Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Mani, or Manichaios, was a major religious figure in early Sasanian Mesopotamia renowned as a healer, visionary, artist, and public sage. The community he founded, the religion of Manichaeism, spread across Eurasia from the late Roman world to south China. Due to its success in Central Asia through the latter part of the first millennium, it played a major role as a conduit for ideas, literatures, and practices between East and West. Mani authored many letters in Aramaic during his public mission (c. 240–270s ce), which were collected to become one ‘book’ in his new scriptures and regarded as canonical for his church. They were translated into numerous languages and read for centuries as guides to life and faith, as well as utilized in liturgy. No complete copy of The Letters survives, but there are many remnants and quotations scattered across a diverse set of sources and scripts: lengthy citations in Latin preserved by Augustine of Hippo and his circle; codex pages in Coptic, Middle Persian, and Uighur recovered during the twentieth century from Egypt and Xinjiang; a list of titles preserved in Arabic by Ibn al-Nadīm; forgeries used in polemical texts; and so on. This major new study, the first ever dedicated to the topic, contains a detailed study of the evidence and an English translation of all the texts. A considerable amount of the material included is either entirely new to scholarship or only known to a small circle of specialists working on the original manuscripts.</jats:p>