Jews and Others
that any such yet existed; and, secondly, even if they had existed, and had
been written in Nabataean script, like the en-Nemara inscription mentioned
above, it is still very unlikely that Jerome could have read them. In any case,
our only scraps of evidence for writing in the Arabic script and language,
dating from before the sixth century, are a couple of small graffiti from the
margins of the settled zone.^88 Sozomenus, however, in the famous passage
in which he relates the rising under Mavia, the conversion of her people to
Christianity, and the descent of theSarakēnoifrom Ishmael, reports that the
Saracen victories at that moment (the late s) were still remembered and
‘‘among theSarakēnoiare [preserved] inōdai[in songs].’’^89 The passage thus
shows a genuine awareness of the existence of (at least) an oral literature
among theSarakēnoi, even if it carries no implication that these songs could
have been written down. Strictly speaking, in any case, though the passage
might reasonably be held to imply an awareness of Arabic as a language, it
does not name it specifically.
In the century and a quarter between the Council of Nicaea of.. and
that of Chalcedon of.., the Near Eastern provinces of the Roman Em-
pire can still, from one point of view, be seen as a zone of Greek culture, but
a culture in which Christianity was ever more dominant. Within that over-
all framework, however, there also persisted an unbroken tradition of com-
munal self-expression in Semitic languages by the two related ‘‘peoples of
the Book,’’ the Jews and the Samaritans, while a capacity for self-expression,
within Christianity, by users of Syriac was rapidly developing and, in written
form, was also beginning to spread westwards across the Euphrates, to an area
where ‘‘the Syrian language’’ was already spoken by some. But no Christian
communities yet had Syriac as their primary public language, and no separate
Syriac-using churches had yet emerged. Nor are there clear indications that
Christian theologians, whether writing in Greek or Syriac, explicitly asso-
ciated heretical doctrines with the language used by the authors concerned.
Ephraim wrote against a variety of heresies, including those associated with
the names of Bardesanes, Marcion, Valentinus, and Mani, without relating
their doctrines to a particular ‘‘ethnicity,’’ or language. Equally, Theodoret, in
discussing the doctrines of Nestorius, who came from the small Greek city
of Germanikaia in Euphratensis, says nothing to identify him as a ‘‘Syrian.’’^90
There must surely also have been pagans for whom dialects of ‘‘the Syrian
. See, e.g., B. Gruendler,The Development of the Arabic Scripts from the Nabataean Era to
the First Islamic Century according to Dated Texts(), ff. Millar (n. above).
. Sozomenus,HE, , .
. Theodoret,Haereticarum fabularum compendium, (PGLXXXIII, cols. –).