Cave of Treasures

Historical source scan page 9

regarded as derived from the "Book of Adam and Eve" described above. Like the "Book of Jubilees" and the "Book of Enoch," the "Book of Adam and Eve" exists in a complete form only in Ethiopic, where it is called "Gadla “Adam Wa Héwan," i.e. "The Fight of Adam and Eve [against Satan]." The best known text is given in a manuscript in the British Museum (Oriental No. 751. See Wright, Catalogue No. cccxx, page 213), which was written in the reign of Bakaffa, king of Abyssinia, 1721-1730. lt was one of the chief authorities used by Trumpp in the preparation of his edition of the Ethiopic text which appeared at Munich in 1880. The forms of several of the Biblical names indicate that the Ethiopic translation was made from Arabic. Translations of the complete book have been made by Dillmann, Das Christliche Adambuch, Gottingen, 1853, and Malan, The Book of Adam and Eve, London, 1882. The discovery of the existence of the Book called the "Cave of Treasures" we owe to Assemani, the famous author of the Catalogues of Oriental Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, which he printed in Bibliotheca Orientalis in four thick volumes folio. In Vol. ii. page 498 he describes a Syriac manuscript containing a series of apocryphal works, and among them is one the title of which he translates by "Spelunca Thesaurorum." He read the MS. carefully and saw that it contained the history of a period of 5,500 years, i.e. from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ, and that it was a historical chronicle based upon the Scriptures. He says that fables are found in it everywhere, and especially in that part of it which treats of the antediluvian Patriarchs, and the genealogy of Christ and His Mother. He mentions that the Patriarch Eutychius also describes a cave of treasures in which gold, frankincense, and myrrh were laid up, and refers to the "portentosa feminarum nomina," who were the ancestresses of Christ. No attempt was made to publish the Syriac text; in fact, little attention was paid to it until Dillmann began to study the " Book of Adam and Eve" in connection with it, and then he showed in Ewald's Jahrbiichern (Bd. V. 1853) that the contents of whole sections of the "Book of the Cave of Treasures" in Syriac and the "Book of Adam and Eve" in Ethiopic were identical. And soon after this Dillmann and others noticed that an Arabic MS. in the Vatican (No. XXXIX; see Assemani, Bibl. Orient. i. page 281) contained a version of the "Cave of Treasures," which had clearly been made from the Syriac. In 1883 Bezold published a translation of the Syriac text of the "Cave of Treasures" made from three manuscripts (Die Schatzhohle, Leipzig, 1883), and five years later published the Syriac text of it, accompanied by the text of the Arabic version. In 1885 I was engaged in preparing an edition, of the Syriac text of the "Debhiritha," i.e. the "Bee," a "Book of Gleanings" composed by the Nestorian Bishop Solomon of Basra (ie. al-Basrah) about A.D. 1222. Whilst making the English translation of this work I found that the "Bee" contained many of the legends and traditions which appeared in the "Cave of Treasures," and to show how greatly the Nestorian Bishop Solomon had borrowed from the work of the Jacobite author of the "Cave of Treasures" in the earlier part of his work, I printed several lengthy extracts from the Syriac from the fine 9 of 130