Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell Read Free Book Online

happen at that particular time? It was mainly because of politics and empire. East and West had been brought together more closely than ever before, thanks to the expansion of huge empires such as those of Persia, Alexander, and Rome. Persia had India on its eastern border and Greece on its west; Rome touched Persia on the east and Britain on the west. So cultures that previously had been isolated from each other could meet. Even in an earlier era, stories of Indian asceticism had reached the early Greek philosophers and inspired the practices of the Cynics, who believed that the only path to true happiness lay in abandoning all possessions and living in complete poverty. In later centuries (especially after sea travel was easier) this kind of contact became even more common. Urbanization, too, threw different religions into a melting pot. It was no longer enough for a people to hold on to the gods they had had for a thousand years: new gods were wanted, and new philosophies to justify their worship.
    What resulted was an era of fervent religious belief and radical intellectual debate that makes the modern world, whose five largest religions are now all more than a thousand years old, look static by comparison. Hinduism and Buddhism entered the Persian Empire. Middle Eastern faiths reached Rome, such as the clannish cult of the god Mithras and the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis (the latter notorious because its initiation rites allegedly involved ritual sex). A man called Elagabalus from the Syrian city of Homs became emperor in the third century, supplanted the old cult of Jupiter with worship of a Levantine sun god, and installed a black meteorite from his hometown as focus of the Rome’s largest temple. In the other direction, the cult of the Greek philosophers spread across the Middle East. Another religion that moved from west to east was Judaism. Perhaps some Jews had remained by the waters of Babylon after their exile there in the sixth century BC ; certainly there was an established Jewish community in Iraq in the early first century AD , when the king of the northern province of Adiabene, his wife, and his mother were all separately converted to Judaism. In AD 70 the Jews of Iraq were joined by others fleeing eastwardfrom the Roman armies that had sacked Jerusalem and demolished its Temple. Babylonia (the region where Babylon had once stood, and which kept its name: the city itself was ruined by this time) became the heartland of the Jewish religion. Estimates of the Jewish population of Iraq go as high as two million by the year AD 500—perhaps something like 40 percent of its population.
    The oldest surviving Mandaean scriptures were written in a language very close to that used by the Jewish scholars who compiled the Babylonian Talmud, one of the most important collections of Jewish law, which was assembled between the third and fifth centuries AD . The Mandaean books show an interest in Judaism and a close knowledge of its practices, but a lot of hostility too. The Mandaeans have adopted John the Baptist but dislike Abraham. They utterly reject circumcision—a practice that marked out the Jews from the Babylonians even during the Jewish exile in Babylon. The Mandaeans take Sunday, not Saturday, as the Sabbath. The legend of Miriai is about a Jewish woman who leaves her community in order to marry a Mandaean man. Jews and Mandaeans knew each other but were rivals.
    Mandaeanism was not alone in being heavily influenced by Judaism: several versions of Christianity were, too. Some tried to keep Jewish law while following Jesus, while others were more hostile. For example, a breakaway Christian group called the Marcionites, founded in what is now northern Turkey in about AD 144, accepted that the events described in the Hebrew Bible (adopted by Christians as the Old Testament) were true, but were appalled by some of them. Why would God, for instance, forbid Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge in the Garden