Al ࡋ

Al is the twelfth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes l, a voiced alveolar lateral. It joins on both sides and so takes a full set of four shapes, initial, medial, final and isolated, according to where it falls in a connected run.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a, and carries no separate sense; the ox-goad behind Syriac lamadh and Hebrew lamed has no counterpart here.

Twelfth place is where l stands in the inherited Aramaic order, which the first twenty-two Mandaic letters follow without alteration. The Mandaic alphabet is a new set of shapes and a new set of names laid over an old sequence, and it is the sequence rather than the shapes that shows the descent most plainly to a reader who knows another Aramaic script.

Unlike Syriac lamadh, which rises above the line in every hand and is the chief landmark on a Syriac page, al carries no comparable prominence in Mandaic. The two letters answer to one another by place in the sequence and by sound, and the resemblance stops there, which is the general situation between these two alphabets.

In Hebrew and Syriac the letter at this place carries the numeral value thirty, and in Syriac it also writes a very common preposition and object marker, which is part of why it is the most conspicuous letter on a Syriac page. Mandaic has neither the numeral value nor that grammatical load, so al is an ordinary letter of the alphabet rather than a landmark on the line.

The Mandaic script exists to carry a body of scripture. The principal books are the Ginza Rabba, the Great Treasure, which is the largest of them; the Book of John; and the Qolasta, the collection of prayers used in the liturgy. Classical Mandaic, written in these letters, is the liturgical language of the Mandaean religion.

Mandaeism is a Gnostic tradition of southern Iraq and south-western Iran, and it is the only one of the ancient Gnostic religions with a continuous living community. That community is small, and since the early years of this century it has been scattered by violence and displacement, so that much of it now lives in a diaspora far from where the language was spoken. The script remains in liturgical use.

Two things follow for an entry like this one. The first is that the tradition holds its script to be sacred and its letters to carry creative power, and that copying the scriptures is a priestly act. The atlas records that because the community states it. The second is that what the letters mean within the tradition belongs to a priesthood entered by initiation, and is not open material. It is not described here, and it is not reconstructed here.

Describing a script is not the same as describing a religion, and this atlas keeps the line where the community keeps it.