1. Term

The term “Mandaean” is used for a Gnostic-type baptismal fellowship (Baptism) that existed on the eastern borders of Syria and Palestine in the first century a.d. and that is the only one of such representatives of the syncretism of antiquity to survive to this day. Modern Mandaeans, some 15,000 in number in the late 1970s, live in the marshy delta region of the Tigris and Euphrates, in the Iranian province of Khūzestān, and in the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Basra.…