(B. E. Perry) The Origin of The Book of Sindbad

B. E.
Perry, Urbana, Illinois

The Origin of the Book of Sindbad
Preface
The literary-historical problem with which this essay deals is one which
has been neglected, unfortunately, by the Orientalists in whose field it most
properly belongs, those, namely, who concern themselves primarily with the
languages, literatures, and history of western Asia in medieval times. The
answer commonly accepted by these Orientalists, äs well äs by folklorists and
others, to the question of where and when the world-famous Book of Sindbad
originated, was made by Indologists more than a hundred years ago from
the point of view of their own specialty, and on the basis of a much more
limited knowledge of ancient Near-Eastern and Greek literature, and its
potentialities, than is available to scholars of the present day. Many new
documents significant for the history of fiction, both Greek and Oriental, have
been published since that time, and the importance of the Hellenistic and
ancient Near-Eastern background for the understanding of Persian and Arabic
story-books in the early Middle Ages has not been sufficiently realized. My
approach to the subject is that of one whose specialty has been the history
of fiction in the Hellenistic age. Not being an Orientalist, although I am able
to control short passages of text, I have had to rely a good deal upon the
published translations and, of course, upon the authoritative writings of
specialists in the various fields. For the Persian text of as-Samarqandi, and
for the Turkish introduction of its editor, I depend on translations made for
me of selected portions, including the long and detailed table of contents,
by Mr. Khossrow Mohandessi and by Mrs. Ahmet özinonu respectively.
The term 'Near East* is used throughout this essay in a somewhat loose
geographical sense, meaning Asia anywhere west of the Indus River, within
the ancient empire of Alexander.
To the Research Board of the University of Illinois I am under special
obligations for having supplied me with valuable equipment in the way of
photographic reproductions and the Services of research assistants.
Urbana, Illinois
June, 1958
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Contents
Chapter Introduction page
I The testimony of Arabic Authors that the Book of Sindbad
came from India 2
II The Testimony of Muhammad b. Ishaq an-Nadim in the
Fihrist conceming the History of Story-Books in the Near
East. Its Justification 6
III The Testimony of Persian and Arabic Authors that the Book
of Sindbad originated in Persia or the Near East 27
IV Arguments advanced by Modern Scholars in Support of the
Theory of Indian Origin 37
V How the Oriental Versions are Related One to Another. The
Contents of the Original Book 58
VI Positive Evidence that the Book of Sindbad originated in Persia
or the Near East 84
Introduction
It has long been assumed, and often stated äs fact in the handbooks of
literature and folklore, that the famous book about Sindbad and the Seven
Wise Masters, conceming the wiles of women, is of Indian origin and that
it was translated into Persian (Pahlavi) from a lost Sanskrit original, of which
no trace has been found. This theory of Indian origin is unsupported by
evidence of any kind which could make it historically plausible or convincing
in the light of our present-day knowledge of Oriental literature; but it has
been so widely propagäted in the past, and is so firmly established äs an
article of faith, that I find it necessary at the beginning of this essay to
examine in detail, and äs completely äs possible, the data and arguments
which have been put forth in support of it, and the fundamental misapprehen-
sions conceming the literary history of story-lore in the Near East upon which
it depends. The result of this preliminary survey will be mainly negative; but
it will bring to the fore, in the course of a somewhat leisurely argument, some
new or hitherto unrecognized data pointing to a contrary conclusion, namely
that the Book of Sindbad was Persian in origin. That is my principal thesis,
and most of the positive evidence upon which it rests will be described near
the end of this study.
I
The Testimony of Arabic Authors
that the Book of Sindbad came f r o m India
The earliest known spokesmen for the view that the Sindbad book came
from India are the universal historians Ya'qubi, in the ninth Century, and
Mas'üdi in the tenth; but what these writers have to say on the subject
obviously rests on nothing more than a vague rumor, and is äs unreliable
äs their Statements about the kings of India and about the author of the

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book itself. Ya'qubi teils us that one of these Indian kings was Kush (variant
Krüsh), "who lived in the time of Sindbad the Wise, and this Küsh wrote the
Book of the Graf t of Women."1 According to Mas'üdi some authors of his time
declared that Brahman was Adam, a prophet sent by God to the Indians,
but others, representing the more widespread opinion, considered him only
a king. Third in succession after Brahman was King Porus, who died in single
combat with Alexander, and he was succeeded (äs is stated also in Ali ibnu
Shah's preface to Ibnu -Muqaffa's Kaliiah wa Dimnah) by King Dabshelim,
who ruled 110 years, although this last point, we are told, was disputed.
"Dabshelim," says Mas'üdi, "was the author of the Book of Kalilah and
Dimnah, whidi was translated into Arabic by Ibnu -MuqaffaV2 After him
ruled Balhit, in whose time diess was invented, "and the king preferred it to
backgammon." Balhit's reign lasted 80 years, according to some manuscripts,
300 according to others. He was succeeded by Kürush, who abandoned the
doctrines of the past and introduced into India some new religious ideas,
more in accord with the needs of his age. "In his reign lived Sindbad, author
of the Book of the Seven Wazirs, of the Teacher, the Young Man and the
King's Wife. It is entitled Kitäb Sindbad ... And this king (Kürush) died
after a reign of 120 years." So says the Arab Cursor mundi.
Historically considered, it is stränge metal that we find in these "Meadows
of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones;"3 but it is not difficult to see where
most of it comes from, and how it grew in the populär Imagination. The Arabs
had heard of Porus äs an Indian king from the romantic biography of Alex-
ander, based on the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes, which was well known in the
Near East; and King Dabshelim, whose name is probably derived from that
of a wise man named Devasarman (alias Visnusarman) in the Pancatantra,
was taken from the pages of Ibnu -Muqaffa's Kalilah wa Dimnah, where
he appears äs a king of India being instructed by the sage Bidpai through
the medium of fables.4 That he was the author of Kalilah and Dimnah is not
stated in any known Oriental version of that book (insofar äs I can recall),
1
Ya'qubi ed. Houtsma, Vol. I, 105, 3—4. I owe this reference to the kindness
of Professor Gustave von Grunebaum of Chicago.
2
Mafoudi, Les Prairies cf Or, texte et traduction par C. Barbiere de Meynard
et Pavet de Courteille, Paris 1861, Vol. I, 159. Ibnu 'l-Muqaffae, on the contrary
(Cheikho's text p. 40 = Knatchbull's translation p. 47), attributes the authorship
only to "the wise men of India;" while Ali (ib. 17. 9—10 = Kn. p. 29) ascribes it
to Bidpai and teils us how he wrote it. This shows how inaccurate Masudi's source
was in drawing historical data from the Arabic Kalilah wa Dimnah. Masudi himself
does not vouch for the truth of these Statements concerning the ancient kings of
India on his own authority. He is merely reporting what others have said on the
subject without indicating his own belief one way or the other. Like Herodotus,
he often reports contrary traditions objectively in a noncommittal or skeptical spirit.
The passage above described extends from p. 157 to 162 in the French editor's
text and translation.
3
Marüj adh-dhab wa ma'adin al jawähir.
4
Devasarman ('God-delight' or 'God-help'—Edgerton) must have been the name
of the Indian king who was instructed by Bidpai, or his equivalent, in that version
of the Paücatantra which was translated into Pahlavi by Burzöe in the sixth Century;
since the two independent derivatives of the lost Pahlavi text, the Syriac of Büd
in the late sixth Century and the Arabic of Ibnu'l-Muqaffa* in the eight Century,
give the name of this king äs Dbsrm and Dbslm respectively, and it appears äs

