Notes on the Season

People who work with the “long-term historical perspective” in the Middle East are likely to be drawn toward more unusual stories that either aren’t headline material or don’t make it into the news at all. The recent news has been dominated by the instability in Pakistan but a perusal of reports on less earthshaking events has yielded some interesting insights into the continuity of ancient and modern cultures.

Iraqi Christians—Ancient Roots and Modern Perils

The Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad recently made a minor stir when he emerged to plead the case of Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister under Saddam Hussein who surrendered to US forces after the invasion of Iraq. A familiar name cropping up in an unfamiliar context, Aziz is a reminder that, amidst all of the talk of sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, few reports mention the status of Christians there.

Although Chaldean Catholics like Tariq Aziz have downplayed their ancient lineage, other Christians in Iraq trace their roots back many thousands of years to the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and their religious affiliations back to St. Thomas the Apostle in the first century AD. Ancient Assyria, as a political entity, effectively began in prehistoric times and ended in the seventh century BCE. The Chaldeans, who instituted the last of the Babylonian empires by breaking away from Assyria and eventually conquering it, were in turn conquered by the Persians in the sixth century BCE.

Chaldean Christians in Iraq are now flooding over the borders and many have fled to Jordan. Their inevitable dispersal poses a threat to more than the continuation of a Christian community that may have been one of the earliest in history. The Chaldeans comprise one of the larger Aramaic-speaking groups. The several thousand-year-old Aramaic language, once the lingua franca of the great Persian Empire, has been rapidly disappearing as a spoken language since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

For those interested in Biblical and Jewish history, the words Chaldean and Aramaic should have strong associations. Abraham is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldees, an anachronism if one accepts the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 to 1000 BCE) origins of the Patriarchs. The Chaldeans were not prominent in Mesopotamia until the sixth century BCE. Large sections of the Bible were written after the Babylonian exile (ca. 586 BCE) in Aramaic and it was also the language that Jesus and the Apostles spoke. Aramaic is still used for various important prayers in the traditional Jewish liturgy.

The Semi-Annual Sectarian Scuffle

Living in Jerusalem, we were always intrigued by the ways in which the important churches of the Holy Land are divided among Christian denominations. Over the centuries, various schemes have evolved in order to keep the peace. The possibility for tensions between the Eastern and Western Christian churches is usually forestalled by the fact that they celebrate the major holidays at different times. The spaces within the churches are, also, scrupulously allocated between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant groups and the keys reside in the hands of neutral Muslim gatekeepers.

Despite these factors, brawls at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter and the Church of the Nativity at Christmas have become all too frequent in recent years. These affairs generally begin with the clerics but extend quickly to involve secular bystanders and the Christmas fracas this past week in Bethlehem was no exception. Palestinian police were called in when members of rival Christian groups began fighting at the church marking the site of Jesus’ birth and four people were wounded in fray. According to reports, the Orthodox encroached on the Armenian section while the priests were cleaning the church following the “Western” Christmas rites. The Eastern Church celebrates Christmas in the first week of January rather than on December 25th.

Supposedly, the Kingdom of Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as its religion in an event traditionally dated to 301 AD. At one time the Armenian Apostolic Church was labeled as Monophysite like the Coptic Church primarily because both churches broke away from the mainstream church before the sixth century AD and refused to accept the condemnation of Monophysitism of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Monphysites believe that that Jesus has only one nature—divine, as opposed to the mainstream church view that he has two natures, one divine and one human.

Although one might say that Christianity, as a universal religion, began in the Greek world with the missionary journeys of St. Paul, the complex series of divisions over doctrine beginning as early as the second century AD eventually split Eastern and Western Christianity. Disagreements over papal authority and the nature of the holy trinity, among other things, resulted in the Great Schism of 1054 AD separating the Eastern (Orthodox) from the Western (Catholic) Church.

While it seems that the Armenian and Greek churches have much in common with respect to their historical relationships to the Catholic Church it is obvious that their differences are more significant. The great debates over theological doctrine of the early centuries of Christianity are no more. The major disputes between churches in both the Eastern and Western traditions are now over spaces that can be measured with a ruler.


Patenting the Pyramids

This story has nothing to do with the Christmas season but is, nonetheless, something that certainly affects Middle East Heritage. Under a new law expected to be passed by Egypt’s parliament, royalties for “commercial use” of Egyptian Antiquities will be required when copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the Pyramids. The law would apply in all countries and the money will be used to maintain thousands of archaeological sites.

Egypt’s relationship to its Pharaonic past has been fairly amiable one since the days of Nasser’s attempt to forge a new “pan-Arab” identity in the fifties and sixties. As it turns out, Egyptians are too proud of their spectacular antiquities to give in easily to a perspective that places them historically on a par with other Arab countries. Further, few people there outside of the Muslim Brotherhood seem to be concerned about the pre-Islamic paganism of Ancient Egypt.

A sore subject for Egypt’s archaeologists and antiquarians, however, has been the plundering of the country’s treasures for Western museums. Since the eighteenth century, Europeans have been traveling to Egypt and looting its sites. The new law, unenforceable though it may be, is undoubtedly a reflection of this inglorious history.