North and east of Palestine the businessman-traveler came to Edessa, a very old city (thought by Muslims to be the birthplace of Abraham) refounded under the successors of Alexander and one of the oldest sites of Christianity. Everyone believed Edessa’s King Abgar had received a letter from Jesus himself, preserved and eagerly read into the sixth century. Even Justinian’s skeptical historian Procopius gives credit to the story. Edessa was also home to the widely regarded Bardesanes, a widely influential teacher of Christian doctrine around 200 CE. East again, and one came to the borderlands proper and another old city, Nisibis.
In the sixth century it was usually on the Persian side of the frontier, and the place to which Roman citizens seeking refuge from religious oppression (Christians out of favor with Constantinople or traditionalists not able to toe the Christian line) would flee. At Nisibis there flourished the largest Christian school of the Nestorians—whom their enemies sometimes called, confusingly, Jews—led by Mar Aba, who is probably the same man known in Greek as Patrikios, who taught Cosmas his doctrine of the tabernacle. These Nestorians had taken up business there when the intolerant emperor Zeno closed the predecessor school at Edessa in 489 and left them no choice but to do business in a more tolerant empire.6 Not far from Nisibis was Daraa, a defensive city that the Roman emperor Anastasius I built around 500, much to the distress of the Persians. That anxiety cast a shadow forward through the next century.
Mediterranean and Persian culture
South of the frontier zone was Arabia, if we can see it as Cosmas and his contemporaries would see it. In antiquity they inhabited the perimeter of Arabia, but the center of the peninsula, then and now, was not entirely barren; for centuries, Mediterranean and Persian culture sent out shoots into the interior, traces of which can still be found. Arabia survived in antiquity at the fringe of Roman and Persian worlds on its wits, on commerce, and on rumors of the world beyond. The Romans had created their own province, inland from Palestine: it consisted mainly of a Roman road running north and south more or less as did the Hejaz railway built by the Ottomans and plagued by Lawrence of Arabia, from Damascus to Medina Businessman Dioscoros from the modest city of Aphrodito.
Long before Lawrence, this was the path of the camel caravan that annually ran down from Damascus to Mecca for the hajj, or pilgrimage. The Nabateans once ruled there from their curious fortress of Petra, a city hidden in a valley approached by narrow defiles, until the Romans made their power unshakable in the second century and the Nabateans’ economic influence faded. As late as the sixth century a substantial Christian church (not rediscovered until 1990) dazzled the eye in that remote fastness with its mosaics and marbles, adjoined by a huge baptistery. The terrain turned the Roman road into the natural boundary between cultivated lands and desert. Rome’s soldiers moved easily up and down the highway and fanned out eastward to terrify and control the desert dwellers, thus ensuring settled agriculture and consistent tax paying to the west.
