THE ASSYRIANS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS
by
THE REV. W. A. WIGRAM
B.D.(Camb.), D.D.Lambeth
Author of
The History of the Assyrian Church
The Cradle of Mankind
The Monophysite Separation
Our Smallest Ally
G. BELL & SONS
LONDON
1929
Assyrian International News Agency
Books Online
www.aina.org
CONTENTS
MESOPOTAMIA is emphatically "the Land of the two Rivers" ( "Bait Nahrein"), Tigris and Euphrates, as Egypt is, with equal decision, the land of the Nile. In strictness, the name is applied -- as we believe that the name Egypt was once applied-to the "Delta" district only, the provinces which the river has won from the sea. In Mesopotamia the alluvial Plain, being the work of two rivers, not one, is not of the triangular shape that the name implies, but includes all the district, from Baghdad down to the Persian Gulf. In practice, the upper part of the river valley, both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, came to be dependent politically on the power that controlled the lower, and has always continued to be so. Thus, the name was extended accordingly, and Mesopotamia means now not only the "delta district" of the Tigris and Euphrates, which is Iraq proper, but also all the province called by the Arabs "the Island" (Jezireh), or the lands between those rivers, from the point where they issue from the mountains of Taurus to the sea. In both lands the site of the capital was dictated by the facts of the course of the rivers. The government had to be somewhere about the head of the delta, where it could control the irrigation, for he who ruled that ruled the land.
The actual city might vary, and a king might choose Babylon, Seleucia or Baghdad, but all of these are within a circle of forty miles radius, and are about the strategic point. Cities in other districts, even if they might be seats of empire for a while, were no more than provincial capitals.
We all know of Mesopotamia as one of the original hearths -- quite possibly the oldest of all from which the fire of civilization was distributed about the world; as such, it has its never-ailing interest for the archaeologist. What gives the country its interest to students of another kind, and a. part of its charm for those whose fate brings them to live there, is this: that in that land, nothing which has once struck root seems ever to perish altogether. It is not only that the soil has preserved the relics of those whose civilization was already old six thousand years ago, but that the land still keeps the old types and customs, so that archeology is there a living thing, not merely the study of the dead. Boats of the model laid in the tomb of the King of Ur, to carry his soul to the land of spirits in 4000 B.C., still ply upon the Tigris to-day, and are the ordinary vehicle of the marsh Arab. Moslem women still bathe ceremonially in the Holy Wells near Baghdad, down which their ancestors descended in the track of the Lady Ishtar to bring up the water of life from the Underworld, that so they may be able to give life to others. The people of the land are still the people of Babylonia and Assyria of old, and up to the dawn of the twentieth century the village life was still that of four thousand years ago. The modern house of Baghdad to-day is still of the type built in Ur before Babylon was.
It is true, of course, that invasions from without have come in again and again through the centuries, and each has brought some foreign culture that may or may not have survived, or a new type that may be there still. The tale of invaders is a long one, for Alexander is not the first on the list, though the Greek may have been the first to bring Western influence into the land. The Turk-as much a foreigner as any-is but one in a series, and his rule but an episode in the history. He, an Eastern, came to the. land from the West; and now the latest in the roll, the English from the Western ocean, have entered the land from the East and South, to rule for an hour where Alexander and Nebuchadnezzar ruled before.
It is a strange fate that has put the hearths of the world's two oldest civilizations-the land of Babel and the land of the Pharaohs-both under the guidance of men from a little island in the Atlantic.
Each of the old stocks of the dwellers in the land -from the union of which we hope to see the modern nation of Iraq form itself-has its own history and its own interest. We propose to take one of them only, the Assyrian or Assyrio-Chaldean1 type, and to give the story of some of the later stages of its development, a story that has a romance that is peculiarly its own. But in telling the tale of any one of the many "millets," or national and religious stocks, which dwell often in unfriendly neighbourhood in the land, it is impossible to avoid dealing also with the political and racial ' problems of the surrounding peoples, and showing how the same difficulties affected all.
The Assyrian stock has probably been there from the very earliest times. Civilization begins in Mesopotamia with a "Hamitic," or possibly Mongolian race, viz. the "Sumerian," at about 4000 B.C. The beginning of this Sumerian kingdom of "Nimrod, son of Cush, son of Ham," was Babylon and Ur (Babel and Erech), in the land of Shinar. So the Hebrew traditionalists gathered from older, and quite reliable, sources of information (Gen. x. 10), and archeology confirms their verdict.
A little later, a Semitic stock, the Accadian, appears in the land, and we read that "Assur" -- the Assyrian emigrants generally -- went out and founded new cities at Calah and Nineveh, of which the ruins abide unto this day. Their emigration may have been caused by the coming of Accad, but they were, like those invaders, of Semitic blood.
It would seem that the Semitic clans migrated northward about the time of the fall of Ur, and the rise of that upstart and parvenu city, Babylon, to the control of Shinar. This took place about 2000 B.C., and the one event may well have been the cause of the other.
Most of the migrating clans were content to settle in what is now Northern Iraq, but some small sects went further. The leader of one of these was known, in the land where he finally pitched his tent, as "Abram the Outlander" (Gen. xiv. 13), and he has left a very deep mark on the religious history of the race.
This was, at least, the standard account as given a few years --go: later discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that there was a Semitic migration northward at an earlier date, and that the emigrants Of 2000 B.C. only followed. where their kinsfolk had gone before them.
The Assyrians rose to greatness in their new land as the founders of the first military empire in history. That would seem to have been their one original contribution to the progress of the world, for their architecture, religion, and science were all frankly borrowed from Babylon. Still, those who gave men the battering-ram and the catapult (the world's artillery till cannon became effective two thousand years later) have at least not been entirely ineffective among the nations.
The fact that they ruled their empire by a system Of "captivities," or by the transplanting of the conquered stocks, brought many new types into Mesopotamia. The best known of these captivities is one of the smallest, the Israelite and it is curious to reflect that traces of this body appear still to exist in the land to this day.
The statement may bring down the wrath of those who hold to the "British-Israel theory," but nevertheless it is the fact. On the River Khabor in Northern Iraq-one of the sites of the original settlement-there still exist Israelite or Jewish villages, and old members of the Jewish colony in Mosul have assured the writer that they regard themselves as "belonging to the ten tribes, not to the two," and as still living "where Sargon, King of Assyria, put our Fathers" (2 Kings xvii. 6)
The Assyrian Empire fell in due time, and others took its place; the kindred stock of the Chaldaeans or Babylonians from the South, and after them the Medo-Persians from the North and East. The Assyrian stock, however, was by no means exterminated, at least there is no evidence of such destruction, -- and seemingly continued to exist in its old home. Of course, there other types in the districts round it, and of these the most marked is the nation of the Kurds or Karduchi.
This "millet" (the Turkish official term for a nationality in their empire is too convenient for a writer to avoid using it) is at once an interest to the traveller and student, and a standing difficulty to the government of the land, whatever that government may chance to be. The Kurds are of Aryan, not of Semitic, stock; the language they use, though its dialects vary, is always closely allied to and derived from Persian; they would seem to have inhabited the mountain districts of "Kurdistan" or Kordyene since before history began. At the least they were there in days of Tiglath-Pileser I. the founder of the Assyrian Empire in the year 1000 B.C., and they were there still in the year 400 B.C., when Xenophon with his Greeks fought his way homeward through their mountains. Nor do their characteristics appear to have altered in the interval between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1900.
They are a strong and gifted, and in many ways an attractive type, with whom many English officials have found it easy enough to be friends. Yet, whether it be from the character of their mountain home, or from something lacking in their own make-up, they are a type manque. Their home is the great semicircle of rugged mountain ranges which extend from the Mediterranean at Alexandretta, round to the north of Mosul and south to the Persian Gulf; a land of narrow mountain valleys, debarred from any access to the sea. Hence, they have never been able to emerge from the "tribal stage" of development, and are in it to this day. They have never been a united race, and none of their blood has ever been able to weld all together, or to produce anything larger than an evanescent confederation of clans. They have had their great men: Saladin is a national hero worthy of any nation; but those great men have made their careers elsewhere, and the nation still remains a set of clansmen only, owning allegiance, for practical purposes, to nothing higher than the chief of a tribe. There may or may not be a "hukumet" or supreme government in the background which the chief knows that he had better not provoke, but ideas of citizenship or patriotism are quite beyond their mental horizon. Not over-religious, normally, they may be swept at times by waves of fanaticism.
So long as there was any ruler that claimed to be Khalif of Islam, then it might be admitted that -- as Kurds are nearly all Sunni Mahommedans by faith -- the "successor of the Prophet" had some sort of claim to the allegiance of the tribesman -- so long, of course, as he did not attempt to enforce it. For as long as the nominal ruler of Kurdistan was the Sultan of Turkey, this idyllic state of affairs was practically allowed to continue, and Turkish "Kaimakams" knew better than to attempt to carry out any orders they might feel obliged to issue. Now, there is no Khalif, and both in Turkey and Iraq, governments want to be obeyed, and, so far, the Kurd has not been able to assimilate himself to a new r6gime. Still, neither the modern Ottoman nor the government of Iraq feel able to acquiesce in the existence of a lawless Alsatia. This has caused trouble, and will continue to do so.
Another national type, the Armenian, has its real home on the tableland to the north of the semicircular zone of mountain that we have spoken of; circumstances, however, have so scattered this unhappy people, that their remnants are found in Mesopotamia as elsewhere, and they form one of the stocks that we have to consider.
In their original home, local conditions allowed a nation to develop, which seemed to be designed as a buffer State between the lands that have always been the seats of great empires, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. A distinctly strong stock, which for centuries was accustomed to provide the picked troops of the Byzantine army,-that army which was for centuries the scientific force of its days,-the Armenian was also gifted with great trading faculties, which even their bitterest enemies would allow that they keep still. But they had also no mean artistic gifts in the direction of painting and architecture, and have always been devoted to the particular form of religion that they professed, which they were apt to make into a standard of their nationality.
Yet, through the centuries, this strong and gifted nation has somehow failed to make good. It has never been anything better than "a strife unto its neighbours" when it was partly independent, for actually so it seldom was,--and a problem to its rulers when avowedly subject to somebody. Unable either to command or to obey, the Armenian was forever intriguing against the suzerain of the moment with the emissaries of his rival.
They were able to attempt great things. In late classic days, when Rome was spreading her dominion over Asia Minor, this stock produced such rulers as Tigranes and Mithiridates, who could rally the East against the encroaching West, and for a moment seemed likely to drive back the Roman, at least to the western side of the Aegean. Yet the effort failed, and in later days the status of Armenia as an independent ally of Rome, between her frontier and- that of Persia, failed also. Once again the obstinate Armenian stock made the effort, and established a kingdom under the House of Bagrad, which had its capital at Ani in Transcaucasia, where the majestic ruins bear witness to Armenian greatness to this day.
For a critical two centuries (860-1060, the days of the first Mongol attacks), the tough mountaineers held back the advancing Seljuk Turks, and it was the obvious interest of the Byzantine Empire to protect and foster so valuable a buffer. That, however, they would not do. The Armenians were Heretics, which meant that their national Church obstinately refused to be subject to the Greek, and they were therefore unworthy of any support from the Orthodox. So Armenia was allowed to go down before the Mahommedan, and Constantinople soon paid the penalty for her folly, when the disaster of Malazkurd (a battle fought in the very year of the Norman conquest of England), gave Anatolia to the Turk for ever. "Lesser Armenia" kept her independence in Cilicia for awhile after, but soon this kingdom fell also.
The Armenian has now been scattered, and forms one of the many elements in the population of Mesopotamia, where are found other strange "nations," or millets, each with a faith that is its own. There are Yezidis, whose "Devil-worship" is probably a survival of a primitive paganism. Sab2eans, who seem to perpetuate the "Gnosticism" of the first Christian century, "Shebbek" and "Sarli," who have found it possible to shelter pre-Mahommedan faiths under the wing of a heretical form of Islam. The land with six thousand years of continuous history is a museum of ethnology and of religious science.
