PREFACE

The merits of Gregory Abulpharagius, or Bar-Hebraeus, regarding history first became known to learned men through his Arabic work, titled A Compendious History of the Dynasties, edited by Edward Pococke at Oxford in 1663. The life of the author and his writings, composed primarily in the Syriac language, were recounted by J. S. Assemani in the Bibliotheca Orientalis, Vol. II, p. 268, etc. Among these stands out the tripartite Syriac Chronicle, which the aforementioned Assemani declared most worthy of the light (loc. cit. p. 312, cf. Catalog of MSS of the Vatican Library, Vol. III, p. 342), and of which he translated the latter two parts almost entirely into his own work. Since the renowned J. D. Michaelis had attempted in vain to obtain from Rome a transcript of the first part, namely the political history from the creation of the world down to the thirteenth century after Christ, I, while staying in Oxford, described the work in my spare hours, using two codices designated among the Huntington collection in the Bodleian Library as No. 1 and No. 52. The latter of these codices is excellent; the former was written carelessly by the monk Joseph in the year 1809, that is, 1498 AD. There exist manuscript codices of the same work, though not inspected by me, in the Vatican Library, from which the champion of the Syriac language, J. S. Assemani, wove fragments into his own work.