Armchair Traveller's History

A History of Travellers and Pilgrims

George Manginis

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781910376515
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Viaggi

A mountain peak above Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, Mount Sinai is best known as the site where Moses received the Ten Commandments in the biblical Book of Exodus. Mount Sinai brings this rich history to light, exploring the ways in which the landscape of Mount Sinai's summit has been experienced and transformed over the centuries, from the third century BCE to World War I.As an important site for multiple religions, Mount Sinai has become a major destination for hundreds of visitors per day. In this multifaceted book, George Manginis delves into the natural environment of Mount Sinai, its importance in the Muslim tradition, the cult of Saint Catherine, the medieval pilgrimage phenomenon, modern-day tourism, and much more. Featuring notes, a bibliography, and illustrations from nineteenth-century travelers' books, this deft blend of historical analysis, art history, and archaeological interpretation will appeal to tourists and scholars alike.

Chapter 1

[… Elijah] travelled for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. […]

The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

1 Kings 19: 8–12

The Early Christian period during which the first Christian anchorites came to South Sinai was one of the most decisive moments in the history of Jabal Mūsā. Two places, a textual one (‘Mount of the Law’) and an actual one (Jabal Mūsā), were brought together and identified with each other. Biblical narratives were projected onto physical entities: the mountain became ‘Mount Sinai’, the bush ‘the Burning Bush’, and the caves had sheltered the prophets Moses and Elijah. The landscape of Horeb was invested with divine grace. The superimposition of patterns of human action – mostly cultic but connected to survival as well – created a stratigraphy of meaning. Written sources and finds from archaeological excavations will be combined to address questions on the life of the Bedouin, the anchorites and the pilgrims, and on the way they perceived and used the place they identified with the ‘Mount of the Law’.

People of the Desert

Landscape, climate and technology have changed little in the region from the early years of the Christian era. It can be assumed therefore that the modes of thinking of those inhabiting the landscape, ex periencing the climate and using the technology have not been drastically altered. The South Sinai Bedouin still resort to ancient revenue sources like herding, agriculture, hunting, charcoal production, smuggling, protection or transportation services for travellers.¹ They also cling onto traditional ways of perceiving themselves and their surroundings:

There is no reason to think that the Bedouin code of honor was any different in antiquity from what it is now. The Bedouin are as natural in the desert as its oases and its flowers.²

There is little information on the prehistoric antecedents of the South Sinai Bedouin. Round structures, nawamis, with a secondary burial usage, appear at several locations.³ Small summer sites, evidently belonging to nomadic pastoral and hunter-gathering populations and dating from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (circa 8500–5500 BC), have been excavated in Wādī ΄l-Dayr.⁴ During the same period triangular-shaped installations of low stone-built walls (the so-called ‘desert kites’), an ancient means of hunting game with separate ‘herding’ and ‘killing’ areas, were being used in the Horeb vicinity.⁵

It seems that Sinai – even its more remote southern portion – was a thoroughfare of communication and population movement between Asia and Egypt in Chalcolithic times (circa 4500–3500 BC), when turquoise was already mined there. This activity continued down to the late second millennium BC, but by then Egyptians supervised a local workforce.⁶ Traces of copper mining dating back to the Chalcolithic Age have been recognised on the northern slopes of the South Sinai Massif.⁷ Mining encouraged sedentarisation. Semi-sedentary populations also engaged in animal husbandry. However, little agriculture appears to have been developed, with the possible exception of some oases.⁸

The material and textual record is smaller and less researched when it comes to the first millennium BC. Although North Sinai was strategically located between Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, South Sinai was distant and isolated.⁹ High mountains made the passage of caravans difficult and the presence of minerals seems to have been the only attraction to outsiders. Consequently, references to South Sinai in late antique historiography were scarce and invariably brief.¹⁰ It can be assumed – based on circumstantial evidence – that the area was annexed as part of Provincia Arabia by the Roman Empire in AD 106, like the northern part of the peninsula.¹¹

Sinai emerges from obscurity sometime in the first or the second century, thanks to the so-called ‘Sinaitic’ inscriptions. One of the earliest references to them appeared in the Christian Topography. The author, a merchant whose name is believed to have been Kosmas, the so-called ‘Indikopleustēs’ (‘he who sailed to India’), narrated that he had actually seen these ‘Hebrew’ sculpted letters in the Sinai desert, perhaps sometime in the first half of the sixth century:

Wherefore, in that wilderness of Mount Sinai, one can see, at all their halting-places, all the stones, that have there been broken off from the mountains, inscribed with Hebrew letters, as I myself can testify, having travelled in these places.¹²

Another reference appeared in Petrus Diaconus’s (1107–1153) Book on Holy Places, which filled the lacuna of the missing part of Egeria’s itinerary (discussed below):

All around the mountains caves have been carved out, and, if you just took the trouble to put up some curtains, they would make marvellous bedrooms. Each bedroom is inscribed with Hebrew letters.¹³