Over a country that was the richest in the world once, "one garden, from Samaffa to the gulf," and that might be so again if modern engineers were allowed to do their work, waves of conquest have constantly ebbed and flowed. Thrice the Persian from the East has come down from his tableland, to hold the river-plain for awhile and to lose it as power went from him. Once in the days of Darius and Xerxes-600-300 B.C. û ere the might of Alexander brought the kingdom of the "Great King" to the ground. Once for four centuries of the Christian era (A.D. 22S-640), when the House of Sassan sought to revive the glory of their Achaemenid predecessors, and could fight with Rome on at least equal terms. Once in the seventeenth century, when he had to yield the prize to the Ottoman Turk under Selim the Grim.
Greek and Roman from the West have made their way in again and again, only to resign what was too far from their capital for them to hold.
Alexander, the great practical dreamer, sought to unite East and West, and make Babylon once more the capital of the world. His successors brought Hellenic culture into the land, but could not subdue it. Trajan, Julian, Heraclius, each in turn followed the lure, and succumbed to it.
A later age saw the Mongols from Central Asia swarm down into it., and inflict on Baghdad a sack that shocked the not over-tender mediaeval conscience. When they retired, the ottomans, men of their blood, were their lawful heirs. All of these, however) were but passing storms. They ruled for a few centuries maybe, but that is little in a land that can count sixty of them. Greek, Persian and Mongol came and went.
There was one type, however, that was for ever coming into Mesopotamia, and making the land his own, and that was the Arab of the desert. Since time began, there has been an infiltrations sometimes an influx, from the desert to the sown, of those whom the desert, bard mother of men, refuses to support. The force behind this is the progressive desiccation of Arabia.
There is no doubt that, at one time, districts of Arabia which are now desolate could support a very considerable population. That most modern and useful tool of the archaeologist, the aeroplane, has revealed the existence of great "corrals" for game, folds for flocks, and settlements of neolithic date, in lands that are now mere wastes of sand. The cause of the change- is still unknown, but men suggest that a slight change in the curve of the path of the monsoon, which now bears its load of rain direct from the Indian Ocean to the Indian Ghats, would imply that the wind in question would drop enough moisture upon Arabia to make a great difference in its character.
With this gradual desiccation has come a regular process of immigration a drift of the desert Arab into the watered lands of Mesopotamia. This began in prehistoric days, and is still going on. Arab tribes leave the desert not too willingly, for the act implies a certain loss of caste in the opinion of their hardier fellows, and they settle where they can in cultivable lands. This has the result that an Arab tribe may be partly nomad and partly settled, even if the nomad does look upon his kin as one may fancy the wild goose looks upon his cousins in the farmyard; and the settled portions, while all the men still count themselves as still belonging to the same. tribe, may be scattered at great distances' from each other, in Iraq territory. Whether the range is for the better for the nomad is a doubtful matter.
Occasionally, instead of the gradual infiltration, there may come a great and marked wave of invasion. One such in primitive days was the inrush of the Accadian type upon the older Sumerian civilization; one in historic times was the great outburst of energy in Arabia that was connected with the rise of Islam, resulting in a definite Arab invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia. It is by no means impossible that the recent activity of the Wahabi fanatics is ' prompted by the same force, and the fact that the desert is now under a different government from that ruling the cultivated land has complicated the question in a new way.
Thus, the Arab has possessed himself of Iraq, and has established his civilization and language in country originally inhabited by a type that was different from, but yet akin to him. The land has now become his, in tongue and in national type. Only students look back beyond the Abbassid Khalifs of Baghdad.
The question of settlement and common development has been complicated by the religious, problem, for the latest of the great immigrations of the Arab stock brought with them, in the seventh century A.D., the militant religion of Islam.
Mesopotamia then, with its long history, is our background, and on it we have to trace the romantic fortunes of one of the many national and religious types of the land, in its relations with the other nationalities and faiths that have appeared in the country.
THE coming of Alexander the Great marks an epoch in the long rivalry of East and West, for there begins with him a period-which was rightly dated from him in the works of all chroniclers of the day-in which Western rule and Western culture are spreading over the East, with either Greeks or Greek-influenced Romans as their standard-bearer. For a thousand years (330 B.C. to A.D. 640) this process goes on, and only ends when the rise of Islam brings a totally new factor into the situation. Alexander is the destroyer of old and decadent empires in the East, but he also seeks to restore them by Western strength and life, and had he lived, his genius might have accomplished the union of the two civilizations. That was his dream, and had he been granted the thirty years of additional working life that seemed to be quite possible when he passed away at the age of thirty-two, he might have embodied it in fact in the empire that seemed to be willing to obey him. When he died, he was the actual as well as the nominal sovereign of a dominion that spread from the Adriatic to the Indus, and he had so impressed his personality upon it, that he and he alone of all men of his age is still unforgotten in those lands. Everywhere in that vast stretch of different types and different religions, men know of "Sikandar," and know him as a hero who is in a class altogether by himself.
What it may be that Alexander had the power and the vision to accomplish, his successors certainly could not do, and those whom he might perhaps have brought together, swung apart and into secular hostility once more.
The "Diadochi" were men of lesser mould, incapable of anything higher than dynastic ambition and only one of them was capable of realizing even that. Ptolemy, knowing at least what he could not do, was content to be the ruler of Egypt, and he founded a dynasty there which lasted for three centuries, and which did most useful scientific work. The man whose patronage made possible the work of Euclid and the Septuagint, effected something for the progress of the world. His rival and comrade, the founder of the House of Seleucus, had a far larger dominion, one that included Iraq and all Mesopotamia, but it has left nothing lasting behind it, unless it be a feat to have impressed its name on one city of far older origin than itself. Kirkuk in Northern Iraq still carries a faint reminiscence of its old name, Citadel of the House of Seleucus, but the "tel" that bears the name was ancient long before the Seleucids ruled in the land.
It is true that they were handicapped by the conditions of their rule. It was a time of confusion, of movement of nations, such as that which was to destroy the Roman Empire seven centuries later, and to come again in the course of history after that. This time it was the Gauls who were coming down into Italy, Greece, and Anatolia. They were to find a home in what we now call France at last, -the land was not even Gallia then,-but in the East they were simply a wave of destruction that came and passed. The did leave some traces, for the province of "Galatia" bore their name after them, and they provided a "motive" for a very famous statue, and an address for an even more famous letter "the Galatians," but for the moment all that they effected politically was to make any enduring work impossible for the House of Selcucus.
When the Seleucids passed, it was the Parthians who took their place, rising into importance about 240 B.C. and remaining holders of the sceptre till A.D. 240,-a long time for a race now so completely forgotten.
They came from the lands by the Caspian, and were Turanian. By stock, which is as much as to say that in blood, and in character, they were much like the Turk. Gradually they won the rule over all Persia and Mesopotamia, and were received as allies by the Chinese Empire in the East. The records of this ancient country, now first coming, into use by Western scholars, often throw unexpected light on periods that were previously quite obscure. The Chinese knew the Parthians, as men who coined silver money with the head of their King, Al-Sak (Arsaces), upon it. They had mastered the art of writing, and so were not without some tincture of the civilization that is lawfully only the heritage of the Celestial kingdom) though being after all, they put the inscriptions on barbarians leather, not on paper, and had a queer way of writing horizontally, instead of straight up and down. Actually, the leather writing material -- parchment -- that so astonished the Chinese ambassadors, was a recent invention, for it was only a short time before that the Pergamenes had brought in that "Pergamenum" which was then displacing the tablet of wax or clay.
The Parthian rule did not extend far to the West. Anatolia was divided between that Pergamus that had invented parchment, and the kindred kingdoms of Pontus and Armenia.
Armenians, of whom we shall have a good deal to say in the future, were an Aryan stock. Their own legends say that they are the descendants of Haik, son of Japhet, who came straight back to Ararat in virtuous protest against the act of his kin, who would insist on building the tower of Babel. Hence the purity of the Armenian language, which all men spoke, before that unlucky episode.
Other stories which they tell of themselves go back to Nebuchadnezzar and to Semiramis, whose river still irrigates their ancient capital of Van. Modern scientists, more prosaically say that they appear in the land about 6oo B.C. and that they then unite with an older stock of aboriginal inhabitants, the "Urartians", a race that had much in common with the Hittites of the central portion of Asia Minor. This latter stock was certainly in the land by 900 B.C. and they fought for some three centuries with the Assyrians of Nineveh, from whom they seem to have borrowed the cuneiform script used in the inscriptions still abundant on their rocks.
Pergamus, Armenia, and Pontus were the immediate neighbours of the Parthian to the West, but behind them lay a greater force by far. Rome was now victorious over Carthage, and was turning her eyes and stretching out her hands to the East. In fact, we are now at the beginning of a duel which was to last for fully 8oo years, between the great empire of the East, whether that empire was Persian or Parthian, and that of the West. Even when Islam rose and changed the conditions of the fight, it still went on with different protagonists, and it may well be that it is not finished yet.
The Turk has fought in that quarrel under the walls of Vienna, and French Crusader and English soldier on the bills of Palestine.
There was a century or so of preliminary fencing, in which the little "buffer States" went down, one after the other. Pergamus gave herself over to Rome; Armenia fought one round under her king, Tigranes, but was hopelessly "knocked out" at once by Lucullus. Pontus, however (a people that was really of the tough Armenian stock), gave a very different account of herself. She found a champion in Mithridates, who could stand up to Rome in three great wars, and defeat her armies again and again, though Rome, in her ordinary fashion, does not blazon those defeats in her history. The Armenian's methods were grim. Romans remembered at least one act of his with horror-the fact that he began one of the three wars by the massacre of every Latin-speaker within his borders, to the number of eighty thousand. Roman strength and endurance won at the end, of course, but generals like Sulla and Pompey did not win easily. In fact, the last named was generally held to have been saved by his usual luck from a very awkward situation ("the best of luck was his all his life, till at the last it turned"), when Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, turned traitor and broke his fierce old father's heart and resistance alike by the act. Mithridates committed suicide, but he left one strange legacy behind him to affect the West, as well as the memory of a fierce resistance. This was Mithraism, the ancient religion of which his name proclaimed him to be a follower and which was spread in the Roman Empire by those followers of his cause whom his conqueror, for the sake of security, disposed in various colonies. That cult f the "'invictus comes," the God of Light and Truth, spread throughout the Empire; wherever there was a camp of the legions, there was a "Cave" or "Lodge" of his Freemason like followers whose memorials are to be found on the Tyne, the Danube, and the Ebro. Even when it went down before a purer form of religion, it stamped its influence pretty deeply on it, as can hardly be denied by those who observe the birthday of their Lord at the winter solstice, even if they do call it Christmas Day.
Mithridates died in 63 B.C. and the fact left Rome and Parthia face to face, rivals for the empire of the East. Indeed the Parthian was no unworthy rival, and we see in Horace the reflection of the impression that he made on the Rome of his day. That writer is never tired of referring to the awe felt by the Roman legionary for the "sagittas et celerem fugam Parthi," and it was a long time before the generals of the Empire found the right answer to the tactics of the horse-archer, "versis animosum equis."
It is interesting to see that his descendant the Turk, though we think of him as a tough infantryman now, was still employing that same mode of fighting in the days of the Crusades, and Richard Coeur de Lion seems to have been the first man to think out a really effective way of meeting him. "The Parthian, who now hold the empire of the East, says Justin, "leave as it were divided the empire of the world with Rome. Thrice have they gone to war with the Romans, and alone among the nations have not been their equals only, but in truth the victors over them."...
The first of these great defeats was the first occasion of contact, the destruction of Crassus at Carrhae. Then the Roman army was nearly wiped out, and the bulk of it made prisoner. Only one officer came well out of the debacle, that Cassius who was afterwards the chief in the plot to murder Caesar. The prisoners were established as colonists by their captors at Merv, where their descendants may be at the present day. Horace again tells us what a shock it was, to hear that some of them had settled down and made the best of their lot (Od. III, v.), though the remedy he puts into the mouth of Regulus would hardly abate the scandal. To get the captured eagles surrendered as a favour was counted as a triumph for Augustus, (Od. IV, xv.).
