Found this via Yonatan Zunger
Found this via Yonatan Zunger
I love history, especially this detailed history about forgotten peoples and cultures, not just the American-centric or European-centric history most of us learn in schools.
Until this morning I'd never heard of the Sabines and had never considered the ebb and flow of people and cultures in the BCE Middle-East who shared different parts of their cultures to create wholly new ones.
Amazing!
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
Sabians: A Way-Too-Long Guide to an Abrahamic Religion Which Might Not Even Exist, and Which the United States Hopefully Hasn't Destroyed
Everyone knows about the Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: the three Abrahamic religions. But there's a missing Abrahamic religion -- a fourth Abrahamic religion -- which no one knows much about.
Because history has a tendency to destroy information, this is the only firm fact we know: around 600 AD, when explaining to his followers which religions they had to tolerate, Mohammad called them the Sabians. But two hundred years later, the Caliphate had forgotten who they were, and (in their confusion) were indiscriminately granting toleration to smaller sects.
Somewhere in the 1400 year interim, we've discovered almost as much as we lost. Here's what we know.
I. Cults and Cold War in 0 AD.
The story probably starts, as most stories about cultural exchange do, with geopolitics and trade.
As anyone who's read the Bible knows, Israel was, at the turn of the millennium, a province of Rome. Unfortunately for Rome and Israel, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East was far more complex than simple imperial domination: the Romans and the Persians were involved in a slow-burning border war over tributary kingdoms in Anatolia, Arabia, and northern Mesopotamia.
Israel's millennial history is pretty representative of the entire situation in the Helleno-Persian frontier region. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Israel had undergone a succession crisis. The Hasmonean dynasty -- a tributary of the Parthian Empire -- had been overthrown by Herod, who was Roman-aligned. His power base was weak, and (after a short exile), he was forced to call in Roman support to keep his throne, at which point Rome moved in and began to administer the country directly.
This wasn't unique to Israel. Alliances, borders, and dynasties rapidly shifted in the areas where the Persian and Roman spheres of influence overlapped. Within a century of the millennium, the alliances and dynasties of both Nabatene and Israel shifted twice. Further south, Arab tribes and cities rapidly changed alliances to avoid direct domination.
But ot everything was hostile. Despite the political instability, overland trade routes extended all the way across Eurasia, from modern-day Shanghai to Portugal. With vastly increased trade came vastly more useful trade languages: by AD 0, most of the Middle East had adopted a single trade language: Aramaic. A speaker who was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek could trade without a translator from Rome to Peshawar. Add Latin, and you could trade from Lisbon to Kabul. Or add a common dialect of Chinese, as many in the Kushan Empire did, and you could trade from Shanghai to Sicily.
By the turn of the millennium, intermittent war, shifting alliances, and far-flung cultural interchange had had major effects on Roman and Persian religions. Temples to the Persian god Mithras had sprung up in Roman Syria; on the Parthian frontier of northern Mesopotamia, the strict dualism of Zoroastrianism had begun to pick up influences from both Hellenic paganism and Judaism. This cultural interchange had had surprising effects elsewhere: there was a temple to Isis in London, and a temple to Hephaestus in Pakistan.
The Jews in Carrhae and Seleucia, on the Roman-Persian border, were right in the middle of it.
II. Carrhae, Seleucia, Israel, and Dissident Pre-Christian Judaism in Persia.
At the turn of the millennium, there weren't any Sabians yet. But if you want to look at the most likely candidates, the most obvious place to look is at the rootstock of Christianity: the Essenes.
If you've been following this series on the history of Abrahamic religions, you probably read the earlier piece on Jewish diaspora and dissent before the Roman destruction of the Temple. If you haven't, here's a quick summary: over the eight or so centuries before the birth of Christ and the destruction of the Temple, Israel was a relatively marginal player in Middle Eastern geopolitics. This led to the irregular expulsion of Jews from the two Jewish-controlled kingdoms in the Levant. Many of those expelled Jews came back. Many of them, when they came back, had developed major doctrinal disputes with the priesthood that controlled the Temple.
