Harran

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In the last centuries of antiquity the temples of Harran stood ranged across the flat ground of Upper Mesopotamia, each built to the shape of a planet, visible far out across the dusty Balikh plain. The church fathers had a name for the place. They called it Hellenopolis, the pagan town — the one city on the road between the Mediterranean and the Tigris that had refused to turn Christian, and would refuse, after that, to turn Muslim. The heavens still ruled it. The moon kept a temple there, and a city kept the moon’s appointed hours, as it had for the better part of three thousand years.

Harran is old past the reach of clean dating. It is named in the Ebla tablets of the twenty-fourth century BCE, and a cult of the moon-god is attested on the site from the Old Babylonian period onward. It sat where the caravan roads crossed — the long routes that ran from Nineveh and the Tigris toward Antioch and the Mediterranean coast — and its Akkadian name, Ḫarrānu, means simply “road” or “crossing.” Everything about the place follows from that geography. A junction city gathers what passes through it; Harran gathered the gods, the kings, the armies, and at last the books of half the ancient world, and held them on a plain that is now a quiet corner of southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, in the province of Şanlıurfa. The classical world knew the town as Carrhae. The patriarchal narratives of Genesis knew it as the place where Abraham’s family halted on the road out of Ur, where his father Terah died and his brother is named Haran. And the sky knew it, above all, as the house of Sin.

The city of the moon

The deep stratum of Harran is lunar. Its presiding god was Sin — Nanna or Su’en to the Sumerians, the moon-god who measured the months and ruled the calendar — and his great sanctuary at Harran, the Ehulhul, the “house of rejoicing,” ranked beside the moon-god’s other capital far to the south at Ur. Two cities, one god, the crescent over both. From at least the second millennium BCE the moon was not a symbol at Harran but a working power of state, addressed in his temple, fed at his altars, consulted before campaigns. The shape of the worship was Mesopotamian to its roots: a sky-religion in which the heavenly bodies were living lords and the calendar was a liturgy.

The devotion was a royal one, and its most famous patron was the man who lost Babylon. Nabonidus, last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (reigned c. 556–539 BCE), was himself bound to Harran — his mother, Adad-guppi, was a votary of Sin there, who lived, the inscriptions say, to the age of a hundred and four and was given a state funeral. Nabonidus rebuilt the Ehulhul, raising the temple directly on its old foundations, and counted that restoration the chief achievement of his reign. He gave the moon-god a precedence that scandalized the priesthood of Marduk in his own capital: a king who exalted Sin of Harran over the city-god of Babylon, and who absented himself for years in the Arabian oasis of Tayma while the New Year festival went uncelebrated. When Cyrus the Persian took Babylon in 539 BCE, the Marduk priesthood was not sorry to see Nabonidus go. The stelae he set up at Harran show the king with hand lifted toward a triad of astral signs — the crescent of Sin, the winged disc of the sun-god Shamash, the star of Ishtar-Venus — and one of them, recovered from the ruins in the twentieth century, sets out in basalt the very planetary order the later star-cult of the city would honor as its lords.

That this single god held the place across so many conquests is the first remarkable thing about Harran. It outlasted the fall of Nineveh — when the Assyrian crown prince Ashur-uballit II rallied the wreck of his empire at Harran in 612 BCE and made it the last Assyrian capital until its fall in 609. It outlasted Babylon, Persia, and the armies of Alexander. The moon kept his temple through all of it, and the Greeks who came with the Seleucids found a star-religion they could read in their own philosophical terms, so that the old astral worship and the new Neoplatonic cosmology of intelligences grew together on the same ground.

Where the legions died

Into this country, in the spring of 53 BCE, marched Marcus Licinius Crassus — the richest man in Rome, member of the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and the one of the three who lacked a great war to his name. He led somewhere between thirty-five and forty thousand men across the Euphrates against the Parthian Empire, seeking the glory and the plunder his colleagues had won elsewhere. He found, near Carrhae, a Parthian general the Romans called Surena, with a force a fraction the size of his own: perhaps ten thousand cavalry, a thousand armored cataphracts and nine thousand horse archers, with a baggage train of camels carrying spare arrows.