A better general than Crassus, Mark Antony himself, also found the Parthian too much for him. Invading their country from Antioch, he was only too glad to get half his army out again by the road of Tabriz and the lake of Urmi, leaving all his "artillery" and baggage behind him. "I never appreciated the work of the Ten Thousand Greeks before," be was heard to say during the campaign. Then a third Roman army was destroyed under Nero. A struggle for the control of Armenia-a matter that was to be a casus belli for generations had caused the dispute, and Artabanes of Parthia had made peace impossible by writing an open letter to Tiberius, in which be advised the Emperor to commit suicide, "for bare decency's sake." War followed, but the army that Nero sent to avenge the insult to the Empire was defeated and forced to capitulate like that of Crassus, and in the peace ' that followed, Parthia secured all the fruits of victory. Her candidate for the throne of the kingdom of Armenia was allowed to rule there, which implied that the border district in dispute was left under Parthian control, and to borrow a modern phrase, "in her sphere of influence." As a sop to Roman amour propre, the prince in question was allowed to pay a visit to Rome and receive a crown there--the sort of sham triumph that might appeal to Nero.
Greater emperors than Nero were to find the Parthian a foe whom they could not subdue. Trajan and Severus could overrun the land, having learned to take military precautions, and to enlist native auxiliaries who could meet the enemy on his own ground, but they could not hold the country. The fact was, that with the means of transport then at its disposal, Roman organization could control no more than it had. The army was of a certain fixed size, and it would seem that financial considerations forbade its increase, even if the men could be found without a form of conscription that was not then possible. If, however, any real disaster were to befall, say, to the legions that defended the eastern frontier, it might take the better part of a year before they could be reinforced from the a Danube, and that would be done at considerable risk. On the other hand, the Parthians, though their country was very difficult to invade and hold, were not formidable as invaders. Great frontier raids were always possible, but the raiders were always possible, but the raiders were always glad to retire when they had got as much as they could carry, and a horde of Parthian horse men could do nothing against a fortified city.
The organization of the Parthian Empire was of the loosest description. Their instincts were those of the nomad, and indeed they had hardly emerged from that state of life when they attained to empire; they were gradually growing out of it and being weakened by the civilization they strove to adopt, during the period of their rule. In this also they present a parallel to the development of their Turkish descendants.
The various provinces of the old Persian and Seleucid Empires were left alone, on the payment of a certain amount of tribute to their overlord; they were governed by their own sub-kings, of the old royal houses,-a privilege that seems to have been extended even to the old royal house of Persia--and these sub-kings or satraps were often at private war with one another. The Parthian army consisted almost entirely of cavalry, the infantry being a mere rabble, and the siege train non-existent. Even when that of the whole Roman army under Antony fell into their hands, they were unable to make any use of it, and could do no more than burn it. Their cavalry, however, was most formidable. It consisted in part of the swarms of light horse-archers which the Romans were to copy in a later age, and which their own descendants were to use against the Crusaders at Dorylmum and on many another field; heavy horse, a corps of lancers, in which man and mount alike were clad in chain-mail, were also used, and they must have been relied on for the final charge after the ranks of Roman infantry had been wearied and shaken by the hours. of archery-fire, to which they could make no reply. The bow, however, was so thoroughly the Parthian weapon that even these "cuirassiers" also carried it, though in other matters they must have looked much like the Norman chivalry as shown to us on the Bayeux tapestry, saving that the use of horse-armour belongs to a later age, in tile West.
While using the bow thus freely, neither the Parthian nor the Roman seem to have realized how much more formidable that weapon can be in the hands of an archer who stands on his own feet to use it, and can thus bend a far more effective bow. English archers in the long French wars always fought on foot, but were often mounted for the march. They were the most effective force of their day, but in the Parthian period the bow was very far from being as effective as Richard I was afterwards to make his favourite weapon, the cross-bow, or Edward I the "long" English variety. Still, it could win the day for its users, and the finest weapon could hardly do more.
As it was their policy to leave the subject kingdoms free, Parthians naturally left the cities, and other internal communities in their empire, large rights of self-government. The cities were, to a very great extent, Greek or Greek-influenced. Very many of them were "Alexandrias," cities founded by the great Macedonian in his brief career. It is one of his many titles to greatness that he had obviously the eye to see where a city would prosper, and would found settlements there. This is by no means usual. The sites of "Freak-cities," founded by some king on a site that caught his fancy, and given his name with the intent that it should be thereby commemorated to all time, arc common enough all the East over, but very few of these have endured. Most of those set up by Alexander remain, and are important to this day. The one in Egypt-his favourite, and where he intended his body to rest-is of course familiar to everyone, but some of the others, while remaining, have disguised their names. It is not everyone who can recognize the name of the founder in "Scanderoon," "Kandahar" or "Secunderabad." These cities were, of course, centres of Hellenic influence in the Empire.
Communities which, like the cities, had a certain distinct life of their own, were also left to enjoy that life by the Parthian rulers, who were content that subjects who were content to be subject, should go their own way in all matters which did not affect the government.
Among these communities, the most important was the Jewish, who had their own organization in Babylon as they had in Egypt, and were even allowed a "millet-bashi," or head of the nation whom they themselves called the "prince of the captivity." The Babylonian portion of the nation was less conspicuous than- but as wealthy and as important and probably as learned as, the portion of the nation in Jerusalem. Of course it was counted as a part of the "dispersion."
The Assyrian stock, still resident in the provinces about the ruins of Nineveh, where Mosul, Arbela, and Kirkuk were already great cities, seems to have been left to its own customs in the same way. Its individual life was far less conspicuous than that of a Greek city or a Jewish community, for it had neither centre to focus it nor chronicler to record it. In due course, however, Christianity was to provide the one, and historians arose to produce the other.
A curious instance of the pertinacity of their life may be found in the development of the Syriac language. All the various Semitic languages, spoken in the lands between Babylon and the Mediterranean, had racial affinities, and it was natural that a common "lingua franca" should grow up among them. This "Syriac" seems to have been at first the common vernacular of the kingdom of Aram (hence "Aramaic"), and then the language of diplomatic and commercial intercourse; it appears as such in the episode Of 2 Kings xviii, 26. Rabshakeh, the Assyrian official, when asked by the Jews to "speak in Syriac, and not in the Hebrew, that the common people can understand," replies in effect: "Yes, you would like it, would you not?" and continues to use the Hebrew that the garrison can hear.
This Syriac language, which is the direct derivative from Hebrew and Assyrian, two tongues which had very much in common with one another, soon became a vernacular, spoken all over Mesopotamia, "Syria," and Palestine. In the last named, it was the vernacular in the time of our Lord, who spoke it habitually, and the fact has left plain traces in the Gospel story, though the narratives as they now. stand were written for Greek readers. At least one of the Gospels-that of St. Matthew-is known to have had a Syriac original, though the relation between that original and the Greek version that we now have, is a problem into which we need not enter here.
From being a vernacular language, it soon developed a literature, though one which was largely translated from the Greek, and it could even give a name to a district. The province of "Syria" known to the Romans did not refer to any country ever occupied by any "King of Syria," but Simply to the land, under Roman dominion, occupied by Syriac-speakers. There never was a "kingdom of Syria," properly so called. That so described in the Old Testament was known to its own inhabitants as Aram.
Syriac remained a vernacular, spread over a wide district, including the kingdom of Edessa with which we shall have to deal later. In due course, however, another conquering speech took its place, with the rise of Islam and the rule of the Arabs. Arabic displaced Syriac, and continues to be the spoken speech of "Syria" unto this day. Of course the change was not very great, for the two languages arc both of the Semitic group, and have a good deal that is common, both in grammar and vocabulary; still it was the definite acceptance of another tongue, brought in by a new conqueror.
Syriac underwent the usual development of languages in its position. It became the vernacular, not of educated people and of the great world, but of country districts and remote provinces, as it still is. Up to the days of the Great War, Syriac was still the vernacular of a small group of villages in the Lebanon, and of a few tiny cantons in the mountain districts of Kurdistan. It also became, in ceasing to be a spoken tongue, the language of literature and of religious services. To this day, the liturgy of large numbers of Christians of the Monophysite confession, whose language for the purposes of dairy life is Arabic, is read in the Syriac that their fathers spoke once, but which they have themselves ceased to understand.
The king of this varied empire, and the immediate ruler of the Parthian stock that was the ruling caste in it, was the head of the sacred Arsacid House, in which was embodied a sanctity that had come down through the ages, and which the members of it had brought with them from their home by the Caspian. just as in the days of their Turkish descendants, there was something of a mystic halo attaching to the House of Osman, so that any member of it was not quite as other men are, and it was impossible for a Turk even to think of any ruler for the Ottoman Empire who was not the head of that House, so it was with the Arsacids. It was Sacrilege even to strike a member of the sacred family, and the person of the King himself was holy in a more special sense. The crown was his by right divine, and regicide was a crime past the conception of man.
Officially, the policy of the King and of his house was phil-Hellenic. This was even expressed in his title, in which he called himself the Friend and Protector of the Greeks. In his age the Greek had ceased to be a political danger to anyone, or indeed a factor in the political game at all, while he was still the leader in civilization and art, both of them influences which the royal House of Parthia seems to have wished to bring to bear upon the people. This being so, it was natural that the Greek cities of the Empire, each one of which was a focus of Greek influence, should be protected and fostered by the ruler, and everything done to encourage them to live their civilized life undisturbed, and to spread their influence upon all within their orbit.
The fact that the Parthian King held it necessary, and part of the role lie had to play, to patronize Greek art and civilization generally, appears from one well-known episode. The drama of the Bacchae was being performed before the court at the time that the news of the great victory of Carrhae was received, and it was actually announced to the King in the words of the drama, when the actor who took the part of Agave, mother of King Penthius, appeared upon the stage with the head of Crassus in his hands and so presented it to the ruler, with the words,- "We have hunted down a mighty beast to-day."
In like fashion, it was the proper thing to have the palace decorated with paintings of Greek myths and Greek triumphs. Europa and Andromeda were constantly pictured there, we read from one who saw them, and even the battle of Thermopylae, despite the fact that, if the Parthians appeared there at all, it was as a contingent fighting on the side of the King of Persia.
This suggests a culture that, so far as it existed at all, was borrowed and not native. The Parthian was outwardly civilized, as civilization went then, but the instincts of the nomad and the barbarian were not very far down, and might come up to the surface unexpectedly. In this again he has much resemblance to his Turkish kin, whose taste for splendid and ostentatious building he would seem to have also shared.
Of this we have an instance in the Palace of Hatra, the one survivor of many splendid palaces of the Arsacid dynasty which arc known to have existed, and which have perished under the hands of their successors. It stands in an oasis in the desert, some fifty miles to the south-west of Mosul, and thirty from the nearest point on the Tigris, the ancient city of Assur. No doubt it is owing to this isolation that it has escaped the destroyer, and remained what it is to-day, an "habitation for flocks," but an unusually well-preserved ruin. It is this position, far from any water save what it commands, that has also rendered the city of which it was the centre so singularly difficult to besiege, so that it was able to defy the Romans twice, at the very zenith of their power, and under the leadership of such emperors as Trajan and Severus.
As the one surviving instance of Parthian architecture, it has real importance in the history of that art, though the importance would be greater if it were not so probable that the Parthians, like the Turks, originated nothing in art, but were content to use the powers of their subjects to produce the grand' buildings which their sense of majesty demanded. One suspects that the stately arches of Hatra are no more really Parthian in provenance--even though a Parthian King built them-than the great mosques that the Ottoman Sultans built at Constantinople are really Turkish architecture. The fact that the Sassanid House used the same style for their palaces, though they are hardly likely to have copied the work of the unloved Arsacid, suggests that both were making use of an older type of architecture that came down from an earlier age.
