"Beyond the Land of Nod: Syriac Images of Asia and the Historiography of ‘the West’” more

History of Religions 49.1 (2009) 48–87.

The Other in Western literature, History of Historiography, Syriac literature, and Historiography

Annette Yoshiko Reed B E YON D TH E LA N D OF NO D : S Y R I AC I M AG E S OF A S IA A N D TH E H I S TO R I O G R A P H Y O F “ TH E W E S T ” Since the 1960s, scholars of Asian religions and cultures have interrogated the idea of “the East,” exposing elements invented and constructed in the course of modern European colonial expansions.1 It is now widely accepted that colonial ideologies have shaped the history of scholarship on South and East Asia. Increasingly noted, moreover, are their lingering effects, particularly on the historiography of “Eastern” encounters with “the West.”2 An earlier version of this article was presented at the Oriental Club of Philadelphia in December 2007. I am grateful to Victor Mair, Benjamin J. Fleming, William A. Adler, David Stern, Samuel Z. Klausner, and Steven R. Reed for feedback, references, and suggestions. A special thanks to Adam H. Becker for pushing me on a number of points. This research was supported by the Dalck and Rose Feith Family Fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 1 See, e.g., John M. Steadman, The Myth of Asia: A Reﬂection on Western Stereotypes of Asian Philosophy, Art, and Politics (Don Mills: Musson, 1969); Zhang Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 108–31; Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999). Compare Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). 2 See, esp., the tendency to treat “Eastern” peoples as passive subjects—whether of “Western” colonial conquest or intellectual categorization, religious understanding or misunderstanding, scholarly romanticization or recovery. Recently, a number of studies have sought to recover the agency of various South and East Asian cultures (and particularly the elites therein) in the cultural processes sometimes attributed to the Orientalist imposition of European ideals. See, e.g., Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient ç 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2009/4901-0003$10.00 History of Religions 49 The present article investigates the converse, namely, how scholarly and popular views of intercultural contacts may have been skewed by the idea of “the West.” It seeks to recover some of what is effaced, ignored, or forgotten when we take for granted a distinctly modern notion of “Western” history—as the evolution of a unitary “civilization” forged by Greeks and Romans in the eastern Mediterranean world and continued by Christians in western Europe (and eventually North America). The ﬁrst part of the article considers how this notion of “the West” took form concurrently with the European “rediscovery” of India and China. It is well known that the modern construction of “the West” was predicated on the appropriation of ancient Greek philosophy, history, and science as the “classical” heritage of European nations. I suggest that the “recovery” of ancient Greek learning also had an early and enduring effect on attempts to trace the prehistory of modern European encounters with Asian societies. Among the results was a narrowed narrative of premodern contacts and connections. According to this narrative, ancient Greek knowledge about “the East” was among the wisdom lost to “the West” during the Christian Middle Ages and reclaimed during the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, when “the East” is said to have been “rediscovered.” When historians of premodern religions and cultures have questioned this narrative, they have typically done so in the context of specialized research on Central Asia and/or with appeal to material evidence for maritime and overland trade (especially along the so-called Silk Road).3 In this article, I build upon some of this research. My focus falls, however, on the possible effects of long-distance trade and travel on Christian knowledge about South and East Asia, on the one hand, and on the perception and representation of cultural difference, on the other.4 History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” Modern Asian Studies 23 (1989): 209– 31; Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory 35 (1996): 111–18; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Peter Heehs, “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 169–95; Arvind Mandair, “The Unbearable Proximity of the Orient: Political Religion, Multiculturalism and the Retrieval of South Asian Identities,” Social Identities 10 (2004): 647–63; Benjamin J. Fleming, “Mapping Sacred Geography in Medieval India,” International Journal for Hindu Studies 13, no. 1 (2009): 51–81. 3 Here and below, I use the designation “Central Asia” broadly, to denote those areas between China and the Caspian Sea, as bordered by Persia, Tibet, Siberia, and Mongolia. On long-distance trade, see nn. 5, 39–41, 43–45, 48, 151, as well as E. E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, ed. Victor Mair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Richard C. Foltz, The Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 4 This focus reﬂects an experiment in integrating the insights that have arisen in the move towards histoire croisée among some historians seeking to address the challenge 50 Beyond the Land of Nod The second and third parts of the article thus turn to a rich but neglected corpus of evidence for intercultural contacts, namely, Syriac literature. I survey some examples of Syriac images of India and China, and I ask whether and how these examples might differ from their counterparts in Greek and Latin literature. To the conventional focus on ancient Greek and modern European encounters with Asian “Others,” I suggest that the representation of “eastern” peoples in Syriac literature offers an alternate analytical trajectory: not only does this evidence tell a different story about ancient, medieval, and modern contacts between cultures, but it destabilizes the very distinction between “the East” and “the West.” This trajectory, as we shall see, takes us from the urban “contact zones” of the Roman Near East in the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era to the trade routes interlacing Byzantium, Persia, Central Asia, India, and China during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Consequently, it helps to draw our attention to the premodern exchange of goods and ideas across an interconnected Eurasia.5 In the process, it may aid us in recovering some of what has been effaced by the conventional focus on the categorization of cultural difference by ancient Greeks and modern Europeans. Whereas Eurocentric world histories have tended to privilege the “classical” and the modern,6 a focus on Syriac Christianity highlights “postclassical” and premodern developments. Furthermore, whereas the assumption of a singular “West” has facilitated the interpretation of “cross-cultural contact” as the encounter of self-evidently separate “civilizations,”7 the Syriac evidence pushes us to reconsider the broad variety of ways in which local, regional, religious, and imperial identities took shape in interaction with of forging new, postnationalist historiographies that move beyond the “discursive turn” and the “culturalist turn” alike. See, esp., Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, eds., De la comparison à l‘histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004), and “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reﬂexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. 5 That is, as constituted and connected by overlapping regional networks, such as the sea routes of the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea, as well as river and land routes across the Near East, Central Asia, northern India, and East Asia. On the historiographical implications of attention to trade, see Touraj Daryaee, “The Persian Gulf Trade in Late Antiquity,” Journal of World History 14 (2003): 1–16; Markus P. M. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology,’ ” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 41–62. There is, of course, ample other evidence that also speaks to such connections; see, e.g., Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 250–62; Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Victor Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). 6 Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26–67, 125–211. On the “enchantment with the modern world and the processes of modern history that has hindered many historians from recognizing the signiﬁcance of cross-cultural interactions in earlier times,” see also Jerry H. Bentley, “Hemispheric Integration, 500–1500 C.E.,” Journal of World History 9 (1998): 237–54 (quote at 239). 7 Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zur Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001). One Line Long History of Religions 51 one another, across a continuum of connections, large and small, forged by conquest, trade, and travel. i. india and china in “classical” literature and european scholarship Since the very dawn of modern scholarship, ancient Greek references to India and China have been a source of fascination.8 European curiosity about East Asia was sparked already in the thirteenth century, when Mongol expansion prompted the pope to dispatch an envoy eastward.9 Upon his return to Europe in 1247, Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpini wrote of his experiences traveling among the Mongols. His account was met by wonder. Was this a culture previously unknown? An answer was posed soon after, when Willem van Rubroek traveled into the Mongol Empire as a missionary. In his travelogue of 1258, he suggested that these seemingly new people might not, in fact, be new; perhaps these were the Sêres (Gr. ShÅreÍ; “silk people”) to whom reference was made in ancient sources.10 Between the thirteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, European curiosity about “the East” would be spurred by the popular account attributed to the Venetian trader Marco Polo, as well as by tales from the missionary travels of Franciscans and Dominicans.11 Interestingly, these were the same centuries that saw the transmission of ancient Greek philosophy, history, and science from Byzantine and Islamic literary cultures to those of western Europe.12 Whereas van Rubroek likely drew his understanding 8 On the development of modern scholarship, see further Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). On “classical” references to India and China, see nn. 23–24, as well as references in more recent studies, esp. Klaus Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1989), and India and the Hellenistic World (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1997); Allan Dahlaquist, Megasthenes and Indian Religion: A Study in Motives and Types (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996); D. P. M. Weerakkody, Taprobane: Ancient Sri Lanka as known to the Greeks and Romans (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). 9 John Howland Rowe, “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 6–7. 10 See chap. 28 of Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes Orientales; W. W. Rockhill, trans., The journey of William of Rubruck to the eastern parts of the world, 1253–55, as narrated by himself, with two accounts of the earlier journey of John of Pian de Carpine (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900), 155. On other travelers to Yuan China, see now Nicholas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 1:46–50, 71–76. 11 On the accuracy of the account associated with Marco Polo, see Standaert, Handbook, 1:50. 12 See n. 32; Deno J. Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), and Constantinople and the West (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Paul Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955); Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 52 Beyond the Land of Nod of the Sêres from scattered references in medieval Christian sources, the large-scale translation of Greek literature during the Renaissance resulted (among other things) in the European “discovery” of a wealth of ancient information about Asian religions and cultures. The Geography of the second-century Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, for instance, was translated into Latin in 1406 by papal request, and a translation of Strabo’s work of the same name followed shortly thereafter; by 1482, Ptolemy’s Geography was even translated into Italian. Ten years later, the information about India in these texts would gain fresh relevance when Vasco da Gama sailed around the tip of Africa to reach the subcontinent. The charting of this sea route alleviated European dependence on overland roads and Muslim intermediaries for the trade of silk and spices, as well as opening the way for Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British colonial rivalries in the centuries that followed. Ptolemy’s description of the world soon formed the basis for a new European cartography.13 With these new contacts came new questions. Was it possible, for instance, to ﬁt these peoples into Christian models of world history? The challenge posed by China’s technology and science was noted already by Joseph Justus Scaliger. Writing in response to the study of China published by Juan Gonzales de Mendoza in 1585, he observed that the great antiquity of China shed doubt upon the long tradition of Christian chronographical discourse about the age of the cosmos and the development of human cultures.14 New questions—sparked by ancient writings and new information—were thus raised concurrent with the decline of medieval Christian models of cartography and historiography alike.15 Before the advent of European Sanskrit philology, ancient Greek ethnographies also served as a major source for information about South Asian religions and cultures.16 The witness of these sources was taken 13 Alessandro Scaﬁ, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 14 Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 362, 406. 15 Note also the effects of this interest in “the East” on European art and design. See, e.g., Leonardo Olschki, “Asiatic Exoticism in Italian Art of the Early Renaissance,” Art Bulletin 26 (1944): 95–106; Prudence R. Myer, “Images and Inﬂuences of Oriental Art: A Study in European Taste,” Art Journal 20 (1961): 203–10; Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 16 Material from Megasthenes looms large, e.g., in the eighteenth-century account of India in George Sale’s Universal History—where it is even suggested that Hercules founded cities in India (An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time, 65 vols. [London, 1747], 2:31). On Megasthenes’ inﬂuence on later scholars, see Inden, Imagining India, 76, 182–83. One Line Short History of Religions 53 so seriously, in fact, that some scholars even ridiculed the populace for believing the ﬁrsthand accounts of modern travelers in cases where they deviated from those of “classical” authors like Ctesias.17 By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholarly and popular knowledge of India would increasingly be based on Sanskrit sources.18 Nevertheless, “classical” literature continued to shape European views of “the East.” On the one hand, ancient Greek ethnographies offered a precedent and paradigm for sympathetic approaches to Asian religions and cultures, as judged apart from Protestant Christian beliefs about the degradation of polytheism and “idolatry.”19 Positive Greek references to Indian Brahmans and gymnosophists, for instance, served to buttress the appeal to the pre-Christian wisdom of the Greeks as the primary comparison-point for South Asian philosophy, mythology, and poetry. Beginning already in the late eighteenth century with Sir William Jones, such parallels would often be cited in concert with the enumeration of parallels between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin languages.20 On the other hand, ancient Greek references to India were treated as necessary evidence for the history of a people thought to have no history of their own. