on the banks of a beautiful stream in the very centre of the kingdom, and at the head of a defile commanding the approaches from the coast to the interior. It was the original residence of the Macedonian kings; and even after the seat of government was removed by Philip II. to the more accessible Pella, it continued to be the burial-place of the royal family. At the celebration of his daughter’s marriage here, Philip II. was murdered by Pausanias in 336 B.C. His son Alexander was buried at Memphis through the contrivance of Ptolemy; but the bodies of his granddaughter Eurydice and her husband Arrhidaeus were removed by Cassander to the ancestral sepulchre. On the occupation of the town by Pyrrhus the royal tombs were plundered by the Gallic mercenaries. Owing to its position commanding the Via Egnatia, the town retained its importance during the Roman and Byzantine periods. For its present condition, see Vodena.
EDESSA, the Greek name of an ancient city of N.W. Mesopotamia (in 37° 21′ N. lat. and 39° 6′ E. long.), suggested perhaps by a comparison of its site, or its water supply,[1] with that of its Macedonian namesake. It still bears its earlier name, modified since the 15th century (by the Turks?) to Urfa.
The oldest certain form is the Aramaic Urhāi (“Western” pronunciation Urhōi), which appears in Greek as an adjective as Ὀρροηνή[2], -νοί[3] (perhaps also as a fortress with spring, as Ὀρρά),[4] and in Latin as Orr(h)ei,[5] and (in the inscription on Abgar’s grave) Orrhenoru(m).[6] The Syriac Chronicle ascribed to Dionysius of Tell-maḥrē derives the name from a first king Urhāi, son of Hewyā, whom Procopius (De bello persico, i. 17) calls Osroes (cf. below), connected by Bayer[7] with Chosroes,[8] from which G. Hoffmann would also derive the Syriac Urhāi (Z.D.M.G. xxxii. 742). The Syriac town name has, however, the form of an ethnic, and we may therefore with Duval leave it unexplained (Hist. 22). The fact that the Arabic name is Ruhä supports the hint of the Graeco-Latin forms that there was a vowel between the R and the H. There is little plausibility in the suggestion of Assemani and others that Ruhā comes from ροη of Callirrhoe. A gentilic of the form Ru-u-ai occurs in a letter (of an Assyrian king?) to chiefs in a (Babylonian?) town as the designation of three captives (Harper, Ass. and Bab. Letters, No. 287 [＝K 94], line 6; cf. Bezold, Die Achämenideninschriften, p. xii.), who have Semitic names; and Ru-’-u-a is the name of an Aramaic people mentioned with other Aramaeans by Tiglath-pileser IV., Sargon and Sennacherib. It is not impossible that some such people may have settled at Urhāi and given it their name, although the Ru-’-u-a are always mentioned in connexions that imply seats near the Persian Gulf.[9] The district name Osroēnē for Ὀρροηνή, is Greek, perhaps due to analogy of Chosroes. It occurs but rarely in Syriac (Uzroina); e.g. Chronicle of Edessa. § 35;[10] elsewhere Bēth-Urhāyē (e.g. Cureton, Spicileg. Syr. 20). In the time of Tiglath-pileser I. (c. 1100 B.C.) the name seems to have been “District of (not Edessa, but) Ḥarrān” (Annals, vi. 71). The Arabs pronounced the name er-Ruhā (see above), and that form prevailed till it gave place to Urfa in the 15th century.
The Greek name Edessa appears in the Jerusalem Targum to Gen. x. 10 as Hădas (הדס, myrtle); it has been proposed (cf. Duval, Hist. d’Édesse, 23) to derive Edessa from Aram. הדת, as though = Carthage, New Town; but Syriac writers, when they occasionally [11] use the name (Edessa, אדסא; so Yāqūt, Adāsā), show no suspicion of its being Semitic. According to Pliny, v. 86, Edessa was also called Antioch, and coins of Antiochus IV. Epiphanes with the legend “Antioch on the Callirrhoe” may imply that he rebuilt and renamed the place (so Ed. Meyer in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, col. 1933, 66; otherwise Duval, Hist. 23; cf. art. Osroene). Pliny indeed seems to call the city itself Callirrhoe, and S. Funk finds it so named in the Talmud (Bab. Mez., 18a רעל רכם נהרא שויר מתא: Die Juden in Babylonien 200-500, ii. 148; 1908); but K. Regling (Klio, i. 459 n. 1) may be right in his emendation which applies the title in Pliny to the sacred spring.
