鲍默《东方教会：亚述基督教图史》第二章：东叙利亚基督教的起源（中英文对照版）

The Beginnings of

East Syrian Christianity II

The political and religious situation on both sides of the Euphrates

Ctesiphon, the future see of the Church of the East.3 Since the Parthian expansion to the west occurred simultaneously with the Roman advance towards the east, a clash between the two ambitious powers was unavoidable. In 92BCE they agreed to the Euphrates as a shared border. The Parthian initiation of diplomatic relations with Rome, as well as with China, helped foster trade along the Silk Road, which included a 1600-kilometre stretch through Parthia.

The homeland of the Church of the East lies in Mesopotamia, the region bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.1 Since the Church has its roots in Mesopotamia and the bordering country of Iran, while Christianity began in the Roman vassal kingdom of Judea and spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, we will offer a brief analytical overview of the states on both sides of the Euphrates.2

The first Roman advance across the Euphrates ended in catastrophe in 53BCE. The Roman triumvir Crassus sought for himself the same glory that his co-rulers Julius Caesar and Pompey had achieved. Instead, at Carrhae, south of Edessa, Rome suffered one of its most humil- iating defeats, and Crassus lost his life. Three decades later Emperor Augustus and King Phraates IV ended a war neither could win and, in 20BCE, recognized the Euphrates as the border, thus beginning the Pax Romana. The river became the place where East and West met – whether in friendship or in rivalry. For the spread of Christianity and for the history of the Church of the East, this border took on a fateful significance. Although Roman armies crossed the river repeatedly in the second and third centuries and conquered Seleucia-Ctesiphon, they had to retreat every time.4 Politically and culturally, Mesopotamia remained part of Asia.

Parthia – empire to the east of the Euphrates

About one hundred years after Alexander the Great led the Greeks to the edge of the world known to the West, a powerful opposing force of Iranian peoples advanced from Asia. One of these was the Parthians, relatives of the Indo-European Scythians, whose homeland extended from the Aral Sea to the Caspian Sea. Around 247BCE they conquered north-eastern Iran and advanced gradually to the west, until they captured the city of Seleucia on the Tigris in 141BCE. Around 55BCE King Orodes II reinforced the military camp of Ctesiphon, on the opposite bank of the river from Seleucia, thus forming the double city of Seleucia-

The mosque built by Caliph Marwan II (ruled 744–750) on the ruins of a Christian church in Carrhae (Harran).2 Carrhae was not only a Nestorian diocese but also the seat of a famous university, where mathematics and Chaldean astrology were taught.3 At Carrhae Rome suffered two serious defeats at the hands of its Iranian archenemies: in 53BCE the Parthians defeated the triumvir Crassus, and in 260CE Shapur I took Emperor Valerian prisoner. Carrhae, like Nisibis, Amida (Dyarbakir) and Aleppo, was plundered and destroyed by the Mongols in 1260.4

The cultural policy of the Parthians was, until the start of the Common Era, hellenophile. In addition to the Parthian language of Arcasid Pahlavi, Greek and Aramaic remained in use. In the realm of religion, Greco-Roman deities were popular with the ruling family, until a nationalistic resistance movement from the Persian heartland led to a revival of the old Iranian beliefs of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism. The Parthians then fostered the building of fire temples and began to collect the Zoroastrian traditions that were later codified in the Avesta.5 many followers in the Roman Empire that in the second and third centuries it was one of the chief rivals of early Christianity. Mithra was the chief deity of the pre-Zoroastrian Iranian pantheon. He was worshipped as the god of the sun, light and war, as well as the god of justice and the patron of treaties. In Zoroastrianism, he supported Ahura Mazda in his battle against evil. In the Hellenistic context he was identified with the sun god Helios, and in Roman belief with Sol Invictus, which made him the favourite god of the army. The goal of the Mithra mysteries, widely popular in the Roman Empire, was to free the soul, which had been born in heaven, from the constraints of the body and to return it, via the seven cosmic spheres, to its origin.6 On the whole, a spirit of religious tolerance

While the spread of Zoroastrianism was confined to the Parthian-Iranian cultural sphere, the cult of the ancient Indo-Iranian god Mithra, widespread in Iran, crossed the cultural boundary of the Euphrates and won over so

predominated among the Parthians, which helped enable the rapid spread of Christianity. of asceticism, Gnosticism and apocalypticism, especially popular among Jews, offered a counterweight to the increasing loss of spiritual direction. Roman religion had long since ossified, since it provided no moral principles, no way of salvation, no possibility for a personal relationship with the divinity, and no emotional home in a faith community. It functioned, at best, as the personified ideal of civil life and the state. At worst, it deteriorated into a cult of the ruler, the idolization of a living person, which began with Emperor Nero and under Domitian was required of all citizens. In 85CE Domitian began presumptuously signing documents as ‘Lord and God’.7

Rome – empire to the west of the Euphrates

The republican structure of Rome did not survive the autocratic rule of Julius Caesar and the subsequent struggles for power. Under Octavian (ruled 29BCE–14CE) – who adopted the honourific Augustus, ‘the exalted’ – Rome became an empire. Rome remained the sole capital of the empire until 324CE, when Emperor Constantine I (ruled 312–337), for strategic reasons, made the city of Byzantium on the Bosporus into a second, new capital, thus shifting the imperial centre of gravity to the east. Constantine I took this step for two reasons. First, increasing military pressure from the Goths and Sarmatians on the Danube and the Sassanians on the Euphrates called for the presence of the emperor and the organs of government close to the threatened eastern border. Second, the new capital controlled the maritime trade with Egypt and the Middle East, as well as the continental trade routes that linked Europe with Asia. Imperial unity collapsed towards the end of the fourth century, when Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379–395) divided the empire between his two sons, giving Arkadios the east and Honorius the west. Although the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, the Eastern Roman Empire, also called the Byzantine Empire, persisted until 1453.

