INTRODUCTION.

Dr Aldis Wright, of Trinity College, Cambridge, had already pointed out the resemblance between the upper writing of this palimpsest and that of Plate XX. The latter is described by Dr Ignatius Guidi as “ Kufi, inclining to Nashi.” I should say “inclining very strongly.” It is perhaps a good specimen of the transition period. Mr Ellis, of the British Museum, tells me that the writing of the facsimile on Plate XX. = Vatican Cod. Arab. 71, dated A.D. 885, is a distinctly Christian one and that he would be inclined to assign mine to precisely the same period. It will be observed that his view differs very slightly from Mr Cowley’s.

There is also some resemblance between this script and that of No. 457 in Mrs Gibson’s Catalogue of Arabic MSS. in the Sinai Convent. See Studia Sinaitica, No. III. p. 89.

The under script is for the most part Syriac. The portion which first attracted my attention is the apocryphal Protevangelium Jacobi followed by the Transitus Mariae, both being from the same manuscript, in a hand which leads me to assign it possibly to the latter half of the 5th century ; or at the latest to the beginning of the 6th. Plates VI. and VII. of this volume will enable the reader to form an independent opinion. A tedious illness prevented my beginning to copy this till 1897 ; and I was of course aware that the story had already been perfectly well edited by the late Dr William Wright, both in the small volume entitled: Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, and in the Journal of Sacred Literature for January and April 1865. But these books have been long out of print, and the MSS. which have been used by that greatest of Arabic scholars are all half a century at least later than my own, with the exception of ff. 1—5 of Add. 14,484, and f. 39 of Add. 14,669, assigned to the latter half of the 5th century ; whilst three are some five centuries later. My manuscript offers the equivalent of 39 1/2 really ancient leaves of what is practically the same text.

I had spent many months in copying this ; and some of it had already passed through the press, when I became aware that Messrs Luzac & Co. were publishing an interesting collection of Syriac texts on the same theme, edited by Dr Budge. At first it seemed as if his work would make mine superfluous, but when I realized that they were founded on a copy made by a modern Syrian, of 13th century MSS., I thought that I would not suppress my own ; and my decision has already been partly justified by the appearance of a variant on fol. 132 a (page A small Syriac letter yodh (ܝ) or a similar hook-like symbol col. b,