126 | CHAPTER 4
probable that Edessene Christian traders implanted their faith on the Mala-
bar coast where it flourishes to this day—if not in the time of the Apostle
Thomas as tradition claims, then surely by the fourth century.^129 Mani both
personally visited India and imagined himself in the prophetic company of
Buddha and Zarathushtra as well as Jesus.^130
Much later, the Muslim philosopher Fārābī (d. 948) and the historian
Masʿūdī (d. 956) drew a vivid if inaccurate picture of Greek medical science
and Aristotelian logic being transmitted to the Arabs round the Fertile Cres-
cent, from Alexandria to Baghdad (this will be discussed further in chapter
5). Once the Greek schools in the Eg yptian metropolis closed and the teach-
ing of medicine and Aristotle died out there, it was transferred to Antioch in
the time of the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (717–20). It persisted there until
only one teacher remained, with two pupils who eventually left, “taking the
books with them.” One went to Harrān in Northern Mesopotamia close to
Edessa, and the other to Marw far away in what is today Turkmenistan. By
these routes the erudition of the Greeks eventually reached Baghdad, where
the scholarly Abbasid caliph Maʾmūn (813–33) especially favored it—as had
several of his predecessors, but our narrative chooses to flatter Maʾmūn.
The history of Aristotelianism is in fact more than incidentally germane
to my First Millennium thesis. I turn to it in the next chapter as a way of il-
lustrating the period’s cultural dynamic. Its strongly exegetical character is
typical of the First Millennium’s other main intellectual movements. In the
next two chapters, I offer a more general account of First Millennium exeget-
ical cultures.
129 S. Neil, A history of Christianity in India (Cambridge 1984–85) 1.26–34; Reed, History of reli-
gions 49 (2009) [4:25] 62–66; E. H. Seland, “Trade and Christianity in the Indian Ocean during late
Antiquity,” JLA 5 (2012) 72–86.
130 Fowden, Empire to commonwealth [4:53] 73; W. Sundermann, “Manicheism iv,” EIr, www
.iranicaonline.org.