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously proclaimed that the Indians were a people without history, living apart from the evolving 17 18 Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature, 5. Here and below, I use the term “India,” for the sake of brevity, to denote the multiple cultures of the subcontinent. As is well known, ancient Greek and Latin references to India do not refer to one clearly delineated locale. In some sources, distinctions are made between multiple Indies (e.g., inner and outer), and Axum is sometimes counted among them (see Philip Mayerson, “A Confusion of Indias: Asian India and African India in the Byzantine Sources,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 113 [1993]: 169–74). This is consistent with the regional diversity of the subcontinent, its shifting dynastic divisions, and its close cultural and economic connections with neighboring regions (e.g., Axum, Southeast Asia, China). Although some impulse towards conceptual unity is evident already in the sacred geographies delineated in Sanskrit epics and puran5as, our current notion of a bounded and singular “India” arguably awaits the modern nation-state of that name. See further Fleming, “Mapping Sacred Geography in Medieval India.” 19 Notably, however, some nineteenth-century studies of parallels between Buddhism and Christianity appealed not to “classical” sources but rather to the earliest Christian notices about South Asia—particularly in the third-century Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria and the fourth-century Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (the latter of which preserves a portion of the Book of the Law of the Countries, discussed below). These Greek and Latin sources sometimes served as a basis for arguing that Buddhism partook in the pre-Christian truth spread by the Logos and/or even inﬂuenced Jesus himself via the Essenes. See further A. Hilgenfeld, Novum Testamentum extra canonem receptum (Leipzig: Weigel, 1866); Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 200–201; Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, trans. David Streight and Pamela Vohnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 20 See, e.g., William Jones, “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus,” in The Works of Sir William Jones in Six Volumes (London: Robinson & Evans, 1799), 1:9–34. 54 Beyond the Land of Nod spirit of rationality that shaped “the West.”21 To this, Leopold von Ranke soon protested. Nevertheless, von Ranke expressed a similar view of India, which he extended to China as well. These two “oriental” peoples had long chronologies, but their antiquity was, in his view, merely a “fable”; neither had any active role in shaping world history.22 To consider the religions and cultures of “the East” in historical context, scholars thereafter often turned to the ancient Greeks (who were seen as the inventors of history) and to Hellenistic and Roman literature (in which Greek historiography and ethnography were put into the service of imperial expansion). By the late nineteenth century, Greek and Latin references to China had been compiled by Henry Yule,23 and those pertaining to India collected by Christian Lassen and J. W. McCrindle.24 Even early on, some doubts were raised about the accuracy of these ancient reports. Yet, for the most part, their utility for understanding Asian societies was accepted, consistent with the common view of their cultures as essentially changeless.25 21 “It strikes every one, in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual products, and those of the profoundest order of thought, has no History . . . India has not only ancient books relating to religion, and splendid poetical productions, but also ancient codes . . . and yet History itself is not found” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree [New York, 1899], 113). See further Robert L. Bernasconi, “With What Must the History of Philosophy Begin? Hegel’s Role in the Debate on the Place of India within the History of Philosophy,” in Hegel’s History of Philosophy, ed. David A. Duquette (Albany: SUNY, 2003), 35–50; and on the Nachleben of this notion, Kerwin Lee Klein, “In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and the People without History,” History and Theory 34 (1995): 275–98. 22 See further Ernst Schulin, Die Weltgeschichtliche erfassung des Orients bei Hegel und Ranke (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958); Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 41–42. 23 H. Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. 1 (London, 1866). The correlation of these notices with Chinese sources was attempted shortly after Yule’s book: F. Hirth, China and the Roman Orient: Researches into their Ancient and Mediaeval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records (Shanghai, 1885). 24 Christian Lassen, Indische Altertumskunde (Bonn, 1847–61); J. W. McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian (London: Trübner, 1877), The Commerce and Navigation of the Erythraean Sea (London: Trübner, 1879), Ancient India as described by Ktesias, the Knidian (London: Trübner, 1882), Ancient India as described by Ptolemy (London: Trübner, 1885), The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great as described by Arrian, Q. Curtius, Diodorus, Plutarch and Justin (Westminster: A. Constable, 1893), The Christian topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian monk (London: Hakluyt Society, 1897), Ancient India as described in Classical Literature (Westminster: A. Constable, 1901). This line of research built on the work of Scaliger, who compiled the fragments associated with Megasthenes—a Seleucid ambassador to India in the fourth century BCE, widely quoted by Hellenistic and Roman authors (e.g., Diodorus, Arrian, Strabo). 25 The perceived relevance of “classical” references to India for early twentieth-century British colonialists is evident, e.g., in a review of McCrindle’s 1901 volume that notes its usefulness for “those political, military, and commercial wanderers whose business leads them into the remoter corners of our Indian Empire, and who can verify for themselves, as they go, the extraordinary accuracy of some, at least, of those old-world records of the changeless East” (Geographical Journal 18 [1901]: 610). History of Religions 55 In recent decades, “classical” references to India and China have garnered new attention, albeit for different reasons. These reports now serve, not as witnesses to a “timeless Orient” but, rather, as evidence for intercultural exchanges prior to the contacts wrought and sullied by modernity. Such references are commonly cited, for instance, in studies that seek to trace the genealogy of the very concept of “the East,” an area of research that has ﬂourished since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism. 26 Some point to fanciful Greek accounts of India (e.g., Ctesias, Herodotus) to unmask the ultimate origins of modern ideas about “the East.”27 Others cite accounts associated with Alexander the Great to celebrate “Classical Antiquity” as a ﬂeeting moment of “Western” openness in what was otherwise a long and shameful history of ignorance about “the East”; for such perspectives, the writings of Megasthenes are exemplary of the interactions between “the West” and “the East” in the wake of Alexander’s conquests—imagined as a golden age of contact, connection, and curiosity, unmatched until the “Age of Discovery.”28 To be sure, scholarship on South and East Asia has changed much since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What has arguably remained the same, however, is the privileging of “classical” writings as sources for the reconstruction of the premodern “West” in encounter with “the East.” By virtue of the European appropriation of the Greek and Roman pasts during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, scholars often take for granted a notion of the history of “the West” as a unilinear narrative—a narrative that begins with ancient Greeks, continues with the Roman Empire and Latin Christendom, and culminates with the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.29 Yet, as we have seen, this idea of “the West” was reiﬁed at precisely the same time as modern notions of “the East”: the formative era between the journey of the ﬁrst European envoy to the Mongol Empire in the late thirteenth century and the consolidation of the Anglo-European tradition of scholarship on Sanskrit, Chinese, and other Asian languages See nn. 1–2. See, e.g., King, Orientalism and Religion, 25–26; Andrew L. March, The Idea of China: Myth and History in Geographical Thought (New York: Praeger, 1974), 23–43, 61–67; Edward Said, “Imaginative Geography and Its Representation: Orientalizing the Oriental,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), esp. 22–23. Compare Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Orientalism and the Ethnographer: Said, Herodotus, and the Discourse of Alterity,” in The Ends of Theory, ed. Jerry Herron, Dorothy Huson, Russ Pudaloff, and Robert Stazier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 86–103. 28 See, e.g., John James Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 37–38. 29 In research on late medieval and early modern Europe, this unilinear narrative has been questioned for decades (e.g., William J. Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” American Historical Review 84 [1979]: 1–15). My point here is only that older views remain common in other subﬁelds and often lurk behind the patterns of selectivity in research on premodern religions and cultures. 27 26 56 Beyond the Land of Nod in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also the same era that saw the promotion of now-familiar notions like “Classics” and “Western Civilization.”30 It was the same era, moreover, that heralded the rise of an historiography which lauded Europe as the rightful heir of ancient Greek philosophy and science, on the one hand, and as the prime focus for world history, on the other.31 ii. edessa, the roman near east, and the greco-roman oikoumene What this narrative effaces is the geographical gap between those ancient Greeks and Romans who wrote about Indians (∆IndoÇ) and Sêres (ShÅreÍ) and those modern Europeans who claimed to be their sole and true heirs— including British and French colonialists, as well as German, American, and other Orientalist scholars. When we set aside the assumption of a unitary “Western Civilization,” the gap becomes obvious: the centers of Greek and Roman cultures were in the eastern Mediterranean, rather than in western Europe.32Accordingly, ancient Greek and Roman understandings 30 On “Orientalism” and “Eurocentrism” as twins, birthed together in Eurasian “contact zones” in the early modern period, see Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism”; Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Concurrent, moreover, was the construction of the very notion of “Europe.” See further Anthony Pagden, The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hartmut Kaelble, Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); Mary Anne Perkins, Christendom and European Identity: The Legacy of a Grand Narrative since 1789 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). On the internal diversity effaced by the image of a singular “Europe” in encounter with external “Others,” see Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within and Without,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 424–52. 31 The latter has often been noted in recent attempts to reframe world history in a manner more ﬁtting for a “globalized” world. On this trend, see Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 508–25; Georg Iggers, “Historiography from a Global Perspective,” History and Theory 43 (2004): 146–54. See also Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History, ed. Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ix–xxi; “AHR Forum: Periodization in World History,” special issue, American Historical Review 101 (1996): 748–82 (featuring Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History”; and Patrick Manning, “The Problem of Interactions in World History”); Natalie Zemon Davis, “What Is Universal about History?” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Gunilla-Freidrike Budde et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 15–20. I am grateful to Ra‘anan S. Boustan for bringing such discussions to my attention. 32 The curious exclusion of even Byzantium from the “Grand Narrative of European History” is noted by Peter R. L. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000 (rev. ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 2–3, 177. Perhaps needless to say, this narrative has also functioned to exclude Islamic empires and literary cultures—even despite the fundamental place of Muslim elites in the preservation and development of ancient Greek literature and learning (see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: One Line Short History of Religions 57 of the bounds of the civilized world differed dramatically from those of later Europeans. From our ancient sources, in fact, we might imagine that Greek and Roman elites would be surprised to learn of the modern claimants to their heritage. As noted above, scholars often point to the fanciful accounts of India by Ctesias, Herodotus, and others to posit the long-standing “Western” mystiﬁcation of “the East.”33 No less fanciful, however, are ancient Greek reports about the peoples of what is now Europe.34 Indians (and, later, Sêres) were readily assimilated to Greek models of wise and ancient “barbarian” nations, as formed on the precedents of Egypt and Babylonia.35 By contrast, the areas to the north and west of the Greeks were long unknown—so much so, in fact, that these lands were rumored to be inhabited by one-eyed peoples and swarms of bees (e.g., Herodotus, Histories 3.115–16; 5.9–10). Northerners were imagined, moreover, to be wild, irrational, and violent by virtue of living too far from the sun.36 The known world, as seen by ancient Greeks, was oriented eastward, encompassing the eastern Mediterranean trade routes and colonies of Greek merchants, as well as the multiple peoples conquered and encountered by the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. Likewise, it was from Macedonia, in what is now modern Greece, that Alexander in the fourth century BCE mounted conquests which stretched across Asia and which resulted in the establishment of Hellenistic empires such as the Seleucids in Syria and Mauryans in India.37 By contrast, detailed knowledge of northern and western Europe awaited Roman military expeditions into Britain, Gaul, and Germania. And, even then and thereafter, western and northern Europeans were often viewed through the lens The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society [London: Routledge, 1998]; and, on the involvement of East-Syrian Christians in the Arabic translation of Greek writings, see Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], 4, 150–51). 33 Benjamin Isaac notes that some precedent for the contrast of “west/Europe/Greece versus east/Asia/Persia” can be found in post-Herodotean Greek ethnography, geography, etc. He stresses, however, that it is misleading to draw any straight line from the writings of Herodotus and others to our own notions of “West” and “East.” See Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. 58– 60, 263, 492–93. 34 Isaac further suggests that images of “eastern” and “southern” peoples (e.g., Egyptians, Persians) were shaped by cultural and political competition, anxiety of inﬂuence, etc., while images of “western” and “northern” peoples (e.g., Gauls, Germani) tended to convey disdain (ibid., 426). 35 Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy (Tübingen: Mohr, 1999), 57–85. 36 See further Isaac, Invention of Racism, 138–42, 204–9, 411–500. 37 For the effects on Greek images of India, see esp. Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature. 