Microfilm from the Rbai Rafid Collection. Photograph by Ardwan Al-Sabti.
Last week I wrote about Ram Zihrun, the head of the age, the man from whom the whole Mandaean priesthood was rebuilt after the cholera of 1831. This week his line becomes evidence.
Around 1900 a Carmelite scholar in Baghdad, Père Anastase-Marie de Saint-Élie, supplied Mandaean manuscripts to the great libraries of Europe. Matthew Morgenstern has shown that many of them were copies made to order, which he calls duplicates.
Two of those copies, one in Berlin and one in Paris, end with the same colophon. It gives a year, a town, a scribe and a host, all with the proper titles and lineages. It is precise, and it is convincing.
It is also wrong. The names are real, but they belong to other men. The year is real, but it belongs to another book.
This is my first review in the series. It follows that colophon back to where it came from, word by word, and asks whether duplicate is still the right word.