The inscriptions have been the object of scholarly debate as to their authorship, date and decipherment. Today they are attributed to either Nabatean copper miners, who arrived in Sinai with the Romans, or to a Nabatean population that began to appear in the area around the late first century BC.¹⁴ They are dispersed all over the peninsula, unlike Greek, Coptic or Armenian inscriptions, which seem to be concentrated along pilgrim routes.¹⁵ An alternative theory attributes them to local shepherd populations, the ‘Bedouin of the past’.¹⁶ The Nabateans themselves had adopted Greek by the late second century, whereas their own language continued to be used in Sinai after the annexation of the Nabatean kingdom by Rome in AD 106 and until the late third century (the latest dated Nabatean inscription from the peninsula dates to 268).¹⁷ South Sinai was distant from trade routes in which the Nabateans would be interested and even copper mining was concentrated away from the area during the period.¹⁸

The wide usage of the term ‘Saracens’ for the populations of Sinai (instead of ‘Arabs’ or ‘Nabateans’) could underline the indigenous nature of the people inhabiting the area during the Early Christian period. However, the term could also have been used to differentiate between tent-dwelling scenites or scenitae and sedentary Arabs (‘Saracens’), thus encompassing a broader area.¹⁹ In any case, by the sixth century the term ‘Saracen’ was used for all Arab-speaking peoples.

By the mid-to-late fourth century Provincia Arabia had become a marginal part of the province of Palaestina Tertia, a change that betrays an improved understanding on the part of the imperial government of the difficulties, even threats, posed by the nomadic tribes of the desert areas of Negev and Sinai. Arab Bedouin tribes were by now used as foederati, confederates of the Romans who guarded frontiers and ensured the protection of the local population in remote areas.²⁰ Monastic tradition assigns a tower surviving within the present-day Monastery of Saint Catherine to the early fourth century and connects it with the imperial Holy Land programme associated with the creation of Palaestina Tertia.

An account of the customs and way of living of these tribes appeared in a hagiographical ‘historical romance’, the Narrations of Nilos the hermit monk of the demise of the Mount Sinai monks and of the captivity of his son Theodoulos. This work has been variously dated by scholars between the fourth and the seventh century:

The aforementioned nation [of the Barbarians] lives in the desert that extends from Arabia to Egypt, the Red Sea, and the river Jordan; they never practiced a craft, or commerce, or agriculture, and they only have the knife to deal with the necessities of feeding. Because they either live by eating the flesh of the desert animals they hunt; or they provide themselves with what they need, in whatever way they can, by robbing people that happen to pass from the roads near which they lurk. When there is a dearth of both of these and they lack in necessities, they use their beasts of burden (which are dromedary camels) as food, conducting a monstrous and flesh-eating life, slaughtering one per family or tent group, and using a little fire to loosen the firmness of the flesh, so as to say that they do not exercise too much pressure on their teeth, they feed themselves like dogs. They are not aware of the spiritual God, or even a handmade one; they worship the morning star and when it rises, they sacrifice to it the appropriate part of their loot, whenever, from a thieving assault, they come across something worth slaughtering.²¹

The text continues with a description of a camel sacrifice and allusions to human sacrifice, involving circumambulation of the victim, blood drinking and omophagia.²² The barbarians inhabited the desert of Sinai and the Negev. They appear to have been hunters and brigands, bursting from time to time into murderous rampages. They also worshipped and sacrificed to the morning star.²³ The writer (who shall be referred to as ‘Nilos’) must have had a distorted view of the Bedouin – contrasting them unfavourably with the virtuous anchorites he praised in following paragraphs – but his testimony cannot be altogether rejected.²⁴

Nevertheless, archaeological evidence points to a more civilised population, occupied with farming in oases and small orchards and with the husbandry of goats, sheep and camels.²⁵ It is probable that the Bedouin also serviced the increasing stream of pilgrims to the area by earning their livelihood as guides.²⁶ The period from the fourth to the seventh century is one of sedentarisation and even urbanisation in arid areas far from commercial thoroughfares. The presence of anchorites and pilgrims must have been the main reason for this change which would be reversed after the Islamic conquest.²⁷ The benevolent figure of Ammanes, the Bedouin chief in the work by Nilos, is far removed from the feral barbarians. Ammanes was probably one of the already mentioned foederati, confederates of the Romans who protected the population of the frontier province of Palaestina Tertia.²⁸

Many of the locals (raiders or traders, farmers or guides) were converted to Christianity through the zealous action of the anchorites. Urban centres like Ṭūr and Wādī Fīran to the west of the peninsula, with several churches and monasteries, were populated with Christian, probably Greek-speaking Arabs.²⁹ Researchers of skeletal material from Early Christian burials in ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Geography
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Epilogue
• Notes
• List of Pilgrims and Travellers
• Image Credits
• Bibliography