Mandaic

Od Gilgamesza do kasydy. Poezja semicka w oryginale i w przekładzie (From Gilgamesh to Qasida: Semitic Poetry in Original Version and in Translation), Księgarnia Akademicka, Kraków 2010 [471 pp.] Orientalista zwykł czytać teksty poetyckie w oryginale, względnie żmudnie się przez nie przebijać, używając dostępnych mu słowników, zazwyczaj obcojęzycznych. Zawsze cenić będzie wyżej oryginał, niezależnie od stopnia opanowania przez siebie danego języka orientalnego. Ale teksty orientalistyczne były, są i będą tłumaczone, zarówno dla orientalistów zajmujących się innymi językami niż hebrajski, arabski, akadyjski, chiński, turecki, japoński etc., jak i dla laików. Tłumaczenie tekstu akadyjskiego, hebrajskiego, syryjskiego lub arabskiego zawsze jest pójściem na ustępstwa. W przypadku tekstów poetyckich (nie tylko semickich) ideałem pozostaje wydanie dwujęzyczne: możemy zawsze porównać oryginał z przekładem. Samo tłumaczenie często nie wystarcza-coś tracimy z oryginału semickiego, pozostaje w nas uczucie niedosytu, zwłaszcza gdy w przekładzie nie oddano melodii i formy oryginału. [...] Przekłady prezentowane w niniejszej książce są naszą próbą zmierzenia się z formą i treścią tłumaczonych tekstów. Nie możemy zagwarantować, że nie złamiemy drugiego zakazu Barańczaka: "Nie tłumacz dobrej poezji na złą poezję" [...]. Interesowała nas głównie forma i postać prozodyczna: to, co najczęściej zostaje utracone w tłumaczeniu. Naśladując formę oryginału lub do niej się zbliżając, zrezygnowaliśmy z przekładu stricte filologicznego. Staraliśmy się zbliżyć do oryginału pod względem treści (niekiedy może zbyt wiernie, mimo że próbowaliśmy uniknąć dosłowności), a zarazem chcieliśmy nadać przekładowi formę poetycką.

Diese ungewöhnliche Zauberschale mit einem hekhalotischen Einschub in aramäisch ist mir in einer deutschen Privatsammlung aufgefallen. Sie wurde bereits in der Sektion für Judaistik des XXVIII. Deutschen Orientalistentages in Bamberg 2001 vorgestellt. Die Keramikschale weist den gängigen Typ mit den folgenden Maßen ø 15,8 x h 6,5 cm auf und verfügt über keine Standfläche. Sie ist von der inneren Bodenmitte bis zur Hälfte in einer spiralförmig verlaufenden zierlichen Quadratschrift1 beschrieben und wird von einem Kreis abgeschlossen, an die sich eine Kartusche mit Text anschließt. Die Schrift ist zum Teil auf einem Drittel stark verblaßt und die innere Mitte wird durch eine Verkrustung überdeckt, so daß der Textanfang nicht auszumachen ist. Der Text selber besteht aus gängigen Beschwörungsformeln mit Nennung des Klientennamen mit einem aramäischen hekhalotisch Einschub, der mit der mehrfach wiederholten Abkürzung des Tetragrammatons (24 x) und dem Schma‘ Israel abgeschlossen wird, gefolgt von der Auflistung der vier Erzengel in der Kartusche

Neo-Mandaic is the modern reflex of Classical Mandaic, the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. Severely endangered, it survives today as the first language of a small number of Mandaeans (possibly as few as 300-500 speakers) in Iran and in the Mandaean diaspora. All Neo-Mandaic speakers are bi- or even tri-lingual in the languages of their neighbors, Arabic and Persian, and the influence of these languages upon the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is considerable, particularly in the lexicon and the morphology of the noun. Nevertheless, Neo-Mandaic is more conservative even in these regards than most other Neo-Aramaic dialects. As the only known surviving modern reflex of any literary dialect of Aramaic, it has one of the longest continuous histories of attestation of any Aramaic dialect and is therefore potentially of great interest to scholars of Aramaic.

