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« Between the Needle and the Noose | Main | The Young Abraham Lincoln? »

February 13, 2007

Comments

Fascinating, how even some of the more obscure religions bear so much connection with others of the region, and even further afield.
Witness this statement by E.S.Drower in one of the linked articles from the wikilink.
"The word manda occurs in several Iranian dialects, or languages in which Iranian words occur; for instance, in northern India the word mandi means a 'covered-in market' or 'bazaar'. In Gujarati there is the word mandap or mandava, meaning a 'shed' or 'temple', derived from the Sanskrit mandapa with the same meaning. The Todas of the Nilgiris in southern India, who have a tradition of migration from the Caspian, call their village, or group of thatched huts with a dairy for the sacred buffaloes, a mand. Ma-da occurs in Sumerian as meaning 'land, or settlement' (philologists arc undecided as to whether Semitic matu is related to it or not. Does Mada lead us back to the Medes?)"

Another snippet mentions how the Mandaeans assert that Adam (one of their sacred figures) hails from Serandib (Ceylon in ancient times).

Truly a treasure trove of reading for a winter blizzard day (which we are having right now, if I can manage to get any reading done during the day, because my kids' school is closed!)

The manda - mandap (which is not just Gujarati but a common word in all north Indian languages) link is entirely plausible, both serving the same purpose. Thanks for shedding linguistic light on this one - always a fascinating subject.

Razib alerted me that the Mandaeans also could be the Sabians - mentioned in the Quran as "people of the Book." But the Wiki entry on Sabians seems to suggest that the Mandaean claim of being Sabians was more of a subterfuge to escape the wrath of the Muslim majority. After all, they consider Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed as "false" prophets - a pretty serious crime in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic scheme of belief. From the little that I gathered, Mandaeism is a mish-mash of Biblical lore (Adam, Noah, John the Baptist) and Zoroastrianism (Dualism).

The fates of small and relatively obscure religious sects, threatened with extinction, always go back to their exclusivity and lack of proselytization - identity defined by birth rather than belief. Parsis in India and elsewhere are grappling with a similar dilemma. I think the Jewish community did too at one time. The Hindus who too consider Hinduism more or less a product of birth (although things are a bit more lenient now), are not similarly threatened only because of their sheer numbers. On the other hand, the Mormons, a marginalized faith in the US, are flourishing and multiplying in their numbers because of their aggressive and methodical proselytization world wide.

As for Serandip or Sarandib (literally, "the golden island" or the current day Sri Lanka), being Adam's original abode, don't you think the paradisical Garden of Eden was more likely to have been located in that lush tropical jewel of an island (complete with big, bad serpents) than in the arid landscape of the middle east?

I mentioned the Adam/Serandib connection, but forgot to mention why it rang a bell for me: Here's the Wiki linkto 'SriPada', also thought by at least some Christians to be Adam's footprint- though the same formation has been interpreted as being Buddha's or Shiva's footprint as well.

Ruchira,

Now that you mention it, Sri Lanka's lush tropical forests and wildlife do seem to resemble more closely the 18th depictionsof the garden of Eden in art than the native flora and fauna of the M.E.!

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