Be that as it may, the plan of the central block of the palace, which is all that remains, is simple enough, but very telling. It consists of a series of "tunnels," each with a "wagon-vault" to roof it, placed side by side and facing south. The central one of the group is higher than the rest, and probably formed the royal reception-room. If, as is likely, this building formed one side of a great court, into which this "diwan-khana" would open, we can trace the survival of the plan, not only in such Sassanid buildings as the "Takht-i-Khosrau," of the great palace of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, but also in many houses of the nobility of later date in Mosul.
The religion of the Parthian kingdom was a mixture. The instincts of the race seem to have been for king-worship, the head of the Arsacid House being regarded as personally semi-divine. In practice they had to temper this, in order to hold the obedience of the Persian nation at all, by a certain respect for Zoroastrianism. The Magi, the priests of that cult, were too strong a clan and corporation for even the sovereign to despise their discontent, and if they were conciliated, the worship paid to the office of the King was not at all contrary to their own teaching.
Thus, a working agreement was possible between the two powers, and the result of it was interesting. It was under the heretic Arsacids, and at the bidding of one of their kings, Valageses, that the holy books of Zoroastrianism, the Avesta, were collected and codified, and in fact put into the form in which they exist to-day., It is quite possible that the Magians felt that their religion was more or less on its defence, and must be ready to give an answer as to what was or was not according to its teaching, and so proceeded to define what, under orthodox princes of the Achaemenid House, they had been content to leave nebulous. Still, the process would have been impossible under a king who was not at least conciliatory.
Underneath both cults, and side by side with them, there existed a substratum of the popular faith of the people, the old nature-worship that is by no means extinct to-day. Holy groves, trees and springs, were revered, and there was no doubt a recollection of the old gods of Babylonia as well. As magical arts going back to the very origin of that civilization are still practised, centuries of Christian and Moslem influence notwithstanding, it would seem natural to infer that these primitive forms of worship were then even more conspicuous and habitual.
It was in this period of Parthian rule, and in this religious milieu, that Christianity was first preached in Assyria. The faith was brought by teachers who arrived in the country from Edessa, though they may or may not have been actually of that State. Till motor traffic altered the conditions of travel, it was practically impossible to get from Syria to Adiabene (the ancient name for the province of Mosul) without passing through the city in question.
Edessa was then the capital of Osrhoene, a little buffer State on the Euphrates, lying between the empires of Parthia and Rome. Its life was brief, hardly longer than that of another such, viz., Palmyra; but, like that State, it bad the importance which a buffer State always may have for the period of its existence. Though part of the Syriac speaking world, it was ruled by a dynasty. of Armenian stock, the House of Abgar, and is counted by the historians of that race as a part of their "empire." Actually, its independence lasted about two hundred years; it was in existence before the beginning of the Christian era, but was overrun and annexed to Rome as a mere preliminary to the big campaign against Parthia in the days of Trajan, and was thereafter part of the Roman Empire.
In that brief period, however, some years before the end of the first century, Christianity reached the little State, and received a welcome there.' It even seems that one of its princes became a Christian, though we need not feel bound to accept as historical the tradition that Abgar of Edessa corresponded with Christ, offering to him an asylum from the hatred of the Jews, and receiving in reply a letter with a portrait of the Lord, and a promise that the city that had declared its willingness to receive him should be ever protected against the attacks of its enemies. The tradition, however, must be of very early date, for it would appear that it must have sprung up previous to the capture of the city by the Emperor Trajan in the year 115, and purely pagan legends of a miraculous immunity promised by some power arc still current in the town.
Growing up thus in what was then an independent country, the Church of Edessa long retained a character of its own, and it was from that centre that the missionaries went on to the empire of Parthia and the land of Adiabene. Tradition kept the names of the first two teachers, viz., Adai (which is Thaddaeus) and Mari, and it appears that they were in the country before the end of the first century, and had consecrated the first bishop of the land--a convert from Magianism named Pqida--as early as A.D. 104.
Later belief held that Adai was either one of the twelve apostles, or at least one of the "seventy," and it is not impossible that such was the fact, though Armenia also claims Thaddaeus (perhaps because of the connection of Edessa with that land) as the real founder of her national Church. This teacher seems to have lived out his life in Adiabene where he is said to have died in peace at an age of over a century. The story goes that Mari went further, evangelizing the land of Babylonia, though the capital Seleucia would have none of him,- and even going down the Persian Gulf "till he smelt the smell of the apostle Thomas in India," but the accounts that remain of him are far less reliable. It is undoubtedly the fact, however, -that Christianity, spreading rapidly elsewhere in the land, struck no root in the capital till a good deal later, and the tradition that the evangelist was so discouraged by a failure there, as to request leave to return to Edessa, has the ring of truth rather than of legend.
Whatever success or failure attended the efforts of Mari in the south, there is no doubt that Christianity spread very rapidly in Adiabene in the north of the land. There, the peasants were of the old Assyrian stock, and their folk-memory may have preserved much of the Babylonian religion which the Assyrians held in common with their kinsfolk there. One of their myths told of :a creation of man from the dust of the earth, a being who was yet so feeble that he could not stand erect under the sun before the gods, but grovelled on the ground. For this reason Bel-Merodach, first-born of the great father, Ea, offered to give his life, and was beheaded, in order that his blood, being mixed with the clay, might produce a newer and nobler creation, that should partake in measure of the nature of the divine. Those who had such notions woven into their minds, might readily accept the teaching of a God who died to save, and who by the gift of his body and his blood could infuse Ws own life into man.
The Parthian government raised no objection to the propagation of the new religion. It was not officially and theoretically tolerant, for it was not organized enough to enforce such a notion, but it simply did not care and did not interfere. There was even hope at one time of procuring a formal edict of toleration from the King Valageses, about A.D. 160, and the project only failed because tile outbreak of a war with Rome put so unimportant a matter out of the King's mind.
If there was no State persecution, there was one very powerful corporation that was hostile to the spread of Christianity, and that was the Magian clan. While the faith spread only among slaves, peasants and artisans (and it is probable that the general rule held good here, and that extension was speediest among those classes), nothing was said; when', however, the "squire" class of Persian blood began to be infected, it was time to do something. Thus we do find cases of persecution, either by the Magian authorities or by family action, of converts from among their own number and entourage. It was not, probably, State action, but that of a great corporation which a government that was not very strong did not care to thwart. When a man of local distinction like the Agha Raqbokt in the year i6o, declares himself a Christian, it is the Magians who demand that the local governor shall act, with law or without it.
As a general rule, however) Christianity had a fair field in Parthia, where toleration was almost as complete as was possible at that time. Hence, it spread rapidly, and after only a century and a quarter (in A.D. 225) the chronicler could already enumerate more than twenty bishoprics. Naturally there were times when Christians had to suffer, in common with all others, from the incidents natural to a disturbed kingdom.
Roman invasions and raids made little mark, being regarded by the historian as part of the course of nature, like an occasional flood. They are signposts by which to date a chronicle, rather than causes for astonishment or complaint. Notices of the descent of hordes of robbers from the mountains of Kardu are at least evidence that the Kurd of those days was what be had been since the days of Xenophon, and is still. It was one of these invasions that made it impossible for the Magians to take effective action against the "renegade" the Christian Agha Raqbokt. The King found his local knowledge and local levies to be absolutely necessary in the emergency, and there could be no further talk of proceeding against him for apostasy, even to oblige the Magians.
There was, however, one specially dastardly form of persecution from which Christians had to suffer then, and suffer still in those lands, or did until very recent days. This was the kidnapping or "capture" of their daughters as either slaves or concubines. Let a girl be thus carried off into the household of some powerful family, and some sort of confession of Zoroastrianism or of Islam-be extorted from her, and then, even if the local authority can be bribed into action by her relatives, how can the "convert" be abandoned to "it false faith"? In days shortly before the- Great War, the Christians of Mesopotamia used to lose as many as 1,000 girls per annum in this way, in spite of the cross, tattooed on their foreheads, to mark them, in d the earliest of their chroniclers complains of the custom as existing in the second century. Little changes in the East. Once let a girl be thus captured, and few can find the strength for a life-long confession of their Lord, a confession none the less meritorious for being absolutely unknown. Still, in these days as in the second century, such hidden saints have existed, and do exist.
Still, while Parthian rule endured, if the Christians had something of the same troubles to endure as was the case with them when the Turkish descendants of the Parthians began to rule in the land, yet on the whole their position was tolerable. The coming of Christianity had given to the old Assyrian stock a focus, on which they could unite their old national feeling, and which could arouse in their people a sense of union.
Meantime, the Church was organized and self-governing. It had received from its Western brethren the system of government that was universal throughout the world (Bishops, Priests, and Deacons), and before the rule of the Parthians had ended, the Scriptures had been made as accessible to them in their own vernacular as the circumstances of the day would allow. That is, the Syriac version of the Old and New Testaments on which the "Pshitta"' version of a later day was based had already been made, though one can hardly say that it was widely circulated.
The Assyrian Church, too, had produced at least one scholar of distinction, though it would seem that his work was not done within the borders of his own land. This was Tatian, compiler of the first harmony of the four gospels--the Diatessaron--who seems to have been born in Assyria, and to have produced his work as early as the year A.D. 170.
The land had also produced a great, if not very regular theologian, in Bar Daizan or Bardesanes, "the Son of the Star." If in his theorizing he mingled Christianity and other philosophies, till authority would not admit the product of his dreaming as Christianity at all, he at least gave to the world the first version of "The Pilgrim's Progress" in his wonderful allegory of "The Search for the Lost Robe."
IN the year A.D. 225 there was a rebellion of the Persian provinces of the Parthian Empire, under the sub-king of the district, Ardashir. The Arsacid King, Valageses IV, took the field against him, but was defeated and killed in single combat by the rebel, and with him the Parthian Empire ended. What had happened was not just the substitution of one king for another, or even of one dynasty for another. It was a rising of the old Persian stock which had been in eclipse since the days of Alexander, and the beginning of the second Persian Empire, that of the House of Sassan, which was to last for four centuries, till the old life of the East passed away for ever with the rise of Islam. It was the period of the last of the old empires, A.D. 225-640.
In the minds of men of the age, this was a revival, not a new creation. Of old, the Achaemenid House had been the anointed of the Lord Ahura Mazda, possessed of the - "Hvareno" which was the mystic halo of kingship. Though it was over five centuries since the House had fallen, the notion that the right was theirs had not died out. The Parthian Arsacids had felt obliged to put in a claim to be of the blood and though the assertion was impossible to the point of being ridiculous, the fact that it was made shows how important the right divine was felt to be. Now, the new royal family, being of Persian stock, had to make the same claim, and though it was absolutely unhistorical, it served its purpose. They said that Artaxerxes II, King of Persia, had no son living at the time of his death. Before his brother, Sassan, had actually assumed royalty, a posthumous heir, that Darius who fell before Alexander, was born to the King's widow, and Sa-;san loyally recognized his prior claim. Lest he should be made into a cause of strife to the realm, he abandoned the world, becoming either a shepherd or a Smith and so living out his life in obscurity. One sees the Zoroastrian mentality in the choice of the walk of life made by the hero; another civilization would have made him a hermit, but to a follower of Zoroaster, that was impossible.
Now the Persians rose to empire again, and the leathern apron of the royal blacksmith became the royal standard of the House.
A claim thus made has, to be emphasized in all possible ways, and so we find the kings of -the second royal House of Persia copying and reviving the institutions of the first. Their imperial bodyguard is a corps of "Immortals." The kings keep the old names of Cyrus and Artaxerxes (Khosrau and Ardashir), and have a fair cause of complaint against the Greek historians who disguised the fact which they were at such pains to proclaim. Greek writers seem to think that it proves their civilization never to take the pains to get a "barbarian" name right,-and indeed are not alone in the notion. Thus, they are not even consistent in their blundering versions, and without special training, it is not easy for the Western to recognize that Chosroes and Cyrus are versions of the same Persian name.
The claim to continuity with the old House was put forward, not merely as a means to win prestige, but as a part of a deliberate policy. Sons of the old Achaemenid House, they claimed the whole Achaemenid heritage. All Anatolia, or Asia Minor, was theirs of right, to their thinking, and they are constantly calling upon the Emperor of Rome to confine himself to that which they admitted to be his--to the countries north of the Bosphorus.
