Book of the Cave of Treasures

Impact

As the history of the Book of the Cave of Treasures is largely unknown, scholars can only speculate as to its impact at the time it was written. We can assume that, at least for a time, it was a well-known work, as—according to Budge—it was translated into Arabic in the seventh or eighth century. The story of how the Book of the Cave of Treasures came to Western audiences begins with Joseph Simonius Assemani. Assemani was a scholar of eastern Christianity and languages such as ancient Syriac. In the first half of the eighteenth century he undertook a series of expeditions into Syria and Egypt, searching for ancient texts. One of the more than one hundred texts he brought back was the Book of the Cave of Treasures. While Assemani made some notes on the book for his Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana (1719), a catalog of ancient manuscripts, the book itself was not published. Aside from these notes, scholars largely ignored the book until the nineteenth-century German scholar August Dillman noted the similarities between it and the Book of Adam and Eve, an Ethiopian text he was translating, and published discussion of these similarities in 1853. Dillman’s work on Ethiopic and other ancient texts was one of the factors contributing to increasing scholarly interest in texts from Africa and the Near East in the nineteenth century. In 1883, Carl Bezold published a German translation of the Book of the Cave of Treasures.

The book made its way into English through the work of the British Museum scholar E. A. Wallis Budge, who in 1927 translated the work in the course of his study of the Book of the Bee, a thirteenth-century Nestorian work by Bishop Solomon of Basra (in modern-day Iraq). Budge asserted that the Book of the Bee borrowed heavily from the Book of the Cave of Treasures. This modern scholarship indicates that the latter book may have served as the basis for many apocryphal works through the years, meaning that the myths and legends it contains may be some of the earliest forms of these stories.