At the turn of the millennium, the Essenes were the result of Israel's most recent geopolitical misfortune. Two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Persian Seleucid Empire had conquered Israel and banned Judaism. This necessarily disrupted the temple authorities' ability to keep doctrine consistent. When the Jews eventually revolted, some Jews objected to the reestablishment of temple authority.
Those Jews, variously called "Essenes" and other names, were irregularly persecuted by the Hasmoneans, but widely tolerated elsewhere. At the turn of the millennium, many (even most) Jews living elsewhere were disconnected from Pharisaic Judaism. Unfortunately, Jews living outside Israel produced few written texts. From Israeli accounts, however, we know that the groups living near the Dead Sea practiced baptism, and that John the Baptist was probably a member.
At this point, the Essenes aren't Christians yet, but they're not quite Jews, either. They've assembled a body of liturgical documents and prophetic works which are at odds with Israeli Judaism. On the Persian side of the frontier, in Carrhae and Seleucia, Essene Jews seem to be a majority of the Jewish minority.
Then Jesus is born, the Middle East implodes, and things get really confusing.
III. 200 AD: Judeo-Christianism, Mani, and the Rise of Pauline Christianity.
Two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the Middle East is a mess.
The most relevant mess is in Israel. Between 66 and 70 AD, there had been enormous and continuing unrest in the Roman province of Judea. The Romans, with their characteristic subtlety and restraint, responded by destroying the temple and expelling the Jews. And while it's impossible to track the routes of people fleeing for their lives, most of the Jews expelled from Judea seem to have gone to places with large Jewish minority populations: into Anatolia, into Egypt, and into Persia, where they fairly quickly find themselves living alongside Hellenized Jews, formerly-dissident Jews, and newly-minted Judeo-Christians.
They don't get along.
The midrashic and early Christian literature from the 200s is pretty clear: the expelled Jews don't like Judeo-Christians, and Judeo-Christians are desperate, partially for practical reasons, to distance themselves from the newly-arrived refugees from Israel. As a result, they invent a new and particularly virulent type of antisemitism.
In Persia, Arabia, and northern Mesopotamia, that conflict still leaves behind some Essenes: representatives of the indigenous Jewish minority that haven't yet converted to Christianity. The record here is pretty thin, but it seems as though some of those indigenous Jews believed in an intermediate religion somewhere between Judeo-Christianity and Judaism: Christ was a fraud, but John the Baptist was a genuine prophet.
And then there's Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion. During this period, there seems to be enormous fluidity among the religions on the Persian frontier. For instance, Mani, the prophet of Manicheanism, was born to Judeo-Persian parents belonging to the 'Elchasite' sect, adopted certain Christian beliefs later in his life, and then fused Zoroastrianism and Christianity into a religion which combined Zoroastrian dualism and Christian soteriology.
In a region with so much conflict and so little religious tolerance, you might expect that the Persian empire would intervene on the behalf of the most philo-Persian sect and stamp out the others. Fortunately for Persia's Jews, kinda-Jews, and kinda-Christians, the Parthian empire is busy collapsing just as this three-way conflict breaks out, and all three groups seem to survive without fully blending.
IV. 600 AD: Mohammad Conquers the Arab World, Saves the Sabians, and then Everyone Forgets Who They Are.
In 0 AD, if you had called a Syrian an 'Arab,' he would have laughed.
Anyone who spoke Arabic as their first language -- south of Mesopotamia, in the various tributary kingdoms and city-states of the Arabian peninsula -- was an Arab. The people in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia who spoke Greek, Aramaic, and Persian identified themselves as a patchwork of ethnicity Greek, Jewish, Persian, Assyrian, and Armenian. The only geopolitically relevant Arab state was Nabatene, which occupied the oases -- and controlled the trade -- between the coastal Arab states and the rest of the world.
Most Arabs who weren't Nabataeans were usually pastoralists or traders, moving goods -- pearls, dried fish, dyes, linen -- between Africa, the coastal Arab states, and the more developed areas in Anatolia and Syria. They had seldom been conquered, because there was frankly nothing to conquer: most of the land they occupied was hostile, and unlike the world powers of today, Romans didn't need their oil.
Mohammad changed that.