To what degree should we be prepared to accept the Mandæans’ own accounts of their origins, as opposed to external accounts and those constructed for them by scholars? This question – often implied, but seldom articulated – lies at the heart of all scholarship on the Mandæans over the last hundred years or more.

Mandaic (in the form generally described as ‘Neo-Mandaic’ or ‘Modern Mandaic’; ISO/DIS 639–3: mid) is the language of the Mandæan community, which was formerly based in Iraq and Iran (Map 26.1) but is today distributed throughout the world, principally in Europe, Australia and North America, as the result of ethnic cleansing in its homeland. Despite its long history of attestation and copious literature, it is moribund today. Even though the members of the Mandæan community, numbering perhaps 60,000 adherents, are familiar with Mandaic through their sacred literature and liturgy, only a few hundred Mandæans, located primarily in Iran, speak it as a first language. Of these, even fewer use it regularly in writing, primarily to compose the colophons that accompany manuscripts.

This article deals with written Aramaic magic of Mesopotamia of Late Antiq-uity and focuses mainly on Mandaic and Jewish magic bowls and metal amu-lets. It tries to prove the connection between these Jewish texts and Mandaic texts, since the Mandaic ones use terms of Jewish theology and legislation as well as the forms of the name of God of Judaism. Using the translations from Mandaic and Judeo-Aramaic the author compares magic artifacts and proves the influence of Jewish tradition on Mandaic magic and also points to a possible connection of hekhalot literature with these Jewish and Mandaic magic texts. The first part focuses briefly on the history of research on Man-daic magic texts, on their basic forms and also on their praxis and treating. Author’s original observation on the possible presence of “magical puns” in magic texts is demonstrated on translation from original Mandaic language. Author points out the potential inspiration of text in Haršia Bišia collection by The Testament of Solomon. The second part of the article deals with the term get (טג) used in Judaism for a divorce bill. Same document is treated also in Mandaic written magic as is seen on several translations. Author also compares synoptically one Mandaic and one Jewish magic bowl to emphasize their linguistic and religious similarities. The final part consists of retracing the names of Jewish angels and God in the Mandaic texts, illustrated again by various translations. Thus we can find angels Gabriel and Raphael in Man-daic amulets and the God’s names as Adonai or Iahu. Author searches also for the names of Mandaic supernatural beings in Jewish texts and apparently finds the name of Abatur on one Jewish magic bowl and maybe the name of Ptahil in the hekhalotic text Sefer ha-Razim.

This is the final version of an article submitted to ARAM periodical for publication. The version that was eventually published was a previous draft for which the authors were never shown proofs. The published version contained the abstract for a different article by Mutazfi, and did not incorporate all of our corrections. At the protest of many of the contributors, the volume was withdrawn from publication, and it is thankfully no longer available. We are making our final corrected version available to interested scholars.

The Mandaeans are the members of an ethno-religious group living in Iran and Iraq. The religion of the Mandaeans is a written tradition and is the main reference of their identity. As a small endogamous group under the hegemony of the non-Mandaeans and exposed to epidemics, they always have been under the threat of cultural extinction. Therefore, group identity protection has become one of their major concerns, which is reflected in their religious practice. The Mandaeans practice a doctrinal ritualistic religion with recurrence theme of purity. The doctrinal rituals allow them to transmit a large number of religious codes through generations and to re-establish their identity. Simultaneously, the obsession with bodily purity symbolically shows their preoccupation with the unity and integrity of the threatened group boundaries. Since recent decades the Mandaeans' homeland in Iran and Iraq has undergone dramatic socio-political changes caused by the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the first and second Persian Gulf Wars and their entailed instabilities. These circumstances led to the emigration of many Mandaeans to other countries and formation of Mandaean diasporas around the world. These new social conditions are making a crucial effect on the Mandaeans' religious system and identity policy. The article is based on a long-term ethnographic study on the Mandaeans of Iran.

