The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics

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Translated from Italian by Charles Hindley Preface to the Italian Edition Preface to the American Edition Prologue 1. The Mandaeans The Ideas Mandaeanism The Literature List of the Principal Published Mandaean Texts, Together with Information on Some Unpublished Ones 5 Bibliographical Suggestions 59 2. The Mandaeans and the West: A History of Interaction The Rediscovery The Mission 83 The Failure 105 The Erudite and Travelers 110 Professors and Diplomats The "Mandaean Question" 3. Legends and History Between Egypt and India Jerusalem, John the Baptist, and the Others Genealogies of Scribes 165 1. Abstracts of Theology 2. The First Man 3. From the Creation to the Flood 4. The Religions of Others 5. The Jews, Jerusalem, and Miriai 6. John, a True Mandaean 7. Jesus, the "False Messiah" 8. The "Son of the Arab Butcher" Glossary Index The Roman jeweler's face is deeply lined by time and by events as distant as his memories. "I believ This book is also the first attempt to reconstruct a reliable and "internal" history of Mandaeanism, Given that the water of the Tigris, especially in and around Baghdad, is not what it used to be, it Soon after the Shah of Persia had been chased out and power had passed to the Ayatollah Khomeini's r So it was with feelings of hope mixed with uncertainty that our Mandaeans, their leaders and their b Memories of past tragic times must have come to mind, for as late as the nineteenth century whole vi Luckily, nothing of that nature happened again, but only a short while after the encounter describ Yet just who are the Mandaeans, and how many of them are there? There is no easy answer, partly beca As far as the Mandaeans who remained in their traditional homelands are concerned, throughout the en To that world, as portrayed by Lady Drower at the very limits of survival, we shall thus be referrin The first of our many uncertainties regarding the Mandaeans concerns the name itself, for we cannot Things are complicated further by the apparent connection between the words nasurariia and Nazoraean It is said that in the past, heading the religious hierarchy was a rig ama, or "head (rig) of the pe of the Carmelite mission in Basra, was usually quite well informed regarding the social and broadly We have no certain information regarding women in the priesthood, and it would seem that they are ev There is a special ritual with which an animal is sacrificed. The animal must be entrusted to a pr The word iardna must in some way be related to the name of the river Jordan, pronounced "larden" in Concerning Mandaean rituals, then, the ones that they are most famous for, and from which their Arab wife of the officiating ganzibra),'6 many positions as there were hours in the day until the moment of birth,17