Since no god, except for the Jewish, made a claim of absoluteness, the gods became inter- changeable. ‘The various cults were regarded by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the authorities as equally useful.’ 8 The twilight of the Greco-Roman gods must surely have provided fertile ground for extensive doctrines of salvation. One was the cult of Mithra, which, as Sol Invictus and his values of justice, duty and discipline, enjoyed particular approval among soldiers. The sole worship of the unconquerable sun god, who rose anew each dawn from the darkness of the night, had an affinity with the need for overcoming religious randomness and for a universal god. The Mithra cult was a preliminary, non-metaphysical step towards a monotheistic religion – a monolatry. The popularity of Mithra can be seen in Emperor Constantine’s 333 declaration of 25 December, the traditional birthday of Sol Invictus, as the day of Jesus Christ’s birth.9 Already in 321, Constantine had declared the Day of the Sun an official Christian holiday.10

The expansion of Roman rule from the Roman-Hellenistic heartland to Asia and Africa led to unprecedented cosmopolitanism and religious syncretism. Militarily and economically, Rome was the victor, but in the realm of religion, it bowed to the vanquished. Such foreign deities as Isis and Osiris, Cybele and Attis, and, above all, Mithra, captured the hearts of the people with their mystery cults. But also the movements

In the region surrounding the principality of Orhay (Edessa), which claimed for itself the title of the first Christian state in the world, there was also a latent monotheism. There the god Marilaha was worshipped as the universal Lord-

God. This proto-monotheism first paved the way for the success of Judaism in Edessa. Since there were in Edessa, as in all of Syria and western Mesopotamia, numerous examples of divine triads,11 the environment was again peculiarly receptive to Christianity, as it enriched these two concepts with the figure of a divine–human mediator and made them more accessible. of Jerusalem. Thus the Jews had to find a means to bridge the chasm between the claim to be the one chosen people of the one God, and the political reality. Responses ranged from that of the Zealots, who called for a holy war against Rome (they awaited the messiah as military commander), to those of the Pharisees, who promoted literal obedience of Mosaic Law; of the Hellenized and pro-Roman Sadducees; and of the numerous penitential preachers and communities anticipating the apocalypse.

The Church of the East owed its rapid expansion in Mesopotamia to the Jewish Diaspora as well, for the earlier missionary efforts to the east of the Euphrates, which presumably began towards the end of the first century, met with particular approval in Jewish circles. The numerically significant Jewish Diaspora in Mesopotamia, which included nearly a million people, had resulted from the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.12 First, in 722BCE, the Assyrians conquered Samaria and deported the ten tribes of Israel to the region of the two great rivers. Then, in 587BCE, the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem and resettled the Jewish upper classes in Babylonia. Simultaneously, many Jews left the ravaged land for Syria and Asia Minor. Although some of the Jews who lived in Babylon slowly returned to Judea following Cyrus II’s victory over Babylonia in 538BCE, the ten tribes remained ‘lost’. This led a few Protestant missionaries, who ‘rediscovered’ the Nestorians of Kurdistan in 1831, to consider them the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel.13 The defeat of the second Jewish uprising of 132– 135CE resulted in an additional wave of Jewish immigration to Parthian Mesopotamia, but also to Arabia and India.

Even though Judaism taught a clear, unambiguous message, for the majority of non-Jewish people, seeking a meaningful and living religiosity, it was unable to offer a viable alternative. Yahweh was, after all, a unique god for his chosen people; birth determined whether an individual belonged among the chosen or the lost. For this reason the prophet Ezra, after the return from the Babylonian exile, forbade mixed marriages with members of non-Jewish peoples and ordered the expulsion of foreign women.15 The circumcision of adult men – a life- threatening procedure in those days – presented a further obstacle to eventual conversion. The later relaxation of these rules enabled successful Jewish missionary activity, as in, e.g., southern Arabia and Yemen. The rejection of circumcision for Gentile Christians, as enforced by Paul, and the emphasis on God as Lord of all people, transcending racial and national affiliations, prepared the way for the teachings of Jesus to achieve success as a world religion. National chosenness metamorphosed into universal chosenness, open to all orthodox believers.

As far as Judea was concerned, it looked for almost a century as if the eschatological vision was being fulfilled, according to which the God of Israel, who was originally also worshipped as Yahweh Zebaoth, the Lord of armies,14 would create in favour of Israel a new world order under the Maccabees. But in 63BCE Pompey brought this dream to an end with the conquest

Paul in Antioch and the broadening of paleo-Christianity community of faith open to all; the old Mosaic criteria had become irrelevant. Paul, Barnabas and Titus travelled to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles James, Peter and John of Zebedee. This Apostolic Council of the year 4821 largely confirmed Paul’s position, adding only four minor qualifications.22 Thanks to Paul’s wisdom, Jesus’ teaching was transformed from one of the countless Jewish messianic sects into a universal religion transcending ethnic particularities. Expressed in simple terms, the faithful are born into Judaism, but received into Christianity.

As a starting and ending point of the Silk Road, Antioch – the third-largest city in the Roman Empire – enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. The first Christians came to Antioch in the course of the flight resulting from the stoning of Stephen in 35CE.16 There, around the year 40, the Greek term christianoi, Christian person, was used to distinguish the Greek-speaking Christians of Gentile origin from the Jewish Christians, called Nazarenes.17 This distinction recalls the profound disagreement that shook the Christian community of Antioch, led by Peter and Barnabas, around 43/45. The dispute centred on the rejection of non-Jewish Christians by the Jewish Christians. The latter, supported by envoys of James, the Lord’s brother, and by Peter, believed that the Mosaic purity laws, dietary guidelines and the obligation of circumcision applied to Gentile Christians as well.18 The Jewish Christians saw in the rejection of circumcision a betrayal of God’s covenant with Israel and thus refused to share the communal liturgical table with uncircumcised Gentile Christians.

