thumb|right|[[Decius orders the walling in of the Seven sleepers From a 14th-century manuscript.]]
The Seven Sleepers (; ), also known in Christianity as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and in Islam as Aṣḥāb al-Kahf (اصحاب الکهف, aṣḥāb al-kahf, lit. Companions of the Cave), is a late antique Christian legend, and a Qur'anic Islamic story. It speaks about a group of youths who hid inside a cave around the year 250 AD to escape Roman persecutions of Christians and emerged many years later. The Qur'anic version of the story appears in Sura 18 (18:9–26). in the Catholic Church, they are venerated individually.
Origins and propagation
The story appeared in several Syriac sources before Gregory of Tours's lifetime (538–594). The earliest Syriac manuscript copy is in MS Saint-Petersburg No. 4, which dates to the 5th century.
The earliest known version of this story is found in the writings of the Syriac bishop Jacob of Serugh (–521), who relies on an earlier Greek source, now lost. which was published in the Acta Sanctorum. Another sixth-century version gives eight sleepers in a Syrian manuscript in the British Museum (Cat. Syr. Mss, p. 1090).
Whether the original account was written in Syriac or Greek was debated, but today a Greek original is generally accepted. The best-known Western version of the story appears in Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend (1259–1266). It also appears in BHO (Pueri septem), BHG (Pueri VII) and BHL Dormientes (Septem) Ephesi.
Accounts of the Christian legend are found in at least nine medieval languages and preserved in over 200 manuscripts, mainly dating to between the 9th and 13th centuries. These include 104 Latin manuscripts, 40 Greek, 33 Arabic, 17 Syriac, six Ethiopic, five Coptic, two Armenian, one Middle Irish, and one Old English. Byzantine writer Symeon the Metaphrast (died c. 1000) alluded to it.
The legend was also translated into Persian, Kyrgyz, and Tatar.
Christian story
thumb|A 19th century German votive painting of the Seven Sleepers. The writing says Bittet für uns Ihr hl. sieben Schläfer (Pray for us, Holy Seven Sleepers).
The story says that during the persecutions by the Roman emperor Decius, around AD 250, seven young men were accused of following Christianity. They were given time to recant their faith but refused to bow to Roman idols. Instead, they chose to give their worldly goods to the poor and retire to a mountain cave to pray, where they fell asleep. The Emperor, seeing that their attitude towards paganism had not improved, ordered the mouth of the cave to be sealed.
Islamic story
thumb|Islamic [[Persian miniature of the Sleepers from a 1577 Stories of the Prophets manuscript.]]
Al-Kahf () is the 18th chapter (sūrah) of the Qur'an with 110 verses (āyāt). Regarding the timing and contextual background of the revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl), it is an earlier Meccan surah, which means it was revealed before Muhammad's hijrah to Medina instead of after. It is the midst sura of Qur'an having the midst word "walyatalattaf" (وَلْيَتَلَطَّفْ), meaning "let him be kind".
The Quran tells that the polytheists (mushrikin) of Mecca, after consulting with the people of the Book, tested Muhammad by asking him three questions, and Surah Al-Kahf was sent down in answer to them. The mushriks inquired about the identity of the Sleepers of the Cave, the real story of Khidr, and about Dhu al-Qarnayn.
The precise number of sleepers is not stated. The Qur'an furthermore states that people started to make "idle guesses" as to how many people were in the cave shortly after the incident emerged. To this, the Qur'an asserts, "My Sustainer knows best how many they were." Similarly, regarding the exact period of time the people stayed in the cave, the Qur'an, after asserting the guesswork of the people that "they remained in the cave for 300 years and nine added," resolves that "God knows best how long they remained [there]." The 9 years are often interpreted as the difference between solar and lunar years. The Qur'an says that the sleepers included a dog, which Islamic tradition names as Qitmir, who guarded the entrance of the cave (verse 18). A 6th-century Latin text titled "Pilgrimage of Theodosius" featured the sleepers as seven people in number, with a dog named Viricanus.
Bartłomiej Grysa lists at least seven different sets of names for the sleepers:
Some Islamic exegetical traditions report that the People of the Cave were seven. Reports attributed to Ibn Abbas state that he was among those who knew their number and that they were seven.
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Duration
Christian accounts
The number of years the sleepers slept also varies between accounts. The highest number, given by Gregory of Tours, was 373 years. Some accounts have 372. Jacobus de Voragine calculated it at 196 (from the year 252 until 448). The excavation brought to light several hundred graves dated to the 5th and 6th centuries. Inscriptions dedicated to the Seven Sleepers were found on the walls and in the graves. This grotto is still shown to tourists.
