During the first week of June 2006, Bosphorus University hosted a conference together with the University of Harran, founded in 1993 in Urfa, a city in southeastern Turkey. Twenty miles to the southeast of Urfa is the ancient city of Harran, which in the mid-eighth century was briefly the capital of the eastern Islamic empire under Marwan II (r. 744-50), the last Umayyad caliph. A celebrated Islamic school of higher studies was founded there during the Abbasid caliphate, and it was this institution that gave its name to the modern University of Harran.
Urfa is on the northern edge of the great Mesopotamian plain, and Arabic is spoken there as well as Turkish, Kurdish, and even a few whispers of Syriac, the language of the tiny Christian community. The villagers in Harran are all Arabic speakers, though these days they also speak Turkish. The main road south from Urfa leads past Harran and through Syria and Iraq to Baghdad, following the ancient caravan route from central Anatolia to the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris.
Urfa has been identified as the biblical “Ur of the Chaldees,” which Alexander the Great refounded as Edessa, after the city near his capital in Macedonia. Edessa became a famous city of religion and scholarship during the early centuries of the Byzantine period, and it played an important role both in the spread of Christianity and in the survival and transmission of ancient Greek learning.
During the medieval era Edessa was held in turn by the Byzantines, Sassanid Persians, Marwanid Kurds, Ayyubid Arabs, Armenians, Crusaders, and Seljuk Turks. An army of the First Crusade under Baldwin of Boulogne took Edessa from the Armenians in 1098. The city then became the capital of the county of Edessa, the first of several Crusader states founded in the Middle East. This state lasted less than half a century, for on Christmas Eve 1144 Edessa fell to the Seljuk Turks, who put all the Christian men to the sword and sold the women and children into slavery. The fall of Edessa made a deep impression on the West, leading Pope Eugenius III to proclaim the Second Crusade. The pope refers to Edessa in a letter he wrote on 1 December 1145 to King Louis VII of France, calling it “the city that… was ruled by Christians and alone served the Lord when, long ago, the whole world in the East was under the sway of pagans.”
The pagans referred to by Eugenius were the Sabeans, who practiced an astral religion that originated in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sabeans prayed to spiritual beings whom they thought were the intermediaries between mankind and a Supreme Being, and who were the intelligences that guided the motion of the celestial bodies. Thus the Sabeans built temples to the sun, the moon, and the five planets, one of which has been excavated at a site called Sumatar Harabesi, some thirty-five miles east-southeast of Urfa.
The Second Crusade never succeeded in regaining Edessa, and the city passed in turn to the Ayyubid Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Mam-luks, and finally the Ottoman Turks, who took it in 1637. Under Muslim rule the city was known as Urfa, a variant of its ancient name, though the tiny Christian community continued to call it Edessa.
The first week of the conference was held in Istanbul on the campus of Bosphorus University, and for the second week it met on the campus of Harran University in Urfa. At the conclusion of the conference we spent a day in Harran, which I had visited for the first time twenty years before. The fragmentary ruins of the medieval Islamic city are now partly occupied by a village of mud-brick houses, each of them roofed with several conical domes, giving them the appearance of giant beehives; the only signs of the modern world are the television antennas and satellite dishes on the rooftops of what are probably the oldest dwellings in Turkey.
While we were in Urfa I presented a paper on the transmission of Greek culture to Islam, during the first phase of which the Christian University of Edessa played a vital role. Works of Greek culture had been translated from Greek into Aramaic at the University of Edessa before it was closed in 489, after which some Nestorian scholars moved to the medical school at Jundishapur. Jundishapur had also received a group of Greek scholars after the Platonic Academy in Athens was closed in 529, among them Isidorus of Miletus, who would later return to Constantinople to help build the great church of Haghia Sophia. The Nestorian and Greek scholars at Jundishapur laid the foundations for the establishment of Greek culture in the medical school there, whose faculty would subsequently move to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and translate these works into Arabic. It intrigued me that this transmission of culture included a Greek physicist from Miletus, where the first philosophers of nature had brought forth their ideas in the sixth century B.C., starting science on the long journey that eventually brought it through the Islamic world to western Europe and subsequently spread it worldwide.
