And here's a story about how some of the knowledge we have today that survived those Dark Ages actually did so, alongside another visit to the complexity of Near and Middle Eastern religious history …
Reshared post from +Andreas Schou
Pseudo-Sabians: Defrauding Islam Into Saving Western Culture
At some point prior to the rise of Islam, someone went and burnt down the Library of Alexandria. The list of suspects is varied: Julius Caesar, Aurelian, Christian mob violence, the Crete earthquake of 365, and the Copitc Patriarch are credibly accused of dealing irreparable damage to its collections. If I had to guess, I suspect that the library was ruined by a series of disasters which culminated, eventually, in the end of the Library's scriptorium.
That was probably more catastrophic than the loss of the books. When the Library was destroyed, its scriptorium was actively trading across the Hellenic world. When the Library was destroyed, it's probable that most of the known lost works existed somewhere else in the world, either in translation or in Greek. But as important scriptoria shut down, however, books stopped being replaced faster than they were lost.
For the next 500 or so years, the classical world lacked a library as active as the Library of Alexandria. By the 800s, however, the strictest monotheist religion began to compile the world's largest collection of pagan works. What follows is a slightly speculative history of how that happened.
I. 0 AD: So, Was the Middle East a Good Place For a Library?
Because it's in the middle.
Here's a wide perspective on the world of the year zero. In the west, you have the huge economies of the Greek Isles, Egypt, and Rome, and the smaller (but still important) economies of the proto-Axumites and the Kingdom of Kush. In the east, you have the huge economies of the Indian kingdoms, Persia, and China.
In the east, trade flows from China and India collect in the Kushan Empire and its Bactrian successors, pass through Persia, and enter the Middle East. The Middle East is a corresponding trade terminal for the west: all the important overland and sea routes from Europe and Africa into the East pass through Syria or the coastal Arab kingdoms before continuing on into India, Persia, and China.
Two relatively minor peoples and places eventually become important players in this story: the nomadic Arabs living in modern-day Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and the Partihian city of Carrhae. Despite being relatively minor regional player, Middle Eastern trade has made both rich.
By the year zero, many of the formerly-nomadic Arabs of the Arabian Penninsula had already transitioned from herding camels and goats to trading spices. The seagoing trade from Africa and India passed along the southern coast of the Arabian Penninsula before continuing on to its destination. The Yemeni kingdoms of South Arabia controlled the flow of spices into Arabia, the Arab kingdom of Nabatene controlled the oases on its northern border, and Arab caravan routes brought the spices across the deserts.
Carrhae was the last Persian outpost before entering Rome, and the last station on the eastern half of the Silk Road. After Rome's disastrous attempt at seizing it in 55 BC, it had become the site of regular and inconclusive border warfare between Rome and Parthia and regularly alternated between Persian and Hellenic ownerhsip. This left trade and border crossings an uncertain prospect. However, this alternating trade and war made Carrhae an unusually cosmopolitan city, and its proximity to both the Roman border and the Royal Road made letters to far-flung correspondents in both the Hellenic and Persian world fairly simple.
II. AD 200: Pseudo-Zoroaster, Carrhae, and the Syrian Fraud Belt
If you've been following this series so far, you're probably confused about why I've kept referring to Carrhae when I talk about Sabians.
Because there probably weren't any there.
To recap the last post: in the year 600 AD or so, Mohammad granted tolerance to 'Christians, Jews, and Sabians,' but without specifying what 'Sabians' were. As it turns out, a small, Zoroastrian-influenced, pre-Christian sect of Essenes living in southern Mesopotamia were probably what he was referring to. Today, that same religion is called "Mandeanism." But if you pull out a map of the classical world and find Carrhae, you'll see that it's almost precisely on the opposite side of Mesopotamia from Seleucia.
But if you look at a lot of Islamic histories, you'll find a lot of references to Mandeanism being founded there. This is almost certainly bunk, as there are no Mandeans there today, the Jewish population from which the Mandeans descended was relatively small, and the city was a pagan stronghold.
Early in Christian history, Carrhae was a resolute pagan stronghold. Under the Assyrians, it had been the center of a religion devoted to the moon-god Sin. Under the Persians, it was still the center of worship for the agricultural god Tammuz. And somewhere around the year 200, it had become a major center of the Hermetic religion.
The explosion of religious diversity which had accompanied the opening of the Silk Road wasn't restricted to monotheistic religions like Christianity and Judaism: paganism and Zoroastrianism were opening up to outside influences as well. Persians were aware of Buddhism, and Indian texts had already made it all the way to Syria. In the European parts of the Roman Empire, mystery cults based on exotic foreign religions opened up in almost every major city, and in Sassanid Persia, mainline Zoroastrianism had been replaced with a monist variant called Zurvanism.
This caused some fraud problems.
Because of the new demand for foreign religions and foreign texts, a number of authors along the Silk Road had discovered that it was far more profitable to write such texts themselves, and tailor them to the preferences of their Roman audience, than to simply find something appropriate and pass it on. You can see this effect in the pagan mystery religions of the period: Roman Mithraism has almost nothing to do with the Persian worship of Mithra, the cult of Sol Invictus was spun out of whole cloth, and the Dionysian Mysteries were just Tammuz-worship with the serial numbers filed off.
