 Samuel 11:3 or 1 Chronicles 11:14. Uriah the Hittite. That’s right, Uriah was neither an Israelite nor even a Semite, he was of Indo-European ancestry. How did this happen? Later on in 2 Samuel, David buys a threshing floor in Jerusalem from a man named Aravnah the Jebusite. It seems that David did not massacre the inhabitants of Jerusalem when he captured it. They were still living in the city and Israelites were living alongside them.

This implies that not only did the Israelites not massacre the entire Canaanite population of the land from Dan to Beersheva, it indicates that non-Israelite inhabitants of the land could rise to positions of great prestige in the early Israelite kingdom. The moral lessons here – of meritocracy, of earning rank on the basis of ability, of a society based around allegiance to a common set of religious ideals rather than ethnic ancestry – are profound. Yet, you’d miss them entirely in the Bible our popular cultural imagination. It takes a careful, scholarly reading of the text to bring it into the light.

Regardless, I’ll still be watching. This show may still have some surprises yet. Also, most of the critics whose names have been attached to this series are New Testament scholars, so I’ll be interested to see how the second half of this series (which begins next week) is going to look.

References:

[1] H.W.F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria (Londong: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), 71-72.

[2] Judges 14:3

Image Sources: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pulasti_%28Philistine%29_and_Tsakkaras_%28painting%29.png; Photo of Gibeah © Christopher Jones 2012; last 2 are screen caps from the series.

Article © Christopher Jones 2013.

The Bible is a 10-part TV miniseries based on, well, the Bible, and produced by Mark Burnett (in his first non reality TV effort) and Roma Downey. The series has been noted for its small army of A list scholars who served as consultants. However, as one of the consultants, Rabbi Joshua Galloway, has noted, “the goal of the production was to remain faithful, or at least as faithful as possible, to the narrative and text of the Bible, as opposed to a historical critical approach.”

This means, for example, that Noah’s Flood is shown as global. It also sometimes means that the visuals tend towards a representation of modern western Sunday School flannelgraph ideas about what the world of the Bible looked like. As a result, the production at times felt like an updated Cecil B. DeMille epic, where Moses and Abraham are not solely based on what the Biblical text and scholarship tell us about their times, but must conform to what we expect them to look like. Certain conventions are observed, such as Moses and the Pharaoh of the Exodus growing up as rivals in the palace, simply because this is how we are used to seeing them portrayed on film.

This past Sunday’s episodes focused on Abraham and Moses, respectively, and the theme of faith is given strong weight as both men are seen doing things that appear completely insane to everyone around them. The scenes of Abraham leaving his home, almost sacrificing Isaac, and trusting that he would someday have a son were an excellent representation of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham, as a “knight of faith” plunging into the unknown based on his trust in God in spite of all reason to the contrary. This comes off to both his contemporaries and the modern viewer as borderline insane, but that is precisely the point. Trust is not always a rational act.

As far as historical commentary, there is not much to say about Abraham because there is not much that can even expect to be verified. Nomads by their very nature leave few archaeological remains. As a result, studies of Abraham and the Patriarchs have taken two approaches.

Bottom: Abraham from “The Bible” TV series. Top: Wall painting of Semitic Middle Bronze Age nomads from Beni Hasan, Egypt. Note the nomad’s woven patterns on their clothes and dresses, compared to the plain brown garb from most characters in “The Bible.” Also note that the nomads in the Beni Hasan painting are armed with spears and bows, while in “The Bible” Abraham and his men are armed primarily with curved Bedouin-style daggers.

The first is to study cultural context and geography, and try and pin the Patriarchs in some time frame (the Middle Bronze Age, the Intermediate Bronze Age, etc) where the culture matches the culture described in the Bible. At the end of the Early Bronze Age (c. 2200 BC) urban culture collapsed and cities all over Canaan were abandoned. For the next 200 years, the population was almost entirely nomadic before cities began to be re-established in the Middle Bronze Age II. Because Abraham was constantly bumping into and getting into conflicts with people in cities when his massive flocks started eating up every green thing around their farmland, most scholars who accept a historical Abraham choose to situate him in the Middle Bronze II.[1]

Others point to anachronisms in the text as a basis for arguing that the stories were composed in the mid 1st millennium BC and therefore too long after the fact to contain any historical information. The presence of camels, whose domestication is otherwise unattested until the 1st millennium, and Abraham’s frequent interaction with “Philistines” who did not arrive in the area until after 1175 BC, are longstanding problems in the narrative.[2]

One can point to some meager remains of camels from the 2nd millennium – a camel figuring from 19th century Byblos, a camel jaw found in a Middle Bronze tomb in Tell el-Farah, a figurine of a loaded camel from a tomb in 13th century Egypt, and so on.[3] The possibility has also been raised that the “Philistines” of Genesis as a use of a later name for a region that was inhabited by Canaanites in the Middle Bronze Age. It is worthy to note that “Abimelech” (the Philistine king in Genesis 21-26) is a thoroughly Semitic name.

Or, one could do what The Bible does and ignore all of this entirely, and make Abraham essentially timeless. Instead of being rooted in Middle Bronze Age nomadic culture, The Bible’s Abraham strides through the generic landscapes of our biblical imagination. Instead of Abraham, Middle Bronze Age sheikh and wealthy leader of a clan, we see Abraham, the leader of a motley group of suitably dirty individuals dressed in suitably dirty, vaguely “biblical” clothes, in a vaguely Bedouin setting, set in a brown and suitably “biblical” landscape.

Top: Abraham in “The Bible.” Not much in view for Abraham’s copious flocks to feed off of. Bottom: Area around Beersheva in March after winter rains, when nomads would have been grazing their flocks.

The Bible’s treatment of Moses takes a similar approach, taking all of our assumptions about the story and returning them to us in the form of a production clearly indebted to The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt. Details such as Moses and the Pharaoh of the Exodus growing up together to become adult rivals are a staple of fictional portrayals of the Exodus, but are not actually in the Bible. The costumes and set design all seem designed to appeal to our American expectations of what the Exodus story should look like, rather than what ancient Egypt actually looked like. The world of The Bible is the world of our cultural imagination of the Bible, rather than the actual world of the Bible.

At the end of his book The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, Thomas L. Thompson wrote that:

But the stories about the promise given to the patriarchs in Genesis are not historical, nor do they intend to be historical; they are rather historically determined expressions about Israel and Israel’s relationship with God, given in forms legitimate to their time, and their truth lies not in their facticity, nor in their historicity, but in their ability to express the reality that Israel experienced. To the extent that this experience can be communicated, it is a revelation of the faith that was Israel’s. And it is through this communication in word that Israel’s experience became ours, and Israel’s faith our faith; for it is through this revelation that we are enabled to see through to the reality and the truth of the human experience which transcends the historical forms in which this experience has been expressed.[4]

While The Bible may seem to many to be fundamentalist in its outlook, it is actually fully in line with the views of Thompson. For The Bible does not intend to be historical, it is rather a “historically determined expression” about a “relationship with God” which is given in a form legitimate to our time. It seeks to express theological truths, but not by making references to solid history, but rather by “communication in word…to the reality and the truth of the human experience.”

Historical context has a way of changing our perceptions and deepening our understanding of the Bible by moving us beyond our cultural blinders and into the Bible’s own world. But, by creating an image separated from historical background, The Bible has (for its first week at least) given us faith disconnected from history. It is the same story we know from childhood, and it looks the same way it looked back then.

References:

[1] For a recent defense of the historicity of the Patriarchs, see chapter 7, “Founding Fathers or Fleeting Phantoms?” in Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eerdmans, 2003).

[2] For more critical views, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (New York: De Gruyter, 1974).

[3] Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 338-341.

[4] Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, 330.

Image Sources: http://www.faithhelper.com/otarch1.htm; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_19171_The_Negev_after_a_good_winter.jpg

Article © Christopher Jones 2013.

It was the summer of 326 BC when Alexander the Great reached the banks of the Hyphasis River in India. His army had just won a hard fought battle against a minor local ruler named Porus. On the far side lay the Nanda Empire, armed to the teeth and ready to meet Alexander’s dwindling army with overwhelming force. “It was said,” reported Plutarch, “that the kings of the Gandaridae and the Praesii were waiting for Alexander’s attack with an army of 80,000 cavalry, 200,000 infantry, 8,000 chariots and 6,000 fighting elephants.”[1] Such stories only made Alexander more eager to take on the challenge of battle, but discontent spread in his camp. To restore his men’s courage, he gave a speech before his army:

For a man who is a man, work, in my belief, if it is directed to noble ends, has no object beyond itself…if any of you wish to know what limit may be set on this particular campaign, let me tell you that the area of the country still ahead of us, from here to the Ganges and the Eastern Ocean, is comparatively small. You will undoubtedly find that this ocean is connected with the Hyrcanian Sea, for the great Stream of Ocean encircles the earth…and to this empire there will be no boundaries but what God Himself has made for the whole world.[2]

Alexander had no way of knowing that there was much more to the east than a “comparatively small” country. The Greeks were only dimly aware of India and were completely unaware of lands beyond it. In reality, past the Ganges lay Burma and Indochina, the Irrawaddy and the Mekong, and then China, a land with resources and population on a scale Greeks had never dreamed existed.

Alexander’s men were unmoved. They refused to go on. Alexander retreated to his tent in rage and did not emerge for three days, believing his troops’ failure of courage the only thing preventing him from becoming master of the entire world.[3]

At that time, China was mired in two hundred years of conflict known as the Warring States Period. By 206 BC, the Han Dynasty was in power and locked in a long brutal war with the nomadic Xiongnu. In 138 BC, Imperial official Zhang Qian was dispatched by the Emperor Wu in search of the Yuezhi, enemies of the Xiongnu with whom the Emperor sought to make an alliance. Not long after departing China, Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held a prisoner for ten years before he finally managed to escape. He finally reached the Yuezhi near modern day Bactria, only to find that they were no longer interested in an alliance. On his return to China, he was again captured by the Xiongnu and held prisoner for a year until a palace coup threw their society into chaos and he was able to make another escape.

Zhang Qian’s travels.

Thirteen years after his departure, Zhang Qian returned to great honor at the Imperial court, who one can imagine had likely given up all hope of his survival. Although he never traveled west of Bactria, he spoke with travelers and tradesmen from lands to the west and brought news of these territories back to the Emperor, as recorded in the Han Shu:

Anxi [Parthia] may be several thousand li west of the Yuezhi. The people live in fixed abodes and are give to agriculture; their fields yield rice and wheat; and they make wine of grapes. Their cities and towns are like those of Ta-yuan. Several hundred small and large cities belong to it. The territory is several thousand li square; it is a yery large country and is close to the K’ui-shui [Oxus]. Their market folk and merchants travel in carts and boats to the neighboring countries perhaps several thousand li distant. They make coins of silver; the coins resemble their king’s face. Upon the death of a king the coins are changed for others on which the new king’s face is represented. They paint [rows of characters] running sideways on [stiff] leather, to serve as records.[4]

“They make coins of silver; the coins resemble their king’s face. Upon the death of a king the coins are changed for others on which the new king’s face is represented.” — Coin of Orodes I of Parthia.

One li equaled 415.8 meters or approximately 1/4 of a mile. Zhang Qian also heard of lands to the west of Parthia:

Li-kan [Syria] and T’iau-chi [Mesopotamia] are several thousand li west of Anxi and close to the Western Sea. It [referring to T'iau-ch'i] is hot and damp. The inhabitants plow their fields, in which they grow rice. There is a big bird with eggs like jars. The number of its inhabitants very large and they have in many places their own petty chiefs; but Anxi [Parthia], while having added it to its dependencies, considers it a foreign country. They have clever jugglers. Although the old people in Anxi maintain the tradition that the Jo-shui and the Si-wang-mu are in T’iau-chi, they have not been seen there.[5]

These reports set the pattern for much of Han China’s knowledge of the Near East. Explorers visited Central Asia and brought back secondhand but nevertheless accurate information that was equal parts random facts and useful knowledge for merchants and diplomats.

“[T'iau-ch'i] is hot and damp. The inhabitants plow their fields, in which they grow rice. There is a big bird with eggs like jars.”

By the 1st century AD, the dreaded Xiongnu had been defeated, the Great Wall protected China’s northern border, and Chinese diplomats were ready to explore further afield. In 97 AD, the procurator Ban Chao sent Gan Ying to explore further to the west in hopes of reaching a rumored great empire known to the Chinese as Da Qin. According to the Hou Hanshu (“History of the Later Han), he “probed as far as the Western Sea, and then returned. Previous generations never reached these regions.” In Parthia, he sought to travel further to the west and was told by the Parthians that “The ocean is huge. Those making the round trip can do it in three months if the winds are favorable. However, if you encounter winds that delay you, it can take two years. That is why all the men who go by sea take stores for three years. The vast ocean urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.”[7]

This was of course completely ridiculous information, but Gan Ying had no way of knowing that the Parthians were lying about the Mediterranean being a giant ocean. Clearly the Parthians did not want the Chinese establishing contact with their sworn enemies in Rome. Gan Ying had to content himself to secondhand reports of Da Qin. According to the Hou Hanshu, “No doubt he prepared a report on their customs and investigated their precious and unusual [products].”[8] This information about a great empire to the west became incorporated into the Hou Hanshu:

The Kingdom of Da Qin is also called Lijian. As it is found to the west of the sea, it is also called the Kingdom of Haixi (Egypt).Its territory extends for several thousands of li. It has more than four hundred walled towns. There are several tens of smaller dependent kingdoms. The walls of the towns are made of stone.

They have established postal relays at intervals, which are all plastered and whitewashed. There are pines and cypresses, as well as trees and plants of all kinds. The common people are farmers. They cultivate many grain crops and silkworm-mulberry trees. They shave their heads, and their clothes are embroidered. They have screened coaches (for the women) and small white-roofed one-horse carts.When carriages come and go, drums are beaten and flags and standards are raised.[9]

“The ocean is huge…The vast ocean urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.” — Andromeda’s Rocks, ancient port of Jaffa, Israel.

Rome had a number of client kingdoms that acted as buffer states between Roman and Parthia, which Gan Ying may have visited (the “smaller dependent kingdoms”). Although Gan Ying almost certainly did not visit the city of Rome, he provided a summary of its affairs based on what he had heard:

The seat of government (Rome) is more than a hundred li (41.6 km) around. In this city are five palaces each ten li (4.2 km) from the other. Moreover, in the rooms of the palace the pillars and the tableware are really made of crystal. The king goes each day to one of the palaces to deal with business. After five days, he has visited all of them. A porter with a sack has the job of always following the royal carriage. When somebody wants to discuss something with the king, he throws a note in the sack. When the king arrives at the palace, he opens the bag, examines the contents, and judges if the plaintiff is right or wrong.

There is a government department of archives. [A group of] thirty-six leaders has been established to meet together to deliberate on affairs of state. Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry.[10]

This appears to be a loose description of the Consuls and Senate of Rome during the era of the Republic. By the time Gan Ying visited Parthia the Republic had been effectively dead for 141 years, and their kings were definitely permanent and were not replaced regularly. If they were replaced, they did not fade quietly into the background.

“When carriages come and go, drums are beaten and flags and standards are raised.”

The Hou Hanshu goes on to list trade goods available in Roman territory: “The people of this country are honest in business; they don’t have two prices. Grain and foodstuffs are always in good supply. The resources of the state are abundant.” The organized and bureaucratic Chinese government definitely admired the reports of the Roman Cursus Publicus courier system: “The population there is dense. Each ten li (4.2 km) there is a postal stage, and each thirty li (12.5 km) a postal station…When envoys from a neighboring kingdom arrive at their border, they use the courier stations to get to the royal capital, and when they arrive, they give them gold coins.” Elsewhere it was noted that: “Finally, there is no trouble with bandits, but there are many ferocious tigers and lions on the road that obstruct and kill travelers. If the caravans don’t have more than a hundred men carrying arms, they will be devoured.”[11]

Most oddly, The Hou Hanshu said that the people of Rome “are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin.” Da Qin literally means “Great China.” The Chinese saw the Roman Empire as another great empire, equal to China except on the other side of the world.[12]

Roman glassware. In the Ecce Homo Convent, Jerusalem, Israel.

Eventually Rome managed to break through the Parthian restrictions. In 166, Marcus Aurelius sent envoys who traveled to China by way of modern-day Vietnam (likely meaning they took a sea route around Parthian territory) and presented the Emperor Huan with “elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell.” This was the first direct communication between the two empires, and the Middle Kingdom was not impressed: “The tribute brought was neither precious nor rare, raising suspicion that the accounts [of the ‘envoys’] might be exaggerated.”[13]

By the third century AD, the Silk Road was in full swing and goods were flowing between China and Rome and all the points in between. Luxury goods such as silk and colored glass were the biggest sellers. “The profit margin is ten to one,” according to instructions for traders in the Hou Hanshu. At the other end of the line in Rome, Pliny the Elder lamented that “At the very lowest computation, India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula withdraw from our empire one hundred million sesterces every year—so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women!”[14]

“They can produce fire from their mouths, bind and then free themselves, and juggle twelve balls with extraordinary skill.” — Statue of a Roman juggler, late antiquity.

In the third century, Chinese historian Yu Huan produced another document titled the Weilue, which offered an extended description of Rome based on the Hou Hanshu. Yu Huan provided more detailed information about how to get to Rome by sailing from Vietnam to Egypt, then up the Nile, across the Delta and along the North African coast before turning north to Italy. Another way was through Parthian territory, although “in early times only the maritime routes (to Da Qin) were discussed because they didn’t know there were overland routes.”[15]

This country (the Roman Empire) has more than four hundred smaller cities and towns. It extends several thousand li in all directions.The king has his capital (that is, the city of Rome) close to the mouth of a river (the Tiber). The outer walls of the city are made of stone.

This region has pine trees, cypress, sophora, catalpa, bamboo, reeds, poplars, willows, parasol trees, and all sorts of plants. The people cultivate the five grains [traditionally: rice, glutinous and non-glutinous millet, wheat and beans], and they raise horses, mules, donkeys, camels and silkworms. (They have) a tradition of amazing conjuring. They can produce fire from their mouths, bind and then free themselves, and juggle twelve balls with extraordinary skill.

…

They have always wanted to communicate with China but, Anxi (Parthia), jealous of their profits, would not allow them to pass.

The common people can write in hu (‘Western’) script. They have multi-storied public buildings and private; (they fly) flags, beat drums, (and travel in) small carriages with white roofs, and have a postal service with relay sheds and postal stations, like in the Middle Kingdom (China).[16]

Yu Huan offered a historically dubious explanation for how another empire could exist that rivaled China, reporting that the Romans “say they originally came from China, but left it.” He also provided a detailed list of products available in Roman territory, which is mostly a long list of expensive luxury items, fine fabrics, gems and precious metals. It also features some stranger trade items such as “rhinoceroses,” “black bears,” “divine tortoises,” and “red hornless dragons.”

“The king of Sifu (Petra) is subject to Da Qin. From his residence northeast to Yuluo (Karak), you go 340 li (141 km), and cross over a sea.” — The road into ancient Petra.

The Weilue also offers brief descriptions of Rome’s client states in the Near East that would be useful to traders. The kingdoms of Petra and Karak are mentioned as well as other places along the Great Rift Valley. No details are given save the direction and distance to other locations, and whether each kingdom was under Parthian or Roman control.[17]

Both the Weilue and Hou Hanshu represent the absolute limits of the transmission of knowledge in the ancient world. No civilizations further apart than Rome and China made contact in the ancient world. And while the two empire’s knowledge of each other was limited and often very inaccurate, the fact that they traded and conducted diplomatic relations testifies to how advanced each civilization had become.

References:

[1] Plutarch, Life of Alexander, trans. by Ian Scot-Kilvert, in The Age of Alexander, (New York: Penguin Press, 1973), 62.

[2] Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander, trans. by Aubrey de Sellincourt (New York: Penguin Press, 1958), 5.26.

[3] Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 62.

[4] “Selections from the Han narrative histories,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hantxt1.html#zhang (accessed February 22, 2012).

[5] “Selections from the Han narrative histories,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hantxt1.html#zhang (accessed February 22, 2012).

[6] “Selections from the Han narrative histories,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hantxt1.html#west (accessed February 22, 2012).

[7] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html (accessed February 22, 2012).

[8] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html (accessed February 22, 2012); Frances Wood, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002), 46-47.

[9] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html#sec11 (accessed February 22, 2012).

[10] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html#sec11 (accessed February 22, 2012).

[11] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html#sec12 (accessed February 22, 2012).

[12] Wood, The Silk Road, 44-45.

[13] “The Western Regions according to the Hou Hanshu,” http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html#sec12 (accessed February 22, 2012).

[14] Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, trans by John Bostock & F.R.S. H.T. Riley, (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137:book=12:chapter=41, accessed February 22, 2013), 12.41.

[15] Yu Huan, Weilue, at “The Peoples of the West, from the Weilue” at http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html#section13 (accessed February 22, 2013).

[16] Yu Huan, Weilue, at “The Peoples of the West, from the Weilue” at http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html#section11 (accessed February 22, 2013).

[17] Yu Huan, Weilue, at “The Peoples of the West, from the Weilue” at http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html#section14 (accessed February 22, 2013).

Image Sources: (Banner) http://www.ssqq.com/travel/barcelona2009romereborn.htm; http://history.cultural-china.com/en/46H151H593.html; http://www.silkroadproject.org/tabid/177/defaul.aspx; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%E6%BC%A2%E6%AD%A6%E5%B8%9D.jpg; (Body) http://www.ibiblio.org/chineseart/contents/atls/c04.htm#; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orodesi.jpg; Photo of an Ostrich © Christopher Jones 2012; Photo of Jaffa © Christopher Jones 2012; http://www.reenactor.net/forums/index.php?cat=14; Photo of Roman Glass © Christopher Jones 2012; http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/161latertheatre.htm; Photo of Petra © Christopher Jones 2012.

Article © Christopher Jones 2013.

Be not, O Greeks, so very hostilely disposed towards the Barbarians, nor look with ill will on their opinions. For which of your institutions has not been derived from the Barbarians? The most eminent of the Telmessians invented the art of divining by dreams; the Carians, that of prognosticating by the stars; the Phrygians and the most ancient Isaurians, augury by the flight of birds; the Cyprians, the art of inspecting victims. To the Babylonians you owe astronomy; to the Persians, magic; to the Egyptians, geometry; to the Phoenicians, instruction by alphabetic writing. Cease, then, to miscall these imitations inventions of your own.[1]

Thus the philosopher Tatian began his Address to the Greeks. An Assyrian by birth who was living in Rome in the mid 2nd century AD, Tatian first joined a pagan mystery cult before encountering the Christian Bible. He later described his conversion to Christianity:

I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks, and too divine to be compared with their errors; and I was led to put faith in these by the unpretending east of the language, the inartificial character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the precepts, and the declaration of the government of the universe as centred in one Being.[3]

As a result, Tatian jumped into the role of a cultural critic of the society that he once embraced. The Greeks saw themselves as the height of human civilization, but Tatian argued that many of their cultural and technological triumphs originated amongst the “barbarians” that 2nd century Greeks looked down on.

Cuneiform star chart from the Royal Library of Nineveh. From the British Museum in London.

Where we can check Tatian’s claims many of them prove to be accurate. Babylonian astronomy is well known to pre-date Greek civilization by thousands of years. Mathematical texts show us that the Egyptians made numerous advances in geometry and were able to calculate volume, the area of a triangle, and may even have developed a basic understanding of the Pythagorean Theorem long before Pythagoras.[4] And all the alphabets in the world are descended from the writing system of the Canaanites and Phoenicians which developed in the 2nd millennium BC.

