Adiabene

Arbela

Drafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)formation

Adiabene — Hadyab in Syriac — is the country between the Greater and the Lesser Zab, east of the Tigris: the old Assyrian heartland, with Nineveh in ruins on one side and Arbela as its capital. Arbela is Erbil, and it has been continuously inhabited for longer than almost anywhere on earth; the citadel mound stands thirty metres above the plain and is made of the debris of its own occupation.

The kingdom appears in the record in the last two centuries BC as one of the vassal kingdoms of the Parthian empire. Nobody founded it as far as the record shows; it is simply there, and the century in which it became a kingdom cannot be fixed closer than a hundred years.

The structure it belonged to was loose by design. A Parthian king of kings sat over great noble houses with their own armed followings and over a ring of vassal kingdoms — Persis, Elymais, Characene, Adiabene, Media Atropatene, Armenia — each with its own dynasty and its own coinage, supplying contingents when called.

Adiabene's kings played that part unremarkably. They fought in Parthian wars, quarrelled with Armenia, and were periodically overrun by Roman armies passing through on the way to Ctesiphon; Trajan took Arbela in 116 and made the country into a short-lived province called Assyria, which his successor abandoned along with everything else east of the Euphrates. One of them, Narses, was drowned in the Zab around 190 by his own overlord for sympathising with a Persian revolt, and the country was plundered as a punishment for its king.

That is the political history, and it is not why anybody remembers Adiabene. What people remember is a passage in Josephus.

A Jewish royal house

Drafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)peak

Josephus devotes a long passage of the twentieth book of the Jewish Antiquities to the conversion of the royal family of Adiabene, and it is the fullest account of a first-century conversion to Judaism that survives.

The queen, Helena, was taught by a Jewish merchant named Ananias while her son Izates was away in Characene, at the head of the Gulf, where he was being taught by the same man. Both accepted the God of Israel. Izates wanted to be circumcised; Ananias advised against it on the grounds that his subjects would not accept a king who had adopted foreign customs, and that worshipping God mattered more than the rite. A second teacher, Eleazar, arrived from Galilee, found him reading the Law, and told him that reading the commandment without performing it was worse than not knowing it. Izates was circumcised.

That exchange is one of the most-discussed passages in the study of ancient Judaism, because it is a live debate about what conversion required, conducted between two Jewish teachers in front of a Parthian client king, and reported by a Jewish historian writing for Romans.

Helena moved to Jerusalem. She arrived during the famine of the 40s — the one Acts also refers to — and bought grain in Egypt and dried figs in Cyprus and distributed them, which the rabbinic tradition remembers her for. She built a palace in the city and a monumental tomb outside the northern wall, which survives and is known as the Tomb of the Kings and was for a long time thought to be a Judaean royal burial. She and Izates were buried in it.

Her descendants fought in the revolt of 66. Josephus names Adiabenian princes among the defenders of Jerusalem, and records that they were taken to Rome as hostages after it fell. A Mesopotamian dynasty on the other side of the Roman frontier sent its royal family to die in somebody else's war because it had become part of the people fighting it.

How far the conversion went beyond the palace is not known. There was a Jewish population in Adiabene before and after, and the kingdom was a Parthian vassal in a region with Zoroastrian, Aramaean, Greek and later Christian communities. What is established is that its kings were Jews for at least two generations.

What makes a kingdom Jewish

Drafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)aside?What aside means

Between the end of the Hasmonean state and the twentieth century, the number of kingdoms anywhere in the world that can be called Jewish is very small, and the two clearest cases are a thousand years and three thousand kilometres apart. They are not the same kind of case, and the difference is the useful part.

Adiabene is a converted dynasty. A king and a queen mother became Jews in the first century, after arguments with two teachers about what conversion actually required. Their descendants were Jews for at least two generations and went to fight and die in Judaea. What is not visible anywhere is a state.

There is no Adiabenian royal inscription that changes its gods. There is no decree, no policy, no evidence of what the population of the country between the Zabs believed or was expected to believe, and no confessional foreign alignment beyond the family's own personal involvement with Jerusalem. Josephus is interested in the palace because a palace conversion is what his argument needs, and the palace is what he shows us. Below it the record is silent.

The other one

Himyar in South Arabia is the stronger case, and the comparison shows why.

There the royal inscriptions themselves change. Around 380 the old South Arabian gods stop being named and the formulas begin invoking Rahmanan, the Merciful, and referring to Israel and the people of Israel. The change holds for a century and a half across several reigns, which is longer than any individual king's enthusiasm. By the sixth century the confession is the axis of the kingdom's foreign relations and the stated reason two Christian empires combined to destroy it.

That is a public religion — something the state says about itself, in its own documents, consistently, at a cost.

Why the distinction is worth keeping

Because collapsing it flatters both cases and describes neither.

