Joel Thomas Walker, The legend of Mar Qardagh. Narrative and Christian heroism in late antique Iraq. [The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 40. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2006; ISBN 0-520-24578-4.] xviii + 345 pp; hardcover.
Andrew
Palmer
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2007
Vol. 10, No. 1
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv10n1prpalmer
Andrew Palmer
Joel Thomas Walker, The legend of Mar Qardagh. Narrative and Christian heroism in late antique Iraq. [The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 40. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 2006; ISBN 0-520-24578-4.] xviii + 345 pp; hardcover.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol10/HV10N1PRPalmer.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 10
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Mar Qardagh
Persian Martyrs
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[1] The
legend of Mar Qardagh is a Syriac text probably written around
600 C.E. at Arbela, modern Irbīl in northern Iraq. It
is set in the same place some two hundred and fifty years
earlier, when the hero, Qardagh, was stoned to death as a
consequence of his anti-Zoroastrian activities. Emphasis
is laid on the patriotism of Qardagh, a commander of troops in
a zone bordering on the Christian Roman Empire; his conversion
to Christianity did not make him sympathize with the enemies of
the Sasanian King of Kings and his rejection of his family and
their Zoroastrian Faith did not lessen his determination to
avenge his people when they were attacked by the
Romans. Today Christians in the same region are sometimes
suspected by Muslims of sympathizing with the Western Powers
which recently invaded Iraq. In the sixth century there were
many military confrontations between the Romans and the
Sasanians, who claimed the whole territory once taken from the
Parthians by Pompey an others and, earlier, from the
Achaemenids by Alexander. In the first half of the seventh
century, the frustrations of the Near East, for so long fought
over by Romans and Persians, where brought to an end by an
unexpected Arab invasion of both empires and the region which
Garth Fowden has described as the Mountain Arena came to
dominate both the Iranian plateau and (to some extent) the
Mediterranean Basin. The legend of Mar Qardagh has a political
message, as well as a religious one: being a Christian in the
Church of the East is not the same as sympathizing with an
Empire which proclaims the Christian Faith, nor is the adoption
of the other-worldly values of the Gospel a justification for
opting out of one’s own world, when it comes to defending
the community into which one was born from external
aggressors.
[2] W. gives
us a tolerably reliable English version of the legend of Mar
Qardagh to set beside the Latin of Jean-Baptiste Abbeloos and
the German of Hermann Feige, both published in 1890; he also
gives us the first ever monograph on the legend. This is
no Bollandist endeavour to eliminate historically suspect
elements from the legend and so make it acceptable as history.
This legend has no value, Paul Peeters had claimed,
contradicting Theodor Nöldeke, as a source for the events
it describes; and W. agrees with Peeters, though he admits
Wiessner’s point (p. 117) that there may be a tenuous
link with a fifth-century Sasanian governor called Qardagh the
nekōrgan, who (according to the correspondence of
Barsauma of Nisibis) resolved a border dispute involving the
raids of pro-Roman Arab tribes. The value of the legend to the
historian is as a literary testament of its own time. The
story of Mar Qardagh enables us to ‘breathe the climate
of northern Iraq on the eve of the Islamic conquest’, the
place and the time of its composition (p. 1, acknowledging
Freya Stark as the source of the phrase ‘literature is a
sort of climate which one breathes’).
[3] As a
source for history of the Church of the East, the legend was
studied, long after Nöldeke and Peeters, by two students
of Syriac-speaking Christianity, Jean-Maurice Fiey and Gernot
Wiessner; the former was most interested in historical
geography, the latter in the Persian epic motifs which are the
subject of W.’s second chapter. The late Sasanian
Empire has been studied by specialists in Persian and Arabic,
with some contributions by archaeologists. Among earlier
authors only Wiessner had adduced the legend of Mar Qardagh as
a source for this period; Walker claims that the Qardagh legend
‘provides new and unexpected evidence for this tradition
[i.e., the Iranian epic tradition] among the
Christians of northern Iraq’ (p. 163). With this
formula W. does scant justice to Wiessner’s
contribution.
[4] The
legend contains a philosophical dialogue in the Greek style,
the aim of which is to show that Zoroastrians make a
categorical mistake in worshipping as eternal entities things
which were made by the Creator of the Universe, such as the sun
and the moon, fire and water, air and earth. This dialogue
was translated into English by Philippe Gignoux in 2001, as W.
acknowledges in a footnote on p. 28; one might have expected W.
to justify the more important discrepancies between
Gignoux’s translation and his own.
[5]
W.’s translation, Part I of his book, is placed on pp.
19-69 after his introduction (pp. 1-18) and before the
interesting selection of photographs with instructive captions
(pp. 73-83) and Part II, consisting of five chapters and an
Epilogue (pp. 85-285). Chapters 1-3, on ‘The Church
of the East and the Hagiography of the Persian Martyrs’,
‘ “We rejoice in your heroic deeds!”
