The Chronography of Bar Hebraeus gives the Syriac text with English translation of the political history of the world from the creation to the year AD 1286. Compiled by the thirteenth-century polymath Gregory Bar Hebaraeus, this chronography contains lists of Hebrew patriarchs and kings of the Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, followed by Muslim Khalifs and Khans, up to the lifetime of the author. It is in reality a chronological and historical encyclopedia, into which an enormous amount of information of various kinds has been crammed. He deals with histories, religions, languages, the manners and customs of peoples; he adds biographies of great warriors and physicians; he describes battles and sieges, and the capture of cities; he talks of the coming of comets and extraordinary appearances in the heavens, earthquakes, famines, falls of snow, and the freezing over of the Tigris and Euphrates; he also reports court scandals, and repeats gossip of all kinds, and tells "laughable stories". Some of his remarks on portents, derived from the appearances of the sun and other heavenly bodies, will remind the reader of passages in Old Morre's Almanack.

Gregory Bar Hebraeus (1226-1286), known in Syriac as Bar `Ebroyo, was a polymath whose writings cover a great diversity of subjects: theology, history, liturgy, medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, grammar, poetry, and even a book of jokes. At the age of twenty, he was ordained Syriac Orthodox bishop and later became Maphrian of the East in 1264.

E. A. Wallis Budge (1857-1934) was Curator of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924. He is known for publishing texts, with English translations, from Coptic, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Egyptian manuscripts. Budge was knighted in 1920. He died November 23, 1934 in London.