Sources of the Seven Sages Stories in Crimean Karaim

The aim of this article is to introduce a little known version of the story of the Seven Sages in the Karaim Language, spoken in the Crimea, but written using the Hebrew alphabet. Throughout the article, reasoned arguments with evidence or various expert but evidentially unsupported opinions, usually because of missing earlier sources, are presented to support this hypothesis. Moreover, a necessarily brief overview of the Seven Sages type stories is discussed to set the background to our research. We suggest that the manuscript at the centre of our research appears to be most similar to the Historia Septem Sapientum version of The Seven Sages of Rome , one of the versions of the Seven Sages stories placed in the Western group.