The laughable stories collected by Mâr Gregory John Bar Hebræ

'treface.
The present work contains the complete Syriac text
of the seven hundred and twenty-seven "Laughable
Stories" which were collected by John Abu'l-Faraj,
more
commonly known as Gregory bar-Hebraeus, the head
of the Jacobite Church, or Maphrian of the East, from
A.D. 1264 to 1286. Sixty-eight of these stories have
been published before, eight by Adler, 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 MS. 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 Morales
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-Bebraeus 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 rnade to trace
the source of all the stories and sayings, for parallels