Although the Apostolic Council resolved the question of circumcision within the Roman Empire, the issue re-emerged among the Nestorians of Mesopotamia after the seventh century as a result of the Arab conquest. Islamic scholars reproached Christians for failing to have themselves circumcised, as their prophet Jesus had been. They replied that baptism had replaced circumcision, as Christ had abolished the latter by his own baptism. Neither an external sign nor ritual cleansings were crucial for the covenant with God, but rather the symbolic death and resurrection in baptism and the inner purity of the heart. ‘What good does it do a darkened house to have lamps on its outer walls while the rooms within remain unlit?’23 Regarding the replacement of circumcision with baptism, the East Syrian metropolitan Odisho of Nisibis (1250–1318) wrote, ‘The Jews had to distinguish themselves bodily from the other heathens, since God had determined that the messiah would appear among their descendants. In the same way [like circumcision] a man marks his camels, sheep and horses, to distinguish his possessions from those of strangers. The baptism of true believers [however] encompasses the mystery of death and resurrection. For immersion in an abyss of water is similar to death, as one no longer has senses, as when one is buried in the earth. The emergence from the water is the symbol of resurrection,

Paul recognized the danger of a split within the nascent Christian community and vehemently opposed the rejection of the communal meal. Following the path of Jesus’s preaching, he declared that the inner spirit of the mind and interpersonal relationships were more important than cultic purity. By turning his attention to Jews and Arabs, to scholars, fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus abolished the distinction, fundamental in Judaism, between pure and impure persons. Salvation depended not on circumcision but rather on baptism and belief in Jesus and his redeeming power.19 ‘There is no longer Jew and Greek, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.’ 20 The new chosen people is a

shown by the interpretation of the destruction of the Temple in 70. Christians, as well as Jews, considered it a judgement of God, but for different reasons: for the former, it was the just punishment for having carried out the crucifixion of Christ; for the latter, it expressed God’s anger over faulty observance of Mosaic Law.27 Not least, the successful proselytization in the Jewish communities provoked the official condemnation of Christians by the Jewish academy at Jamnia around the year 80.28 The conflict growing out of the desire to lay claim to the heritage of the Jewish tradition while simultaneously disassoc- iating oneself from contemporary Judaism led to a position critical of the Jews, which was also found in the Church of the East. In the second century this conflict resulted in the founding of a rival Church by Marcion.29

St Peter’s cave church in Antakya, Turkey, formerly Antioch. As a starting and ending point of the ancient Silk Road, Antioch was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of the Roman Empire. From here traders travelled to China via the cities of Edessa, Nisibis, Seleucia- Ctesiphon, Ray (Teheran) and Merv – all early and important dioceses of the Church of the East. The grotto of Peter is a natural cave, which, according to tradition, the evangelist Luke gave to the young Christian community. Paul, Barnabas and Peter are said to have preached here. The facade, built by the Crusaders after 1098, was restored in 1863. Today the grotto of Peter belongs to the Catholic Church and is looked after by Capuchins.5

Christianity crosses the Euphrates

The traditions of Mar Thoma, Mar Addai and Mar Aggai, and the correspondence of King Abgar of Edessa with Jesus Christ

The question of when the Church of the East began, defined as the start of missionary activity east of the Euphrates, leads directly to the conflict between Nestorian tradition and the testimony of textual criticism. No fewer than ten names appear among those who claim to have been the first to carry the Good News to the east. Tradition and scholarship do concur, at least, regarding where Christianity first took hold, namely in Edessa (Urfa) and Adiabene (northern Iraq). Reports that the Three Kings 30 or the pilgrims who had been in Jerusalem at Pentecost 31 were the first missionaries to the Parthian Empire clearly belong in the realm of myth. Likewise, we must not concern ourselves with the traditions about Peter, Benjamin and Bartholomew, who are associated with India, as well as Lycaonia, resembling rising from the grave. For this reason, the apostles required that, before baptism, the candidates wear black penitential garments and afterwards white robes, to represent the transition from the world of darkness to the world of light.’ 24

On the one hand, the Apostolic Council ensured Christian unity, but, on the other, it deepened the rift with Judaism, since it raised the general question of the abandonment of Jewish law. The imprisonment of Paul by the Jewish temple police that led to his death around 5825 and the stoning of the leader of Jerusalem’s community James, ordered by the high priest Hannas II four years later,26 as well as the refusal of the Christians to participate in the first Jewish revolt, made the gap unbridgeable, as was

Ethiopia, Arabia and Armenia.32 Abha was, for his part, simply a companion of Mar Mari.33 The names of St Thomas, Mar Addai, Mar Aggai and Mar Mari, however, ought to be taken seriously, especially since they occupy the first four places in the official chronology of the patriarchs of the Church of the East.34 conclusively determined regarding the historical veracity of the Thomas mission, the possibility of his journey to India cannot be excluded, especially since regular maritime traffic took place between Rome and India.41

Mar Addai is the central figure of The Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac work written around 400, which adopts and expands on Eusebius’s narrative from a century earlier.42 It tells of the missionizing of Edessa and of the correspondence of King Abgar V Ukama (ruled 9–46) with Jesus Christ. Edessa, the Syrian Orhay, was the capital of the small kingdom of Osroene, which lay in a double lock between Parthia and Rome. It owed its wealth to the control of a section of the Silk Road, which ran west towards Antioch and east towards Nisibis, but it was also at the mercy of the two great opposing powers. In 214CE Emperor Caracalla made it a Roman prefecture.

Two distinct traditions exist regarding the apostle Thomas, and these appear, at first glance, mutually exclusive. According to Eusebius of Caesarea and later Nestorian sources, the apostle brought the Gospel to the Parthians.35 By contrast, according to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas 36 and the Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum,37 the Doctrine of the Apostles, of the same age, he travelled to the court of King Gondophares in India. Both of these anonymous Syrian documents from the first half of the third century are based on Jesus’s call for a universal mission38 and gather the various traditions into a worldwide plan, according to which the apostles divided the world into twelve regions and assigned them by casting lots. In this manner, India was assigned to the apostle Thomas; Edessa, Arabia and the regions bordering Mesopotamia to one of the seventy apostles called Addai; and Mesopotamia as far as the border with India to Aggai, a disciple of Addai. The three missionary regions followed one another seamlessly and stretched from Edessa to Gog and Magog – that is, to the other side of the known world.39 Later, the Nestorian mission to China forced open precisely such borders. The two Thomas traditions can, in fact, be harmonized, since historical evidence, in the form of coins bearing his name and a stone inscription, proves the existence of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares. He ruled over the region now encompassing south-eastern Iran and Pakistan, from c.19 to 50CE. It is thus conceivable that Eusebius could have character-ized his empire as ‘Parthian’.40 While nothing has been

According to the Doctrine of Addai, around the year 31 King Abgar V, who suffered from leprosy, wrote a letter to Jesus, asking for healing and inviting him to Edessa.43 In his reply, Jesus praised the king for believing in him without knowing him; he himself could not come to Abgar, since he had to complete his mission and return home to his Father. But he promised to send a disciple, who would cure him and bless Edessa. While Jesus dictated his response to Abgar’s envoy, Hanan, this man painted his picture and took it back with him to Edessa, where it became a greatly honoured talisman of the city,44 until it was taken to Byzantium in 944. Later, during the iconoclastic controversy, this image, called the Mandylion, served as an iconodulist argument in favour of the Byzantine painting of icons of Christ.45

