Can we forget the Sabians of Eski Sumatar, Turkey?

I think there is not a single scholar today who would disagree that the Sabians were Aramaeans. There are many (some published and some unpublished) inscriptions, all in Syriac, on the walls and the rocks of the vast Sabian religious enclosure at Eski Sumatar, at the east of Urfa (Edessa of Osrhoene – Urhoy) in Southeastern Turkey.

Of course, the current inhabitants of the small village at the confines of the enclosure are all Muslims and Arabic native speakers, but according to local traditions there were Sabians living in the surroundings as late as 100 or 70 years ago. To follow these traditions, the last Sabians secretly departed from their land and reportedly settled in Mardin (Marida), further in the East.
I dedicated to them part of a chapter focused on Osrhoene in my book ‘The Six Chapters of the Orient’ (http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/8-11-2005-74671.asp) that is rather an archeological – historical itinerary, not a paperback in Mesopotamian History or History of Religions (published in Greek in Greece in 1994).

Tamara M. Green published an informative book, with a catchy but somewhat inaccurate title, ‘The City of the Moon God – Religious traditions of Harran’ (http://www.brill.nl/m_catalogue_sub6_id1353.htm), focalizing more on the Sabians.

The title is inaccurate because the Sabian Religious Capital was not ‘the City of the Moon God’ but ‘the City of the Sever Stars – Gods’. It is essential to bear in mind that the astrolatrous Sabians were rather heliocentric than seleno-(or luno-)centric….

Certainly this contribution views the subject through a Hellenistic viewpoint that is typical of Colonial Historiography. I found it however good as an effort to stimulate further academic interest on the so much disregarded subject, and I published a book review about it in the Journal of Oriental and African Studies (1993); it was one of my last publications under the name Cosmas Megalommatis (before my adhesion to Islam).

I find it interesting to reproduce the summary presentation and the two quotations published on the aforementioned page of Brill Publishing House.

Summary presentation

"This study treats the religious and intellectual history of the city of Harran (Eastern Turkey) from biblical times down to the establishment of Islam. The author starts from the well-known reference in the Qur'an and the early Islamic histories to the people of Harran as Sabians, one of the 'peoples of the book.' The author unravels strands of religious tradition in Harran that run from the old Semitic planetary cults through Hellenistic hermeticism, gnosticism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism and Christian cults to esoteric Islamic sects such as the Sufis and Shiites.

Quotations

'...I welcome Green's book, which should spur scholars to renewed efforts.'
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Religious Studies Review, 1994.

'Tamara Green est en effet bien qualifiée pour nous offrir de nouveaux ouvrages sur les rapports entre les Sabiens et les Musulmans et dans cette perspective on souhaite voir les résultats de ses recherches futures.'
Cosmas Megalommatis, Journal of Oriental and African Studies, 1993.

To summarize and conclude, after having repeatedly visited, studied and photographed the mostly unexcavated monuments of Eski Sumatar, I would say that the Sabians were not idolatrous; the use of idols seems to have been very limited.

The Sacred Sabian enclosure encompasses seven circular temples that were partly below and partly above the surface of the earth. Every temple was dedicated to one of the Seven Stars, bearing names of Assyrian – Babylonian religious origin, i.e. Shamash, Sin, Ishtar, etc.

In Sumatar, the earlier Assyrian – Babylonian religious influences on the Aramaeans seem to have been completely incorporated within the Aramaean cultural milieu of the Late Antiquity.

I do not think that one can date the rise of the Sabian religion before the late Achaeamenid times, and apparently there is some Persian influence mostly at the architectural level, in the sense that the circular temples were not common either among the Assyrians – Babylonians (add also Sumerians, Elamites, Hurrians and Amorrites, earlier Mesopotamian and para-Mesopotamian cultures) or among the Aramaeans themselves, and the Sumatar buildings remind us of Persian Fire Temples (Pyreia in Greek) as attested for instance in Takht-e Suleuman (Praaspa, I mean the building named Zendan-e Suleyman) in the Iranian province of Kordestan (near Tekab).

I do not find any relationship between the Sabians and the Mandaeans, except that they were (are) both Aramaean of ethnic origin. At the level of religion, the two systems may belong to what we call ‘Gnose’ or Gnosticisms of the late Antiquity, but there are at times vast differences between two Gnostic systems. What did the Opheites and the Ostanists have in common? Nothing!

I am rather inclined to accept that the Sabian religion was an Astrolatric – Astrosymbolist system involving initiation rites like several Gnostic, Isiac and Mithraic systems of the Late Antiquity.

What I would find as religiously closest to the Sabians are the Chaldaean Gnostics (Aramaeans) as attested through texts such as ‘the Chaldaean Oracles’ (‘Khaldaikoi Khresmoi’ in Greek, rather known through earlier French editions as ‘Oracles Chaldaiques’).

I would say that these Chaldaean Gnostics are the Aramaean – Mesopotamian ‘counterpart’ of the Egyptian Hermetic groups.

However, a recent, long and multipartite discussion about the Sabians (http://f19.parsimony.net/forum33113/messages/665.htm) made me think one more time about the deep Western (European and American) ignorance of the misconceived and misrepresented (by them) Middle East.