So, why dispute the ages of inventions with the Greeks? Tatian’s main argument was that Judaism, and by extension Christianity, pre-dated Greek paganism and was therefore more likely to be true. Moses, after all, pre-dated Homer, for no one could agree when Homer actually lived while the histories of the Babylonians and Phoenicians established the early date of the Jews.[5]

Furthermore, he argued that Greek paganism was not only a recent invention but also immoral:

Aristotle, who absurdly placed a limit to Providence and made happiness to consist in the things which give pleasure, quite contrary to his duty as a preceptor flattered Alexander, forgetful that he was but a youth; and he, showing how well he had learned the lessons of his master, because his friend would not worship him shut him up and and carried him about like a bear or a leopard He in fact obeyed strictly the precepts of his teacher in displaying manliness and courage by feasting, and transfixing with his spear his intimate and most beloved friend, and then, under a semblance of grief, weeping and starving himself, that he might not incur the hatred of his friends.[6]

Criticism of Alexander the Great as an egomaniac and a tyrant cannot have gone over well in 2nd century Greece, when the sophist movement had taken Alexander hagiography to new heights. Yet, it is easy to see that this was how Alexander was viewed by those “barbarian” inhabitants of the Near East who as a result of Alexander’s boundless ambition saw their cultures were overrun with Hellenism and governed by tyrannical self-proclaimed god-kings.

Clement of Alexandria

Such are the battle lines that Tatian drew through world history. In the west, there was pagan Greece, snotty elitists who followed a multitude of gods and were not really sure why. In the east, there were a multitude of cultures from the Egyptians to the Jews to Tatian’s own Assyrians whom  the Greeks looked down on as barbarians but who had invented civilization and possessed more ancient and correct philosophies for understanding the world.

Fifty years later, Clement of Alexandria advanced a similar argument partially based on Tatian’s work. His Stromata featured an even longer list of innovations often attributed to the Greeks which were actually invented by various barbarian peoples. Astrology? Oil lamps? The twelve-month calendar? Medicine? Geometry? Required bathing before entering temples? All of these were invented by the ancient Egyptians. The trireme, the archetypal Greek warship? That came from Sidon. Flutes, notes, and diatonic harmonies? Those came from Phrygia. Hair dye came from Colchis, boxing gloves from Bithynia, chariots from Persia, and stonecutting and alphabetic writing from Phoenicia.[7]

“We have heard that the Persians were the first who fashioned the chariot, and bed, and footstool; and the Sidonians the first to construct a trireme.” — Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.16.

Furthermore, Clement argued that among the famous Greek philosophers “most of them were barbarians by extraction, and were trained among barbarians.” Pythagoras was a Tyrian or a Tuscan, and anyhow he studied in Egypt and also with Persian Magi and also consulted with Indian Brahmins. Antisthenes was a Phrygian. Thales was a Phoenician who studied under Egyptian priests. Plato studied under Sechneuphis of Heliopolis. Democritus, often called “the father of modern science,” studied in Babylon, Persia and Egypt to learn from the wisdom of all those great civilizations.[8]

We could debate how accurate this list is. Stonecutting definitely pre-dated Phoenician culture, our earliest known solar twelve-month calendar comes from Sumer instead of Egypt, and chariot originated in Mesopotamia. On the other hand, the origin of the trireme in Phoenicia is given serious weight by naval historians and we have already discussed the Phoenician origins of the alphabet and Egyptian origins of geometry.[9] But that is beside the point. Why did these learned men of Greece travel to the east to sit at the feet of Magi, Brahmins and priests? Because the east had something to offer to the west. Clement sought to show that the east had its own rich traditions of philosophy:

Thus philosophy, a thing of the highest utility, flourished in antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations. And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians; and the Druids among the Gauls; and the Samanaeans among the Bactrians; and the philosophers of the Celts; and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Saviour’s birth, and came into the land of Judaea guided by a star. The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanae;, and others Brahmins. And those of the Sarmanae; who are called Hylobii neither inhabit cities, nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands. Like those called Encratites in the present day, they know not marriage nor begetting of children.

Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours.

There are also among the Germans those called sacred women, who, by inspecting the whirlpools of rivers and the eddies, and observing the noises of streams, presage and predict future events. These did not allow the men to fight against Caesar till the new moon shone.

Of all these, by far the oldest is the Jewish race; and that their philosophy committed to writing has the precedence of philosophy among the Greeks…very clearly the author Megasthenes, the contemporary of Seleucus Nicanor, writes as follows in the third of his books, On Indian Affairs: All that was said about nature by the ancients is said also by those who philosophise beyond Greece: some things by the Brahmins among the Indians, and others by those called Jews in Syria.[10]

Unlike Tatian, Clement’s purpose in writing was not to convince the West that they should adopt the wisdom of the East so much as to remind the East that they, too, had made valuable contributions to human knowledge. Philosophy and science were not the exclusive properties of any one culture, they were part of the shared human experience. Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Buddha, Democritus, Plato, Moses…all of these men had something to offer. Clement’s real fear was that eastern Christians would associate philosophy and science with Greco-Roman paganism and throw out everything associated with it:

Some, who think themselves naturally gifted, do not wish to touch either philosophy or logic; nay more, they do not wish to learn natural science. They demand bare faith alone, as if they wished, without bestowing any care on the vine, straightway to gather clusters from the first. Now the Lord is figuratively described as the vine, from which, with pains and the art of husbandry, according to the word, the fruit is to be gathered.

We must lop, dig, bind, and perform the other operations. The pruning-knife, I should think, and the pick-axe, and the other agricultural implements, are necessary for the culture of the vine, so that it may produce eatable fruit. And as in husbandry, so also in medicine: he has learned to purpose, who has practiced the various lessons, so as to be able to cultivate and to heal. So also here, I call him truly learned who brings everything to bear on the truth; so that, from geometry, and music, and grammar, and philosophy itself, culling what is useful, he guards the faith against assault. Now, as was said, the athlete is despised who is not furnished for the contest. For instance, too, we praise the experienced helmsman who has seen the cities of many men, and the physician who has had large experience; thus also some describe the empiric. And he who brings everything to bear on a right life, procuring examples from the Greeks and barbarians, this man is an experienced searcher after truth, and in reality a man of much counsel, like the touch-stone (that is, the Lydian), which is believed to possess the power of distinguishing the spurious from the genuine gold.[11]

Eventually Christianity, originating in the East, out-competed and conquered paganism while absorbing some of its fruits. The philosophical heritage of Plato and Aristotle was harnessed to defend Christian orthodoxy, just as Clement had desired. The Eastern church retained its mystics, while the Western church embraced reason as a tool for understanding God.

In the 2nd century, Tatian asked the Greeks “For which of your institutions has not been derived from the Barbarians?” In the 21st century, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr responded to Saudi criticism of his country by exclaiming “Iraq is the cradle of civilization that taught humanity reading and writing, and some Bedouin riding a camel wants to teach us!” Clement may have proposed a way forward by recognizing all philosophy as a search for truth, but a search for truth does not remove basic aspects of human cultural identity. People will still take pride in their own culture’s accomplishments and compare them to other cultures. Arguments about who owns history, who invented what, and what culture contributed the most will go on forever. But as a side effect of the debate, one can hope that many people will take Clement of Alexandria’s message to heart and “bring everything to bear on the truth, culling what is useful.”

Part 1 – A Gallery of Inventions: Some Lesser Known Firsts from the Ancient Near East.
Part 2: More Inventions of the Ancient Near East

References:

[1] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, trans. by J.E. Ryland (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tatian-address.html, accessed Jan. 27, 2013), 1.

[2] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 29, 42; “Tatian,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14464b.htm).

[3] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 29.

[4] Luke Mastin, “Egyptian Mathematics,” Story of Mathematics (http://www.storyofmathematics.com/egyptian.html); J.J. O’Connor and E.F. Robertson, “An Overview of Egyptian Mathematics,” (http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Egyptian_mathematics.html); Marshall Claggett, Ancient Egyptian Science: A Sourcebook, Volume 3, Ancient Egyptian Mathematics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 196-197.

It must be noted that the Egyptians were concerned with practical mathematics. While they discovered Pythagorean triples, they did not formally describe an abstract theorem the way that Pythagoras did.

[5] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 31, 36-39.

[6] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 2.

[7] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, trans. by William Wilson, 1885, NewAdvent.org, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0210.htm (accessed July 5, 2011), 1.16.

[8] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.15.

[9] Peter James & Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 489; H.T. Wallinga, Ships and Sea Power before the Great Persian War: The Ancestry of the Ancient Trireme (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1993), 112-114.

[10] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.15.

[11] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 1.9.

Image Sources: (Banner) http://aleppocodex.org/aleppocodex.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saint-clement-of-alexandria.jpeg (Body) Photo by Author © Christopher Jones 2012; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saint-clement-of-alexandria.jpeg; http://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/a-trireme-in-new-york-harbor/

Article © Christopher Jones 2013.

Any historian who sets out to write a biography of the historical Mary is immediately confronted by two divergent narratives. The first view, held by Catholic and Orthodox Christians (and in part by Muslims) sees Mary as a girl consecrated from birth, who remained completely devoted to the service of God before, during and after the life of Jesus. According to this view, Mary was perpetually a virgin, married in name only, and had no biological children. On the other hand, the Protestant view (as well as that held by many modern critical scholars) is that Mary was a young, poor peasant girl raised, betrothed and married in the normal fashion. After the birth of Jesus she gave birth to other biological children.

Tradition holds this grotto under the Church of St. Anne in Jerusalem to be the birthplace of Mary, however this tradition only seems to date to the 5th century AD.

Every aspect of her life is muddled by the tension between the two views. Each view of Mary – prototypical nun or wife and mother – comes loaded with its own set of theological implications that are beyond the scope of this article. Most authors simply choose one interpretation, mention the other view in order to quickly dismiss it, and call it a day. But this fails to answer the important question of how we ended up with two narratives in the first place, and why so many people believe one or the other to be correct. Rather, this article will begin at the beginning of Mary’s life, take all sources into account, and work from there.

One immediately runs into difficulties establishing any basic facts about Mary’s early life. Her parents are not named in any 1st century sources, but tradition in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches holds that they were named Joachim and Anna. This cannot be traced earlier than the 2nd century.

Scholars have long grappled with the different genealogies given for Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Matthew traces the descent of Jesus from David and Solomon, through the Judean kings and then through the descendants of Jehoiachin in the post-exilic period. Luke on the other hand traces Jesus’ descent from David’s lesser known son Nathan.[1]

Many scholars beginning with John of Damascus in the 7th century have sought to explain the two competing genealogies by arguing that Matthew shows the ancestry of Joseph while Luke shows the ancestry of Mary. Yet, Luke explicitly identifies Jesus as “the son, so it was thought, of Joseph son of Heli.”[2] Advocates of this view are forced to propose a textual corruption of some sort and that the text originally read that Jesus was a descendant of Heli. The text would be reconstructed as something like “the son (as it was supposed, of Joseph, but really) of Heli.” Advocates of this view further argue that the name Heli is short for Eliakim, another variant of the name Joachim, the traditional name for the father of Mary.[3]

But why is Mary never mentioned in her own genealogy? John of Damascus argued that it was because “it was not the custom of the Hebrews nor of the divine Scripture to give genealogies of women,” ignoring that Matthew’s genealogy lists four of them and the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1-8 mention numerous women whenever they were deemed to be  worth mentioning. It seems rather strange that Luke, who otherwise paid much more attention to Mary than Joseph, would fail to mention Mary in his account of her lineage and substitute Joseph instead. Other scholars came up with different explanations for the discrepancy. For instance, in the early 3rd century, Sextus Julius Africanus argued that the line of Joseph had been muddled with numerous levirate marriages, and that original records had been lost, leading Matthew and Luke to reconstruct the ancestry of Joseph as best they could from oral traditions and private family records. Hence, they ended up with different lists.[4]

Regardless of the names of Mary’s parents, Luke does inform us that Mary was related to Elizabeth, the wife of Zechariah the priest and the mother of John the Baptist. Both Elizabeth and Zechariah were descendants of Aaron, the first high priest. Zechariah “belonged to the priestly division of Abijah,” one of the 24 priests named by David in Jerusalem.[5] This implies that Mary did not belong to the tribe of Judah, as is often alleged, but to the tribe of Levi. It also means that, contrary to the common Protestant claim that Mary was a poor peasant, she was in fact born into the hereditary ruling class of Jewish society. She definitely was not some sort of proto-marxist heroine of the lower classes as envisioned by certain neo-Anabaptist authors. Protestant Midrash aside, by the end of the 1st century BC, the priestly families of Jerusalem lived in large houses, had accumulated extreme amounts of wealth and held a lot of political power. Most of them seemed to have belonged to the Sadducee sect which attracted the powerful and wealthy but had little influence amongst the general population.[6]

Beneath the foundations of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem lie the remains of mansions belonging to the priestly families of Judea from the 1st century AD. If Mary was born into a priestly family, she likely grew up in a setting similar to this, enjoying the finest things that the land of Judea had to offer.

The possibility that Mary grew up a Sadducee is intriguing but there is no evidence for it. There is no hint of key Sadducean beliefs – rejection of divine fate, belief in only the Torah and rejection of the Oral Law, and rejection of the existence of an afterlife – in any of Mary’s brief dialogue in the Gospels. Of course, not everyone who was a priest was a Sadducee and not everyone inherits the religious beliefs of their parents. In any case, if Mary held to the Sadducees’ rejection of the existence of angels and divine fate it would completely clash with Luke’s narrative, which relies on angels and divine fate to shape events.[7]

Anything else that can be said about Mary’s childhood and upbringing depends entirely on how much weight is given to a mid 2nd century document called the Protoevangelium of James. The Protoevangelium is not accepted as canonical by any church, which will lead most Protestants to disregard it entirely, but the historian does not have the luxury of discarding sources simply because they do not fit a preconceived theory. The gospel purports to have been written by Jesus’ step-brother James at the time of the death of Herod but seems to depend on the nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke, meaning it post-dates those gospels. The work is one of several “infancy gospels” which began to appear in the 2nd century to meet a demand brought about by believers curious to know more about Jesus’ family, birth and childhood.[8]

Fresco showing Mary’s trial by water, from the Church of Santa Maria fores portas, in Castelseprio, Italy. From the 7th-9th centuries AD.

In the Protoevangelium, Joachim and Anna are a wealthy childless couple in Jerusalem earnestly praying for a child.
An angel appears to Anna telling her she will soon conceive, and nine months later she gives birth to Mary. In return, when Mary was three years old her parents took her to the Temple and dedicated her as a temple virgin in the service of the Lord. There, she lived in the Holy of Holies, fed by the hand of an angel, until she turned twelve years old.

At this point, the priests placed her in the care of Joseph, an elderly widower with children from a previous marriage. The Protoevangelium never refers to them as married. When Mary was discovered to be pregnant with Jesus, she and Joseph were given the water test for adulterers described in Numbers 5:12–27. They both pass, and begin their journey to Bethlehem where Mary stops in a cave, about to give birth. Joseph went to find a midwife, but Jesus was born by appearing out of a cloud and a bright light. The Protoevangelium ends with the flight to Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents, and Zechariah the priest is killed when he refuses to give up the location of his son John.[9]

The question is, how much of the Protoevangelium was invented out of whole cloth, and how much represents earlier traditions that may have some historical basis?

An initial reading says: not much. The story of Joachim and Anna praying for a child clearly draws on the Biblical stories of Sarah and Hannah (the Hebrew version of Anna, no less) where similar women seeking children were visited by angels or heard voices from God. Hannah even dedicated the resulting child to service in the Tabernacle and he slept in the Holy of Holies, just as Anna dedicates Mary in the Protoevangelium.[10]

Model of the Second Temple. From the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

A larger historical question was if there was even a system set up in the second Temple for “temple virgins” as described in the Protoevangelium. Catholic scholar Taylor Marshall believes evidence of a guild of women dates back to Tabernacle times. Exodus 38:8 references the “servers [feminine plural] who served at the entrance to the Tabernacle.” 1 Samuel 2:22 states that Eli’s sons “slept with the women who served at the the entrance to the Tabernacle” at Shiloh. The books of 2 and 3 Maccabees each reference “unmarried girls who were kept in seclusion” who mourned when the Temple was threatened by foreign monarchs. The 1st century pseudepigraphal work of 2 Baruch mentions “virgins who weave fine linen” and that they should burn their cloth so the enemy does not capture it.[11] All of this is frustratingly vague, and nothing here clearly describes a guild of unmarried young women dedicated to service in the Temple. In the Mishnah, the curtain over the Holy of Holies is described as being “made up of 82 ____” and two textual variants read either “maidens” (i.e., it was woven by them) or “ten thousand” (i.e., made up of 820,000 threads). The Talmud records a debate over whether “the women who wove the Temple curtains” were paid from the Temple’s operating funds or repair budget, but once again there is no suggestion that these women were unmarried or dedicated to service in the Temple.[12] There is no mention of such women in Josephus, or in the Kodashim order of the Mishnah and Talmud dealing with Temple practices. All told, the evidence for a guild of temple virgins working in the second temple is slim to none. It seems more likely that the author of the Protoevangelium was unfamiliar with the Temple and got the idea from pagan institutions such as the Vestal Virgins.

The suggestion in the Protoevangelium that Mary lived in the Holy of Holies of the Temple is not at all consistent with Jewish practice and is instead an attempt to make a theological allegory: Just as the Holy of Holies in the first Temple contained the Ark of the Covenant, so the second Temple contained Mary, the bearer of the New Covenant. Likewise, the “water test” administered to Joseph and Mary betrays an ignorance of Jewish practice: The ordeal was administered only to the woman, not to the man.[13]

The Protoevangelium‘s view of Joseph is rather curious, describing Joseph as an old man who was chosen by lot from all the widowers of Judea to marry Mary. When he protested that he was old and she was twelve, the priest reminded him  of how the sons of Korah who rebelled against Moses were swallowed up by the earth. Yet, the text stops short of saying that Mary and Joseph were married, even going so far as to modify the Biblical text. When Joseph discovers Mary is pregnant in the Gospel of Matthew, an angel tells him “do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife.” In the Protoevangelium, this is changed to “be not afraid of this maiden.” Instead of a husband, Joseph is portrayed as a guardian put there to care for Mary.[14]

Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley, so named although it has nothing to do with Absalom and dates to the 1st century BC.

The story of the martyrdom of Zechariah became much more intriguing in 2003 when Joe Zias discovered a Greek inscription on the monument known as Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. Although heavily damaged, the inscription read “This is the funerary monument of Zachariah, martyr, a very pious priest, father of John.” Although the monument was built in the 1st century BC or AD, the inscription likely dates to the 4th or 5th century AD based on the language and style of lettering. The tradition of Zechariah as a martyr may have begun by linking Zechariah the father of John the Baptist with a “Zechariah son of Berekiah” whom Jesus accused the Pharisees of murdering “between the Temple and the Altar.” The stories were further confused by another Zechariah son of Baruch, who was assassinated in the Temple courts during the Jewish Revolt in AD 70 and his body dumped in the Kidron Valley. Regardless, even if Zechariah son of Berekiah was the same as the father of John the Baptist, the Protoevangelium records that he was killed by Herod while Jesus said he was killed by the Pharisees, who were often opposed to Herod. It seems far more likely that Jesus was referencing Zechariah the Old Testament prophet, whose father was also named Berekiah. Zias could only conclude that “the inscription confirms all the known textual data.” The evidence is too vague to do anything else.[15]

Finally, the Protoevangelium records that Zechariah was High Priest and he was succeeded by Simon. Neither of these men are recorded as serving as a High Priest even though we know the name of every single High Priest from this period. It is hard to believe that this information would have been completely inaccessible in the 2nd century (the writings of Josephus were widely available to Christian authors throughout church history). Rather, it shows us that the author simply did not care. Whatever his goal was in writing the Protoevangelium – whether to promote certain theological views about Mary or simply to entertain – supplying accurate factual information did factor into the picture. Whatever traditions were incorporated into the narrative of the Protoevangelium were modified to fit the needs of the narrative. This can be seen in the changes the author made to the story of the Gospel of Matthew to make Joseph Mary’s guardian instead of her husband. The Protoevangelium’s historical value is next to nothing. Its only use is the evidence it can give us of popular beliefs about Mary in the 2nd century.

With the Protoevangelium of James discarded, the only sources we have for Mary’s early life are the four Gospels and local geographical traditions, and both provide scant information in this regard. A local tradition of uncertain provenance says that Mary and her parents resided in Sepphoris in the Galilee. Jews began to settle the Galilee region in large numbers in the 1st century BC, which is likely how Joseph ended up moving from his ancestral home of Bethlehem to Nazareth.[16]

Agricultural land in Galilee near Sepphoris, looking towards the site of Cana (in the far right).

We do not know how Mary and Joseph first met. Marriages were often arranged between families, however the use of marriage brokers to match couples is not attested before the 2nd century AD. Contrary to popular perception, men could also meet women on their own. Young women were not locked inside their homes until they were married, rather, they frequently left the home to draw water (wells were a common social gathering space), go to market, or even to find employment as shopkeepers. On the fifteenth day of the month of Av, Mishnaic and Talmudic sources report that “the daughters of Israel came out and danced in the vineyards” and “whoever was unmarried repaired thither.” The young men were instructed “do not set thine eyes on beauty but set thine eyes on good family.”[17]

While Mary’s age at betrothal is often given as being in her early teens (Catholic tradition says she was fourteen), evidence from inscriptions indicates that girls married any time between the ages of 12 and 26. Joseph was likely older, but how much older is not certain. Disregarding the Protoevangelium’s tales of an aged widower, ancient sources give varying numbers for the proper marriage age for a man. Philo of Alexandria argued that the time for a man to get married was between the ages of 28 and 35. On the other hand, the rabbis of the Talmud encouraged early marriage, with Rabbi Ishmael stating that God was angry with a man who waited to get married after the age of twenty. Most likely, the poorer the economic situation, the longer men waited to marry because they needed to be financially secure in order to support a family.[18]

Regardless of whether Joseph met Mary in Sepphoris where he may have worked or in the Jerusalem area where he had family, the two families would have arranged the betrothal, drawn up a ketubah or marriage-contract, and the groom would pay a small, symbolic bride price to the bride’s father. The betrothal period would last a year or two, during which the bride to be would continue to live at her parents’ house. For some purposes, the couple were already considered legally married. Ending a betrothal required a certificate of divorce.[19]

It was during this time, according to the Gospel accounts, that Mary’s life changed forever. Luke records that Mary was in Nazareth (for what purpose, we are not told) when an angel appeared to her and said: “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” Mary replied in bewilderment, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel informed her that she would conceive because “the Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” As a result, her child “will be called the Son of God.” Mary replied, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

Roman era village and agricultural terracing on a hillside at Safat, near Ein Karem.

Mary’s next actions betray a state of uncertainty and confusion. Told by the angel that he relative Elizabeth was six months pregnant despite her old age, she rushed to Zechariah and Elizabeth’s home (traditionally at Ein Kerem four miles west of Jerusalem). Encouraged by Elizabeth, she remained there three months before returning home.[20]

At some point in time, it became obvious that Mary was pregnant. Joseph was an observant Jew, faithful to the Law, and was well within his rights to have Mary thrown off the cliff near Nazareth and stoned to death for adultery. Priestly families were especially strict about upholding their family honor and purity, and any questionable ancestors in a person’s lineage could make them undesirable marriage partners.

But he did not want her to die, so he instead thought of a plan by which he would quietly divorce her. She would then live out the rest of her days in the household of her father or male relatives, forever single, but keeping her life and the life of her child. Instead, Matthew records that another angel appeared in a dream to Joseph, telling him to go ahead and marry Mary, because she had conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph then “did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife, but he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son.”[21]

Luke picks up the narrative again with a census ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus which forced every man to return to his ancestral home to register. The issues related to the date and historicity of the census have been dealt with extensively in other literature and will not be discussed here. Mary accompanied Joseph to Bethlehem, it has often been speculated that she did so to escape the suspicions and dirty looks that remaining home would have entailed, and her apparent shotgun wedding would have done little to assuage matters. On the other hand, the rabbinic authorities of the time were not entirely united in their opinion of whether it was permissible for a betrothed couple to have sexual intercourse, so it may or may not have mattered.[22]

Regardless of whether or not they thought it legitimate, the people of Nazareth certainly thought that Joseph was Jesus’ father. Luke records that at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry “he was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph. When Jesus returned to Nazareth and preached their they exclaimed “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”[23] Yet, a century later the pagan critic Celsus charged that Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier named Panthera, a charge which Origen astutely noted meant that Celsus was admitting there was something unusual about Jesus’ birth, otherwise he would simply have argued that Joseph was his natural father. Celsus’ allegations were later echoed by Jewish writers in the Talmud and the Toledot Yeshu.[24]

While Luke 2:7 is often translated to read that “there was no room for them in the inn,” it is unlikely that a town the size of Bethlehem would have even had an inn. The Greek word katalyma used in the verse is elsewhere translated “guest chamber,” and likely referred to a guest room in a house belonging to one of Joseph’s distant relatives. There was no room in the guest bedroom, so Joseph and Mary had to be housed in an “overflow room” usually used for storage. Here she gave birth to Jesus, and laid him in a manger pressed into service as a crib. In the 2nd century, Justin Martyr reported that Jesus was born in a cave, and many homes in the area had a room that was made from a cave in the hillside.[25]

The Grotto of the Nativity under the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the spot where Jesus was born.