After the ascension of Christ, Thomas sent Addai to the ailing king.46 He cured him and then turned to preaching to the people, condemning the worship of the planets and idolatry: ‘It is a terrible and incurable sickness when creatures worship other creatures. It is blasphemy to place

The Armenian St Thaddeus

Monastery in north-western Iran is said to have been founded in the fifth century by a hermit in the place where he found the bones of the apostle Thaddeus. The small church, built of dark stone blocks, was erected in 1319–1329 and restored in 1490. The light-coloured church, added to the west, was donated by the Persian crown prince Abbas Mirza in 1810–1820. St Thaddeus is often erroneously equated with Mar Addai, the missionary of Edessa, as Thaddeus was one of the twelve apostles and Addai one of the seventy.6 creatures, which are foreign to His nature, on the same level with the Creator.’ These words antici- pate Mohammed’s rebuke of idol worshippers. Then Addai continued: ‘Even if you do not know the Scriptures, doesn’t nature teach you that the eyes of your idols see nothing? They are not to blame, for they are deaf and dumb, but you are at fault.’ 47 The king then converted, and Addai sent missionaries disguised as traders to Mesopotamia. Shortly before his death he named Aggai as his successor, who likewise sent missionaries to the east. A few years after Abgar’s death, one of his sons had Aggai murdered in the church, and the dying man appointed Palut as his successor. And so go the legends – but what are the facts? destroyed by the great flood of 201.48 Thus the church of Edessa would have been the first historically verified Christian house of worship, even earlier than the chapel of the border city of Dura Europas, on the Euphrates, which was built between 232 and 256.49 It is impossible that King Abgar V was a Christian, though King Abgar VIII, who ruled almost two centuries later (177–212), may have been. The sole witness is Bardaisan of Edsesa (154–222), who wrote in his ‘Book of the Laws of the Lands’: ‘King Abgar adopted the faith’.50 However, Bardaisan was later expelled from the Orthodox Church as a heretic. He also gathered around himself his own followers and founded one of the faith communities that rivalled the Orthodox Church, as had done Marcion (c.85–160) and Mani (216–272/274),

(Opposite page, left) King Abgar V of Edessa holds the Mandylion, presented to him by his ambassador Hanan. Detail of a wooden icon from the tenth century, Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.7

It is certain that Edessa had a church very early, and the city chronicle reports that it was

whose churches were active in Edessa. Was Abgar VIII a follower of Bardaisan or of Palut, who, as representative of the Orthodox Church in Edessa in the late second and early third centuries, represented only a minority of believers calling themselves Christian? At that time there predominated in Edessa an internal Christian syncretism of Babylonian proportions, in which Marcionites and Manichaeans referred to themselves as Christians and the followers of Palut were called ‘Palutians’.51 Despite this, it is possible that King Abgar VIII called himself a Christian. The first historically verifiable bishop of Edessa is Qune (†313), who may have further encouraged the Abgar legend. one of Ephrem’s hymns,52 Edessa’s prestige increased. Now this city could claim to be the first Christian principality in world history, as well as to possess the letter of Jesus, a portrait of him from his lifetime and the relics of the apostle Thomas. Edessa prided itself on being the ‘mother city of Syrian Christianity’.53 The theme of the Abgar legend – which presumably served as a model for Eusebius towards the end of the third century – became part of the glorification of Edessa, as it elevated its ruler to a forerunner of Emperor Constantine. In addition, it attested to the orthodoxy of the Christians vis-à-vis rival sects by tracing its Episcopal authority back to an apostle.54 In sum, several Christian groups were found in Edessa in the second century. Still today, Edessa’s contributions in the realms of

(Right) The citadel of Edessa

(Sanliurfa) Turkey. On the eastern marble column (left in illustration), an inscription in Old Syriac reports that it is dedicated to Queen Shalmath, who was either the wife of Abgar VIII (ruled 177–212) or the daughter of King Ma’nu VIII (ruled 214–239). The fortress seen today dates back to the Crusaders of 1098. The church that was flooded in 201 presumably stood at the north- eastern base of the citadel.

At the north-western base is shown a cave, venerated by Muslims, which, according to a local legend, was the birthplace of Abraham.8

When, around 370, the bones of the apostle Thomas were taken to Edessa, as we learn from

theology and linguistics are recognized. It was home to the renowned School of Edessa, also called the School of the Persians, where Ephrem the Syrian (306–373) taught after his flight from Nisibis in 363. This school developed into a stronghold of Antiochene theology, which provided the foundation of the dogma of the Church of the East.

Its consonant alphabet is a further development of the Phoenician. Thanks to the Syriac Gospel harmony of Tatian (c.170) and the Tetragospels called the Peshitta (c.400), Syriac spread rapidly in Asian Christianity.55 The earliest version is Estrangela, which evolved, after the split of the Miaphysite Jacobites from the Dyophysite Nestorians, into the Serto script in the west in the early eighth century and later into the Nestorian script in the east.56 Also belonging to the sphere of Aramaic script culture – in part because of the Nestorian mission to Asia – are the right-to-left and/or top-to-bottom script of the Sogdians, the Uigurs, the Mongols and the Manchurians.57 Finally, since the fourteenth century, Christian texts have often been written in Arabic and a related Syrian script, Garshuni,

Likewise unquestioned is the fact that both Syriac languages and scripts developed out of the Aramaic dialect of Edessa. This language, which was widespread in Syria and Parthia and functioned as the lingua franca of Egypt and Asia Minor as far as India, was Jesus’s mother tongue and belongs to the Semitic language family. Beginning in the fifth century BCE, it replaced Hebrew as the colloquial language of the Jews.

