Welcome to our website!
Our collections of documentaries, interviews, edited films of rituals, slideshows, and photographs, are grouped under the headings 'People', 'Rituals', 'Festivals' and 'Exhibits (Films, Slideshows and Albums).'
If you aren't familiar with the Mandaeans, we recommend starting with the slideshow of our exhibition and/or our documentaries, Faith in Exile and Like a Sugar Cube in a Cup of Tea, and then continuing your explorations with the videos on our People page. You may then want to watch edited versions of the Rituals. The Festivals collection contains more than 2000 images, many depicting the rituals as they evolve.
When you click on a thumbnail image, you are interfacing directly with the database, which will show you details about collection as well as the images. You may need to scroll down slightly to see embedded videos, which you can increase to full-screen mode; for photos, click to see them as a gallery.
All items are tagged to make searching easier and some have URLs linking to Lady Drower's The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, which still remains the classic open-access book in English on the Mandaeans. But please be warned, it was written in the late 1930s and as our interviewees explain, many things have moved on! Our Links page lists some more recent academic writing and most importantly of all, some of the most prominent Mandaean organisations working to improve the security and human rights of this endangered community.
This website is in English language but many interviews are in Arabic or Persian and the subtitles give a paraphrase, rather than a detailed translation. Rituals are in Mandaic (Aramaic) and in general we have not translated them. Their texts are usually fixed and featured in scholarly publications. For Mandaic words we have usually kept to Drower's transliterations, for easier understanding by non-specialists. Our apologies to specialists for any inconsistencies and for the annoyance this will cause.
The materials in our public collections are on Open Access, issued under Creative Commons Licence BY NC SA. This means that:
- they may be downloaded, but the source (our project) must be acknowledged.
- they must not be used for commercial purposes.
- if shared, they must be shared under the same terms.