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Syr./Hebrew Ḥārān; Latin Carrhae; Arabic Ḥarran. Ancient city in Mesopotamia,
approximately 45 km south-southeast of
Muʿjam al-buldān and the
place where Abraham and his family sojourned according to the Book of
Genesis, Ḥarran had become known as a center for the cult of the moon god
Sin by the 14th cent. BC. Because of its strategic importance as a frontier
town, the Christian emperors usually refrained from interfering in the
religious life of Ḥarran, which remained a stronghold of paganism. When the
pilgrim Egeria visited Ḥarran in 383, the town had a Christian bp., and the
house of Abraham, which stood outside the city, had been turned into a
church, but the population of the city, she tells us, probably with some
exaggeration, was wholly pagan. The Greek Fathers refer to Ḥarran as
Hellenopolis, ‘the city of the (pagan) Greeks’; the Syriac Life of
Ephrem likewise calls it ‘the city of the pagans’ (Ḥārān mdittā d-ḥanpe). Some have argued that it was
in Ḥarran that Simplicius and his Neoplatonist companions settled upon their
return from Persia where they had sought refuge after the closure of their
school in Athens by Justinian in 529. Taken by the Arabs in 639/40, Ḥarran
briefly became the seat of the caliphate under the last (eastern) Umayyad
Marwān II (744–750). It was probably early on under Arab rule, before the
8th cent., that the Syriac work entitled the ‘Prophecies of the pagan
philosophers in brief’ was written, inviting the pagans of Ḥarran to convert
to Christianity. According to Ibn al-Nadīm, it was at the time of a visit by
Caliph al-Maʾmūn in 830 that the people of the town identified themselves
with the Sabians (Ṣābiʾ) mentioned in the Qurʾān, so as to escape
persecution by claiming to be a ‘people of the book’. Ḥarran was considered
a center of pagan Greek learning under the Abbasids, especially for the
mathematical sciences. The Ḥarranians were probably the last group of
non-Christians who continued to use Syriac. In his
Lexicon,
The first known bp. of the city is Barses, who was made metropolitan of
Edessa in 361. His successors include Vitus, who attended the Council of
Constantinople in 381, Daniel, a cousin of
As Miaphysite bishops of Ḥarran before the Arab conquest, we know of Yuḥanon
(mentioned in 502/3, banished by Emperor Justin in 519), Sergius bar Karyo
(ca. 557 – ca. 578, translator of
The
seventh century in the West-Syrian chronicles, 83). The last known
Syr. Orth.
bp. of Ḥarran is Ephrem, heard of when the Armenians asked for
access to an altar in the Syr. Orth. church in Ḥarran in 1252.
The E.-Syr. see of Ḥarran, attested between the 7th and 11th cent. and
suffragan to
Among the ruins of Ḥarran, dotted today with beehive-shaped adobe houses of the Bedouin Arabs who settled here in the 19th cent., are those of a large basilica church located near the northeastern end of the oval-shaped medieval city.
See Fig. 55.