And in the days of Nimrod, the mighty man (or giant), a fire appeared which ascended from the earth, and Nimrod went down, and looked at it, and worshipped it, and he established priests to minister there, and to cast incense from it. From that day the Persians began to worship fire... -from "The Fourth Thousand Years" One of the most prolific and respected Egyptologists of the Victorian era, Budge here offers his translation of the 4th-century A.D. Syrian text commonly known as "the Cave of Treasures," a history of the world from the Creation to the crucifixion of Christ and considered by some to be an apocryphal book of the Bible. Budge's extensive notes, linking the work to other ancient writings, as well as the numerous illustrations, make this unusual work, first published in 1927, an excellent resource for students of ancient civilizations and comparative mythology. SIR E. A. WALLIS BUDGE (1857-1934) was curator of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924. Among his many works of translation and studies of ancient Egyptian religion and ritual is his best-known project, The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East.
Interesting collection of apocrypha of questionable authenticity, but still fascinating as an insight into what early Christians included in their general beliefs. Kind of borders on headcanon at times with some of the elaborate connections being. And at one point the writer declares that since nobody else knows accurately all of the generations from Adam to Christ, he will write them down for us (it's never explained why he knows and nobody else does). Love it.
This was an amazing book to read - a fascinating apocryphal work which supplemented other knowledge e.g. it went into Mary's genealogy and gave further anecdotal accounts of the patriarchs etc. Was particularly interested in tales of the Grigori or "The Watchers".