What followed became, in Roman memory, a byword for catastrophe. On the open plain the legions could not close with an enemy that would not stand. The horse archers rode beyond javelin range and poured volleys into the Roman square; when the legionaries locked shields into the testudo, the cataphracts charged the rigid formation; when they loosened ranks to meet the lancers, the archers resumed their shooting, their quivers kept full from the camel train. The cycle did not break. Crassus sent his son Publius out with a detachment to drive the archers off; the Parthians drew the column away with a feigned retreat and destroyed it, and sent the young man’s head back on a spear. By the time it ended, some twenty thousand Romans were dead and ten thousand taken prisoner. Crassus himself died in a botched parley. The Parthians captured the legionary eagles — the aquilae, the standards whose loss was a wound to Roman honor that festered for a generation, until Augustus recovered them by negotiation and minted the recovery on his coins. Carrhae entered the language as one of the worst defeats Rome ever suffered, and the plain of the moon-city became the place where the Roman east met its limit.

The other emperors who came to Harran came as pilgrims rather than conquerors. The last pagan to wear the purple, Julian, stopped at Harran in 363 CE on his way to the Persian war and is reported to have consulted the moon-oracle there before marching to the death that ended classical paganism’s last political hope. The choice of shrine was apt. Of all the cities of the Roman east, this was the one that still kept the old gods openly — that an emperor trying to turn back the Christian tide would naturally visit, and that would outlive him in its paganism by seven hundred years.

The planets and the persistence

What set Harran apart was not that it had once worshipped the moon — many cities had — but that it went on worshipping the heavens long after the surrounding world had changed religion twice. When Mesopotamia turned Christian, Harran did not. When the Arab armies came in the seventh century and Islam became the order of the land, Harran did not turn then either. The conquest displaced Sin from his chief site, and in time a mosque rose where the great sanctuary had stood; but the pagans of the city were left, for two centuries, to keep their rites on the margins of the new world — learned, useful, and a long way from the centers of zeal.

Their religion, as it can be reconstructed from later and largely hostile Arabic writers, was a cult of the seven planetary powers. Above the visible world ranged Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, each the governor of a tract of fate, and above them a first cause too remote to be approached except through the mediation of the spheres. The planets were not lights but intelligences, and they were served as gods are served: each had its temple, its day, its hour, its metal, its color, its incense, and the form of building proper to its nature, so that the round of the cult tracked the round of the heavens. Sin the moon, the city’s most ancient lord, now stood as one planetary governor among the seven — the oldest devotion of Harran folded into a wider order the community had received from two directions at once, from the Babylonian tradition that named the planets gods and from the Greek philosophy that called them intelligences. The logic of such a cult — that the powers above govern the world of generation below, and that the right image, hour, and substance can draw a planet’s virtue into matter — is the logic of late-antique astral religion, the same frame that Iamblichus defends in his On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, and the same idiom of spheres and intelligences gathered in the Chaldean material of Cory’s Ancient Fragments. Whether one reads the rites of Harran as worship or as astrological operation, the distinction the modern eye expects was not one the city itself drew.

The community survived the way it did by an accident of scripture and a feat of legal nerve. The Quran names a tolerated people called the Ṣābiʾūn — the Sabians — in three places, beside the Jews and Christians, without ever saying who they were. The pagans of Harran took the empty name for themselves and, under the borrowed papers of a revealed religion, carried the star-worship of antiquity two centuries deeper into the Islamic age. They are the people known as the Sabians of Harran, and they named as their ancient sages Hermes and Agathodaimon, the bringers of their sciences and their books. (They must be kept distinct from the Mandaeans of the southern Iraqi marshes, the baptizing people who also carried the Sabian name in Arabic — a different community, a different religion, an accident of the shared word.) Whether Harran truly transmitted a continuous Hermetic doctrine, or whether the learned of Baghdad assigned the prestige of Hermes to a conveniently pagan and bookish people, the sources will not finally settle.

What is firm is that the men of Harran were among the great translators of the early Abbasid age. Their native Syriac opened the Greek learning of late antiquity to them; their star-religion gave them a standing reason to study the sky. The foremost was Thabit ibn Qurra, born at Harran around 826 — a money-changer by his first trade who became one of the finest mathematicians and astronomers of his century, a translator of Archimedes, Apollonius, and Ptolemy, and the founder of a scholarly dynasty that served the caliphs for generations. He remained, to the end of a life lived in Baghdad, a pagan of the moon-city. Through such men, and through the planetary correspondences their cult preserved, Harran became remembered — rightly or not — as a way-station on the road by which Greek science and the astral magic of antiquity passed into Arabic, and through Arabic, eventually, back into the Latin West.