The rest of the Christmas story, the visit of the shepherds, the dedication of the baby Jesus at the Temple, the visit of the Magi, and the resulting flight to Egypt until the death of Herod, are all so well known as to need no retelling. After returning from Egypt, Joseph and Mary relocated back to Nazareth to avoid the erratic reign of Herod’s son Archelaus.[26]

Luke tells us that after these events Mary “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart,” that is, she collected information in hopes of one day being able to understand her son and how her world had turned upside down. The family settled into a normal routine of life. Joseph resumed work as a Tekton, that is, an architect or building technician. He would have been able to command a good wage for this work. The family was very observant, for they made yearly trips to Jerusalem for the Passover.[27]

It is here that we come to the most controversial aspect in Jesus’ life. Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that Mary was a perpetual virgin despite being married to Joseph. This immediately runs into problems, in that all four Gospel writers describe Jesus as having brothers. When Jesus returned home to Nazareth and taught in the synagogue, the people “took offense to him” and exclaimed, “Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” Matthew and Luke repeat the same story. Luke further records that after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, the disciples met for prayer “along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”[28]

Paul wrote to the Galatians that three years after his conversion he met with “James, the Lord’s brother” in Jerusalem and called him a pillar of the church. Later, he wrote that the resurrected Jesus “appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” Josephus writes of this same James to say that the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus “assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James…when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.” The public outcry led to Ananus’ removal from the office of High Priest.[29]

In the latter half of the 2nd century, Hegesippus reported that during the reign of Domitian (81-96 AD) “there still survived of the kindred of the Lord the grandsons of Judas, who according to the flesh was called his brother.” His contemporary Sextus Julius Africanus mentioned people “called desposyni, on account of their connection with the family of the Saviour” who lived in the villages of “Nazara and Cochaba” and “pride themselves in preserving the memory of their noble descent.”[30]

At the same time, the 2nd century saw a growing emphasis on the theology of the Incarnation and a growing Mariology meant to counter the claims of Gnostics such as Valentinus who argued that Christ did not have a human nature and was purely divine. According to the Valentinians, Mary was merely a conduit for bringing Jesus into the world, not his mother in the biological sense. Against this view, theologians such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons argued that Jesus did in fact have a biological mother from whom he derived his human nature, while the virgin birth is evidence of his divine nature.[31]

“Mary from an Annunciation” by Francesco di Valdambrino, Siena, Italy, 1425. In the Bode Museum in Berlin.

Alongside the theologians, different theological interpretations of Mary began to develop among the rank and file, best demonstrated by the Protoevangelium of James. It is an intriguing feature of Marian theology that much of it was developed by the Catholic rank and file laity rather than by theologians in ivory towers in Alexandria or grottos in Bethlehem. The infancy gospels were decidedly down-market, written for people who “preferred hearing stories of a super-Jesus to contemplating theories of the eternal generation of the Logos.”[32] Here, the idea first appeared that Mary was a virgin from birth to death.

This view was largely ignored by the church fathers until the beginning of the 3rd century. Before the 3rd century, writers such as Ignatius of Antioch, Aristides, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus defended the virgin birth without arguing for Mary’s perpetual virginity. In the late 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria wrote that “many even down to our own time” regarded Mary as a virgin only until the birth of Jesus, while “some say that” she remained a perpetual virgin. In the early 3rd century Origen wrote that “some say, basing it on a tradition in the Gospel according to Peter, as it is entitled, or ‘The Book of James’ that the brethren of Jesus were sons of Joseph by a former wife.” He added that those who held these views did so because of a “wish to preserve the honour of Mary in virginity to the end.” Nevetheless, he opined that “I think it in harmony with reason that Jesus was the first-fruit among men of the purity which consists in chastity, and Mary among women; for it were not pious to ascribe to any other than to her the first-fruit of virginity.” Finally, in the first years of the 3rd century Hippolytus of Rome articulated the analogy implicit in the Protoevangelium between Mary’s womb and the Ark of the Covenant. Mary was “all-holy, ever-virgin.” Just as the Ark contained the Covenant between God and the Israelites, so Mary’s womb contained Jesus, the new Covenant between God and mankind. Just as none could enter the Holy of Holies but the High Priest, so none could enter Mary’s womb but the new High Priest Jesus Christ.[33]

Yet, dissenters persisted. Tertullian affirmed the virgin birth while holding that Jesus’ brothers were in fact his brothers. He even challenged whether Christians should speak of “the Virgin Mary” at all, since Paul wrote of Jesus as “born of a woman” rather than “born of a virgin” and “although she was a virgin when she conceived, she was a wife when she brought forth her son.” He sought to counter those who thought Jesus was only divine by arguing that Jesus’ mother and brothers showed his humanity. After all, in Matthew 12:49 Jesus pointed to his disciples and said “these are my mother and my brothers.” Noting that “heretics have removed this passage from the gospel,” he argued that Jesus was transferring the title of blood relationships to those who had faith. He couldn’t be transferring this title unless he had someone to transfer it from, therefore, he had to have actual blood relations who were his mother and brothers.[34]

In Rome in the fourth century, Helvidius made another series of arguments against Mary’s perpetual virginity. Matthew 1:23 says that she was betrothed to Joseph, not entrusted to him for a guardianship. Matthew 1:25 says that Joseph “had no union with her until she gave birth to a son,” and “until” implies that Joseph and Mary did have union after she gave birth. Why does the author not simply say that “he did not have relations with her again” like in the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38:26? And why does everyone from the people of Jesus’ hometown to the Apostle Paul speak of Jesus’ brothers? Finally, what is wrong with the idea of Mary having a normal marriage? “Are virgins better than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were married men?” asked Helvidius. “Are not infants daily fashioned by the hands of God in the wombs of their mothers? And if so, are we bound to blush at the thought of Mary having a husband after she was delivered?[35]

“Virgin Mary from the Church of Our Lady in Ravensburg” by Michael Erhart, 1480, Ravensburg, Germany. In the Bode Museum in Berlin.

In the east, a sect know to their detractors as the Antidicomarians existed in Arabia which expressed similar views. Nevertheless, the tide was turning and the view of perpetual virginity was becoming the norm. Epiphanius of Salamis denounced the Antidicomarians as blasphemers, “as though they had a grudge against the Virgin and sought to cheapen her reputation.” Jesus, as Firstborn of all creation, could not have brothers. He was the “Lion of Judah” and since lionesses can only conceive once, so Mary could only have conceived once. Mary took a lifelong vow of virginity and was betrothed to Joseph for protection only, because Joseph and eighty year old widower at the time. Jesus’ brothers and sisters were born from Joseph’s earlier marriage. And after all, the name “Mary” means “virgin,” and this has to have some significance. Finally, he concluded with an impassioned plea that “He who honors the Lord, also honors his Holy Vessel. He who dishonors the Holy Vessel, dishonors his own master as well. Leave Mary, the Holy Vessel, the Holy Virgin alone!”[36]

In Rome, Jerome likewise countered Helvidius with a similarly invective-filled work titled The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary. Jesus’ brothers, he argued, were in fact his cousins. The disciple James son of Alphaeus was the same as James the brother of Jesus. Joseph, in fact, was a perpetual virgin just like Mary.[37]

Epiphanius’s spectacularly bad arguments (lions give birth to litters of cubs at a time, and Mary is a form of the Hebrew Miriam, which goes back to the time of Moses and is a contraction of the Egyptian name Meri-amun, meaning “daughter of [the Egyptian god] Amun”) give little support to his position, and most of Jerome’s arguments are rationalizations (the accounts COULD be interpreted to say that Jesus’ brothers were cousins, etc) rather than arguments from evidence. It is only at the end of Jerome’s work that he shows his true cards. While denying that he had “in the least disparaged marriage,” he argued that virginity was preferable, for there were already too many people on the earth: “The world is already full, and the population is too large for the soil. Every day we are being cut down by war, snatched away by disease, swallowed up by shipwreck, although we go to law with one another about the fences of our property.” Instead, Jerome preferred that Christians be virgins and dedicated to God, rather than be distracted by “the prattling of infants, the noisy household, children watching for her word and waiting for her kiss, the reckoning up of expenses, the preparation to meet the outlay” and all the other worries of motherhood. “Tell me, pray, where amid all this is there room for the thought of God? Are these happy homes? Where there is the beating of drums, the noise and clatter of pipe and lute, the clanging of cymbals, can any fear of God be found?”[38]

The problem is, this seems to be exactly what happened. Whilst Mary was left pondering the meaning of Jesus’ birth, we next encounter her when the twelve year old Jesus was left behind in the Temple over Passover. When they found Jesus learning from the priests, she scolded him: “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” Jesus replied that he had to be “in my Father’s house,” but as Luke records that his parents “did not understand what he was saying to them.” Joseph disappears from the bible after this point and it is often surmised that he died when Jesus was still an adolescent. Mary next appears when Jesus was thirty and beginning his ministry, coming to Capernaum with her sons in order “to take charge of him, for they said, ‘he is out of his mind.’” Indeed, there is, as Tertullian put it “a want of evidence of His mother’s adherence to Him.” Whatever she was expecting after pondering the events of Jesus’ birth, she was apparently not expecting him to become an itinerant preacher drawing crowds from as far as Idumea, Jordan and Sidon.[39]

Icon of Mary and child. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

And there Mary exits the ministry of Jesus, along with his brothers, a skeptic of his ministry and purpose. All told, there seems little reason to believe that Mary was a perpetual virgin. The doctrine was not based on any historical evidence, but on a belief that celibate asceticism was preferable to married childbearing as well as an analogy between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant which presupposed a continuity of sacred space. In this manner of reasoning, theological assumptions direct history, rather than letting the historical record determine theological assumptions. It certainly does not fit in a 1st century Jewish context, for God commanded Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and increase in number.” None of the major Jewish schools of thought advocated celibacy. In fact, the Mishnah stated that if a marriage did not produce children after ten years it was required that a couple divorce, for to remain married would be in defiance of the commandment.[40]

Mary reappears in the life of Jesus at the crucifixion, and even there, her presence is only mentioned in the Gospel of John. While Jesus was hanging on the cross, Mary, Mary’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene stood nearby and observed. When Jesus saw her and his disciple John there, he said to her “Dear woman, here is your son.” To John he said “here is your mother.” Then, “from that time on, this disciple took her into his home.”[41]

Since the days of Jerome and Epiphanius, advocates of Mary’s perpetual virginity have used this passage to make a case for Jesus’ lack of brothers. Why did Jesus commit Mary to John’s care, if Mary had other sons that could care for her?[42] Yet, the skepticism of Jesus’ family provides a ready explanation for this: If Jesus’ brothers did not believe in his ministry, he could have had good reason to not trust them. Instead, by commissioning John to care for his mother, he could keep exposing his family to his teachings even when he was gone.

Grotto under the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. One tradition holds that Mary lived in a house on this spot in her old age and eventually died here.

Apparently it worked, for Mary appears again in the first chapter of Acts, in attendance at a prayer meeting along with Jesus’ brothers. And from this point on the historical evidence trails off. We do not know if she lived to see her son James thrown off the temple and murdered in Jerusalem in 62 AD. All available evidence indicates that John relocated to Ephesus, but we do not know when he did so. Therefore, two traditions have sprung up. One states that Mary lived in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, at a site later commemorated by the “Mother of all Churches” as well as the modern Dormition Abbey. She was buried in the Kidron Valley. The other tradition states that Mary moved with John to Ephesus, where she died and was buried.[43]

Since then, Mary’s role has only grown in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. After all, if Mary gave Jesus his human form, she had to be somehow shielded from Original Sin to avoid passing this to Jesus, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception developed. And if Mary was not born with Original Sin, she was free from even venial sin and lived a sinless life. The teaching of the Assumption – that after the end of her life Mary was taken both body and spirit into heaven – was a tradition for millennia before finally being defined as doctrine by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Orthodox Christianity rejects the concept of hereditary original sin and therefore has no need of an Immaculate Conception, but accepts the Assumption in a modified form as the Dormition of Mary.

While many early Protestant theologians held to many aspects of Catholic Mariology, over time the Reformation principles of Sola Scriptura, Sola Christus and Soli Deo Gloria led Protestants to abandon most of the doctrines of Marian theology in favor of a view of Mary that relied solely on the text New Testament. Rather than a cosmic singularity, Mary came to be understood as thoroughly average person chosen by God to be used in extraordinary ways. As such, for Protestants Mary is a role model for believers to follow rather than a woman of unattainable perfection.

With that, we can conclude with a piece universally admired: Mary’s modest contribution to the New Testament, the famous Magnificat:

My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
even as he said to our fathers.

“Our Lady of Sorrows” by Pedro Roldan, Sevilla, Spain, c. 1670. In the Bode Museum in Berlin.

Mary’s blessed state and favor with God brought her joy but also brought her immense suffering. She gave birth to Jesus under a cloud of suspicion, grew distant from him as he began his ministry, saw him crucified, and perhaps lived to see her other son James murdered. Yet, she still considered herself blessed, not for the material benefits in her life but because she saw God using her to bring about his plan of salvation “even as he said to our fathers.”[44]

References:

[1] Matthew 1:1-16; Luke 3:23-38; 2 Samuel 2:14.

[2] Luke 3:23.

[3] “Genealogy of Christ,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06410a.htm (accessed December 22, 2012).

[4] John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, trans. by E.W. Watson and L. Pullan, (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3304.htm, accessed December 22, 2012), 4.14; Sextus Julius Africanus, Letter to Aristides, (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0614.htm, accessed December 17, 2012), 1-5.

[5] Luke 1:5, 36; 1 Chronicles 24:10.

The precise relation of Mary to Elizabeth is unclear, except that Elizabeth was significantly older than Mary.

[6] M. Stern, “Aspects of Jewish Society: The Priesthood and Other Classes,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, ed. by Shmuel Safrai & M. Stern (Fortress Press, 1976), 576-577, 609-611; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. by William Whiston, 1737 from http://sacred-texts.com/jud/josephus/index.htm#aoj (accessed December 22, 2012), 13.10.6, 3; Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. by William Whiston, 1737 from http://sacred-texts.com/jud/josephus/index.htm (accessed December 22, 2012), 2.8.14.

[7] For Sadducean beliefs, see Josephus, The Jewish War, 2.8.14; Antiquities of the Jews, 13.5.9, 13.10.6; Mark 12:18; Acts 23:8.[8] Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 214; “Apocryphal Gospels of Catholic Origin,” The Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01601a.htm#III1 (accessed December 22, 2012).Another example of a 2nd century infancy gospel is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Most other infancy gospels are based on these two.

[9] The Protoevangelium of James, trans. by. Alexander Walker (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0847.htm, accessed December 19, 2012).

[10] Paul Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory: Carta’s Atlas of Biblical Biography (Jerusalem: CARTA, 2009), 160; 1 Samuel 2:21-28, 3:3; Protoevangelium of James, 7.

[11] Taylor Marshall, “Did Jewish Temple Virgins Exist and was Mary a Temple Virgin?” Canterbury Tales, http://cantuar.blogspot.com/2011/12/did-jewish-temple-virgins-exist-and-was.html (accessed December 22, 2012); Exodus 38:8; 2 Samuel 2:22-23; 2 Maccabees 2:18; 3 Maccabees 1:18; 2 Baruch 10:19, trans. by R.H. Charles (http://wesley.nnu.edu/sermons-essays-books/noncanonical-literature/noncanonical-literature-ot-pseudepigrapha/the-book-of-the-apocalypse-of-baruch-the-son-of-neriah-or-2-baruch/, accessed December 22, 2012);

While 2 Baruch is ostensibly about the destruction of the first Temple, it was written after the destruction of the second Temple and was undoubtedly influenced by it.

[12] Mishnah Shekalim, 8:5; Bab. Talmud, Kethuboth 106a (English translation found at http://www.halakhah.com/).

[13] Protoevangelium of James, 16; Numbers 5:11-31.

[14] Protoevangelium of James, 8-9, 14, Matthew 1:20.

[15] Joe Zias and Emil Puech, “The Tomb of Absalom Reconsidered,” Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 68, No. 4, (December 2005), 148-165 (available online at: http://tfba.co/content/index.php/projects/34-tomb-of-absalom); Matthew 23:35; Josephus, The Jewish War, 4.5.4; Zechariah 1:1.

[16] “The Blessed Virgin Mary,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15464b.htm (accessed December 23, 2012); Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 157-159.

[17] Shmuel Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 752-755; Mishnah Taanith, 4:8; Bab. Talmud, Taanith 30b-31a.

[18] Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 752-755; David W. Chapman, “Marriage and Family in Second Temple Judaism,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, ed. by Ken M. Campbell (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2003), 186-187; James S. Jeffers, “Jewish and Christian Families in First Century Rome,” in Judaism and Christianity in First Century Rome, ed. by Karl Paul Donfried and Peter Richardson (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1998), 134-135; Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book1.html, accessed December 23, 2012), 103; Bab. Talmud, Kiddushin 29b.

[19] Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 160; Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 752-753; Chapman, “Marriage and Family in Second Temple Judaism,” in Marriage and Family in the Biblical World, 186-194.

[20] Luke 1:26-45.

[21] Matthew 1:18-25; Deuteronomy 22:13-21; Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 162; Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 753.

[22] Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 162-163; Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 756-757.

[23] Luke 3:23, 4:22.

[24] Origen, Against Celsus, trans. by Frederick Crombie (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0416.htm, accesed December 23, 2012), 1.32; Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 21-22.

[25] Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 163; Luke 2:6-7; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, trans. by Marcus Dods and George Reith (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0128.htm, accessed December 23, 2012), 78.

The birth in a cave is also recorded in the Protoevangelium of James, although that work’s relation to Justin is unclear and this may indicate the existence of a pre-existing tradition of birth in a cave. The preserved Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem seems to support this.

[26] Matthew 2:21-23.

[27] Luke 2:19, 2:41; Ben Witherington III, Women in the Earliest Churches (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 141-142; Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 168.

[28] Mark 6:1-3; Matthew 13:53-57; Luke 4:14-30; Acts 1:13-14.

[29] Galatians 1:19, 2:9; 1 Corinthians 15:7; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 20.9.1.

[30] Hegesippus, Fragments “Concerning the Relatives of Our Savior,” (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hegesippus.html, accessed December 24, 2012); Sextus Julius Africanus, Epistle to Aristides, 5.

[31] Epiphanius, Panarion, trans. by Frank Williams (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 31.7.3; Irenaeus of Lyons, Against All Heresies, trans. by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm, accessed December 18, 2012), 3.19.1-3, 3.22.1-2; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 66-67.

[32] John T. Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman Army, A.D. 173-337,” Church History, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), p. 156.

[33] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans,trans. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm, accessed December 21, 2012), 1; Aristides, Apology, trans. by D.M. McKay (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/aristides-kay.html, accessed December 18, 2012), 2; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, trans. by William Wilson (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0210.htm, accessed December 25, 2012), 7.16; Origen, Commentary on Matthew, trans. by John Patrick (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1016.htm, accessed December 25, 2012), 10.17; Hippolytus of Rome, On Daniel, trans. by S.D.F. Salmond (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0502.htm, accessed December 25, 2012), 2.6; Hippolytus of Rome, Against Beron and Helix, trans. by. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/hippolytus-dogmatical.html, accessed December 25, 2012), fr. 8.

[34] Tertullian, Against Marcion, trans. by Peter Holmes (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0312.htm, accessed December 26, 2012), 4.19; Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, trans. by Peter Holmes (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0315.htm, accessed December 26, 2012), 7, 23.

[35] Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, trans. by W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3007.htm, accessed December 20, 2012), 3, 5, 9, 13-14, 20.

[36] Epiphanius, Panarion, 78.2.1-2, 78.6.1-2, 78.8.2-4, 78.21.1-6.

[37] Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15-18.

[38] Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 21-23.

[39] Luke 2:41-49; Mark 3:20-35; Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 7.

[40] Safrai, “Home and Family,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, Vol. 2, 749, 791.

[41] John 19:25-27.

[42] Epiphanius, Panarion, 78.10.10; Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 15.

[43] Wright, Greatness, Grace & Glory, 172.

[43] Luke 1:46-55.

Image Sources: All images © Christopher Jones 2012, except the following:

Fresco at Castelsprio: http://www.arts.magic-nation.co.uk/annunciation23.htm

Photo of Absalom’s Pillar: © Ariel Horowitz, taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Avtomb.JPG

Article © Christopher Jones 2012.

Part 1 – A Gallery of Inventions: Some Lesser Known Firsts from the Ancient Near East.
Part 3 – Tatian, Clement of Alexandria and the Battle for History.

My post from last month highlighting a number of less well known inventions from the ancient Near East proved quite popular, so a sequel is of course forthcoming. Once again, this series avoids covering well known innovations like cities, writing, schools, agriculture and the wheel. Here are some more inventions that you may not know came from the ancient Near East.

1. Investment Banking

The Great Ziggurat of Ur. Sumerian temples played a major role in the ancient Mesopotamian economy.

Modern banking traces its origins to Babylonian temples in the early 2nd millennium BC. Ancient Mesopotamian temples always had a redistributive economic function. Temples took in donations and tax revenue and amassed great wealth. They then redistributed these goods to people in need such as widows, orphans, and the poor (sometimes the temples became corrupt and hoarded wealth, but that’s a topic for another article).

After a thousand years of this, the priests who ran the temples were literally sitting on giant piles of money. So around the time of Hammurabi (in the 18th century BC), they began to make loans. Old Babylonian temples made numerous loans to poor and needy entrepreneurs. The loans were made at reduced below-market interest rates lower than those offered on loans given by private individuals, and sometimes arrangements were made for the creditor to make food donations to the temple instead of repaying interest.[1]

Nevertheless, the temples still lacked many of the features of a full bank. They did not take deposits, issue checks, or engage in fractional reserve banking. They were religious institutions offering loans as a charity service, closer to modern microfinance initiatives than to Goldman Sachs.

Something closer to modern banking emerged in the neo-Babylonian period in the 7th century BC. Banking was conducted by certain families who passed the trade on from parents to children. The Ea-iluta-bani family of the city of Borsippa was active from 687 to 487 BC. Beginning as mid-level land owners possessing several tracts of agricultural land, the men of the family married well, received decent sized dowries, and invested their liquid assets (mostly silver and food products) in loans.

Cuneiform tablet detailing a loan of silver, c. 1800 BC. The text reads:
“3 1/3 silver sigloi, at interest of 1/6 sigloi and 6 grains per sigloi, has Amurritum, servant of Ikun-pi-Istar, received on loan from Ilum-nasir. In the third month she shall pay the silver.”
1 sigloi=8.3 grams.

Numerous contract documents have been recovered which list recipients of loans, the amount loaned, the term of the loan and the interest rate to be paid. When the loan was repaid, the tablet was usually broken. This gives us a possibly skewed picture of loans, because the only tablets we can read are from the loans that were not repaid.

What we can tell is that the Ea-iluta-bani family generally loaned at 20% annual interest. In other cases, possibly when the debtor was less reliable, items were taken as security in lieu of interest. If the loan was not repaid, the item would be kept and sold. Sometimes the security was an item that increased in value, such as a slave that could perform service for the creditors for the duration of the loan. This was in effect a disguised form of interest.

The Ea-iluta-bani family tended to make about half of their loans in silver and the other half in food products. There were no coins in use, so silver was measured by weight and purity. Silver had the advantage of having a fairly constant value. Food products on the other hand tended to decrease in value shortly after the harvest time and increase in value during times of the year when they were less plentiful. The family, therefore, tried structure contracts so as to lend out foodstuffs when they were cheapest and get repaid when they were more more expensive, making a greater profit.