Is it possible that we have here an early version of the cry "Asia for the Asiatics" that we arc beginning to hear once more to-day?
Naturally, the mere making of such a claim as this implied a series of wars with Rome, and lest this should be insufficient of itself to provide excuse 'for battle, fortune had seen to it that there should be two other and additional casus belli always to hand. These were (A) the question of the control of the provinces about the city of Nisibis, where was the Alsace-Lorraine of that day, a district which both could claim, providing a passage into the territory of the enemy, and a gate that could be shut in the face of an invader; (B) the problem of the control of Armenia, that restless land which was almost sure to be inviting the power that did not control it at the moment, to protect. it against the "tyranny" of its then suzerain. Only such a miracle as the simultaneous accession of two peace4oving rulers was likely to keep the peace for long together between such neighbours as these.
In the series of wars that form a natural feature of the four centuries of Romo-Persian rivalry, the honours on the whole seem to be with the Persians. There is a colossal system of "cross-raiding," in which the one often gets as far as Antioch, and the other as far as Seleucia, but it is the Persians who carry off gigantic "captivities" from the Roman provinces, not the other way about, and one Roman emperor died as a captive in their hands, and another was killed in battle against them. . Rome could claim no such trophies as those.
The struggle ends in a veritable combat of giants, the war between Chosroes Parviz and Heraclius, during which, for several years together, the watchers on the walls of Constantinople could see the camp-fires of the Persian no farther off than Chalcedon on the other shore of the Bosphorus. The Persian was never a sailor, and never did the magic spell of a witch stop more abruptly at running water than did the armies of Chosroes on the Shore of that salt river. So the war ended with the acceptance by both of the status quo ante, and with both empires so exhausted that they fell within a decade to the power of the Arab.
As the Sassanid accession to power was a revival of the old Persian nationality, it was also a revival of the national religion. We do not know whether the faith of Zoroaster had been the means whereby the life of the nation had been preserved during its five centuries of subjection. We can only say that it would be quite in keeping with the ways of the Orient if it were so, and that it is certain that$ when the nation rose, the faith rose with it. The religion of Ahura Mazda, as reformed by Zoroaster about 6oo B.C., becomes the Faith, and its organization the established Church of the Persian nation.
With the faith came its hierarchy. In primitive days the Magians were the Levitical tribe of the Persian race, one of the seven clans into which the nation was divided, and the one charged with religious duties. Now they appear as an organized and well-drilled clergy. Magians as such are priests of the fire-temples, Mobeds are the Bishops, each apparently with a diocese of his own; at the head of the whole is the Mobed-Mobedan, who is one of the very greatest of the dignitaries of the State. He can rebuke even the Shah-in-shah himself, if le so far forgets himself as to act tyrannically. "Mend your ways, son of Sassan, or-" He has at his command the Magian at the fire-temple in every village, and where altar and throne are counted as inseparable, the Mobed-Mobedan is very nearly as powerful as the King. It seems that if the King shall depart from the faith which it is his duty to guard, the prelate may even issue a "Fetva" proclaiming him deposed, like the Sheikh-ul-Islam in latter-day Turkey.
What is taught by this formidable hierarchy is the old -faith of Ahura Mazda or Ormuzd, as reformed by Zoroaster and now reissued by the Mobeds. As we have seen, one of the precautions taken by that body during the long subjection had been to codify their religion and to stereotype its ancient scripture. The Avesta has now taken form in its canonical books. Perhaps this accounts for one curious fact. We have noted that Mithraism, the offspring of the religion of Ormuzd (for Mithras was originally only a subordinate god in the Persian Pantheon), had extended itself in the West after the fall of Mithridates and the foundation of colonies out of the remnant of his army. This cult was now flourishing all over the Roman Empire. There was hardly a camp along the frontiers where men did not gather to worship Mitbras, the first-born of Ahura Mazda, the effulgence of his glory. Yet, in his own country, when the faith of which his teaching was a branch had risen to supremacy, we hear nothing of him. It would seem that his cult had extended in a way comparable--mutatis mutandi--to the cult of Our Lady in Christendom. Then there came a reaction, and in Sassanid days the faith that the Mobeds taught was the ancient belief, as reformed by Zoroaster. That great man was of the nature of a Protestant reformer, and removed the "secondary god" from his system. There is nothing of Mithras, the Mediator and Comrade, in his teaching, and it was the faith as he had stereotyped it that the Mobeds taught now. Whether popular religion consented to give up the invictus comes is another question.
Still, it was the faith at its best that was taught in Persia in the days before its fall, and its influence on the character of the nation produced a type of man that was in many respects very fine. The Persian in Sassanid days still kept much of the tradition of Cyrus, being taught "to ride, to speak the truth, to draw the bow." He was by nature, as his descendant still is, a lover of hunting and of horsemanship, and there must have been much that was fine in the ages that produced two such games as polo and chess! As soldiers, Persians under the House of Sassan became even more formidable than the Parthian had been, keeping his dash and adding science to it. Their social and government system was practically feudal, the landowner paying, as of course, military service to the King; and thus, as in Europe in later days, the strength of the army lay in its "chivalry," the armoured knights. These were drawn from the "Azatan," the free tenants-in-chief of the King, and they came to war under his leading, clad in chain mail, and mounted on big heavy horses, specially bred for the work, and also mail-clad. Naturally, the swarm of light horse--the horse-archer that Rome now copied--was kept up, and the infantry were better than in Parthian days, thanks to the example of the corps of "Immortals." Elephants were used in war, and the Shah-in-shah had what the Parthian never could rise to-a regular siege train.
This force was well disciplined and drew its regular pay, as appears from the story that the King of Kings, Chosroes Anushirwan himself, was called to come on parade, as part of his duty for certain fiefs that he held. There he was duly inspected and sent back to barracks as "improperly equipped!" He had neglected to supply himself with the two spare bow-strings that every cavalryman had to take into the field.
The very fine doctrine of Zoroaster, that he who did aught to increase the dominion of Life-human, animal or vegetable-was increasing the realm of Ormuzd thereby, and fulfilling a religious duty in the act, was sure to make the land prosperous. The great irrigation system of Mesopotamia was at its best in Sassanid days, and we are assured that the whole of the great delta was one garden; a squirrel might travel from -Seleucia to the Persian Gulf without ever having to come to ground. Under that hot sun, it is the land under the shade of the trees that produces the best crops, so that the significance and value of the forest is apparent. The traditional engineering knowledge needed for the upkeep of the great dykes was still available, and the Shah-in-shah felt that he had inherited the duty of caring for them from his Babylonian. predecessors. Sometimes his measures were grim. We hear of one case when carelessness had allowed a formidable breach to appear. Chosroes crucified forty overseers at the breach itself, and filled it up by marching the cultivators into the water, to form a living wall with their backs. Earth was then heaped around them, and they were buried there alive. It was the King's order that the wall should be re-made, and on its repair depended the life of the whole p Vince whence those cultivators came; so the men died,-as Arab sheikhs in later days have called on their followers to die also.
In early Sassanid days, the Christian Church in the country was left alone. It had its old status, but was in more danger than before, for the reason that the Magians-always its most dangerous opponents-had now more power than in the time of Arsacid rule.
The reasons why a faith so high and noble as that of Zoroaster should have felt a hatred so special for one even higher, are worth a moment's study. They are stated in a royal firman of rather later date, obviously dictated by the Magians, and revealing the popular feeling.
"These Christians destroy our holy teaching, and teach men to honour one God, and not to Honour the sun, or fire. They defile water by their ablutions; they refrain from marriage and the procreation of children, and refuse to go out to war with the Shah-in-shah. They have no rules about the slaughter and eating of animals; they bury the corpses of men in the earth. They. attribute the origin of snakes and creeping things to a good God. They despise the servants of the King, and teach witchcraft."
In other words, the Christians were men of different habit to the Magian and therefore abominable, like the foreigner in China today. Some of the habits complained of might have been amended by Pauline teaching about respecting the prejudices of others, and some of the charges were at most only half true, like the one about service in the army; but there was ground enough for such a race-hatred between Zoroastrian and Christian, as we see today in India between Moslem and Hindu.
Active persecution, however, did not break out until the conversion of Constantine had made the Roman Empire officially Christian. After that, every Christian was politically suspect. It was not 4 possible for the Persian official to believe that the "rayah" or subject who followed the religion of the Roman enemy was not a sympathizer with that enemy, and Roman authority provided any excuse that was needed. Constantine, most ostentatiously and tactlessly, claimed a protectorate over all the Christian subjects of the Shah-in-Shah,-and then went to war with him. Christian powers have repeated the blunder in later days with the Turk.
The first of these persecutions lasted forty years, and was full of every kind of horror. One must not, however, think of these movements as proceeding, in the East, in the orderly and relentless style of the Roman Empire. An imperial firman for the destruction of churches and the killing of such Christians as would not adore the sun was issued, but in the East a firman is not so much an order as permission,-the standing order being, "thou shalt do nothing at all." It was the release of a race hatred, normally held in check, to do its will on its objects, if men liked; there were many ways of escape besides the ordinary slackness of the Oriental official. Still, for about a century and a half, whenever there was war between the Persian and the Roman-and we have seen how frequent that was sure to be-there was persecution for the Assyrian. Of course there were intervals of peace, and in one of these we find a sort of Charter, or Edict of Milan, issued by the Shah-in-shah for the benefit and government of the whole body.
By this act the King of Kings (Yezdegerd "the Wicked," who was looked on by the Magians as almost an apostate for his pains), recognized the whole Assyrian Church as what a later age was to call a "millet," a nationality organized in a Church under its religious authorities. The authority in this case being the Catholicos or Patriarch, with five "Metropolitans" and about forty bishops under him. The "millet" had the right to exist, and to worship in its own way, being controlled in internal matters by its own Patriarch. It had not, however, the right to make converts, or at least not from the "established religion" 6f the State, then Magianism. All this, too, was only durante beneplacito regis. If the Shah-in-shah found any cause to suspect the subject "millet" of disloyalty, h . c was still entitled to take the only precaution that an Oriental potentate understands, and order persecution or massacre. The precedent thus first set has often been repeated by Mahommedan rulers over Christian nationalities.
This qualified toleration was secured to the body by an episcopal ambassador of the Roman Empire, one Marutha, who was also. a physician, and had won the gratitude of Yezdegerd in that capacity. He was able to announce what he had won to the Church at the first formal council of its members of which we have knowledge, held in A.D. 410. At that council the body also accepted a document of which it had previously had no official knowledge -the Creed of Nicaea.
Hitherto the Assyrian Church had been absolutely isolated from the West, and as lasting schisms' bad not then come into being, there was no other local Christian body in question. Armenia had not then a Church of its own. To its great benefit, it had known nothing of the weary Arian controversy, for its bishops, being outside the Empire, were not present at the Council of - Nic2ea. Fifteen years after the assembly the leading theologian of the Assyrian Church--Afraat, known as "the sage of Persia"--uses language which shows plainly that he had simply no knowledge of the question discussed there, no matter on which side his sympathies would have been.
Of course, the existence of the Assyrian Church was known in the Roman Empire, though not by that name; there it was known simply as "the Church of the Easterns," a term which meant to them, speaking in Constantinople, "the lands to the East of the Roman Empire.;" In exactly similar wise, "Easterns" to us means, Christian Churches to the East of us in Europe, in Constantinople and Asia Minor. When Assyrian bishops refer to "the Westerns" in. their turn, they do not mean even Antioch, far less Rome-a' city that was not above their horizon at all-but the bishops . of Nisibis and Edessa.
Now this Eastern or Assyrian body accepted the Nicene Creed- in the form in which it was put forward by the Council Of 325, as fully accordant with what they had always taught. It is their heritage to this day, though usage has with them, as with the Westerns, altered its wording without affecting its theology.
