The History of Mar Behnam and Sarah: Martyrdom and Monasticism in Medieval Iraq 9781463239145, 1463239149

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The History of Mar Behnam andSarah

Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text andTranslation 7 Series Editor Adam H. Becker

3HUVLDQ0DUW\U$FWVLQ6\ULDF is a series of Syriac martyrologicaltexts composed from the fourth century into the Islamic period. They detail the martyrdom of a diversity of Christians at the hands of Sasanian kings, bureaucrats, and priests. These documents vary from purely mythological accounts to descriptions of actual events with a clear historical basis, however distorted by the hagiographer’s hand.

The History of Mar Behnam andSarah

Martyrdom and Monasticism in Medieval Iraq

Edited and Translated by

Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent Kyle Smith

gp 2018

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2018 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܙ‬

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2018

ISBN 978-1-4632-3914-5

ISSN 1941-871X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................................. vii Map ............................................................................................................ ix Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Summary of the Text ...................................................................... 6 Historicity and Origins ................................................................. 16 Literary Context ............................................................................. 20 Editions, Translations, and Manuscripts ................................... 26 Editions ..................................................................................... 26 Translations .............................................................................. 26 Manuscripts .............................................................................. 27 Further Notes on the Manuscripts and Apparatus ............ 34 Stemma............................................................................................ 38 Synopsis .......................................................................................... 38 Text and Translation .............................................................................. 43 Bibliography ..........................................................................................141 Primary Sources ...........................................................................141 Secondary Sources .......................................................................142 Index of Biblical References ...............................................................151 Index of People and Places .................................................................153

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Several people helped us produce this book. Amir Harrak lent us his personal photographs of the Martyrium of Mar Behnam, including his print of the shrine’s interior façade that is reproduced on the cover. He also cheerfully answered our questions about the art, architecture, and inscriptions at the site, which is near his own hometown of Mosul. (As a supplement to this volume, the reader is advised to consult Amir’s publications on the Syriac and Garshuni inscriptions of Iraq, including those that existed at Mar Behnam until March of 2015.) Aaron Butts and Simcha Gross shared with us the advance proofs of their excellent text-and-translation volume on a related Syriac story about another child martyr, ʲAʨdć da-Mšiʘć (“the Slave of Christ”), also published by Gorgias Press. The Syriac text of the manuscript used for this edition was converted into Serto and fully vocalized by Raban Cyril Babi of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in Damascus. We are grateful to Fr. Babi for his assistance with this particular project and, more generally, for continuing the scribal traditions of Syriac Christians into the digital age. Thanks, too, to Melonie SchmiererLee at Gorgias Press for assisting with the formatting of the text and to Melissa Sung for designing the cover. Two people merit very special thanks: Lucas Van Rompay and Adam Becker. Luk provided us with his photographs of British Library Add. Syriac MS 12,174 (1196 CE), the base text for this edition and the oldest manuscript to preserve Behnam and Sarah. He kindly checked our English translation of the Syriac, assisted us immensely in the preparation of the critical apparatus, and offered helpful notes on the five medieval manuscripts consulted for this edition. Meanwhile, Adam, as the editor of this series, was the one who urged us to pursue this project in the first place. He meticuvii

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lously read through the entire draft of our work from start to finish, offering us dozens of helpful corrections and suggestions. While we are humbled to have such generous and intelligent friends and colleagues, who should be given much of the credit for the successes of this volume, they are, of course, in no way responsible for its remaining shortcomings. Finally, we are both immensely grateful to our families for their love and support. Milwaukee and Toronto, July 2018

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INTRODUCTION The History of Mar Behnam and Sarah tells the story of two siblings, the son and daughter of a Magian king. Rich in intrigue, Behnam and Sarah is filled with dreams and visions. Its heroes tout martyrdom as the pinnacle of Christian theology-in-action, quoting the New Testament liberally to make their case. Thematically, the text bears the hallmarks of several earlier Syriac martyr acts, notably those that focus on family relations, the deaths of children, and the conversion of Sasanian elites. Like many of these texts, Behnam and Sarah looks back to the middle of the fourth century, to the golden age of martyrdom in the Sasanian Empire, when the Persian king Shapur II (309–79 CE) is said to have persecuted Christians for forty years. 1