Silver, on the other hand, could be loaned out at any time. 80% of our surviving contracts are for periods six months or less, but this may simply indicate that short term loans were less likely to be repaid. The Ea-iluta-bani family women would often loan out their dowry as a long term investment in order to make a steady stream of profit from interest payments.

By the time of the Persian Empire, finance was a major business in the cities Babylon, Borsippa, Sippar, Uruk, Nippur, Uruk, Larsa and Ur. Banking families such as the Egbi in Babylon, Iddin-Nabu of Babylon and Murashu of Nippur became very wealthy and even engaged in international commerce with countries outside of Mesopotamia. The Murashu broadened their investments under Persian rule, in addition to simple loans they branched out into real estate and managed and rented land. Due to their large land holdings, the Murashu family became extremely powerful in Persian-controlled Mesopotamia. They may have become too powerful. All record of their activity ceases after the 10th year of Darius II in 413 BC. Either the records are lost, or Darius moved to end their power.[2]

2. Poison Gas

In AD 256, the Sassanid Persians under Shah Shapur I laid siege to the Roman border fortress town of Dura-Europos in Syria on the Euphrates River. During the assault, the Persians built several siege ramps. They also dug a number of mines to try and cause the walls of the fortress to collapse.[3]

Aerial view of the fortress town of Dura-Europos, on the west bank of the Euphrates on the border of Roman Syria. Tower 19 was situated in the middle of the wall to the left side of the picture.

One mine was dug at Tower 19 on the west wall of the city. The Persians started the tunnel in the back of a rock-cut tomb outside the city limits and tunneled through the soft gypsum until they reached the foundations of the walls. They pulled out some of the foundation stones and replaced them with timber, intending to set them on fire and collapse the wall.

Diagram showing the jumble of remains of Roman soldiers found in the tunnel under Tower 19 at Dura-Europos. The green discs are metal studs from the middle of shields.

But the Roman defenders had been watching all of this. They began building their own walls higher to thwart the siege ramp. They then dug their own tunnel under the ramp, causing it to collapse. To counter the tunnel under Tower 19, the Romans began digging their own tunnel out from the walls. The goal was to meet the Parthian tunnel underground, fight them under the city walls, and capture their tunnel before they could do any damage to the walls.[4]

But the Roman tunnel was at a higher level than the Parthian tunnel. When the Romans broke through the roof of the Parthian tunnel, the Parthians ignited a mixture of pitch and sulfur, producing a cloud of poisonous sulfur dioxide that would have asphyxiated the Roman soldiers within seconds.

The remains of the lone Persian soldier who died in the tunnel under Tower 19, overcome by the gas.

French, American and Syrian archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1930′s discovered twenty Roman soldiers jumbled in the tunnel. A single  soldier in Parthian armor was found with his body half burned. He was likely the last man out charged with lighting the mixture, and was overcome by the gas before he could escape. It was not until 2009 that chemical analysis showed the presence of sulfur dioxide inside the tunnel.[5]

Once the gas cleared, the Parthians returned to the tunnel and set the supports on fire. The tunnel collapsed, but the wall merely dropped a few meters without toppling.

Despite the Roman efforts, Dura-Europos eventually fell to the Persians. Shapur I ordered the city destroyed, and it was never rebuilt.[6]

3. Zoos

Painting showing a captive giraffe from the tomb of Rekhmire, a vizier under Pharaohs Thutmose III and Amenhotep II.

Monarchs in the ancient Near East commonly maintained zoos as symbols of prestige. In this way, zoos served the same function as massive palace gardens or giant statues of winged bulls: They looked cool. A well supplied zoo stocked with exotic animals from all over the empire and beyond showcased the king’s influence and power to collect such animals and pay for their housing and upkeep.

The earliest evidence for this practice stretches as far back as 3500 BC, in Predynastic Egypt. Excavations at the Late Predynastic city of Hierakonpolis have shown that the local ruler there kept a large collection of animals. Excavations have uncovered the remains of 112 animals, including ten dogs, a cow and calf, two elephants, three hippos, eleven baboons and six wildcats. Some of the animals were buried on mats with grave goods. The bones of some of them had evidence of healed fractures and indications they were fed a captive diet, indicating they had been cared for.[7]

Assyrian relief on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (ruled 859-824 BC), showing conquered peoples bringing an elephant and two monkeys for the royal zoo.

Egyptian Pharaohs maintained zoos all the way down to the time of the Ptolemies, even keeping large, dangerous and hard to care for animals such as lions, bears, gazelles and giraffes. The practice spread to Mesopotamia as well. The Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (ruled from 1114-1076 BC) seems to have popularized the practice of collecting animals as tribute and keeping them in a palace zoo. Later, Assurnasirpal recorded that “I caught animals alive. I collected in my city Calah herds of wild oxen, elephants, lions, ostriches, male and female monkeys, wild asses, gazelles, deer, bears, panthers…all the beasts of plain and mountain, and displayed them to all the people of my land.”[8]

4. Metal Water Pipes

Plumbing and sewage is a necessary part of high-density urbanization and therefore plumbing is also as old as cities themselves. Sewers are first known from the Indus Valley civilization at Mohenjo-Daro at around 2700 BC. Terra-cotta pipes were used at the Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete to bring water from the mountains to the palace at about 2000 BC.

Scale model reconstruction of the pyramid and temple complex of Sahure.

But the first known use of metal water pipes comes from the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Sahure at Abusir, Egypt. Sahure was a member of the 5th Dynasty, and reigned from 2487 to 2475 BC. He built a small pyramid which was later largely dismantled by looters seeking to re-use the stone. Next to the pyramid he built a mortuary temple, which at first appearance was also unremarkable compared to other Old Kingdom mortuary temples. Closer investigation of some of the offering rooms used by the priests revealed that they had drains plumbed with copper pipes. The temple featured over 590 feet (180m) of pipe. The pipes were all made from sheets of copper folded over to make a tube. The drains connected to a central sewer paved over with limestone slabs that drained wastewater away from the complex.[9]

5. Greek Fire

The use of fire in warfare is very old. Assyrian siege reliefs show defenders using burning materials to try and set attacking siege engines on fire. However, the use of oil rags, burning arrows, and torches had its limitations, and enterprising military engineers set about finding new ways to make use of fire. At the siege of Delium during the Peloponnesian War in 424 BC, the Boetian attackers built a flamethrower which used a bellows to blow pitch and sulfur through an iron tube and quickly turned Delium’s wooden city walls into a blazing inferno. However, this weapon suffered from very short range, requiring the machine to nearly touch the walls.[10]

In the early 3rd century AD, the Roman army officer and diplomat from Ceasarea named Sextus Julius Africanus described a new mixture that could be used by defenders of cities to set siege engines on on fire. Unlike pitch-based confections, this new mixture was supposed to spontaneously combust upon contact with air:

Kindle fire spontaneously also by this composition: It is prepared, indeed, thus: of native sulfur, of rock salt, of ashes, of thunder stone, of pyrites, pounding equal amounts fine in a black mortar, the sun being at the zenith; also there is mixed together black mulberry sap and Zacynthian asphalt, liquid and free flowing, an equal amount of each, so as to become sooty colored; then there is added to the asphalt the least bit of quicklime.

This mixture contains several ingredients that are highly flammable. Sulfur’s flammable nature is well known. “Zacynthian asphalt” was pitch or bitumen (oil) from the Greek island of Zakynthos.

Quicklime heats rapidly upon contact with water, and this could ignite highly flammable substances. It may have been the ingredient that caused the whole mixture to ignite.

Most intriguing is the inclusion of an ingredient of uncertain identity called “thunder stone” (Greek brontesinos) It is interesting to note that the mixture already contains two of the three ingredients in gunpowder: sulfur and charcoal (the ashes that Africanus mentions). Was “thunder stone” the third ingredient, potassium nitrate? As far as we know, Gunpowder first appeared in China 700 years after Africanus lived and did not reach the Near East until the 13th century. It has been speculated that Byzantine Greek Fire contained potassium nitrate, but that has generally been discounted by recent scholars.

What is sure is that Africanus’ mixture was extremely volatile and dangerous:

But it is necessary to knead it carefully with the sun at the zenith, and to protect the face, for it ignites unexpectedly. But, being put together, it is necessary to seal it in some copper container, this having it at readiness in a box, and also no longer exposing it to the sun. But at night, if you should wish to inflame the armament of the enemy, smear it on them or some other things, but secretly; for when the sun appears, all will be burned.[11]

The lack of explosive force seems to indicate that the substance was not gunpowder. Rather, its incendiary properties seem to have made it useful as a tool of sabotage. It seems to have had a very low combustion point and therefore needed to be kept cool or used at night. All in all, it has been suggested that the mixture was a forerunner of Byzantine-era Greek Fire. Some have even suggested that the passage was a later insertion into the text based solely on its similarity to 7th century Greek Fire. Since the exact composition of Greek Fire has been lost, we cannot say for sure if the two are related, but it raises the interesting possibility that Greek Fire was in use in some form for several hundred years earlier than conventionally thought.[12]

6. Makeup

Shell-shaped cosmetics case from the Royal Graves of Ur, c. 2600 BC.

The earliest known cosmetics were discovered in the Royal Graves of Ur, a series of Sumerian burials from the Early Dynastic IIIa period of Ur (c. 2600 BC). The graves of prominent women contained gold scallop-shell dishes which when tested were shown to contain pigment residue. A smaller cosmetic box owned by Queen Pu-abi featured an ornate carving of a lion attacking a goat.

The boxes once contained Kohl, a lead sulfide based compound. The pigments came in white, red, yellow, blue, green and black and were applied to the skin around the eyes. Not surprisingly, modern Kohl usage has been linked to lead poisoning. However, studies of ancient Egyptian Kohl usage have suggested that the lead salts in the compound may have been beneficial and stimulated the immune system of those who wore it.[13]

Kohl was also used in Egypt, where both men and women regularly used it to paint their eyes. Numerous other cosmetics were used, such as fats and oils perfumed with frankincense, myrrh or cinnamon. Red ochre and yellow ochre were used to change the tone of skin. All of these things were extremely expensive and a mark of high status. In fact, the ability to afford perfumes and cosmetics was a metaphor for a status of wealth to be aspired to by ordinary Egyptians.[14]

7. Mirrors

Papyrus showing an Egyptian woman using a mirror to apply cosmetics.

Concurrent with the development of cosmetics was the development of the mirror. The world’s first mirrors were found in female graves at the site of Çatal Hüyük, a neolithic urban center in southeastern Anatolia dating to around 6000 BC. Made of polished obsidian, these mirrors only gave a dim reflection of the face of the user.

It has been suggested that dark basins filled with water or polished stone slabs were used as mirrors in early Egypt, but little hard evidence is available. Polished copper mirrors first appeared in about 3200 BC in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Telloh. From this point on, the use of polished bronze and copper mirrors became very common throughout the Near East.

Gradually, mirrors became more elaborate. Handles began to appear in the Egyptian Old Kingdom. By the Middle Kingdom, handles had become elaborately decorated with cast bronze figurines attached. Mirrors made from silver, gold and electrum were experimented with. Convex mirrors were made, magnifying the reflected image and allowing mirrors be smaller and use less metal.

Mirrors were not just used for personal purposes. Bronze mirrors were also found at the copper mines at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula. Since miners were probably not applying eye liner, it has been speculated that the mirrors were used to reflect light down the mine shafts.[15]

8. Spear Phalanx

The Greeks made the phalanx famous, but the concept was nearly 2000 years old by the time they adopted it. The earliest depiction of a spear phalanx comes from a stele from the Sumerian city-state of Lagash. The stele was commissioned by King Eannatum of Lagash to commemorate victory in a border war with the rival city of Umma at about 2455-2425 BC.

The stele clearly shows some important differences with the Greek phalanx. For example, it does not appear that every soldier has a shield. Rather, some soldiers are carrying the very large shields while numerous spears protrude from the gaps between them. This would make the formation even more complex than a Greek phalanx, requiring coordinated movement between shield-bearers and spearmen.

There are no other depictions quite like this stele, so it is completely unclear to us how common this formation was and how often it was used. Spearmen certainly fought in a line in most cases, but a tightly packed phalanx of heavy shields that covered a spearman and his neighbor is not widely attested. It may have been the normal method of fighting in Sumer, or it may have been used only by certain elite soldiers of Lagash under Eannatum. We have no way of knowing.[16]

9. Aqueducts

As has already been covered in detail on this site, the first aqueduct was built in 690 BC on the orders of the Assyrian king Sennacherib as part of the system of canals that supplied water to the capital city of Nineveh. One of the eighteen canals that connected Nineveh with the Tebitu reservoir unavoidably crossed over another stream near the modern village of Jerwan in northern Iraq. The Assyrians built a 90-foot stone aqueduct of stone that bridged the stream. A fine slope kept water flowing.

Sennacherib was very proud of this structure, to the point where he had inscribed on the aqueduct that “I caused a canal to be dug to the meadows of Nineveh. Over deep-cut ravines I spanned a bridge of white stone blocks. Those waters I caused to pass over it.”

The water system of Nineveh eventually featured 150 km of canals, aqueducts and other water works. Although limited, the Assyrian aqueduct pre-dated the more famous Roman version by 500 years.[17]

10. The Suez Canal

The dream of linking the Gulf of Suez with the Mediterranean Sea did not begin with Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Suez Canal company in 1854. The Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II began the first attempt to connect the two seas some time after acceding to the throne in 610 BC. He expanded the Egyptian navy, and according to Herodotus he sent a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa. He then put together a vast crew of workmen to attempt to dig a canal to link the Gulf of Suez with the easternmost branch of the Nile Delta. The planned canal would run east from the Nile Delta, and link up with Lake Timsah. Smaller canals would link Lake Timsah with the Great Bitter Lake and the Gulf of Suez.

He never finished the job. Herodotus claims 120,000 laborers lost their lives, but this is certainly exaggerated. Herodotus also reported that an oracle told Necho that his hard work would be for the benefit of a barbarian, so he stopped. Whatever the real reason, work on the canal halted for more than eighty years.

After the Persians conquered Egypt, Darius I decided to complete the canal as part of a program to expand the sea power of Persia. Herodotus’ narrative at this point is confirmed by four granite blocks on which Darius had inscribed that “I commanded to dig this canal from a river by name Pirawa which flows in Egypt (the Nile) to the sea which goes out from Persis. Afterwards this canal was dug out as I commanded and ships went from Egypt through this canal as was my desire.” The canal served as a vital sea link between Persia and Persian possessions in the Mediterranean.

Eventually, the canal silted up and fell into disuse. Ptolemy II, another king focused on expanding Egypt’s sea power, had the canal dredged and restored in 270 BC. The canal was open for several more centuries, until the Roman Emperor Trajan had to restore it again sometime in the early 2nd century AD. The Arab general Amr Ibn al-As had it repaired again after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640. It fell into disrepair again and no canal bridged the gap for over a thousand years, until the Suez Canal was completed in 1869.[18]

The first canal’s marks on the landscape are still visible, as can be seen by the strip of green fertile land that follows the path of the ancient canal.

Part 1 – A Gallery of Inventions: Some Lesser Known Firsts from the Ancient Near East.
Part 3 – Tatian, Clement of Alexandria and the Battle for History.

References:

[1] John F. Robertson, “Social and Economic Organization in Mesopotamian Temples” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. I, ed. by Jack Sasson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 444-453.

[2] Francis Joannès, “Private Commerce and Banking in Achaemenid Babylon,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 3, 1475-1485; Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 371.

[3] Carly Silver, “Dura-Europos: Crossroad of Cultures,” Archaeology, August 11, 2010 (online feature) http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/dura_europos/ (accessed May 2, 2012).

[4] “Death Underground: Gas Warfare at Dura-Europos,” Current Archaeology, November 26, 2009 (online feature) http://www.archaeology.co.uk/cwa/world-news/death-underground-gas-warfare-at-dura-europos.htm (accessed May 2, 2012); “The Final Siege of Dura: Ancient Chemical Warfare?” http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/research/projects/roman-soldiers-in-the-city-dura-europos-syria-1/the-final-siege-of-dura-ancient-chemical-warfare (accessed May 2, 2012).

[5] Samir S. Patel, “Early Chemical Warfare – Dura-Europos, Syria,” Archaeology, Vol. 63, No. 1, January/February 2010, http://www.archaeology.org/1001/topten/syria.html (accessed May 2, 2012); Stephanie Pappas, “Buried Soldiers May Be Victims of Ancient Chemical Weapon,” LiveScience, March 8, 2011, http://www.livescience.com/13113-ancient-chemical-warfare-romans-persians.html (accessed May 2, 2012).

For the original analysis of the Dura-Europos chemical warfare evidence, see Simon James, “Stratagems, Combat, and “Chemical Warfare” in the Siege Mines of Dura-Europos,” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 115, No. 1 (January 2011), 69-101.

[6] Carly Silver, “Dura-Europos: Crossroad of Cultures,” Archaeology, August 11, 2010 (online feature) http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/dura_europos/ (accessed May 2, 2012).

[7] Mark Rose, “World’s First Zoo – Hierakonpolis, Egypt,” Archaeology, Vol. 63, No. 1, January/February 2010, http://www.archaeology.org/1001/topten/egypt.html (accessed May 3, 2012).

[8] “Zoos and Parks,” http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/zoos.htm (accessed May 3, 2012); H.W.F. Saggs, The Might that was Assyria (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), 65, 267.

[9] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 361-362; Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988), 76-77; Jimmy Dunn, “The Pyramid of Sahure and Abusirby,” TourEgypt, http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/sahurep.htm (accessed May 3, 2012).

[10] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. by Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1954), 4.100; Michael Lahanas, “Ancient Greek Inventions,” http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/InventionsF.htm (accessed May 3, 2012).

[11] Sextus Julius Africanus, Military Extracts, fr. 11, in Francis C.R. Thee, Julius Africanus and the Early Christian View of Magic (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1984), 154.

[12] John F. Shean, Soldiering for God: Christianity and the Roman Army (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 193-194; John Maxson Stillman, The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (Dover Publications, 1960), 195-196.

[13] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 255; Dominique Collon, “Clothing and Grooming in Ancient Western Asia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, ed. by Jack Sasson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 503.

[14] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 255-256; Geraldine Pinch, “Private Life in Ancient Egypt,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, 368.

[15] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 248-250; Jay M. Enoch, “History of Mirrors Dating Back 8000 Years,” Optometry and Vision Science, Vol. 83, No. 10 (October 2006): 775-781 (online access at http://journals.lww.com/optvissci/Fulltext/2006/10000/History_of_Mirrors_Dating_Back_8000_Years_.17.aspx#P15)

[16] William J. Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC (New York: Routledge, 2006), 55-57.

[17] Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1934), 10-20, 36, 41, 44; L. Sprague De Camp, The Ancient Engineers (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 63-64.

[18] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 89-92; De Camp, The Ancient Engineers, 44; Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, 360-361; J.M. Cook, The Persian Empire (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1983), 65-66; Herodotus, The Histories, trans. by Andrea L. Purvis (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 2.158-159.

Image Sources: (banner) http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mharrsch/320584699/; Headdress of Queen Puabi from http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/zwoje35/text11p.htm;  (body) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancient_ziggurat_at_Ali_Air_Base_Iraq_2005.jpg; http://www.bancaditalia.it/media/fotogallery/museomoneta/museomoneta/solido;internal&action=_setlanguage.action?LANGUAGE=en; http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/dura_europos/; http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/research/projects/roman-soldiers-in-the-city-dura-europos-syria-1/the-final-siege-of-dura-ancient-chemical-warfare; Yale University / http://www.livescience.com/13113-ancient-chemical-warfare-romans-persians.html; http://www.egyptholiday.com/egypt_2007_diary/day_13.htm; http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/spr03/422/April22/422April22.html; http://www.talkingpyramids.com/abusir/pyramid-of-sahure/; http://sumerianshakespeare.com/509245/509329.html; http://www.beauty-and-the-bath.com/ancient-egyptian-makeup.html; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stele_of_Vultures_detail_01a.jpg; Colorized version of image from Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1934), 17; Google Earth / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canal_des_Pharaons.svg

Article © Christopher Jones 2012.

Christian pacifism has raised its profile in recent years, likely prompted by dissatisfaction with increasing political polarization, and promoted by some influential writers. Ideas promoted in the past century by Cecil John Cadoux and John Howard Yoder with little headway have found a modern defender in Stanley Hauerwas and a popularizer in Shane Claiborne, whose books, speaking tours and radical lifestyle have attracted many admirers if few followers.

Central to all of these authors’ ideas is the concept of the “fall of the church.” They hold that early Christianity was pacifist and anarchist in character, and rejected the ideas of military service and loyalty to the state. As Christianity came to be accepted by the Roman government at around the time of Constantine, the church became corrupted by its relationship with state power. After Constantine the church became willing to acquiesce to state power and wage war, execute people in the name of the state, force conversions, and recognize the authority of rulers other than Jesus. According to Yoder, the behavior of the early church is important because the early Christians “read the Bible in a first-century context. They read the New Testament in the same world in which it was written, in the same language in which it was written. They probably read it, therefore, with more understanding than we do. Hence, how they read the New Testament is helpful to us in our reading of the New Testament, whatever the limits of their faithfulness.”[1]

While the emperors and soldiers of the late Empire clearly used Christian symbolism, what about the army before Constantine?

I shall leave the theological portion of this debate for other websites. What I will do is examine the central historical claim of the “fall of the church” thesis: That Christians before the era of Constantine were pacifists who did not enlist in the Roman military. Unfortunately, none of the pacifist authors who have tackled this question have much experience in ancient history and it has led them to make certain errors which have led to erroneous conclusions.

First, to cover some basics of the Roman Army from Augustus to Constantine. The Roman army during this period was an all-volunteer force. No one was in the army who didn’t want to join. The Army was made up of two groups: The Legions and the Auxilia. Recruitment for the legions was open only to Roman citizens, who served for 20 years unless they were injured and medically discharged or were kicked out. On the other hand, the auxilia were recruited from the peregrini, the non-citizens of the provinces. Their term of service was 25 years, after which they received Roman citizenship as well as conubium, the right to marry a non-Roman wife but still pass on Roman citizenship to their children. The navy was smaller and accepted more non-citizens, but the model was essentially the same. As a result, service in the auxilia was a common route for social and economic advancement for those who were not Roman citizens. In 212, the emperor Caracalla decreed that everyone in the Roman Empire was now a Roman citizen, but  the auxilia did not disappear (many units were now centuries old with a storied battle history they were loath to part with), rather, they ceased to be a method for social advancement and became just another type of unit which included special units such as cavalry and archers.

Like everything else in Roman society, the army also had a pagan religious element. Festivals, sacrifices, and sacred ceremonies honoring the gods, the emperor, the Legion’s standards, and nonspecific virtues such as virtus and disciplina were commonplace. How Christians in the ranks would deal with the requirement to partake in these ceremonies would become a major issue.[2]

In the 1st century, we have some scraps of evidence of Christians in the Roman military. The gospel of Luke states that some soldiers (possibly from the Roman puppet Herod’s auxiliary forces) asked John the Baptist for religious advice, and he told them “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” Matthew mentions that Jesus was visited by a centurion in Capernaum who asked him to heal his sick servant. Later, the book of Acts records that Peter preached at the house of a centurion named Cornelius who was stationed in Caesarea, and the man and his household became some of the first non-Jewish converts to Christianity.[3]

From the conversion of Cornelius at about AD 39 to AD 173, we have absolutely no sources referencing Christian participation in the army. None. It may have happened, it may not have happened. Either way, we know nothing about it, so speculating is futile.[4]

In 173, we have a story that would be easy to dismiss were it not documented by five sources. During the Marcomannic Wars, emperor Marcus Aurelius was leading the Legio XII Fulminata (“Thunderstruck”) campaign along the Danube against the Quadi, erstwhile allies of Rome who had switched sides. The Quadi met the legion with a superior force and drove them to an open field away from water sources. It was a hot day, and the Quadi halted their attack to allow heat and thirst to take its toll.

Surrounded, outnumbered, out of water, growing weak from thirst and in desperate straights, what is clear from the sources is that lots of men began to pray. Soon, a thunderstorm materialized. Lightning struck the treeline where some of the Quadi had gathered, scattering many of them. Rain and hail poured from the sky. No battle could be fought in such weather, so the Quadi withdrew, which was fortunate for the Romans as they were so busy gulping down water collected in their helmets and shields that they were hardly in a position to fight.