For the Persians living on the border, starting a Roman cult was a difficult prospect. Even small mystery cults were licensed by the Roman state, and run by government officials. But due to the vast correspondence network which ran out along the Royal and Silk roads, a translator from Carrhae could make a prosperous living 'translating' texts he could ascribe to Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, or an Indian source. And so they did. Much of the Greek world's information about Zoroaster, and many of the Hermetic texts popular in Rome and Egypt, started out somewhere around Carrhae.
Over time, the combination of fraud and cultural exchange created a syncretic paganism in northern Mesopotamia. Though the corpus of Hermetic documents is immense and diverse, it seems to have been a Hellenized understanding of Persian and Egyptian myths, combined with neo-Platonism and Christian Gnostic beliefs.
Toward the end of this period, as Byzantium consolidated Christianity as its state religion, Greek interest in Persian religion finally dried up, and the fraud trade slowed to a trickle. Fortunately for its pagans, however, Harran's regular alternation between Persian and Byzantine rulership (and a series of religious toleration clauses buried in Sassanid-Byzantine peace treaties) had protected its pagan population from much of the active persecution which had Christianized the Eastern Roman Empire.
Though much of Carrhae's population had converted to Christianity by the time the Arabs invaded, there was still an active and diverse community of educated Greek, Assyrian, and Persian pagans.
III. 600 AD-850 AD: A Philosopher-Caliph Ignores Paganism to Save Philosophy
Relatively shortly after being founded, Islam overflowed its banks, conquering most of the Middle East.
This caused a number of practical problems with toleration, taxation, and administration. During his lifetime, Mohammad had neatly solved the problem of religious revolt: tolerate monotheist non-Muslims, but tax them, putting pressure on them to convert. Unfortunately, this had caused a revenue problem: Muslims owed the Caliph a zakat — i.e., money for charity — but did not owe the higher, broader taxes which non-Muslims were forced to pay. As a result, the early Caliphate was skeptical about conversion to Islam, because widespread conversion would have resulted in the end of the taxes that funded further expansion.
Once Muslims started to consolidate their rule over Syria and Anatolia, however, they encountered a second problem: many of the local elites — people they needed to co-opt in order to run the government — belonged to religions which Islam didn't tolerate. It was theologically unacceptable to tolerate kuffar in positions of power. But the early Caliphs fudged a little, and paganism persisted across most of the northwestern Caliphate for quite some time.
Which brings us back to Carrhae, now called Harran, around the year 800. Though the Caliphate had taken it from Byzantium almost 200 years ago, the Caliphate had been wracked with regular succession conflicts and civil wars for almost 150 years, and despite its six-year stint as the capital of the Caliphate, no one had bothered to persecute the pagans out of existence.
Like the multilingual, multicultural pagans elsewhere in Syria, Harran's pagans were active in translation and trade. Though the market for mystery cults and pseudo-Zoroastrian texts had dried up long ago, much of the Silk Road's translation business was handled by the descendants of Harran's pagans, and the local government appears to have left well enough alone.
Until 830.
While passing through Harran on his way to one of the Caliphate's interminable border wars with Byzantine, the Caliph al'Mamun inadvertently discovered that Harran still had a large Hermetic pagan population. He left an order with the local government that the pagans were to convert to one of the religions of the book — he didn't care which one — upon his return, or be put to the sword and have their sanctuaries burned.
Surprisingly, Harran's pagans didn't convert.
Poring over existing jurisprudence on the religions of the book, they realized that the Koran's definition of 'Sabian' had been lost somewhere between 150 and 200 years ago. Upon al'Mamun's return, Harran's Hermetics explained to al'Mamun that they did not need to convert, that they were already Sabians, that Sabians were powerful astrologers and worshipped the stars, and that the prophet Idris (who was also poorly defined by the Koran) had revealed their religion to them.
al'Mamun bought it.
al'Mamun was one of the first Caliphs to be sympathetic to Hellenic philosophy. One of his first acts as Caliph was to establish the House of Wisdom and to put the full backing of the Caliphate behind the project of collecting, translating, and expanding on the works of the natural philosophers. He funded the first organized scientific research in the Islamic world, including the excavation of the Great Pyramid of Giza, and was patron to some of the first alchemists.
IV. Epilogue: Pseudo-Sabians and the Great Library.
After 500 years without a Great Library, the Caliph al'Mamun had finally restarted the immense project of cataloging and preserving the classical world's knowledge. And though he had also started an inquisition to root out Shi'a and pagans elsewhere in the Caliphate, he had granted the pseudo-Sabians of Assyria a grant of clemency which would last until the 1200s.
Over the next 200 years, Harran's cache of classical texts migrated down to Baghdad. If you browse a list of the names of prominent Islamic translators and academics, you'll frequently run into a familiar epithet: al-Sabi, or 'The Sabian.' The astronomer Albategnius, the translator and mathematician Thabit al-Sabi, the mathematician Abu Ishaq al-Sabi, and the historian Hilal al-Sabi were all pagan pseudo-Sabians.
Would we have lost most of the classical corpus without them? That's a bit far. But without an edict of toleration for those best able to translate, and a Caliph willing to preserve vast quantities of heretical works, the world would have suffered through another 300 years without a grand scriptorium. Considering how much we lost after the first one was destroyed, I can't imagine how much ground we'd have to retread if there had never been a second.
Next Up: Heretical Islam and Christianity in the Syrian Fraud Belt!