Some of the most important work carried out in the House of Wisdom was done by Thabit ibn Qurra of Harran, one of the greatest scientists in the medieval Islamic world. Thabit, as we have learned, was a Syriac-speaking Sabean who earned his living as a money changer in Harran before he was discovered there by one of the Banu Musa and went to work as a translator at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. There he translated from Greek and Syriac into Arabic the works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius, Hero, Ptolemy, Nichomachus, Hippocrates, and Galen. Thabit's own work in mathematics, physics, astronomy, and medicine, translated from Arabic to Latin, was highly influential in the early development of European science. Roger Bacon refers to him as “the supreme philosopher among all Christians, who has added in many respects, speculative as well as practical, to the work of Ptolemy.” But Thabit, as we know, was not a Christian; nor did he ever convert to Islam, for till the end of his days he remained a Sabean, which in Bacon's eyes would have made him a pagan or a heathen, a worshipper of the celestial bodies.
The Sabeans of Edessa and Harran would have inherited their knowledge of astronomy from sources originating in ancient Mesopotamia, part of the same tradition that gave them their astral religion. Apparently the Sabeans, like the Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia, acquired their knowledge of Greek culture from the Alexandrian philosophical schools in late antiquity. In the case of the Sabeans this included not only rational science and philosophy but also the occult sciences of astrology alchemy magic, and hermeticism, or secret knowledge, named for the legendary Hermes Trismegistus.
Thabit ibn Qurra was privy to all of these traditions, inheriting the astronomical lore of Mesopotamia and both rational and occult science from Hellenistic Alexandria, and transmitting them to the Islamic world in Baghdad through his translations as well as his own writings. MASI lists 80 of his extant manuscripts, comprising 30 in astronomy, 29 in mathematics, 4 in history, 3 in mechanics, 3 in descriptive geography, 2 in philosophy, 2 in medicine, 2 in mineralogy, 2 in music, 1 in physics, 1 in zoology, and 1 in mysticism. Thabit's treatises on astronomy and mathematics were extremely influential in both Arabic and medieval European science, although his famous trepidation theory proved to be erroneous.
Thabit's four extant historical works are all concerned with the Sabeans, their history, chronology, religion, and customs. One of them, a Syriac manuscript entitled Book of Confirmation of the Faith of Heathens, proudly presents Thabit's claim that the Sabeans were heirs of the ancient pagan culture that civilized the world.
We are the heirs and offspring of paganism which spread gloriously over the world. Happy is he who for the sake of paganism bears his burden without growing weary. Who has civilized the world and built its cities, but the chieftains and kings of paganism? Who made the ports and dug the canals? The glorious pagans founded all these things. It is they who discovered the art of healing souls, and they too made known the art of healing the body and filled the world with civil institutions and with wisdom which is the greatest of goods. Without them the world would be empty and plunged in poverty.
Thabit's single extant work on mysticism is entitled Kitab al-Hiyal (Book on Ingenious Manners). It survives only in medieval Latin translations bearing the titles De Prestigious (On Magic) or De Imaginibus (On Images), which MASI describes as a “handbook for manufacturing metallic, wax and clay images of people, animals, cities or countries for magic operations connected with astrology.” Recent research indicates that one of Thabit's grandsons who worked in Baghdad in the mid-tenth century taught his students the techniques of talismanic magic, which he presumably learned from Thabit. Two of the students of Thabit's grandsons were grandsons of the famous Andalusian physician al-Harrani, who practiced medicine at the court of the amir ‘Abd al-Rahman II (r. 822-52) in Cordoba, and it was through them that Thabit's work on the occult sciences was introduced to Spain and subsequently to the Christian West.
My students are always surprised to find that Thabit would write a book on talismanic magic, which one of them described as “voodoo.” I told her that scientists from the time of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks had been involved in astrology, alchemy, divination, and magic. Thabit was working in Baghdad around the time when the Thousand Nights and One Night was written, when the glorious reign of Harun al-Rashid was still fresh in memory. He was the most famous scientist of his time, renowned for his knowledge of magic as well as his mathematics, and could have been a model for the villainous Moor—a student of “sorcery and spells, geomancy and alchemy, astrology, fumigation and enchantment”—who led Aladdin to his magical lamp.