The slow extinction and the ruined plain

The toleration did not hold forever. The legal protection of Harranian paganism was revoked for the last time in the eleventh century, and the surviving temples were pulled down amid the wars of the local dynasties; a last round planetary sanctuary is reported to have stood on the citadel mound until the upheavals of that age finished it. The end was not a defeat in argument or a wave of conversion but attrition and the sack — the common fate of the upper Mesopotamian plain. The community thinned toward nothing, and when the Mongols took Harran in 1260 and emptied it by 1271, deporting what was left of its population, the city of the moon-god ceased to be a living place. The heavens kept their courses; there was simply no one left at the foot of the temple to keep the appointed hours.

What the Mongols left, and the centuries since have weathered, is what a visitor finds today: an open expanse of tells and broken walls under a hard sun, the great circuit of the medieval city walls still traceable, the citadel mound at the southeast where the last sanctuary is thought to have stood. The most arresting ruin is the Grand Mosque — the Ulu Cami, also called the Firdaus or “Paradise” mosque — built under the Umayyad caliph Marwan II between 744 and 750, when he made Harran his capital. It was vast for its day, some 104 by 107 meters, the oldest monumental mosque of Anatolia; little of it stands now but a stretch of the eastern wall, the mihrab, a fountain, and a square minaret rising 33 meters over the empty ground. Around the medieval town spread the Madrasa and the schools that earned Harran its later reputation as a seat of astronomy and translation — the intellectual life of the moon-city outliving, by a few generations, the cult that had nourished it.

The ruined Grand Mosque of Harran — the Ulu Cami, built c. 744–750 under the caliph Marwan II — its square minaret standing over the broken eastern wall. — Verity Cridland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

And then there are the houses. Across part of the old site and in the village beside it stand the conical mudbrick dwellings called kümbet — the “beehive” houses of Harran, domed cones of mud brick laid up without timber, their tapering roofs clustered like a hive’s cells against the treeless plain. The form is a practical answer to a land with little wood and fierce summer heat: the high dome vents the hot air, the thick earthen walls hold the cool. The technique is ancient, traceable in the region across long centuries, and the surviving houses are mostly recent in their fabric even where the method is old — so that the beehive village is less a relic than a living continuity, the same building craft answering the same plain. The image has become the emblem of the place: where once seven temples stood to seven planets, the cones of the mudbrick houses now break the skyline of the moon-city.

The “beehive” houses of Harran — domed cones of mud brick built without timber, a vernacular answer to a treeless, sun-struck plain. — Andy Carvin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The modern study of Harran has had to reconstruct a vanished religion from the records of those who disapproved of it, and the work has run in two directions at once. Tamara Green’s The City of the Moon God (1992) follows the cult of Sin from its Assyrian roots into its Islamic afterlife, and remains the standard account of the place as a religious whole. Against an older view — associated with David Pingree and Michel Tardieu — that made Harran the great reservoir from which Hermetic and astral learning flowed into Arabic, Kevin van Bladel’s The Arabic Hermes (2009) argued that “Sabian” came to serve as a loose Arabic word for pagans of many kinds, and that Harran’s Hermetic credentials were in significant part the construction of later doxographers. The effect is to shrink the city from the engine of a transmission to one node among several — without dissolving it, for a learned, legally tolerated pagan people that produced a Thabit ibn Qurra is a hard historical fact, whatever the bookmen of Baghdad made of its Hermes.

Excavation has gone on at the site through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, tracing the mosque, the mound, the medieval university, and the layers of a settlement that reached back four and a half millennia. The Ehulhul itself, the moon-god’s house that Nabonidus rebuilt, has not been certainly located under the later strata — fitting, perhaps, for a god whose worship outlasted every empire that tried to claim him and then went out so quietly that even the place of his temple is in doubt. The crescent that ruled the calendar of three thousand years now rises over an empty plain of walls and cones, and the only liturgy kept at Harran is the slow one of weathering mud brick under the same sky the planet-priests once read.

→ In the library: Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians (Taylor, 1821) · Cory — Ancient Fragments, incl. the Chaldean Oracles (1832)

→ Related: Sabians Of Harran · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Astrology · Chaldeans · The Magi · The Mandaeans · Persepolis · Petra · Ostanes