Though recognized now as a "millet," with a right to exist when the Shah-in-shah did not liappen to be at war with Rome, the Church was still as much liable to persecution as ever on the frequent occasions when Rome and Persia were at war, for it was still as much as ever "suspect" by the Persian government. For about seventy years these periodical massacres were endured, but one cannot wonder at the growth of a feeling which may be thus expressed: "We'are Christians, and cannot ever give up our faith. But, can we not do something to show the Shah-in-shah that we are not precisely the same brand of Christian as those in the Roman Empire, and therefore need not be massacred every time he happens to have a quarrel with the Emperor?"
Another feeling was also present in their minds, and those of other Christians within the Roman Empire, at the same time. We have seen that the national instinct was strong in the people, and this naturally tends to express itself in what the nation cares most about-its religion.
Greeks, however, were then the ruling power in the Roman Empire, and they were much inclined to regard the Christian. Church as their natural heritage in which they had the obvious right of the fittest to rule. Where there was a national instinct, as in Egypt or Syria, this tendency was resented, and in a day when theology was the only form of politics known, the natural and easy way to show that resentment was to take up any theological slogan of the moment which happened not to be in favour with the Greek, and to make the maintenance of it a point of national honour.
In the fifth century, the theological question of the hour Was that known as the "Christological." We do not propose to enter into that tangled dispute, the details of which can be found in any standard theological work, while the problem as it affects the Assyrians more particularly is discussed in the writer's own book upon the matter.2
Briefly, the question was this. It is admitted that Christ was Divine -- a question settled in the Arian controversy. That being so, how is this Divine Being also Man? Various answers were given, for theology of the most abstract has, an interest for an Oriental that is unintelligible to any Western, with the possible exception of a Scot. Broadly, the Greeks were the better theologians. That is to say, their efforts at expressing in words a spiritual truth that is beyond all human language were less unsatisfactory than those of their opponents. The Orientals, however, both in Egypt, Syria, and Persia, bad, as we see, a natural prejudice that made them disinclined to accept any Greek explanation, whatever its merits, and an inclination to support any man whom Greek authority had condemned!
Here, when the matter did come before them, they had what was undoubtedly a good case, in the question of the condemnation of Nestorius. Whatever the merits or demerits of the doctrine of that unlucky Patriarch of Constantinople, there was no doubt that his condemnation was unjust. In the tribunal that condemned him, the Council of Ephesus, Cyril of Alexandria, his personal enemy, united the posts of accuser and presiding judge, and then proceeded to pack the jury by refusing to admit any who might be possibly friendly to the. defendant.
About A.D. 480 then, all these questions came up together: the desire to be free from persecution; the resentment at Greek dictation; and the instinct of the expression of national life in the religious sphere. It so happened that, at the-moment, the practical leadership of the "millet" was in strong and not very scrupulous hands, namely those of Barsoma of Nisibis, a man who appears to have united the posts of Metropolitan Archbishop and Warden of the Marches. With the influence derived from both of his ranks to back him, he organized the Church on a footing of distinct separation from the "Westerns" in the Roman Empire, and introduced other reforms, calculated to reconcile a Persian government to its Christian subjects. He passed a law, in a council held for the purpose, laying it down expressly that all bishops and clergy might marry, thus offending the growing instinct for celibacy in the Greek Church, and conciliating the sentiment of the anti-ascetical Zoroastrians. He also took advantage of the break-up of the great college at Edessa-to which Assyrian youth had hitherto gone to seek education-and established a great school within Persian borders at Nisibis. It was at once the worthiest and most lasting piece of work that Barsoma accomplished in -a chequered and picturesque career. The great university into which his school developed was the means by which his nation, in after days, were to instruct their Arab masters, and a later chapter will show how important that work of theirs was for the world. All this was done by this vigorous prelate in the intervals of political intrigues and his- work of suppressing border raids!
The separation of the Assyrians from the Church of the Empire was by no means settled finally by the work of Barsoma. The Easterns gradually came to realize that there had been a reaction in the West against the Council of Ephesus to which they objected, and that its work had been revised at Chalcedon. Then there was also a reaction in the East against some of what Barsoma had done, and the Assyrian Church found herself under her greatest and most saintly Patriarch, Mar Aba, who attempted reconciliation.
The Council of Chalcedon was definitely accepted as a matter of faith and-though modern Assyrians have rather forgotten the fact-it is still formally recognized by them to this day! Then, just when formal adjustment of the difficulty seemed to be easy, things went wrong. Certain men dead in the peace of the Church--Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus--whom Assyrians counted as saints, were condemned improperly in Constantinople, in the hope of appeasing a faction there, and the drift into separation continued. Soon each party was employing technical terms of its own in the controversy, terms not translatable by either into the language of the other, or into English; and each was too sure that the other was wrong, to listen to any explanation.
Actually, estrangement had not crystallized into formal separation before the year 620, or only just before the Mahommedan conquest made reconciliation far more difficult. It was at just the same date that the national Churches of Egypt and Syria--the "Monophysites"--also consummated their separation from the Greek, and thus presented Islam with that permanently divided Christianity which was to serve as so firm a foundation for the rule of Turks over Christians for so many centuries.
To add irony to the position, any one of the separated Churches, either then or' now, would have accepted any orthodox confession that did not use the technical terms that had become matters of dispute. To this day all could agree to use the "Athanasian Creed" loyally, so far as its doctrinal portions go, while the "Damnatory clauses" that form a stumbling-block to the modern Western are no obstacle whatever to the Oriental.
When once the Church was thus put in a position of comparative security, and organized on a self-governing basis, its extension was marvellously rapid. Christianity is essentially an Oriental religion, and when presented by Orientals to Orientals it appeals to them as it was intended to do. So the Assyrian Church; without any of the paraphernalia of missionary societies and elaborate subscription lists, was able to extend itself by its own natural growth in the very districts that are the despair of all Christian Missions to-day. Early in the sixth century we find bishops and archbishops in such centres as Merv, Herat, Samarkand. What would we give for a native Christianity in those centres to-day? Yet so national were they that the churches in Samarkand were known as "'the Persian temples." Wanderers of the nation-for the Assyrian of the sixth century was like his descendant of the nineteenth, and the instinct of the wander-lust was strongly developed in him took their faith with them when they went to the nomad Turks of Tartary, to India, and to Central China. Bishoprics seemed to grow up there naturally, without hesitation or delay. One wanderer "from Persia" is even said to have got to the extremity of the West, and to have penetrated the Island which the Byzantine Procopius, writing at the period, thinks of as the abode of departed spirits, so thoroughly had the Romans forgotten the Britain they occupied not long before. The Persian left a reminiscence of his name, Ivon, at "St. Ives."
In their own country, Christians often occupied high positions. They were great merchants, and the medical profession was almost their monopoly. Under Chosroes II, the Grand Vizir Burgmihr and the chief of the tax-farmers, Shamta, were both Assyrians. One thousand pieces of gold per day was the sum that the latter contracted to pay the Shah-in-shah, for the taxes of the provinces that he farmed.
The Church had, in a word, accepted its position as in the Persian Empire, and in consequence the Assyrian stock, with its Syriac language and its Syriac liturgy, had become part of the general machinery of state. In many ways their position resembled that of the Greeks in the later days of the Ottoman Empire. They did not provide the army, for the good reason that the army was closed to them; but in all the machinery of government and of daily life they were the source of the indispensable machinery, which the Persian-landowner and sporting squire-was no more capable of supplying than was the like-nurtured Ottoman of Asia Minor in a rather later age.
While the Assyrian stock had thus been making its own. way, the lot of the Armenian, that rather unstable buffer, had been developing on different lines. For some time after the revolution that replaced the Sassanid House on the throne, the Armenians had been content to be in the Persian sphere, in spite of the fact that their ruler, the subking of the land, was an Arsacid by descent. Then Zoroastrian zeal offended their prejudices. Some iconoclasts of that religion-the Magian had an almost Mahommedan dislike for "graven images" -broke the ancient and sacred statues of the Sun and Moon that adorned a temple in the Armenian capital. This produced a revolt about the year 297, and the Armenians, true to their old habit, called in the rival empire of Rome.
Diocletian, then Augustus, was glad to take them as allies in the next act of the endless Romo-Persian war, in which he was very successful. Galerius, his colleague and general, was sure that he could subdue Persia once and for all if he were allowed to go on; but Diocletian, more cautious, held him back, and was content to make peace on the terms of the cession of the "Debatable land" of the Nisibene provinces to Rome, and the acknowledgment of the fact that Armenia was henceforth "in the Roman sphere."
The fortresses that Diocletian built, to cover the approach to Nisibis, and to guard the pass between that plain and the Armenian tableland, arc still in existence. Armenia was given a sub-king, one Tiridates, a man of the old Arsacid stock, but a trusty ally of Rome.
Only four years later, there was a development that Diocletian-who was just then commencing the persecution that we associate with his name could hardly have expected. Tiridates ' turned Christian and proceeded rather forcibly to make his faith the faith of his people. Still, the Armenians were soon to give an instance of the fact-not unknown elsewhere-that a religion that is dictated by force at first, may come to be accepted by a nation as the very core of its life. Diocletian was surprised, but seems to have concluded that he need not sacrifice a political ally on such grounds, and very soon the fact that Constantine succeeded him gave the Armenian sound reason for seeking the Roman alliance.
The conversion of the Armenian King is a romantic story. Tiridates had been as sound a persecutor as Diocletian could desire, and when a cadet of his House, Gregory, went to Cappadocia for education and came back a Christian, he promptly dropped him into a dungeon. Soon after, the King was afflicted with a "Nebuchadnezzar-like madness," the result, men said, of his having offered violence to a Christian virgin, S. Rhipsima. Gregory, having been taken from his prison, cured and converted the King, who then made him the first Archbishop of what was the first national Church of history. This was in the year 310. Soon the Church developed its own Liturgy, under the influence of the Church of Cappadocia (and in the days of St. Basil and St. Gregory there were no better teachers to be had); a successor of Gregory, Isaac the 'Great, gave the Armenian nation its own alphabet to take the place of the Syriac, the Semitic symbols in which the Aryan stock bad till then tried to express its language.
Isaac's alphabet, if awkward to English eyes, is so well fitted to the Armenian language, that every sound has its letter, and no letter more than one sound while those who have acquired the language say that it is easy to transliterate into those symbols and to express in them the sounds of any tongue.
As usual, the Armenian proved but a wavering ally politically, partly because in the next Persian war the Roman emperor was Julian, who went out of his way to insult a useful ally for being a Christian. On his defeat and death, the country passed to the Persian sphere again, and then was divided, Persia obtaining the "lion's share." A native sub-king was left at first, but the quarrels of his subjects soon reached such a point that they -- in spite of the protests of their Archbishop at this act of national suicide-asked to have a Persian "Marquis," or Marzban, in his room. This was soon followed by persecution, the Persian trying to enforce a confession of Zoroastrianism on the subject people, and it is admitted by the Armenian historian that many of the nobles gave up their faith in order to save their lordships. In the end, however, the Shah-in-shah- came to the conclusion that Christianity was so thoroughly the national faith that the effort to convert the people was more dangerous than profitable, and they were left to their own religion.
Very shortly, however--and the development must have been very welcome to the Persian statesmen--the process that bad brought about a separation between the Assyrian Church and that of the Empire began to tell in Armenia also. The Greek habit of treating Christianity as a piece of Greek property, and as a means of "Graecizing" the other nationalities, caused the Armenians to declare themselves separate from the Church of Constantinople. It so happened. that the theological slogan which the Armenians took up in opposition to the Greek was a different one from that which had appealed to the Assyrian, in that the imperial council that they objected to was Chalcedon and not Ephesus, and their peculiar heresy was "Monophysite" and not "Nestorian." All non-Greek nations in the Eastern Empire of Rome (such as the Egyptian and the Syrian) took up the catchword that was condemned by the Greek bishops there, and the Armenians followed their example. Thus, by a development that the Persian officials must have found as convenient as the Ottoman did in later days, the two subject races of Christians in their borders were separated, not only from "the enemy" in the Roman Empire, but from each other as well.
