ancient city of Alexandria

The Church of the East

History as taught today tends to forget that once the largest and most influential Christian churches existed to the East of the Roman Empire, with a reach extending to Central Asia, China and India along the Silk Road. Often dubbed Nestorian, they played an important role in the dispersal of Hellenism to Islam. In Syria and Mesopotamia, Hellenism was a continuous and powerful cultural force, and Muslim theology, philosophy, and science grew on soil saturated with Hellenistic culture. In due course, Constantinople would declare the Churches of the East heretical, but they essentially mediated Hellenistic and Christian thought, alchemy, science and medicine to the Arab culture in these lands.