addition to being used in funerary settings, Old Syriac had an important royal status within the kingdom of Edessa, as can be gauged from its use on coins (see below) and from official dedicatory inscriptions. Not unlike Palmyra and Hatra, Edessa was rich in monuments and sculptures that celebrated the royal family and members of the local elites; an important trace of dedicatory statuary survives in the form of a column that still stands on Edessa’s citadel. As its inscription makes clear, the column once held a statue of the Edessene queen (or princess) Shalmat, daughter of the crown prince Ma‘nu, and was set up in the first half of the third century CE by a high-ranking official in the kingdom (As 1). The inscription also attests to the use, in Edessa, of the Middle-Persian title paṣgriba, usually understood as “crown prince,” which can be compared to the same title in Hatra (Gnoli 2002; Mosig-Walburg 2018; see also CIL IV 1797, the Latin funerary inscription, set up in Rome, of the Edessene “crown prince,” filius rex, Abgar Phraates); at the same time, this inscription demonstrates the continuing importance of the royal family after Edessa was made a Roman colonia in the early third century (Millar 1993: 476–477).
Other inscriptions have a religious or votive character and demonstrate the interaction between Semitic and Mesopotamian cults and Greco-Roman religion. A group of inscriptions from a site about 60 kilometers southeast of Edessa, Sumatar Harabesi, attest to the continuation of the cult of Sin (the Mesopotamian god of the moon, also venerated in nearby Harran) and are part of a sanctuary area where altars, reliefs (As 27/28), and betyls were erected in honor of the god; no trace of the cult of Sin, however, survives in inscriptions from Edessa itself (Healey 2019). Other inscriptions make reference to Maralahe, the “Lord of the gods,” in a funerary setting (As 20), or to record the erection of votive pillars, thanks to the involvement of local governors and cultic personnel (As 36, As 37). Hints about concepts of an afterlife might come from funerary inscriptions that use the term “house of eternity” for a tomb (As 7, As 9, As 59, Am 1, Am 2, Am 3, Am 5, Am 6, Am 7, Am 10), or from curses upon anyone removing the bones of the deceased (As 20, Bs 2). A religious character, possibly also related to the afterlife, has been suggested for some funerary mosaics with Greco-Roman mythological subjects, such as two mosaics representing Orpheus playing the lyre (Am 7; Healey 2006), which have been connected to the cult of Orpheus, and a mosaic representing a phoenix standing on a funerary stele beside an (empty?) sarcophagus (Am 6; Healey 2017: 5–6, 2019: 60–62).
There survive also inscribed mosaics from the second and third centuries CE that raise important questions about the familiarity of Syriac speakers with Greco-Roman culture, mythology, and even literature, despite the language barrier between Greek and Syriac. The Euphrates Mosaic (228/229 CE) is inscribed in both Greek and Syriac and represents a personification of the river-god Euphrates surrounded by two symbolic female figures; they might represent Fecundity and an interpretatio graeca of the Syrian goddess Atargatis (Bm 1; see also Chapter 16). Another especially remarkable inscribed mosaic depicts a Greek mythological scene, the creation of mankind by Prometheus, where Zeus, overseeing the scene, is identified as “Maralahe” (Cm 11, Bowersock 2001). Furthermore, an especially impressive circle of mosaics reproduces selected scenes from the Iliad, with characters labeled in Syriac; the mosaics were produced at a time when no Syriac translation of this text is known to have circulated (or of any other piece of Greek classical literature for that matter), and Syriac speakers must have been aware of this text from Greek sources. The mosaics depict specific scenes from the Iliad, including 1.318–338, when Briseis is led away from Achilles, and 9.182–198, when Achilles and Patroclus receive the embassy of the Greeks in Achilles’s tent (Cm 3, Cm 4, Balty and Briquel-Chatonnet 2000). The mosaics with Syriac inscriptions from a villa recently discovered SW of Edessa and dating back to the first half of the third century CE include the representation of the myth of Achilles on Scyros (in the triclinium, together with other mythological scenes of dubious identification) and playful naked Erotes picking grapes from vines that develop out of craters; the scenes can be compared with iconography from Zeugma and Palmyra (Abdallah et al. 2020).
