Az ࡆ

Az is the seventh letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes z, a voiced alveolar sibilant. It joins only to the right, so the letter that follows it begins a new connected group.

Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of naming a letter by its sound with a preceding a, and carries no separate sense; the weapon behind Syriac zain and Hebrew zayin has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.

The seventh place is the place z holds in Hebrew, in Syriac and in the older Aramaic sequence, because the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep the inherited Aramaic order exactly. Only the signs added at the end of the alphabet depart from it.

Only the letters that join on both sides take a full set of four shapes. Az, joining on one side, has fewer, and the difference is visible on any page of Mandaic writing: after an az the pen lifts and the next letter starts a fresh run. Mandaic shares this behaviour with Syriac and Arabic, which each have their own list of letters that join only to the right, and the lists are similar without being identical. Comparing them is one of the few places where the kinship of these scripts shows in how they are written rather than in what order the letters come.

Set a Mandaic alphabet beside a Syriac one and almost nothing matches. The shapes are unlike, the names are unlike, the numeral values are absent on one side, and the phonology has moved. What matches is the order.

Position by position, the first twenty-two Mandaic letters answer to the first twenty-two Syriac letters, and to the twenty-two Hebrew letters, and to the twenty-two places of the Arabic abjad reckoning. Az is seventh in all of them. That is not coincidence and it is not convergence: an order is an arbitrary thing, and an arbitrary thing shared by four alphabets is inheritance.

This is why the atlas links these letters to one another on place rather than on anything else, and says so in each relation. It is also why the question of where the Mandaic letterforms came from can stay open without unsettling anything. Published accounts assign the shapes either to a cursive form of Aramaic or to the Parthian chancery script; that argument concerns the drawing. The sequence is not part of it.

For a reader the practical value is that a Mandaic alphabet can be mapped onto a known one letter by letter without recognising a single shape. Someone who knows Hebrew can find the Mandaic letter that answers to samekh by counting to fifteen. That is a real piece of access to a script very few people outside its community can read.