The chronography of Gregory Abû'l Faraj, the son of Aaron, the Hebrew physician, commonly known as Bar Hebraeus : being the first part of his political history of the world / translated from the Syriac by Ernest A. Wallis Budge.

  • Bar Hebraeus
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The chronography of Gregory Abû'l Faraj, the son of Aaron, the Hebrew physician, commonly known as Bar Hebraeus : being the first part of his political history of the world / translated from the Syriac by Ernest A. Wallis Budge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    compositor can never be wholly eliminated, the reader can never be certain that the printed text is absolutely correct. A full-sized facsimile of Hunt No. i was out of the question, because of its unwieldiness, and the great cost of its reproduction would place the volume beyond the reach of all but the wealthy. I then consulted Mr. John Johnson, Printer to the Uni¬ versity of Oxford, and having gone into the matter very carefully he showed that the cost of producing a facsimile of the text of Hunt No. i, whether by line blocks or by photography, was prohibitive. In either case each column of text would have to be divided and its two halves made to form one octavo page; and the text would fill 876 pages! But the manuscript Hunt No. 52 lent itself more readily to our wishes. By reducing the size of the page of the actual text a very little it was possible to reproduce the manuscript page for page, each with its two columns of writing, and to produce a complete facsimile including all the marginal corrections and notes. Mr. Johnson’s experiments were eminently successful, and the result of them is the excellent facsimile of the text of Hunt No. 52, which accompanies my translation. The scribe who wrote the text made mistakes, like every other scribe, but the student who is not working at the manu¬ script in the Bodleian Library, will for the first time know of a certainty exactly what the scribe did write, and will not have to contend with the mistakes of the editor and compositor, and some of the emendations pro¬ posed by modern scholars. The encyclopaedic character of Bar Hebraeus’s Chronography made the addition of a full Index of proper names and things absolutely necessary, and I have endeavoured to provide one. The writing of the slips, about 15,000 in number, and the making of the fair copy for the printer occupied several weeks. In connexion with the Index I gratefully acknowledge the assistance which I received from Mrs. K. M. Gadd, whose experience enabled her to sort the slips and arrange them in alphabetical order with great success. It is a natural wish to show the reader what the monastery is like in which Bar Hebraeus’s remains are preserved. For many years I tried to obtain photographs of the venerable Monastery of Mar[i] Mattai, which once seen can never be forgotten, but it was impossible to find a photographer who would undertake the journey thither from Mosul, and the trouble and risk incurred in the transport of a camera and plates to the monastery. Two years ago when my former colleague in the British Museum, R. Campbell Thompson, D.Litt., F.S.A., was excavating the great temple of Nabu at Kuyunjik (Nineveh), I asked his help in the matter. With great willingness he set to work and found a photographer and sent him with full directions to the Monastery, and the plates in the Introduction showing the exterior and interior, and the inscriptions over the graves of Bar Hebraeus and Mar[i] Mattai have been made from the negatives then made. All the negatives