History: Pre-Hellenistic.—Until excavation gives us more definite data we can only infer from its position on one of the main thoroughfares between the Mediterranean and the East (see Mesopotamia) that Urhāi-Edessa, possibly bearing some other name, was already a town of some importance in the early Babylonian-Assyrian age. Whatever may have been the ethnographical type of the early inhabitants, it must by the beginning of the second last millennium B.C. have included Hittites in the large sense of the term, probably Aryans, and certainly Semites of some of the types characteristic of early Assyrian history. Most probably its people belonged to the domain of the then more famous Ḥarrān-Carrhae, between which and Samosata (on the Euphrates) Urhāi lies midway (some 25–30 m. distant from each) in the district watered by the Balīh. Although at Edessa itself no cuneiform documents have yet been found, a little more than four hours journey eastwards, at Anaz (＝Gullāb?)＝Dūr of Tiglath-pileser IV. was found in 1901 a slab with a bas-relief and an inscription; and 15–20 min. W. of Eski-Ḥarrān, in 1906 a very interesting 6th-century Assyrian inscription (see Mesopotamia).
In the later Assyrian empire the population was largely Aramaic-speaking; but S. Schiffer’s theory (Beiheft I. zur Orientalistischen Litteratur-Zeitung) finds contemporary evidence of Israelites settled in the neighbourhood of Edessa in the second half of the 7th century B.C. At the fall of Nineveh many towns in Mesopotamia suffered severely at the hands of the Medes. The period remains dark, notwithstanding the obscure light that has been thrown on it lately (Pognon, Inscriptions). When Aramaic began to take the place of Assyrian in written documents is not known; but just across the Euphrates the change had occurred as early as the 8th century B.C. (Zengīrli, Hamath; see also Pognon). Certain it is that the earliest documents that have survived in Syriac, or Edessene Aramaic, do not represent an experimental stage. Moreover, although the Syriac of the Story of Aḥīqār is of a late type, the sources of the story, traces of which are to be found in the Hebrew Tobit (q.v.), go back to the pre-Hellenistic period.
Graeco-Roman Times.—According to a credible tradition found in Eusebius (Excerpta, 179), the Syriac Chronicle ascribed to Dionysius of Tell-maḥrē (Tullberg, 61), and elsewhere, Urhāi was renovated, like other Mesopotamian sites, in 304 B.C. by Seleucus I. Nicator, who gave it its Greek name.[12] It would share in the Hellenistic culture of Syria, although the language of the common people would continue to be Aramaic (E. R. Bevan, House of Seleucus, i. 227 f. with reff.). With the decay of the Seleucid power, weakened by Rome and Parthia, the old influx from the desert would recommence, and an Arabic element begin to show. Von Gutschmid (Untersuch., cf. Duval, ch. iii. end) argues plausibly that it was in 132 B.C., in the reign of Antiochus VII. Sidetes, that Edessa became the seat of a dynasty of some thirty local kings, whose succession has been preserved in native sources. The name of the first king, however, appears in different forms (cf. above), and one (Osroës-Orhai) is so like that of the town that Ed. Meyer suspects the historicity of the first reign, of five years. The names of the other kings—Abgar, Maʽnu, Bekr, &c.—are for the most part Arabic, as the people (in whose inscriptions the same mixture of names occurs) are called by classical authors; but the rulers, among whom an occasional Iranian name betrays the influence of the dominant Parthians,[13] would hardly maintain their distinctness from the Aramaic populace. This state which lasted for three centuries and a half, naturally varied in extent.[14] Bounded on the W. and the N. by the Euphrates, it reached at its widest as far as the Tigris. At such times, therefore, it included such towns as Ḥarrān (Carrhae), Nisibis, Sarūg, Zeugma-Birejik, Resaena, Singara, Tigranocerta, Samosāta, Melitene. Its position “on the dangerous verge of two contending empires,” Parthia and
- ↑ So Appian, Syr. 57; cp. Steph. Byz., s.v. Εδεσσα: διὰ τὴν τῶν ὑδάτων ῥύμην.
- ↑ Steph. Byz., s.v. Βατναι.
- ↑ Dio, passim.
- ↑ Isidore Charac. 1 (Müller, Geog. Gr. Min., i. 246).
- ↑ Several times in Pliny, Nat. Hist.
- ↑ CIL. vi. 1797.
- ↑ Hist. Osrhoena et Edessena, p. 33.
- ↑ Written Ὀσρόης in Dio Cassius, Excerpta, lxviii. 22.
- ↑ See the reff. collected by M. Streck, M.V.G., 1906. The name occurs in the same company in the fragmentary tablet K. 1904. The mountain Ru-u-[a], mentioned thrice by Tiglath-pileser IV., is placed by Billerbeck near Hamadān (Sandschak Suleimania, 82, 86, and map, 1898).
- ↑ See further Payne Smith, Thesaurus 110 b.
- ↑ In translating from the Greek; also in Ephraim (Duval, Hist. 22, n. 4) and the Acts of Sharbīl (Cureton, Anc. Syr. Doc. 41).
- ↑ On a possible restoration under the name of “Antioch on the Callirrhoë” see above.
- ↑ The Edessans used to call their town “the city,” or “the daughter,” “of the Parthians” (Cureton, Anc. Syr. Doc., 41 ult., 97 l. 7; 106 l. 12).
- ↑ The portion of the Mesopotamian steppe under Osrhoënic influence was, according to Nöldeke (Zeitsch. Ass. xxi. 153, 1908), called ‘Arābh in Syriac.