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but is an inference carelessly made from the mention of him therein, either
by Mas' di himself or by someone before him. The same kind of false inference
is made also concerning the authorship of the Book of Sindbad by
both Ya'qubi and Mas' di, but with contrary results; the former ascribes
it to King Kush or Kurush and the latter to Sindbad, although neither is more
than a character mentioned in the book. It is quite obvious that neither of
the two Arab historians knows anything about Kush or Kurush s a king of
India by tradition, other than what might be inferred from the mention of
him in the Book of Sindbad.
N ldeke observes (ZDMG 33, 525) that the Syriac translator of the Arabic
Sindbad probably thought of his .JLJ** (= J^f = Old Pers. Kurush)
s Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, which would be known to him from the
Old Testament, and which was so understood by the Greek translator, who
renders it Êàñïò ü ôùí Ðåñóþí âáóéëåýò. An Arab, says N ldeke, would not
be likely to think of Cyrus, about whom only a few Arab scholars had learned
from Christian or Jewish sources. But it so happens that Mas' di was one of
those few; and what he says about Cyrus (Jcf) s king of Persia, in
the following passage, is far more definite and historical than anything that
he had to say about Cyrus (again <A>/*)5 as a king of India living in
the time of Sindbad. I quote from the French editor's translation of chap. xxi
in the Prairies d'Or (vol. II p. 127 f.), where Mas' di is giving a summary
account of Persian history, compounded of Biblical and mythical Persian
traditions: "Bahman mourut apres un regne de cent douze ans. On pretend
que ce fut sous ce roi que les Israelites, apres une captivite de soixante et
dix ans a Babylone, retournerent Jerusalem, et que Korech le Perse gou-
vernait alors l'Irak au nom de Bahman qui rosidait Balkh. On ajoute aussi
que Korech otait ne d'une femme juive et que Daniel le Jeune etait son oncle;
on evalue vingt-trois ans la duree de son regne. Mais d'autres historiens
ajoutent que Korech fut un roi particulier et independant de Bahman, qui
d'ailleurs avait cesso de regner a cette epoque, et ils le classent parmi
les rois perses de la premiere opoque. Cette opinion est loin d'etre
partagoe par tous les historiens anciens." The king's name in the Pahlavi
text of Sindbad, from which the Arabic version was derived, may or may not
Dewsarm in the Pahlavi book Shatrang Namak. In the earliest Sanskrit form of
the Pancatantra as reconstructed by Eagerton, which, as regards the frame-story,
is probably a later or at any rate a different form of the book than that from which
the Pahlavi translation was made (see below, p. 53), the king's name is Amarasakti,
and the teacher (of his sons, not of himself as in Kalilah and Dimnah) is named
VisnuSarman. In the Sanskrit text, the name Deva£arman appears as that of a monk
in Bk. I and again of a wise Brahman in a story told by VisnuSarman at the be-
ginning
5
of Bk. V.
N ldeke, p. 526, lists the variant spellings of this name, at is appears in
the manuscripts at this place (I 161), as follows: Kursh, Kurush, Kurus, Krus,
"und eine verst mmelte Lesart" Kush. In the second passage (II 127 f.) the
French editor prints J>>f without mentioning any variants, and transliterates
it as eKorechs. AI Bir ni, in his Chronology of Ancient Nations, completed in the
year 1000 A. D. (Sachau's translation p. 115), gives a western chronology of the early
Persian kings in which the Greek historical tradition, as regards Cyrus, Cambyses,
Darius and Xerxes, is correctly retained in that order, although reconciled in some
part with the legendary traditions of the Persians, as these appear in the Shahnama.

have been Cyrus with the historical connotation whidi that name had for
the Syriac translator and for Mas'udi in the passage above quoted; but it
may well have been the equivalent of Kai-Khusrau (the partial projection
of Cyrus in the Shahnama, or simply Khusrau, either of whidi might have
served äs the name of an ideal king of Persia in a story-book, even in the
time of Khusrau I Anushirwan.6
The populär rumor which lies back of the Statement made by Mas'udi and
by Ya'qubi, that the Book of Sindbad was of Indian origin, arose, in all pro-
bability, from the close association of that book with Kalilah and Dimnah,
the translation of which from an Indian language into Persian by Burzöe,
and thence into Arabic by Ibnu Muqaffa', was a famous event and had
been widely proclaimed in the prefaces of the Arabic editions. Since the two
books were often mentioned together äs being of the same kind, and äs having
both come from abroad, it was very natural, if not inevitable, that what was
commonly predicated about the origin of the one should be extended un-
critically to the other. This liability to error on the part of Arab historians
concerning the origin of Sindbad does not, of course, prove that Mas'udi was
wrong, but it does show that no trust can be placed in his Statement. It is
just äs likely to be wrong äs to be right; and it conflicts with the testimony
of other writers of his own time and later, according to which the Book of
Sindbad originated in Persia. This contrary testimony, which will be cited
below, comes from authors who were in a better position to know whereof
they spoke than was either Mas'udi or Ya'qubi, and for that reason their
testimony, in my opinion, must carry more weight. However that may be,
the answer to the question before us must depend primarily, not upon any
man's explicit testimony, but upon such indications äs may be found within
the book itself, considered in relation to literary history and fashions in the
Near East and in India.
The following Statement is made about the Book of Sindbad by Muhammad
b. Ishaq an-Nadim (al-Warräq) in his monumental survey of literature,
completed in the year 987 A. D. and entitled Kitäb al-Fihrist (ed. G. Flügel
I p. 305, line 2): "The Book of Sindbadh the Wise is in two forms, the greater
and the lesser.7 And there is a dispute about this book also, äs there is a
Nöldeke in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie II 132 f.: "Übrigens

berührt sich audi Herodot's Darstellung mit der iranischen Heldensage, wie wir
sie aus späterer Zeit kennen: Der fremde König (Astyages-Afrasiab) gebietet, den
persischen Prinzen (Cyrus-Kai Chosrau), Sohn seiner Tochter (Mandane-Firangis)
umzubringen; dieser wird aber gerettet und wächst unter Hüten auf; später stürzt
er seinen Grossvater." Concerning the name Khusrau (or Khosrau) äs having long
been familiär among the Persians, äs that of a Persian king, ever since the second
Century A. D., see Nöldeke's note 5 on p. 137, op. dt. In the Arabic version of the
Seven Wazirs recently published by Ahmed Ate§ (see below, p. 61 f.), which is the
oldest form of the Sindbad story known to be extant in Arabic, the king in question
is said to have been "a king of kings of the Persians" and his favorite wife was "of
the daughters of the royal family of Khusrau: min bänat al mulük al akäsirah
(p. 349, line 4).
7
It is irnpossible to say with any certainty what was meant by these terms, or
whether either of the two editions to which they refer can be identified with any
extant version of the book. A variant reading in two manuscripts of the Fihrist (see
Flügel II p. 149, n. 11), to which Nöldeke first called attention, states that the

dispute concerning (the origin of) Kaliiah and Dimnah. The prevailing
opinion, and the one nearest to the truth, is that it is an Indian product."
Here the author is referring to what he had said on the preceding page: "As
for the Book of Kaliiah and Dimnah, there are different opinions concerning it.
Some say that the Hindus composed it, and that this is evident from the
introduction to the book. Others say that the Arsacid kings wrote it, and
that the Hindus are wrong in calling it their own. Still others maintain that
it was composed by the Persians, and that the Hindus wrongly attribute it to
themselves. Some also say that the author of certain parts in it was the wise
Buzurjmihr. God knows."8 Since both Kalilah and Dimnah and Sindbad are
listed by the author (p. 305.20) under the heading of "Indian books of stories
and fables," it is clear that both, in his beh'ef, were of Indian origin. It is
noteworthy, however, that there was no uniformity of opinion on these
questions among learned men in the tenth Century. There must have been
able defenders of the belief that the Book of Sindbad was Persian in origin;
and certainly that thesis was much easier to maintain with reference to the
nature of the book itself and what was in it, than it was to deny the Hindu
origin of Kalilah and Dimnah, which was declared in the preface by the
Persian translator himself.
II
The T e s t i m o n y of M u h a m m a d b. Ishaq a n - N a d i m in
t h e F ihr i st, c o n c e r n i n g t h e H i s t o r y o f S t o r y - B o o k s
in the N e a r East. Its J u s t i f i c a t i o n
What the author of the Fihrist thought about the history of the type of
story-book which is represented by our Sindbad is set forth clearly in the
famous passage where he comments on the Persian origin of the Thousand
and One Nights. Here I quote the translation by Sir Richard Burton:* "The
first section, on the history of the confabulatores nocturni (tellers of night-
tales) and the relaters of fanciful adventures, together with the names of books
treating upon such subjects. Mohammed ibn Is'hak saith:—The first who
indited themes of Imagination and made books of them, consigning these
'greater Sindbad' was translated, or composed in a new form (näyälä), by one Asbagh
h. Abd al Aziz b. Sälim al Sajistäni, and that it bore the name "Aslam and Sindbad."
Since the name Aslam does not appear in any of our texts, Nöldeke (ZDMG 33, 521 f.)
inferred that only the 'lesser Sindbad' has survived; and that Comparetti was wrong
in identifying the extant form of the book, in which each of the seven wise men teils
two stories, äs the greater Sindbad. The latter, in Comparetti's belief, was an
expanded Version of the lesser Sindbad in which, äs in the eighth night of Nachshabi's
Tutinameh (cf. below p. 39 f.), the wise men told each only one story. But the ap-
pearance of the name Aslam in the unknown Version elaborated by Asbagh is no
guarantee that the same name appeared in other texts of the 'greater Sindbad'; and,
if not, Comparetti's explanation may be right. MasTidi (below n. 60) cites the Book
of Shimas under the title 'Ferzeh and Simas', but the name Ferzeh does not appear
in the texts of this book which have come down to us. It is quite possible—and this
may be what Nöldeke meant—that only the lost version made by Asbagh was known
äs the 'greater Sindbad', because, perhaps, it was greatly extended and elaborated äs
compared with the Book of Sindbad in the earlier form in which we know it.
8
y
On Buzurjmihr, see below, n. 14.
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Aden Edition), London 1886,
Vol. X 71—73.

