PREFACE.

the University of Strasbourg. It is incomplete; 68 leaves are missing at the beginning, and something is missing at the end.
The leaf bearing the number 135 is evidently not in its place; we have reproduced it at the beginning of our edition, pp. 1—5; it seems to relate to the monastic life, which is the subject of the pages that remain to us of the third memra treatise/discourse of the first part 1—48, which we have published under the title of Ktaba d-Marduta Book of Education/Discipline, according to the different passages we encountered in the course of the work, and particularly the one we read in the fifth letter, page 58: "Especially that excellent teaching: how and by what path one should walk on the road of perfection."

In what remains to us, the date is not marked, but one reads at the end of the Book of Perfection, f. 134a Col 2, these words written by another hand in Jacobite characters, with black ink, in the direction of the length of the page: "Completed is this book; whoever wrote it, completed it in the good hope of the angelic (pure?) life by the hand of the sinner Abraham the Monk, in the year 1914."

The manuscript is entirely in estrangelo a formal, ancient Syriac script on parchment; it appears to be nearly contemporary with the author, who lived in the first part of the 7th century, if it is not his own, (See p. VIII).
The volume contains: 1) The Book of Perfection, pp. 1—485; 2) A collection of five epistles, pp. 486—600; 3) A beginning of sentences or maxims of wisdom, pp. 601—602.
The Book of Perfection, not having the beginning, has been so called according to the various passages of the book itself: p. 144 and 485, Ktaba d-mashlamuta Book of Perfection; p. 493, Ktaba d-gmiruta Book of Completion/Maturity; p. 6 and 584, Ktaba d-gmiruta.