Neo-Mandaic in Fin de Siecle Baghdad.

• Author: Haberl, Charles G.
• Position: Report

INTRODUCTION

One of the earliest attested texts in Neo-Mandaic, and one of the few witnesses to the now-extinct Iraqi dialect of Neo-Mandaic, was a letter first published among the texts in the fifth volume of Jacques de Morgan's Mission scientifique en Perse. (1) Unfortunately, de Morgan offered no translation of this text or of any of the other Mandaic texts he claimed to have collected in Persia between 1889 and 1891. Nearly a century after de Morgan's mission, Rudolf Macuch transcribed this text with the help of his informant Nasser Saburi of Ahvaz, Iran, and supplied a translation in his Neumandaische Chrestomathie. (2) With the help of my informant, Nasser Sobbi of Flushing, New York, USA, I have prepared a new transcription, using the system I developed for the Neo-Mandaic dialect of Khorramshahr, (3) and a new translation, filling some of the gaps in Macuch's earlier attempt and offering a few variant readings in the process.

Although the author of the letter offers little information about himself beyond his name, "Hirmez," many details suggest that it was written in Baghdad sometime during the final years of the nineteenth century. The vocabulary shows strong Ottoman influence; the names given for the gemstones appear to be derived from Ottoman Turkish--the words zimrut, iaqut, and clmas call to mind the Turkish forms zumrut, yakut, and elmas rather than the original Arabic forms zwnurrud, yaqut, and [sup.c.almas]--and the coins used as legal tender in these transactions are Ottoman gold liras and mejidis. The former was a gold coin first introduced in 1843, equivalent to one hundred piastres or five mejidis, and the latter was a silver coin equivalent to twenty piastres, which was first minted in 1844 during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecit I (1839-1861). The author of the letter is accosted by a zabut or officer (Classical Arabic ddbit-, which is pronounced Sabut in Baghdad), who speaks to him in the colloquial Arabic of Baghdad. Likewise, the one place name mentioned in the letter, Khanezghan, is the name of a Baghdad arcade, and while two of the addressees are not immediately identifiable, Macuch identified the third (Patre Anastase) as Pere Anastase-Marie de St. Elie (1866-1947) of the Carmelite Mission in Baghdad. (4)

Pere Anastase-Marie, known to Iraqis as Anastas al-Karmali, was the editor of the monthly journal Lugatu l-cArab and an intimate of the French Orientalist Louis Massignon. He was also deeply involved with the Mandaean community. When the Iraqi historian Abdul Razzak al-Hassani revived the old libel that the Mandaeans are worshippers of the stars and planets in his 1931 book al-Sabi'unfi Hadirihim wa-Madlhim ["The Sabians in Their Present and Past"], Pere Anastase-Marie played an important role in their defense. The Mandaean priest Sheikh Dukhayil, then the ganzibra of Nasiriya, initiated a suit against al-Hassani and presented a copy of the Ginza Rba before a court of law in Baghdad. During this trial, Pere Anastase-Marie served as a translator and objective witness, translating the passages in which the worship of the stars and the planets is explicitly rejected. During the course of his long association with the Mandaeans, he also amassed a collection of Mandaic manuscripts, which Drower and Macuch cited as one of the primary sources for their dictionary of Mandaic. (5)

Given that the letter was apparently written in Baghdad and addressed to a "Patre Anas-tase" who was not only a friend of the Mandaean community but also literate in Mandaic, Macuch's hypothesis would appear to be well founded. It is unlikely that there were multiple Mandaeophone Pere Anastases running around Baghdad at the turn of the century. There is only one possible objection to this hypothesis: at the time when this letter was allegedly collected by de Morgan, the future Pere Anastase-Marie was only twenty-three years old and still known to the world as Pierre Paul Marini. He would not adopt the name Pere Anastase-Marie de St. Elie until he was ordained in 1894, three years after de Morgan's mission had concluded. (6) Furthermore, although Pere Anastase-Marie was born in Baghdad and spent most of his life there, he was living in Belgium and France at the time that de Morgan collected his texts. For these reasons, it is likely that the letter was actually written after 1894, once Pere Anastase-Marie had been ordained and had returned to Baghdad, but obviously before September 6, 1904, the date on which the text was published. It is not immediately clear how a letter written in Baghdad sometime during the late 1890s or early 1900s came to be published together with a group of texts allegedly collected in Persia a decade earlier.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE LETTER

Although Clement Huart, who wrote the introduction to the volume, described the language as "un arameen fort corrumpu," most of the vocabulary is recognizably of Aramaic origin. (7) There are a few loans from Arabic, including the roots of three verbs (tawwah 'he tossed' from t-w-h, laqradet 'you don't want' from r-d-w, and Iahattit 'I didn't speak' from h-d-6) and two conjunctions (inkan 'if from Arabic 'in kana and (va-)lakin 'but' from Arabic wa-lakinna). It is also worth noting that the numbers given in the letter are derived from Persian rather than Arabic or Mandaic (yek 'one' from Persian yak, so 'three' from Persian se, pien 'five' from Persian panj), which is typical of spoken Mandaic even today. Likewise, the conjunction agar 'if is of Persian origin, even though it is here placed in the mouth of the Arab officer.

The letter follows the standard orthography found in other Neo-Mandaic texts. With the exception of / [epsilon]/, all vowels are represented, but without any indication of length or quality. The letter consistently represents an epenthetic vowel, either /e/ or /c/. The letters , , , (p), and may represent either stops or spirants; may indicate /b/, /v/, or /w/; indicates both /g/ and /B/; indicates both /k/ and / [chi]/ (p) indicates both /p/ and /f/; and indicates both /t/ and /u/. Neo-Mandaic orthography often differs from that of Classical Mandaic by using to represent /w/ or /v/ even where they are reflexes of Classical Mandaic /b/. As Neo-Mandaic contains several phonemes not found in Classical Mandaic, several letters from the original alphabet have been modified to represent these phonemes by the addition of two dots placed below. Consequently, may indicate /t [integral]/, /[??]/, or /[??]/; indicates /[delta]'/; and indicates /h/. As in the Classical manuscripts, emendations are indicated by a row of dots placed beneath the corrupt text, with the emended text placed above. In the transcription, the former has been indicated by striking through the text and the latter by indicating the letters in superscript.

Given the relative obscurity of Neo-Mandaic (as compared to other dialects of Aramaic such as Classical Mandaic), it may be useful to preface my remarks on the text with a sketch of its grammar. (8) Despite the complete collapse of the Classical system of states, and the obsolescence of the most common Classical plural morpheme...