The major advantage to nomadic pastoralism is that, if necessary, you can pick up your entire population and transform it into an army. During his lifetime, Mohammad didn't do precisely that, but did something else unprecedented: unified the coastal Arabs, the central Arab oasis cities, and the formerly Nabataean Arabs of northern Arabia and southern Mesopotamia. And somewhere in that area, he encountered a religion significant enough to mention and familiar enough to tolerate. A religion which he called 'Sabians.'
The Koran specifies that Islam is to tolerate the three religions of the book: Christians, Jews, and Sabians. Relying on folk etymology, early hadith seem to believe that Sabians (or, in their spelling, Sabi'un) are converts to Islam. But an equally reasonable derivation is the Syriac root s-b', or "to baptize."
That brings us back to Seleucia, now on the border between the Caliphate and the Sassanid Empire. Four hundred years after the collapse of the Parthian Empire, much of southwestern Persia has converted to Christianity. Much of the rest is occupied by the descendants of diasporic Jews: Sura, a small city southeast of Seleucia, is the center of the emerging rabbinic tradition.
And somewhere around here -- maybe in Seleucia, maybe nearby in the city of al-Hira -- there's a religion which acts much like the pre-Christian Essenes did. They reject Jesus and venerate John the Baptist. They speak the Syriac dialect of Aramaic. They describe their most important rite as sb': baptism by immersion. And like Mani, who was born 400 years before Mohammad, they reject the Jewish prophets, the authority of the Temple, and believe in an elaborate system of good and evil angels.
Until the Iraq war, the Mandeans -- the people whom Mohammad once called 'Sabians' -- were still living an hour's drive from where their religion was most likely born: an incredibly stubborn people who outlived much more widespread religions like Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, and Judeo-Christianity in order to arrive in the modern era, diminished but intact.
And now they're almost gone.
After fleeing religious violence in Iraq, they're almost all gone from their homeland: to Syria, where they've been persecuted by both the government and the rebels; to Iran, where they're persecuted by the theocracy; and to Germany and Australia, far from their homeland. In vast conflicts, it's always the most powerless who stand the most to lose.
I love history, especially this detailed history about forgotten peoples and cultures, not just the American-centric or European-centric history most of us learn in schools.
Until this morning I'd never heard of the Sabines and had never considered the ebb and flow of people and cultures in the BCE Middle-East who shared different parts of their cultures to create wholly new ones.
Amazing!
Originally shared by Andreas Schou
Sabians: A Way-Too-Long Guide to an Abrahamic Religion Which Might Not Even Exist, and Which the United States Hopefully Hasn't Destroyed
Everyone knows about the Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: the three Abrahamic religions. But there's a missing Abrahamic religion -- a fourth Abrahamic religion -- which no one knows much about.
Because history has a tendency to destroy information, this is the only firm fact we know: around 600 AD, when explaining to his followers which religions they had to tolerate, Mohammad called them the Sabians. But two hundred years later, the Caliphate had forgotten who they were, and (in their confusion) were indiscriminately granting toleration to smaller sects.
Somewhere in the 1400 year interim, we've discovered almost as much as we lost. Here's what we know.
I. Cults and Cold War in 0 AD.
The story probably starts, as most stories about cultural exchange do, with geopolitics and trade.
As anyone who's read the Bible knows, Israel was, at the turn of the millennium, a province of Rome. Unfortunately for Rome and Israel, the geopolitical situation in the Middle East was far more complex than simple imperial domination: the Romans and the Persians were involved in a slow-burning border war over tributary kingdoms in Anatolia, Arabia, and northern Mesopotamia.
Israel's millennial history is pretty representative of the entire situation in the Helleno-Persian frontier region. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, Israel had undergone a succession crisis. The Hasmonean dynasty -- a tributary of the Parthian Empire -- had been overthrown by Herod, who was Roman-aligned. His power base was weak, and (after a short exile), he was forced to call in Roman support to keep his throne, at which point Rome moved in and began to administer the country directly.
This wasn't unique to Israel. Alliances, borders, and dynasties rapidly shifted in the areas where the Persian and Roman spheres of influence overlapped. Within a century of the millennium, the alliances and dynasties of both Nabatene and Israel shifted twice. Further south, Arab tribes and cities rapidly changed alliances to avoid direct domination.