Coins
Coinage from the kingdom of Edessa was arguably first produced under King Wael son of Sahru (r. 163–165), at a time when Wael had strong Parthian support in the context of Lucius Verus’s Parthian war of 161–166; these coins have Syriac inscriptions, while later coinage was inscribed in either Syriac or (more commonly) Greek. In fact, most coinage from Edessa has inscriptions in Greek and post-dates the deposition of the philo-Parthian Wael, when his successor Ma‘nu VIII Philoromaios (165–176) was allowed to mint silver denarii for Marcus Aurelius, Faustina the Younger, Lucilla, and Lucius Verus. Arguably, however, Roman coins were in use at Edessa before local coins were minted, as is indicated by Syriac countermarks with the names of Edessene kings (Howgego 1985: no.26, 695, 696; Ross 2001: 167 n.6; Luther 2009). The present chapter focuses on Syriac coinage alone (for an overview of Greek coinage, see Ross 2001: 145–162, and Edessene coinage in BMC Arabia xciv–cvii, 91–118, with pl.XIII–XVII): the only known coins with Syriac inscriptions were minted in bronze during the second half of the second century, under the reigns of the kings Wael (r. 163–165), Ma‘nu VIII (165–176), and Abgar VIII (176–211).
The Syriac coinage by Wael includes an issue representing the bust of King Wael, on the reverse, and the head of the Parthian king, Vologases IV, on the obverse, arguably celebrating Parthian friendship before the end of the Roman–Parthian war (161–166), as a result of which Osrhoene became a satellite kingdom of Rome (see Chapter 27); the only Syriac inscription on these coins indicates the identity of the sovereign with the label “King Wael” (Co1). Another issue by Wael presents his bust similarly identified in Syriac as “King Wael,” and, on the reverse, a temple accompanied by the inscription “the God Nah∙ay” (this god is also mentioned in Bs 2, a funerary monument for a religious functionary, a budar, of Nah∙ay; Healey 2019: 53–54). In the best-preserved examples of this issue, the temple is seen in three-quarters perspective, with a star depicted on the pediment, and with a cube-shaped betyl lying on a pedestal beneath the doorway (Co 2). The only other known coins with Syriac inscriptions, by the kings Ma‘nu VIII and Abgar VIII, have a simpler iconography; they all represent the bearded bust of the king on the obverse, wearing a tall tiara, and, on the reverse, the Syriac legend “King Ma‘nu,” or “King Abgar,” encircled by a wreath (Co 3 and Co 4). The representations in coins of Edessene kings shows a clear debt to Parthian royal iconography (Winkelmann 2007).
Parchments and Papyri
Among the Syriac sources for the study of the Roman Near East, parchments and papyri occupy a prominent position. While only few instances survive from the period covered by the present volume, it should be emphasized that these documents are only a small remnant of the lively scribal and legal traditions of Edessa and Osrhoene (Chapters 11 and 35). In addition to these documents, a glimpse of the administrative and scribal activities in the kingdom of Edessa during the third century derives from a historiographical source, the Chronicle of Edessa, a composite annalistic compilation that took its current form during the sixth century but that includes earlier material (more on this below). The text makes reference to the official “scribes,” or perhaps “clerks of Edessa” (3.12: sōprē d-ʼūrhōy), and to “prefects (or commissioners) of the city” (šarrıĪrē da-mdıĪtō), who were in charge of the official archive of Edessa (ʼarkeyōn d-ʼūrhōy from the Greek archeion; 3.13–16); the recent discovery of the tomb of a scribe, Gadya, demonstrates the wealth that qualified administrative personnel could own (Önal 2017: 132–134). The royal archive of Edessa was still functioning in 243 CE (as attested by P. Dura 28) and was also known to Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. eccl. 1.13.5 and 10; Segal 1970: 20–21); it contained not only private documents such as the copy of a Syriac deed of sale found in Dura-Europos (P. Dura 28), but, arguably, also annalistic records of the Abgarid dynasty, later used in the compilation of the Chronicle of Edessa. The surviving