Christian heroism and Sasanian epic tradition’ and
‘Refuting the eternity of the stars: philosophy between
Byzantium and late antique Iraq’ have been touched on in
the preceding paragraphs. We turn now to the rest of Part
II.
[6] Chapter
4, on ‘Conversion and the family in the Acts of
the Persian Martyrs’, contains what is perhaps the most
original insight of this monograph. W. notes that the
Acts of the earliest Sasanian martyrs ‘typically
emphasize the solidarity of Christian families, especially the
affective bonds between mothers and their sons’, whereas
those of the late Sasanian martyrs tend to focus on ‘the
persecution of the daughters and wives of vociferously
“pagan” families’, though they
‘include, more often than not, scenes of
reconciliation’ (p. 244f.). ‘The Qardagh
legend presents, by comparison, an utterly uncompromising view
of Christian ascetic heroism’ (p. 245). What is not
altogether satisfactory is W.’s explanation of these
literary trends and, in particular, of the unique status which
he claims for his text.
[7] Chapter
5, on ‘Remembering Mar Qardagh: the origins and evolution
of an East-Syrian martyr-cult’. Here W., while regretting
‘the badly underdeveloped state of Christian archaeology
in former Sasanian lands’, pays tribute to the pioneering
work of Fiey on the cults of the East Syrian saints and martyrs
(p. 248), but remarks on how few other studies there have been.
He tends to believe, though admitting that specific proof of
continuity has yet to be excavated, that the annual market at
Melqi, outside the walls of Arbela, attested by the legend of
Mar Qardagh, is of pre-Christian origin and that its religious
focus in earlier times was the cult of the goddess Ishtar. This
goddess, whose statue may have been moved out every two years
from her primary temple in the city of Arbela to Milqia (a name
very like that of Melqi) outside the walls for the duration of
her festival, has a warlike aspect (p. 251), but little else in
common with the saint. The evidence is a
‘persuasive’ reconstruction by A. Livingstone of a
fragmentary text. Melqi plays a prominent part in the
story of Qardagh’s life and it was there that his
monastery was later situated, presumably on the ruins of the
church—no need, surely, to distinguish between the
‘great and handsome church’ in §98 of B and
that in the corresponding section of the Mosul
MS—mentioned in the last paragraph of the text.
[8] On p.
267 W. points out that the main stream of the West-Syrian
tradition ignores Qardagh, although he was commemorated in the
fourteenth-century calendar of Tur ‘Abdin. In this
connection it is worth remarking that Tur ‘Abdin is a
plateau which includes the northern slopes of Mount
Izlo/Izlā, on the southern slopes of which several
monasteries existed which belonged to the Church of the
East. This ridge had once been the frontier between the
Roman (Tur ‘Abdin) and Persian Empires, a fact ignored in
Map 2 on p. 4, which, like most other maps of the Roman
frontiers, places the greater part of Tur ‘Abdin in
Sasanian territory. Far be it from me to suggest that my
book, Monk and mason on the Tigris frontier: the early
history of Tur ‘Abdin (University of Cambridge
Oriental Publications, 39; Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1990) ought to be included in the sizeable
bibliography of modern scholarship (29 pages); but that is
where the relevant geographical evidence is
collected. That there was, throughout the centuries,
intellectual exchange between West-Syrian and East-Syrian monks
living in close proximity to one another in this remote and
agricultural region could be assumed, if it had not been
demonstrated (which, I think, it has). This route for the
transmission of the ideas of John Philoponus from West-Syrian
circles (in which, for doctrinal reasons, he was favoured) to
the Church of the East (where they are found, unexpectedly, in
the legend of Qardagh) might perhaps be added to those
enumerated in n. 150 on p. 203.
[9] The
conclusions of the several chapters are resumed in the
Epilogue, where W. also suggests that the revival of the cult
of Mar Qardagh at Alqoš after the First World War should
be connected with the continuing tendency in the Church of the
East (and to a lesser extent among Syrian Christians generally)
to bolster the identity of a small ethnic group by reference to
the past glories of the Assyrian Empire (p. 285). Already
in the fourteenth century Rabban Saliba of Hah, the Syrian
Orthodox compiler of the calendar cited in my last paragraph,
highlighted this ‘nationalistic’ association in his
brief entry: ‘Mar Qardagh of the
genso/gensā of Sennacherib, who was crowned on a
Friday.’ The Syriac word gensā can
mean family or nation; this recalls §3 of the legend,
where we read (in W.’s translation, p. 20): ‘Now
holy Mar Qardagh was from a great people (gensā)
from the stock of the kingdom of the Assyrians
(’tōrāyē). His father was
descended from the renowned lineage of the house of Nimrod, and
his mother from the renowned lineage of the house of
Sennacherib.’