58 Beyond the Land of Nod of ancient Greek stereotypes about savages and nomads, as perhaps exacerbated by Roman anxieties about marauding tribes from the north.38 The era of Roman expansion also saw the intensiﬁcation of economic connections with empires to the east. Overland trade in silk, spices, and other commodities linked the Romans with the Kushans via the Parthians—the latter of whom may have entered into an alliance with the Han dynasty of China around 115 BCE.39 From both Roman and Chinese sources, it seems that Parthians sometimes played an intermediary role in overland Eurasian trade, possibly limiting direct Roman contact with merchants from South, Central, and East Asia.40 Any monopoly, however, would have been loosened by the end of the ﬁrst century BCE, due to the discovery of the monsoon route from the eastern coast of Roman Egypt to the southern shores of the Indian subcontinent.41 With increased economic connections between cities on the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean, as well as along the rivers leading inland (e.g., Nile, Euphrates, Indus), came increased interactions between Indian, Egyptian, and other merchants. The intensiﬁcation of long-distance trade also seems to have sparked a lively interest in “eastern” lands among Roman elites. Like modern Europeans long after them, learned Romans turned to Greek sources for knowledge about India.42 This period of relative peace and growing trade even resulted in increased Roman awareness of East Asia, as suggested by the 38 Roman authors delighted, e.g., in telling tales of the Gallic severing of human heads and in joking about the Germanic lack of proclivity for learning. See further Isaac, Invention of Racism, 411–39; Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 148–51; Guy Halsall, “Funny Foreigners: Laughing with the Barbarians in Late Antiquity,” in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91–96. 39 That is, during the reign of Wu Di (140–87 BCE). The Han seems to have been the ﬁrst era of direct contact between China and the Near East, although goods appear to have traveled between these regions earlier (John Ferguson, “China and Rome,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römische Welt 2.9.2 [1978]: 581–603). 40 So J. Thorley, “The Silk Trade between China and the Roman Empire at Its Height, Circa A.D. 90–130,” Greece & Rome 18 (1971): 73. Manfred G. Raschke, however, questions the inﬂuence attributed to “middlemen,” emphasizing instead the importance of Roman cities on the eastern frontier (“New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römische Welt 2.9.2 [1978]: 641–42). 41 Albrecht Dihle, “Die entdeckungsgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen des Indienhandels der römische Kaiserzeit,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römische Welt 2.9.2 (1978): 547–51. See also P. J. Turner, Roman Coins from India (London: Royal Numismatic Society, 1989); S. Suresh, Symbols of Trade: Roman and Pseudo-Roman Objects Found in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004). 42 With respect to the Roman appropriation of Greek ethnography for economic, military, and imperial aims, the classic formulation remains A. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). One Line Short History of Religions 59 sudden growth of references to silk and “silk people” in Latin poetry and Greek geographical writings at the turn of the Common Era.43 This is perhaps not surprising inasmuch as exports from South and East Asia seem to have been entering the Roman Empire along multiple routes.44 A set of overland routes passed westwards from northern Han China, through the Kushan and Parthian empires, and into a series of socalled “caravan cities” in Syria, such as Palmyra, Edessa, and Nisibis along the Tigris and Euphrates, and Antioch and Tyre on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In addition, goods and merchants moved along the sea routes of the Indian Ocean, up the Nile to Egyptian cities like Alexandria, up the eastern coast of the Red Sea to southern Syrian cities like Petra, and up the Persian Gulf, Tigris, and Euphrates to northern Syrian cities such as Palmyra, Edessa, and Nisibis.45 From a small group of wealthy centers of eastern trade and commerce—Alexandria in Egypt; Tyre and Antioch on the Mediterranean; Petra and Palmyra nearer to the desert; and Edessa and Nisibis in the lush land around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—silk, spices, and other commodities traveled into the Roman Empire, to be sent northwards along imperial roads and westwards on the sea routes of the Mediterranean. For those seeking literary evidence for sustained Eurasian contacts and their cultural effects in premodern times, these cosmopolitan cities would seem to provide an apt focus. Surprisingly little has been done, however, to investigate such possibilities.46 Modern studies have richly discussed archaeological evidence for Eurasian trade and have sought to align material data with geographical and political information preserved in 43 See discussion and references in J. Thorley, “The Development of Trade between the Roman Empire and the East under Augustus,” Greece & Rome 16 (1969), esp. 216. 44 Thorley, “Silk Trade,” 71–80; Raschke, “New Studies,” 642–44, 824–51; Louis C. West, “Commercial Syria under the Roman Empire,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 55 (1924): 159–89; Otto Maenchen-Helfen, “From China to Palmyra,” Art Bulletin 25 (1943): 358–62; Warwick Bell, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London: Routledge, 2000), 123–29; J. B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005), 44, 79, 137; Fergus Millar, “Caravan Cities: The Roman Near East and Long-Distance Trade by Land,” repr. in The Greek World, the Jews, and the East, ed. Hannah Cotton and Guy MacLean Rogers, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3:275–99. Among cities in Roman Syria, Palmyra remains best attested for trade. 45 Some of these cities may have also served as stations for the processing of raw silk into woven textiles. Gary K. Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31 BC–AD 305 (London: Routledge, 2001), 194. 46 Characteristic is the attitude of Albrecht Dihle, who chooses “to neglect the rather limited conception of India which only the Syrian writers had, and to concentrate on the comparison between the classical and the Christian ones” (“The Conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman Literature,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society [1964], 17). 60 Beyond the Land of Nod Greek and Latin.47 Nevertheless, scholars have yet fully to explore whether Indian Ocean trade might have shaped the images of South, Central, and East Asian cultures in the Geez literature of the Ethiopian Axumite Empire or in the Coptic literature of late antique Egypt.48 Much the same can be said for the literature penned in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic used by Christians in cities like Edessa and Nisibis.49 Arguably, the same Eurocentrism that has shaped modern scholarship on Asian religions and cultures (and notions of world history more broadly) has also had an impact on research on the forms of Christianity that developed outside of the Roman Empire and on its edges. “Classical” languages and literatures formed a privileged part of the pedagogical training of early modern European elites, and they still remain dominant in teaching and research on the formative pasts of European and North American nations. In comparison, the other languages of late antique and medieval Christianity (e.g., Geez, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic) have received relatively little attention. Moreover, until recently, modern scholars have told the history of Christianity primarily as a story about the Roman Empire, medieval Latin Christendom, and their modern European heirs.50 Among the many other forms of Christianity pushed to the margins of modern histories is a major transregional/transnational tradition, namely, Syriac Christianity.51 This tradition developed in the eastern portions of the Roman Empire in the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era, taking shape initially in Edessa (now Urfa in modern Turkey). While Latin Christianity spread westwards and northwards, Syriac Christianity spread eastwards See nn. 8, 23–24, 40–41, 43–44. On Indian Ocean trade, see Albrecht Dihle, Umstrittene Daten: Untersuchungen zum Auftreten der Griechen am Roten Meer (Cologne: Westdeutscher, 1965); Lionel Casson, The “Periplus Maris Erythraei”: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 16–18, 39–43; Richard Salomon, “Epigraphic Remains of Indian Traders in Egypt,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (1991): 731–36; André Wink, “From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Medieval History in Geographic Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 416–45; Philippe Beaujard, “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems before the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of World History 16 (2005): 411–65. 49 Raschke stresses, for instance, that merchants from such cities would have been at an advantage inasmuch as Greek and Aramaic were “the two major languages of Eastern commerce” (“New Studies,” 643, also 833–35). 50 Brown, Rise of Western Christendom; Sebastian P. Brock, “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity,” in Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, ed. H. W. Attridge and G. Hata (Leiden: Brill, 1992), esp. 212. Despite and because of this pattern, some “oriental” Christianities were also romanticized in early research; see n. 153. 51 C. Buck, “The Universality of the Church of the East: How Persian was Persian Christianity?” Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society 10 (1996): 54–95. On the other major transregional religious movement in which the Syriac language was prominent, see Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in Mesopotamia and the Roman East (Leiden: Brill, 1994), and Manichaeism in Central Asia and China (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 48 47 History of Religions 61 and southwards. In Late Antiquity, it became the dominant form of Christianity in the Persian Sasanian Empire as well as on the Indian subcontinent. Beginning around the seventh century, we even ﬁnd evidence for its spread into parts of Central Asia and China. In what follows, then, we shall survey a selection of references to India and China in Syriac literature. It is well known that encounters with other cultures sparked systematic efforts at mapping cultural difference in ﬁfthcentury BCE Athens (e.g., Herodotus), ﬁrst-century BCE Rome (e.g., Polybius, Strabo, Diodorus), and nineteenth-century Europe (e.g., Hegel, von Ranke). Yet such “classical” and modern examples are only a small part of a much broader story. By tracing another trajectory, we may be able to ﬁll in a bit of the rest, while also pointing to elements effaced by the usual focus on Greek, Roman, and European elites. In other words: we know how the world looked from Athens and Rome, and later from London and Berlin, but how did it look from cities like Edessa? a. edessa between (roman) “west” and (parthian/persian) “east” The ancient city of Edessa embodies the difﬁculty in imposing modern views of “the West” and “the East” onto the cultural and political landscapes of premodern Eurasia.52 Edessa was founded by the Hellenistic Syrian dynasty of the Seleucids at the end of the fourth century BCE.53 With the decline of Seleucid imperial power in the second century BCE, it became the center of an independent state. Its line of native kings was established in 131/2 BCE and lasted for more than 300 years, allied at times with Rome and at times with Parthia.54 This independence would last until 214 CE, when the city was brought under Roman rule.55 As noted above, Edessa was among the cities on the shifting border between Rome and Parthia (and later, Sasanian Persia), situated in a region at the crossing of multiple sets of trade routes by virtue of its geographical location between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.56 Among these cities, Edessa seems to have been distinguished by its status as a center of learning. Whereas the wealth of neighboring cities like Palmyra seems not to have resulted in any notable literary production, Edessa was lauded 52 On this point for the Roman Near East more broadly, see Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.–A.D. 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 489–534. 53 For the pre-Seleucid and Seleucid history of the city, see H. J. W. Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs at Edessa (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 9–10; Segal, Edessa, 1–8; Amir Harrak, “The Ancient Name of Edessa,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 51 (1992): 209–14. 54 Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs, 10–15; Segal, Edessa, 9–61. 55 See further Millar, Roman Near East, 472–81, 553–62; Segal, Edessa, 110–92; Steven K. Ross, Roman Edessa: Politics and Culture on the Eastern Fringes of the Roman Empire, 114–242 CE (London: Routledge, 2001). 56 Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs, 9; Ross, Roman Edessa, 15–18. 62 Beyond the Land of Nod as the “Athens of the East.” The city also seems to have been the ﬁrst center of literary production in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic that may have originated there.57 From a modern perspective, Edessa can be deemed “Western” inasmuch as its elites were steeped in ancient Greek learning and Hellenistic culture.58 Moreover, for much of its history, it was part of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, it was located on the eastern border of the empire, and this border was far from stable.59 Perhaps partly as a result, the inhabitants of Edessa seem to have articulated their distinctive identities in dynamic interaction both with the Greek learning that emblematized elite Roman culture and with a variety of other proximate regional and imperial cultures. Even as Greek paideia ﬂourished among the city’s elites, the material culture of Edessa attests the absorption of Nabataean, Judaean, Parthian, and Persian elements. As in Roman Palestine, moreover, we ﬁnd the persistence of local languages and identities, long after Roman conquest brought an end to self-rule.60 In addition, as we shall see, references to South and East Asia in early Syriac literature raise the possibility that at least some educated Edessenes may have perceived themselves—and perhaps promoted themselves to Roman rulers—as native informants on “eastern” peoples more broadly.61 b. india in the acts of thomas Strikingly, references to India can be found in some of the oldest surviving works in the Syriac language. One famous and early example is the John F. Healey, “The Edessan Milieu and the Birth of Syriac,” Hugoye 10, no. 2 (2007). Becker, Fear of God, 10–11; Sebastian P. Brock, “From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning,” repr. in his Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984), V 17–34, and From Ephrem to Romanos: Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late Antiquity (Brookﬁeld: Ashgate, 1999); Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs, 16–17, and “The School of Edessa: Greek Learning and Local Culture,” Centres of Learning, ed. J. W. Drijvers and A. A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 49–59. 59 On Edessa’s “frontier culture,” Sasanian incursions into the region, and the place of the Syriac language in the forging of a “cross-frontier community” straddling Roman and Sasanian Empires, see esp. Sidney H. Grifﬁth, “Christianity in Edessa and the SyriacSpeaking World: Mani, Bar Daysan, and Ephrem; The Struggle for Allegiance on the Aramean Frontier,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 2 (2002): 5–20. See also Segal, Edessa, 110–254; Ernst Kirsten, “Edessa, eine römische Grenzstadt des 4. bis 6. Jahrhunderts im Orient,” Jahrbuch fur Antike and Christentum 6 (1963): 144–72. 60 The persistence of Jewish/Judaean identities long after Roman imperial conquest is the best known example of a dynamic operant elsewhere in the Near East as well; see further Kevin Butcher, Roman Syria and the Near East (London: British Museum, 2003), 28–29, 87–98. 