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2 results

  • Chapter 5 - Modelling Msarrqūtā

  • from Part II - ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’
  • Edited by Kate Cooper, Royal Holloway, University of London, Jamie Wood, University of Lincoln
  • Book:
    Social Control in Late Antiquity
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020, pp 105-130

  • Summary

    This study demonstrates how the macrocosm of slavery, along with its violent measures of discipline and punishment, was assimilated into and reproduced by Christian ascetic culture of late antique Syria, in both urban and rural spaces. After investigating the nature of slaveholding practices in the cities and outlying villages of the region, the study asks how the type of slavery that was characteristic of Syria may have affected the ascetic practices of fourth- and fifth-century monks who lived on the fringes of cities and villages. Finally, in order to understand the ascetic afterlife of slavery in Christian Syria and Mesopotamia, the study also explores the nature and ascetic function of slavery in some later sources of the sixth and even seventh centuries. This exploration into the later centuries gauges the potency of discourses and practices of slavery. It also serves to make us aware of just how powerful, pervasive, and persistent doulological discourse and discursive shifts were in late antiquity.

  • 19 - Syria and Mesopotamia

  • from Part IV - Regional Varieties of Christianity in the First Three Centuries
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 351-365

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the emergence of Christianity in the region broadly known as Syria: stretching from the coastal ports outside Antioch east to Palmyra and Persia, and from Mesopotamia in the north down to Palestine. In the course of the late first and second centuries, the Semitic dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac took hold as a primary Christian language of the Syrian region. Because of the prominence given to Antioch in the New Testament, its relative proximity to Jerusalem, and the strength of its Jewish community, scholars have taken Antioch as a primary centre for Christianity's earliest development. Syria preserved the earliest known collection of Christian hymns, the Odes of Solomon. The legendary Acts of Thomas, originally composed in Syriac but quickly translated into Greek, is an account purporting to tell the adventures of the apostle 'Judas Thomas' as he carried the gospel message east of Antioch, converting communities and kingdoms in Mesopotamia and India.