Caspian Sea, the most westerly part of the great Kushan empire was Transoxania, and Hatra lies south of Mosul. At the start of the third century, Christian cells existed in all of these regions. What do other sources report? of which there are, again, a West Syrian and an East Syrian version. [^58]

The former St John the Baptist Church of Edessa, which the

Miaphysite bishop Nona and successor of the Nestorian bishop Ibas had built in 457. In the late fifth century the bones of Mar Addai were brought here. The church served as cathedral for the Crusaders from 1098 to 1144, after which it was converted into a mosque by Saleh ad-Din Ayyubi. In the three-naved, 35-metre-long, 20-metre-wide, and 9-metre-tall building it is notable that the apse is oriented not towards Mecca but towards the east. Each set of six round columns forms five arches, which separate the main nave from the side aisles. The lower windows are decorated on both sides with stone figures depicting entwined snakes, which one also finds in monasteries of Tur Abdin. The mosque was renovated at the end of the eighteenth century. For its part, the Circis Peygamer mosque was built on the Church of St Sergius and St Simeon, erected by the

Nestorian bishop Ibas before 457.9

Although Syriac is still used today in both Syrian Churches as a liturgical language, its use as a colloquial language is rapidly declining, not least because of the Christians’ emigration to western countries. While in Tur Abdin in south-eastern Turkey the few remaining West Syrians still speak a dialect called Turoyo, the East Syrian dialect family, called Surit, is still spoken by the approximately 200,000 Nestorians and Chaldeans on the plain of Mosul, in Baghdad, in Iranian Azerbaijan and the northern Syrian region of Khabur. In the European, American and Australian Diaspora, however, Surit is slowly dying out as a colloquial language. Yet the West Syrian dialect, still spoken today around Ma’alula, north of Damascus, has lost its religious association and is used by Christians of various denominations, as well as by Muslims. [^59]

The Syrian acts of Mar Mari, from the sixth/ seventh century, which take up the Abgar legend, credit Mar Mari with the first complete evangel- ization of Mesopotamia. He serves as the apostle to Mesopotamia, whose two major rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, according to Genesis, flowed out of paradise (Gen 2:14). According to the acts, Mar Addai sent him from Edessa to the east. He first taught in Nisibis and then moved on to Arbil, the capital of the principality of Adiabene in modern Iraqi Kurdistan, where he cured the king of leprosy and cast out a demon from the son of an officer. On the way south, he, like Jesus, healed the afflicted, cast demons

Mar Mari and the first missionary journey to the Parthian Empire

‘Our brothers from Parthia do not marry two wives; Jewish Christians are not circumcised, our sisters from Gilan and Kushan do not associate with foreigners; those from Persia do not marry their daughters; those from Media do not abandon their dead, nor do they give them to the dogs to eat, nor do they bury the dying while still alive, Christians from Edessa do not kill their wives or sisters who commit adultery, and those from Hatra do not stone thieves.’60 This quote from Bardaisan’s ‘Book of the Laws of the Lands’ from the early third century is not merely instructive on account of the descriptions of the morals of the Asian peoples mentioned but also provides valuable evidence of how far Christianity had spread to the east by the end of the Parthian dynasty (224/226CE). Parthia should be understood here as Mesopotamia, and Persia and Media as Iran. Gilan lies to the south of the

Manuscript Syrus Curetonianus.

An Old Syriac manuscript on

parchment, written in Estrangela script, from the mid-fifth century. (British Museum, London. Add. 14451 f49v.)

out of the possessed and even raised the dead. In Seleucia-Ctesiphon he encountered resistance; the citizens wanted nothing of the Good News. Only a successful demonstration of divine judgement, in which the apostle remained unharmed in a blazing fire,61 enabled a few conversions, after which Mari destroyed a pagan temple and erected atop its ruins a chapel – the future cathedral of Kokhe. He then followed the Tigris south, reached present-day Basra and concluded his journey in Khuzistan and the province of Persia. The acts close with the extolling of Mari, who, like a ‘pillar of fire’, led believers through the desert of ignorance into the kingdom of the Gospel.62

The acts represent an obvious attempt to portray the Christianization of the Nestorian heartland as the work of an apostle. They cannot be taken at face value, although the historian J. M. Fiey believes that the church of Kokhe was in fact founded at the time of Mari. On account of the description of Mari’s chapel and the fact that, between 79 and 116, the Tigris altered its course, he concludes that Mari must have laid the cornerstone before 79 / 116.63 However, the first historically certain bishop of Seleucia- Ctesiphon was Papa, who served from c.290 to 315 and died in 327. We can be assured that, beginning in the second century, there existed in Seleucia-Ctesiphon an independent Christian community, which showed evidence of an episcopal structure in the third century. Already around 315 Bishop Papa tried to gain primacy over the other dioceses of the Church and to impose on them a disciplined administration. Although Papa himself failed to achieve this, the other bishops soon accepted that the bishop of the capital should take over the administrative leadership of the Church.64 In any case, it is certain that the diocese of Seleucia-Ctesiphon – that is, the nascent Church of the East – was never subordinated to Antioch. Reports stating that the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon required the recognition of the bishop of Antioch are later forgeries. The article from the corpus of Nicea of 325, according to which no East Syrian synod may

(Right) The large arch of Chosrau the Great (ruled 531–579) in Seleucia- Ctesiphon, which Shapur I (ruled 240 / 41–272) presumably had built by Christian prisoners of war. [^10] The Ivan is the largest brick barrel vault in the world. Until 780 the patriarchal see of the church was in Seleucia-Ctesiphon. take place without the consent of the patriarch of Antioch, is also an apocryphal postscript from the fifth century. [^65] were allied with one another. [^68] It is certain that, following his condemnation in Rome around 172, Tatian (c. [^110]–180), author of the Gospel harmony called the Diatessaron, returned to his homeland of Assyria, probably to Adiabene. He characterized himself as proud to be an Assyrian and scorned the Hellenistic world. His ‘Address to the Greek’ ends as follows: ‘In every way the East excels and most of all in its religion, the Christian religion, which also comes from Asia and which is far older and truer than all the philosophies and crude religious myths of the Greeks.’ 69 After his return, he spread his gospel in Assyria and taught a strict form of asceticism. This uncompromising asceticism – condemned in the West as Encratism – which demanded from true Christians a separation from the world

The Chronicle of Adiabene, dating from the sixth century, offers information about the region north of Baghdad. According to this disputed chronicle. [^66] Mar Addai personally consecrated the first bishop, Mar Pkidha (in office 104–114), which would seem to be a daring claim. [^67] However, conditions in Adiabene were favourable for early missionary efforts, since, as in Edessa and Nisibis, a large Jewish community lived there, and it was there that the Parthian vassal Prince Izates converted to Judaism around the year 60. There were also close diplomatic and trade ties between Edessa and Adiabene, as the two princely families