61 On Julius Africanus and Bardaisan, see William A. Adler, “Ancient Edessa at the Crossroads of Christianity and Rome,” forthcoming in Judaism, Christianity, and the Roman Empire, ed. Natalie Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed, and “The Cesti and Sophistic Culture in the Severan Age,” forthcoming. 58 57 History of Religions 63 early third-century Acts of Thomas, which was written in Syriac and later translated into Greek, Latin, Coptic, Geez, and Arabic.62 This work belongs to the early Christian genre of “apocryphal acts,” wherein novelistic motifs are used to recount the miracles, missionary travels, and martyrdoms of Jesus’s apostles. The Acts of Thomas begins by recounting Jesus’s partitioning of the entire known world among his twelve apostles. To Thomas is assigned the land of India (§1).63 To achieve this goal, Jesus sells Thomas into slavery. He is sold to an Indian merchant, “Óabban the merchant of King Gudnaphar,” so as to ensure that the teachings of Jesus will be spread eastwards (§2). In the ﬁrst part of the Acts of Thomas, the apostle is taken to one part of India by ship (§§3–4), where he is commissioned as a carpenter to build a palace for King Gudnaphar (§§17–18). Thomas takes all the money given to him by the king and gives it away to the poor (§19). Gudnaphar eventually discovers the ruse, whereupon Thomas discloses that he has built a palace for the king in heaven through acts of charity (§20). Although the king is initially unconvinced (§21), his brother dies, returns from the dead, and reports that he has seen the heavenly palace (§§22–24). Gudnaphar is persuaded, and Thomas vindicated (§25–28). In the second part of the narrative, Thomas is called to travel onwards by land to another part of India, which is ruled by a different king and which is called the kingdom of Mazdai (§§29–101). There, the apostle performs miracles of healing and converts many. Eventually, he attracts the attention of the authorities and is imprisoned (§§102–58). Although Thomas is said to have been martyred at the hands of jealous princes (§§159–68), the story ends with the king of Mazdai persuaded of the truth and power of his teachings (§170). In keeping with its genre, the aims of the Acts of Thomas are theological, didactic, and hagiographical, rather than historical. That this text is based on some awareness of India, however, is signaled by the name of the ﬁrst king, who is called Gudnaphar in the Syriac and Gundafov r oÍ in the Greek translation. The historicity of this monarch is conﬁrmed by numismatic and inscriptional evidence for an Indo-Parthian ruler named Guduhvara/UndoferhÍ, 64 who was centered in the city of Taxila in 62 63 A. F. J. Klijn, ed. and trans., The Acts of Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 1962). Eusebius depicts Thomas as sent to Parthia, whereas Jerome, Ambrose, and Ephrem mention his travels to India. See further ibid., 27, 159, and below for Thomas’s later associations with China. 64 The name is commonly Latinized as “Gondophernes,” “Gondophares,” etc. It appears to be derived, however, from Old Persian “Vindafarna” (Sten Konow, Kharosh†hi Inscriptions, with the Exception of those of A¶oka [Calcutta: Archaeological Survey of India, 1991], xliv–xlvii). 64 Beyond the Land of Nod Gandhara (now in modern Pakistan).65 From the Kharoß†hi Takht-i-Bahi inscription, we can infer that he ruled the Kabul valley from around 20 to 45 CE.66 Some awareness of the multiplicity of empires on the Indian subcontinent is suggested by the assumption, on the part of the authors/redactors of the Acts of Thomas, that the story of Christianity’s spread to India can only be told as a twofold tale of maritime and overland travel. Lourens P. van den Bosch has thus proposed that its image of India is consistent with how we might imagine the subcontinent to be perceived by inhabitants of Edessa—namely, through the lens of trade and in terms of the multiple routes (maritime and overland) by which goods came into the region.67 Although not betraying ﬁrsthand knowledge of South Asian religions and cultures, its representation of India is marked by a degree of verisimilitude (and perhaps also by a concern for verisimilitude) unmatched by its Greek and Latin counterparts.68 To this day, the forms of Christianity that ﬂourish in South Asia appeal to Thomas as their founder and use Syriac as a liturgical language.69 It remains uncertain when Christians ﬁrst traveled to the subcontinent and which speciﬁc region(s) they ﬁrst visited.70 For our purposes, what is signiﬁcant is that Syrian Christians were eager to promote this connection. Not only was Thomas proudly proclaimed as the apostle of Edessa, but— at least from the fourth century onwards—the city’s inhabitants claimed to possess the body of the apostle, as allegedly carried there by an Indian merchant.71 The connections between Thomas, India, and Edessa were even inscribed onto the sacred landscapes of Edessa: a church was built 65 Here and below, I use “Gandhara” in the sense of what Richard Salomon calls “Greater Gandhara”—i.e., the Peshwar and Swat valleys and the region surrounding Taxila (Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharoß†hi Fragments [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999], 3–5). 66 See further D. C. Sircar, Indian Epigraphy (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965), 245– 49. Some have sought to connect Gad, the name of the king’s brother in the Acts of Thomas, with Gudana, another name occurring on Indo-Parthian coins; see discussion in L. P. van den Bosch, “India and the Apostolate of St. Thomas,” in Acts of Thomas, ed. Jan Bremmer (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 133–34. On Takßa¶ila/Taxila, see Mahabharata 18.5.29; John Hubert Marshall, Taxila: An Illustrated Account of Archaeological Excavations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), esp. 58–64. 67 Van den Bosch, “India,” 125–48, esp. 136–37. 68 Gary Reger, “On the Road to India with Apollonios of Tyana and Thomas the Apostle,” Mediterranean Historical Review 22 (2007): 257–71. A concern for accurate information about India is present, of course, in the Periplus. There, however, the focus falls wholly on practical, mercantile issues; as Casson notes, religion is conspicuously absent (Periplus Maris Erythraei, 10). 69 See n. 112; van den Bosch, “India,” 125–26. 70 See further van den Bosch, “India,” 137–48. Eusebius (Historia ecclesiastica 5.10) claims that it was the apostle Bartholomew who ﬁrst spread the Gospel in India; interestingly for our purposes, he does so in an account of an Alexandrian Christian (i.e., Clement’s teacher Pantaneus) visiting South India. 71 Ephrem, Carmina Nisibena 42; also Acts of Thomas 170. One Line Long History of Religions 65 on the site of the purported tomb of Thomas, and in the fourth and ﬁfth centuries, travelers from elsewhere in the Roman Empire visited the city to make pilgrimage to it.72 Why—we might ask—would third-century Syrian Christians wish to connect themselves with India in the ﬁrst place? One possibility is that the Acts of Thomas was composed, at least in part, as a Christian counternarrative to a contemporary “pagan” work, namely, Philostratus’s Vita Apollonii.73 Written in the early third century CE, this work celebrates the life and deeds of the ﬁrst-century Anatolian holy man Apollonius (ca. 40–110 CE) and features a lengthy account of his journeys throughout the known world. Signiﬁcantly, for our purposes, Apollonius’s travels to India loom large in the Vita Apollonii (bks. 2–3), as does his visit to Taxila (Tav x ila) in particular (2.20–30).74 Philostratus recounts that Apollonius met the Indian philosopher-king Phraotes, who tells him of the mountain of the Brahmans (BracmaÅneÍ). It is by visiting the Brahmans and spending many months on their mountain (3.13–50) that Apollonius is said to gain otherworldly knowledge and the power to work miracles, which he then takes back to the Roman Empire. To the tale of Apollonius, the Acts of Thomas presents a striking point of comparison and contrast: it depicts the apostles of the ﬁrst-century Jewish holy man Jesus as spreading throughout the known world on his behalf. In contrast to Apollonius, Thomas is a healer and wonder-worker who is able to surprise and surpass the Indians themselves. Moreover, whereas Philostratus appears content to repeat ancient and fantastical Greek legends about India, the authors/redactors of the Acts of Thomas seem to have drawn on knowledge current in Edessa due to its trade connections with multiple regions in India. A related possibility is that the Vita Apollonii and the Acts of Thomas are both third-century responses to traditions about the Indian sojourn of Alexander the Great—a Hellenistic legendary tradition that was being richly developed by Roman authors in the ﬁrst and second centuries CE.75 In those tales, it is the philosopher-king Alexander who meets with Indian gymnosophists and Brahmans. When read against the background of such claims, the celebration of Apollonius and Thomas as visitors to India 72 Egeria, Itinerarium 17.1; 19.3. Late antique literature from throughout the Roman Empire stresses Thomas’s connections to both India and Edessa, due to the inﬂuence of the Acts of Thomas (Klijn, Acts of Thomas, 19). 73 For a comparison, see Reger, “On the Road,” 257–71. 74 See further J. Elsner, “Hagiographic Geography: Travel and Allegory in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997): 22–37; Roshan Abraham, “Magic and Religious Authority in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2009), 28–75. 75 See further Richard Stoneman, “Naked Philosophers: The Brahmans in the Alexander Historians and the Alexander Romance,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 99–114. 66 Beyond the Land of Nod may bespeak a shared concern to proclaim spiritual power as the force that truly rules the world: both works may use narratives about the eastward travels of (eastern Roman) holy men to subvert the imperial ideology of the Roman Empire and to relativize its claims to power. c. india and china in writings associated with bardaisan When read from this perspective, what distinguishes the Acts of Thomas is the choice to depart from the ancient Greek traditions repeated both by the Roman redactors of the Alexander legend and by Apollonius’s biographer Philostratus. This choice, as noted above, may reﬂect its provenance in the city of Edessa or in its sway. It is also possible that the Acts of Thomas was compiled, more speciﬁcally, in the wake of the visit of an Indian delegation in 218 CE to the Roman emperor at the time, Elagabalus (r. 217–22), himself a Syrian “pagan” priest from nearby Emesa.76 Evidence pertinent to this visit raises the intriguing possibility that religious and cultural knowledge was exchanged during the encounter. Porphyry, a third-century Syrian Neoplatonist, reports that the Indian delegation met with his elder contemporary, the Christian philosopher Bardaisan of Edessa (De abstinentia 4.17.9–14). In addition, Porphyry claims to preserve Bardaisan’s own account of what he learned about South Asian religions.77 The account displays an intimate familiarity with ancient Greek traditions about India. When Porphyry reports what the Indian visitors told Bardaisan about the wise men of their land, for instance, he notes that these are the ones “whom the Greeks habitually call ‘gymnosophists’ ” (4.17.3–4). In addition, consistent with the Greek traditions associated with Megasthenes, he divides Indian sages into two “schools,” here called Brahmans and Samaneans.78 76 Jan Bremmer, “The Acts of Thomas and Women,” in Bremmer, Acts of Thomas, 77. From our literary evidence, it is impossible to determine the speciﬁc region or dynasty from which this delegation was sent. That said, a North Indian delegation seems more likely in light of our other evidence for Roman–Kushan relations in the second and third centuries CE (on which see John Thorley, “The Roman Empire and the Kushans,” Greece & Rome 26 [1979], 181–90). 77 Porphyry, De abstinentia 4.17; Gillian Clark, trans., On Abstinence from Killing Animals (London: Duckworth, 2000), 113–14. It is unclear whether Bardaisan wrote this account in Syriac or Greek, but it is now preserved in Greek, and it is not impossible that it could have been translated by Porphyry himself. See also Porphyry, On the Styx apud Stobaeus, Florilegium 1.3.56; Jerome, Adversus Jovianum 2.14; and discussions in H. J. W. Drijvers, Bardaißan of Edessa (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966), 11, 173–76, 218; F. Winter, Bardesanes von Edessa über Indien: Ein früher syrischer Theologe schreibt über ein fremdes Land (Innsbruck: Thaur, 1999); Adam H. Becker, “Bardesanes,” in Brill’s New Jacoby: Fragments of Greek Historians, ed. Ian Worthington (CD-ROM; Leiden: Brill, 2006). 78 The term Saman∂oi seems to reﬂect Sanskrit ¶raman5a, Pali saman5a, or the like. That Greek variations of the term could be applied speciﬁcally to Buddhists in the third century is clear from Clement’s reference to Sarmav n ai as those “among the Indians [who] are those History of Religions 67 The description of the Brahmans (BracmaÅneÍ) largely follows ancient Greek tradition. It is stated, for instance, that they are a hereditary grouping, akin to a priesthood; some of them are said to dwell on mountains, and some near the Ganges (4.17.16–35).79 By contrast, the description of the Samaneans (Samana∂oi) includes many features not attested either in ancient Greek reports about Indian religions or in the Roman works that repeat and rework them. Interestingly, a number of these apparently new features resonate with what we know of early Buddhist monasticism.80 The Samaneans, for instance, are said to be drawn “from all the peoples of India” (ejk panto;Í touÅ tΩn ∆IndΩn eßqnouÍ; 4.17.15–16). To join their ranks, one undergoes an initiation rite that consists of shaving one’s hair,81 putting on a robe, and leaving one’s home, wife, and children (4.17.35– 45).82 Bardaisan further reports that Samaneans live in buildings outside philosophers who follow the precepts of Bouv tta” (Stromateis 1.15.71). Whatever the meaning of references to possibly related ﬁgures in earlier Greek literature (e.g., Garmavnai in Strabo 15.1.59–60), this identiﬁcation seems to ﬁt well with the development in the Indian usage of the term ¶raman5a /saman5a, as discussed in Patrick Olivelle, The A¶rama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11–16. Olivelle notes that “at least by the time of A¶oka (middle of the third century BCE), ¶raman5a was used principly, if not exclusively, with reference to non-Brahman5 ical ascetics. The compound word ¶raman5a-braman5a is used in A¶okan inscriptions to indicate the double class of religious people worthy of honor and donations. A century or so later the grammarian Patañjali uses the same phrase as an example to illustrate the rule of Pan5 ini about compounds in which the component words refer to objects that are opposed to each other. The same compound is also used in the Pali Canon with a reference similar to that of the A¶okan inscriptions. An examination of early Brahman5 ical texts, several of which in all likelihood predate A¶oka, however, indicates that the clear distinction and even opposition between braman5a and ¶raman5a may have been a later semantic development possibly inﬂuenced by the appropriation of the later term by non-Brahman5 ical sects such as Buddhism and Jainism” (11–12; see also Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities,” 211). Contrast Dihle, who credits Megasthenes with introducing the twofold distinction (“Conception of India,” 21). 79 On the view of Brahmans in Greek and Latin literature, see Stoneman, “Naked Philosophers,” and “Who Are the Brahmans? Indian Lore and Cynic Doctrine in Palladius’ De Bragmanibus and Its Models,” Classical Quarterly 44 (1994): 500–510. 80 On the westward spread of Buddhism, see Matteo Compareti, “Buddhist Activity in Pre-Islamic Persia According to Literary Sources and Archaeology,” Transoxiana 12 (2007); cf. Warwick Ball, “How Far Did Buddhism Spread West? Buddhism in the Middle East in Ancient and Medieval Times,” al-Raﬁdan 10 (1989): 1–11. 