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  • Chapter 13 - Bardaisan’s Disciples and Ethnographic Knowledge in the Roman Empire

  • from Part III - Cultural Translation and Transformation
  • Edited by Alice König, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Rebecca Langlands, University of Exeter, James Uden, Boston University
  • Book:
    Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235
    Published online:
    28 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020, pp 291-308

  • Summary

    What were the sources for the ethnographic knowledge of Bardaisan of Edessa (active c. 200 CE) and his literary circle? This chapter maintains that such ethnographic knowledge, as exhibited by Bardaisan’s surviving historical fragments and the Syriac Book of the Laws of the Countries, was much more indebted to intertextual engagements with Greek and Latin material available to a contemporary Roman readership than to information collected from ‘eastern’ contacts and connections, as scholars sometimes surmise. Roman imperial networks in fact enabled the circulation of ethnographic information that served the authorial strategies of Bardaisan’s literary circle. Yet, Bardaisan’s circle attributed such knowledge, whether implicitly or explicitly, to eastern literary and oral sources and thus framed themselves as ‘eastern’ experts for both local Edessene and broader Roman audiences. In this way, they navigated the intricate space between ‘Roman’ and ‘Other’.