The most useful overview of the Syriac martyrdom narratives set in this period is Sebastian Brock’s “A Guide to the Persian Martyr Acts” in Brock (2008): 77–125. For a reassessment of Shapur’s persecution and the history of the religio-political situation in fourth-century Persia, see Smith (2016). The most noteworthy scholarship on Behnam and Sarah includes: ʲ$EGćl (1949) and (1951); Bruns (2011), with a German translation of Paul Bedjan’s Syriac edition of the text; Habbi (1990); Horn (2006–07); Novák and Younansardaroud (2002); Saint-Laurent (Forthcoming); Wiessner (1978); and Younansardaroud (2002). For scholarship focused more on the medieval martyrs’ shrine that was dedicated to Behnam and Sarah, see Abu al-Souf (1990); Fiey (1966): 565–609 and (1970); Harrak (2010) and (2018), with a French translation of Bedjan’s edition; Harrak and Niu (2004); Rassam (2009); Rahmani (1908) and (1929); Sargysan and Harrak (2015); Snelders (2010): 257–335, 553–70 and (2012); Snelders and Jeudy (2006); Syrian Catholic Patriarchate (1955); and Wolper (2015). 1

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But Behnam and Sarah is an outlier. The text’s distance from the late antique age of martyrs is remarkable. Although it is set in the fourth century, it was not composed until eight hundred years later, in the middle of the twelfth century. In this way, the text demonstrates the extent to which Syriac martyrdom narratives developed as a genre of hagiography over the centuries, from late antiquity deep into the medieval period. In its repetition of earlier martyrological and historiographical themes, Behnam and Sarah reveals itself as a pastiche. It is a medieval patchwork of Greek, Persian, and Syriac traditions that were stitched together to create a new hagio-historiography. This may explain its bizarre chronology. Behnam and Sarah are killed upon the order of their father, but he is not Shapur, the infamous persecutor of Christians so well known from scores of other Syriac martyrdom narratives. Instead, the martyrs’ father is Sennacherib, the ancient Assyrian conqueror better known from the Hebrew Bible, the Syriac translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle, and the ancient ruins of the king’s great palace at Nineveh. He is Sennacherib, except, in this case, he is a Sennacherib who is described as the Magian ruler over both “the kingdom of the Persians” and “the city [not the empire] of Assyria.” 2 Behnam and Sarah is not unique among Syriac sources in referring to Sennacherib. Numerous Syriac texts from late antiquity and the early medieval period mention both him and the Assyrians, usually with the goal of portraying Syriac-speaking Christians as the heirs of the ancient Assyrian or Aramaean past. 3 But the text is undeniably odd in presenting the Assyrian king as the father of two Christian martyrs. Like his father, Behnam, too, is borrowed from the distant past, albeit less overtly and then only at the end of the story, following his martyrdom. When Behnam appears in a vision to an afflicted pilgrim who has come to the shrine that houses the marSee the translation, §§14; 20; 27; and 65. On the Bible and Syriac historiography as sources for Assyria and Sennacherib, see Becker (2008); Debié (2006); Harrak (2001) and (2005); Holm (2014); Joseph (1998); Payne (2012) and (2015): 127–63; Salvesen (1998); and Walker (2006–07). 2 3

INTRODUCTION

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tyrs’ relics, he is literarily transfigured into a Greek military saint as filtered through a seventh-century Syriac martyrdom narrative, the History of Mar Qardagh. 4 Without being explicitly named as such in the text, Behnam becomes a mounted St. Sergius, the Roman soldier and martyr whose cult dominated the late antique Near East along the frontier zones of the Syrian steppe and northern Mesopotamia. 5 While the story of Behnam and Sarah is primarily a narrative about two young martyrs, they are not the only heroes in the text. Mar Mattai, the monk who baptizes Sarah and cures her of her leprosy, is just as important as the martyrs. Mattai’s healing of Sarah was sufficiently miraculous to inspire Behnam and his companions to convert to Christianity, for which they would later be killed. After their deaths, Mattai wrought another miracle: it was he who converted Sennacherib and the king’s unnamed queen to the faith. He also proposed building a martyrium dedicated to Behnam and Sarah, although the construction of the shrine was ultimately overseen by their mother, the queen. The construction of the martyrs’ shrine is hardly an ancillary part of the text. Nearly half of the narrative is devoted to describing the extensive Christian building projects funded by the king and queen after their children had been killed and they themselves had converted to Christianity. The building projects were directed by Mattai and, after his death, two other monastic leaders—Mar Zakkai and Mar Abraham. In addition to two different martyrs’ shrines, the construction included monastic churches, cisterns, protective walls, a road, and a pilgrims’ hospice. Although much of the construction was funded from the royal treasury, many Christians contributed, too. Those of modest means offered their labor, while a wealthy Persian Christian named Isaac donated much of the funding for the martyrs’ shrine itself. According to the text, Isaac had never heard of Behnam and Sarah until he happened upon the monks and pilgrims who were flocking to the site of their martyrdom, which was out on an exFor Qardagh, see Walker (2006) and (2006–07). On Sergius and his cult, see Fiey (1958) and (1961); Fowden (1999); and Walter (2003). 4 5