81 Compare Strabo 15.1.61. On Buddhist practices of shaving in their South Asian cultural contexts, see Patrick Olivelle, “Hair and Society: Social Signiﬁcance of Hair in South Asian Traditions,” in Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 17–23. 82 Most interesting in this regard are parallels with the Rhinoceros Sutra, a Gandhari version of which is preserved in a birch-bark scroll from the ﬁrst century BCE. Just as Bardaisan describes the Samanean as one who “takes his robe and goes away to the Samaneans, without another look or word for his wife and children” (4.17.41–42) and thereafter “has no wife or possessions” (4.17.59–60), so the ideal of the Buddhist in the Rhinoceros Sutra is one who has “given up son and wife and money, possessions and kinsmen and relatives . . . casting off marks of a householder like a mountain ebony tree shorn of its leaves, [leaving home, wearing] the saffron robe . . . having broken the ties of a householder, like a bird who has torn a strong 68 Beyond the Land of Nod of the city bounds, where the ringing of bells marks their times of prayer and meals and where they spend their days engaged in philosophical discussion (4.17.45–60).83 As in the Acts of Thomas, what appears to be new knowledge about India is here put to use in a manner that speaks to the concerns of Christians in third-century Roman Syria. Not only was early Syriac Christianity marked by ascetic tendencies,84 but the distinction between two groups of Indian wise men may have resonated with the distinction between Syriac Christianity and the native “pagan” cults and priesthoods that remained powerful in the region.85 In other words, Indian culture may here be presented as an example of the monarchic patronage of a variety of wise men—as had been the case in Edessa when Bardaisan frequented the court of the native monarch Abgar the Great, who had died a mere six years prior to the visit of the Indian delegation.86 At the very least, the example of this “eastern” land may here be used to laud the subordination of imperial power and privilege to the spiritual authority of wise men.87 net, not returning” (Richard Salomon, A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra: British Library Kharoß†hi Fragment 5B [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000], 106–8). Written in Kharoß†hi (a script related to Aramaic), this and other Gandhari sources provide important early evidence for Buddhism in Gandhara. These data prove particularly relevant, for our purposes, in light of the references related to Taxila in sources cited above and the trade links between this region and the Roman Near East. Although the artistic products of Gandharan Buddhism are well known and celebrated for their rich connections to Hellenistic and other cultures, further understanding of its literary heritage awaits the results of the transcription and publication of Kharoß†hi fragments in the British Library, etc., by the University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project. See further Richard Salomon, “Recent Discoveries of Early Buddhist Manuscripts and their Implications for the History of Buddhist Texts and Canons,” in Between the Empires: Society in India, 300 BCE to 400 CE, ed. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 349–82. 83 Compare, e.g., the assessment of our evidence for early Buddhist practices (esp. the striking of the gan5d5i) in Gregory Schopen, “Making Time in Buddhist Monasteries: On Calendars, Clocks, and Some Liturgical Practices,” in Buddhist Monks and Business Matters (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 260–84. 84 Sebastian P. Brock, “Early Syrian Asceticism,” Numen 20 (1973): 1–19. The possibility that Indian asceticism had some inﬂuence on early Syrian monasticism was posited by Arthur Vööbus, “The Origin of Monasticism in Mesopotamia,” Church History 20 (1951): 35–37. On Buddhist monasticism in the post-Mauryan, pre-Gupta period, see Gregory Schopen, “A Well-Sanitized Shroud: Asceticism and Institutional Values in the Middle Period of Buddhist Monasticism,” in Olivelle, Between the Empires, 315–47. 85 Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs; Garth Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982): 33–59. 86 That is, in 212 CE. On the end of independent Edessene rule soon thereafter see Segal, Edessa, 14–15. On Bardaisan and Abgar—as well as on the fate of the former after Edessa’s absorption into the Roman Empire—see Epiphanius, Panarion 56.1–2; Adler, “Ancient Edessa.” 87 This point is stressed repeatedly in Bardaisan’s account: “No Brahmin is ruled by a king or pays any tax to others” (Porphyry, De abstinentia 4.17.16–17); “The [Samaneans] have houses and sacred precincts built by the king, with administrators who receive an allowance from the king to feed those who gather there. . . . And others have so much reverence for them and for the Brahmins that even the king visits them and supplicates them to pray and make requests for the troubles of the land, or to advise him on what to do” (4.17.49–63). One Line Long History of Religions 69 India is also mentioned, together with the land of the Sêres, in the thirdcentury Syriac Book of the Laws of the Countries.88 This work records Bardaisan’s teachings, probably as penned by his student Philip. When the text surveys the peoples of the known world, it begins “in the extreme east of the whole world” with the Sêres.89 With regard to the Sêres, it stresses that all are eminently law-abiding: “in the whole country of the Sêres there is no idol, no prostitute, no murderer.”90 The Brahmans of India are similarly said to observe a law thousands of years old “not to kill, to worship no idols, to commit no fornication, to eat no meat and to drink no wine.”91 The text then considers the rest of the inhabitants of what are here categorized as “eastern” lands—Persians, Geli, Bactrian Kushans, Rakamaeans, Edessenes, Arabs, and inhabitants of Hatra—before turning northwards to peoples such as Germans, Britons, and Amazons.92 Taken together, this worldwide cultural survey serves, for Bardaisan, as an argument against astrological determinism.93 In this, his overarching aim is to promote Christianity as a transregional/transethnic religion. Towards this aim, he proclaims that his coreligionists could be found even in Gaul, Persia, Media, and Hatra, and among the Geli and Kushans.94 In one sense, Bardaisan’s account stands in continuity with ancient Greek ethnography.95 When seen against this background, however, what is striking is the prominence granted to peoples far to the east of the Mediterranean world. Whereas the descriptions of Germans and Britons echo the most salacious elements of Herodotean and other Greek accounts of northern and western tribes,96 the Book of the Laws of the Countries is broad in its eastern scope and detailed in the descriptions of peoples such as Kushans, Geli, Indians, and Sêres—who are, moreover, generally depicted in a more positive light than the far-ﬂung peoples to the west and 88 H. J. W. Drijvers, ed. and trans., Bardaisan, “The Book of the Laws of the Countries” or “Dialogue on Fate” (1965; repr.; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2007). Portions of this book were also translated into Greek and integrated into two fourth-century works, penned in Greek in Roman Palestine and Syria, respectively: Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica (6.10.1– 48) and the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (9.19–29). 89 Drijvers, Book of the Laws, 41. Compare Strabo 11.11.1; Pliny, Natural History 6.20; Pausanius 6.26.6–9. 90 Drijvers, Book of the Laws, 41. 91 Ibid., 43. Whereas the Syriac version associates Brahmans with India, Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 6.10.14, reads: “among the Indians and Bactrians there are many thousands of those called Brahman.” 92 Drijvers, Book of the Laws, 43–49. The references to Kushans are absent from the Greek parallel in Eusebius. 93 Tim Hegedus, “Necessity and Free Will in the Thought of Bardaisan of Edessa,” Laval théologique et philosophique 59 (2003): 333–44. 94 Drijvers, Book of the Laws, 59–63. 95 Ibid., x. 96 Ibid., 49–51. 70 Beyond the Land of Nod north of Edessa. Indeed, Bardaisan’s native city is even included among the survey of the cultures of “the East.” In light of the contemporaneous appeals to “eastern” sages discussed above, we might speculate that the example of the ancient Brahmans here serves to neutralize Greek claims to wisdom and philosophy, just as the example of the eminently lawful Sêres relativizes Roman imperial claims to the maintenance of social order. In any case, the contrast is indeed striking with Philostratus, who imagines India as a magical land in which pure Hellenism survives, untouched by the corruption of Roman power.97 Like the discussions of Indian religion preserved by Porphyry, the descriptions of Brahmans and Sêres in the Book of the Law of the Countries reﬂect their reimagining through the lens of Christian concerns. Nevertheless, it may be signiﬁcant that the concern for such cultures goes well beyond the stereotypes of the Asian “Other” in Greek and Latin literature. In the writings of Bardaisan, moreover, “the East” bears a positive valence, consistent with a broader tendency, namely, the Syrian appropriation and positive redeployment of Greco-Roman ideas about “eastern” peoples and “barbarian” wisdom—what Adam H. Becker has termed the “autoorientalizing” impulse in Syriac Christian self-deﬁnition.98 d. mapping centers and peripheries Also poignant is the interest, in both the Acts of Thomas and Book of the Laws of the Countries, in envisioning large-scale conceptual geographies that integrate a variety of peoples outside of the Roman Empire. For this, Syrian Christians had ample precedents in ancient Greek ethnography and Greco-Roman geography. Nevertheless, the contrast with other Christian perspectives remains striking: at a time when learned Christians elsewhere in the Roman Empire were beginning to tell the story of the rise of Christianity as a tale bounded by the limes of empire and deﬁned by Roman power, some Syrian Christians were mapping their place in the world with appeal to a broader vista, which encompassed the variety of cultures whose merchants and products ﬂowed through their cities. The Rome-centered histories of “Church Fathers” like Eusebius have shaped the focus and concerns of modern scholarly research on the rise and spread of Christianity to this day.99 As a result, it is only recently 97 See further Abraham, “Magic and Religious Authority,” 28–75, as well as appendix 2 on precedents for the use of Indian sages as vehicles for the expression of Greek philosophical ideals. 98 Adam H. Becker, “The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical East,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 123 (Tübingen: Mohr, 2003), esp. 398–400. 99 Brock, “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity”; Adam H. Becker, “Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes: Questioning the ‘Parting of the Ways’ Outside the Roman Empire,” in One Line Long History of Religions 71 that scholars are beginning to recover a more integrative view, taking seriously—as Peter Brown reminds us—that “the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a far wider Christian world, whose center of gravity lay, rather, in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East.”100 Early Syriac works like the Acts of Thomas and the Book of the Laws of the Countries evoke this wider vista. Accordingly, they serve to remind us of the cultural, linguistic, and geographical proximity of the Roman Near East to regions outside the bounds of the Roman Empire. Seen from this perspective, the cosmopolitan culture of Edessa can be seen to stand in a continuum of connection with other local cultures developed in Eurasian “contact zones” to the east of the Mediterranean. To the familiar Near Eastern examples (e.g., Armenia, Judaea), we might add others, such as Bactria and Gandhara—regions located, like Syria, along the trade routes connecting South and East Asia with the Roman Empire.101 The Gandharan culture of northwestern India, for instance, was also shaped by the encounter with Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian empires.102 Like the distinctive Syrian local culture of Edessa, the Indic local culture of Taxila was shaped in response to Aramaicization during the age of the Achaemenids and to Hellenization after the conquests of Alexander,103 The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95; Tübingen: Mohr, 2003), 343–62. 100 Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 2; see 1–34 on the “Grand Narrative of European History” that has effaced this otherwise obvious point. He further notes the value of a focus on “churches of the East” (e.g., Greek, Coptic, Syrian, Armenian) for helping us to reorient our understandings of Christian history within and beyond Europe—away from the notion of a single (Roman) center and towards a view of “a constellation of centers,” each shaped by simultaneous impulses towards universalism and localization, and each in interaction with others through the exchange of goods and ideas (15–16). 101 See further J. Lerner, The Impact of Seleucid Decline on the Eastern Iranian Plateau: The Foundations of Arsacid Parthia and Graeco-Bactria (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999); Jason E. Neelis, “Long-Distance Trade and the Transmission of Buddhism through Northern Pakistan, Primarily Based on Kharoß†hi and Brahmi Inscriptions” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001), esp. 377–493. 102 See discussion and references in Michael Witzel, “Brahmanical Reactions to Foreign Inﬂuences and to Social and Religious Change,” in Olivelle, Between the Empires, esp. 460– 64. Partly as a result of the fame and inﬂuence of tales about Alexander and Taxila, it is sometimes forgotten that this area was under the sway of the Achaemenid empire during the reign of Darius I (i.e., as part of the satrapy of Gandara, which was one of three “Indian” satrapies, along with Thatagus, Hindus; see Herodotus, Histories 3.91, 94; 7.66; G. Walser, Die Volkerschaften auf den Reliefs von Persepolis, Teheraner Forschungen, 2 vols. [Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1966], 2:89–95; Peter Magee, C. Petrie, R. Knox, and F. Khan, “The Achaemenid Empire in South Asia and Recent Excavations in Akra in Northwest Pakistan,” American Journal of Archaeology 109 [2005]: 711–14). 103 The impact of the Achaemenid Empire in northwestern India built on long-standing connections between Iranian and Indic cultures and may be evident in the inﬂuence of Aramaic on the scripts of the area (esp. Kharoß†hi). See further Magee, “Achaemenid Empire,” 72 Beyond the Land of Nod as well as by interactions with Parthian and Sasanian imperial cultures thereafter.104 Both cities, moreover, were located in regions interlaced with rivers (Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Hydaspes/Jhelum), in areas apt for engagement in maritime and overland trade. And, in both, distinctive scripts and dialects were used to preserve and promote local identities, in interaction with (and in resistance to) multiple imperial cultures.105 It may be tempting to isolate our literary evidence for the representation of cultural difference in Syriac literature from our material evidence for intercultural contacts and cultural commonalities across premodern Eurasia. That something might be missed in the separation of “rhetoric” from “reality,” however, is suggested by the resonance between Syriac Christian images of “the East” and what we know of the connections between the Near East and South Asia. The references to Indians and Sêres in the Acts of Thomas and writings associated with Bardaisan are clearly products of the discursive construction of cultural difference, in interaction with earlier acts of imagination by Greeks and Romans alike. Yet such accounts may nonetheless ground their plausibility in the greater knowledge about (and interest in) Asian cultures current in a cosmopolitan cultural milieu. It is perhaps not coincidental, for instance, that the unusually sharp concern for “eastern” lands in Syriac literature resonates with what we know of (1) the shifting spheres of empire that sometimes entwined the histories of Syria and northwestern India and (2) of the lines of longdistance trade that connected the Roman Near East with the Indian subcontinent in new ways in the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era. Their departures from so-called “classical” accounts may hint at some of the cultural effects of the intensiﬁcation of long-distance Eurasian trade. At the same time, such choices may signal Syriac Christian attempts to forge non-Roman or transimperial identities by drawing on their own 711–41; Witzel, “Brahmanical Reactions,” 460–66; Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11–14, 19–22, 28–30, 42–56; Andrew Glass, “A Preliminary Study of Kharoß†hi Manuscript Paleography” (MA thesis, University of Washington, 2000), esp. 11–20. 