vvorks to the libraries, and who ordered some of them äs though related by
the tongues of brüte beasts, were the palaeo-Persians (the kings of the first
two dynasties). The Ashkanian Kings of the Third Dynasty appended others
to them and they were augmented and amplified in the days of the Sassanides.
The Arabs also translated them into Arabic, and the loquent and eloquent
polished and embellished them and wrote others resembling them. The first
work of such kind was entitled 'The Book of Hazar Afsan', signifying Alf
Khurafah (1000 amusing tales), the argument whereof was äs follows: A King
of their Kings was wont, when he had wedded a woman and had lain one
night with her, to slay her on the next morning. Presently he espoused a
damsel of the daughters of the Kings, Shahrazad hight... and, whenas she lay
with him, she feil to telling him tales of fancy; moreover she used to connect
the story at the end of the night with that which might induce the
King to preserve her alive and to ask her of its ending on the next night, until
a thousand nights had passed over her . . . Mohammed bin Is'hak adds:—And
the truth is, Inshallah, that the first who solaced himself with hearing night-
tales was Al-Iskandar (he of Macedon), and he had a number of men who
used to relate to him imaginary stories and provoke him to laughter; he,
however, designed not therein merely to please himself, but that he might
become the more cautious and alert. After him the Kings in like fashion
made use of the book entitled 'Hazar Afsan'. It containeth a thousand nights,
but less than two hundred night-stories, for a single history often occupied
several nights. I have seen it complete sundry times; and it is, in truth, a
corrupted book of cold tales."10
Allowing for misconceptions concerning the antiquity of secular books
written in Persian, including the Hazar Afsan, and for the identification of
Persian history with that of the Near East in general, there is still a great
deal of historical truth in what the author of the Fihrist here teils us. He is
entirely right in his main point, that story-books analogous in kind, though not
in extent, to the Thousand and One Nights and to Kalilah and Dimnah, and
fictional books of entertainment generally, had been at home in the realm of
Persia ever since the time of the first dynasty of Persian kings, and that more
of such books were produced in subsequent ages under the Ashkanians
(= Parthians, Arsacids) and under the Sasanians. It is important to see and
understand this matter in large historical perspective, because it bears upon
the nature and provenience of great quantities of medieval story-lore, both
in the Near-East and in western Europe, with reference both to its forms and
to its subject-matter and motifs. For this purpose it is necessary to digress
for a while from our primary topic, which is the testimony of medieval and
modern scholars concerning the origin of Sindbad, and to which we shall
return below.
In ancient times, when the reading public was very small or non-existent,
books written in prose were primarily informative, didactic, or historical, and
10
In a note Burton explains that 'cold tales' is equivalent to 'silly auecdotes',
adding "Here speaks the good Moslem." With the scnolarly author of the Fihrist,
äs with ancient writers in the formal tradition generally, prose fiction is not
respectable literature.

their substance, generally speaking, had to be true in theory. Prose had no
sanction äs artistic entertainment. It was only in poetry, itself orally com-
municated for the most part, that fiction äs artistic entertainment was looked
upon äs legitimate. Under those conditions, which prevailed throughout
Greece and the Near East in the fifth Century B. C. and earlier, there was no
recognized place for fiction written down on its own account äs an independent
form of literary entertainment. It was excluded by the canons of literary
propriety, which, in those early times, were much more severe, restricted, and
intellectually orientated than they were in the Middle Ages, or ever in India.
In medieval times those ancient literary proprieties, which had long been
upheld by learned fashion in the post-classical world, were at last broken
down, like dikes before a flood, by the impact of new and less intellectually-
disciplined and less academic cultures; and it was not until then, whether
in the East or in the West, that story-books could be written and circulated
freely for their own sake äs entertainment-literature. Narrative substance
which had been brief and strictly ancillary or incidental in the context of
ancient authors was expanded, multiplied, and dramatically elaborated äs an
end in itself in the Middle Ages, either with or without the formal pretext that
it was told for the sake of illustrating a moral or philosophical principle, or
that someone other than the author had voudied for it äs historically true or
äs his own experience. Stories of the kind which we read in Sindbad or in the
Arabian Nights had been very plentiful in the Near East from the earliest
times, but their circulation was oral and therefore unrecorded, except upon
those relatively few occasions when the story was given äs part of a larger
history, äs in Herodotus, or äs the Illustration of a philosophical principle, äs
in the story of Gyges and his ring in Plato's Republic, in the Aesopic fables,
and in the wisdom books of the Assyrians and Babylonians, some of which,
written in Sumerian, date back to the 18th Century B. C. and are still in part
extant.11 The book of Achiqar, which purports to be an account of his own
11
For a sketdi of Sumerian wisdom literature according to the latest advances in
this field, see S. N. Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer (Indian Hills, Colorado,
1956) pp. 152—159; J. A. Van Dijk, La Sagesse Sumero-Accadienne, Recherches sur
les Genres Litteraires des Textes Sapientiaux, avec Choix de Textes, Leiden (Brill)
1953. Kramer's colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Edmund I. Gordon,
is preparing for publication a large number of proverbs and fables from tablets
written at Nippur in the 18th Century, over thirty of which are fables of an 'Aesopic'
type, consisting of a short narrative passage ending epigrammatically with a quoted
speech, and in some cases making use of a somewhat extended dialogue. The first
part of this interesting and historically significant publication has now appeared in
the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, XII (1958) 1—21.
The prototype of the 'History of the First Larrikin' in Burton's Supplemental
Nights V 281—288, a widespread folktale of a humorous and picaresque kind, has
recently been published with a translation and commentary by O. R. Gurney in
Anatolian Studies VI (1956) 145—162, VII 135 f., from a cuneiform tablet found at
Sultantepe and dated in the year 701 B. C. The tablet is unusually well preserved and
extends to 160 lines followed by a colophon of 13 lines containing the date. The
story is composed, äs the editor teils us (p. 147), in the form of a poem with a fairly
regulär metre. It relates to a poor man of Nippur named Gimil-Ninurta who outwits
the mayor of the city, who had mistreated him, by giving him a thorough beating on
three different occasions.

experience written by an historical character, originated in Assyria and was
well known, in an Aramaic version at least, if not in old Persian, in the fifth
Here follows an outline of the narrative with quotations from Gurney's translation
(itah'cized words represent revisions recently proposed or adopted by Dr. Gurney
since the publication of his translation):
"There was a man of Nippur, poor and humble,
Gimil-Ninurta was his name, a miserable man.
In his city Nippur wearily he sät.
He had no silver, the pride of his people,
he possessed no gold, the pride of mankind.
His store-room lacked the pure grain,
with craving for bread his mood was bitter,
with craving for meat and beer his face was disfigured.
Daily for lack of food he used to lie hungry.
He was clad in garments for which he had no change."
He sells his only garment and buys a goat with the money; but he dares not feast on
the goat at home all by himself, lest his neighbors complain of his failure to share
the feast with them; and, besides, he cannot provide the other things that should go
with a feast. " Where will be the beer?" He decides to make a present of the goat to
the Mayor, in the confident expectation that His Honor will invite him to share in the
feast and will provide the beer and other trimmings. Then he goes to the Mayor's
house and explains his business to the gate-keeper, who reports to the Mayor.
"When Gimil-Ninurta entered into the presence of the Mayor
[in] his left hand he grasped the neck of his goat,
while with his right he greeted the Mayor.
'May Enlil and the city of Nippur bless the Mayor!
May Ninurta and Nusku cause him to prosper greatly!'
The Mayor spoke thus to the citizen of Nippur:
'What is your crime that you are bringing a bribe?5"
Gimil-Ninurta explains to the Mayor just what his intentions and calculations were,
but the Mayor remains angry and unappeased and directs his servants äs follows
(lines 58—60)^
"Give him, the citizen of Nippur, a [bone] and a sinew,
give him a drink of One thircT [beer] from your can,
send him away and show him out the gatel"
On leaving, Gimil-Ninurta addresses the gate-keeper in these words (66—69):
"The blessings of the gods on your master! Give him this message:
Tor the one load which you [put] upon me,
I will pay you back three times for one/
The Mayor heard this and laughed all day."
Thereafter Gimil-Ninurta manages to borrow a chariot from the king, for which he
promises to pay one mina of gold, and presents himself to the Mayor in the guise of a
nobleman sent by the king to make a deposit of money for the temple of Enlil. While
the Mayor is entertaining him, he secretly opens the empty cash-box which he had
given the Mayor in trust, on the pretense that it contained gold. Then he blames
the Mayor for having lost or stolen the deposit. He gives him a thorough beating
"from his head to the soles of his feet," receives from the Mayor two minas of gold
äs reparations, and says, on leaving, to the gate-keeper:
"The blessings of the gods on your master! Give him this message:
Tor the one load which [you put upon me]
I have paid off one score; [there remain two more].' "
Next (116—134) the poor man gains admittance into the private room of the Mayor
in the disguise of a physician, where he gives the Mayor another very vigorous beating
and departs, taunting him äs before: "The blessings of the gods ... I have paid off
the second score; there remains one." After that the Mayor alerts all the people of his
household and surrounds himself with guards; but Gimil-Ninurta again loofs him by
hiring a man to call out at the gate "I am the man with the goat!" Whereupon all the
household pursue him and Gimil-Ninurta, entering from the opposite direction, finds
the Mayor alone, and gives him the third beating.
I have to thank Mr. Viktor Julow of the Museum Deri in Debrecen, Hungary, for
having first called my attention to this interesting publication of the Sultantepe
tablets by Dr. Gurney. Mr. Julow writes that we have in this old Babylonian story