The first part of this article examined the features that distinguish the language of the earliest Mandaean colophons from Classical Mandaic and demonstrated that many of these features are shared with the contemporary Neo-Mandaic dialects recorded in the research literature since the 20th century. Part 2 presents editions and translations of the source texts with some brief philological notes and seeks to identify the origins of the linguistic innovations.

The present article presents four new linguistic features that link Early-Mandaic and Neo-Mandaic: 1. Diphthongization and fortition of long vowels ū/ī: ṭbukta “grace”, arbiktinkia “four of you (f.pl.)”; 2. Apheresis of y in the gentilic noun: hudaiia “Jews”; 3. Assimilation of z in the root ʾzl: tʿlun “you (m.pl.) will go”; and 4. Internal analogy in the system of cardinal numbers: tarta “two”. The presence of these forms in the two extreme phases of the language as opposed to their almost total absence in the canonical collections of Mandaic scriptures prove not only the ancient origin of some Neo-Mandaic peculiarities but also the wide range of varieties of Mandaic that flourished in Mesopotamia in Late Antiquity.

The Glossarium Sabicum, Persicum, Turcicum, et Arabicum (henceforth, Glossarium) is a quarto manuscript in the collection of the Leiden University Library, where it is accessioned as Acad. 222. Even though the Glossarium has the appearance of a set of field notes, hastily compiled and subsequently left unedited, a cautious analysis of its pages will reward the reader with a remarkably accurate and surprisingly consistent first attempt at documenting a language. This language, identified herein as “Sabian,” must not be confused with either Classical Mandaic or Neo-Mandaic, but approached as a separate language in its own right.

The paper addresses the Mandaeans' long lasting identity challenge as a small ethno-religious group living under the threat of cultural extinction. The Mandaeans are followers of an ancient gnostic tradion and they have been living in Mesopotamia for several centuries. Because of their unkown and partly esoteric relgion, they have always been the subject of the religious intolerance of thier neghbouring people. This have made the identity concern one of the main social concerns of the Mandaeans. This concern, in turn, reflects in the religious system of the Mandaeans.
The Mandaeans have developed elaborated rituals with the repetitive theme of body purification. Babtism, ablutions and food taboos show this carful concern about purity. This obsession with body purification symbolically expresses the Mandaeans' anxious care about the purification of the group body.
In last decades, because of the wars and social and plitical unrests in their homeland, the Mandaeans have started to emigrate from their countries to Europe, North America and Australia. Fromation of scattered diaspora and living in mulitcultural scular societies can bring about dramatic changes in the Mandaeans religious practice and cosmology. There are some signs that show this changes have been started.

The most characteristic figures in the Mandaean religion are the beings known as the eutria. unlike the supreme being, who remains largely aloof from the material world, the eutria repeatedly intervene in the affairs of mankind to protect the Mandaeans and punish those who threaten them. The origin and precise meaning of this term have been the subject of some debate. The scholarly consensus that has developed over the past fifteen decades, namely that it is cognate with aramaic ʽuṯrā 'riches' and therefore must mean 'riches', is not justified either by the internal evidence from the Mandaic literature or by the comparative evidence from the other semitic languages.

Yahia Bihram, a pivotal figure in the Mandaean community of the 19 th century, composed several autobiographical texts. This article presents a new edition of one of his lengthiest works, incorporating numerous corrected readings based upon close examination of the original manuscript. With the aid of recent linguistic research into Neo-Mandaic and contemporary documents, the article proposes many new interpretations and the correct identifications of historical names and places.

While the broader question of Mandaean origins is a vexing and contentious one,  the consensus among western scholars that has emerged over the previous century maintains that the Mandaeans’ own accounts of their origins are completely fantastic, not at all grounded in historical reality, and therefore derivative of other religious traditions, particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This consensus has in turn severely complicated the Mandaeans’ relationship with Muslim authorities in their countries of origin. This consensus has developed upon several factors, but in the realm of philology no single factor carries greater weight than the question of the Mandaic language.

Mandaeans vi. Neo-Mandaic Language or modern Mandaic, the contemporary form of Mandaic, the language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. As such, it is the only known form of any of the classical literary dialects of Aramaic to survive to the present date, but it is severely endangered today.

