ABSTRACT
By the middle of the third decade of the third century ce, Edessa’s Abgarid monarchy was little more than a memory, the remnant of which lived on in the person of the pas.griba Ma nu. The city was integrated into the empire; it had achieved the glorified status of a metropolis; its people, now Roman citizens, attached ‘Aurelius’ or ‘Aurelia’ to their Semitic, Iranian or Greek names, signalling their self-identification with the new order. Edessa retained its remarkable mix of Semitic, Iranian and Greek identities, and indeed was about to enter into the phase of Christian literary activity that represented the greatest flowering of Syriac culture. Its transformation into Roman Edessa, however, was nearly complete. Before the final extinction of the Abgarids, the royal name returned to the scene in the person of Abgar X or Aelius Septimius Abgar, the contemporary of the Emperor Gordian III (238-44), as has long been known on the basis of coins bearing the names and images of both rulers.1
