ZA'BISM. In the article on Sabmans (q.v.), we spoke chiefly of certain inhabitants of Arabia Felix, the " Sabaioi" of the Greeks, or " Sabmi" of the Romans. It appears that this name was, in the 4th C. A.D., superseded by that of Himyarites, and belonged to many tribes, that derived their descent from one Saba (" a descendant of Eber, or descendant of Noah"). who also was called Abd Shemesh—Servant of the Sun. These Sabmans, who considered themselves pure autochthons, in contradistinction to the immi grated tribes, have often been confounded with a numb& of other peoples of antiquity, and with professors of many forms of religious belief and speculation; in fact, the con fusion that has sprung out of the unwieldy mass of information found respecting these many varieties, and which has been hopelessly mixed up by many generations of orien talists and theologians, is almost without parallel. We shall not here survey the manifold systems and theories that have been evolved from time to time, and handed down care fully, but we shall rather—in the main following Dr. Chwolson—enumerate the principal stages of Zabism as it appears, considered as a religious phase of mankind. We must premise that we exclude at once those imaginary Zabians who were taken by the medi aeval Arabic, Jewish, and Persian writers to be identical with heathen or star-worshipers, as well as those who, like the ancient Chaldeans, the ante-Zoroastrian Persians, the Buddhists, etc., were vaguely called by that name by Mohammedan and other writers of the 12th century. These writers all start from the notion that idolatry, star-worship, and Sabmism were identical. and they called nearly all those who were neither Jews or Christians, Lior Mohammedans or Magians, heathens or Sabmans. Zabism had then become, like Hellenism, from being a nomen gentile, an appellative. Confining ourselves to historical Zabism, we have to distinguish ,(1) the Chaldean Zabians of the Koran. These are the " Parsified " Chaldee heathens or •non-Christian Gnostics—the ancestors of the present Mendaites, or so-called Joannes Christians, who live not far from the Per sian gulf, and speak a corrupt kind of Chaldee-Aramaic; and (2) the. Pseudo-Zabians, or Syrian Zabians (in Harran, Edessa, Rakkah, Bagdad), or, since 830-831 A.D., remnants of the ancient Syrian but Hellenized heathens. These disappear (as Zabians) since the 12th c., but perhaps still exist, under some other name, in Mesopotamia. It is those Pseudo-Zabians who spoke the most refined Syro-Aramman dialect. They form the chief representatives of Zabism emphatically deserving of the name. The first-named, or Chaldean (Babylonian) Zabians, who transferred that name to the Harranic Zabians, and were of great influence upon the development of these latter's peculiar speculations, are the people meant under that designation by the Koran, and by the Mohammedans of this day. They are, as we said, also known as Christians of St. John, or Menthates.
Among the Nabathean heathens of the n.e. of Arabia and the extreme s. of Mesopotamia, near Wasith and Bassra, there arose, in the last decennium of the 1st c. A.D. a man named Elxai (Elchasai = Seythianus), born in the u.e. of Parthia (probably an adherent of Zoroastrianism, perhaps also acquainted with Buddhism), and spread among them Parsee ideas and Parsee religious rites and customs. They called themselves illendaites —i.e., Gnostics. Many of their religious legends and tales they adopted at a later period from their Jewish and Mohammedan neighbors—chiefly, it is presumed, with a view of making themselves less hated by the ruling Mohammedan powers. They received the name of Ssabiin from their constant washings, and purifications and baptisms. Their Arabic neighbors occasionally translated this word into the Arabic A1-Mogtasilah," those• who wash themselves." About a hundred years after the foundation of this sect by Elchasai, Manes was born of Mendalte parents, and was brought up among the MendaItes. He remained faithful to this creed up to his 24th year, at which period he founded the new sect of Manichmans (q.v.), which did not at first depart so considerably from Men daTsm as it did at a later period (see MaxiciftEam). To these aboriginal Zabians there succeeded, in 830 A.D., a totally different kind of sect the same name—viz., the Harninian Syrians. They themselves derived their denomination from one Zabl, who is variously called a son of Seth, son of Adam, or a son of Enoch or Idris, or a son of Methuselah, or of some fictitious Badi or 3Iari, a supposed companion of Abraham; while the Mohammedan writers, who, like the Greeks, endeavor to derive everything from their native tongue, either declare it to be derived from ssaba," to turn, to move," because they turned to the paths of untruth, instead of that of the true religion—i.e., Islam; or, as the Zabians themselves sometimes explain it," because they have turned to the proper faith. Another Arabic derivation makes them take their name, still more absurdly, from a root ssabacc = to fall away from the proper religion, or to turn one's head heaven ward—i.e., for the purpose of worshiping the angels and the stars, etc. European ccholars have for the most part followed either Brooke or Scaliger, who variously hold the name to have sprung either from an Arabic root, which would point to their having conic from the "east," or, again, from the Hebrew word for "host," viz., of heaven, which they were supposed to worship. The real state of the case, however, is that, whatever, the derivation of the name, it did not originally belong to the Harranians, as we have stated already, but was assumed by them, for the purpose of evading the Moham medan persecutions, from the people mentioned in the Koran.