(Opposite page) The Convent of St Thecla in Ma’alula, where Aramaic is still spoken. This important pilgrimage site memorializes the Roman officer’s daughter Thecla, who became a student of the apostle Paul against the will of her parents and took refuge from her persecutors in a cave in Ma’alula.

and its pleasures, since it condemned matter as evil in itself, left a decisive mark on East Syrian monasticism. century, the Izla Mountains became the meeting place of the two rival Syrian sister Churches, the Nestorian and the Jacobite. The Nestorian metropolitan see of Nisibis officially came to an end in 1616, and the last Nestorian monks left the monastery of Mar Augin between 1838 and 1842.74 Nisibis’s reputation was founded not only on the monasteries of the Izla Mountains, however, but also on the School of Nisibis, which was likewise traced back to Bishop Jacob, who wanted to fight Arianism, which had been condemned at the Council of Nicea in 325. In any case, we know that he employed Ephrem the Syrian as a biblical exegete. When the city was handed over to the Sassanian king Shapur II in 363, Christian instruction ceased, and Ephrem fled to Roman Edessa, where he taught until his death and supported his bishop in the fight against Arianism.75

Also in the region of Nisibis, lying halfway between Edessa and Adiabene, there were Christian communities at the end of the second century, as is evident from inscriptions on the grave of the bishop of Hierapolis, Avircius Marcellus.70 Nisibis was a border city, fought over by the Romans and the Persians, which was fortified into a mighty citadel by Emperor Diocletian in 297. The first bishop of Nisibis for whom there is historical evidence is the one-time ascetic Jacob (†338), who took office around 301 or 308 and participated in the Council of Nicea in 325. From 313 to 320 Bishop Jacob had built the great cathedral that is named for him, to which Bishop Vologes added in 359 the baptistery that still stands today. In the eighth century then Metropolitan Sabrisho I rebuilt the ruined cathedral and integrated the baptistery into it as a southern chapel.71 The ‘discovery’ of the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest also goes back to Bishop Jacob. According to Syrian tradition, this was not Mount Ararat but rather Mount Djudi, east of Cizre in south-eastern Turkey, where the ruins of the Nestorian monastery still stand.72

Let us turn now to the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates. Evidence shows that the region around today’s port city of Basra in southern Iraq, then known as Prat de Maishan, was elevated to a metropolitan see shortly after 310,76 after an earlier Bishop David of Basra is said to have carried out missionary work in India,77 from which one can conclude that Christian communities existed here, too, in the third century. Also supporting this claim is the discovery of Christian graves with Syriac inscriptions from the mid-third century on the island of Kharg in the upper Persian Gulf. Archaeological excavations have shown that later, from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, a Nestorian monastery with sixty cells stood on the island. The monastery included a church with three naves, whose walls featured stucco ornamentation in the Sassanian style. In those days the island functioned as a trade centre for ships from India and China on the way to Mesopotamia. The discovery of countless pieces of glass permits the assumption that the monks themselves produced glass for export.78

In neighbouring Tur Abdin, ‘Mount of the Servants’, there arose from the fourth century onwards one of the most renowned centres of East Syrian monasticism, whose hermitages and monasteries were grouped high above the plain of Nisibis in the Izla Mountains. Members of the oldest East Syrian monasteries, which dated from the early fourth century, included Mar Augin, Mar Yuhanon and Mar Malke, though the last converted as early as the seventh century to the Syrian Orthodox Church, also called the Jacobite. In the seventh century the Great Monastery, founded in 571 by the reformer of Nestorian monasticism, Abraham of Kashkar (491–586), became a source of renewal for East Syrian spirituality.73 Also beginning in the seventh

The St Jacob Church, founded in 313, in Nisibis (Nusaybin), south-eastern Turkey. Its founder Jacob participated in the Council of Nicea in 325. In the eighth century the Nestorian metropolitan Sabrisho I renovated the cathedral, the oldest remaining part of which is the baptistery from 359, visible on the lower edge of the picture. Nisibis was a metropolitan see of the Church of the East until 1616.11 In 1915 Turkish massacres eradicated the last Christians.

In considering the question of among whom Christianity first found acceptance in Mesopotamia, four groups of people are relevant: first, the numerically significant Jewish Diaspora; and, second, the native Aramaeans, Assyrians and Chaldeans of northern Mesopotamia, to whom the Persians came towards the end of the third century. Beginning in the mid-third century additional Christian refugees streamed into the empire of the Sassanians, as they fled the perse- cutions of the Roman emperors Decius in 250, Valerian in 257–258 and Diocletian in 303–304. The fourth numerically important group were the Roman and later Byzantine prisoners of war and deportees, whom the Sassanian kings resettled in their empire, again beginning in the mid-third century. For instance, in 260 Shapur

I (ruled 240–272) laid waste to Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia and conquered Antioch, from which he deported tens of thousands of Christians, including Bishop Demetrius, and resettled them in Mesopotamia and the ancient province of Susiana. There he had built the city of Gondeshapur, called Beit Lapat by the Syrians. However, the deported Christians of Greek descent refused to be integrated into the Church of the East and instead created their own Episcopal congregations, which used Greek as their liturgical language. The xenophobic Zoroastrian high priest Kartir was also aware of this distinction within Christianity, as he disting- uished in his famous inscription of Naqsh-Radjab (c.290) between Aramaic-speaking ‘Nasraye’ and Greek-speaking ‘Krestyane’.79 Only the

The Monastery of Mar Augin, founded by East Syrian monks in the early fourth century, was until 1629 a stronghold of Nestorian monasticism. The last Syrian Orthodox monk of Mar Augin died in 1974. Near Mar Augin stand the ruins of the formerly Nestorian monasteries of Mar Yuhanon, Mar Abraham the Elder and Mar Malke.12 The Syrian Orthodox Monastery of Mar Augin has re- opened in April 2010.

0 30 km 20 10 N Mar Augin Mar Yuhanon Mar Abraham (Kashkar)

The Thomas Christians

of South India rebuilding of ecclesiastical structures, which followed the seventy-year-long persecutions and occurred on the occasion of the synod of 410, brought an end to this doubling of hierarchies.

