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Show A Prayer Ten Centuries Old. Among the documents and manuscripts manu-scripts taken by the Polliot mission of Franco from a cave In Chinese Turkestan, Turkes-tan, where they had lain during ten centuries, Is a curious manuscript recorded re-corded by the French Academy of Sciences Sci-ences The manuscript Is In one of the oldest known Hebrew texts. It Is a prayer formed of passages taken from the Psalms and from tbo prophotB, written in beautiful nquuro Hebrew, with a very rudimentary system of vocalization. vo-calization. Evidently the manuscript was carried car-ried on the person of the man who owned it. Hebrew scholars believe thai the document dates from the eighth or ninth century of the Christian era, and that it belonged to a pious Jewish merchant mer-chant of Arabia. No such paper was known In Arabia In either the eighth or ninth century, therefore It is supposed sup-posed that the manuscript was transcribed tran-scribed for its owner when ho was in China, whero such paper was to b found. Harper's Weekly. |