Again, we consider it to be more than doubtful whether the Armenians, who thus refused to express their Christian religion in Greek technical terms, really meant to teach the heresy of which the Greeks held them guilty. The "Nestorian," as men called the Assyrian, did not mean. to teach two personalities in Christ, and the. "Monophysite," as men called the Armenian and Syrian, did not mean that the humanity was annihilated. In both cases the matter was a confusion of technical terms, which could have been explained had either side in the quarrel really desired a reconciliation.
Hitherto we have only spoken of Christianity as in contact with Zoroastrianism. Actually, however, there were other religious movements afoot in Persia, that had an importance outside the borders of that realm. One of these was the "Manichaean" movement, of which the prophet was Manes, born in the third century A.D. His doctrine assumes the' dualism of Zoroaster, the two kingdoms of Light and Darkness, which the Persian personifies in the figures of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. On this, however, Manes grafts a strict and pessimistic form of asceticism. To the Zoroastrian, life was admittedly a battle between good and evil, but in the long run the good must overcome. Meantime, it was the duty of a good servant of Ahura Mazda to fight evil and to increase good in all ways, notably by begetting fresh sons and servants of the Lord.
To the Manichaean the world was utterly evil. Some sparks of good and light had got entangled in it, no doubt, probably by the fali of some celestial spirit in a pre-mundane life; they might, perchance, be saved out of it, but the world must perish, and the sooner the better. The good and enlightened man would refrain from propagating his kind in such surroundings. It is not altogether surprising that a cheerful and loyal Zoroastrian like King Ahram summed the position up thus: "This fellow would destroy the world. Clearly it is my duty to destroy him." And destroy him he did, having him flayed alive, according to one account, and hanging up his skin before the gate of the capital as a warning to all and sundry. Though the prophet was martyred, the cult continued, and it took over certain as ' pec ' ts of Christian teaching. Christ appears to it as one of the great spirits that have come down into this world from above, though-seeing. that matter is essentially evil-it is quite impossible that he should have really become man, or really been crucified. What hung upon the Cross can have been no more than a phantom. This doctrine, which was taught by other men before Manes, seems to make a strong appeal to certain Oriental minds, for it persists to this day as the orthodox teaching of Islat-n on the subject of the crucifixion. The root-doctrine of Manichocanism, viz., the essentially evil nature of matter, makes a very strong appeal to many Eastern and to some Western minds, lying as it does at the root of much asceticism.
Thus the brotherhood, which had an elaborate system of ranks, and a hierarchy of its own, persisted in Persia for many generations, having its supreme father or Pope at Babylon first, and in later days at Samarkand. Its philosophy appears again in the West, in later days, doing very evil work when it taints the mind of St. Augustine, and reaching formidable dimensions when it prompts the Albigensian movement, but it is doubtful whether there is any direct connexion between this and the Eastern Manichees. It seems to be rather a tendency in the human mind, that may appear on the surface of it at any age or in any country.
The beginning of the sixth century saw another movement of an extraordinary kind in Persia--something that we can only describe as an early version of what the twentieth century has learned to call Bolshevism. Mazdak, a Persian noble of -high rank, proceeded to preach, and to some extent to carry through, a drastic reform of Zoroastrianism and the old social system of Persia, which amounted to a communistic revolution. All men were equal, said this very modern-minded zealot, and all life was sacred. All property was common, and property included women, or at least it was said that such was the case, perhaps only by the enemies of the new prophet. Vegetarianism, humanitarianism, and in fact all the modern "isms" that a later age thinks are its own peculiar inventions, were proclaimed by this sixth-century reformer.
The new gospel received an amazing welcome, sweeping the country for the moment in a way that one can only explain by the suggestion that the rigid caste system of the old Persian nation, with its seven tribes, had provoked a great deal of suppressed resentment. This fact may very well explain the equally striking success of the gospel of Islam a century later.
It was not only those who had everything to gain, but those who had most to lose, by the new doctrine, who welcomed its preachers; one is inclined to suggest such a wave of socialistic enthusiasm as that which marked the early days of the French Revolution. The nobles abandoned their rank; even the Shah-in-shah himself, Kobad, became a "brother" of the cult, and is said to have surrendered even his harem' to his "brethren in the faith."
The spectacle of an autocrat turned communist suggests rather the realms of Gilbert and Sullivan. than sober history, and a student. feels that some sort of explanation of the phenomenon must be found. One suggestion is that the King had a real political object in his seeming madness, and that he sought to -use the new movement to break the power of the nobles, and of the Magian caste. If so, he failed in his object; the forces of conservatism rallied, and the "Mobed-Mobedan," or head of the Magians, issued such a solemn "Fetva," or official declaration, as the Sheikh-ul-Islam could once pronounce in Turkey, in reply to a formal question. "If Zeid, who is Caliph of Islam, apostatizes from the faith, is it lawful to depose the said Zeid?" By such a declaration, or its equivalent in Zoroastrian form, Kobad was deposed and imprisoned in the "'Tower of Oblivion," the ominously named Loches of the Sassanid kings. To depose the Shah-in-shah, however, was a terrible step to take. No man dare take the vacant place, and Kobad, assisted by his wife,. escaped from his oubliette and claimed the throne once more.
It seems that he had learned his lesson, and henceforward, whatever his private opinions, he would rule as a Zoroastrian.
Disappointed in their royal . proselyte, the Mazdakeans attempted to play a political game, and rose in revolt. On this Kobad, in association with his son Chosroes, whom he bad joined with him in rule, read them a terrible lesson. He called all the chiefs of the movement, some hundreds in number, to a conference, and himself entertained their leader Mazdak at a banquet. The feast done, Chosroes invited the aged prophet (who had 'been his own tutor) to come out "and see some trees of the King's Planting." Mazdak came, and saw long rows of the feet of his own friends, projecting from the pits in, which they had been buried alive by the Kitig's order! The teacher was himself seized and impaled, at the head of that terrible garden, and the movement was thus stamped out in the blood of its leaders. There was to be no reform of Magianism, such as might perhaps have saved it when the day of its trial was to come.
In the seventh century the duel between Rome and Persia, that had lasted for more than four hundred years, reached its climax and its end.
Chosroes II, "the victorious," who at the beginning of his reign had had to ask support from the Roman Emperor Maurice against a rebel in his own land, declared war against Rome when Maurice was murdered by the ruffian Phocas. Nominally, he was out to revenge a friend; actually, he hoped to win the whole "Achaemenid heritage" at last, and for the moment he actually did so. An amazing series of triumphs put Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor in his hands, and the fact that he built palaces in the conquered provinces is evidence that lie really intended to hold them. When he was in occupation of Chalcedon, and looking across the strait at Constantinople, he could afford to neglect the fact that a detachment of his army had been cut up. in Syria by raiding Arabs, and could laugh at a letter brought him from their leader, one Mahommed ibn Abdallab, calling on the Shah-in-shah to recognize him as the prophet of God.
Meantime, in its hour of distress, the Roman Empire had found a man, and one who appreciated the value of sea-power. Heraclius, striking alternately at Alexandretta and Trebizonde (for he was able to leave sea-girt Constantinople to guard herself), entirely subdued the Eastern Empire in a series of marvellous campaigns. At last came the collapse of Persia, the miserable death of the "victorious" king, and -the proposal for peace between the two exhausted combatants, on the basis of the status quo ante.
Heraclius now showed himself a man of great dreams as well as of mighty deeds. He sought not only for the restoration of peace to the Empire, but to the Church as well, and longed for the reconciliation of the Assyrian and the Armenian Churches to that of Constantinople.
For a moment it seemed that he had actually succeeded. Ishu-yahb, the Assyrian Patriarch, came to see the Emperor, charged with the return of the True Cross, a relic captured by the Persians when Jerusalem fell, and returned under the terms of peace. Emperor and Patriarch discussed reunion and soon came to an understanding, sharing together the holy mysteries; this understanding held good between the Emperor and the head of the Armenian Church.
Unfortunately neither leader was able to carry his followers with him, for in all three parties the zealots were sure that "those others" must certainly be wrong. Assyrians suspected Greeks; Greeks had no great faith in the orthodoxy of the Emperor, and none were able to hold friendship with those of different custom to themselves. How was it possible, for instance, for a decent and orthodox Greek to hold communion in sacris with those Armenians "who did not mix water with the Eucharistic wine, and who did not eat either eggs or cheese on Saturdays in Lent"?
So nothing was done, for the Christian nations were irrevocably divided, and ere long those who had rejected the union saw the followers of a united Islam sweep over them all alike.
THE brief period 636-642 saw the overthrow of the historic empire of Persia by the Arabs, and the conquest and occupation of their country by that new force. In itself, the actual conquest was not extraordinary. A country exhausted by a long and terrible war, and under the rule of a King who was the one weakling and craven of his long line, was suddenly attacked by a fresh foe, full of all the demoniac energy which the Jehad gives to those who believe in it, an army in which every soldier was a fanatic, and fought like a volunteer in a forlorn hope.
The battle of Cadesia--one of the decisive days of the world's history--gave Mesopotamia to the Arab, and with it a spoil the richness of which the conquerors could not understand. Then followed a period of Arab migration into the newly conquered land, which soon became Arabian. The invaders settled down with their families, they mixed with the old inhabitants, who were, after all, of kin to their stock, and made the land their own. Mesopotamia, however, was not Persia, and Omar did not intend the conquest to go farther, and even forbade advance. Still, the soldiers were not to be held, and the resistance made to their attack was far less formidable than they must have expected. A respectable defence of the castle of Shuster against a foe quite inexperienced in the art of siege; a battle at Nehavand, in which the 13crsian general was out-maneuvered by the Arab, was all the resistance put up against them, and the thing was done. By 650 the last of the House of Sassan had died, much like the last of the Achaemenids, as a refugee at Merv, and the Christian Bishop of that place gave charitable burial to his remains.
But Persia, though overrun, was not colonized as the Mesopotamian provinces bad been; the country remained Persian, but, strange to relate, the Magian religion collapsed and Islam was readily accepted in its room. The faith of Ahura Mazda bad been the religion of the people since time began. Thirteen centuries before the Arab conquest, it had been reformed by Zoroaster, but it remained the same. The race had been tried by foreign conquer ,it before, and during five hundred years of subjection the faith bad kept the nation in life. Now, at the moment apparently of its full strength, when it has all the organization and prestige of an stabilized Church, it passes like a dream.
A very few years after the conquest, it is the faith of a negligible minority, and now it is hard to find a living trace of it in lands where the ash-heaps of its sacred fires form fair-sized hills. It is only in a foreign land, where the very name of its followers proclaims them aliens (Parsis, Persians), that those followers form a body which, if not large, is influential and most honourable. Persia rises again in due course, as soon as the inevitable reaction against Arab rule has had time to gather strength, but the revival of the nation does not mean the revival of her faith; only the formation of a sect, or series of sects, in Islam.
It was about a hundred years before that revival gathered strength. During that time, the Khalifs of the House of Omayya, the brother of the Prophet's grandfather, ruled at Damascus. Muavia, founder of this "Omayyad" line, had won his office as the necessary man, to whom Hassan, the son of Ali, had been glad to resign a burdensome throne. When Hussein, the brother of Hassan, rose in revolt against him and was killed at "the place of Martyrdom," Kerbala, sentiment. turned against the line.
It was felt that it was stained with the blood of that tragedy, which has always made so strong, if so incomprehensible, an appeal to Persian Moslems; and there was no loyalty left. for it. Hate of the "usurping line" gave the spur that was needed, and the Black Standard of the House of Abbas, uncle of the Prophet, was raised by Abu Muslim, who had begun life as a slave of that family. The revolt blazed up, and the general of the Omeyyad Khalif was defeated in a decisive battle outside Mosul, in the great triangle between the Tigris and the Zab. That rolling plain is the decisive field of that part of the world, for thrice it has seen the great battles which have decided the fate of that part of Asia.
Arbela was fought there though the fight did take its name from the city to which the victors poured . to find Darius' baggage train; there Heraclius fought his last and greatest battle with the Sassanid army, and there the House of Abbas won the Khalifate from the House of Omayya. The fruits of victory were made secure by a massacre, when the victor invited ninety members of the hostile family to a banquet, and murdered every one. Only one member of the family escaped, to win a throne for himself in Spain.