‘[The Saviour said to him:] Fear not, Thomas, go to India and preach the Word there, for my grace is with you. But he did not obey and said: Wherever you wish to send me, send me, but somewhere else! For I will not go to the Indians.’ Acts of Thomas.81

Later prisoners of war were either Orthodox faithful to Chalcedon or Miaphysites, who formed their own congregations and did not assimilate. The monopoly of the Church of the East over Sassanian Christianity came under still greater pressure when the Miaphysites, who were persecuted in the Byzantine Empire starting in 519, sought refuge to the east of the Euphrates and set up their own hierarchy there. These various waves of immigration of Christian refugees help account for the fact that, although at the start of the seventh century Christians constituted nearly half the population of the Iranian Empire, about 75 per cent of these were Nestorians, 20 per cent Miaphysite Jacobites and 5 per cent Melkites faithful to Chalcedon.80

Just as Jonah once refused to go to Nineveh at God’s command, and God outwitted him with the help of a giant fish, Thomas does not want to obey Jesus. Jesus – presented in the Acts of Thomas as the apostle’s twin brother – also plays a trick on him. When he encounters a merchant from India, whom King Gondophares has directed to bring him a builder and carpenter, Jesus sells him his brother Thomas. The merchant travels with Thomas by sea to India and presents him to his king, who assigns him to build a palace. But, instead of building this, he spends months distributing the money entrusted to him, until the king orders Thomas to show him the allegedly completed palace. ‘You cannot see it now,’ the apostle informs him; ‘rather you will see it only when you have departed from this life.’ The message is clear and marked by Neo-Platonic thought: the world assumed by us to be true is unreal and insignificant, and the true world lies on the other side and is accessible only to the enlightened mind’s eye.

In retrospect, three factors contributed to the rapid success of the missionary efforts in the east: First, significant Jewish exile communities were living in Mesopotamia. Second, Aramaic served as lingua franca from Antioch to Central Asia, enabling Aramaic-speaking missionaries to communicate easily with both Jews and non- Jewish merchants and members of the upper classes. Third, the close-meshed net formed by the various routes of the Silk Road eased the spread of new religions. Although the Roman- Parthian border was generally tightly maintained, traders or missionaries disguised as traders could cross it unhindered. In fact, the missionizing of Mesopotamia, which moved from Edessa to Nisibis, Arbil, Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Maishan, followed the land routes of the Silk Road. The sea routes then enabled the expansion of missionary activity to the islands of Kharg and Socotra, as well as – presumably – South India.

The ignorant king grows angry and decides to have Thomas skinned and burned. Then the king’s brother Gad dies and angels bear his soul to heaven, where he is to choose his new home. He selects, of all places, the palace built by the apostle, which the angels deny him. But they allow him to return to earth to buy the palace from his brother, after which the king asks Thomas, as the ‘servant of God’, for forgiveness and instruction. The king suspects that his builder is Jesus Christ, who appears to him in the form of his twin brother, which is likewise a Gnostic

element. Overjoyed, the apostle administers the three sacraments to the king, making him a Christian. These sacraments are the ‘seal’ of baptism, anointing with oil and the Eucharist.82 In the last chapter of the acts, Thomas leaves the king and journeys to South India, where he dies as a martyr at Mylapore near Madras. According to Indian tradition, Thomas did not travel directly from Gondophares’s realm to Madras but, rather, made landfall on the island of Malankara in the bay of Cranganore, in the coastal region of Kerala. Here he founded seven churches along the Malabar Coast before being killed around 68CE in Mylapore. This tradition is also recalled by the official names of six of the eight Oriental Churches of India, which include designations of either Malankar or Malabar.83 The relics of the apostle also made a long journey. Around 370 they were transferred to Edessa, where they remained until they were moved before the fall of the Crusader state of Edessa in 1144 to the island of Chios, and then again in 1258 to Ortona on the Adriatic coast for safe keeping. In 1953 the relics came full circle when the Vatican gave the right arm of the apostle to the newly built Thomas mausoleum in Cranganore.

The apostle Thomas, the most highly venerated apostle of the Church of the East, in the illustrated Gospel book on parchment from Mardin. It was given to the Church of the Mother of God of Ziad in 1272 by Bishop Dioscuros (1222–1282), who had it rebound. Its original owner was named as Abu Shahak, possibly a Nestorian jurist who died in 912. Whether the illustrations are in fact older than the text, which is written in the Serto script, remains disputed.13 (Library of the Church of the Forty Martyrs, Mardin, Turkey.)

The first historical witness to an autonomous Christian community in Kerala may be Pantaenus, who, according to Eusebius and Jerome, was sent by his bishop between 180 and 190 from Alexandria to India, where he encountered Christians.85 A century later Bishop David of Basra, mentioned above, travelled to India around 295 / 300, establishing the first official contact between the Thomas Christians of South India and the Church of the East.86 Then, around 345, one Bishop Joseph of Edessa – who, at the Council of Nicea, had signed as ‘bishop of all the churches of Persia and of Great India’ – visited Kerala. Presumably, the hierarchal integration of the Thomas Christians into the Church of the East, which endured until the forced ‘conversion’ of the East Syrian Christians of Kerala to Roman Catholicism in 1599, began with Bishop Joseph. This tie to the Thomas Christians was formalized around 410 or 420 with the creation of the metropolitan see of Rew Ardashir, which had jurisdiction over the Indian dioceses.87

No evidence exists for an apostolic mission to Kerala. However, considerable evidence shows that diplomatic relations, as well as a flourishing maritime trade, existed between the Roman Empire and the west coast of India. Thanks to knowledge of the monsoon winds, ships could cross the Indian Ocean between Egypt and Cranganore, called Muziris by the Romans, in less than two months. Pliny the Elder referred to Muziris as ‘primium emporium Indiae’ – the first port of India – and Strabo (63BCE–21CE) reported that, every year, 120 ships linked the two continents together. The discovery of 2300 Roman coins from the period from 123BCE to 117CE testifies to the significance of this trading relationship.84

The stone cross in front of the formerly Nestorian Church of St Mary in Kuravalangad, Kerala, bears a Middle Persian inscription from the seventh/ninth century. The great bronze bell of the church from 1584 has a Nestorian inscription.14 Today the church belongs to the Roman Catholic Church.

