Anecdota Oxoniensia. Semitic series.

IANTR OD UC TION.

xvii

preserved at Oxford, and a copy of the second part, relating events from
the Incarnation onwards, exists at Florence. The latter work, however,
has been carried on by a continuator down to the year A. D. 1312, and
this has occasioned the erroneous belief that Mahbub himself lived in
the fourteenth century. Mahbfb is a writer several times quoted by
Al-Makin in the first part of his history. According to the Florentine
MS., Mahbub or Agapius was a Jacobite or monophysite bishop of
Manbaj.
Use was also made in the work now edited of a History of the /
Councils, of the homilies of the patriarch Theophilus, and of a Guide to
the Festivals. It seems that there were several of such Guides in the
ecclesiastical literature of Egypt, and the Synaxaria were partly based
upon them. Our author was, moreover, acquainted with some at least of
the biblical books, and he quotes from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and
the Gospels.
He would seem to have read the romance of Aura, which still exists
in Arabic, and was probably translated from the Coptic.
The curious work called the Book of Clement or Apocalypse of Peter
is also quoted by our author at the end of his history. Copies of this
work exist in Europe, as, for instance, in Paris and at Oxford.
Our author does not tell us whence he derived his accounts of Nubia,
of Abyssinia, and of the Indian Christians. Of Nubia he may have
read in the work of 'Abd Allah ibn Ahmad ibn Sula'im, quoted by
Al-Makrizi. Of Abyssinia he may have learnt something from the
envoys who frequently arrived in Egypt from that country, as bearers
of despatches addressed to the Coptic patriarch. Of India he may
have received information from the mouths of Christian travellers; or
perhaps those Indian priests who at the end of the seventh century
came to Egypt, to beg the Coptic patriarch to send out a bishop to
their fellow-countrymen, may have left behind them some account of
the state of Christianity in India.
In those parts of his work which treat of the general history of
Egypt, our author chiefly follows Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and Al-Kindi.
Copies of the Fut1ih Misr or History of the Conquest of Egypt by the
lMuslims, composed by the former of these two writers, exist in Paris.
C [1. 7.]