Am ࡌ

Am is the thirteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes m, a voiced bilabial nasal. It joins on both sides.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a. The water that stands behind Syriac mim, Hebrew mem and, through the Phoenician sequence, the Greek mu, has no counterpart in the Mandaic name, which describes a pronunciation rather than a thing.

Mandaic is written right to left and joined, as Syriac and Arabic are, so a word is drawn as a connected run broken only where a right-joining letter falls. Am is one of the letters that keeps a run going, and a long Mandaic word can carry a single unbroken stroke across most of its length. The letters that break a run are halqa, az, it, aksa and ash, together with the three signs that close the alphabet; everything else, am included, carries the stroke on.

Am holds the thirteenth place, where m stands in Hebrew, in Syriac and in the older Aramaic sequence. Mandaic has no separate final letters of the kind Hebrew developed; what it has, like Syriac, is positional forms belonging to the letters themselves.

In Hebrew the thirteenth letter has a separate final form counted apart from the twenty-two, and in Hebrew and Syriac it carries the numeral value forty. Mandaic has neither. Its positional forms belong to the letter and are not counted separately, and no numeral use of the Mandaic letters is described in the reference literature.

Mandaean texts are transmitted in manuscripts copied by priestly scribes, and the copies carry colophons that record the chain of copyists standing behind them. A colophon is not a decoration; it is a statement of who copied this book from whose copy, and back through the line.

That habit has an unusual consequence. It leaves a documentary record of transmission running back a very long way, and modern scholarship has been able to work with those chains as evidence in their own right, which is something few textual traditions of comparable age make possible. The copying is a religious act as well as a technical one, and the record it leaves is a by-product of taking it seriously.

There is a source problem alongside it, and it should be stated plainly. A great deal of what was published about Mandaeism in Europe from the seventeenth century onward came through missionaries, travellers and colonial officials, who named the community by their own categories and had their own reasons for describing it as they did. Where that material is the only evidence for a claim, the claim is only as good as the witness, and this atlas says so rather than repeating it as established.

The community's own texts, copied by its own scribes in these letters, are the primary record. What they mean within the tradition is the priesthood's to say.