The Beginnings of East Syrian Christianity | 27

The next two historical witnesses are disputed. One concerns the Byzantine envoy and Bishop Theophilus, who certainly visited the kingdom of Himyar in modern Yemen before 356 but hardly India.88 The other dubious witness concerns a merchant, Thomas of Kana, who landed in Cranganore with 72 families in, depending on the source, 345, 754, 774 or 795.89 Even if this information seems unbelievable, it is conceivable that Christians had fled the Sassanian Empire for India before the severe persecutions instituted by Shapur II around 341. More reliable is the reference by the metropolitan of Merv, Ishodad, that in 425 a priest from India named David translated the Letter to the Romans into Persian.90

Nestorian stone cross in the now Syrian Orthodox Church of Valiya Palli in Kottayam, Kerala, from the sixth/ninth centuries. It testifies to the close relationship between the Church of the East and the Thomas Christians of Kerala. The text reads: ‘Who believes in the Messiah and God above and in the Holy Ghost is redeemed through the grace of Him who bore the cross.’15

A century later an Egyptian sailor, writing under the pseudonym Cosmas Indicopleustes, published an anti-Ptolemaic polemic entitled ‘Topographia christiana’, which described the world not as a sphere but as a disk. The value of

the book, addressed to the Nestorian patriarch Mar Aba, lies in its description of the Christian communities he encountered during his voyage of 522 / 525 to Ethiopia, India and Sri Lanka. ‘Even in Taprobane [Sri Lanka] there is a church of Christians, with clergy and believers.’ He added later, ‘The island has a church of Persian Christians and a priest who is appointed by Persia.’ Regarding India, we learn that there were also Christians ‘in the region of Malé [Malabar], where pepper grows’. And ‘in Calliana [the city of Quilon] there is moreover a bishop, who is appointed from Persia; likewise on the island of the Dioscorides [Socotra] in the Indian Ocean’. There ‘the inhabitants speak Greek; there are clergy who receive their ordination in Persia and are sent to the island, and a multitude

0 150 km 100 50 SRI LANKA

One of the two copper tablets from 849 held by the patriarchal see of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar in Tiruvalla, Kerala. The tablet, inscribed on both sides, is the final page of a document in which Governor Atikal Tiruvatikal confirms various privileges to the East Syrian Terisa Church of Quilon. On the front of the tablet the witnesses are listed in Arabic in the Kufic script, as well as in Pahlavi, and on the back in Pahlavi and Judaeo-Persian (Persian in Hebrew script). of Christians’.91 This report demonstrates the integration of the Christian communities of Socotra, Sri Lanka and South India into the Church of the East. As a consequence of the disagreement between Patriarch Ishoyahb III (in office 650–660) and the rebellious metropolitan of Rew Ardashir, Shimun, who incited the Thomas Christians to disobedience against the patriarch, the patriarch removed the Indian bishops from the rebellious metropolitan see and created a metropolitan see of India under his direct authority, which was later confirmed by Patriarch Timothy I (in office 780–823).92

The few exceptions are the ruins of a church on Socotra;93 a ‘Nestorian’ cross carved into a pillar in the ancient royal city of Anuradpura on Sri Lanka;94 a handful of gravestones in Kerala, such as that of Manarcad from 910; the approximately three-metre-high stone cross in front of the Church of St Mary in Kuravalangad; and at least five relief-type stone crosses, about 80 to 100 centimetres high and 60 to 80 centimetres wide.95 Another cross was dug up by the Portuguese in 1547 in Mylapore. These crosses are of two types, and examples of both can be found in the Valiya Palli Church in Kottayam, built in 1550, which belongs today to the Syrian Orthodox Church. They were taken from a much older church in Cranganore. The smaller stone cross, from the sixth to ninth centuries, stands in the altar of the

Although Kerala is now home to about 300 churches, no structures survive from the first millennium, since they have all been rebuilt or newly constructed after the fifteenth century.

The second copper plate from c.849, found in the patriarchal see of the Mar Thoma Church in Tiruvalla. The plate is inscribed on only one side in the Old Tamil language and Vatellatu script. northern side aisle, and the somewhat larger one, from the tenth century, stands in the southern side aisle. The same Pahlavi (Middle Persian) inscription runs along the outer edge of each cross. It reads: ‘Who believes in the Messiah and God above and in the Holy Ghost is redeemed through the grace of Him who bore the cross.’ The second cross features a second inscription, written in Estrangela and taken from the Letter to the Galatians (6:14): ‘Let me not glorify except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ 96 and mixed Tamil-Grantha script, written on both sides along the length of the tablet.97 The wording of this document makes clear that this Christian family was considered equal to the second highest Indian caste, the warrior nobles.

In the second document, from 849 (or 824), the time of the South Indian king Stanu Ravi, Governor Atikal Tiruvatkial extended to the Terisa church of Kollam (Quilon), which had been founded in 824 by Marvan Sapir-Iso, the privilege of taxation and sole jurisdiction over a certain number of subject families. The name Marvan Sapir-Iso is a corruption of the Syrian episcopal title Mar and the name Sabrisho, which means Jesus is my hope. The document confirms a later tradition from the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries, which recounts the arrival of the bishops Mar Sabrisho and Mar Piruz in Quilon. The Christians also maintained in a specific area the privilege of levying customs duties, authority over measurement and administration of the royal seal. An additional document contains further details and states that one established the borders of this transferred region by means of a ceremony in which a female elephant was led along these boundaries.98 The names of the witnesses are marked on both sides of a tablet in Arabic, using the Kufic script, in Pahlavi and in Judaeo-Persian (Persian in Hebrew script). Older sources mention additional tablets, but these have been lost.

Still more important are two documents, written on a total of six copper tablets, of which five have survived. Two of these are found in the patriarchal palace of the Mar Thoma church in Tiruvalla, and three are held by the Malankar Orthodox-Syrian church of Kottayam. The older document acknowledges that in 774 King Vira Raghava Chakravati granted the following privileges to the Christian Iravi Korttan from Cranganore: he was named leader of the traders’ guild and ‘lord of the city’ and had the right ‘to charge a broker’s commission and customs duty on all that can be weighed, measured and counted’. Additionally, he could carry a sword, employ personal messengers and use such princely insignia as a litter and a ‘royal parasol’. The rights ‘are passed down to his son and his son’s son, as long as sun and moon exist’. This document is inscribed in the Old Tamil language