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posed plain with no refuge or place of shelter in sight. At the time, Isaac was en route to Jerusalem on his own pilgrimage. After the monks told him the story about Sarah’s miraculous healing and the conversion and martyrdom of the two siblings, Isaac offered his own prayers to the martyrs. When Behnam appeared to him in a vision that night, he counseled Isaac to abandon his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and spend his money endowing the monks’ considerable labor: “Only take care that you build a shrine here and a place of prayer,” Behnam tells him, “God will reckon your wages in return more than if you go to Jerusalem.” 6 The following night, Behnam appeared to Isaac’s servant, confirming Isaac’s vision, and drove out the demon that had been afflicting the young man. Intriguingly, the many building projects discussed in the text have real, non-literary counterparts. Monastic institutions, or their ruins, dedicated to Isaac and the three abbots mentioned in Behnam and Sarah—Mattai, Zakkai, and Abraham—have existed for centuries on the Jabal MaqlŠb, a lone mountain northeast of Mosul in northern Iraq. 7 In reference to the scores of monks who lived there, the Jabal MaqlŠb was known as Mount Alfaf, the “Mount of the Thousand.” Until the martyrium dedicated to Behnam and Sarah was destroyed by the Islamic State in 2015, it, too, stood for centuries near Mosul. Though the martyrs’ shrine was on a welltraveled pilgrimage route southeast of the city, near the confluence of the Greater Zab and Tigris Rivers, for most of its existence both the shrine and its associated hospice and monastery remained closely tied to the monks of Mount Alfaf. Effectively, the Monastery of the Pit, as the shrine to Behnam and Sarah was known, was an outpost of the great Monastery of Mar Mattai, which still stands some fifty kilometers north of the shrine. §91. See Fiey (1966): 756–84. For a brief history of monasticism in Iraq, see Brock (2009). Despite the focus being farther upriver, in what is now southeastern Turkey, Palmer (1990) is useful for understanding the early history of monastic building activity in northern Mesopotamia. In the text of Behnam and Sarah itself, the narrator explains that thousands of monks and other faithful Christians came from far and wide to assist in building the Monastery of Mar Mattai (§73). 6 7

INTRODUCTION

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Behnam and Sarah’s shrine once boasted beautiful relief sculptures and ornate inscriptions in several languages—Syriac, Arabic, Garshuni, Armenian, and even Uighur, the only one of its kind in Mesopotamia. 8 The stonework exemplified the craftsmanship of the Syrian Renaissance in the twelfth and thirteenth century, and it highlighted the shrine’s importance to several different groups of people. Soon after its reconstruction in the mid-twelfth century, the Monastery of the Pit was sought out as a place of healing among Christians, Muslims, and Yezidis. 9 Its iconography of Behnam as a saint on horseback, a figure immediately intelligible to many in the Middle East as St. Sergius, or St. George, was attractive to Muslims who were accustomed to conflating sites honoring Greek military saints with their own prophet Khiʡr-Elias, the mysterious “Green Man” of the Qurʱan whom the Persian and Arabic versions of the Alexander Romance depict as the servant of the great king and the discoverer of the spring of eternal life. 10 When read with an awareness of the complicated religious history of Mosul in mind, Behnam and Sarah can be understood as not only a medieval reinterpretation of the late ancient Syriac martyrological genre but also a monastic foundation myth. The monk who wrote the tale seems to have done so amidst an ecclesiastical dispute in the mid-twelfth century, an argument that pitted the monks of Mosul and the Monastery of Mar Mattai against a number of interlopers from Takrit. 11 In creating an ancient backstory for Syrian Orthodox monasticism in northern Mesopotamia, the monks of the Monastery of Mar Mattai and its federated institutions could lay Most comprehensively on the inscriptions, see Harrak (2010). For the Uighur inscription, see Harrak and Niu (2004). For the Armenian inscriptions and graffiti, see Sargysan and Harrak (2015). 9 In his Dictionary of the Countries, the thirteenth-century Muslim geogUDSKHU