Tower and Town, May 2022 (view the full edition)Traversing Time and Territory: Syriac prayer-amulets from northern Mesopotamia
Prayer-amulets were part of the daily life of the communities. Apart from their medical application, they were used in a wide range of situations: the blessing of crops and assistance in political feuds, in short for every conceivable problem that might occur. Written in classical Syriac (a dialect of Biblical Aramaic), the prayer-amulets also included many loan-words from Arabic and Persian that had been absorbed into Sureth (vernacular Syriac) spoken by the communities. As products emanating from the societies in which they were used, the prayer-amulets are a rich expression of how the Christians who had lived in northern Mesopotamia for millennia until they were forced to leave more than a century ago coped with the everyday problems that confronted them. The prayer-amulets were heir to an ancient tradition rooted in Mesopotamia that transgressed time and territory, having links to the terminology of incantation bowls that were in widespread usage during the sixth-seventh centuries, particularly in the Babylon region. At Turfan in western China where the Church of the East had dioceses until the medieval period, fragments of prayer-amulets, the forerunners to those used in northern Mesopotamia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have also been found.
Protection was the prayer-amulets' main purpose. The codex handbooks termed themselves 'books of protection' and would conventionally call on the name of Jesus, typically beginning "by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ we begin to write the book of protection from all kinds of evil". Thereafter a series of prayers formed a Prologue to the miscellany of amulets. Erica C.D. Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christianity (Emerita), SOAS Erica Hunter |
The Christians who dwelt in the villages of northern Mesopotamia until the opening decades of the twentieth century inhabited a triangular area roughly corresponding to the Hakkari mountains south of lake Van in Turkey, the Azerbaijani plains in Iran and the foothills north of Mosul in Iraq. In these remote regions, religion played a major role in the traditional, largely rural societies, with the priest acting in many different capacities beyond his liturgical and pastoral duties. Priests wrote prayer-amulets for their parishioners to protect them from various ailments. Churches functioned as asylums and places of healing. Lunatics were incarcerated at the famous monastery of Rabban Hormizd, near Alkosh north of Mosul. [Fig. 1] The relics of saints or holy men were also believed to be efficacious. In the 1840s, James (Philip) Fletcher saw pilgrims at the monastery of Mar Behnam, near Nimrud, taking away parcels of dust from the martyrs' graves that were 'esteemed a specific for all kinds of diseases'. These practices of course had ancient origins and were not confined just to the Christian tradition. Jewish and Muslim communities also engaged in similar practices and often there was a kind of 'inter-faith' dialogue at the vernacular level, where people sought help outside their own religious tradition.
European visitors to the communities in the nineteenth century noted, often disparagingly, that the clergy wrote and sold prayer-amulets. Justin Perkins, an American Presbyterian missionary, described the commissioning of such an item. He was dining with a priest, when a Moslem villager came asking for an amulet to cure his sick cow. The priest immediately recited a prayer over some salt (that was to be fed to the beast) and was recompensed for his labor with a small sum of money by his grateful client. This possibly formed a lucrative sideline to his meagre livings. On this occasion he recited the prayer, but in other circumstances he might have written the prayer-amulet on a piece of paper, a 'scroll' which his client would have rolled or folded up. Few exemplars of these individually tailored items have survived due to the fragility of their fabric (paper) as well as deterioration through their everyday, practical usage. Although people were reluctant to part with an item that they believed had potency and could offer protection, a handful of these personal scroll prayer-amulets have made their way to institutions in Europe, North America and the Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia). In the case of the request for the cow, the priest recited from memory the prayer-amulet for his Muslim client. On other occasions he might have consulted a codex handbook, consisting of various prayer-amulets that could be used for a whole range of complaints. These small pocket-sized codices are more common and quite a few have found their way into various libraries in Europe and north America. In recent years, a sizeable collection has come to light in Armenia and Georgia; they were brought by refugees who relocated from northern Mesopotamia to the Caucasus in the vicissitudes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of the prayer-amulets were illustrated with miniatures of varying subject matter. A particularly popular motif is that of the "rider-saint" i.e. a mounted saint slaying a demonic beast. 'St. George and the Dragon' [Fig. 2] was especially favoured Illustrations of the four apostles were common, and the wide-ranging subject-matter also includes images of weapons; as well as scorpions and snakes.