This much anticipated volume, the first in Harrassowitz's new Mandaeological series Mandaistische Forschungen, (1) contains the proceedings of the 1st Conference of Mandaic and Samaritan Studies, in memory of Rudolf Macuch, the premier scholar of the Mandaic language during the latter half of the twentieth century and one of the leading Aramaicists of his time.
53, Burtea challenges the conventional wisdom that the Mandaic language and its literature were first recorded in the present script, on the grounds that a small number of common words are consistently spelt defectively, seemingly following the orthography of other Aramaic scripts--indicating to him that the Mandaeans must previously have been literate in one of these other scripts before adopting their present script.