The Laughable Stories of Bar-Hebraeus by Bar-Hebraeus, tr. E.A.W. Budge [1897]

Bar-Hebraeus was a 13th century bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church. Born in 1226 in what is now Turkey, Bar-Hebraeus was renowned as a scholar and theologian. He died in 1286 in Persia. Writing mostly in Syriac and Arabic, Bar Hebraeus wrote on philosophy, poetry, language, history and theology, including a comprehensive history of the world, the Chronicon Ecclesiasticum.

The Laughable Stories are a sequence of anecdotes categorized by the story-teller: starting with Persian, Indian, Hebrew and Christian sages, and including stories of Misers, Clowns, Thieves, and Animals and so on. Many of these stories have been included in compilations much further away in time and space. While a streak of sexism runs through the collection, in a couple of instances, the shoe is on the other foot. While many of these tales were probably pretty funny in the original 13th century cultural context, some of them will be totally mysterious to moderns.

Production notes: The translation, by E.A.W. Budge, who also did many of the Ancient Egyptian texts at this site, used a 19th century form of quotation in which quotes are inserted at the start of each line in multi-line quoted blocks; this has been modernized. This made the transcription difficult, since in some cases I had to make editorial decisions as to the location of the modern quotes. --J.B. Hare, October 9, 2009.