SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 97Greeks and Romans mostly ignored the Arabs, the geographer sees Palestine
and the Hijāz as related to the same vast Rift Valley geolog y, communicating
easily both by land and via the Red Sea. Adding the origins of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam to the Mediterranean framework is no challenge, cer-
tainly not to the cartographer. The historian too can relate them easily to
what was already familiar.
The Mediterranean paradigm begins to reveal its inadequacies, though,
once we look at the dissemination of these religions, and the regions where
they matured as cultural forms. Babylonian exile in the early sixth century
BCE had established a major non- Palestinian focus for Jewish culture in
Mesopotamia/Iraq, which endured two and a half millennia. So the Jews be-
came entangled with the Iranian world, which also produced its own reli-
gions: Mazdaism, never much at home anywhere except the Iranian heart-
lands, or wherever in Iraq Iranians had settled; and Manicheism, which from
third- century Iraq spread far to the East as well as the West.
As for Christianity, its early missions took it to the Greek cities of Syria,
Asia Minor, and Greece itself, much the same places in which Greek philoso-
phy and Roman law thrived. Also to Rome, which by this time could not but
be a major objective for any new idea. West of Rome, it would be hard to
rank Latin North Africa, or Spain, or Gaul, among the most creative regions
of pre- Constantinian Christianity, even allowing for occasional charismatic
or learned figures such as Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 200; actually a Greek- speaker
from Smyrna), or Tertullian of Carthage (d. c. 225). Latin Christianity be-
fore Augustine of Hippo had little to offer the Greeks; and by Augustine’s
death in 430 the two worlds were drifting slowly apart. But in the East there
was Syriac Christianity to be taken into account, already from the second
century. Beyond the Hellenized regions of Syria, but also interwoven with
them, strands of Syriac- speaking Christianity focused especially on Edessa in
Mesopotamia, near to Rome’s eastern frontier. Although to begin with Syr-
iac Christianity was very much a translation culture from the Greek, it devel-
oped its own style and terms of reference, and as early as Ephrem of Nisibis
(d. 373) produced a liturgical poet so distinctive he was translated into
Greek, Latin, and various Oriental languages, and attracted a hive of imita-
tors. The interest Syriac monastic milieus developed in Aristotle, from the
mid- sixth century onward, turned out—as we shall see in chapter 5—to be a
major channel by which Greek thought reached and fertilized the Muslim
world. (The tenth- century Muslim writers who trace the exile of Greek learn-
ing from Alexandria round the Fertile Crescent to Baghdad oddly echo the
sixth- century story according to which the philosophers expelled from Ath-
ens took refuge at Ctesiphon.^20 )
Already by Constantine’s day there were communities of Syriac Chris-
tians in Iran as well. Occasional Sasanian persecution reinforced their iden-
20 See above p. 11 n. 34, and below p.150.