Mandaean scribal practice attaches to each copied text a colophon naming the copyist and the chain of predecessors from whose manuscripts the copy descends, and the Qolasta's colophons are among the longest of any Mandaean book, running through dozens of named priests. Scholarship that has worked through these chains, above all the studies of Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley on the postscripts, traces continuous copying back to the early Islamic centuries and, in the reconstructed earliest links, to a copyist named Zazai of Gaokhta placed around 270 CE, evidence that parts of the liturgical corpus are among the oldest strata of Mandaean literature, older than the final redaction of the great prose collections. The hymns' poetry, with its parallelism and its imagery of the soul's exile and return, has drawn comparisons with other Aramaic religious poetry of late antiquity.
The prayerbook reached Western scholarship through manuscripts acquired from the community, and the standard complete translation is that of E. S. Drower, published in 1959 as the Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans. For the community itself the book has never been an object of study so much as a working instrument: priests learn its prayers by heart in training, and the liturgy has continued through the community's modern catastrophes, the drainage of the marshes, the wars in Iraq, and the emigration that has scattered most Mandaeans to diaspora communities on other continents, where tanks of river water now stand in for the yardna and the same prayers are said over them.