چکیده:
This contribution investigates perceptions of Arab nomads in the hagiography
of the Late Antique East. Over the past decades, these texts, mostly
saints’ lives and episodes from church histories, have often been used to provide
social and cultural historians with information on the ethnography, geography,
customs and manners of those labelled “Saracens” or “Ishmaelites” in the texts.
However, the historicity of the narratives is difficult to assess, and a closer inspection
reveals that most of the motifs used in Late Antiquity revert to older models
from Classical Antiquity. The article therefore focuses on specific aspects, such
as how the writers depicted the Arabs’ manners and customs as contrasting with
their own societies and constructed a dichotomy between the civilisation and the
animal-like ferocity of the former. It becomes clear that Christian authors used
the depiction of the Arabs’ seemingly deviant lifestyle in order to both reassure
their readership and excite its curiosity. The display of God’s omnipotence in a
large number of the texts discussed here offered a chance to demonstrate that
Christian saints could eventually convert such people, or, when conversion was
not possible, could still hope for very potent miracles.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In Herodotus’ description, the nomadic Scythians are eaters of raw meat and drinkers of milk,⁸ 6 On the text, its anonymous author, transmission and motifs, see Daniel Caner, History and Historiography from the Late Antique Sinai, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010, 76; see also Josef Henninger, “Ist der sogenannte NilusBericht eine brauchbare religionsgeschicht liche Quelle?,” Anthropos 50 (1955): 81–148, and Michael Link, Die Erzählung des PseudoNeilus, ein spätantiker Märtyrerroman, München: Saur, 2005, 8–24.
Rose KlinkeRosenberger, Leipzig: Har rasowitz, 1941) as well as the discussion on the ritual’s importance in the accounts of Ibn Isḥāq Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 2/21/16 10:28 PM custom situated somewhere between extreme demonstrations of authority, as in the case of the Lakhmīd ruler alMundhir III, who allegedly butchered four hundred Christian nuns in honour of the deity alʿUzzā,¹² and a cultural stereo type born of Christian fear and polemic, which was replete with ancient descrip tions of barbarians.
Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 2/21/16 10:28 PM terms “Ishmaelites,” “Saracens” and, less commonly, “Hagarenes” are broadly interchangeable in Late Antique sources,²⁶ another Greek hagiographer, Cyril of Scythopolis, writing about a century after Theodoret, came up with an aetiology that embedded the Arab nomads much more within the Christian worldview: baptism transformed their condition from one of slavery to one of freedom; they were no longer Ishmaelites or Hagarenes – i.