John Stathatos: Azzanathkona

AZZANATHKONA

Of the caravan city Azzanathkona we know little. Its first and last mention in contemporary annals was in the form of a sketch, one of several learned articles by the orientalist M. Rostovtzeff which appeared in 1928 in The Helm, a Russian émigré newspaper published from Berlin. Strangely, though the rest of the articles were subsequently published under the title O Blijnem Vostoke (Paris, 1931), the one on Azzanathkona was not included. The name does indeed appear in the index, but only as a local version of the goddess Atargatis, to whom a temple appears to have been dedicated in Dura Europos.
     That Azzanathkona was more than a provincial incarnation of Artemis/Atargatis is clear from a Palmyrene inscription quoted in the supplement to Dittenberger's Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones which places her in an ambiguous but hardly subordinate relation to the great triad of Bel, Yarbihol and Aglibol. Indeed, Rostovtzeff's suppressed article advanced the claim that Azzanathkona was the titular goddess of an eponymous trading centre in the centre of the Nejd desert, well to the south of the Petra-Ctesiphon trading route. The city Azzanathkona appears to have flourished until roughly the middle of the fourth century AD, at which time it was destroyed in a joint raid by the Bene Komara and Bene Mattabol, an unusual example of collaboration between two normally hostile desert tribes.
     Azzanathkona's power and wealth were based on three factors: its key position on an a minor but still profitable caravan route, control of the region's sole wells, and the fame of its annual winter solstice rites. The nature of these rites is obscure, but that they were of an unusually licentious nature is hinted at in a ferocious attack by Clement of Alexandria; sadly, the learned bishop's information was of a generalised rather than a specific nature, and his condemnation, while all-embracing, leaves us none the wiser. To these few facts can be added the details provided by the Jerash XVII papyrus, according to which the women of Azzanathkona were regarded as abominable for shaving their heads and for wearing red; that a special tax was imposed upon philosophical treatises and itinerant philosophers; and that the performance of Greek plays was punished by banishment.
     The location of Azzanathkona remains a mystery. A joint Anglo-American expedition is rumoured to have stumbled across its traces after a freak sandstorm exposed a handful of stone buildings in 1923, but as the expedition was in fact carrying out undercover surveys for the Aramco oil consortium, its reports remained confidential. André Malraux and Corniglion-Molinier claimed to have caught a glimpse of it from the air in March 1934 during their search for Mareb, but were unfortunately unable to provide precise geographical references. The ravings of a sergeant in the Long Range Desert Group, sole survivor of a unit lost during a training exercise in the Nejd in 1942, do however more or less bear out Malraux's report of its position; he spoke of squat round towers emerging from the sand, of his vehicle's wheels breaking through the ground into an ossuary, and of a plague of scorpions. The entire region is now out of bounds to travellers.~