Century B. C.12 As a book it had the sanction of being an historical record
äs well äs a moral treatise. In Parthian times, or not long afterwards, it was
elaborated and assumed the form which it has in the Syriac version;18 and in
the ninth Century or thereabouts almost the whole story was transferred to
the legend of the sage Buzurjmihr, supposed minister under Khusrau Anu-
shirwan, äs it appears in the Pahlavi Shatrang Namak and elsewhere.14 A
the ultimate source of a very populär Hungarian modc-heroic poem, Ludas Matyi,
written in 1804 by Mihäly Fazekas of Debrecen: Ludas Matyi, a poor peasant boy,
carries twenty geese to market, but a feudal landlord, Döbrögi, confiscates his geese
and punishes nim arbitrarily with fifty strokes. The boy swears to take triple
vengeance. The first time he thrashes Döbrögi in the disguise of an Italian caroenter,
the second time in the shape of an army surgeon, and the last time with the help of a
horse-dealer who is paid to call out to Döbrögi and his armed guards, 'Tm Ludas
Matyi!" Mr. Julow adds that he has found a dozen variants of this tale from France
to Georgia, and that the Hungarian author probably borrowed the theme from a Frendi
version. Dr. Gurney comments on the closely parallel version in the Arabian Nights
and refers to Aarne-Thompson, Types of the Folk-Tale no. 1538, Bolte-Polivka An-
merkungen
12
... Grimm III 394. The physician's disguise is said to be in all versions.
Concerning the historicity of the principal diaracters in the story of Achiqar, the
following Statement is made by the well-known Assyriologist A. T. Olmstead in Jour.
Amer. Or. Soc. 56, (1936) 243; " 'Ahiqar, counsellor of all Assyria and seal-bearer of
King Sinaherib/ is Ahiaqar, second officer of Barhalza, who appears in a document
of 698, probably also the Ahiaqar, official of Bit Sinibni, mentioned in a letter (see
C. H. W. Johns, Assyr. Deeds and Documents, nos. 468, 251; L. Waterman, Royal
Corresponaence of the Assyrian Empire II 258 f.). His nephew and adopted son,
Nadin, is the scribe Nadinnu, who appears in 671 and writes letters to Esarhaddon
and Ashur-baniapal (Johns op. cit. nos. 60, 368; Waterman I 274 f., II 36 ff., 274) ...
Nabusumiskun ... is well known äs the mukil apate, 'rein-holder', or cavalry com-
mander, of Sennacherib and the writer of several letters (Johns, no. 253; Waterman
I 296 f., II 44). Perhaps the disgrace of Ahiqar was connected with the harem
intrigues for the throne at the close of Esarhaddon's reign, when other important
officials met a worse fate." On the Persian background of the Aramaic papyrus of
Adiiqar, see A. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., 208. Cowley
(207 f.), agreeing with Sachau, estimates that the original composition may date from
the middle of the sixth Century; but Olmstead refers it to the seventh Century, before
the fall of Assyria.
18
Olmstead /. c. The Parthians are mentioned several times äs enemies of the
Assyrians, and one of them, to whom Nadin writes a forged letter, is "Akhi the son
of Hamselin, king of Persia and Elam."
14
On the legend of Buzurjmihr, see the very instructive article by Arthur
Christensen in Acta Orientalia, VIII (1929) 81—128, where the numerous and varied
testimonies of Persian and Arab writers are brought together and summarized. The
Shatrang Namak, in the words of E. W. West (Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II_119), relates
very briefly how "Dewasärm, king of the Hindus, sent to king Khusro-i Anöshak-
rübän, a set of chessmen and other valuable presents, with a demand for an
explanation of the game, or a heavy tribute. After three day's consideration,
Vadshorg-Mitrö (Buzurjmihr), Khüsrö's prime minister, explains the game and
invents that of backgammon, with which and many valuable presents he is sent to
India, to make similar demands from Dewasärm, whose courtiers fail in explaining the
new game after forty day's consideration, and their king has to pay tribute." Other
stories relating to the career of Buzu^mihr, which are likewise modelled on the story
of Adiiqar, are told at lenght by the historian Tha'älibi (d. 1038 A. D.) and by Firdausi
in the Shahnama. These writers teil us, in addition to the substance of the Shatrang
Namak, that Buzurjmihr, some time after his return from India, feil into disgrace
with the king and, being banished from the court, was compelled to live in an
Underground cavern, where, after long confinement, he became blind. Under these
circumstances, the emperor of Byzantium sent to Anushirwan a sealed ehest with this
diallenge: "If you can teil my envoy what is in this ehest (without unsealing it), I
promise to pay tribute to you, otherwise not." When none of his wise men proved
able to answer this riddle, the king, realizing that only Buzurjmihr could do so, even
10 Brought to you by | Glasgow University Library

beast epic remarkably similar in some ways to that of Reynard the Fox,
written in the seventh Century B. C., has been published recently from tablets
found at Assur.15 The influence on picaresque stories in the Arabian Nights
of the Egyptian story told by Herodotus (II 121) concerning the thief who
stole from the king's treasure house has been demonstrated by Nöldeke;16 and
many a novellistic motif found in the Greek writer recurs in the Arabic. The
romantic story of Zariadres, brother of Hystaspes, and the Scythian king's
daughter Odatis, the main outlines of which were taken over first into the
Pahlavi romance Jätkär-i-Zarirän (ca. 500 A. D.), and later by Firdausi in
his account of Gushtasp the brother of Zarer and the daughter of the Roman
king in the Shähnäma, was told by Chares of Mitylene, a court official under
Alexander the Great, in his history of Alexander. Chares says that the story
was famous in Asia, that it was pictured on the walls of temples and royal
palaces, and even in private houses, and that it was recorded in the
(presumably Persian) books of history.17 The Miles Gloriosus of Plautus,
derived from an unknown Greek comedy, dramatizes a story of erotic intrigue
which recurs in all its main features in the Arabian Nights in the Tale of the
Füller (Butcher) and his Wife and the Trooper, and in the Tale of Qamar
Az-Zaman.ls Put into narative form, instead of dialogue, many of the mimes
which were acted on the stage in late Alexandrian and early Roman imperial
though blind, restored him to his former position of honor, and Buzurjmihr, having
solved the riddle, thus caused the emperor to pay tribute to Anushirwan. All this
is patterned on the old story of Achiqar. Apart from the exploits above mentioned,
many wise sayings are ascrioed to Buzurjmihr in the writings of Masudi, Dinawari,
Bar Hebraeus, and other authors; and the Pahlavi Pandnämak, written probably in
the late ninth Century (Christensen p. 108 f.), consists of a series of maxims and moral
utterances in the form of questions and answers whidi purport to have been written
by Buzurjmihr at the request of Khusrau Anushirwan. Christensen (p. 108) concludes,
with much probability äs it seems to me, that this_ famous but mysterious wise man
and prime minister "n'est que le double de Burzöe, le grand medicin de Khusrau l,
et que le nom de Buzurjmihr, 'Celui qui a le grand Mithra (pour protecteur)', est
une altoration de Burzmihr, 'Celui qui a le haut Mithra (pour protecteur)', le nom
complet de Burzöe"." Burzöe, he explains, is a diminutive of Burzmihr; and, since
the alteration of the latter to Buzurjmihr might arise very easily in Arabic writing,
but not in Pahlavi, we may infer that the Snatrang Namak, and the whole legend
about Buzurjmihr, äs we have it, dates from some time after the Arab conquest of
Persia.
15
E. Ebeling, "Die Babylonisdie Fabel," in Mitteil. d. dtorient. Gesellschaft Bd. II
Heft 3 (Leipzig 1927) 17 ff. The text is incomplete and füll of lacunae, but the
action seems to have been somewhat äs follows: The fox conspires with the wolf to
outwit the shepherd dog and to prey upon his sheep. The dog is put on trial before
Shamash for neglect of duty and is vigorously accused by the fox. Somehow the
tables are turned; for, in the next fragment, the dog, who seems to have been
acquitted, is successfully prosecuting the fox and wolf, while the fox by tears and
entreaties is trying to beg off from his sentence. In the last fragment the fox is in
the proximity of a lion who threatens to devour him, and here again Reynard is
resorting to tears.
16
ZDMG 42. 68 ff.; cf. E. Littmann, 1001 Nacht VI 711.
17
Chares in Athenaeus xiii 575 a; cf. E. Rhode, Der Griechische Roman* 47—54;
Nöldeke in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 133 f.
18
Burton XI 231 ff. and Clouston ib. XII 329 ff.; Littmann VI 451 ff. See also
Von Grunebaum in JAOS 62.278, and the saine author's Medieval Islam 296;
H. Fischer and J. Bolte, Die Reise der Söhne Giaffers ... des Christoforo Armeno,
Tübingen 1895 (208te Publ. des Litt. Vereins in Stuttgart) 219—221. On the last-
mentioned story-book see below, note 132.
11 Library
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times would read very much like the clever stories of adulterous intrigue, of
the outwitting of husbands, the clever devices of women, the picaresque
adventures of rogues, the tricks played by sharpers on simpletons, etc., which
we find in abundance in the Arabian Nights and in Sindbad. The fortleben
of these mimes in the later literature of the Near East, especially Arabic and
Syriac, was traced by J. Horowitz in bis book entitled Spuren griechischer
Mimen im Orient, published in 1905.19 They must have been well known and
much used for entertainment at court by the Parthian kings, who were great
immitators of Greek fashion in such matters.20
Not long before 100 B. C. one Aristides of Miletus, otherwise unknown,
published a lengthy book entitled Milestoka, which was composed of the same
kind of witty and licentious stories, mostly erotic, äs those mentioned above.
This book, which has not come down to us,21 passed into the hands of the
Parthian general Surenas at the battle of Carrhae in 53 B. C., having been
found in the baggage of the Roman officer Roscius. Surenas displayed it to
the Senate at Seleucia äs a means of ridiculing the Romans, but Plutarch teils
us that Surenas himself kept a large number of concubines and that he revelled
habitually in all-night parties with women and amused himself with all kinds
of dissolute entertainments. Roscius indeed was blameworthy, says Plutarch,
but it was mere impudence on the part of the Parthians to mock at the Milesian
stories, "when many of their own kings, the Arsacidae, had been born of Milesian
and lonian pleasure-girls." What, may we suppose, did Surenas do with those
Milesian tales? In all probability he brought them to the attention of his king,
Orodes, who was, according to Plutarch's account (Crassus 33), the same kind
of man äs Surenas and who, besides speaking Greek, was well acquainted
with Greek literature and fond of Greek entertainments.22 This Ashkanian king
19
Von Grunebaum (JAOS 62.278) observes that Horowitz, without expressly
saying so, makes it clear that he sees Greek influence at work in the formation of the
realistic urban narrative, which is so prominent in the AN. See also what Rhode
says on this subject in his Griech. Rom.3 597 f., äs quoted below, p. 16.
20
The Parthians, says W. W. Tarn (Ox. Class. Dict. 651), "were the supreme
imitators of the ancient world; they stepped into a ready-made Greek kingdom, and
just copied the Seleucids. They utilized Greek science, Greek secretaries, Greek
methods of administration and court titles, wrote on parchment and had Greeks on
their Council... later an occasional Parthian readied China, and there imitated the
Chinese by becoming a Chinese scholar ... their Greek cities had perhaps rather
more autonomy than under the Seleucids, and there was an outburst of Greek lite-
rature in the East; never was communication across Asia less trammeled, and Seleucia,
center of all routes, dominated Asia's trade." On the many contacts between Greeks
and Indians in the Hellenistic period, see in general Tarn's book, The Greeks in
Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938), especially chap. ix, and W. E. Clark's "Hellenism
and Indic Philology" in Class. Philol. 15. l—22. An example of the use made by
Parthian kings of Greek dramatic entertainments, and their writing of books in Greek,
is given by Plutarch in the passage summarized below, n. 22.
21
A Latin translation of the Milesiaka in 13 books or more was made by the
Roman historian Sisenna (d. 57 B. C.), but from this translation only 67 words have
been preserved in ten different fragments. From the Greek original nothing remains
except a gloss quoted from the sixth book. It is probable that some of the stories
in Apuleius come from Aristides, but we have no specific proof of it.
22
He was watching a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides at the wedding
feast of his son when the head of Crassus was tossed onto tne stage. Amid great
applause, the leacüng actor, Jason, seized the bloody trophy and waving it about
performed a Bacchic dance, chanting the verses from the play relating to the head

