A fragment of the ‘Death of Adam’ (appendix to the ‘Testament of Adam’) contained in Ibn al-Kalbī’s Kitāb al-aṣnām (9th century AD)

Abstract

Ibn al-Kalbī’s Kitāb al-aṣnām includes a tradition that corresponds to a fragment of the apocryphal work known as the ‘Testament of Adam’, specifically to the motif of the ‘death of Adam’, which is in fact an appendix to it. In this paper we analyze the structure of the Islamic tradition and its chain of transmitters, as well as the possible origin of the fragment, which we believe must have reached Islam as part of the corpus of the isrāʼīliyyāt.