The Laughable Stories Collected by Mar Gregory John

preface*
The present work contains the complete Syriac text
of the seven hundred and twenty-seven " Laughabh)
Stories "—which were collected by John Abu'l-Faraj,
more commonly known as Gregory Bar-Hebrgeus, the
head of the Jacobite Church, or Maphrian of the East,
from A.D. 1264 lo 1286. Sixty-eight of these stories
have been published before, eight by AdJer, Bernstein
and others, and sixty by Morales ;
but the remainder
now appear in print for the first time. The text is
edited from two MSS., one of which (India Office M8.
No. 9) was written in the year 1712, and the other (a
modern copy in my own possession) in 1893, and so
far as can be judged from the extracts given by Mor-
ales from the Vatican MS. No. CLXXIII, the greater
part of which was written about the year 1333, we
have the text much as it existed about fifty years
after the compiler's death. The translation has been
made tolerably literal, but the language of Bar-
Hebraeus is so concise that I have been obliged to give
paraphrases rather than translations of certain of his
stories and pithy sayings. No attempt has been made
to trace the source of all the stories and sayings, for
M.