was the kind of man who would relish the Milesian tales of Aristides and
would take pains to preserve them at his court at Seleucia. In course of time
it was natural that they should be translated into Pahlavi, and, for all that we
know, they may have served äs the basis on which the Hazar Afsaneh was
founded. Seleucia, a great outpost of Greek civilization, was destroyed in
164 A. D.; but the Parthian capitol thereafter was at nearby Ctesiphon, just
across the Tigris river, and at least one of the early Sasanian kings, Bahram Gur
(420—438), is said to have had some knowledge of Greek and of Greek
writings.23
The Greek books which achieved the widest circulation in the languages of
the Near East were often books of a very humble and obscure origin and
nature, such äs were ignored or despised by literary men in Hellenistic times.
Among these may be mentioned the romantic biography of Alexander by an
unknown Pseudo-Callisthenes; the Physiologus written by an unknown
Christian author in the second Century;24 the Life of Secundus the Silent Philo-
sopher, which was known äs well or better in its Near-Eastern versions, written
in four different languages, and in its medieval Latin form, than it ever was
in Greek;25 the Life of Aesop, dating from the first Century after Christ; the
collected fables of Aesop;26 the collection of vaudeville jokes known äs Philo·
gelos which, along with other books of the same kind, has left its mark on the
Laughable Stories of the Syrian Bar Hebraeus,27 and on the collected jests of
the Turkish Nasreddin,2* although no oriental translation of the book itself is
known to have been made. Many Greek romances of love and adventure,
which have not survived, because the ancient critics and curators of literature
regarded them äs trivial and not worth keeping, were nevertheless written
and widely read in the first two centuries of the Christian era; and the lite-
rary form-pattern of these romances, äs known to us from the extant specimens,
of Pentheus in the hands of his frenzied mother Agave. Concerning the Armenian
king Artavasdes, whose sister married the son of Orodes, Plutarch says that he wrote
tragedies,
23
histories, and orations (in Greek) and that some of these were still extant.
E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia I 262.
24
On the history of this book see my article "Physiologus" in Pauly-Wissowa-
Kroll,
25
Realencyclopädie XX 1074 ff.; on the Oriental versions, ib. 1116 ff.
The unmistakable influence of this book upon the frame-story of the Book of
Sindbad is shown below, p. 84 ff.
26
The oldest extant collection of fables ascribed to Aesop, the so-called Augustana
or Class I (Peny, Aesopica I 300) contains some 230 fables and dates from the first
or second Century. This collection and the prose paraphrase of Babrius (Class IV)
were the principal sources of the Syriac and Armenian collections. A Syriac translation
of some 75 of these Greek fables, made in late antiquity, probably betöre the seventh
Century, served äs the basis of the so-called fables of Syntipas, retranslated by
Andreopulus in the eleventh Century (Aesopica I 517—520), and of an unedited
Arabic book in which Josipos (Aesop) teils fables to King Nebuchadnezar; cf. Aesopica
l 522 f., and below p. 21. The earliest Armenian fables, ascribed to Olympianus, were
translated quite literally from the Greek; but the medieval collections, ascribed to
Mekhitar Gösch and to Vardan, contain, along with many fables which are close to
their Greek sources, many others which come from the folklore of the Near East.
Among all these Armenian fables, upwards of 550 in number, not more than a dozen
have been taken from Kalilah and Dimnah; and no fable of Indian origin, or from
KD, 27
has been admitted anywhere into either the Greek or the Syriac collections.
Laughable Stories, translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, London 1899, chapters
15—17;
28
Horowitz op. dt. pp. 34 ff.
A. Wesselski, Der Hodscha Nasreddin, Weimar 1911, 2 vols.
13 Library
has shaped the outlines and conventions of many a story in the Arabian Nights,
through direct influence, äs the distinguished Arabist Gustave von Grunebaum
has convincingly demonstrated.29 The Greek Life of Secundus, whidi, äs we
shall see, had a decisive influence in shaping the frame story of the Book of
Sindbad, is little known, even to classical sdiolars, and only one Student of
Sindbad, in so far äs I know, has so much äs mentioned it.80 Even more
unknown to students of the history of the novella are certain stories in the
Life of Aesop whidi belong to the oldest version, written in the first Century,
but which, because they are omitted in the abbreviated vulgate version of
Planudes (ca. 1300), were never seen in print until they were pubUshed by the
present writer in Aesopica (1952). One of the stories to which I refer is the
prototype of a story in Balzac's Contes Drolatiques entitled "Comment fut
basty le Chasteau d'Azay,"31 and another, a story of seduction, is much the
™ "Greek Form Elements in the Arabian Nights" in 7AOS 62 (1942) 277—292;

Medieval Islam, A Study in Cultural Orientatiori* (Chicago 1954), chap. ix; "Greece
in the Arabian Nights;" Kntik und Dichtkunst, Studien zur arabischen Literatur-
geschichte (Wiesbaden 1955) 82, n. 7. In the last mentioned place Von Grunebaum
calls attention to V. F. Büchner's view, put forth in the Encyclopedia of Islam IV
1022 b (Eng. ed.), that the romantic epic entitled Wämiq and 'Aarä, written by the
Persian poet 'Unsuri (d. 1049 A. D.), the contents of which are known to us from a
later Turkish poet (see E the in Geiger-Kühn II 240), was based ultimately on a
Greek romance. Büchner says: "We may perhaps assume that there were free
versions of such romances in Pahlavi literature (which perhaps came through Syriac)
and that the original story of Wämiq was based on a work of this kind. Tne matter
must of course have been adapted to the East and Muslim authors must have later
contributed their share." Cf. Browne Lit. Hist. of Persia I 12; II 275 f. Assuming
a Pahlavi original back of 'Unsuri's epic, it is not necessary to suppose
that that original was based on a Greek romance dealing specincally
with the same theme, although such may have been the case. For that
theme, to judge from Büchner's outline of it—a lover travelling into a
far country and undergoing many hazards in order to win, äs he finally does, a
princess with whose picture he had fallen in love—was fundamentally the same äs
the old Persian story of Zariadres and Odatis, which was well known in the time of
Alexander. The literary form per se is no doubt inherited from Greek romance, but
there is no need of assuming intermediate stages of development in the narrative
substance between the Pahlavi epic and the ancient version of the story, whether oral
or written. The romancer or epic poet is usually more of a creator, in the arrangement
and multiplication of his rnaterials, than a copyist or an editor. Another
romantic epic, comparable in kind to the Greek and said to be based
on an old Pahlavi original, is the Wis and Ramin of the poet Fakhur'd-Din of
Jurjan (ca. 1048), which, according to Ethe (I.e.; cf. Browne II 274f.), "nicht nur
in ihren allgemeinen Grundzügen, sondern im ganzen Verlauf der Handlung genau
der30 Liebestragödie von Tristan und Isolde entspricht."
P. Cassel, Mischle Sindbad, Secundus-Syntipas, Berlin 1891, p. 345. Cassel
thought that the Greek biography of Secundus (written in the second Century) was
based
81
on the Book of Sindbad! See below, n. 150.
See my Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fahles of Aesop (1936)
pp. 8—10 for a Latin translation of this story with some comment on parallel versions;
Aesopica I pp. 95, 59, and 127 for both the Greek and the Latin texts. Another
version, not noted in Studies, is given in Kryptadia (Heilbronn, apud Henniger
1883—1888, anon.) III 150 ff.; cf. ib. I 350 ff., which is similar. The story in
outline: A woman offers a reward to a lover if he shall succeed in gratifying her
sexually ten or more times in succession. The sexual athlete fails technicaUy on the
last count, and the woman refuses to pay him the stipulated reward. The lover then
appeals to the woman's husband äs judge, or to a court, and wins his case by pleading
it in terms of a parable relating to knoddng apples or nuts off a tree: he had brought
down ten (12, 14) apples (or nuts) with one tnrow of a stick, but the tenth apple had
fallen in the dirt, or was an empty nut. In one version, probably from North Africa,