Relief on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, showing Roman troops surrounded by the Quadi as a rain god arrives with a thunderstorm on the upper right.

Christian authors Tertullian and Apollinarius said that the Christians in the legion prayed and credited them with providing rain, adding that Marcus Aurelius thanked his Christian soldiers for their prayers. Pagan writer Cassius Dio credited an Egyptian magician named Arnuphis who “invoked by means of enchantments various deities and in particular Mercury.” The unknown author of the Historia Augusta credited the prayers of Marcus Aurelius himself, he did not note the receiving deity. The event is also depicted in a relief on a column commissioned by Marcus Aurelius in Rome, where the rain is seen coming in anthropomorphic form, with a rain god spreading his arms over the troops.[5]

What can one make of this? The presence of Christians in Legio XII cannot be casually dismissed. The legion was normally based in Melitene in Cappadocia, a place with a large Christian population. The earliest Christian writer to mention the incident was Tertullian, who wrote about it a mere thirty years after it happened. Apollinarius, the other Christian to mention it, was from Melitene.[6] The accounts are easily reconcilable. One can surmise that once the unit was surrounded and in dire straits, the men began praying to the gods of whatever religion they happened to follow. The Christians prayed their God and the pagans to every god they could possibly think of. When rain fortuitously came, each man walked away convinced that his prayers had caused his personal deity to come through for everyone.

Since Cadoux and Yoder first published their views some decades ago, archaeology has shed new light on Christians in the Roman Army in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries. A number of gravestones have been found that list a soldier’s religion as well as his unit. H. Leclerq recorded 8 pre-Constantian Christian gravestones of soldiers. The earliest is a gravestone of a Christian who served in Legio II Parthia and died in 201. This makes it not only the earliest Christian soldier’s inscription, but one of the oldest known Christian inscriptions period.[7] Legio II was raised by Septimius Severus in 197 in preparation for his invasion of Parthia, so the soldier in question cannot have served long before his death.

The remains of two Christian churches from the early 3rd century have been excavated by archaeologists, and both of them are linked to the Roman army. The oldest was discovered at Megiddo in Israel in the late 1990s. The church was built in a back room inside of a military fortress that served as the headquarters of the Legio II Traiana (“Trajan’s”) and Legio VI Ferrata (“Ironclad”). On the floor there is a mosaic depicting two fish as a symbol of Jesus Christ. Any doubt about the room’s use and the identity of its worshipers is removed by inscriptions written in Greek on the mosaics:

“The God-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.”

“Gaianus, also called Porphyrius, centurion, our brother, has made the pavement at his own expense as an act of liberality. Brutius carried out the work.”

Mosaic on the floor of an early Christian church within the Roman army fortress at Megiddo.

Akeptous is a woman’s name, and the names of several other women were also written on the floor. This indicates women played some role in this church as well, despite having benefactors and a congregation likely made up of soldiers.[8]

The second church was located inside a house built against the city wall in the fortress city of Dura-Europos, on the west bank of the Euphrates on the Syrian frontier. The church was built around 241. The city also featured a synagogue as well as temples to Mithras and numerous polytheistic deities. Unlike Megiddo, we have no direct evidence that soldiers attended the church save the circumstantial evidence of its location inside a heavily fortified border garrison town that was home to thousands of Roman soldiers.

The church only operated for fifteen years. In 256, Dura-Europos became a target for Persian Shah Shapur I of the ascendant Sassanid Empire. In preparation for the siege, both the synagogue and the church were filled in with dirt in order to strengthen the walls (this preserved the numerous paintings which adorned the insides). It was futile. The city was taken in a violent assault that included one of the first recorded cases of the use of poison gas in warfare. The city was razed to the ground, its population deported, and was never rebuilt.[9]

Aerial view of the fortress town of Dura-Europos, on the west bank of the Euphrates on the border of Roman Syria.

Most of this archaeological evidence was unknown when Cadoux and Yoder were writing their works. As a result, the most discussed pieces of evidence are not the archaeological finds but the textual evidence from the early church fathers.

An often overlooked individual in this debate is a Christian named Sextus Julius Africanus. Born in Aelia Capitolina (formerly known as Jerusalem), he served as an officer in the Roman army before joining the civil service as a diplomat during the reign of Severus Alexander. For the rest of his life he traveled widely. He led an embassy to Edessa, sought funds to rebuilt Emmaus, worked to establish a library in Rome, visited Alexandria, Nysa and the site of Noah’s Ark. He met and later corresponded with Origen. The topics of his writings reveal him to be a polymath and one of the first Christian intellectuals to branch out of theology and into other fields. He wrote a work of history called the Chronography which drew on Christian, Jewish and Pagan sources. He engaged in textual criticism of the book of Daniel, proving that the additional sections in the Septuagint were not in the original text. Another work called the Kestoi dealt with science, magic and technology. Here he offered advice on military morale, tactics and technology, including swordsmanship, the proper use of war elephants and a recipe for making burning phosphorus. Unfortunately for his place in history, the vast majority of his writings have been lost.[10] His views on war and the validity of the state have not survived, but seeing as how he carried out the duties of both and wrote about them, it seems he did not categorically disapprove of either.

Most discussion of the textual evidence has centered around two prolific writers of the early 3rd century church: Tertullian and Origen. Here, the pacifists often commit what is known amongst ancient historians as the Everest Fallacy. That is, the lack of source material in the ancient world causes us to mistake the exceptional for the typical. The pacifists tend to take the writings of Tertullian and Origen as normative for Christian thought of the period, when in fact these two prodigious writers were exceptional theologians of their time. Using them as “typical” Christians of their time period is equivalent to seeing Mount Everest as a “typical” mountain, or William Shakespeare as a “typical” English playwright of the 16th century, or the Beatles as a “typical” British rock band of the 1960s. The truth is, many Christians of the early 3rd century were illiterate, and many other authors such as Julius Africanus have had their writings lost. Tertullian and Origen survived because they were considered exceptional, not because they were typical.

Reconstruction of the baptismal font in the church at Dura-Europos, at Yale University Art Gallery.

With that said, what do these two men say on the issue? Tertullian’s views changed over time. In the first years after his conversion, c. 197, he penned a work titled Apology (sometimes styled “Defense of the Christians”) where he argued that Christians were not dangerous subversives but were in fact loyal citizens of the Roman Empire deserving of official toleration and protection. After all, he said “We are not Indian Brahmins or Gymnosophists, who dwell in woods and exile themselves from ordinary human life.” Christians, he wrote, were normal members of society and valued the Empire because of the peace and security that it provided. Thus they prayed for its safety and continued survival. What did they pray for specifically? “We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish.”[11]

To further his case, Tertullian pointed out that “We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you— cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum—we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods.” Later, he added that “We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground with you…How it is we seem useless in your ordinary business, living with you and by you as we do, I am not able to understand.” Christians according to Tertullian were normal members of society in everything except their refusal to take part in pagan religious rites. They carried on commerce, farmed, and served in the navy and army (and were therefore found in “fortresses” and “the very camp.”). If they wanted to hurt the Empire they could, but they didn’t want to, because they were just as personally invested in its survival as everyone else.[12]

Later in life, Tertullian’s views changed. By about 206 he had embraced the Montanist movement, a sect of Christianity that put an emphasis on prophetic revelation and strict morality. Declaring that “what has not been freely allowed is forbidden,” he became legalistic, moralizing and harshly critical of the Roman government and political system.[13] When asked to comment on the propriety of Christians serving in the Roman military even if they were not required to make pagan sacrifices or execute people, he rejected the idea outright. Whereas he had once argued that Christians supported the Roman state, he now declared that “There is no agreement between the divine and the human sacrament, the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot be due to two masters— God and Caesar…how will a Christian man war, nay, how will he serve even in peace, without a sword, which the Lord has taken away?”[14]

He expounded further on his views in another work titled “On the Military Crown.” This piece was occasioned by a Christian soldier who had refused to wear a laurel crown when his unit was personally inspected by the emperor. He was arrested for insubordination, tried, and sentenced to death. Some Christians condemned him for being an extremist and needlessly antagonizing the authorities. Tertullian came to his defense, arguing that the laurel crown was a symbol of the gods Apollo and Bacchus. While it might be permissible to use pagan goods for non-religious purposes, such as burning incense to get rid of a foul smell, he argued that crowns had no practical use outside of their symbolism and therefore Christians should have nothing to do with them.[15]

Inscription dedicating to “God Jesus Christ” a table which stood on the stone pedestal to the left, at the Megiddo church.

He then moved on to consider the issue of “whether warfare is proper at all for Christians.” He strongly concluded that it was not. How, he asked, could Christians wield a sword when Jesus told Peter to put his sword back in its place? How could a Christian soldier pull guard duty on the Sabbath when he won’t work? How could a Christian soldier guard pagan temples, or march under the flag of a regime hostile to Christianity? It was wrong, he argued, for Christians to have any loyalties but to Christ. Christians should not join the army and those in the army should leave immediately.[16]

Writing from Alexandria, Origen proposed a more systematic theory of Christian pacifism in his “Against Celsus.” Countering Celsus’ charge that Christians did not serve in the military, Origen argued that Christians did better by staying home and praying for the emperor, “wrestling in prayers to God on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed.”

In response to Celsus’ charge that if everyone did as the Christians did the empire would be overrun by its enemies, Origen argued that Christianity uniquely had the potential to unite all the peoples of the world under one faith. Once everyone became a Christian and followed its pacifist teachings, there would be no more wars and no kingdom would have to worry about being conquered by another one.[17]

Where Origen went a bit fuzzy is about what was supposed to happen before this point. What happens when not all the world is Christian, and there are still wars and foreign invasions? He implied that some wars are just by saying that Christians should pray for the emperor’s success in war, but seemed to suggest that Christians become freeloaders and stay home while other people do the fighting.[18]

What is clear from this body of evidence is that in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries many Christians were joining the army and many soldiers were converting. If they were not, Tertullian and Origen would not have felt the need to spill so much ink to write about it.[19]

Cleaning the Megiddo mosaic. The text on the left reads “Gaianus, also called Porphyrius, centurion, our brother, has made the pavement at his own expense as an act of liberality. Brutius carried out the work.”

There were several factors that made the army conducive to Christianity. Contrary to Claiborne’s claim that early Christianity was “filled with those who had been left in the wake of imperial progress – day laborers, working children, old folks, feisty revolutionaries, single working mothers, those with disabilities, immigrants, and other who just had nothing to lose,” early Christian conversion in fact was a province of the upper classes. Upon closer thought this should not be surprising, for a religion that is spread primarily by sacred texts presupposes the ability to read. Christianity spread along trade networks and into urban centers, amongst the merchants, administrators and tradesmen. The last areas penetrated by Christianity were the ranks of the rural poor.[20]

Roman soldiers, especially officers, were more likely to be literate as it was needed for administrative functions. Army units were constantly on the move throughout the empire, indeed, soldiers may have spread Christianity to some new areas such as Britain. After the sporadic persecutions of Nero, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius in Lyons, Christianity entered a period of unofficial toleration. The emperor Alexander Severus even met with Origen personally and kept a statue of Jesus (along with statues of Orpheus, Abraham and Apollonius of Tyana) in his personal shrine. Caracalla’s decree in 212 granting citizenship to the entire empire likely opened the door for many more Christian recruits to join the legions. Throughout the first half of the 3rd century, “one gets the sense that the army had adopted a modus vivendi with its Christian troops by following an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy” with regards to their religious beliefs and observance of Army religious practices. Likely, some form of accommodation and compromise was arrived at on the unit level. In Megiddo, it even appears that some of the officers themselves were Christians and funded church construction for their men. When the persecutions began during the reign of Diocletian, many commanders were reluctant to condemn their Christian soldiers, and some tried to give them every way out possible. They didn’t want to lose good soldiers over the seemingly arbitrary whims of the emperor.[21]

Against this evidence, Yoder was forced to admit that Christians did serve in the military before Constantine, but tried to justify his position by arguing that this time period was “The epoch of Pax Romana, an age of world peace. There were brushfire skirmishes with barbarians around the edge of the empire, but few Christians lived there. Most of the Mediterranean world had not seen war for centuries.” In this world, “Most Roman soldiers were simply bureaucrats. They carried the mail, administered roads, and enforced laws and the prison system.” Christians who joined the army  “probably did it because the work was easy and the rewards generous, without troubling themselves much with moral analysis.”[22]

This assessment of Roman history is, quite frankly, absolutely preposterous. First, to refute the idea that service in the Roman legions was “easy,” Flavius Vegetius’ account of the training of a Roman legionnaire can be found here. It included running, obstacle courses, vaulting over wooden horses in full armor, digging trenches, mock combat twice a day with “wooden swords double the weight of the common ones,” ruck marching with 60-pound packs, and field exercises featuring lengthy marches and maneuvering in formation. Conditions were harsh. Modern analysis of surviving legion rosters and discharge records estimates that only 50-60% of soldiers completed their full term of service. Combat, harsh military discipline, medical discharges, and disease took care of the rest.[23]

What is even more preposterous is the claim that the 3rd century was “an age of world peace.” Between the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the beginning of Constantine’s establishment as sole emperor in 324, there were no fewer than 21 wars against foreign enemies, three major secession movements, two major civil wars, and thirteen military coups. The period is referred to as the Third Century Crisis, and is generally seen as a time that nearly brought the Roman Empire to its knees. Of course most of these wars were on the borders of the empire. That is also where most of the soldiers were stationed.

Another pacifist, Roland Bainton, has claimed that Christians only served in non-combat positions, specifically in the positions of frumentarius, vigiles, beneficarius and protectores. The problem is, Bainton seems to have not been aware of what these positions actually were. A vigiles was a firefighter and could pass as a non-combat position, but the frumentarii were the emperor’s  intelligence agency and secret police. A beneficarius was a supply officer, but it was invariably an intermediate rank that a soldier held before his promotion to centurion. A protectores was an officer in charge of training, but the position did not exist before Constantine’s military reforms so no one would have held it pre-Constantine. Yoder and others have claimed that Christians served only as police to enforce civil order, not as soldiers, but this overlooks the fact that in most of the Empire soldiers were the police.[24]

Wall painting from the church at Dura-Europos showing Jesus and Peter walking on water.

The rapid growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire stoked fear and resentment amongst the pagan population, some of whom blamed the Christians for the gods’ apparent disfavor towards the empire. The first persecutions under Decius in 250 and Valerian in 260 were brief, and ended when each ruler was killed in battle.

Much worse came during the reign of Diocletian from 285 onwards. By this time, Christians had filled the ranks of the military to the point that Diocletian had doubts about the loyalty of his troops. Before he could begin a general persecution of Christians in the empire, he first had to purge the military of Christians. Soldiers were forced to offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods, if they refused they were to be expelled from service. Some were executed.

Numerous stories of military martyrs date to this time period. Many are unreliable, but many others are written in a style that indicate the accounts were based off of notes taken at an actual trial. The stories of soldiers such as Marinus, Maximilian, Marcellus, Dasius, Julius the Veteran, Tipasius and others are too lengthy to recount here. Their presence, however, reveals some facts about the presence of Christians in the Roman army. The men described were veterans and well-regarded by their fellow soldiers. Some of the men were officers or offered promotion to officer rank. Julius served 27 years, fought in seven campaigns and re-enlisted after his original term of service had expired. In many cases, their commanders were reluctant to act against them due to their exceptional service and offered them bonuses, gave them time to reconsider, or tried to make other accommodations to convince them to make the sacrifice and remain in the service.

What is important to note is that the soldiers’ trouble always came from refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods or wear religiously symbolic clothing. We don’t have a case of a pre-Constantian soldier martyr who was brought to trial for refusal to fight. This indicates their objection was to Roman army religion, not to the concept of war and soldiering itself. Their long terms of service also seem to indicate that their rejection of army religion hadn’t been a problem for their officers until orders came down from above to start making it a problem.[25]

The debate over pacifism in the early church has often overlooked the views of Christians who lived outside of the Roman Empire. While few written sources that address the topic have survived, the actions of the kingdom of Armenia are an interesting case. Towards the end of the Diocletianic persecution Maximin Daia, the emperor of the east, attempted to extend the persecution into the Roman client state of Armenia. Armenia was at the time the world’s only officially Christian nation, and when Maximin’s troops attempted to enforce his decrees there the entire country rose in armed revolt and defeated the Roman forces.[26]

Wall painting from the church at Dura-Europos showing Jesus healing the paralytic.

So what are we to make of Origen and Tertullian? The available evidence seems to indicate that at the very least, a large number of Christians disagreed with them. Tertullian’s embrace of the Montanists clearly took him outside the mainstream of contemporary Christian thought of his era. Because of this, the pacifist views which he adopted after joining the sect were likely also outside of the mainstream. Origen is a more interesting case, but even here we can note that he corresponded with other scholars such as Julius Africanus who quite likely disagreed with him.

It is also interesting to note that the two scholars lived in the most peaceful parts of the Roman Empire at that time.[27] One can justifiably wonder if their views on war might have been different had they had lived in Britain, or the Danube frontier, or the border with the Sassanid Empire. As it was, once Constantine came to power and Christianity grew to encompass the majority of the population of the Roman Empire, Christians all of a sudden had to take on the duties of the responsible exercise of power. As a result, Ambrose and Augustine began to develop what became known as Just War theory, which has dominated Christian thought on the matter ever since.

There was no golden age of a pacifist church avoiding the worldly entanglements of politics, only to trade its soul to Constantine for earthly power. Instead, as Peter Leithart observes, “the story of the church and war is ambiguity before Constantine, ambiguity after, and ambiguity right to the present.”[28] The pacifists are reaching back for a mythical past that never existed. There has always been disagreement on the issues of war and the legitimacy of the state, and there likely always will be so long as the world breeds overreaching governments and discontented citizens.

Further Reading:

Cecil John Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude Toward War (London: Headley, 1919), available online at: http://archive.org/details/earlychristianat00cadouoft.

John T. Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman Army, A.D. 173-337,” Church History, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 149-163+200.

Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine (Madison, Wisconsin: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

John F. Shean, Soldiering for God: Christianity and the Roman Army (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010).

Vassilios Tzaferis, “Inscribed ‘To God Jesus Christ’: Early Christian Prayer Hall Found in Megiddo Prison,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (March/April 2007), available online at: http://www.bib-arch.org/online-exclusives/oldest-church-02.asp.

John Howard Yoder, Early Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2009).

References:

[1] John Howard Yoder, Early Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 2009), 43.

[2] John T. Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman Army, A.D. 173-337,” Church History, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), p. 149-163+200; John Helgeland, Robert J. Daly and J. Patout Burns, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 48-55; Arthur Darby Knock, “The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year” Harvard Theological Review 45 No 4, 1952, p. 223-229.

[3] Luke 3:14; Matthew 8:5-13; Acts 10:1-48.

[4] Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine (Madison, Wisconsin: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 260.

[5] Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. by G.A. Williamson (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 5.5; Tertullian, Apology, trans. by S. Thelwall (1885), NewAdvent.org, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm (accessed April 19, 2012), 5; Cassius Dio, Roman History, trans. by Earnest Cary (1927), LacusCurtius, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/home.html (accessed April 12, 2012), 72.8-10; Historia Augusta, trans. by David Magie (1932), LacusCurtius, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/home.html (accessed April 12, 2012), Life of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 24.4.

[6] Helgeland, et. al, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience, 32-34.

Note, the Christians did mistakenly assert that the legion’s nickname Fulminata came from this event. In fact, inscriptions show the name dates to the time of Augustus over 150 years earlier. (See Shean, Soldiering for God, 190-191).

[7] John F. Shean, Soldiering for God: Christianity and the Roman Army (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 183.

[8] Vassilios Tzaferis, “Inscribed ‘To God Jesus Christ’: Early Christian Prayer Hall Found in Megiddo Prison,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (March/April 2007), available online at: http://www.bib-arch.org/online-exclusives/oldest-church-02.asp

[9] Carly Silver, “Dura-Europos: Crossroad of Cultures,” Archaeology, August 11, 2010 (online feature) http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/dura_europos/ (accessed April 19, 2010).

[10] Shean, Soldiering for God, 193-194.

[11] Tertullian, Apology, 30, 32, 42.

[12] Tertullian, Apology, 37, 42.

[13] “Tertullian,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14520c.htm; “Montanists,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10521a.htm; Tertullian, On The Military Crown, trans. by S. Thelwall (1885), NewAdvent.org, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm (accessed April 19, 2012), 2.

[14] Tertullian, On Idolatry, trans. by S. Thelwall (1885), NewAdvent.org, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0302.htm (accessed April 19, 2012), 19.

[15] Tertullian, On the Military Crown, 1-2, 7-10, 12.

[16] Tertullian, On the Military Crown, 11.

[17] Origen, On The Military Crown, trans. by Frederick Crombie (1885), NewAdvent.org, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0416.htm (accessed April 19, 2012), 8.68-73.

[18] Leithart, Defending Constantine, 269.

[19] Leithart, Defending Constantine, 264-265.

[20] Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus for President (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2008), 156; Shean, Soldiering for God, 113-114.

For more on the spread of Christianity, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperOne, 1997).

[21] Shean, Soldiering for God, 143-144, 155, 207-209, 244.

[22] Yoder, Early Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, 50; John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public & Evangelical (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1997), 70 n. 14.

[23] A Companion to the Roman Army, ed. by Paul Erdkamp (London: Blackwell, 2011), 427.

[24] Helgeland, “Christians and the Roman Army, A.D. 173-337,” 162-163.

[25] Helgeland, et. al, Christians and the Military: The Early Experience, 56-65; Shean, Soldiering for God, 186-205.

[26] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 9.8.

[27] Shean, Soldiering for God, 202-203.

[28] Leithart, Defending Constantine, 278.

Image Sources: (banner) http://www.amazon.com/The-Letter-Scroll-Archaeology-Tells/dp/B004JZWK2I; http://www.hijclothing.com/?p=499; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Missorium_Kerch.jpg (Body) http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth212/late_antiquity_imp_image.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Miracolo_della_Pioggia.JPG; http://www.amazon.com/The-Letter-Scroll-Archaeology-Tells/dp/B004JZWK2I; http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/dura_europos/; http://blog.beliefnet.com/bibleandculture/2010/01/the-church-in-the-house-in-dura-europos.html; http://www.itsgila.com/highlightsarmageddon.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dura_Baptistry_Christ_walking_on_water.jpg

Article © Christopher Jones 2012.

Christianity may have begun as a small group of a few dozen followers of Jesus, but it grew at a steady clip for the next two centuries. By the late 3rd century AD this growth had exploded into a major religion within the Roman Empire. Many members of the upper classes had converted, especially women. Christians served in the army and held positions in the civil service. Christian churches were organized throughout much of the empire, with bishops in major cities and pastors leading local congregations throughout towns and villages. Churches were built in most cities as Christians moved out of meeting in private houses to create their own places of worship.[1]

Meanwhile, the Roman Empire was falling apart in fifty years of unrest known as the Third Century Crisis. The prosperous, largely peaceful empire of the Severan Emperors gave way to constantly changing governments, weak emperors and numerous military coups. Foreign invasions threatened all of the borders of the empire and some regions of the empire sought to secede and break away. The protracted unrest caused the economy to take a nose dive. The government sought to address the problem of low tax revenues by devaluing its currency, which made the problem worse. Poverty caused many people to leave cities and become semi-serfs, working land owned by large landowners.

Romans were looking for answers as to why their once powerful empire was in decline. As in so many similar cases throughout history, many of them answered these questions by blaming religious minorities. Traditional Roman religion did not recognize any such concept as the separation of church and state. The state employed numerous priests to conduct rituals, make sacrifices and read omens, all to ensure the favor of the gods upon the state. If the state was experiencing ill fortune, then the gods must be displeased and punishing the Roman people.

If the gods were displeased, for many people the obvious reason for their displeasure were the Christians, the Manichaeans and other religious groups growing in numbers across the empire. The Christians argued that they were good citizens – they paid taxes, lived moral lives, followed the laws, and served in the military – and that this qualified them as loyal Romans despite their refusal to offer sacrifices to the Roman gods. Most of the time, the Roman authorities had tacitly if not officially accepted this argument. Sporadic persecutions occurred numerous times, but in the 3rd century they became more frequent and drastic. The emperors Decius and Valerian each issued decrees that Christians must sacrifice to the Roman gods or be executed.