Call Adiabene a Jewish state and you assert a confessional population and a religious policy that no evidence supports, and you flatten the thing Josephus actually recorded, which is more interesting than a policy: a live disagreement between two Jewish teachers, conducted in front of a king who wanted to do the thing properly, about whether reading the commandment was enough.

Call Himyar merely a dynasty with a private faith and you cannot explain the inscriptions, the persistence across reigns, or the war.

One is a family that converted and stayed converted through a rebellion, a famine relief operation and a tomb outside the walls of Jerusalem. The other is a state that changed what it said about God in public and was eventually killed for it. Both are rare. They are rare in different ways.

What Arbela became

Drafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)end

Ardashir annexed Adiabene around 226, in the same sequence of campaigns that took Characene, Elymais and the Parthian empire itself. It became a Sasanian province and its dynasty disappears from the record.

That sentence is the whole of the ending, and the disproportion between it and what the country turned into afterwards is the point of the chapter that follows this one.

By 226 the kingdom had already been two things it is worth naming in one place.

It had been a Parthian vassal for something over two centuries: a small state between two rivers, supplying troops, quarrelling with Armenia, and being walked over by Roman armies with somewhere else to be. It had a Jewish royal house for at least two generations of that, whose members were buried outside the walls of Jerusalem and whose princes died in the revolt of 66.

And by the time Ardashir arrived it had been Christian, in its towns and among some of its gentry, for about a hundred years — long enough for its bishops to have been martyred, imprisoned and educated abroad, and for the see at Arbela to have become the senior church east of the Roman frontier.

The kingdom stopped in 226. Almost nothing else did.

A dark pit

Drafted from Wigram, An Introduction to the History of the Assyrian Church, or The Church of the Sassanid Persian Empire, 100-640 A.D. (1910)afterlife

The country outlasted the kingdom by a very long way, and what it became is better recorded than anything the kingdom itself did — because the people writing it down were interested in bishops rather than kings.

The source has to be introduced with a warning. Nearly everything known about early Christian Adiabene comes through the History of the Bishops of Adiabene by Mshikha-Zkha, a sixth-century compiler from the province who says openly that he is working from earlier authorities now lost. Its authenticity has been disputed at length, and Wigram, writing in 1910, believes it more readily than a modern reader should. What follows is what that tradition says, which is a different thing from what happened, and it is the only connected account there is.

The first bishops

Pqida was consecrated first bishop of Adiabene in 104, and he had been born a slave in a Magian household and raised in that religion. He got his freedom, was converted, and was persecuted for apostasy — not by his owner, the tradition is careful to say, but by the owner's family. He escaped them and spent five years travelling with his teacher before being made bishop.

His successor Samson was killed by Magians in 123. Wigram notes what that makes him: the first man to die for the Christian faith in a country which afterwards supplied, he thinks, more martyrs than any other.

The third, Isaac, converted a Zoroastrian landholder of some standing named Raqbokt. The mobeds sent men to kill the convert; the men arrived, found him away from home, and rather than go back empty-handed took the bishop instead and shut him up for a while in a dark pit. The same punishment had been used on Pqida's account earlier. It is a small detail and it says a great deal about the period: an organised priesthood with enough standing to send out killers and not enough authority to have the killing sanctioned, improvising on the day.

Because that is the pattern for the whole Parthian period. Persecution in Adiabene came from the Magian clan, not from the government. Formal state persecution of Christians in the east does not begin until the Sasanians, and then not until Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the rival empire and every Christian in Iran a potential partisan of the enemy. The Syriac historians make the point sharply: there was no organised persecution in the east until its day was over in the west.

Which made it a refuge

So for two centuries the traffic ran the wrong way.

While Christians were being killed for their religion inside the Roman empire, Adiabene was comparatively safe, and people crossed the frontier eastwards and settled. Later the Sasanian kings would add to the population by force, carrying off whole towns from Roman Syria and resettling them in Mesopotamia. The combined effect, Wigram argues, was to keep an isolated church in some contact with theological argument in the west — not close contact, but not none.

Traffic went the other way too, on ordinary business. Abd-Mshikha, bishop of Arbela from 190 to 225, had become a Christian while at Antioch as a student, and came home with it.

The general election

By 225 the church east of the frontier had more than twenty bishops. Arbela appears to have been the only see in Adiabene itself, which is why it was recognised as a metropolitan seat when the eastern church organised itself into a hierarchy at the council of 410 — the arrangement that made it legally independent of every patriarch in Roman territory, and that would eventually send missions as far as China.

And then there is the detail that puts the whole record in proportion.

Mshikha-Zkha, writing the history of his own province, reaches the year 225 — the year the Parthian empire that had ruled Adiabene for three centuries was destroyed and replaced by the Sasanians — and mentions it in passing. Wigram's comparison is that he notices it about as much as an English writer notices a general election.

That is what a country looks like from the inside once the kingdom has stopped mattering to it. The dynasty that Josephus made famous is gone, the empire it was a client of has just fallen, and the man writing the local history records the change of régime as background to an episcopal succession, because in Arbela the succession was the news.