same in all essentials s that about Rustico and Alibedi in Boccaccio's Decame-
ôïç (3.10).32 A short fragment o£ the old Life of Aesop, written in Uigurian
Turkish in the ninth Century, has recently been published from a group of
Manichean writings found at Chotscho in Eastern Turkestan. In all probability
the original from whidi this Turkish version was made, presumably a Syriac
text, was brought from Persia by the Manichaeans, who had migrated in large
numbers together with their leader into further Asia to avoid the persecution
of the Sasanian king Bahram I (273—6 A. D.).33 This was one of the many
story-books whidi were circulated in Persia in the time of the Ashkanian kings.
Some traces of its influence can probably be seen in the Book of Sindbad,
where the loser of a wager or a contest is required to drink up the sea, and in
the parable of the uncultivated field in the story of the lion's track.34
That Alexander used to listen to story-tellers at night was probably an old
tradition in Persia, based on the manifold gossip reported by his contemporaries
concerning the manner in which he spent his nights at Susa and Babylon. The
Greek historians do not teil us explicitly that Alexander listened to story-
tellers, but the nature and variety of his nocturnal entertainments, whidi
they describe, were such that the use of Professional story-tellers along with
jesters on those occasions would be natural. The emperor Augustus, according
to Suetonius (Aug. 74, 78), made use of story-tellers (aretalogi, fabulatores)
at his banquets, and often called them in at night when he could not sleep.
Collections of jests and short anecdotes were often put into books for the
use of Professional entertainers;35 and we are told by Athenaeus (xiv 614 e)
that Philip of Macedon, who kept a large troop of actors, musicians and
buffoons at his court (ib. ÷ 435 c), once paid a talent to a Company of Athenian
ãåëùôïðïéïß for a written copy of their collected jests. Materials of this kind,
including the librettos of mimes, and perhaps also collections of short stories,
like those of Aristides, may have been passed on from one king to another s
part of the royal equipment used for entertainments at court. If so, what the
the parable relates to trespassing on a field and the case is pleaded before a Moslem
judge, who is also the husband.
82
Aesopica I p. 75.
83
See L. Rasonyi Nagy, "Das Uigurische Aesop-Josipas-Fragment," in Byzanti-
nisdi-Neugriediisdie Jahrb dier VII (1928—1929) 429—443.
84
Reference is made to the episode cited above in note 31. There the wife of
Xanthus says to Aesop: "I engaged you to cultivate my field (in the sexual sense),
but you went beyond and cast your seed on another's land." The wager to drink
up the sea is told in eh. 69—73 of the Vita Aesopi ( = Aes. pp. 57 f.), and in the tale
about the 5-year-old child in Sindbad. According to D'Herbelot (Bibl. Orient. 516b),
the story of how Aesop proved to his master that not he but his fellow slaves had
eaten the figs (Vita Aesopi eh. 3) is told of Loqman by Tha' libi in his Tafsir and
appears also in the Persian Rumi's Mathnawi. Another story from the old Greek
Life of Aesop, relating to the omen of two crows (eh. 77), is told with only slight
Variation s a Persian story by W. A. Clous ton (Flowers from a Persian Garden 108)
and by St. Clair Tisdall in his Modern Persian Conversation-Grammar (Ex. 11, from
a book entitled $ad Ifik yat).
85
See Rohde, Gr. Rom.3 590 ff.; Crusius, article 'Aretalogi' in Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll
R.E. II (1895) 670ff.; Maas on ãåëùôïðïéïß ib. VII (1912) 1019ff.; S. Trenkner, The
Greek Novella in the Classical Period, Cambridge 1958, 17 ff., where much valuable
testimony is brought together concerning story-telling s a form of social entertain-
ment among the Greeks.
15 Library
author of the Fihrist says about the origin and history of the Hazar Afsaneh
may well be true.36
It is precisely in the Near East, from Assyrian times onward, that the con-
ditions under whidi men lived, social, political and cultural, were most
favorable to the growth and proliferation of that kind of urban story which
figures so prominently in the Arabian Nights and in Sindbad: stories of intri-
gues at court involving kings with their ministers and harems, stories about
the clever devices of women, of adulterers, of sharpers in the market-place,
and of merchants travelling into stränge and distant lands. What Rohde says
in this connection concerning life in the old Greek cities, especially in lonia,
is no less true of other cities in the Near East, regardless of the nationality
of the peoples who dominated them a t different times: "One may well believe
that nowhere eise in the world were all the conditions favoring the formation
of a rieh body of Novellendichtung so closely brought together äs they were
among the citizens of Greek states: the keen observation of what was novel
in life's relationships, the zest for witty things, for audacious exploits, for the
reckless self-seeking of individuals gifted with unusual abilities, an ironical
way of looking at human activity; and, amid all this, that most fertile, rieh, and
highly skilled fantasy which was the peculiar inheritance of the Hellenic
people. Even if one knew nothing from specific testimony, one might suppose,
äs a matter of course, that, amid the gossip of loungers in the market-places
of Greek cities, the flowers of populär story-lore, sometimes prettily imaginative,
sometimes pungent and prickly, must have sprung forth in the gayest abun-
dance. In contrast therewith, India is the last place in which one would,
a priori, look for the home of a body of fiction so ingenious, so rooted in the
keen observation of the realities of middle-class life in the town, and so drily
ironical."87 Rohde goes on to say that the Indian fancy, impatient of the dull
and narrow conditions of earthly living, shows an irresistable tendency to
take flight into the boundless regions of magical, grotesque, and supramundane
invention, äs manifested in such books äs the Vetälapancavinsati, the Vikra-
macarita or Somadeva's Kathäsaritsägara; and that, in contrast with the story-
books last mentioned, which show the Indian style of fiction in its truest
character, the Pancatantra, with its worldly, novellistic contents, its positive
presentation of ideas, and the relative simplicity of its tales, gives one the
impression of being something foreign, äs if it were imported from abroad.
That which is most distinctive about the structure of the Pancatantra is its
abuse of the frame-story. Instead of there being only one such, äs in Sindbad
and many western books, where 99% of the stories are arranged paratactically
on the same frame, we have, in the Pancatantra, a series of frame-stories
and frame-stories within frame-stories, and this process is carried so far
36
The third section of the third discourse in the Fihrist (p. 140) gives an account
of the "courtiers, favorites, minstrels, jesters and buffoons (who composed books)
and the names of their books." It would be stränge indeed if a good part of this
material had not been passed on from the authors and practitioners of Arsacid times.
Many good specimens of it may be read in the Laughable Stories of Bar Hebraeus,
especially in chapters 13—18.
37
Rohde op. dt. 597 f.