104 See further Richard Mann, “The Early Cult of Skanda in North India: From Demon to Divine Son” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2003), esp. 187–209; Suchandra Ghosh, “Revisiting the Early Historical: Understanding Transitions at the Crossroads of Asia, c. Mid Second Century B.C.E. to c. Third Century C.E.,” Studies in History 23 (2007): 289–310. 105 The use of Aramaic and Greek in Taxila, Kandahar, etc., is attested in inscriptions from the Mauryan period. See discussion and references in Salomon, Indian Epigraphy, 133–45, 152–53; Witzel, “Brahmanical Reactions,” 470–71; B. N. Mukherjee, Studies in Aramaic Edicts of Asoka (Calcutta: Indian Museum, 1984). On the persistence of long-standing local traditions in the region, see J. Mark Kenoyer, “New Perspectives on the Mauryan and Kushana Periods,” in Olivelle, Between the Empires, 33–49. On the Indic language of Gandhari, particularly as penned in the Aramaic-derived script of Kharoß†hi, see nn. 82 and 103. See n. 57 on the development of the Syriac dialect of Aramaic. One Line Long History of Religions 73 perspectives on what constituted the known world, its center, and its peripheries. iii. trade, travel, and the eastward spread of syriac christianity So far, we have focused on third-century Edessene materials, considering the ways in which some early Syriac writers both reworked and departed from Greco-Roman ideas about peoples to the east of the Roman Empire. These examples, as we have seen, provide us with a snapshot of the ways in which cultural difference was conceived and represented in one of the many “contact zones” in Eurasia at the dawn of Late Antiquity—in cities where distinctive local cultures evolved amidst shifting imperial borders, shaped by the intercultural contacts enabled by long-distance trade. In this section, I would like brieﬂy to turn to some later texts and traditions, which may speak to the enduring place of a concern for “eastern” peoples within Syriac Christianity. Such examples, as we shall see, shift our focus from the local cultures of “contact zones” to transregional travel and migration; they may thus aid us in bringing yet another perspective to bear on the connections between premodern Eurasian cultures and evolving Christian attempts to make sense of them. In addition, they provide an heuristic lens through which to glimpse yet more of what is effaced by scholarly narratives about the encounter of “East” and “West” that focus on the “classical” and the modern, to the neglect of the centuries between them. a. “nestorian” journeys In a recent article on “hemispheric integration,” Jerry H. Bentley has pointed to the economic and political factors that facilitated the further intensiﬁcation of the transregional connectivity of Eurasia between 500 and 1000 CE: . . . both political and economic foundations facilitated cross-cultural interactions. Political foundations were the large, stable societies organized by centralized imperial states—particularly the Tang empire in China and the Abbasid empire in southwest Asia, and to a lesser extent the Byzantine empire in the eastern Mediterranean basin and even the Carolingian empire in western Europe. The economic foundations were the overland trade networks linking east Asia and the eastern Mediterranean region by the silk roads and the emerging maritime networks of the Indian Ocean basin. . . . Furthermore, technologies of transportation lowered the costs of long-distance trade: the camel increasingly replaced the horse . . . and the establishment of sea lanes and the development of maritime trade networks in the Indian Ocean opened new and cheaper avenues to travel and trade.106 106 Bentley, “Hemispheric Integration,” 240. 74 Beyond the Land of Nod Space does not permit any detailed discussion of trade, conquest, travel, and migration in the multiple regions and empires in which Syriac Christianity spread during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Some sense of the general context nonetheless proves useful, for our purposes, inasmuch as it helps us to situate the movements of Syrian Christians in broader historical, economic, and geographical perspective. The spread of Syriac Christianity has been popularly dramatized as the tale of a small group of “Nestorians” expelled from the Roman Empire as “heretics” and ﬂeeing ever eastwards. Such a narrative, however, skews our understanding both of Syriac Christianity and of its place within cultures east of the Roman Empire. By the sixth century, we can speak of two separate streams of Syriac Christianity, the heirs of which survive to this day. East-Syrian Christianity (what is now called the “Church of the East”) became an ecclesiastical organization independent from the Roman imperial church in the decades after the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, 107 whereas West-Syrian Christianity (what is now called the “Syriac Orthodox Church”) separated from that of Rome after the Council of Chalcedon twenty years later.108 The label “Nestorian” was given to the former by their Latin Christian enemies and West-Syrian competitors (e.g., “Jacobites”), despite the fact that the bishop Nestorius was neither the founder of the movement nor the major ﬁgure in shaping its theology. Although the label remains common in popular parlance, it is widely dismissed in specialist scholarship as inaccurate and misleading.109 For our purposes, the characterization of the “Church of the East” as “heretical” is important to note inasmuch as it has enabled misleading assessments of the status of this form of Christianity in Late Antiquity and beyond. It is true that Christians who frequented the “School of the Persians” in Edessa moved across the Roman–Sasanian border to the nearby city of Nisibis upon the closure of this school in 489 CE.110 In the centuries that followed, however, East-Syrian Christianity became the dominant Christian tradition in the Sasanian Empire, and it was even granted ofﬁcial recognition from some Zoroastrian monarchs.111 The church had its own schools, a developed ecclesiastical structure, and a 107 For an accessible survey of its history, see now Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East (London: Routledge, 2003). 108 On the continued exchange of knowledge between them, see Lucas von Rompay, “La littérature exégétique syriaque et le rapproachment des traditions syrienne-occidentale et syrienne-orientale,” Parole de l’Orient 20 (1995): 221–35. 109 See, esp., Sebastian P. Brock, “The ‘Nestorian’ Church: A Lamentable Misnomer,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 78 (1996): 23–36. 110 Becker, Fear of God, esp. 41–97. 111 See further Sebastian P. Brock, “Christians in the Sasanid Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalties,” in his Syriac Perspectives, V 1–19; Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006), 169–80, 332–83. History of Religions 75 liturgy in Syriac. By the sixth century, moreover, it was already wellestablished on the Indian subcontinent: Indian bishops appear to have been appointed under the authority of the “Church of the East,” in fact, up until the arrival of Portuguese missionaries in the ﬁfteenth century.112 After the fall of the Sasanian Empire, some East-Syrian Christians continued to live in Persian and other lands that came under Islamic rule.113 Others migrated further eastwards into Central and East Asia—as amply evidenced by Chinese literary notices, Syriac tomb inscriptions in Central Asia, and Syriac and Chinese manuscripts found along the “Silk Road” (e.g., at Dunhuang).114 b. syriac christian perspectives on the magi That these changing circumstances had an impact on the images of “eastern” lands and peoples in Syriac literature is suggested by the wealth of traditions about the Magi, as richly examined in a recent article by Witold Witakowski.115 The description of these ﬁgures in the Gospel of Matthew is infamously terse: Matthew notes only that an unspeciﬁed number of Magi/magicians (mavgoi) came “from the East” (a;po; ajnatolΩn) because they saw a star and wished to pay homage to the child born as the king of the Jews/Judaeans (Matt. 2:1–2). Some curiosity about the precise origins of these ﬁgures is evident in the Greek and Latin writings of Christian exegetes in the Roman Empire.116 Justin, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, for instance, speculated that the Magi were Arabs, while Clement and Cyril of Alexandria identiﬁed them as Persians,117 drawing 112 See further E. Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India, trans. E. R. Hambye (Westminster: Newman, 1957); L. W. Brown, The Indian Christians of St. Thomas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); C. Chaillot, The Malankara Orthodox Church (Geneva: Inter-Orthodox Dialogue, 1996); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 113 Baum and Winkler, Church of the East, 42–81. 114 Standaert, Handbook, 1:4–38; W. Klein and J. Tubach, “Ein syrisch-christliches Fragment aus Dunhuang/China,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 144 (1994): 1–13; Maria Adelaide Lala Commeno, “Nestorianism in Central Asia during the First Millennium: Archaeological Evidence,” Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society 11 (1997): 20–67; W. Klein, “A Christian Heritage on the Northern Silk Road: Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence of Christianity in Kyrgystan,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 85–100, and “Syriac Writings and Turkic Language according to Central Asian Tombstone Inscriptions,” Hugoye 5 (2002). 115 Witold Witakowski, “The Magi in Syriac Tradition,” in Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, ed. George A. Kiraz (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2008), 809–44. 116 See further Tim Hegedus, “The Magi and the Star in the Gospel of Matthew and Early Christian Tradition,” Laval théologique et philosophique 59 (2003): 81–95. 117 See, e.g., Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 77; Tertullian, Against the Jews 9; Epiphanius, Expositio Fidei 8; Clement, Stromateis 1.15; Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Isaiah 49.12. Still others suggested that Babylonia was the home of the Magi; e.g., Maximus, On Epiphany 18; Theodotus of Ancyra, Homily 1.10. 76 Beyond the Land of Nod on the depiction of mavgoi as Persian priests in the writings of Herodotus and other ancient Greek authors.118 In quantity and diversity, however, traditions about the Magi preserved in Greek and Latin pale in comparison with those preserved in Syriac. Witakowski observes that “the Syrians possessed a variety of traditions concerning the Magi from the East . . . conspicuous in comparison with the rather uniﬁed and limited developed tradition current in the West”; he stresses, moreover, that “it is also among the Syrians that the most extensive composition on the theme was created.”119 When seen in light of the traditions examined above, these discussions may signal an enduring interest in “eastern” peoples within Syriac Christian historiography and self-deﬁnition.120 At the very least, they draw our attention to the contrast with other Christian worldviews preserved and promoted in Greek and Latin materials. Whereas Christians in the Roman Empire drew on ancient Greek ethnography to explain the Magi’s origins “from the East,” Syriac materials speak to the evolving interpretation of these ﬁgures in light of experiences within imperial cultures east of the Roman Empire. Like their western counterparts, some Syriac Christian exegetes read the Magi of Matthew as Persians. Yet, as Witakowski has demonstrated, their imagining of Persian Magi is far from a mere iteration of ancient Greek ethnographic tropes; East-Syrian Christians were both better informed about Persian religions and more ambivalent towards them.121 As early as Ephrem (ca. 306–73), Syriac Christian exegetes interpreted the Magi through the lens of the Persian culture of their own times and with reference to the practices of Zoroastrian priests.122 Likewise, as Witakowski has shown, late antique and medieval Syriac traditions about the Magi were often shaped by a concern “to show that Jesus’ higher power 118 That is, consistent with the derivation of the Greek term mavgoÍ from Persian magus. For “classical” images of these ﬁgures, see A. de Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 76–120. On the migration of the term, see also Victor Mair, “Old Sinitic *Myag, Old Persian Magus, and English ‘Magician,’ ” Early China 15 (1990): 27–47. 119 Witakowski, “Magi,” 810, 833. European compositions about the Magi emerged later (e.g., the Latin Historia Trium Regum of Johannes von Hildesheim in the fourteenth century; the Old French L’Histoire des trois rois in the ﬁfteenth)—concurrent with the rise of European interest in “the East” discussed above. 120 Note also the place of ancient Assyria in Syriac Christian self-deﬁnition (Becker, “Ancient Near East,” 394–416). 121 Witakowski, “Magi,” 836. 122 See, e.g., Ephrem, Hymns on the Nativity 21–22 (cf. Hymn against Julian 2); and discussion in Witakowski, “Magi,” 816–17, who also notes an echo of older traditions about Mithra in Hymn 21. For text and translation, see Edmund Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate, 2 vols., Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium 186–87 (Louvain: CSCO, 1959), 1:107, 110; Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, trans. Kathleen E. McVey (New York: Paulist, 1989), 175–76. History of Religions 77 over that of ﬁre, thereby symbolizing the Zoroastrian religion’s inferiority to Christianity.”123 Proximity to, and competition with, Zoroastrianism are further signaled by the integration of “Zardost” (i.e., Zarathustra) into tales explaining how the Magi came to have knowledge of the birth of Jesus,124 as well as by the innovation of Persian names for these ﬁgures.125 Following Sebastian Brock, Witakowski thus proposes that these traditions were cultivated particularly by Zoroastrian converts to Christianity in the Sasanian Empire.126 c. imagining the magi in china For our purposes, it will sufﬁce brieﬂy to note two further examples that speak to connections, real and imagined, with peoples even further eastward. Both stand in continuity with Syriac traditions about the Magi cultivated in the course of the appeal to these ﬁgures for Christian selfdeﬁnition vis-à-vis Zoroastrianism. Both, however, may also attest the effects of long-distance trade and travel on evolving images of the Magi and “the East” in Syriac Christianity. The ﬁrst is an intriguing apocryphon preserved in the late eighthcentury Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnin.127 This work, the Revelation of the Magi, claims to record the ﬁrsthand account of the Magi who visited the infant Jesus; it has recently been the subject of a focused study by Brent Landau.128 It bears intriguing points of resonance with earlier Edessene traditions, exhibiting, for instance, an interest in the eastward travels of the apostle Thomas (chaps. 29–31).129 Whereas the Acts of Thomas invokes India, however, the Revelation of the Magi conjures lands even more distant. 