But ot everything was hostile. Despite the political instability, overland trade routes extended all the way across Eurasia, from modern-day Shanghai to Portugal. With vastly increased trade came vastly more useful trade languages: by AD 0, most of the Middle East had adopted a single trade language: Aramaic. A speaker who was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek could trade without a translator from Rome to Peshawar. Add Latin, and you could trade from Lisbon to Kabul. Or add a common dialect of Chinese, as many in the Kushan Empire did, and you could trade from Shanghai to Sicily.
By the turn of the millennium, intermittent war, shifting alliances, and far-flung cultural interchange had had major effects on Roman and Persian religions. Temples to the Persian god Mithras had sprung up in Roman Syria; on the Parthian frontier of northern Mesopotamia, the strict dualism of Zoroastrianism had begun to pick up influences from both Hellenic paganism and Judaism. This cultural interchange had had surprising effects elsewhere: there was a temple to Isis in London, and a temple to Hephaestus in Pakistan.
The Jews in Carrhae and Seleucia, on the Roman-Persian border, were right in the middle of it.
II. Carrhae, Seleucia, Israel, and Dissident Pre-Christian Judaism in Persia.
At the turn of the millennium, there weren't any Sabians yet. But if you want to look at the most likely candidates, the most obvious place to look is at the rootstock of Christianity: the Essenes.
If you've been following this series on the history of Abrahamic religions, you probably read the earlier piece on Jewish diaspora and dissent before the Roman destruction of the Temple. If you haven't, here's a quick summary: over the eight or so centuries before the birth of Christ and the destruction of the Temple, Israel was a relatively marginal player in Middle Eastern geopolitics. This led to the irregular expulsion of Jews from the two Jewish-controlled kingdoms in the Levant. Many of those expelled Jews came back. Many of them, when they came back, had developed major doctrinal disputes with the priesthood that controlled the Temple.
At the turn of the millennium, the Essenes were the result of Israel's most recent geopolitical misfortune. Two hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Persian Seleucid Empire had conquered Israel and banned Judaism. This necessarily disrupted the temple authorities' ability to keep doctrine consistent. When the Jews eventually revolted, some Jews objected to the reestablishment of temple authority.
Those Jews, variously called "Essenes" and other names, were irregularly persecuted by the Hasmoneans, but widely tolerated elsewhere. At the turn of the millennium, many (even most) Jews living elsewhere were disconnected from Pharisaic Judaism. Unfortunately, Jews living outside Israel produced few written texts. From Israeli accounts, however, we know that the groups living near the Dead Sea practiced baptism, and that John the Baptist was probably a member.
At this point, the Essenes aren't Christians yet, but they're not quite Jews, either. They've assembled a body of liturgical documents and prophetic works which are at odds with Israeli Judaism. On the Persian side of the frontier, in Carrhae and Seleucia, Essene Jews seem to be a majority of the Jewish minority.
Then Jesus is born, the Middle East implodes, and things get really confusing.
III. 200 AD: Judeo-Christianism, Mani, and the Rise of Pauline Christianity.
Two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the Middle East is a mess.
The most relevant mess is in Israel. Between 66 and 70 AD, there had been enormous and continuing unrest in the Roman province of Judea. The Romans, with their characteristic subtlety and restraint, responded by destroying the temple and expelling the Jews. And while it's impossible to track the routes of people fleeing for their lives, most of the Jews expelled from Judea seem to have gone to places with large Jewish minority populations: into Anatolia, into Egypt, and into Persia, where they fairly quickly find themselves living alongside Hellenized Jews, formerly-dissident Jews, and newly-minted Judeo-Christians.
They don't get along.
The midrashic and early Christian literature from the 200s is pretty clear: the expelled Jews don't like Judeo-Christians, and Judeo-Christians are desperate, partially for practical reasons, to distance themselves from the newly-arrived refugees from Israel. As a result, they invent a new and particularly virulent type of antisemitism.