The elevation of the House of Abbas to the Khalifate-or at least to the claim to it-is really an act of Persian nationalism and dislike of Arab dictation, for we can hardly think that there was any warm feeling of personal loyalty in Persia for the respectable uncle of the Prophet. It was, however, really a definite breach in the unity of Islam, of which we see the first sign when "the ship was broken, shattered by the storm of Kerbela." The Khalifs of the House of Omeyya were rulers of the whole "House of Islam," as the "Successor of the Prophet and Commander of the Faithful" ought to be. The House of Abbas never attained that. Abd-ur-rahman, the one survivor of the House of Omayya, became Khalif in Spain, which would never recognize the rulers of Baghdad. Soon other claimants to the title rose in Africa, and in Egypt, the line that claimed descent from the daughter of the Prophet, Fatima.
It is true that the founders of this line did not make the claim with any seriousness, but merely as a means of getting prestige. One of the first of the house, Muizz, was asked by the "Ulema," or doctors of the Law, in Cairo, to produce his pedigree, and proof for the exalted claim he made. Muizz laid a drawn scimitar and a bag of gold before them. "There is my pedigree, and there is my proof"; the Ulema were perfectly satisfied. Others, however, came to believe in their manufactured pedigree as fervently as man does in such Cases.
The title of the House of Abbas then to the Khalifate was never undisputed, and the divisions of Islam date from their accession, but for a time they ruled the bulk of the Empire, and that very brilliantly. Mansur founded the new capital at Baghdad, and his son Harun-ar-rashid followed him there. Presently, however, the administration broke down. The Khalifs became the slaves of their own bodyguard of Seljuk Turks, "Begs"' and "Atabegs" attained to virtual independence in the provinces, and the Empire practically broke up into several small States, of which Persia was one, while the nominal Khalif and Sultan of the whole could hardly stir out of his own . capital. That, howevcr3, was far in the future, when Mansur and Harun were ruling in Baghdad.
During the Arab conquest, the Assyrian nation could do nothing but remain quiet, and, in fact, "lie low" and let the storm pass over them, hoping that the blast would do as little harm as might be to their nation. They were accustomed to be regarded by their rulers much in the same light as they themselves regarded their bees, and indeed in the collections of omens and magic spells which the wise men among them used, and some of which survive to this day, it is quite proper for the same portent to foretell either a revolution in the State, or an outbreak of swarming-fever in the hive,-the inquirer being at liberty to decide which is more probable or dangerous for himself.
Actually, the coming of the Arabs must have been a relief. r-or twenty years the war between the two great empires of Rome and Persia had been raging, -and though their sympathies may have been with the Christian, there is little doubt that the peaceful cultivators had suffered from both.
Their Patriarch, Ishu-yahb, had just made a concordat with the Emperor and the Church of the Empire, but that vanished naturally, now that facts had made it impossible to carry it out in practice. There was no -"orthodox" Church anywhere in the reach of the Assyrian, now that the Roman or Byzantine Empire had retreated to the northern side of the Taurus range. His immediate duty was to care for the well-being of his flock in their new condition, and to make the best terms he could for them with the Arab authorities.
The Arab leaders, representing Omar the Khalif, made no difficulty about this. Christians of the Assyrian Church were to have full security as a "millet" in the land, on practically the same terms. as they had received under the Persian. That is to say, those born in the nationality had the right to remain in it and practise their religion, with exemption from Military service. They might repair their churches, but might not erect new ones without permission; they had, of course, to pay the ordinary taxes, with the "kharj" in addition, in substitution for the military service that they could not render and Mussulmans would not accept, though monks were declared to be exempt from this burden. Finally, it was specially laid down that Christian girls who were taken in marriage by Moslems might keep their religions rule excellent in intent, but hard to execute in fact.
Hitherto the Assyrians had been practically the only "millet" in the Persian Empire, though of recent years a certain number of "Monophysites" (mostly brought in from Syria in the enormous "captivities" which the Sassanid kings had collected there) had been added to their number, and these had obtained, after some friction, a governmental status parallel to that of the Assyrians. Now, however, whole provinces of what had been the Roman Empire were subject to the Khalifate, including Egypt and Syria, where the mass of the population was Christian of the Monophysite confession. The story of their separation from the Orthodox Church is long and tangled, and perhaps the writer may be allowed to refer students to his own work upon the subject.3
These now settled down on the same terms as the Assyrians, under their own Patriarchs. The Copts, the Christian population of Egypt, hardly came into touch with Assyrians at all, but the "Syrians" or Jacobites (so called from the monk Jacobus Baradaeus who had organized their body) were their near neighbours. They had their Patriarch at Antioch, who in later ages came to reside in a monastery near Mardin, and a "Mafrian," or Archbishop, who was in theory the head of those in the Persian Empire, and dwelt in the monastery of Sheikh Mattai near Mosul. His raison d'etre had really ceased, now that all of his "millet' were under Arab rule, but that did not hinder his continuance in office.
The Assyrian Church, when once the storm of war had passed and things had become normal. was now prosperous, wealthy, and widespread'. How widespread we may see later. Toleration extended to the point of its being allowed to hold councils, which under a Moslem government is to go far indeed. So long as a subject of the government keeps to what authority is used to and follows precedent and routine, all is well. Anything unusual is suspect, and any attempt to rise to a new situation is held to be dangerous. Omne ignotum tro terribili is the rule. The Assyrian Church and nation then settled down to the life of a "millet" under Mahommedan rule, which means that for centuries it had little history. The life of such a Church is uneventful, and it is well that it should be, for most events are of the nature of disasters. The life of a soldier under the conditions of modern war was once described as "an eternity of boredom, enlivened by moments of acute physical terror, " and that of a Church under Arab rule was an eternity of dullness, enlivened only by occasional risk of massacre, when anything occurred to irritate authority, and to incline it to take the only precaution that the Mahommedan understands.
These sudden storms might blow up on the instant, out of the clearest sky, for the government was eternally suspicious. One eighth-century Patriarch, Khanan-Ishu, remarked casually once that Islam ruled by the power of the sword, not by Grace. It was one of those perfectly true statements that it is not well to make, for the Khalif Abd-l-melck happened to hear of it, and the Patriarch thought himself lucky to get off with a heavy fine-or bribe to some official-and a term of imprisonment. Sometimes it was the intrigues of unworthy Christians that caused the trouble, as when one Isa, doctor to the Khalif Mansur, demanded a bigger douceur of the Patriarch Jacob II than that prelate would give, and the doctor in revenge whispered some accusation into the ear of the Khalif, and procured the imprisonment of all the Patriarchs.
Fortunately, the plotter on this occasion spoilt his own game by going just a little too far. He told the Patriarchs that the Khalif was proposing to destroy all the Christian churches, but that for a heavy bribe he, Isa, would persuade him to show mercy. The Patriarchs went straight to Mansur, and he, a good Moslem, was furious at the notion that he would deny to "rayahs" a right that the Faith expressly guaranteed to them. The rascally doctor was impaled for slandering the Commander of the Faithful, and the Patriarchs released.
Not that the churches were always safe, even so. Harun-ar-rashid, who was liable to fits of fanaticism, once actually issued an order for the destruction of all of them in the province of Basra, because they practised relic-worship in opposition to Koran. It was only the influence of Zubeydeh his wife which induced him to rescind the order.
Of course, the Khalif had no real confidence in corporate Christian loyalty. Individuals might be his favourites, and rise to wealth, influence, and even real power; the "rayahs" as a whole could not be trusted, and indeed the government did nothing -to earn their trust. Once, it is recorded, the Assyrian Patriarch asked for some favour for his people which had been denied to the "Melkites" or Imperialists; members of the Orthodox Church that is, who were Arab subjects, but yet members of the "Greek Emperor's Church." "We of the ancient millet' are loyal," said the Patriarch; "we know no sovereign save the Commander of the Faithful." "Loyal?" said the Arab official. "You know that you all hate us alike."
Naturally this relegation to slave status and the perpetual consciousness of degradation (the Khalif Mutawakkil had ordered all Christians to wear-a special dress) had its effect in producing the slave character in those subject to it. This means, a spirit of intrigue and low cunning, and a readiness to adopt any dirty means to gain a. desired object. There is no national stock, even the proudest and most self-confident, which could stand such treatment without being lowered by it, and perhaps lowered rather speedily.
Assyrians were not more exempt from this than others. We find at least two Patriarchs, Khananishu and Timothy the Great, confessing to the councils assembled at their consecration to the Patriarchate that they had attained their high Office by intrigue and bribery, and by open disregard of the proper formalities. There was this excuse, that no official could conceive any other way of doing anything. The temptation to do some undesirable service for some person in authority, in order that the Bishop may curry favour with that person thereby, and so be in a position to serve his "millet," is always present. Where you cannot depend on justice in the ruler, most men are likely to do evil that good may come.
The career of Timothy the Great gives an instance of this, that has the merit of being at least picturesque. Harun-ar-rashid had flown into a rage with his wife Zubeydeh for some unknown reason, and had promptly divorced her by the triple divorce. Having recovered his temper, the Commander of the Faithful became sorry for what he had done, and was only anxious to take his favourite wife back again, but found it was not possible, according to law. Simple divorce is easily undone, but if a Moslem shall divorce his wife triply, he may not take her back again until such time as she has been wedded again to another Moslem, and divorced by him. No doubt the rule was laid down by the Prophet to check an evil custom, for "the thing that is allowed, but disliked by Allah is divorce." There were men until lately in officially Moslem lands, and probably are still, who earned a rather disreputable living by marrying divorcees in this way, and then divorcing them-for a consideration of course. Either this low trade was not practised in Harun's day, or he felt that to avail himself of it was infra dignitatem Imperatoris. Timothy the Patriarch, one regrets to say, made a suggestion that opened a way out. Let Zubeydeh declare herself a Christian, and then, as an apostate, she was dead in law, and all her previous engagements were void, for if a Moslem shall apostatize, all his wives are ipso facto divorced. Then she could revert and be pardoned by the Khalif, and be married again to him, and all would be well! Was it thus that Zubeydeh was brought to intercede with her husband for the Basra churches?
At first, when the Arabs conquered Mesopotamia, the power of the Christians was very great, for they were the sole educated class. It is true that the Arabs proved apt learners, and this advantage was lost in a century or so, but for the time it was important. All the learning of the Greeks came to the Arabs, and in measure to the Persians also, through their Christian teachers, who were for the most part of the Assyrian Church.
They had their colleges at Nisibis and at Seleucia, where Plato and Aristotle were taught, in Syriac and later in Arabic, and it was thus that Arabs became acquainted with Greek learning. When one remembers that after the night of the Dark Ages had descended on Europe, and Greek had been altogether forgotten, it was through Arab profe6sors at Cordova and Salamanca that Western Europe first learnt to know Aristotle once more, one feels that Paris and Oxford owe more to the Assyrian schools, and to their turbulent founder Barsoma, than they always realize.
It is a far cry from Nisibis to Oxford, particularly when the road runs through Cordova, but it seems to have been the way by which Aristotle travelled from Athens to the English universities. Medicine, too, which we have seen was almost a Christian monopoly under the Sassanids, continued in their bands, and it is specially said that Gabriel, the court doctor, was the right hand of the Patriarch Timothy in all his State business, owing to the constant and private access that he necessarily had to the Commander of the Faithful.
The Church was now at its greatest extension. Of the five and twenty Metropolitan Archbishops who owed allegiance to Timothy-and whose names have been preserved in an official list-some were as far to the West as Damascus and Jerusalem, where the Assyrian body had certain rights in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A "Nestorian" Church of far later date still survives in Famagusta, to show that there was at least a congregation in Cyprus too. South, the Church extended to Sumatra and Malabar, where their witness still survives. North, there were Bishops of the "Tents of the Kurds," nomad prelates of nomad flocks, among the mountains that were till lately the. last refuge of the nation. Tim