After suffering greatly from a destructive inundation in the early part of the sixth century, Edessa was restored by Justinian on such a magnificent scale that it was reputed to be one of the wonders of the world. According to Arabian writers there were at one time no fewer than three hundred convents and monasteries in and around Edessa. These, like similar institutions in Asia Minor and Europe, were schools of intellectual culture in which the lover of learning could devote himself to the acquisition of knowledge in entire peace and security. One of the most celebrated of Edessa’s homes of learning and culture was that known as “The School of the Persians,” because its first students and teachers were chiefly Christian refugees from Persia. Its foundation was largely due to St. Ephrem, who so eclipsed all his contemporaries in scholarship that their works soon fell into oblivion. So voluminous were his works, so widely read were they, and so great were their authority that their author was acclaimed the “Column of the Church,” “The Prophet of the Syrians,” “The Harp of the Holy Spirit.” And in so high esteem were his books held, that they were, as St. Jerome informs us, publicly read in some churches after the Holy Scriptures. It was in the schools of Edessa that the Syriac language and literature reached their highest degree of development. It was in them that Syriac was molded into what subsequently became the classic speech of the Syrians from the Tigris to the Mediterranean and which is seen at its best in the works of Bardesanes and St. Ephrem, in the Peshito and in Tatian’s “Diatesseron.” But neither in Edessa nor elsewhere did the Syrian Church ever produce such eminent scholars and men of so great literary genius as a Basil or a Eusebius, a Chrysostom or a Gregory Nazianzus. We are, however, indebted to Syrian scholars for the translation of many precious Greek works which otherwise would have been lost, and for thus “having passed on the lore of ancient Greece to the Arabs” who in their turn were so greatly instrumental in putting it at the disposal of the scholars of the West. There is but little in Urfa to-day to show what it was when it was known as Edessa and when students and learned men flocked to it from all parts of the East as to one of the greatest seats of learning in Christendom. There is, it is true, a great castle standing, and walls and towers that date back to the time when Edessa was a Latin principality under Baldwin, and evidences of the city’s former occupation by Romans and Persians and others, but there is little which will long claim the attention of the serious visitor.