In Persia, Arabia, and northern Mesopotamia, that conflict still leaves behind some Essenes: representatives of the indigenous Jewish minority that haven't yet converted to Christianity. The record here is pretty thin, but it seems as though some of those indigenous Jews believed in an intermediate religion somewhere between Judeo-Christianity and Judaism: Christ was a fraud, but John the Baptist was a genuine prophet.
And then there's Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion. During this period, there seems to be enormous fluidity among the religions on the Persian frontier. For instance, Mani, the prophet of Manicheanism, was born to Judeo-Persian parents belonging to the 'Elchasite' sect, adopted certain Christian beliefs later in his life, and then fused Zoroastrianism and Christianity into a religion which combined Zoroastrian dualism and Christian soteriology.
In a region with so much conflict and so little religious tolerance, you might expect that the Persian empire would intervene on the behalf of the most philo-Persian sect and stamp out the others. Fortunately for Persia's Jews, kinda-Jews, and kinda-Christians, the Parthian empire is busy collapsing just as this three-way conflict breaks out, and all three groups seem to survive without fully blending.
IV. 600 AD: Mohammad Conquers the Arab World, Saves the Sabians, and then Everyone Forgets Who They Are.
In 0 AD, if you had called a Syrian an 'Arab,' he would have laughed.
Anyone who spoke Arabic as their first language -- south of Mesopotamia, in the various tributary kingdoms and city-states of the Arabian peninsula -- was an Arab. The people in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia who spoke Greek, Aramaic, and Persian identified themselves as a patchwork of ethnicity Greek, Jewish, Persian, Assyrian, and Armenian. The only geopolitically relevant Arab state was Nabatene, which occupied the oases -- and controlled the trade -- between the coastal Arab states and the rest of the world.
Most Arabs who weren't Nabataeans were usually pastoralists or traders, moving goods -- pearls, dried fish, dyes, linen -- between Africa, the coastal Arab states, and the more developed areas in Anatolia and Syria. They had seldom been conquered, because there was frankly nothing to conquer: most of the land they occupied was hostile, and unlike the world powers of today, Romans didn't need their oil.
Mohammad changed that.
The major advantage to nomadic pastoralism is that, if necessary, you can pick up your entire population and transform it into an army. During his lifetime, Mohammad didn't do precisely that, but did something else unprecedented: unified the coastal Arabs, the central Arab oasis cities, and the formerly Nabataean Arabs of northern Arabia and southern Mesopotamia. And somewhere in that area, he encountered a religion significant enough to mention and familiar enough to tolerate. A religion which he called 'Sabians.'
The Koran specifies that Islam is to tolerate the three religions of the book: Christians, Jews, and Sabians. Relying on folk etymology, early hadith seem to believe that Sabians (or, in their spelling, Sabi'un) are converts to Islam. But an equally reasonable derivation is the Syriac root s-b', or "to baptize."
That brings us back to Seleucia, now on the border between the Caliphate and the Sassanid Empire. Four hundred years after the collapse of the Parthian Empire, much of southwestern Persia has converted to Christianity. Much of the rest is occupied by the descendants of diasporic Jews: Sura, a small city southeast of Seleucia, is the center of the emerging rabbinic tradition.
And somewhere around here -- maybe in Seleucia, maybe nearby in the city of al-Hira -- there's a religion which acts much like the pre-Christian Essenes did. They reject Jesus and venerate John the Baptist. They speak the Syriac dialect of Aramaic. They describe their most important rite as sb': baptism by immersion. And like Mani, who was born 400 years before Mohammad, they reject the Jewish prophets, the authority of the Temple, and believe in an elaborate system of good and evil angels.
Until the Iraq war, the Mandeans -- the people whom Mohammad once called 'Sabians' -- were still living an hour's drive from where their religion was most likely born: an incredibly stubborn people who outlived much more widespread religions like Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, and Judeo-Christianity in order to arrive in the modern era, diminished but intact.
And now they're almost gone.
After fleeing religious violence in Iraq, they're almost all gone from their homeland: to Syria, where they've been persecuted by both the government and the rebels; to Iran, where they're persecuted by the theocracy; and to Germany and Australia, far from their homeland. In vast conflicts, it's always the most powerless who stand the most to lose.
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