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The Book of the Cave of Treasures

notes to the hypertext transcription


The Book of the Cave of Treasures is a sixth century Christian sacred history written by a Jacobite. The Jacobites are an eastern Monophysite sect, seperate from both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. This book and the Book of the Bee are both interesting because they present the 'history' of the world from the creation to the death of Christ, thus reproducing a good bit of the story contained in the Bible, but they also contain many stories not included in the canonical account, some of the material being Jewish, some of it Greek, and some of it Mesopotamian. According to Budge--

The principal object of the writer of the "Cave of Treasures" was to trace the descent of Christ back to Adam, and to show that the Christian Dispensation was foreshadowed in the history of the Patriarchs and their successors the kings of Israel and Judah by means of types and symbols. (Introduction, pp. 33-34)

Transcription standards and notes: Underlines represent breve (short) markings over vowels, and dots under consonants, ` and ´ represent right and left pointing apostrophes in transcriptions of Semitic words. Some of the references to the pagination of the Syriac MS. (i.e., in the format [Fol. 8a, col. 1]) were off and have been corrected; missing references, however, have not been supplied. Some of the transcriptions of names from the Syriac have been standardized.


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