This stage of persecution ended when Valerian was captured by the Persians in 260 and Christianity was again tolerated, but the crisis continued. Nevertheless, friction between pagans and Christians continued. The Christian church, with its hierarchical structure, social support networks, and ruling bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, was viewed as a threat to Imperial power, a sort of potential fifth column who did not follow the Roman gods and therefore was damaging the Roman state. To make matters worse, Christianity’s outlaw status made it an attractive religion for all those within the empire who hated Rome. Especially in Egypt and North Africa, Christianity became associated with local nationalism and anti-Roman sentiment.[2]

In short, Christianity was viewed as an internal threat to the unity and security of the empire. This view was especially strong amongst Imperial officials, whose hatred of Christians is evidenced by the numerous tortures many of them devised which went above and beyond their mandate. As is also often the case throughout history, leaders sought to pin blame on a disliked minority in order to divert attention from their own failings.

Late 3rd Century bust of Diocletian, now on display at the Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul.

Into this world stepped a 40 year old army officer named Diocles. Born in Salona, Dalmatia (modern day Solin in Croatia) to parents of low birth, he had enlisted in the army and worked his way up through the ranks. In 284, the reigning emperor Numerian was murdered by soldiers in Syria. The army then declared Diocles emperor, and he changed his name to the more Latin-sounding Diocletian. After defeating an army led by Numerian’s brother Carinus in modern day Serbia, he took control of the entire empire in 285.

Diocletian set out to radically transform the entire Roman Empire. The first and most obvious problem to be rectified was the growth of military power: between 235 and 285 there had been no fewer than 13 military coups. To put a stop to this, in 293 Diocletian split the empire into four parts, called the Tetrarchy. Two sections of the empire would be governed by Augusti, theoretically ruling as equals but with Diocletian as the practical senior partner. Two other sections would be governed by lesser rulers given the title of Caesar, who would be trained to eventually succeed the Augusti. This system kept army commanders from gaining too much power, as each was under the control of a more local ruler.

Diocletian named Maximian the Augustus of the western empire, ruling Italy, Africa and Spain with his capital at Milan. Constantius was named Caesar of Britain and Gaul with his capital at Trier. In the east, Diocletian himself took control of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor, with his capital at Nicomedia. He named Galerius Caesar of the Balkans and Greece, with his capital at Sirmium on the Danube. All three of these men also hailed from the Balkans: Maximian came from Sirmium in modern Serbia, Galerius from Serdica in Dacia (modern Sofia, Bulgaria) and Constantius from Dardania in what is now Serbia. Rome was no longer the capital city of the empire that bore its name.[3]

Map of the Tetrarchy, as established in 293.

Aside from this decentralization of power into four parts, the rest of Diocletian’s reform involved accumulating as much power as possible to the person of the emperor. Whereas Augustus and those who followed him had adopted the title princeps, claiming to be a “first among equals” and striving to preserve the fiction of the old Republic, Diocletian adopted the title dominus, formerly a term used by slaves to refer to their masters. Now, instead of a “first among equals” from among the free citizens, the Roman people were his slaves and he was their master. Visitors to the imperial court were required to prostrate themselves before him, and if they were lucky they were allowed to kiss the hem of his robe. Previously, the power and legitimacy of the princeps was said to be derived from the Senate and the Roman people. Diocletian instead declared himself to be the gods’ representative on earth. His legitimacy was derived from the gods, not from any earthly source. He gave himself the name Jovian, as the earthly representative of Jupiter. Maximian followed suit, calling himself Herculius to compare himself to Hercules. The Senate was almost completely ignored, reduced to ruling the now unimportant city of Rome.[4]

All this created an ideology that sought to unify the empire under one religion, one system of government and one ruler. Diocletian’s deputy Galerius was said to be an admirer of the system of government of the Sassanid Persian state, where “It is the manner and practice of the Persians for the people to yield themselves slaves to their kings, and for the kings to treat their people as slaves.”[5] These transformations required transforming Rome from an authoritarian state to a totalitarian one. The hated frumentarii, or secret police, were abolished but quickly replaced by the Agentes in Rebus, a new force of couriers that also served as a domestic intelligence agency dedicated to keeping the emperor informed and to snuffing out dissent within the empire.[6]

A two-denarius coin of Diocletian, showing him wearing the crown of Sol Invictus rather than the more traditional olive branch.

The first persecutions came in 297 AD. In that year, the Persians under Shah Narses invaded Syria. Under the circumstances, Diocletian viewed the Manichaeans, who followed the teachings of a Persian prophet named Mani, as a potential fifth column. He issued a proclamation to provincial governors that the Manichaeans would “attempt through the accursed morals and savage laws of the Persians to infect men of a less wicked nature, i.e. the modest and peaceful race of the Romans” with “the poison of a malignant serpent.” All copies of Manichaean scriptures were ordered burned, Manichaean religious leaders were to be executed, and followers were to be executed as well if they refused to convert. Property was to be confiscated and placed in the Imperial treasury.[7]

Although internal security had been restored within the empire, things had not gotten much better otherwise. The Persians were defeated in 298, but the economy had still not recovered from the third century. The Tetrarchy system created a need for four armies instead of one, and as a result taxes were raised to pay for the expansions. More people joining the military further shrunk the tax base, causing more increases. Taxes were so high that many people had no incentive to produce goods for sale, and inflation continued to run rampant. Later on, Diocletian attempted to control inflation by instituting price controls, but this merely caused people not to sell at the decreed low prices and made the problem worse.[8]

Matters came to a head in 299 in the capital city of Nicomedia. Priests attempting to conduct a divination rite complained that their omens were cloudy. They blamed Christians for somehow obstructing the rites by causing the gods to not show their will. As a result, Diocletian ordered the palace staff to all make a sacrifice to the Roman gods or be flogged.[9]

What followed over the next months and years was a purge of the army. First, efforts were made to record the religion of every soldier in the ranks. Soldiers were then ordered to sacrifice to the Roman gods. If they refused, they were stripped of rank and discharged, and their careers were over. Nevertheless, many Christians in the ranks refused to worship the Roman gods and were discharged. Some of them were executed, but only a few as Diocletian feared a military rebellion.[10] Nevertheless, the purge of the army is the origin of many martyr’s tales of the military saints. The stories and legends told about St. George, St. Acacius, St. Sebastian, Sts. Sergius and Baccus, and the other soldier-martyrs of Catholic and Orthodox tradition largely date to the purges of the army at this time.

A Medieval fresco of St. George, one of the soldier martyrs of the great persecution, found in the Matskhvarishi church at Svaneti in the Republic of Georgia.

The ancient sources disagree somewhat on when Diocletian decided to initiate the general persecution of Christians. Eusebius believed that Diocletian had been planning the persecution from an early date, and was merely waiting for the correct time to put it into action. In Eusebius’ view, moves such as the purging of the palace and the army were done to ensure those institutions’ loyalty when the time came to carry out the general persecution. In the view of Lactantius, Diocletian initially planned only to purge the military and the civil service with minimal bloodshed. Only later did he decide at the urging of Galerius to carry out the general persecution, although Lactantius hinted that Diocletian’s reluctance was somewhat of a front and that Galerius was being set up as a fall man in case the plan failed. The pagan historian Eutropius provides some support for this understanding of Diocletian’s character, calling him a man”of a crafty disposition” who “was willing to gratify his own disposition to cruelty in such a way as to thrown the odium upon others.” Both Lactantius and Eusebius were Christians who lived through the persecutions, but neither had access to the inner deliberations of Diocletian’s court, so his true thought process will likely never be known.[11]

What is clear is that in the winter of 302 Galerius traveled to Nicomedia and pushed Diocletian to act with force. He sought not simply to purge Christians from government but to exterminate Christianity from Roman territory. Most of the officials present endorsed Galerius’ proposal. Diocletian then inquired of the oracle of Apollo at Miletus, who also endorsed Galerius’ plan. Plans were then set in motion, to be launched the next spring. Diocletian did overrule Galerius in one aspect; he requested that the first stage of the plan be carried out without bloodshed.

On February 23, 303, the persecution began. The day was the festival day of Terminus, the Roman god of endings, and the date had been deliberately chosen to symbolize the day the Roman Empire would terminate Christianity. The Christians were not expecting further persecutions, they were instead preparing to celebrate Lent in preparation for Easter. At dawn in Nicomedia, soldiers and treasury officers broke down the gates to the church in the city. Copies of the scriptures were confiscated and burned. The church’s furniture and furnishings were looted. Fearing that fire would spread throughout the city, the soldiers decided not to fire the building and instead spent several hours razing it to the ground with axes and iron implements.[12]

Medival depiction of the beginnings of the persecution in Nicomedia.

The next day, a decree was published throughout the empire which ordered Christians stripped of all honors and titles. Churches were to be closed. Christians no longer had the right to sue in court, and if they were sued they could not defend themselves and a default judgment would be entered against them. Most importantly, all Christians were now stripped of the immunity from torture normally enjoyed by all Roman citizens.

In Nicomedia, a man named Euethius defiantly ripped down a public copy of the proclamation and tore it into pieces. He then proceeded to insult Diocletian and Galienus’ Balkan ancestry, saying scornfully that “these are the triumphs of Goths and Sarmatians.” Despite Diocletian’s orders to refrain from bloodshed at this stage, he was arrested and burned alive for his gesture of defiance.[12]

Galerius pushed Diocletian to lift his injunction against bloodshed. According to Lactantius, he had men set the imperial palace in Nicomedia on fire and then blamed the Christians. Diocletian instead ordered his palace staff tortured in order to find out who set the fire, of course none of them knew anything so this was pointless. Galerius’ men set another fire a short time later, and Galerius fled the city, pleading that his safety was in danger with so many saboteurs about. Eusebius mentions the fire but did not mention any “false flag” theories about its origin.

Orthodox icon of Anthimus, the bishop of Nicomedia who was executed in 303.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the immediate imperial response to the fire was a bloodbath in Nicomedia. According to Eusebius, “By Imperial command God’s worshipers there perished wholesale and in heaps.” Dorotheus and Gorgonius, two Imperial servants who were Christians, were executed by strangulation. Anthimus, the bishop of Nicomedia, was beheaded. Many other Christians were arrested, tied up, loaded onto boats and then dumped overboard into the Sea of Marmara to drown. The bodies of Dorotheus and Gorgonius were dug up from where they had been buried and dumped into the sea out of fear that their grave would become a shrine.

Another Christian of Nicomedia named Peter was dragged to a public square and ordered to make a sacrifice. When he refused, he was stripped naked, hung by ropes and flogged until many of his bones were exposed. His torturers then mixed salt and vinegar and poured it over his open wounds. When he still refused to sacrifice, they brought out a brazier with a lit fire, and slowly roasted him as if he were an animal. The fire consumed him slowly, so as to still give him an opportunity to give in and offer to make the sacrifices, but he steadfastly refused until his life gave out and he expired.[13]

That summer, Diocletian issued another decree ordering that all members of the Christian clergy were to be arrested throughout the empire. City prisons quickly became crowded with pastors and bishops who were rounded up and confined. Eusebius described the scenes of the summer of 303, reporting that “I saw with my own eyes the places of worship thrown down from top to bottom, to the very foundations, the inspired holy scriptures committed to the flames in the middle of the public squares, and the pastors of the churches hiding disgracefully in one place or another, while other suffered the indignity of being held up to ridicule by their enemies.”[14]

But the worst was yet to come. In November, A third decree was issued which stated that the clergy were to be allowed to go free if they agreed to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Many apparently did so and were released. One of the apostates happened to be Marcellinus, the bishop of Rome. The Christian authors tend to gloss over this point, so the number of people who caved in cannot be estimated. Eusebius mentioned them only in passing, saying he preferred to focus on “only those things by which first we ourselves, then later generations, may benefit.”[15]

For those who refused to partake in worshiping the Roman deities, a horrific ordeal usually awaited them. The authorities were directed to force them to make sacrifices using any means necessary. In practice, this generally meant extreme forms of torture were employed on the orders of local judges. Many began competing with each other in a race to the depths of sadism to come up with the most fanciful and painful torture methods. Some pastors were flogged until they bled to death. Others were broken on the rack, stretched and beaten and then had their skin scraped until they died.

Some lucky ones got off easy. In some cities such as Caesarea, the authorities simply wanted to get the job over with as quickly as possible and found as many loopholes as possible to accommodate the Christians so they could mark them off as having sacrificed and get them out of their hair. One man was seized by the arms and hauled to the altar, where the officials forcibly manipulated his hands into offering the sacrifices and then let him go. Another man was rumored to have sacrificed, and although he had done no such thing he did not deny the rumors and was marked down as having sacrificed. Another man who cried out that he would not offer any sacrifices was smacked upside the head and told to shut up, and was then marked down as having sacrificed even though he did not.[16]

Others were not so lucky. In Antioch, Romanus, a deacon from Caesarea, was visiting Antioch where he denounced Christians who were partaking in the sacrifices there. For his outburst, he was arrested and sentenced to be burned at the stake. As he was being tied to the stake, he mockingly asked “Where is the fire for me?” His captors then cut his tongue out of his mouth, but decided not to execute him and threw him back into prison. Two years later, he would be strangled to death at a time when many other prisoners were being released.[17]

The persecution became much more intense in early 304. A fourth imperial proclamation was issued which stated that all Christians – not just the clergy – were to be required to offer sacrifices. If they refused, they were to be coerced into doing so through whatever means the judges thought necessary.[18]

In Phrygia, one village whose population was entirely Christian refused as a body to offer sacrifices. A force of legionaries surrounded the town, set its major buildings on fire and then massacred its inhabitants. Lactantius actually praised the officer who ordered this massacre for his mercy, compared to those who preferred to cause death by slow torture. Another victim in Phrygia was the finance minister of the province, a man of Italian descent named Adauctus, who was executed despite an impeccable record of service to the empire.[19]

A bound man is attacked by a leopard in this mosaic showing an arena scene from Sollertiana Domus in North Africa from the late 3rd century. The same fate awaited Christians in Phoenicia during the persecutions.

In Antioch, some Christians were roasted over braziers while others took an easier way out and threw themselves off of the tops of buildings to avoid being tortured. Also in Antioch was a wealthy woman named Domnina who had two unmarried daughters. All three of them were arrested. They were very afraid, only of physical torture but of the potential for sexual violence. The three women made a scheme to escape. As they were being moved from one place to another, they asked the soldiers to excuse them as they passed by a river, pleading the need to relieve themselves. When they went down to the river, they dove in, were carried away downriver and escaped. Two other girls in Antioch were not so lucky, there were dumped overboard from a ship to drown. In Pontus, local judges devised a method of driving reeds under the fingernails of those who refused to offer sacrifices, others had molten lead poured over their backs.[20]

Further south in the province of Phoenicia, Tyrannion, the bishop of Tyre and Zenobius, presbyter of the church in Sidon, were executed by beheading.[21] In Tyre, most Christians were Egyptian expatriates, and here the Roman authorities decided to use the executions as a spectator sport. Rather than dumping people into the sea, the authorities in Tyre sent a steady stream of victims to die at the hands of wild animals in the arena. So many were sent to the arena that it seems the animals grew tired of killing them. Eusebius was in Tyre during some of the executions there and was an eyewitness to some of the arena executions, where animals hung back and did not attack the victims.

You would see a youngster not yet twenty, standing without fetters, spreading out his arms in the form of a cross, and with a mind unafraid and unshakable occupying himself in the most unhurried prayers to the Almighty; not budging in the least and not retreating an inch from the spot where he stood, though bears and panthers breathing fury and death almost touched his very flesh. Yet by some supernatural, mysterious power their mouths were stopped, and they ran back again to the rear. Again you would have seen others – there were five altogether – thrown to an infuriated bull. When others approached from outside he tossed them with his horns into the air and mangled them, leaving them to be picked up half-dead; but when in his fury he rushed head down at the lonely group of holy martyrs, he could not even get near them, but stamped his feet and pushed with his horns in all directions. Provoked by the hot irons he breathed rage and threats, but divine providence dragged him back. So, as he too did his intended victims no harm whatever, other beasts were set on them. At last, when these animals had launched their terrible varied assaults, the martyrs were one and all butchered with the sword, and instead of being buried in the earth were given to the waves of the sea.[22]

Silvanus, the bishop of Gaza, was sent to the copper mines of Phaeno in the Arabian desert. There, Silvanus and 39 other Christians were executed by beheading. Others in Gaza found death by burning at the stake or in the arena. Six other young men from the region volunteered to take to the arena, they instead were taken to Caesarea and all beheaded on the same day in March 304.[23]

Scenes of the persecution in Egypt as depicted in a 13th century icon of St. Catherine in the monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt. Clockwise from the top left: Christians are flogged, taken to prison, given the opportunity to sacrifice to the pagan gods, burned en masse, beaten by guards, and roasted on a brazier over an open flame.

In Egypt, persecution descended into a massive bloodbath. Before the persecution, Christians were numerous in Egypt and even held high ranking positions in the provincial government. Once the persecutions began, bishop Phileas of Thumis said that the judges and soldiers “were not to show the least consideration for us but to regard us and treat us as if we no longer existed.” Many Christians were executed by beheading, drowning, crucifixion, flogging or breaking on the rack. Some were hung from crosses but supported so they did not suffocate and were instead left to die of starvation and exposure. In Thebes, some had their skin peeled off with pieces of broken pottery. Others had their ankles tied to machines that sprung in opposite directions, ripping their legs off. Some had their arms and legs bound to ropes and had all four limbs pulled in different directions. When the ropes were taunt and the victims helpless, they could be tortured with other implements. Still others were hung from buildings from a nail driven through one wrist, allowing their body weight to tear and dislocate their joints. Some were bound to pillars, and as their body weight sagged it drew the ropes tighter and tighter around their bodies.

Orthodox icon of St. Juliana of Nicomedia, another victim of the persecutions.

Eusebius estimated the daily death toll as ranging between twenty and a hundred executions per day in Thebais alone. Axes sometimes broke due to the number of beheadings per day, and executioners became to fatigued and horrified to continue. Those who were near death from the torture methods were cut down and then dumped into the streets to die. The church leadership in Egypt was decimated, with many bishops executed. Phileas himself was beheaded.[24] These actions – the torture of Roman citizens, the beheading of government officials – would have been unheard of in the early years of the Roman empire, when exile and condemnation of memory were the worst punishments given to a high ranking official for even the worst of crimes. Now, all semblances of the rights of citizens had been swept away by Diocletian, who ruled as a demi-god whose word was law.

One can surely marvel at the incredible, otherworldly fortitude displayed by those who refused to break under such pain. Modern military counter-interrogation training teaches that everyone has a breaking point that they will eventually reach, after which they will crack mentally and cooperate in some way. Eusebius and Lactantius both imply that many Christians reached their breaking point, but they also list a surprising number who did not, despite being subjected to horrific pain. How does someone avoid breaking under such circumstances? To answer the question, let us look to another era, that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:

So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared?

What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die — now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.

Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.

But how can one turn one’s body to stone?

Well, they managed to turn some individuals from the Berdyayev circle into puppets for a trial, but they didn’t succeed with Berdyayev. They wanted to drag him into an open trial; they arrested him twice; and (in 1922) he was subjected to a night interrogation by Dzerzhinsky himself. Kamenev was there too (which means that he, too, was not averse to using the Cheka in an ideological conflict). But Berdyayev did not humiliate himself. He did not beg or plead. He set forth firmly those religious and moral principles which had led him to refuse to accept the political authority established in Russia. And not only did they come to the conclusion that he would be useless for a trial, but they liberated him.

A human being has a point of view!

N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbor on the Butyrki bunks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every night. Two years earlier, a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her home on his way through Moscow. “But he wasn’t the former Metropolitan, he was the Metropolitan! Truly, I was worthy of receiving him.” “All right then. To whom did he go when he left Moscow?” “I know, but I won’t tell you!” (The Metropolitan had escaped to Finland via an underground railroad of believers.) At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman’s face, and she replied: “There is nothing you can do with me even if you cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing me.” (They would lose contact with the underground railroad.) “But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged by God right this minute.”

There were such people in 1937 too, people who did not return to their cell for their bundles of belongings, who chose death, who signed nothing denouncing anyone.[25]

Many more Christians likely survived by fleeing to the hills. By fleeing urban areas for rural locations they would be harder to find. Others took to the wilderness and lived in the desert or the hill country. Ironically, the persecution served to spread Christianity into new areas as Christians moved to places they had never lived in to before and preached to the people there.[26]

Outside of the Near East, the persecution raged as well. Harsh measures were taken in Galerius’ tetrarchy in the Balkans and Maxentius implemented Diocletian’s edicts in Italy, North Africa and Spain. The exception was Constantius, who largely ignored Diocletian’s orders in Gaul and Britain and merely pulled down a few churches for the sake of appearing to comply.[27]

In December of 304, Diocletian traveled to Rome to celebrate his 20th year in power. After a few days there he appears to have suffered a sudden illness, and was carried to Dalmatia to recuperate. He remained there until summer, before returning to Nicomedia where he hid in his palace and only made one public appearance that year. He was reported to be disoriented and prone to fits of rage, which could indicate he had received brain damage from a stroke. Rumors swirled that he had died, but he made another public appearance in March 305, albeit gaunt and nearly unrecognizable.

The peristyle hall at Diocletian’s palace in modern-day Split, Croatia. Diocletian spent the last six years of his life living as a recluse inside the vast complex.

Galerius pressured him to retire for health reasons, and may have hinted that he would overthrow him if he did not. Diocletian agreed, and convinced Maxentius to retire with him. The two men promoted Galerius and Constantius to the rank of Augustus. Despite gaining new titles, the two new Augusti kept their original territories. Diocletian then shocked everyone by not naming Constantius’ son Constantine Caesar, instead choosing Galerius’ nephew Maximin Daia to rule the East and Galerius’ old friend Flavius Valerius Severus to rule Italy and Africa. Diocletian then faded into the background, to spend his last years in seclusion inside his fortress-like palace on the shores of Dalmatia.[28]

This ended the persecution of Christians in the western empire, but Galerius continued the persecution in the east with the same vigor. In Caesarea, a 19 year old man named Apphianus stopped a man named Urbanus from sacrificing. He was promptly arrested, held in the stocks for a night and then taken before a judge. When he refused to recant his faith, he was flogged and beaten until many of his bones were exposed, then his feet were wrapped in oil rags and set on fire. “The fire consumed his flesh and penetrated to his bones, so that the humors of his body were melted and oozed out and dropped down like wax.”[29]

Orthodox icon of St. Theodora (Theodosia) of Palestine, martyred in Caesarea at age 17.

Apphianus’ brother Aedisius was sentenced to slavery in the mines. In Tyre, another young man named Ulpianus was flogged, tied inside an oxhide bag with a dog and an asp, and thrown into the sea. In Caesarea, a 17 year old girl from Tyre named Theodosia waved at some prisoners awaiting judgment and asked them to remember her to God when they arrived at their destination. She was seized “as if she had committed a profane and impious act” and taken before the governor, who “tortured her with dreadful and most terrible torments in her sides and breasts, even to the very bones.” Still living, she was then thrown into the sea to drown. Many other Christians in Tyre were sent back to labor in the desert copper mines, except this time many had their foot burned with a hot iron to cripple them.[30]

Some other incidents that have been preserved include 97 men from Thebais who were maimed by having their left foot burned with a hot iron and their right eyes cut out and cauterized. Shortly thereafter, a gathering of Christians in Gaza studying the scriptures was raided and everyone arrested there received the same treatment.[31]

An early 4th century bust of Galerius. The sculptor has chosen to only hint at the emperor’s reported morbid obesity.