that the ostensible but unreal Subordination of b to a, a to A, and A to I (the
education of the princes) is of common occurrence. Thus a complex System of
hypotactical arrangement, the logic of whidi is hard to follow, is imposed
upon a series of stories whidi are told, in reality, eadi for its own sake äs
dramatic entertainment; and whidi ought, therefore, to be put forth inde-
pendently one of another. The kind of Rahmenerzählung whidi consists in
motivating a string of mutually independent stories, by representing them
äs being told by one or more diaracters in a primary story, is a classical form-
pattern whidi has a long history in the Graeco-Roman world and in the Near
East. Since the purpose of the primary story is to furnish a setting for the
others, it need not be mudi of a story in itself, and it may consist of nothing
more than a description of the presumably historical circumstances under
whidi certain persons met and told stories, or made speeches, eadi in his
turn. Structurally, there is no essential difference between the Symposium
of Plato on the one band and the Decameron of Boccaccio, or Sindbad, on the
other. The form-pattern in all three is fundamentally the same. The difference
lies mainly in the substance of what is assigned to the speech of the dramatic
characters in one book or another. This substance varies according to the
kind of entertainment or instruction that the author chooses to convey. In an
age in which fiction is in populär demand, although unsanctioned äs such by
literary convention, the author may use a dialogue or the description of a
banquet or an entertainment äs a frame for his stories; and if he can publish
a fictitious narrative of some length on its own account, äs does Apuleius, he
may put any number of other stories into the mouths of characters in the main
story. In the lost Milesiaka of Aristides it is probable that the stories were
represented äs told by the participants at a banquet. In Lucian's Toocaris ten
romantic stories of adventure are related by two interlocutors, one a Greek
the other a Scythian, in what is formally a philosophical dialogue on the
subject of friendship; but the dialogue in reality is only a frame for the stories
and not important in itself. The System by which Apuleius introduces some
seventeen different novellae into the framework of his principal story, some-
times subordinating one to another, is more haphazard and less logical and
perspicuous than that of the Toxaris or of the Book of Sindbad, but his diva-
gation from the paratactic simplicity of the classical form does not go so far
äs that of the Pancatantra. The latter does not represent the original form-
pattern from which the Rahmenerzählung in Sindbad and in the Arabian
Nights is derived, which is western in kind, but only a perversion of that
form; and the sharp difference in this respect between the Pancatantra and
Sindbad points to the Near-Eastern origin of the latter. Likewise perverted,
äs compared with the Greek or Near-Eastern Originals from which they are
undoubtedly derived, are two of the fables in the Pancatantra: the story of the
ass in the panther's skin, who mistakes a man for a she-ass and pursues him
(III 1; cf. Babrius 139); and that about the ass without heart and ears (IV 1;
cf. Babrius 95, Lion, Fox and S tag), which is füll of false motivation äs
compared with the earlier Greek fable, and in which the ass is persuaded that
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2 Fabula 3 Authenticated | 130.209.6.50
the lion, from whose claws and teeth he has barely escaped with his life, is an
affectionate she-ass. Having no heart or ears, he could not see the difference!38
Under the heading "Titles of Indian books of entertaining stories (khuräfat),
evening tales (asmär), and narrations (ahädith)", the author of the Fihrist
(p. 305) lists the following items, many of which seem to be unknown to-day,
or unidentified: l, Kaliiah wa Dimnah, to which six of the eleven lines (14—24)
composing the entire section are devoted; 2, The Greater Book of Sindbad,
The Lesser Book of Sindbad; 3, Book of Buddha; 4, Book of Büdäsäf and
Balühar;89 4 a, Book of Büdäsäf separately; 5, Book on the Literature of India
and China; 6, Häbel's Book of Wisdom; 7, A Book of India on the Story of
38
An Armenian version of this fable (Vardan 5 in Marr's text) has more of the
original motivation than the Pancatantra and seems to represent an intermediate
stage of evolution between the Greek and the Indian forms. In the Armenian fable,
äs in the Pancatantra, the fox (jackal) is sent to lure an ass (instead of a stag) to the
lion's cave, because the physicians have prescribed the heart and ears of an ass äs
medicine for the sidc lion; whereas, in Babrius, what the lion wanted was only food,
because he was too old to diase his prey. The fox in the Armenian fable, äs in the
Greek, lures his victim by telling him (the ass) that the lion wishes to share his
kingship with him; but the lure in the Pancatantra (hence in KD) is the love of a she-
ass, and the difference between a lion and a she-ass was much easier for the ass to
see and feel, on his first encounter, than the difference between a friendly lion and a
hostile one. The mention of ears in both the Armenian and the Hindu versions is
otiose and violates plausibility. The lion could see for himself that the ass had ears.
Originally only the heart was in quesüon. In Babrius the fox steals it when it falls to
one side while the lion is busy devouring the body of the stag. He thinks that the lion
will not miss it, and that his theft will remain undetected; but how can the jackal
in the Pancatantra, and the fox in the Armenian version, dare to eat the only parts
of the ass that the lion wanted for medicine? And why should the jackal, wno was
not sick but only hungry, eat those particular parts, rather than some other parts,
on the ground that "they must be an excellent physic?" At the beginning of the fable
in the Pancatantra the jackal is anxious for the lion to get well, in order that he may
provide food for tliem both äs usual; by eating just the heart and ears of the ass,
he defeats his own purpose. The Armenian fable, which is secondary and corrupt äs
compared with the Greek original, seems to represent the Near-Eastern form of the
fable which was taken into the Pancatantra, where it was still further corrupted by
the introduction of the erotic motif.
39
According to Brockelmann (Gesch. d. Arab. Lit. Zweite ... Aufläse Bd. I, 1943,
158) a long fragment of this "Kitäb Bilauher wa Büdäsäf," contained in the ency-
clopaedic Rasail of the Ikhwanu'l Saphä ('Brethern of Purity'; cf. Nicholson, Lit.
Hist. of the Arabs 370 f.) was published at Bombay in 1306/1888. I have not seen this
book and cannot be sure about its Contents. Brockelmann (Suppl. I, 1937, p. 238)
equates it with Barlaam and Joasaph and describes it äs "eine buddhistische Legende,
die ihre jetzige Fassung und ihre Verbreitung den Manichäern verdankt." The Book
of Balühar mentioned in the Nihäyatu*l-irab (below p. 31) is probably the same book;
but the Book of Büdäsäf (4 a above), which is outlined therein on the authority of
Ibnu'l Muqaffa', who seems to have translated it from the Pahlavi (see Browne in
/RAS 1900, 216 f. and Brockelmann, 1937, p. 235), is very different from Barlaam
and Joasaph, although it is likewise derived from the Indian legend about the life of
Buddha and belongs to that general cycle of stories. As outlined in the Nihäyat, this
Book of Büdäsäf is a story relating to the Persian king Farrukhän and his son
Büdäsäf, who enters upon the life of an ascetic, but later marries, resumes his
kingship, and begets Ardawän, the last of the Parthian kings. It is obvious that this
book, which shows some close analogies with the Story of Baläsh the Säsänian (see
n. 63 below) and is füll of inserted fables, was composed originally by a Persian
author and was not translated from a Sanskrit text. The same is probably true also of
Büdäsäf and Balühar (no. 4 above); and the Book of Buddha (no. 3 above) may be
the same äs the Persian Book of Büdäsäf, since the title is equivalent.

