Heinrich Petermann (1801–1876), Berlin Orientalist. He learned the Mandaic script in the house of the priest Yahia Bihram, as it was read and written in the community, and brought it back to Berlin.
When the scholars drew the map
In Part 1, I followed the first Europeans who noticed the Mandaeans and their script. A Dominican friar met them on the riverbanks in the thirteenth century. An Italian Carmelite who had lived among them in Basra wrote the first European book about them. Printers in Rome and Oxford, who had no Mandaic type, turned Latin, Greek and Hebrew letters on their sides and called the result Mandaic. Travellers and scholars, from Thévenot and Kaempfer to Bernard, Hyde and Niebuhr, set the letters into their great tables of the world’s writing. Each of them noticed the script. None of them could place it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, that age of noticing was over. The script had been copied, printed badly and then more carefully, and still no one could say what it was. Where had it come from? What family of writing did it belong to? The community that wrote it was still where it had always been, in the south of Mesopotamia and Elam, still copying its books by hand, still teaching the letters to its young priests. The next chapter would, for the first time, be written by Europeans who went to learn the script from them, or who sat long enough with the manuscripts to learn it on their own.
The first to go was Heinrich Petermann, a Berlin Orientalist already in his fifties when he reached the Mandaean settlements in the early 1850s. He stayed for months in the house of a priest named Yahia Bihram and learned the language, the prayers and the rhythm of the hand at his side. Yahia Bihram was the brother-in-law of my ancestor Ram Zihrun: the German scholar learned the script in our family’s house. The Mandaic Petermann carried back to Berlin and put into print was not the Mandaic of the European imagination. It was the Mandaic a priest had taught him in his own house.
Julius Euting, working in Tübingen in the same years, took the opposite path. He did not travel to the community; years later he would ride through Arabia instead, sketchbook in hand. For his Mandaic work he sat with the manuscripts that earlier travellers had brought to European libraries and made the script his own from the inside of those volumes. While still in his twenties he drew the whole Mandaean prayer book by hand for the printer, so carefully that his edition is still a pleasure to hold a hundred and fifty years on. With Petermann’s edition beside it, the field had its first proper texts to work from.
Theodor Nöldeke, in Kiel and later Strasbourg, did the work that anchored everything after. He wrote the grammar of the language that every serious student of Mandaic still has to walk through, and he lived to be ninety-four. What is less remembered is that he placed the script twice. In his first study, in 1862, he derived it from Syriac, the script of the eastern churches. Seven years later, reviewing Petermann’s and Euting’s editions, he changed his mind: the script was “truly Babylonian”, he wrote, grown on its own out of the old Aramaic. His grammar of 1875 said it again. The textbook tradition that followed kept his first placement and dropped the second. A scholar who is honest enough to change his mind in print is the best kind of scholar. The field has not always returned him the favour.
Mark Lidzbarski, a generation later, gave the opposite answer its most influential form. Born in Russian Poland, he ran away from home as a boy and ended up a professor in Germany. The Mandaeans, he argued, had begun as a Jewish baptist group in Palestine, had moved east, and had brought their script with them. His proof was a single letter: the Mandaic a, he said, looked too much like the Nabataean one, the script of Petra, to have grown up anywhere else. His German translation of the Ginza, the great holy book of the Mandaeans, carried this Western reading into the standard reference work, and for most of the twentieth century it was the assumed answer. Not everyone was convinced. In 1939 Franz Rosenthal pointed out that the whole likeness rested on that one letter, and that one letter can develop the same way twice.
The next chapter was written not in a German seminar but in a house in Baghdad. Ethel Stefana Drower, married to the judicial adviser to the government of Iraq, lived there for a quarter of a century, from 1921 to 1946, and had already published novels before she turned to the Mandaeans. She sat with the priests, wore white when the ceremonies called for it, and slowly and patiently became the observer the field had never had. The manuscripts she gathered, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, are still the heart of what scholars work from. Her books gave every historian of religion after her something solid to stand on.
In 1970, two papers appeared that broke the Western reading open. Joseph Naveh, an epigrapher in Jerusalem, wrote that there was “no connection at all” between the Nabataean and the Mandaic scripts, and placed Mandaic among its neighbours in the region instead. Peter Coxon, in St Andrews, came at the question from another side and found that the letters gave no support for an early Mandaean presence in the south on the evidence of the script alone. After half a century, the Western reading had to make room for an Eastern one.
Not everyone moved. Rudolf Macuch, a Slovak-born scholar in Berlin, held on to an early date, built much of his case on the Haran Gawaita, the Mandaeans’ own account of their history, and on early inscriptions from the Iranian borderlands, and answered his critics fiercely in print. He could be wrong on a point and right on a point in the same paragraph, and he made the question impossible to ignore. Kurt Rudolph, in Leipzig on the other side of the Iron Curtain, defended the Western reading with care, decade after decade, and wrote the synthesis a generation of historians of religion would draw on. He held his position to the end.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, Franz Altheim had gathered the linguistic groundwork on which the Eastern view would later rest: how the script writes its vowels, how certain consonants trade places, its links to the Parthian world. Part of his case leaned on a passage in a ninth-century Syriac commentary by Ishodad of Merv, a reading Coxon took apart the following year. In our own century, Charles Häberl drew the Eastern threads together: the Mandaic script, he proposed, was one of several shaped by the official writing of the Parthian empire in its last centuries. Bogdan Burtea, writing in the same years, went back over the history of the debate and showed it to be less tidy than the textbooks say. He reads Nöldeke as the Eastern witness he was, and Rosenthal as a sceptic rather than a pillar of the Western camp. Today the linguistic consensus, gathered by Holger Gzella in his histories of the Aramaic languages, places the Mandaic script and its language firmly in Babylonia.
Alongside the philologists, others laid the material foundation. Edwin Yamauchi edited the magical bowls, clay bowls written with protective spells and buried under the floors of late antique houses. Erica Hunter worked on the catalogue of the bowls in the British Museum. Jorunn Buckley gathered the colophons, the notes in which each scribe names himself, his teachers and the book he copied from, together with the lines of their scribes into one volume. The colophons themselves reach back to the third century, to the scribe Zazai d Gawazta. Without that material record the arguments about the script would have no ground to stand on.
These have been the questions of the field. Where did the script come from? What tradition does it belong to? When did the community arrive? Behind them sit a century and a half of careful work and patient correction, and the questions are still not settled. The early observers noticed the script and could not place it. The scholars drew the map, and argued over where to put it. But the script, when you sit with it, is asking a different set of questions. In Part 3, I will turn to those.