Thabit stands in a long line of wizard-scientists stretching from Pythagoras to Newton, for in the popular mind those who achieve an understanding of nature gain power over it. Most modern historians focus only on the rational side of the developments that led to the Scientific Revolution, leaving out of consideration what Plato called “the spindle of Necessity on which all the revolutions turn,” referring to the heavenly spheres that once carried the celestial orbs in divinely ordained harmony.
The ancient Sabean faith continues to the present across the border from Harran in Syria, as well as in Iraq, as I learned only a few years ago. Harran and other beehive villages to its south in Syria are inhabited by seminomadic Arabs who herd their flocks in the Jullab plain, the northernmost extension of the great Mesopotamian desert. Until two decades ago, when I first visited Harran, the way of life of the villagers had not changed since biblical times, with desert nomads gradually abandoning their wandering ways and settling down for a time here on the northern margin of the Mesopotamian plain before moving on again, just as the family of Abraham did when they passed this way three millennia ago. Genesis 12:1-5 tells of how Abraham left Harran in obedience to the call of Yahweh:
Yahweh said to Abram, “Leave your country your family and your father's house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing…. So Abram went as Yahweh told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had amassed and the people they had acquired in Haran. They set off for the land of Canaan and arrived there.
Twenty miles south of Harran the main road crosses the border into Syria, where there are about a dozen villages inhabited by Arabs who still hold to the ancient Sabean faith. The road then continues south for another fifty miles to Al-Raqqa, an ancient crossroads on the left bank of the Euphrates.
Al-Raqqa was refounded in 771 by the caliph al-Mansur. Harun al-Rashid built a palace north of Al-Raqqa in the closing years of the eighth century, calling it Kasr as-Salam, the Palace of Peace. Thenceforth this became his favorite residence, and Al-Raqqa became the second capital of the Abbasid caliphate after Baghdad.
The astronomer al-Battani, a younger contemporary of Thabit ibn Qurra's from Harran, built an observatory in Al-Raqqa in the last quarter of the ninth century. The astronomical tables he compiled there were translated into Latin and were used by both Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. Al-Battani was also a Sabean, but, unlike Thabit ibn Qurra, he converted to Islam. Nevertheless, he remained proud of his Sabean heritage, as evidenced by the title of his great work on astronomy, Zij al-Sabi, the Sabean Tables.
Just to the south of Al-Raqqa the road from Urfa crosses the Euphrates and joins the main highway from Aleppo to Baghdad. Beyond the junction the highway runs along the right bank of the Euphrates, following the track of the oldest caravan route in the world,which has brought goods and ideas back and forth between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean since the beginning of recorded history and even before. Thabit ibn Qurra would have followed this route on his way to Baghdad, bringing with him the knowledge of Greek and ancient Mesopotamian astronomy that he translated into Arabic in the House of Wisdom.
Thabit arrived in Baghdad circa 862, a century after its founding as the Abbasid capital. A century later the geographer Muqaddasi could with justice describe the Abbasid capital as a city beyond compare, an encomium that I recalled in Harran, thinking of Thabit ibn Qurra setting out on the road to Baghdad:
Baghdad, in the heart of Islam, is the city of well-being; in it are the talents of which men speak, and elegance and courtesy. Its winds are balmy and its science penetrating. In it are to be found the best of everything and all that is beautiful. From it comes everything of consideration, and every elegance is drawn towards it. All hearts belong to it, and all wars are against it.
And that brought to mind lines by the poet Khuraymi, lamenting the destruction of Baghdad in a civil war in 812-13. This threnody has a particular resonance now, when the city is once again being ravaged by internal strife:
Behold Baghdad! There bewildered sparrows
Build no nests in its house.
Behold it surrounded by destruction, encircled
With humiliation, its proud men besieged.
But Baghdad was restored and flourished for another four centuries before it was destroyed again, and during that time Thabit ibn Qurra and those who succeeded him in the House of Wisdom continued their translations and researches, which in time were passed on to the West.
Such is the story of how Greek science came to western Europe through the lands of Islam, passing through Harran on the road to Baghdad, where I ended an intellectual quest that began in Miletus, led along the way by the power of Aladdin's lamp.