There is no surviving Greek version of books 5–8 of the Conics. The text of the eighth book is lost, but an Arabic translation from the Greek of books 1–7 had been made in the ninth century. This text was unknown in the West until the seventeenth century, when manuscripts of it began to appear. This manuscript belonged to Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop of Armagh, who made it available to Edmond Halley for his edition of Apollonius. Halley had earlier learned sufficient Arabic to produce an edition of another work by Apollonius, and a page of his Latin text has at some point been inserted into the manuscript.