[10] The
beauty of the presentation is unfortunately let down by the
shortcomings of the proofreading, particularly in the
transcription of Syriac: I counted more than a hundred
misspellings. The translation is also marred by a number
of errors. Students of Christian architecture need to know that
the word translated as ‘vaulted chancels’ in
§69 (p. 69) is not a plural, but a transcription of the
Greek κογχη, meaning
‘apse’; and students of philosophy should compare
all the existing translations of the dialogue on creatures, as
the following short extract from §17 (p. 28 f.) shows:
‘The blessed one said to him,
“Do you not worship the sun and the moon, fire and water,
air and earth, and call them gods and goddesses?”
‘Qardagh said to him, “Yes, I
worship them because these things are eternal entities and have
not been made [this should be: and no creatures; the Syriac is
w-law ‘bīdē, not w-law
‘bīdīn].”
‘The blessed one said to him,
“Now from what have you deduced that the luminaries are
eternal entities and have not been made [see above]?”
‘Qardagh said to him, “From their
constant course and because of the [var. B] immutability [B
reads ‘mutability’; the reading
‘immutability’ comes from A!] of their nature, and
from the fact that they endure [Syriac: mkatrīn,
which is ‘abide’] by the strength of their nature
and are not changed like other things, and are set on high
above [the conjunction w- is here strongly
adversative; translate: ‘but are set on
high’].” ’
[11] In
§18 (p. 29) the word qāpsīn/qāpes
is translated first as ‘store up [their warmth]’,
then as ‘restrain [its rays]’; the former
translation is inadmissible. I found as many mistakes on
each of the following pages of the dialogue. On p. 30
‘they also are not alive’ should be ‘they are
not even alive’, as in l. 4 f. of the same section (p.
29). In §19, l. 2, ‘greater’ should be
‘to a greater degree’; in l. 5, ‘organs of
the body: the brain etc.’ should be
‘organs of the body, such as the brain
etc.’; in l. 8, ‘parts’ should be
‘things’; in l. 9, ‘in’ should be
‘of’; in l. 10 f. ‘the whole world would be
destroyed’ should be ‘that would entail the
destruction of the whole world’; in l. 11,
‘bond’ should be ‘girdle’; in l. 13,
‘plants’ should be ‘roots’. On p.
31 (§20), l. 1, the word ‘qualities’ has been
supplied by the translator and
mārānā’īt should be
‘in a sovereign manner’, not ‘chiefly’;
in. l. 2, ‘receive’ should be ‘have
received’; in l. 4 metnged should be translated
‘is afflicted’, not ‘is blinded’, and
‘suffers’ should be ‘suffers harm to his
sight’; in l. 10 ‘have been made’ should be
‘creatures’ (see above) or ‘created
entities’, as in l. 13; in l. 15, ‘rout’
should be ‘defeat’; in l. 16,
‘dissolved’ should be ‘liquefied’ and
the word ‘even’ should be omitted; in l. 17,
‘vanishes’ should be ‘evaporates’; in
l. 19, ‘heated’ should be ‘ignited’ and
‘by the luminaries’ should be ‘by fire’
(although this involves emending the text); in l. 20,
‘each of them’ should be followed by
‘singly’ and ‘even of’ should be
‘including’. In n. 58 on p. 31 W. writes:
‘Literally “has come into being”
(hwāyā hū).’ This should be:
‘Literally: “is a contingent being”
(hwāyā-[h]w).’ The corrections
necessary on these three pages suffice to show that no
scholarly argument can be based solely on this translation.
[12] One
might also have hoped to see more sensitivity to the way the
author plays on Syriac words, particularly on the word
mšīhā
‘Messiah’, which has almost the same appearance on
the page as mšaynā
‘domesticated’, from šayyen
‘he pacified’ (see p. 50, l. 1: ‘From when I
put on Christ, the peace of the world, I did not want of my own
volition to clothe myself in the rage of battles’), while
the root mšah means both ‘anoint’
and ‘measure’ (see p. 22, l. 7:
‘intemperate’ =
‘unchristened’). By no means all allusions to
the Bible are noticed; for example, the child Samuel also said,
‘Here I am!’ when he heard his name called by a
supernatural being in the night (p. 23).
[13] If
one is not too pedantic, though, this book is enjoyable and
instructive to read. It certainly gives a more panoramic
view than any previous study of the legend, with more
suggestive insights and more abundant documentation, though
perhaps the contribution of Wiessner to the conception of
Chapter 2 might have been more generously
acknowledged._______
Notes
† The author is a Research Associate at both
the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and
Instituut voor Oosters Christendom, Nijmegen.