Despite being crowned emperor, Galerius had never even been to Rome. In fact, according to Lactantius, as a Dacian whose people had been conquered by Trajan 200 years prior, he held strong anti-Roman views and sometimes said he intended to rename the Roman empire the “Dacian empire.” In addition, he “so acted, in imitation of the Persian kings, as to bereave men of their liberties…not only were inferior magistrates put to the torture by him, but also the chief men in cities, and persons of the most eminent rank, and this too in matters of little moment, and in civil questions.” A brutal tax assessment was carried out during which many citizens of all religious backgrounds were tortured when they were suspected of holding back property from the assessors. His private life was sadistic and debauched. Lactantius recorded that “He kept bears, most resembling himself in fierceness and bulk, whom he had collected together during the course of his reign. As often as he chose to indulge his humor, he ordered some particular bear to be brought in, and men were thrown to that savage animal, rather to be swallowed up than devoured; and when their limbs were torn asunder, he laughed with excessive complacency.” [32] Overall, under Galerius the empire became not only brutal, but inefficient as well:

But these were slight evils in the government of Galerius, when compared with what follows. For eloquence was extinguished, pleaders cut off, and the learned in the laws either exiled or slain. Useful letters came to be viewed in the same light as magical and forbidden arts; and all who possessed them were trampled upon and execrated, as if they had been hostile to government, and public enemies. Law was dissolved, and unbounded license permitted to judges,— to judges chosen from among the soldiery, rude and illiterate men, and let loose upon the provinces, without assessors to guide or control them.[33]

13th century Coptic icon of St. Catherine, from St. Catherine’s monastery in the Siniai, Egypt. Catherine was a wealthy woman of Alexandria who was killed for refusing Maximin’s sexual advances.

Meanwhile in the rest of the empire events were fast outpacing any one leader’s ability to keep ahead of them. Constantius died in 306 and appointed Constantine to be Caesar. Severus moved up to Augustus of the western empire. When Galerius attempted to levy a tax on the city of Rome in 307 the Praetorian Guard staged a coup in that city and declared Maxentius, son of the former emperor Maximian, to be a Caesar as well.

Maximian then came out of retirement and supported his son. Maximian, Maxentius and Constantine then each declared themselves Augusti and made a pact to oppose Galerius. Severus attempted to invade Italy to defeat them, but was defeated, captured and executed. Galerius responded by invading Italy himself, but was defeated before Rome and forced to retreat while his undisciplined troops ran wild looting the  Italian peninsula. Galerius justified this by invoking the atrocities Italians under Trajan had done to his native Dacia two centuries earlier.

His defeat left four different Augusti and only one Caesar. Maximian then tried to depose his son, but his son’s troops remained loyal and he was forced to flee. In the fall of 308, Galerius appointed Licinius as Augustus of the western empire, despite the fact that he did not control any of the western empire. Licinius was given control of Thrace, Illyricum and Pannonia instead.

War quickly fractured the rebel coalition, however. Maximian took refuge with Constantine, then stabbed him in the back by taking his troops in Gaul and attempting to overthrow him. Most of the troops remained loyal to Constantine and chased Maximian to Marseilles, which they quickly captured the city. Maximian hanged himself shortly thereafter.[34]

In 310, Galerius became ill with what appears to have been some form of colorectal cancer. Writing of a man who had taken much pleasure in causing suffering to others, Lactantius wrote with some schadenfreude in giving a detailed description of his slow death from the disease, how ulcers in his nether regions began to bleed profusely, scab over and bleed again, until gangrene and diverticulitis set in and maggots began to eat away at his flesh.

While in this state, he issued a proclamation calling for an end to the persecution of Christianity while simultaneously defending the need for ordering the persecution in the first place, claiming the need to “return to sound ideas.” His proclamation, however, was basically an admission that the persecution had failed. It noted that many Christians refused to recant their faith even in the face of death, and the empire was nowhere near eradicating Christianity.[35]

Replica of a bust of Maximin Daia, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Nevertheless, once Galerius died in 311 Maximin Daia succeeded him as emperor and within six months reversed this decree and resumed persecution. Christians were released from prison and the mines only to be re-arrested and ordered to offer sacrifices again. Many more were executed, and many others were maimed by having one eye gouged out and the tendons of one foot burned off with a red-hot iron.[36]

This last stage of the persecution was a replay of the most vicious scenes of brutality from previous persecutions. People were flogged, burned, and sometimes cut to pieces and staked out as food for wild dogs. Many women were seized and forced to satisfy Maximin’s sexual appetite. Maximin claimed in a proclamation that all this was necessary because the human mind must recognize that “the beneficient providence of the almighty gods governs it and keeps it secure,” asking that “who can be found so stupid or devoid of all sense as not to see that it is thanks to the beneficent activity of the gods that the soil does not refuse the seeds committed to it and disappoint the expectations of the farmer?…And that the sea does not rage and swell under the blasts of the squally winds? And that typhoons do not burst without warning, bringing destruction in their wake?” Since good things came from the favor of the gods, Christians were imperiling the gods’ favor and thereby constituted a threat to the security of the state.[37]

Maximin’s logic was put to the test when plague and famine both came that winter. This was compounded when Maximin’s forces were defeated in war by Armenia, at the time the world’s only officially Christian nation.[38] In the meantime, open war had broken out in Italy between Constantine and Maxentius. In 312, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and seized control of the empire. Now the master of the western Roman world, Constantine ordered Maximin to cease the persecution of Christians and issued the famous Edict of Milan ordering religious toleration throughout the empire and the restoration of property confiscated from Christians.

Cameo showing the coronation of Constantine.

Constantine then made an alliance with Licinius against Maximin. In 313, Licinius and Maximin clashed at Tzirallum in Macedonia and Maximin was defeated. Maximin died of an illness later that year and Licinius took control of the eastern Empire.

Relations between Licinius and Constantine quickly deterioriated. Fearing that Christians would support Constantine instead of him, Licinius began passing laws banning Christians from assembling and controlling the communication of bishops. His governors used this as a pretext for executing more Christians, including the bishop of Pontus. War broke out in 324, with Constantine winning a succession of quick victories and taking sole control of the empire.

Without a doubt, the Great Persecution was an abysmal failure. Not only did it fail in eradicating Christianity, it spread the faith to new places. The harsh measures used generated sympathy for Christians even amongst pagans such as Constantius. Instead of eliminating internal divisions, the persecution aggravated them and in the process accelerated the decline of the Tetrarchy system. In the civil wars that tore apart the Tetrarchy, Christians rallied to Constantine as their deliverer. Christian intellectuals such as Eusebius would later heap praise on Constantine as a model ruler who delivered them from persecution.

The number of dead in the persecutions cannot be known. Orthodox church tradition speaks of 20,000 dead in Nicomedia alone. Eusebius recorded 91 deaths in Palestine, but these were primarily deaths of people that he knew or deaths that he observed. Eusebius also reports that in the second year of the persecution in Egypt there were up to 100 people executed per day in Thebais alone, and he indicated that the bloodshed in North Africa was comparable to this number. If we accept Eusebius’ numbers the total number of dead must have been at least in the tens of thousands.

Amongst Christians, the Great Persecution is remembered as the worst and most severe of the Roman persecutions of Christianity. Numerous martyrs and saints killed in the persecutions are venerated by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The fortitude displayed by those who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods is held up as a paragon of virtue. On the other hand, the legends of many of the martyrs grew with time and passed from the realm of history to the realm of folklore. The straightforward accounts of Eusebius were supplanted by more fanciful stories involving miraculous occurrences and extremely dramatic situations. Both the real persecutions and the legends served to reinforce the identity of suffering and martyrdom amongst Christians.

Amongst modern western atheists on the other hand, there has been a tendency to minimize or deny the persecution. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon famously discarded all the reports of the Christian writers about the persecution, claiming they were biased. In the early 20th century, Joseph McCabe argued that the persecution was both completely justified and vastly exaggerated, claiming that “only a few hundred” people were killed throughout the entire empire, they were “largely zealots who demanded death” and the persecution was a justified response to Christian “anti-patriotic teaching” that was needed in order to preserve “the welfare of the state.”

It’s very hard to offer a sound moral justification for the murder and extermination of minority groups in service of the cause of national unity and the aggrandizement of power to a totalitarian dictator. This is something that has generally been recognized as wrong across numerous cultures and religions throughout history.

Fortunately more recent historians have stood up to correct such loose interpretations. They have also charitably noted that Gibbon, McCabe and others like him were writing in the early part of the 20th century, before the horrors of the modern totalitarian state exploded into the popular consciousness. The Holocaust, the Stalinist gulag system, the death camps and prison systems of Cambodia and North Korea all showed the modern world the folly of seeking any accommodation with totalitarian states. As Stephen Williams wrote in his 1985 book Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, “Even allowing a margin for invention, what remains is terrible enough. Unlike Gibbon, we live in an age which has experienced similar things, and knows how unsound is that civilised smile of incredulity at such reports. Things can be, have been, every bit as bad as our worst imaginings.”[39]

References:

[1] Dale T. Irvin, Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Volume 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (New York: Orbis, 2007), 111; Carl Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 681; Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. by G.A. Williamson (London: Penguin,1965), 8.1.

[2] Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times, 681; Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Vol. 1, 111, 160-161.

[3] Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times, 696-697.

The empire was first split in two, with Diocletian and Maximian ruling east and west, respectively, from 286 until the Tetrarchy system was introduced in 293.

[4] Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times, 697-698; Eutropius, Abridgment of Roman History, trans. by John Selby Watson, 1853, http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/eutropius/index.html (accessed April 7, 2012), 9.26.

[5] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, trans. by. William Fletcher, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0705.htm (accessed April 5, 2012), 21.2.

[6] The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 12, 288; G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World (Harvard University Press, 1999), 178.

[7] “Diocletian’s Edict against the Manichees,” in A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, ed. by J. Stevenson(London: SPCK, 1957), 267-268.

[8] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 7.1-2.

[9] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 10.1; Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.4.

[10] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 10.1; Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.4.

[11] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 10.1-11.1; Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.4; Eutropius, Abridgment of Roman History, 9.26.

[11] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 11.1-12.2.

[12] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 13.1; Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.5.

[13] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.6.

[14] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.2.

[15] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.2; “Pope St. Marcellinus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09637d.htm (accessed April 6, 2012).

[16] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.3; Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine,trans. by. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2505.htm (accessed April 6, 2012), 1.4.

[17] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 2.1-5.

[18] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 3.1.

[19] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.11; Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. by. William Fletcher, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0701.htm (accessed April 6, 2012), 5.11.

[20] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.12.

[21] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.13.

[22] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.7.

[23] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.13; Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 3.2-4.

[24] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.8-10, 13.

[25] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 130-131.

[26] Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. by Ernest Cushing Richardson, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2502.htm (accessed April 6, 2012), 2.2; Irvin and Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, Vol. 1, 111.

[27] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 13.13; Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 15.1.

[28] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 17.1-20.1; Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times, 697-698.

[29] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 4.3-11.

[30] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 5.2-7.3.

[31] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 21.1, 23.1, 27.1.

[32] Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine, 8.1-4.

[33] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 22.1.

[34] Roebuck, The World of Ancient Times, 698-702.

[35] Lactantius, Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died, 33.1-35.1; Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.17.

[36] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 8.16, 9.1-2.

[37] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 9.7.

[38] Eusebius, The History of the Church, 9.8.

[39] Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (New York: Routledge, 2000), 179 (originally published in 1985).

Image Sources: (banner) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Christian_Martyrs_Last_Prayer.jpg (“The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer,” 1883 painting by Jean-Leon Gerome; (body) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Istanbul_-_Museo_archeol._-_Diocleziano_%28284-305_d.C.%29_-_Foto_G._Dall%27Orto_28-5-2006.jpg; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:119_Diocletian.jpg; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._George._Fresco_from_Matskhvarishi_church,_Svaneti,_Georgia.jpg; http://archhistdaily.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/february-23-all-was-rapine-confusion-tumult/; http://www.stjosephmelkitecatholicchurch.org/menaion_for_september/index.album/p-alignleft-bisept-3-commemoration-of-the-holy-hieromartyr-anthimus-bishop-of-nicomedia-our-holy-father-theoctistus-companion-in-ascetisism-of-euthymius-the-great?i=10&s=1; http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/index14.html; http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2008/11/st-catherine-great-martyr.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Juliana_of_Nicomedia.jpg; http://tripwow.tripadvisor.com/slideshow-photo/remains-of-peristyle-diocletian-s-palace-split-croatia.html?sid=11344182&fid=upload_12877507132-tpfil02aw-21619; http://stmarypawtucket.org/resources.php; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Romuliana_Galerius_head.jpg; http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2008/11/st-catherine-great-martyr.html; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daza02_pushkin.jpg; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Constantine-cameo.jpg

Articles © Christopher Jones 2012.

Part 2: More Inventions of the Ancient Near East
Part 3 – Tatian, Clement of Alexandria and the Battle for History.

It is not a stretch to say that the ancient Near East is known in the modern world primarily for its inventions. World-changing Near Eastern inventions such as agriculture, metallurgy, the wheel, writing and the chariot are well known. Yet, these are just the tip of the iceberg of ancient Near Eastern ingenuity and engineering. Here, we will examine some more familiar everyday items that trace their origins to the ancient Near East.

1. Pin Tumbler Locks

Simple barred doors are effective at keeping people out of something, but they suffer from a major flaw: They can’t be opened from the outside. You can lock your front door to keep intruders out at night, but a barred door won’t do you any good to keep people out of your house when you’re not there.

So the solution was to figure out ways to lock and unlock doors from the outside. At around 2000 BC, the Egyptians invented a complex key system that involved using strings to manipulate several cylindrical pieces of wood through a hole. When the space between the cylinders on the string lined up with the edge of the door, the door opened.

Modern replica of an Assyrian pin lock. The back plate would be bolted to the outside of a door. The paddle-shaped object is the key, which is inserted into the bar and pushes up the pins, allowing the bar to be removed.

A less clunky and more elegant solution to the problem came from Assyria. The palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad (built from 717-706 BC) featured a new type of lock that used loose pins to hold the bolt in place. This was a simple version of the modern pin tumbler locks used on most doors in the modern world.

This lock worked by putting the bar on the outside of the door instead of the inside. This bar had a notch cut into it, and holes drilled into the top. When the bar was in place, loose pins in the door dropped into the holes and held the bar in place. To unlock the door, a key with pins sticking out of the end that matched the holes was inserted into the notch and used to push the pins upwards, allowing the bar to be slid free of the door.

The Romans later copied this design, and modern pin tumbler locks operate on the same principles. Their main improvements in modern locks have been to make the pins different lengths (so different keys open different doors), make the whole system smaller and add rotation to make it easier to open.[1]

2. Penicillin

Ancient Egypt was famous throughout the ancient world for its advanced medical practice and excellent doctors. Numerous papyri survive which contain instructions on the diagnosis and treatment of injuries. While doctors in the rest of the world were a singular profession, Egyptian doctors developed a range of specialized fields including dentistry, gynecology and proctology. While many of the prescriptions for drugs are now known to be useless, in some cases the Egyptians stumbled upon something useful.[2]

The Edwin Smith surgical papyrus, a textbook on treating wounds, head trauma, fractures and spinal injuries of the upper body that dated from the 17th century, recommended the following diagnosis and treatment for a wound that appeared to be infected:

If thou examinest a man having a diseased wound in his breast, while that wound is inflamed and a whirl of inflammation continually issues from the mouth of that wound at thy touch; the two lips of that wound are ruddy, while that man continues to be feverish from it; his flesh cannot receive a bandage, that wound cannot take a margin of skin; the granulation which is in the mouth of that wound is watery, their surface is not and secretions drop therefrom in an oily state.

Thou shouldst say concerning him: “One having a diseased wound in his breast, it being inflamed, (and) he continues to have fever from it. An ailment which I will treat.”

Thou shalt make for him cool applications for drawing out the inflammation from the mouth of the wound:

a. Leaves of willow, nbs’-tree ksnty. Apply to it.

b. Leaves of ym’-tree, dung. hny-t’, ksnty, Apply to it. Thou shalt make for him applications for drying up the wound: a. Powder of green pigment wsb-t, thn.t, grease. Triturate bind upon it.[3]

Blue Penicillum bread mold, whose antibiotic qualities were utilized but not fully understood by the ancient Egyptians.

We now know that willow bark has antiseptic qualities that reduce inflammation. Later Egyptian doctors took this treatment further and began prescribing “bread in a rotten condition” to be applied to infected wounds that were discharging pus. Blue bread mold is better known in the medical world by its scientific name Penicillum, making the ancient Egyptians the first to use antibiotics.[4]

Some scientists have expressed skepticism that the amount of penicillin absorbed would have been enough to be effective, but even trace amounts applied directly to a wound would have had some effect on the infection.[5]

The Egyptians did not know that infection was caused by bacteria and did not understand the scientific principles underlying the use of antibiotics. Rather, they figured out the effectiveness of bread mold by trial and error. While throwing anything at an infected wound in hopes that something would work, some Egyptian doctor somewhere decided to try moldy bread, and – surprise -  he got results.

3. Batteries

As I’ve already covered in more detail elsewhere on this site, a number of clay pots with metal rings and rods inside of them have been found in Iraq. They date from about 100 AD, during the Parthian period. Experiments have confirmed that they were capable of operating as wet-cell batteries and could potentially produce half a volt of electricity.

What could the Parthians have possibly wanted to do with a low grad electrical current?  One of the first explanations was that they were used to electroplate objects. However, the electrical current from one battery is not enough to electroplate an object, and no electroplated objects have been found from the ancient world. The most prevalent explanation is that they were used for pain therapy, similar to how electric catfish and rays were used to treat pain in the ancient world. This is certainly possible, but it is also possible that these batteries were a novelty item that gave a slight shock to anyone who touched both pieces of metal but had no practical use outside of being a curiosity.[6]

4. Beer

Beer dates back to at least 3000 BC, although it may have originated earlier, in the pre-urban agricultural societies of the Neolithic period. What is known for sure is that beer became a popular beverage in the Sumerian city-states of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians made wine as well, but beer was clearly the alcoholic drink of choice. In some cities, up to 40% of the yearly grain harvest was diverted to beer making.[7] Like most things in polytheistic cultures, beer making had its own patron goddess, Ninkasi. Most of our information about Sumerian brewing techniques comes from hymns to Ninkasi that describe how beer was made.

A funerary model of a busy beer brewery, from the Egyptian 11th Dynasty, dating to between 2009 and 1998 BC.

In Sumer, barley and emmer were the grains of choice for beer making. The barley grain was soaked and allowed to germinate and sprout. It was then dried, crushed and flavored with herbs, spices, honey or dates – the exact mixture presumably depended on the brewer – and mixed with bappir or “beer-bread.” The mixture was then heated to mash in an oven. Once it was ready, it was spread out to cool and more sugar (from either honey or dates) was added to speed fermentation. Water was added, and the whole mixture sat in a vat and slowly drained through a filter into a vessel below.

The resulting beer still had lots of little pieces of soggy bread floating in it, and as a result it had to be strained before drinking so you got liquid instead of a semi-solid. One way of doing this was to have a common pot of beer on a table, and those socializing around it would each have individual straws with a filter on the bottom that they would use to drink the beer.

This cylinder seal impression from the Early Dynastic IIIa period (c. 2600 BC) shows two seated men drinking beer from a common pot using long straws.

The beer’s thickness did make it an excellent source of nutrients, especially vitamin B. Because Sumerians ate little meat, beer was an important part of their diet and a major source of vitamins.

Beer was also popular in ancient Egypt, where breweries were closely associated with bakeries. The methods of manufacture were similar to those used in Sumer.[8]

5. Automatic Doors

Alexandria during the Hellenistic and Roman periods was one of the world’s foremost cities, full of splendid architecture and technological marvels. During the first century AD, the city was home to an inventor and tinkerer named Heron. A Greek by ethnicity and an Alexandrian native, Heron built a a number of inventions ranging from the whimsical to the immensely practical. His designs for syringes, force pumps, catapults, fire engines, surveying tools and odometers fall into the latter category. His designs for windmill-powered pipe organs, mechanical birds, and an entirely mechanical drama production featuring its own sound effects and several talking puppets are all examples of the former.

Diagram of Heron’s automatic doors. Lighting a fire on the altar heads the sphere on the left, which pushes water into the bucket, causing it to pull on the system of pulleys and open the temple doors.

One of his more spectacular inventions was a temple with automatic doors. When priests lit a fire on an altar in front of the doors, it heated air inside a sphere underneath the altar. The heated air expanded and pushed the water in the sphere through a siphon and into a bucket. As the bucket filled up, it became heavy and lowered down on a system of pulleys. The ropes attached to the pulleys swung poles on which the doors were hinged, opening the doors.

The overall effect of this was to make it look like the statue of the god inside the temple opened his own front door spontaneously in order to receive the sacrifices being offered on the altar. In an updated version of his device, Heron added a trumpet which blew automatically when the doors were opened.

Unfortunately, no trace of any automated temple has been found. There seems little doubt that such systems were used, as Heron makes reference to similar designs created by other inventors. The delicate systems required to open and close the doors are unlikely to have survived for 2000 years.[9]

An animation of Heron’s doors in operation can be seen here.

6. Vending Machines

Another of Heron’s inventions was something he called the “sacrificial vessel which flows only when money is introduced.” This was a vending machine that dispensed water for worshipers to use to perform sacred washing prior to entering the temple.

Diagram of Heron’s vending machine. Dropping a coin in the top hits the paddle R, causing the cork to lift out of the tube and water to flow to the customer.

The machine was very simple. A coin dropped in the top slot fell onto a paddle on the end of a lever and depressed it, causing the other end of the lever to raise up and pull a cork out of the spout in the bottom and allow water to flow out. As the lever pan sloped downwards, coin slid off after a short time and the pan rose back to its original position. The cork then dropped back into place and stopped the water flow.[10]

7. Lenses

The earliest known optical lens was discovered in 1853 by Sir Austen Henry Layard during his excavations of the Assyrian city of Nimrud. Found in a collection of glassware, the lens dates to the latter half of the 700s BC. The lens was not glass, rather it was made from ground and polished rock crystal. The lens is plano-convex, having one flat side and one convex side, and is about a quarter of an inch thick.

The Nimrud Lens, currently on display at the British Museum in London.

The lens is certainly primitive. Its focusing abilities have been described as “poor,” calling into question its utility as a burning lens. It does, however, give a magnification of o.5x, not large but enough to potentially aid a scribe trying to read small cuneiform script or an artist working to add detail to a small cylinder seal.

Other lenses have been found at various Mediterranean sites, and textual evidence from Greece indicates that burning glasses were surely known by the 5th century BC. Some scholars have questioned whether these items were used as magnifying lenses, saying they were meant as jewelry. Yet, the fact remains that lenses such as the Nimrud lens work as magnifying lenses, and there were definitely situations where such lenses could prove useful. It seems hard to imagine that no one would have been idly messing around with their jewelry one day and figured out that they could see things closer when they looked through it.[11]

8. Maps

The Babylonian World Map, also on display in the British Museum.

The Babylonian Map of the World is a curious tablet from about 600 BC, found in Sippar in southern Iraq, which contains a strange pattern of geometric shapes with labels. Many points are labeled with known place names such as “Babylon,” “Assyria,” “Urartu,” and “Elam.” Others have a less specific designations such as “swamp,” “mountain” and “Canal.[12]

Some features on the map correspond to real world locations, for example the walls of Babylon are represented by the square that straddles the Euphrates River, just like the real walls of Babylon. On the other hand, the map only shows locations near to Babylon, although the Babylonians doubtless knew of lands beyond Elam and Assyria. Yet on the map, past Assyria lies the great Ocean that encircles the world. Beyond the ocean lie 7 triangles labeled “islands,” said to be “beyond the rising sun” or “beyond the flight of birds.”

Maps and surveys of local areas, towns, villages and buildings are known from Mesopotamia and elsewhere from earlier dates, but this map is unique in that it is not a representation of something that people can see all at once. Rather, it represents the world as the map-maker imagined it. He couldn’t see the world, he had to draw it based on descriptions, general directions and his own imagination of what the world should look like.

Drawing of the map, with translations of the inscriptions.

Clearly the distorted geography is a function of having to shoehorn the known world to fit the disc-shaped earth that the Babylonians imagined. Therefore, the map appears to be symbolic and stylized. Rather than an exact map of the type we think of today, the map was an artistic representation of the Babylonian view of the world and of their place in it. If you look closely Babylon is not the center of the world as one might expect, rather, the center of the world is a dot put in the middle of the Euphrates River. This might be taken as a representation of how important the Euphrates was to life in Mesopotamia – that is, it was the center of their lives.

9. Libraries

The invention of writing meant the creation of documents. And the creation of documents in turn created the need to store documents. Piling lots of clay tablets in one place meant that one needed systems to categorize and retrieve information, in order to be able to actually find stuff when you needed it. And so, the first libraries were created.

