Dienstag, 6. Dezember 2016

Harranian names of the planets

The Harranian pagans (whose Hellenistic Syrian religion survived until perhaps the 11th century CE) associated the weekdays with the planetary deities, and according to an Arabic source (al-Nadīm, Fihrist 9.1), they used some Akkadian-Syriac and some Greek names for them.

Sun
"Helios": That the sun's Greek name was used in this Syrian town argues against the stereotype of "oriental" sun worship spreading west.
Moon
"Sin": It is unsurprising that the moon god, whose cult centre the city had been for millenia, continued to be called by the Akkadian name Sîn (from earler Akkadian Su'en), even as the inhabitants spoke Syriac/Aramaic. Syriac-speakers were more likely to adopt foreign-language divine names into their language than the Greeks were (who tended much more to "translate" them). The Syriac name, Sahr(a), may have been used side by side with the Akkadian, as was (perhaps still is) done by the Mandaeans.
Mars
"Ares"
Mercury
"Nabu": Like Sin, this name is Akkadian and was adopted or retained by the Syriac-speaking Harranians.
Jupiter
"Bal": I am very strongly inclined to see this as the Aramaicized Akkadian Bēl rather than the Aramaic Bʿel. This is partly because the <ʿ> should not simply drop out and partly because...
Venus
"Balthi": ... even if the second vowel of Venus' name is <a> rather than <i> (as in Dodge's translation), the Aramaic word for "wife, lady" (the feminine of Bʿel) is bˁīlā / bˁīltā, whereas the Akkadian-derived Beltī is known to have had a sort first vowel, which would mean that <ʿ> dropped out in both names and <y> (for the long ī) was not written in the latter, which is much harder to account for than the spread of Akkadian-Aramaic planetary names (which is well-attested). (Wilhelm Eilers, "Sinn und Herkunft der Planetennamen", p.59, gives the same etymology, although in a curious slip he says that this "expression is still alive today", a statement contradicted even by the article he cites as his source.)
Saturn
"Kronos"

Dodge, who has translated the Fihrist, gives the names as:
Aylīyūs, Sīn, Lārīs, Nābiq, Bāl, Balthā, Qirqis

Chwolsohn, in his anthology of materials about the Harranians, transcribes somewhat loosely:
Iliôs (ايليوس), Sîn (سين), Ares (لاريس), Nabûq (نبوق), Bâl (بال), Balthî (نَلثى), Kronos (قرنس)

A more faithful transcription of his Arabic text is:
ˀĪlīyūs, Sīn, Lārīs, Nabūq, Bāl, Balthī, Qurunus

The Greek and/or Aramaic names transcribed into Arabic are (in the probable pronunciation of the time):
(ˀ)Īli(y)os, Sīn, (ˀ)Arīs, Nebū, Bēl, Beltī, Kronos (Qronos in Aramaic?)

That Chwohlson's construal of the first name is better than Dodge's is obvious (cf. the Greek pronunciation I gave).
The second is unproblematic, the third and fourth seem to have been erroneously expanded; there are variant readings of both without the l- and the -q, but these are hopelessly corrupt.
The sixth name, بلثى, corresponds to Aramaic blty (beltī), thus the ambiguous final letter represents -ī rather than Dodge's -ā.
Chwohlson's reading of the final name, QRNS rather than any of the attested variants (like QRQS, which Dodge uses), is fully justified; as for the vocalization, compare the Ghāyat al-Hakīm, which has Q(u)rūn(u)s (p. 196 in Ritter-Plessner's edition), which becomes Koronez in the Latin Picatrix.

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