For an expanded version of this paper published in Hebrew see: https://www.academia.edu/8295044/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%AA_%D7%94%D7%91%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%AA_%D7%94%D7%99%D7%94%D7%95%D7%93%D7%99%D7%AA_%D7%95%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%90%D7%99%D7%AA_%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%AA_-_%D7%A0%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%9E%D7%92%D7%A2

The fragmentary Ugaritic text RS 16.266 (= KTU 1-3 1.83) contains a number of lexical and other problems exacerbated by the state of the tablet and difficulties in defining the plot and characters involved in the text. One of these lexical issues involves the analysis of two verbs that appear to be from the root √θrp. The Ugaritic word has a thus far unrecognized set of cognates in later Aramaic dialects, i.e., Syriac, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and Mandaic. The verbs in this cognate set have the semantics 'to strike (esp. of a snake)', and thus clarify both the activity and morphology of the fearsome dragon described in RS 16.266.

Aula Orientalis 33/2 (2015) 271-286. Final Proof.
This article presents the editio princeps of a Mandaic lamella from the Martin Schøyen collection. In the accompanying commentary, several Mandaic lexemes are discussed: abulia ‘fissures’, audana ‘desolated place’ and ʿbdunia ‘Abaddons’, gusparta ‘rooster’s comb’, d-p-n ‘to strike’, huṣa ‘palm frond’ (for later Manaic hukṣa), ṭasa ‘lamella, metal strip’, y-ṭ-b ‘burnish’, mitnia ‘loins’, m-r-s ‘to crush’, n-p-a ‘to shatter’ (< Aramaic n-p-ʕ), ʿumta ‘oath’, qmaha ‘amulet’, ragama ‘smiting’, šdqa ‘paralysis’, šuliata (pl. form) ‘afterbirths’ and šlutina ‘bat’. It also discusses the shift of *ʿu > i before a and orthographic interchanges of z and d.

In his Fihrist, the tenth-century scholar Ibn al-Nadīm produces a list of seventy names of demons, unfortunately without providing any information on his sources. Five names mentioned clearly contain the
Semitic theophoric element <’l> ‘God’, attested in various orthographies, which may indicate that these names were incorporated as a result of contact with other religions and beliefs. To this end, some other names
with likely Semitic origins will also be discussed. The goal of this essay is to establish whence Ibn al-Nadīm took these names and what this implies for our understanding of the contact between Muslims and non-
Muslims in early Islamic Mesopotamia.

Mandaic incantations follow a certain set-up that was inherited by the Mandaean scholars from the Babylonian scribes during the period of the outgoing temple cults in the triangle of the cities of Babylon, Borsippa, and Kutha. The Mandaic incantation series was not written at random, but transmits this scholarly tradition of magical texts as found in earlier Mesopotamian text material. This is already noticeable in the endorsements on the outside of the scrolls, where one encounters the term (shapta) “incantation”, a loanword from Akkadian shiptu followed by the name of the incantation series. Each incantation formula is split up with lines to divide the individual sections (baba). A ritual with instructions finishes up each incantation series. It is designed to increase the effectiveness of magical texts by practical advice on how to handle the written text. Although all these details are quite well known, they have been totally ignored by recent editors when it comes to publishing scrolls of magical contents from the Drower Collection. Many technical terms were incorrectly interpreted and assigned. Among them one finds the Babylonian deity Mulit, physiognomic terms, and others. The scroll DC 20 is here chosen as an example.

Browsing the Internet for the Mandaeans one comes across the website “Mandaean World”, where one can read under the logo of the Uroboros snake, the gnostic serpent encircling the world: “The origins of both the peo- ple, and of the religion are one of the continuing mysteries of Mandaean re- search.” This quotation describes exactly the difficulty by which a hundred and fifty years of scholarly discussion was led mostly within Europe concern- ing the “Mandäerfrage”. A scholarly dispute more at home in theological cir- cles or in research groups whose main interest is the study of the world reli- gions than among linguists.