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=> From Assyrian Temples to the Churches

From Assyrian Temples to the Churches

Posted by Maggie (Guest) - Monday, January 29 2007, 23:37:10 (CET)
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From Assyrian Temples to the Churches

David Gavary
California

As a focus of worship, the early Assyrian temple undoubtedly differed from its much more recent Christian counterpart, yet there is a remarkable coincidence between religious architectural forms of this second millennium BC and early churches of the late pre-Islamic era. The conservative, persistent, transcendent character of Assyrian civilization has long been appreciated. In religion it has been remarked upon repeatedly.

Assyrian-ness survived the conquest of Achaemenid ( not by war, but revolt, betrayal and treachery) Greek, Parthian and Sasanian rulers, and did not even succumb to the Islamic conquest. There are even echoes of Gilgamesh in the Arabian Nights. Thus, a literary work as the Arabian Nights may owe much to its Pre-Islamic, local Assyrian antecedents, just as it displays distinctive, obviously new elements.

One area which seems not to have been investigated from this point of view is Assyrian Christianity, the dominant Christianity of much of the Church of the East during the long reign of the Sassanians. No doubt because of the historical and ideological watershed which Christianity seems to represent historical in the minds of theologians and historians, little thought seems to have been given to the degree to which the Church of the East in particular does or does not display some of the distinctively Assyrian characteristics which, in other circle of life, seem to have persisted long after the fall of the Assyrian empire. It is well known that scribes continued to write Sumerian and Akkadian on cuneiform tablets into the Achaemenid, Parthian period. It’s been known that the system of provincial administration which functioned, with some modifications, under the Greeks, Parthians, Sassanians, the earliest Caliphs and Ottomans, greatly resembled that which was in place under the Assyrians and can, in some ways, be traced back to the administrative reforms of Shulgi in the Ur III period which divided Babylonia and Diyala region into over twenty provinces. It is not the intention of this article to offer an interpretation of the Church of the East theology in light of our knowledge of ancient Assyrian ritual or the ancient Assyrian Pantheon. Rather , it is to draw the reader’s attention to some remarks which seem to have been overlooked by most scholars interested in the survival of the ancient Assyrian culture imprint on the later material culture of the Tigris –Euphrates valley.

Discussing the plans of the two churches excavated at Ctesiphon (Teesphoun or teshvoun).
It has been remarked on the absence of an apse at one end of the church, a regular feature in Assyrian, Syrian and Coptic churches.

Close parallels and more likely prototypes are offered by the temples of Assyria and Babylonia, where we see the same rectangular sanctuaries connected with the main body of the edifice only by the narrowest of doors.

Recent excavations at Kish have shown that the semicircular apse was well known to the Sasanians, and it was universal in Syria. The ancient religious edifices of Assyria had avoided it, however, and there can be little doubt but that we see the continuity of this ancient Assyrian’s idea in today’s churches.

The origin of the square ends to the sanctuary seems to be a feature of far earlier date, For it is such rectangular sanctuaries in Assyrian and Babylonian temples, and a comparison of the plan of such a one as the Anu Adad temple at Ashur with that of the Ctesiphon churches is, to say the lest, suggestive. It seems that we have yet another instance of the art or architecture of early Assyria exercising it influence in the Christian period.

There seems little doubt that the striking parallels between the early Assyrian temple plans discussed here and the Nestorian and Assyrian Church of the East Churches of Ctesiphon and Al-Qousour, near the center of Faillaka (Kuwait) deserve further study. More generally, they raise a point often overlooked in Assyrian studies and research into early Christianity but well-attested in ethnographic literature, namely the possible survival of ancient practices from Pre-Christian, Assyrian antiquity in Mesopotamia, principally Church of The East Christianity. Historians of Islam are well aware that there are many survivals from the religions of Pre-Islamic Western Asia which are detectable in Islam. It has been argued that the ritual sacrifice of a lamb as has been described in a Neo-Assyria text from the library of Ashurbanipal finds an undeniable parallel in the so-called ‘Aqiqa’ offering made seven days after the birth of a child. It is quite possible that ancient Assyrian religious beliefs, cult practices and paraphernalia (from portable – Objects to entire building complexes) may be reflected in Assyrian Christianity and Islam in ways which scholars have largely over looked until now, and the congruence between Assyrian temple plans Church of the East and Nestorian churches would appear to embody one such case.

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