that surround the Shatt al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan province in Iran. Worldwide, there are believed to be between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans. Until the Iraq War, almost all of them lived in Iraq. Many Mandaean Iraqis have since fled their country because of the turmoil created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation by U.S. armed forces, and the related rise in sectarian violence by extremists. By 2007, the population of Mandaeans in Iraq had fallen to approximately 5,000. The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private. Reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders: particularly from Julius Heinrich Petermann, an Orientalist; as well as from Nicolas Siouffi, a Syrian Christian who was the French vice-consul in Mosul in 1887, and British cultural anthropologist Lady E. S. Drower. There is an early if highly prejudiced account by the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier from the 1650s. Etymology The term Mandaic or Mandaeism comes from Classical Mandaic and appears in Neo-Mandaic as . On the basis of cognates in other Aramaic dialects, semiticists such as Mark Lidzbarski and Rudolf Macuch have translated the term , from which derives, as "knowledge" (cf. in Daniel 2:21, 4:31, 33, 5:12; cf. , with characteristic assimilation of /n/ to the following consonant, medial -nd- hence becoming -dd-). This etymology suggests that the Mandaeans may well be the only sect surviving from Late Antiquity to identify themselves explicitly as Gnostics. History According to the Mandaean text the Haran Gawaita, the Nasoraean Mandaeans, who were disciples of John the Baptist, left Judea/Palestine and migrated to Media in the 1st century CE. The reason given for this was their persecution in Jerusalem. The emigrants went first to Haran (possibly Harran in modern-day Turkey), or Hauran and then the Median hills in Iran, before finally settling in the southern provinces of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). During Parthian rule, Mandaeans flourished under royal protection. This protection, however, did not last with the Sassanid Bahram I ascending to the throne and his high priest Kartir persecuting all non-Zoroastrian religions. At the beginning of the Muslim conquest of Mesopotamia in , the leader of the Mandaeans, Anush Bar-Danqa, is said to have appeared before the Muslim authorities, showing them a copy of the Ginza Rabba, the Mandaean holy book, and proclaiming the chief Mandaean prophet to be John the Baptist, who is also