The Book of Splendours

Preface.

When I published a part of my translation of the great Grammar of Barhebraeus, the Book of Rays original: "Buch der Strahlen", in 1907, I hardly thought of publishing the text of this work itself one day. For my part, I did believe it was worthy of a thorough examination and a more general study than those to which it had given rise until now. But I barely dared to hope to find similar interest among my learned colleagues. The friendly, and sometimes energetic, exhortations of orientalists from several countries and three parts of the world showed me that I was mistaken.

When the rest of this work appeared in 1912, I still had little hope, despite everything, of being able to prepare an edition of the text one day. It is only thanks to the ROYAL SOCIETY OF LETTERS of Lund that it can appear now.

The text offered by this edition is not absolutely the same as the one that served as the basis for my translation. A change in the principles that governed the reconstruction of the text led to a certain number of revisions. Repeated collations, I could well say repeated until satiety, of the main manuscripts also made it possible to correct errors from the Book of Rays. However, I am far from imagining that I have been able to remove all the faults from the text as it now appears. Although the list of corrections that one will find below, on page c, is quite extensive, it is probably far from complete. The form and content of this text make the collation...