123 Witakowski, “Magi,” 820, in the context of discussing an allusion to Zoroastrian priestly practices in the History of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He makes the same point, more generally, on pp. 836–38. 124 See, e.g., Theodore Bar Koni, Livre des scolie, ed. and trans. R. Hespel and R. Draguet, 2 vols., Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium 431–32 (Louvain: CSCO, 1981–82), 1:53–54, 74–75; Book of the Bee §37, ed. and trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (Oxford, 1886); Witakowski, “Magi,” 826–29, 831; Richard J. H. Gottheil, “References to Zoroaster in Syriac and Arabic Literature,” in Classical Studies in Honour of Henry Drisler (New York, 1894), 27–32; J. C. Reeves, “Reconsidering the ‘Prophecy of Zardust,’ ” in A Multi-Form Heritage: Studies on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Robert A. Kraft, ed. Benjamin Wright (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 167–82. 125 Witakowski, “Magi,” 839–43. 126 Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire,” 15; Witakowski, “Magi,” 814, 836–38. 127 Sebastian P. Brock, “Syriac Historical Writing: A Survey of the Main Sources,” in his Studies in Syriac Christianity (Brookﬁeld: Variorum, 1992), 10–13; Witold Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel Mahre (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987). 128 Brent C. Landau, “The Sages and the Star-Child: An Introduction to the Revelation of the Magi: An Ancient Christian Apocryphon” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008); quotations below follow his edition and translation. See also Witakowski, “Magi,” 810–14, 837–38. 129 Landau, “Sages and the Star-Child,” 169–93. 78 Beyond the Land of Nod In the Revelation of the Magi, the Magi are identiﬁed as twelve “sons of eastern kings, in the land of Sir, which is the outermost part of the entire East of the world inhabited by human beings” (2.4; see also 4.1).130 Their realm is located in the “Great East” beside “the great sea that is on the outside of the world, from the east of the land of Nod” (2.4). Inasmuch as the Syriac term for the land of their origin (Sir) corresponds to the term used by Bardaisan as the equivalent of the Greek Sêr, it seems that the Magi are here placed in China.131 The Revelation of the Magi goes on to claim that these far-eastern kings possessed special wisdom, passed down from the very ﬁrst human being, Adam, to his son Seth (2.5–3.7).132 These teachings are said to have been penned in books, which were hidden from the beginning of human history in a cave near the Garden of Eden (4.1). Inasmuch as these kings were entrusted with preserving and reading these books, they are credited with the oldest continuous tradition of writing and reading in the entire world. They are also credited with knowledge about the birth of Jesus: because the Magi possessed primordial books predicting the time and signs of the coming of the messiah, they immediately knew the meaning of the special star that they saw in the sky (4.3–11.7). In the process, the Revelation of the Magi offers an innovative variation on earlier Jewish and Christian traditions about the location of the Garden of Eden. When describing Eden, the biblical book of Genesis refers to four rivers that ﬂow from it: the Gihon, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the river Pishon that encircles the land of Havilah (Gen. 2:8–14). Already in the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era, some Jewish and Christian exegetes had identiﬁed the river Pishon with the Ganges or Indus and the land of Havilah with India.133 There is no early precedent, however, for the location of Eden next to the land of the Sêres. To my knowledge, the only In the list of their names in 2.3 is included “Austazp son of Gudaphar.” Gerrit J. Reinink, “Das Land ‘Seiris’ (Sir) und das Volk der Serer in jüdischen und christlichen Traditionen,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 6 (1975): 72–85. On the implication that Thomas thus traveled to China, see J. Tubach, “Der Apostel Thomas in China: Die Herkunft einer Tradition,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 108 (1997): 58–74. 132 The association of Seth with sacred books suggests that this text’s notion of the eastern land of Sir conﬂates ancient Greek and Syriac views of the Sêres with ancient Jewish and Christian views of “Seiris” (e.g., Josephus, Judaean Antiquities 1.147). See further Reinink, “Land Seiris”; Guy Stroumsa, Another Seed: Studies in Gnostic Mythology (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 115–19. 133 See, e.g., Josephus, Judaean Antiquities 1.37–38; 1.143–47; 8.164; Eusebius, Onomasticon 80.24; Jerome, Epistles 51.5.5, 125.3.2; Commentariorum in Esaiam 6.13; Ambrose, De Paradiso 14; Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram 8.7. The interpretation of Pishon and Havilah as pertaining to India is often linked to the reference in Gen. 10:29–30 to Cush’s son Havilah and the “mountain of the East.” This exegetical tradition also shaped the Christian cartographical tradition, wherein India is often placed at the farthest edge of the world, adjacent to Eden (see sources cited in n. 13). 131 130 History of Religions 79 other late antique literary source to associate Eden and China is the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Christian monk who hailed from Alexandria and who claims to have visited India (see §§47–49). What might account for their shared departure from traditional views of the Garden of Eden as adjacent to India? One possible explanation is that both texts took form among Christians who were more familiar with South and East Asian geography than their counterparts in Latin Christendom.134 In other words, they may have known enough about the Indian subcontinent to know that it was not at the edge of the world—and adjusted their sacred geographies accordingly. On one level, the Revelation of the Magi stands in the long tradition of Jewish and Christian attempts to integrate newly known lands and peoples into the traditional framework of biblical geography and history (esp. Genesis 2, 10). Like Cosmas’s Christian Topography, it does so on the basis of a broader body of geographical knowledge than seems to have been current in Europe. This particular case may also reﬂect something of the self-consciously “eastern” perspectives noted above. As in the Acts of Thomas, the Christian past is here retold so as to integrate the variety of cultures familiar to its Syriac Christian authors/redactors but not mentioned in their scriptures—albeit in ways that simultaneously project their own vistas onto an imagined Christian world much broader than the bounds of any empire. Unfortunately, the date and setting of the Revelation of the Magi prove difﬁcult to pinpoint; although we can posit a Syrian or Persian provenance, its precise origins remain uncertain. Landau proposes that the work took form between the second and fourth centuries CE, at roughly the same time as the Acts of Thomas, while Witakowski argues for a midfourth-century date for an early form and emphasizes the Sasanian milieu in which Syriac traditions about the Magi ﬂourished.135 Given the complex 134 With regard to Cosmas, his own travels may or may not account for this knowledge, which could reﬂect information garnered from his Alexandrian milieu and/or from his studies with a Syriac Christian teacher from Persia. See further Mayerson, “Confusion of Indias,” 169–70; Milton V. Anastos, “The Alexandrian Origin of the ‘Christian Topography’ of Cosmas Indicopleustes,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 3 (1946): 76–77; W. Wolska-Conus, ed., Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographie Chretienne, 3 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 1:17. For the location of Eden in eastern Africa, compare also Expositio totius Mundi 8 (also from Roman Syria), and see discussion in Scaﬁ, Mapping Paradise, 89; I am grateful to the anonymous reader for bringing this parallel to my attention. 135 Landau suggests that its core was composed in the late second or early third century and was later redacted in a Syriac version of the third or fourth century, possibly in Edessa, primarily through the addition of material about Thomas (“Sages and the Star-Child,” 18, 132–68). Witakowski limits himself to positing a date for the hypothetical Urschrift shared with Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum (“Magi,” 813–14). 80 Beyond the Land of Nod textual history of the Revelation of the Magi, another option is to posit a later date for the present form of the work—or, more speciﬁcally, for its reference to Sir as the homeland of the Magi. Inasmuch as this reference is missing from the parallel material preserved in the ﬁfth-century Latin Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, the possibility arises that it may have entered the textual tradition at a later date, perhaps closer in time to Cosmas. By then, the Indian subcontinent would have been familiar enough to East-Syrian Christians to shed doubt on its proximity to the primordial lands surrounding the Garden of Eden. China, by contrast, was perhaps close enough to be known and yet far enough to remain mysterious. Reference to the land of the Sêres might have allowed for the integration of yet another distant land into the sacred geography of Syriac Christianity, while at the same time developing the appeal to the “eastern” wisdom in Syriac Christian self-deﬁnition. Whatever the precise date of the present form of the Revelation of the Magi, it remains that its reference to China would have had even more resonance in the eighth century, at the time of its integration into the Chronicle of Zuqnin. Whereas earlier Syriac Christian exegetes had drawn on biblical traditions about the Magi to negotiate Christianity’s relationship to the ofﬁcial Zoroastrian religion of the Sasanian Empire, such a concern might not have been so pressing after the fall of that empire and the absorption of formerly Sasanian territories into new Islamic empires. By the eighth century, moreover, East-Syrian Christians had traveled into parts of Central and East Asia, and they had even established settlements and churches in some Chinese cities. When considering evidence for the establishment of churches in China during the Tang dynasty, scholars often point to the so-called “Nestorian” stele of Xi’an of 781 CE.136 For our purposes, the Chinese and Syriac inscriptions on the Xi’an stele also prove signiﬁcant as eighth-century evidence for evolving views of the Magi and “the East” in East-Syrian Christianity. These inscriptions, after all, celebrate the “Brilliant Teaching of Da Qin” (i.e., Christianity) in part by recounting the tale of “Persians” who saw a star and traveled westwards to pay tribute to the sage Jesus born of a virgin in Da Qin (1.4).137 136 The inscription attests the entry of Christianity into China by 638 CE; see discussion and references in Standaert, Handbook, 1:3–4. Citations here follow the English translation in James Legge, The Nestorian Monument of Hsî-an Fû (1888; repr., New York: Paragon, 1966). On the stele’s European reception, see now Michael Keevak, The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). 137 On the possible reasons for the shift in the Chinese term for Christianity from the “Persian teaching” (Bose jiao) to “Da Qin teaching” (Da Qin jiao), see T. H. Barrett, “Buddhism, Taoism and the Eighth-Century Chinese Term for Christianity,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65 (2002): 555–60 esp. n. 7. History of Religions 81 As is well known, Da Qin is attested already in the late Han period as a Chinese term for parts of the Roman Empire, and it is identiﬁed with Byzantium (Fulin) in some texts from the Sui and Tang.138 Yet, as T. H. Barrett has recently stressed, its meanings went beyond geography: not only could it denote a far-western “counter-China,” but “Da Qin is mentioned in Taoist literature before the Tang precisely to provide an example of a speciﬁcally Taoist utopia.”139 In the Liexian zhuan, for instance, Laotzi is said to have visited both India and Da Qin.140 Just as travel to distant lands is paired with the celebration of wisdom in Greek traditions about the journeys of Alexander and Apollonius to India and in Syriac traditions about the journeys of Thomas to India and China, so too perhaps in Taoist traditions about the westward journeys of Laotzi.141 What is signiﬁcant, for our purposes, is that East-Syrian Christians in Tang China shared a view of the “mysterious West” with their Taoist contemporaries—and, moreover, used this idea to promote Christianity within a Chinese cultural milieu (esp. 2.9). In the Xi’an stele inscriptions, moreover, the romanticization of Da Qin is intertwined with the concern for “eastern” cultures in the Syriac traditions examined above. Here, for instance, the Magi are called “Persians” (1.4) in a manner consistent both with earlier Syriac biblical exegesis and with the probable Persian origins of the Christian community in China. Moreover, as in the Revelation of the Magi, the description of the westward travels of the Magi is mirrored by an account of the eastward travels of Christian missionaries. Just as the Revelation of the Magi connects the eastward travels of Thomas with the eastern origins and westward voyage of the Magi (16.1–18.8; 19.6; 21.5; 29.1–31.10), so the inscriptions on the Xi’an stele draw a parallel with the Persian bishop here credited with introducing Christianity to China: the journey of the Magi is said to have been replicated in reverse by the bishop Alopên—who saw signs in the sky that prompted him to 138 Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “Review Article: The Roman Empire as Known to Han China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1999): 71–79; cf. D. D. Leslie and K. H. J. Gardiner, The Roman Empire in Chinese Sources (Rome: University of Rome, 1996). 139 Barrett, “Buddhism, Taoism,” 557–58. Pulleyblank similarly stresses that “the Chinese conception of Dà Qín was confused from the outset with ancient mythological notions about the far west” (“Roman Empire,” 78). 140 Barrett, “Buddhism, Taoism,” 558; Max Kaltenmark, Le Lie-sien tchouan: Biographies légendaires des immortels taoïstes de l’antiquité (Peking: Centre d’Études Sinologiques, 1953), 61, 64, 66. 141 On the implications vis-à-vis Buddhism, see Barrett, “Buddhism, Taoism,” 557–58. On Buddhist long-distance travel, see discussion and references in Neelis, “Long-Distance Trade,” esp. 34–37. Note also early Buddhist travelogues, e.g., Samuel Beal, trans., Si-Yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 629), 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1884); James Legge, trans., A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of his travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399–414) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886). 