THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENTnecessarily go together, let alone imply ethnicity, and indeed it is hard enough
to clarify the development and inter-relation of the various languages and
scripts known from the area, especially as our evidence is so unevenly spread.
Syriac, the form of Aramaic from the region round Edessa, was unusual in
that it became an important literary language during late antiquity, being used
for many works of Christian theology and other kinds of Christian writing. An
increasing infl uence of Greek can be seen in the Syriac writings of the sixth
and seventh centuries, and there were many translations from one language
into the other, especially of saints’ lives and apocryphal works; many works
circulated in several versions – Greek, Syriac, and sometimes Armenian, Geor-
gian or, later, Arabic. However, few writers deployed both languages equally
well themselves (they included bishop Rabbula of Edessa and his successor
Ibas, both in the fi fth century). Whether the use of Greek implies any kind of
conscious Hellenism is hard to say. Funerary inscriptions from the Golan
and from modern Jordan, for example, indicate that Greek was still in wide-
spread use by individuals up to the seventh century, and many churches,
including the fi ne churches at Jerash (Gerasa) in the so-called Decapolis,
whose other cities included Philadelphia (modern Amman), were decorated
with mosaic inscriptions in Greek verse as late as the middle of the eighth cen-
tury and after. A mosaic with inscription in Greek from Umm er-Rasas (Kas-
tron Mefaa), east of the Dead Sea and some 56 km south of Amman, dates
from 718, though it has also been dated much later, and further construction,
again with an inscription in Greek, in the same church is dated as late as 756.
A range of the most important cities of the region are all named and depicted
in mosaic, and from the sixth century we also have a mosaic map of Jerusalem
itself in the church of St George at Madaba. Sophronius of Damascus, the
future bishop of Jerusalem (d. 638), was able to compose poems in learned
Greek verse to express his grief at the Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614,^30
and the Nessana papyri show that a mastery of Greek was still thought desir-
able in much more remote places. Greek also continued to be the language
of the Chalcedonian church in Jerusalem, and this continued in the Melkite
church in the Islamic period. Similar questions surround the continued use of
classical architectural forms and especially of classical iconographical themes,
which continued to be used even in sixth-century and later church contexts
in Jordan.^31
These questions of language history have recently been studied, particu-
larly in relation to documentary and epigraphic evidence as indicating history
‘on the ground’. Similar issues arise in the increased use of Coptic in Egypt
and its relation to Greek, and can be seen clearly in the very large numbers
of Egyptian papyri.^32 In Syria, one important type of such evidence is pro-
vided by the signatures in records of church councils or other ecclesiastical
documents such as the so-called Letter of the Archimandrites of 569 (above,
Chapter 7). But fl uidity or interplay is also evident in intellectual and religious
spheres. Greek philosophy had been read at Edessa long before the fourth
century, and Greek learning also penetrated to the famous schools at Nisibis