A portion of the Ebla archive during excavation. The tablets were dropped into a heap when the city was destroyed and their shelving collapsed.

The oldest library yet found comes from the Syrian city-state of Ebla, which was destroyed at around 2300 BC. The vast majority of texts were administrative documents, listing taxes, land titles and the like – the sort of thing one would find in a courthouse today. But a smaller group of documents created what could be the first known research library. Some tablets list Sumerian words. Others are a sort of mini bilingual dictionary, listing Sumerian with accompanying Eblaite translations. Two duplicate tablets contained the text of a Sumerian myth.

While the academic holdings of the Ebla library were small, other libraries such as the archive at Nippur (c. 2000 BC) had so many texts that they had to create catalogs of their holdings. Two tablets found at Nippur list the titles held in the archive. At the Hittite capital of Hattushas, cataloging was taken a step further and included short summaries of each tablet. Tablets began to have summaries of their contents added to the end, as well as specifying if they were part of a numbered series. There were limits, of course. Alphabetization was not possible without the use of an alphabet, so the order which titles were listed was haphazard.

Surprisingly, the Assyrians were systematic collectors of library materials. Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 BC) and Assurbanipal (668-627 BC) both systematically collected libraries. Assurbanipal’s library contained a large collection of texts on interpreting omens, a number of texts on translating between Sumerian and Akkadian, and literary texts which include some of our most complete texts of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Much of this material was looted from territories conquered by the Assyrian armies. Others were taken or bought (we’re not clear as to which) from private collections.

Drawing of wooden shelving at the Ebla Archive, showing how it may have looked.

Royal collections were open only to a select few, and those select few could only view official documents under the watchful eye of a court official. Some private collections practiced lending, complete with curses written on the tablets to be called down in the name of various gods on the borrower who did not return his items or returned them damaged.

Later, the Greek Ptolemies would open up another era of Near Eastern libraries by creating the famous Library of Alexandria, dedicated to compiling human knowledge rather than providing necessary services to a monarch. Throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods, libraries flourished in the Near East. Many collections were lost at the end of antiquity, and others were transferred to monastic libraries and preserved there.[13]

10. The “Yo Momma” Joke

Modern eighth grade humor can trace its origins to an Old Babylonian text containing a collection of riddles. Mostly, these riddles serve as a clear illustration of how humor is extremely dependent on cultural context in order to actually be funny. For example, one riddle read:

He gouged out the eye:
It is not the fate of a dead man.
He cut the throat: A dead man (-Who is it?)
Answer: A Governor.

Yet, the intent of some humor is clear even 3,500 years after it was written, as evidenced by this damaged text:

… of your mother
is by the one who has intercourse (with her) (-What/who is it?)

The answer to this riddle is also lost, but we can all see what direction it’s going.[14] For some reason, the publication of this text made national news, even to the point that Stephen Colbert covered it on his show.

Next: Part 2: More Inventions of the Ancient Near East
Part 3 – Tatian, Clement of Alexandria and the Battle for History.

References:

[1] Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 468-472.

[2] Kent R. Weeks, “Medicine, Surgery and Public Health in Ancient Egypt,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 3, ed. by Jack Sasson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 1794-1795.

[3] Edwin Smith Papyrus, translated at http://www.touregypt.net/edwinsmithsurgical.htm#Case%20Forty-One:

[4] Michael D. Parkins, “Pharmacological Practices of Ancient Egypt,” in The Proceedings of the 10th Annual History of Medicine Days, Health Sciences Centre, University of Calgary, March 23-24, 2001 (Calgary, Alberta: Health Sciences Centre, 2001), 10; Milton Wainwright, “Moulds in Ancient and More Recent Medicine,” The Mycologist, Vol. 3, p. 21-23.

[5] Wainwright, “Moulds in Ancient and More Recent Medicine,” 21.

[6] Paul T. Keyser, “The Purpose of the Parthian Galvanic Cells: A First Century A.D. Electric Battery used for Analgesia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), 81-90; Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 146-157.

[7] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 333.

[8] Jane M. Renfrew, “Vegetables in the Ancient Near Eastern Diet,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, 197-199; Marten Stol, “Private Life in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, 497.

[9] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 129-131; L. Sprague De Camp, The Ancient Engineers (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 257-262.

[10] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 128-129; De Camp, The Ancient Engineers, 258.

[11] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 157-161, 163.

[12] James and Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 59-60.

[13] Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001), 1-16.

[14] Owen Jarus, “Sex, Beer & Politics: Riddles Reveal Life of Ancient Mesopotamians,” LiveScience, http://www.livescience.com/18147-ancient-riddles-decoded-mesopotamia.html, January 26, 2012; Nathan Wasserman and Michael Streck, “Dialogues and Riddles: Three Old Babylonian Wisdom Texts,” Iraq, (2011) Vol. 73, 117-125.

Image Sources: (Banner) http://www.britannica.com/bps/media-view/123691/1/0/0; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BabylonianWorldMap2.jpg; (Body) http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/hsc09b.htm; http://photo-dictionary.com/phrase/7500/molded-bread.html; http://miscellaneous-pics.blogspot.com/2011/03/ctesiphon-arch-baghdad-battery.html; http://patentpending.blogs.com/patent_pending_blog/2004/10/the_baghdad_bat.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FuneraryModel-BakeryAndBrewery_MetropolitanMuseum.png; http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlj/2012/cdlj2012_002.html; http://thecrystalkim.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/the-item-door/; http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/01/the-greek-engineer-who-invented-the-steam-engine-2000-years-ago/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nimrud_lens_British_Museum.jpg; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baylonianmaps.JPG; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Map_of_the_World

Articles © Christopher Jones 2012.

Assyria was a land power for sure, which means that its power was at its roots based on agricultural production. As both an agrarian society and a highly militarized state, Iron Age Assyria is not the type of society where one would expect to find much independent thought or innovation in the civilian sector. This is partly true. Few pieces of Assyrian agricultural technology were new. Most were adapted from surrounding cultures. But some great agricultural innovations and feats of engineering did arise.

Modern day farmer's fields along the Tigris River near Diyarbakır, Turkey.

The heart of ancient Assyria was situated along the Tigris River, in what is now northern Iraq. The Two Rivers were vital to farming in what would otherwise be a desert, but they also carry six times the silt of the Nile River. This means that their river beds are shallower and fill up faster, and therefore the rivers change courses more often. They also flow faster, and the Tigris flows even faster than the Euphrates. While the Nile flooded regularly and predictably and gently inundated Egypt’s fields every year, the shallow beds, fast rate of flow and heavy silt load meant that the Tigris and Euphrates were prone to violent, unpredictable floods that spilled over their banks and washed away fields rather than replenished them.[1]

As a result, systems of levees and canals were built in Mesopotamia from as early as Sumerian times. Canals were used to trap water, which could then be used to irrigate fields. There were no sluice gates to control the water flow, rather, fields were flooded by digging through the canal wall to flood the field, and then shoveling mud into the breach to seal it back up again once the desired amount of water had come through.This meant that each farmer’s field had to directly border a canal. As a result, complex canal systems sprung up everywhere people lived in Mesopotamia. Maintaining the canals was a major duty of government. The nation’s food supply depended on it.

Flood irrigation from canals is still used by many farmers in modern Iraq.

Rivers flooded in the spring as mountaintop snows melted at the sources of the rivers. Canal breaching was done at this time on fallow fields to prepare them for planting. The fields would then be plowed in autumn after a rain. If there were no rains, more irrigation was required. Once the field had dried out enough so that the ground was not wet, but before it was rock hard, it was ready to be plowed.

Plowing was done with oxen, typically four to a plow. The soil was tough enough that the plow required three or more passes for the point to break up the soil create a good furrow. It took three men to work a plow team, to guide the oxen and hold down the plow handles. There was no steering mechanism on plows or any wheels. Once the end of the furrow was reached, the oxen had to be unhitched and the plow turned around, and the oxen re-hitched and the process begun again in the other direction.

A plow team in Egypt's Old Kingdom. Assyrian plow teams 2,000 years later would not look much different.

At the end of this laborious process came the seeding, usually done in October. Barley was by far the most common crop. Wheat, emmer, millet, flax and onions were also grown in the fields. Seeding could be done by hand, but from the mid 2nd millennium BC mechanical seeders started to appear. These tools resembled plows pulled by oxen, but with a very small blade. Above the blade was a hopper, which fed a chute that ran down behind the blade. As the seeder moved forwards, seed was deposited into the furrows.

Drawing of a relief from Mesopotamia, c. 1500 BC, showing a mechanical seeder. b) indicates the seed hopper while a) indicates the chute.

Once the field had been seeded, it was flooded again up to the height of the furrows. The water leached away salts from the soil on sides of the furrows. The field could be watered several more times during the winter, once a month in January, February and March.

While large waterings were conducted by breaking and rebuilding the canal wall, this was time-consuming and back-breaking labor. Smaller scale watering and the watering of shade gardens was done with a shaduf, a simple counterweight crane used to dip a bucket into a canal or river and lift it up to a field or garden. The shaduf had been in use in the Near East and Egypt for thousands of years as a basic tool of farming.

An Egyptian Shaduf used to water a garden. From the Tomb of Ipuy at Deir-el-Medina, reign of Rameses II, mid 13th century BC. Assyrian shadufs would have been virtually identical.

Harvest time came in April for barley and onions, and in May and June for flax and emmer. Harvesting was done by hand with sickles. Grain was threshed on a threshing-floor by oxen who dragged a threshing-board over the grain. The grain was then tossed in the air to allow the wind to separate the chaff from the kernels. The whole cycle then began anew, with fields being cleared, irrigated and plowed.[2]

This was the cycle of agricultural life in Mesopotamia. It is how the vast majority of the population spent their lives. The cycle of floods and rains, planting and harvest, provided a framework that governed life between the Two Rivers. These practices pre-dated the Assyrian Empire by millennia and they would survive long after it was gone.

Yet, improvements could be made. A major duty of the Assyrian kings was to maintain an effective canal system to enable farmers to water their land. Kings took other measures to boost agricultural production. Tiglath-Pileser I, who ruled from 1115 to 1077 BC, boasted that:

I had plows put into operation throughout the whole land of Assyria, whereby I heaped up more piles of grain than my ancestors. I established herds of horses, cattle and donkeys from the booty which by the help of my Lord Ashur I had taken from the lands over which I had won dominion.[3]

As Assyrian power grew and the population boomed, greater demand for foodstuffs meant that more elaborate irrigation systems had to be constructed. Assurnasirpal II (who ruled from 883 to 859 BC) is most famous for his military conquests, but he also embarked on a major civil engineering project to expand the canal system around the capital city of Nimrud. He dug a major canal linking Nimrud with the Upper Zab River. In an inscription he boasted that:

I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak, and called it Abundance Canal. I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince,
fig, grapevine…[4]

Assurnasirpal’s Abundance Canal also served to water the king’s royal gardens, full of plants taken from lands he had conquered. He concluded dreamily that “The canal-water gushes from above into the gardens; fragrance pervades the walkways, streams of water as numerous as the stars of heaven flow in the pleasure garden. Like a squirrel I pick fruit in the garden of delights.”[5]

In the late 8th century, Sargon II (who ruled from 722 to 704 BC) built a new capital at Dur-Sharrukin. As part of this new city, he planted an even bigger garden. This urban forest featured thousands of trees, including “2,350 loads of apple trees” supplied by “the people of Nemed-Istar” and “1,000 loads of apple trees” from “the people of Suhu,” along with medlar, plum, quince and almond trees. The garden featured an artificial hill with an altar on top, a pond large enough for pleasure boating, and a pondside pavilion with a columned roof providing shade.[6]

More importantly, Sargon worked to expand the canal system. When his troops marched into the Caucasus Mountains against the kingdom of Urartu in 714 BC, they discovered a new type of water system: the qanat (so called in modern Arabic, also called kerez in Persian). This was a tunnel used to funnel water down from hills to the plains below. They were built by digging a series of shafts straight down from the surface. Tunnels were then dug between the bottoms of the shafts to create an underground tunnel. The first shaft was dug at a water source, a stream or natural well at higher elevations. The resulting tunnel sloped gently downhill, allowing the water to flow down the mountain.

Diagram of a typical qanat system.

Sargon of course devastated the Urartian countryside, but he brought the qanat system back to Assyria, where many qanawat were built and are still in use to this day.[7]

Sargon was killed in battle in 704 BC and succeeded by his son Sennacherib (704-681 BC). Sennacherib began even greater public works projects. He moved the capital again, this time to Nineveh, which he vastly expanded. Nineveh was bisected by the Tebitu River, so to control the river while still supplying the city with water he dammed the Tebitu ten miles upstream from Nineveh and then dug a canal from the reservoir to the city. This allowed flooding to be controlled. The canal was shallower than the river, so water could more easily be used to irrigate the fields by digging out the canal walls and refilling them.

Plan of the structure erected by Sennacherib where the canal separated from the river at Bavian.

To further control flooding, Sennacherib had an artificial swamp created on the northeast side of the city in order to absorb water overflowing the canals. The swamp was also designated a royal game preserve for hunting by the king and stocked with game birds, deer and wild boars. This first stage of construction was completed by 694 BC.

As Nineveh grew, one canal was not enough. More canals were dug, until eighteen canals connected Nineveh to the Tebitu reservoir and other water sources. This in turn created greater demand on the reservoir’s water supplies. To remedy this, Sennacherib’s engineers dammed the Atrush river and built another canal to feed into the Tebitu at Bavian. This canal featured a working sluice gate which according to an inscription “opens by itself, without using a spade or a shovel, and allows the waters of prosperity to flow. Its gate is not opened by any action of mens hands.” This was a huge technological leap ahead of canal banks that were dug through with a shovel and closed by shoveling dirt back into the breach. Now, gates could be opened and closed and water re-routed by mechanical process instead of back-breaking labor.[8]

The course of the new canal required crossing over another stream near the modern village of Jerwan in Iraq, so the engineers built an aqueduct thirty feet high and ninety feet long to bridge the waters. This structure was built of stone and sealed with concrete to prevent the water from leaking. In order to keep the water flowing, the bed of the aqueduct was built on a finely graded slope. The structure was supported by a type of false arch in which stones were stacked in a staggered fashion, appearing arch-like but lacking the weight-bearing properties of a true arch. Sennacherib was very proud of this structure, having inscribed on the aqueduct that “I caused a canal to be dug to the meadows of Nineveh. Over deep-cut ravines I spanned a bridge of white stone blocks. Those waters I caused to pass over it.”[9] This was the world’s earliest known above-ground aqueduct, pre-dating the famous Roman structures by 500 years.

Reconstructed plan of the Jerwan aqueduct, completed in 690 BC.

Artist's depiction of the Jerwan aqueduct.

The new canal system was completed in 690 BC after fifteen months of work. Just before the sluice-gates were scheduled to be opened in a ceremony at which Sennacherib and priests were to be present to make sacrifices to the river-gods Ea and Enbilulu. Before they could conduct the ceremony, water pressure built up behind the sluices and burst them open. While many Assyrians likely feared that this was a sign of divine disfavor, Sennacherib declared that the gods had been so pleased with the work of the canal that they had opened the gates themselves without waiting for his ceremony.

The ceremonies went ahead as planned, just without the dramatic opening of the canal. Priests offered oxen and sheep as sacrifices, and Sennacherib gave gifts of “linen, and brightly colored garments,” “golden rings” and “daggers of gold” to the engineers, architects and workmen who had built the canal. At the head of the sluice gates at Bavian, he set up six steles with images of the gods carved onto them.[10]

Eventually, the water system of Nineveh featured 150km of canals, aqueducts, qanawat and other water works.[11] Sennacherib summed up his accomplishments in an inscription at Bavian:

At that time I greatly enlarged the site of Nineveh. Its wall and outer wall thereof, which had not existed before, I built anew and raised mountain high. Its fields, which through lack of water had fallen into neglect and…while its people, ignorant of artificial irrigation, turned their eyes heavenward for showers of rain–[these fields] I watered; and from the villages of Masiti, Banbarina, Shapparishu, Kar-Shamash-nasir, Kar-Nuri, Rimusa, Hata, Dalain, Resh, Eni, Sulu, Dur, Shibaniba, Isparrira, Gingilinish, Nampa-gate, Tillu, Alumsusi, and the waters which were above the town of Hadabiti eighteen canals I dug and directed their course to the Khosr River. From the border of the town of Kisiri to the midst of Nineveh I dug a canal; these waters I caused to flow therein. Sennacherib’s Channel I called its name.[12]

Sennacherib also sought to outdo his predecessors in terms of the massive palaces and gardens, including one structure he called the “Palace Without Rival.” This palace was built on a site previously occupied by a palace of Tiglath-Pileser I. By the time of Sennacherib, this palace was 400 years old and in poor condition. Flooding had undermined the foundations and the ground surrounding it was turning into a swamp into which the entire structure was slowly sinking. Sennacherib had the old palace torn down and canals built to drain the water from the area.

Drawing of a relief from Nineveh depicting Sennacherib's Gardens. An aqueduct resembling the Jerwan aqueduct can be seen in the upper right. Streams can be seen crisscrossing the garden and a small pavilion is situated on top of a hill in the center of the garden.

He then built his new palace, a magnificent building designed to display the king’s power, wealth and dominion over the far reaches of the empire. This structure featured a room filled with “objects of astonishment” as well as “colossal striding lions, such as no previous king had ever constructed before me,” twelve fierce lion-colossi,” “twelve mighty bull-colossi,” and, much more strangely, “twenty-two cow-colossi invested with joyous allure, plentifully endowed with sexual attraction.”[13] This structure featured massive terraced gardens, including a park laid out adjacent to the palace intending to imitate Mount Amanus. Most interesting is the system Sennacherib described for watering the gardens:

I created clay molds as if by divine intelligence for great cylinders and alamittu-palms…In order to draw water up all day long I had ropes, bronze wires and bronze chains made, and instead of shadufs I set up the great cylinders and alamittu-palms over cisterns. I made these royal lodges look just right. I raised the height of the surroundings of the palace to be a Wonder for All Peoples. I gave it the name “Incomparable Palace.”[14]

What is meant by these terms? According to Stephanie Dalley, the alamittu-palm was typically depicted in Assyrian art as having a spiral-like internal structure, and therefore the bronze tree-trunks and bronze spirals indicated that the entire bronze and copper mechanism was in fact an Archimedes screw. This is generally thought to have been invented in the 3rd century BC but if this interpretation is correct the device was used in Assyria long before then.[15] This was a totally new form of agricultural technology, one that would represent a major development if the Assyrians did in fact invent it.

An Archimedes screw-pump.

Yet, the description is still rather vague and open to interpretation. No archaeological remains or artistic depictions of Archimedes screws have been found in Assyria. One drawback is that large bronze screws inside metal cylinders would have been extremely heavy, with some estimates running as high as two or three tons.[16]

Could Sennacherib’s inscription be describing something else less technically advanced? One possibility is that the references to chains and cylinders describe some sort of bucket elevator, which was used to raise water through a cylinder from a lower level of the gardens to a higher level. This of course has no more or less to recommend it than Dalley’s view, and I merely raise it as an alternative hypothesis until something else comes to light.

Dalley goes so far as to suggest that the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon were in fact the gardens of Sennacherib. The problem with the Hanging Gardens is that Nebuchadnezzar’s palace has been extensively excavated and very little evidence of major gardens has been found. Dalley points out that the descriptions of the Hanging Gardens by classical authors contain many features of Sennacherib’s gardens in Nineveh: terraces, a structure built in imitation of a mountain, and Archimedes screws to water the upper levels. Dalley theorizes that the writers who wrote of the Seven Wonders of the World confused Babylon with ancient Nineveh, and were actually describing the gardens of Sennacherib.[17]

This is certainly an interesting hypothesis, but one that cannot be a definitive solution. For one, there is the problem that the gardens of Nebuchadnezzar were described not only by Greek and Roman authors but by Berossus, a native Babylonian who lived in the 3rd century BC and wrote a history of Babylon in Greek. His history has unfortunately been lost, but fragments survive quoted in other authors such as Josephus. Although he did not use the term “hanging gardens”, Berossus recorded that Nebuchadnezzar in building his palace:

Now in this palace he erected very high walks, supported by stone pillars, and by planting what was called a pensile paradise, and replenishing it with all sorts of trees, he rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country. This he did to please his queen, because she had been brought up in Media, and was fond of a mountainous situation.[18]

The second problem is that Sennacherib’s gardens were destroyed when Nineveh was sacked in 612 BC. There is no way that anyone alive or even recently alive could have seen them in the 2nd century BC when people began to compose lists of wonders. It seems rather odd that Greeks of the 2nd century onwards would know many technical details of gardens that were destroyed 500 years prior, and that a native Babylonian would confuse a famous landmark of his own city with the capital of a foreign power that oppressed his city for centuries.

Karen Foster has proposed an alternative theory: that Nebuchadnezzar was copying features found in earlier Assyrian royal gardens. Terraced gardens, irrigation systems and the imitation of the form of a mountain were all features common to the accounts of Sennacherib’s and Nebuchadnezzar’s gardens, and some of these features were also found in later Persian gardens.[19] Without finding definite evidence of the Hanging Gardens, we cannot say for sure. If this were the case, it would truly be a testament to the advanced nature of Assyrian agriculture and irrigation that one of the Wonders of the Ancient World was a direct copy of an Assyrian royal garden.

A set of more recent images of the Jerwan Aqueduct can be found here.

References:
[1] L. Sprague De Camp, The Ancient Engineers (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 51-52; Christopher J. Eyre, “The Agricultural Cycle, Farming, and Water Management in the Ancient Near East,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, ed. by Jack Sasson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 180.

[2] Eyre, “The Agricultural Cycle, Farming, and Water Management in the Ancient Near East,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, 180-182; H.W.F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), 163-164.

[3] Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria, 162.

[4] Translated in Stephanie Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” Garden History, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Summer, 1993), 4.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” 4-5.

[7] De Camp, The Ancient Engineers, 61.

[8] Thorvild Jakobsen, “The Water Supplies of Nineveh,” in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1934), 41; Seton Loyd, “The Canal Head at Bavian,” in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, 49; Stephanie Dalley and John Peter Olson, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), 6; De Camp, The Ancient Engineers, 63-64.

[9] Loyd, “Architectural Description of the Aqueduct,” in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, 10-20; De Camp, The Ancient Engineers, 63-64.

[10] Jakobsen, “The Water Supplies of Nineveh,” in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, 36-41.

[11] Karen Radner, ‘Nineveh, Assyria’s capital in the 7th century BC’, Knowledge and Power, Higher Education Academy, 2011 [http://knp.prs.heacademy.ac.uk/essentials/nineveh/] (accessed February 7, 2012).

[12] Jakobsen, “The Water Supplies of Nineveh,” in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, 36.

[13] From inscriptions translated in Karen Polinger Foster, “The Hanging Gardens of Nineveh,” Iraq, Vol. 66, Nineveh. Papers of the 49th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part One (2004), 217; Dalley and Olson, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World,” 7.

[14] From inscription translated in Dalley and Olson, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World,” 7.

[15] Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” 6-9; Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled,” Iraq, Vol. 56 (1994), 46-48.

[16] Dalley and Olson, “Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World,” 8.

[17] Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Gardens and the Identification of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Resolved,” 6-9; Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled,” Iraq, Vol. 56 (1994), 46-48.

[18] Berossus fragment in Josephus, Against Apion, trans. by William Whiston, 1737 (http://sacred-texts.com/jud/josephus/apion-1.htm), 19.

[19] Foster, “The Hanging Gardens of Nineveh,” 209, 217.

Image Sources: Colorized version of drawing seen later in the article; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tigris_River_At_Diyarbakir.JPG; Laith Hammoudi/MClatchy Newspapers (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/17/72051/once-worlds-bread-basket-iraq.html); James Henry Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1926), 70; Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization, 124; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipuy_shaduf.jpg; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Qanat_cross_section.svg; Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1934), 48 (A search of copyright renewal records does not indicate that the copyright on this publication was renewed. The work is also available for free online. I believe it to be in the public domain. If this is incorrect, please notify me and I will attend to it); Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, opp. pg. 8; Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan, 17; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hanging_Gardens_of_Babylon.gif; last three images from image plates in Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan.

Article © Christopher Jones 2012.