Other possible sites of the cave of the Seven Sleepers are in Damascus, Syria and Afşin and Tarsus, Turkey. Afşin is near the antique Roman city of Arabissus, to which the East Roman Emperor Justinian paid a visit. The site was a Hittite temple, used as a Roman temple and later as a church in Roman and Byzantine times. The Emperor brought marble niches from Western Anatolia as gifts for it, which are preserved inside the Eshab-ı Kehf Kulliye mosque to this day. The Seljuks continued to use the place of worship as a church and a mosque. It was turned into a mosque over time, with the conversion of the local population to Islam.
A cave near Amman, Jordan, also known as the Cave of Seven Sleepers, which has eight smaller sealed tombs inside and a ventilation duct coming out of the cave.
List of notable sites
Asia Minor
- , Ephesus, Turkey
Middle East and North Africa
- Mar Musa, monastery in Syria
Little is heard of the Seven Sleepers during the Enlightenment, but the account revived with the coming of Romanticism. The Golden Legend may have been the source for retellings of the Seven Sleepers in Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in a poem by Goethe, Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle," and H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes. It also might influence the motif of the "King asleep in mountain."Mark Twain did a burlesque of the story of the Seven Sleepers in Chapter 13 of Volume 2 of The Innocents Abroad.
Contemporary
Edward Gibbon gives different accounts of the story in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The Serbian writer Danilo Kiš retells the story of the Seven Sleepers in a short story, "The Legend of the Sleepers," from his book The Encyclopedia of the Dead.
The Italian author Andrea Camilleri incorporates the story in his novel The Terracotta Dog in which the protagonist is led to a cave containing the titular watchdog (as described in the Qur'an and called "Kytmyr" in Sicilian folklore) and the saucer of silver coins with which one of the sleepers is to buy "pure food" from the bazaar in Ephesus (Qur'an 18.19). The Seven Sleepers are symbolically replaced by lovers Lisetta Moscato and Mario Cunich, who were killed in their nuptial bed by an assassin hired by Lisseta's incestuous father and later laid to rest in a cave in the Sicilian countryside.
In Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, Will Stanton awakens the Seven Sleepers in The Grey King, and in Silver on the Tree, they ride in the last battle against the Dark.
The Seven Sleepers series by Gilbert Morris takes a modern approach to the story in which seven teenagers must be awakened to fight evil in a post-nuclear-apocalypse world.
John Buchan refers to the Seven Sleepers in The Three Hostages, in which Richard Hannay surmises that his wife Mary, a sound sleeper, is descended from one of the seven who has married one of the Foolish Virgins.
The Seven Sleepers are mentioned in the "Les Invisibles" song on the 1988 Blue Öyster Cult album Imaginos.
Several languages have idioms related to the Seven Sleepers, including:
- Hungarian: hétalvó, literally a "seven-sleeper," or "one who sleeps for an entire week," is a colloquial reference to a person who oversleeps or who is typically drowsy.
- Irish: "Na seacht gcodlatáin" refers to hibernating animals.
- Norwegian: a late riser may be referred to as a syvsover ("seven sleeper")
- Swedish: a late riser may be referred to as a sjusovare ("seven sleeper").
- Welsh: a late riser may be referred to as a saith cysgadur ("seven sleeper") – as in the 1885 novel Rhys Lewis by Daniel Owen, where the protagonist is referred to as such in chapter 37, p. 294 (Hughes a'i Fab, Caerdydd, 1948).
Feast day
The most recent edition of the Roman Martyrology commemorates the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus under the date of 27 July. The Byzantine calendar commemorates them with feasts on 4 August and 22 October. Syriac Orthodox calendars gives various dates: 21 April, 2 August, 13 August, 23 October and 24 October.
Bibliography
External links
- Qur'an–Authorized English Version The Cave- Sura 18 – Qur'an – Authorized English Version
- "SS. Maximian, Malchus, Martinian, Dionysius, John, Serapion, and Constantine, Martyrs", Butler's Lives of the Saints
- Text containing the Seven Sleepers' commemoration as part of the Office of Prime.
- Sura al-Kahf at Wikisource
- Photos of the excavated site of the Seven Sleepers cult.
- Gregory of Tours, The Patient Impassioned Suffering of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus translated by Michael Valerie
- The Lives of the Seven Sleepers from The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, William Caxton Middle English translation.
- The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus by Chardri, translated into English by Tony Devaney Morinelli: Medieval Sourcebook. fordham.edu
- The Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers, by Hugh Magennis, ROEP: Resources for Old English Prose, University of Oxford, 2025