Mandaeism is the only religion of late antique Mesopotamia to have survived continuously into the present with its own scriptures, its own script and its own priesthood, and that survival is the central fact about its attestation.
The Ginza Rabba is the principal book, divided into a right side concerned with cosmology, ethics and history and a left side concerned with the soul's ascent, read at funerals. The Qulasta is the collection of liturgical prayers and hymns used in baptism and in the rites for the dead. The Book of John contains discourses attributed to John the Baptist, who holds a central position in the tradition.
The language is a form of Eastern Aramaic, written in a distinctive script, and it is the only Aramaic dialect whose religious literature was transmitted by its own community without interruption.
Alongside the books sits a body of material with no religious authority but great historical value: incantation bowls from Mesopotamia, inscribed in Mandaic, which place the language and some of its formulae firmly in late antiquity and provide dated evidence outside the manuscript tradition.
Western scholarship began in earnest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was for a period preoccupied with what Mandaeism might reveal about the origins of Christianity, which distorted the questions asked of it.
The community has faced severe disruption in Iraq and Iran since 2003, and much of it is now in diaspora.