82 Beyond the Land of Nod set upon his own voyage eastward, traveling to China in order to found churches there (2.7). Just as East-Syrian Christians in Sasanian Persia used the Magi as a locus for reﬂection on Christianity’s relationship to Zoroastrianism, so East-Syrian Christians in Xi’an appealed to these same ﬁgures to articulate their place in a dominantly Taoist milieu. d. east-syrian christians and the “rediscovery” of “the east” The fortunes of East-Syrians in China, as of those in Syria and Persia, would rise and fall with the political shifts of emperors and dynasties. What is signiﬁcant, for our purposes, is that East-Syrian Christians were prominent in the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century—precisely at the time when Europeans ﬁrst “rediscovered” the purportedly forgotten “silk people.”142 In light of the traditions surveyed above, it is perhaps not surprising that East-Syrian Christians might play a mediatory role in the encounter between Mongols and Europeans. The Mongol embassy to Rome in 1287– 88, for instance, was led by Rabban Sauma, an East-Syrian Christian born in Beijing. Just as European travelers published accounts of their eastward journeys in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so too was the tale of Rabban Sauma’s westward journey recorded in a fourteenth-century text, now extant in a Syriac translation of the original Persian.143 As in the Xi’an stele, it is here “the West” that is perceived and presented as an exotic land of wonder at the far end of the world, in a manner not unlike the representation of “the East” in contemporaneous European accounts of voyages to South and East Asia. Furthermore, even in the thirteenth century, some Christians in Europe seem to have been aware of their Asian coreligionists. When van Rubroek set out on his journey to ﬁnd the Mongols, for instance, he brought with him a letter penned in Syriac, apparently assuming that Syriac-speaking Christians might be found even in furthest corners of “the Far East.”144 That this suspicion was conﬁrmed is clear from the accounts of van Rubroek and later European travelers to South and East Asia, in which reference is often made to encounters with Christians native to those lands. Such accounts and encounters, however, were consistently ﬁltered through the polemical stereotype of East-Syrian Christianity noted above, 142 Standaert, Handbook, 1:43–98; Lieu, Manichaeism in Central Asia and China, 177–98. James A. Montgomery, The History of Yaballaha III and of His Vicar Bar Sauma (1927; repr., Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006); E. A. Wallis Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan (London: Religious Tract Society, 1928). 144 See, e.g., Rockhill, Journey of William of Rubruck, 105. See further Baum and Winkler, Church of the East, 81–93; Charles F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton, eds., Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). 143 One Line Short History of Religions 83 namely, as the “heresy” of “Nestorianism.” Van Rubroek, for instance, dismissed the Christians whom he met in the Mongol Empire as “Nestorians,” and he depicted them as wayward in their rituals and ethics.145 Likewise, even as the tales of Marco Polo lauded the rediscovery of India as the rediscovery of the land visited by the apostle Thomas, Odoric of Pordenone emphasized that the Christians there had become “Nestorians” and, hence, were “vile and pestilent heretics.”146 Accordingly, in the centuries that followed, European missionaries often counted proponents of East-Syrian Christianity as among those Asian peoples purportedly in need of conversion.147 Arguably, echoes of such assessments can still be heard in research on the history of contacts between “Eastern” and “Western” cultures.148 In studies of interreligious contacts along the so-called “Silk Road,” for instance, it is still common to ﬁnd the language of “excommunication,” “expulsion,” or “deportation” used to describe the missionary travels and migrations of East-Syrian Christians.149 The movement of “Nestorians” eastward and the presence of “Nestorianism” throughout Asia are often noted, but encounters with “Nestorians” and “Nestorianism” tend to be distinguished from encounters with “Christians” and “Christianity”—the latter of which are deﬁned in terms of Europe.150 Placed in historical perspective, the eastward journeys of East-Syrian Christians may be better understood in terms of political and economic shifts across Eurasia during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages—such as the large-scale migration of various peoples in the wake of the conquests of shifting empires and the broadening of the feasible scope of journeys of migration, mission, and pilgrimage concurrent with the intensiﬁcation of trade and with technological advances in long-distance See, e.g., Rockhill, Journey of William of Rubruck, 142–45, 168–78, 234–43. See further van den Bosch, “India,” 145–48; Neill, History of Christianity in India, 75. 147 Note especially the Synod of Diamper. See further Baum and Winkler, Church of the East, 112–15; Neill, History of Christianity in India, 208–19; John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 148 In a recent book on the “Silk Road,” for instance, the chapter on Syriac-speaking merchants and missionaries bears the title “A Refuge of Heretics” (Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road, 61). 149 That is, mapping the life story of Nestorius onto the history of so-called “Nestorianism.” 150 For a recent example of this broader pattern, see Frances Wood, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 118– 19; similarly, when considering the possible inﬂuences that shaped Pure Land Buddhism, Julian Pas deﬁnes “Nestorianism” simply as “a Christian heresy repudiated by the ofﬁcial church” (Visions of Sukhavati [Albany: SUNY Press, 1995], 315–18). Notably, the distinction between “Christian” and “Nestorian” can be found already in early modern travelogues (e.g., Rockhill, Journey of William of Rubruck, 116, 141–42, 168). 146 145 84 Beyond the Land of Nod travel.151 Yet, despite the potential value of Syriac texts and traditions for illumining the cultural effects of such developments, this material has been largely ignored, not least because of the assumption that EastSyrian Christianity is something other than “Christianity.” iv. conclusions As we have seen, familiar narratives about the “Western” encounter with “the East” do not sufﬁce to account for Syriac Christianity, either in its early Edessene forms or its late antique and medieval developments in Persia, India, and China. Whereas modern ideas about “the West” are sometimes coterminous with Christianity, the Syriac evidence draws our attention to the self-consciously “eastern” identities of some early Christians in Edessa, as well as to the eastward travels, migrations, and settlements of their late antique and medieval heirs. As such, this evidence may aid us in recovering some of what has been lost in the marginalization of multiple Christianities from the dominant scholarly narratives about the history of this religion. It may also point us, more broadly, towards what is missed when we reconstruct the history of premodern Eurasia primarily on the basis of those languages and literatures that came to be privileged as “classical.”152 In addition, attention to Syriac evidence may help to expose some of the enduring effects of older ideas about the (European) center and (nonEuropean) peripheries of world history on our understanding of interactions between religions in premodern times. We have seen, for instance, how the presumption of the centrality of the Roman Empire in scholarship on premodern Christianity has fostered the view of Syriac and other “churches of the East” as doctrinally deviant, on the one hand, and as geographically and historically peripheral, on the other. Such tendencies may have also distracted from the potential value of Syriac and other Christian sources to illumine the premodern history of Christianity and its place in the religious landscapes of an interconnected Eurasia. Moreover, whereas modern ideas about “Western Civilization” have naturalized a notion of ancient Greek learning as the “classical” heritage of modern Europeans, our evidence for Syriac Christianity highlights the varied afterlives of ancient Greek learning on and beyond the borders of the Roman Empire—and in languages other than Greek and Latin. In 151 On trade, travel, and the spread of Buddhism, e.g., see Neelis, “Long-Distance Trade,” esp. 491–553; Xinru Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1–600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Charles Holcombe, “Trade-Buddhism: Maritime Trade, Immigration, and the Buddhist Landfall in Early Japan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (1999): 280–92. 152 So Fergus Millar, “Redrawing the Map?” in Cotton and Rogers, Greek World, Jews, and the East, 3:491–95. History of Religions 85 older scholarship, Syriac literature was often deemed signiﬁcant as a source for recovering the “Semitic Christianity” of Jesus.153 By contrast, recent research has pointed to the profound place of ancient Greek language and learning in Syrian Christian literary cultures, as well as to the impact of Hellenism on Syrian and other Near Eastern cities.154 This is consistent with what we have seen of the references to South and East Asia in early Syriac materials: they betray indebtedness towards ancient Greek traditions, even when they seek to supersede them. In this, Syrian Christian elites were not alone: a similar ambivalence is found among late antique Roman and Jewish elites, no less than in medieval Byzantine, Islamic, and European literary cultures. Our Syriac evidence may offer us, then, a glimpse into one small part of a broader story of the reception of ancient Greek traditions—of which their reception in western Europe is also only a small part.155 Scholars of Asian religions and cultures may be correct to stress the relative lack of interest among medieval European Christians in learning accurate details about the geography and cultures of the Indian subcontinent, let alone about the Sêres and their silk.156 In Latin Christendom, only a small fraction of earlier Greek writings about India lived on, and the land of the Sêres was largely forgotten.157 Fanciful tales about strange peoples at the end of the earth were transmitted and embellished, but most of the results of ancient Greek ethnography and Greco-Roman cartography appear to have been lost. Too often, however, scholars have explained this situation simply with appeal to the “Christian” suspicion of nonreligious learning and/or to the medieval loss of “classical” knowledge—painting a picture of the Christian Middle Ages that enables the presentation of early modern encounters 153 Just as modern scholarly images of South and East Asian societies echo the European reinterpretation of “classical” ideas about “Greek-ness” and its “Others,” so too with scholarly images of Syriac Christianity: in this case, inﬂuential was the interpretation of the ancient Greek contrast between “Greek” and “barbarian” in terms of dichotomies such as “Greek”/ “Jew” and “Greek thought”/“Semitic thought.” Note, e.g., Francis Crawford Burkitt’s Early Christianity Outside the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), which culls Syriac evidence for traces of a primitive Christianity “free and innocent” from “the ill-matched union of Greek and Semitic thought” (9). On this tendency, more broadly, see Adam H. Becker, “Doctoring the Past in the Present: E. A. Wallis Budge, the Discourse on Magic, and the Colonization of Iraq,” History of Religions 44 (2005): 195–99. 154 See n. 58 above. 155 I am grateful to Adam H. Becker for pushing me on this point. 156 See, e.g., Donald Frederick Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1: The Century of Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), bk. 1, 20. 157 Note especially the Nachleben of the Alexander Romance, on which see Richard Stoneman, Legends of Alexander the Great (Rutland: J. M. Dent and Charles E. Tuttle, 1994); the Vita Apollonii and Acts of Thomas also circulated in the Latin West, as did the traditions from the Book of the Laws of the Countries integrated into the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions. 86 Beyond the Land of Nod as something radically different.158 Yet it is perhaps not so much that ancient Greek wisdom, Roman trade contacts, or ancient “Western” curiosity about “the East” were “lost” during the Middle Ages. Rather, detailed knowledge of India and China may have not penetrated in any pronounced fashion from the eastern Mediterranean centers of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine empires into the distant lands of Germanic, French, and British peoples on their northern and western fringes during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.159 Elsewhere, however, many such traditions were being actively transmitted, supplemented, and updated in light of new information, garnered from new connections and contacts. That the elite encounter with “classical” culture forms only one element of Syriac Christian tradition and self-deﬁnition is also amply clear from the materials surveyed above. Fergus Millar has noted how the cities in the Roman Near East that were the most “Hellenized” in the ﬁrst centuries of the Common Era were also those marked by the most contact with regions east of the Roman Empire.160 Seen from the standpoint of the usual contrast between “East” and “West,” this may appear paradoxical. Yet, when we reorient our cultural and religious histories along the lines suggested by studies of trade, it makes sense that Hellenistic traditions might ﬂourish precisely in those cities most shaped by the ﬂow of traditions from multiple regional, religious, and imperial cultures.161 The enduring power of the local cultures wrought in such cities, moreover, is suggested by the late antique, medieval, and modern evidence for Syriac Christianities shaped by their Edessene origins and by the exegesis of Jewish and Christian scriptures, but also by their interactions with a variety of imperial cultures—Zoroastrian, Islamic, and Taoist alike. Just as the Syriac Christian evidence challenges our conventional notions of the encounter between “the West” and “the East,” so it may also undermine the very notion of a distinction. At the outset, we noted how modern scholarship on Asian religions and cultures took form in interaction with evolving views of “the West” (1) as the prime focus of world history (i.e., as the only “civilization” subject to change and as the crucible of modernization) and (2) as the sole heir to “classical” learning See, e.g., Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, bk. 1, 20–30. See, e.g., Ram Chandra Prasad, Early English Travelers in India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1965), xxix–xxxii. 160 Millar, Roman Near East, 492, 510, 518–21. 161 As Butcher notes when surveying numismatic evidence for Syrian identities more broadly: “what emerges . . . is an insistence on the local and the particular, which the discourse of opposition, between generalized identities like ‘Greek’ and ‘indigenous,’ or the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West,’ obscure rather than illuminate” (Kevin Butcher, “Information, Legitimation, or Self-Legitimation? Popular and Elite Designs of the Coin Types of Syria,” in Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, ed. Christopher Howgego et al. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 151). 159 158 History of Religions 87 and its purported intellectual hegemony (i.e., as the privileged agents of scholarly analysis, for which other cultures are passive objects of categorization, understanding, recovery, etc.). As also noted above, similar patterns can be found in the history of research on Syriac Christianity: whether celebrated or ignored, it has been typically treated as peripheral to a story of the development of Christianity that has its presumed center in Rome and its purported culmination in Europe.162 The Syriac sources provide an alternate perspective, shaped by more expansive vistas onto the cultural and religious landscapes of premodern Eurasia. Consequently, they may aid us in reorienting our own perspectives on the past—away from the older ideas of center and periphery inscribed in Eurocentric world histories and towards perspectives more ﬁtting with what we now know of the constellation of connections sparked by conquest, trade, and travel. Seen from the perspective of the Syriac sources, moreover, the “post-classical” era was hardly a dark age in the history of interactions between “East” and “West.” Rather, it was an era in which Christians lived and ﬂourished within a variety of empires across Asia, formulating in the process a rich variety of ideas about the diverse cultures of the known world and the wisdom, genealogies, and histories that connect them. 162 Notably, fresh attention has been brought to this and other “churches of the East” in the wake of the recent explosion of interest in contemporary non-European Christianities, particularly in the wake of Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Many such studies are shaped, however, by older tendencies towards romanticization (e.g., Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia— and How It Died [New York: Harper, 2008]).

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