The genesis of this book was in the late 1980s when Samuel Lieu first proposed the concept for the volume and approached Iain Gardner to collaborate, especially with translations of the extensive Coptic corpus. Gardner began to prepare portions of the Kephalaia codex, but in fact that developed into an entirely separate volume which is only partly represented here. Over a number of years the authors collected texts and made translations whilst they were occupied with other projects (often these contributed entirely new or previously unavailable pieces). Then, in 2000, we finally had the opportunity to put together the translations and introductions that we had gathered for this volume. We are very grateful to our contributors, some of whom had to complete their translations to meet stringent deadlines. We are grateful too to the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust and Warwick and Macquarie Universities for grants over a number of years for research on Manichaean texts discovered in Egypt and in Central Asia. To Dr Malcolm Choat we owe a warm word of thanks for helping in the task of indexing and final checking of the typescript. We would also like to thank Dr Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press for his personal interest in the project and Professor Aloïs van Tongerloo and his research assistants at Catholic University of Leuven, Mr Dieter Taillieu and Kristof D'hulster for checking the translations from the Fihrist of Ibn an-Nadīm.