the Fall of Adam; 8, Book of Tarka;40 9, Book of Dabak (?) the Hindu on Man
and Woman;41 10, Book on the Indian Standards of Eloquence;42 11, Book
of Sädiram;4312, Book of the King of India, Fighting and Praying; 13, Shänäq's
Book of Good Counsel;44 14, Book of Atar on Beverages; 15, Book of Wis-
dom by Bidpai. Note that the list begins and ends with Kalilah and
Dimnah, for the "Book of Bidpai on Wisdom" can hardly be anything eise
than one of the numerous editions of that work; that it includes one other
title (no. 11) which belongs apparently to the Bidpai tradition; and
that Sindbad is mentioned äs usual next to Kalilah and Dimnah. These two
books are the only ones in the list whidi we know to have been story-books
with a wide circulation in the Near East; the others are either not story-books
at all (so, apparently, nos. 5, 7, 8, 9,10,13, 14), or they are books which failed
to achieve any reputation äs such, or to survive, even if they did contain an
abundance of stories. In contrast to the preceding section on Persian books,
which the author divides into two paragraphs with separate headings, one
containing books of amusing stories, the other various kinds of books including
epic narratives, this section on Indian books is heavily padded with entries
which obviously do not belong under the heading of story-books, where they
have been placed. All Indian books which the author knew to be extant in
Arabic, so it would seem, are here classified äs story-books, regardless of their
nature and Contents; and the Book of Sindbad is included among them, not
because the author knew anything about its origin, which, äs he says, was
disputed, but because it was a story-book and broadly similar in kind to
Kalilah and Dimnah. The gravitational pull of that one book's fame was so
great that it drew other story-books into its orbit; and it is this, more than
anything eise, which, in modern times, has cast the suspicion of Indian origin
on great quantities of storylore which are, in the light of all our documentary
40
Evidently a philosophical handbook of the kind described by Winternitz, Gesch.
d. Ind.^ Lit. III 474 ff.: "Andererseits gibt es eine Anzahl von kleinen Handbüchern
dieser 'Tarka-Philosophie', die ausgezeichnet geeignet sind, nidit nur als Einführung
in das Nväya-Vai£esika, das M. N. Dvivedi treffend als die 'Grammatik der indischen
Philosophie* bezeichnet hat, sondern in die wissenschaftliche Literatur der Inder
überhaupt zu dienen."
41
Winternitz, op. dt. III 226 n. 3, reports the Statement made by an Indian
commentator that a poet named Dhävaka wrote the drama entitled Ratnävali (a
love story) under the name of king Harsa in the seventh Century; but he adds that
this must be a mistake based on a false reading of Dhävaka for Bäna. It seems
possible, however, that the ascription of the Ratnävali to Dhävaka had already been
made in the tenth Century, and that the reference in the Fihrist is to that drama,
or to some other work ascribed to Dhävaka. On the narrative contents of the
Ratnävali, see Winternitz ib. 227.
42
Kitab hudüd mantiq al hind.
43
This evidently refers to a separate edition of the story of the wise Bilär, which
is a chapter in the Arabic and in the old Syriac KD. Sadiram (variants: sädrm,
sädqrm, sädät—Keith-Falconer, p. xlix) is the name of the king in the Arabic version
of that story.
44
Kitäb Shänäq fi'l tadbir. Shänäq is the Indian Cänakya, minister of King
Candragupta, to whom are ascribed collections of proverbial sayings and books
on mecücine; see Winternitz III 134 ff. and 543, n. 2. Many aphorisms from this
source, were later taken into the HitopadeSa (= 'Book of Good Counsel9), for which
see the learned article by L. Sternbach in 7AOS 76 (1956) 115 ff.: "Cänakya's Apho-
risms in the Hitopades*a."
19 Library
evidence, indigenous in the Near East. Witness the story of Achiqar; for
which Benfey, who judged all such things on the analogy of the Pancatantra
and its diffusion into the West, found an Indian Original' in the story of king
Nanda in the Sukasaptati*5 Because it is often mentioned along with KD,
Rhys Davids, in his Buddhist Birth-Stories (p. 238), lists the Book of Sindbad,
which he identifies with "Sindbad the Sailor" (!) äs one of the many versions of
Kalilah and Dimnah! "It is worth noting" says Von Grunebaum, "that al-
Berüni (d. 1048), the greatest Muslim expert on India, was perfectly aware
of the relative insignificance of the Indian influence on his civilization."46
Birüni was speaking with special reference to science in a broad sense, but
what he says applies equally well to the field of literary art and to books of
fiction. What the Muslim world learned from outside itself came mainly from
the Semitic and Hellenistic cultures and not from India. Birüni, who read
Greek, Syriac and Sanskrit, besides speaking Arabic and Persian, had great
respect for Arabic äs a language well suited for writing on scientific and cri-
tical subjects. He would radier be cursed in Arabic, he says, than praised in
Persian; the last-mentioned language "is fit only for legends about the Persian
kings and stories of nightly entertainment (asmär al laylat)."*1
The first paragraph dealing with Persian books in the Fihrist (305. 4—7)
has the heading "Names of Persian Books," and the second paragraph
(305. 8—12) is headed "Names of Books composed by the Persians." Since the
first of these two paragraphs follows immediately after the long account of
night-stories and amusing tales, which, äs quoted above (p. 6 f.), begins
with the statement that these were first put into books by the ancient Persians,
and ends with an account of the dispute about Kalilah and Dimnah and about
Sindbad, it is clear that this paragraph is meant to include only books of that
kind; and the titles listed in both paragraphs (10 in the first and 9 in the
second) bear this out, insofar äs these titles can be understood. About one-
half of those in the first list are unintelligible to me, either because the names
are uncertain, or because there is nothing in the wording of the title to indicate
the nature of the book's content; but in die second list all save one or two
of the titles plainly refer to Persian epics, or to books on the legendary history
45
In an article entitled "Die kluge Dirne" in Das Ausland (1859) 457 ff., refuted
bv B. Meissner in ZDMG 48 (1894) 196. On the Assyrian origin of Achiqar see
aoove, n. 12. Some of the narrative motifs of the story of Adiiqar, including the
diallenge to make a rope of sand, have been taken over, along with the biolical
story of Solomon's Judgment, in a slightly altered form, into the so-called Mahä-
Ummagga-Jätaka (no. 546; pp. 163, 166 in vol. VI of the translation by E. B. Cowell
and others); cf. Winternitz, Gesch. d. Ind. Lit. II 111 ff. The influence of the
Achiqar story is also evident in Somadeva's Kathäsaritsögara in the stories of Siva-
varman and Vararudii (Tawney-Penzer, Ocean of Story I 51—54), where a favorite
minister, being condemned to death by the king on a false charge in a hasty fit
of anger, is hidden away by the fellow-officer to whom his execution had oeen
entrusted, and afterwards restored to favor when the king learns the truth and
repents. The same story, inspired undoubtedly by that about Adiiqar, had been
told in ancient Persia concerning Croesus äs adviser to Cambyses, according to
Herodotus III 36.
46
Medieval Islam2 319, n. 95.
47
Max Meyerhof, "Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Berinn" (text and trans-
lation), in Quellen und Studien zur Gesch. d. Naturwiss. und der Medizin 3
(1932), 40 f.

of Persia. Only those titles in the first list which are intelligible, or which admit
of reasonable conjecture concerning their contents, need be mentioned here.
The first title is that of a book called Hazär Dastän ("The 1000 Tales"),
which means the same in Persian äs Hazär Afsäneh and is probably the same
book, the one on which the Arabian Nights was built.
Next comes a title in which the second word, probably a name, is left
obscure in FlügeFs text (thus o°^)\ but the first name, Yosipäs, is very
nearly that by which Aesop was known everywhere in the Near East (i. e.
Yosipos), at least in Syriac and Arabic texts, and the fact that his name is here
coupled with another seems to indicate that the book was not an ordinary
collection of Aesopic fables, but either a biography of Aesop, in which case
the second name might be that of his master (Xanthos in Greek), or a book in
which Aesop was represented äs telling fables to some king, äs is the case
in an unpublished Arabic text which is extant in other manuscripts and, in
Carshuni writing, in codex Petermann 24, where it is followed by the unique
Syriac version of Sindbad published by Baethgen.48 Of these two possibilities,
the former seems to me to be the more probable. The book in question may
well have been a Persian translation of the Syriac version of the Life of Aesop
(Josipas in the Turkish text) which the Manichaeans took with them into
Eastern Turkestan (above p. 15). If so, the second name in the title might be
read er»**» , for Xanthos. In the oldest Greek text of this biography the
title is "Book of Xanthos the Philosopher and of Aesop his Servant," which
might have been changed to read, in the Syriac and Arabic, "Book of Josipos
and Xanthos." In the anonymous Mujmalut-Tawarikh, written in 1126 A. D.,
a Kitab Josipas is listed, along with the Kitab Sindbad and two other titles, äs
being among the books composed in the time of the Ashkanian kings. This
may have been the same book äs that here mentioned in the Fihrist.40
The fifth title in the list is the "Book of Amusing Stories and Entertainment"
(Kitab khurafat wa nazihat), which cannot be identified; and the sixth is the
"Book of the Bear and the Fox," which invites some speculation concerning
its nature and content in the light of other fables in which those two animals
are the principal actors. If this Persian story was in book form, äs the title
indicates, it must have been a beast epic rather than a short fable, unless,
perhaps, the fable about the bear and the fox served äs a frame for the intro-
duction of other fables. However that may be, it seems probable that the fable
in question told how the bear accused the absent or tardy fox of disloyalty
to King Lion in his sickness, and how the fox, in the role of physician, turned
the tables on his enemy by prescribing, äs a sure remedy for the king, the
application of the warm skin of a newly-flayed bear. This story, with the
wolf in place of the bear, appears in Reinhart Fuchs, in several medieval Latin
texts including the Ecbasis Captivi and Isengrimus, and in one Greek fable
which is preserved only in the late collection edited by Planudes (Aesopica
48
Cf. note 26 above. A tianslation of these Carshuni fables, 68 in number, has
been made by Professor Ronald Williams of Toronto, and will be included in the
second volume of Aesopica.
49
For the testimony of the Mujmalu 't-Tawarikh, see below, n. 62.
21 Library
no. 258); but a version in which the bear is the victim instead of the wolf is
found not only in the Latin poem of Paulus Diaconus in the time of Charle-
magne (Aesopica no. 585), but also in a medieval Armenian text, which is the
same in outline äs the story in Paulus. This Armenian fable is no. 96 (also
96 a, 96 b, 96 c in slightly variant forms) in the corpus of 380 fables edited
by N. Marr in the second volume of his Sborniki Pritch Vardana (St. Peters-
burg 1899). It is the only fable in the corpus in which a bear and a fox are
brought together, there are only two other fables in which a bear plays a
leading part, and the western form of the story, in which the fox and wolf are
principals, does not appear at all in the Armenian collections. It is probable,
therefore, that the Persian story of the Bear and the Fox, owing to its proximity
in time and place to the Armenian fable, and to the singularity of the bear's
appearance in the latter, was essentially the same story. Since the majority,
perhaps two-thirds of the animal fables in the Armenian collections, come
from Greek Originals, it is probable, äs Marr points out (I p. 478), that this
form of the fable was also derived from a Greek source, and that it was from
a Greek source, rather than from the Orient, that the fable came to Paulus
Diaconus at the end of the eighth Century. The building up of animal-epics
and fabulae extravagantes by the agglutinative process of stringing together
one after another, äs the adventures of the clever fox or the unlucky wolf, a
series of originally separate and independent fable-motifs, was äs common
in Armenia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries äs it was in the West,
both in the oral and in the written propagation of fablelore.50 If we are right
in identifying the Persian Book of the Bear and the Fox with the story given
in Vardan and Paulus Diaconus, it follows that this tenth-century Persian book
was a veritable prototype of the western Reynard, however different its several
episodes may have been. As noted above (n. 15), a beast epic relating to the
fox, wolf and dog is partially preserved in an Assyrian text of the seventh
Century B. C.
The last title that need be mentioned in the list of Persian story-books in
the Fihrist is the seventh, the "Book of Rüzbah the Orphan." We cannot know,
of course, what the contents of this book were; but we may suspect that the
story was similar in outline to that of Ahmed the Orphan, which appears in
Scott's version of the Seven Wazirs.51 This is a famous tale of which many
0
How these animal epics still circulate orally in modern times in the Near East
is well illustrated by E. H. Carnoy and J. Nicolaides in their valuable book, Traditions
Populaires de Aste Mineure, Paris 1889. See especially the "Roman de Renard"
on pp. l—42, which was told to the authors by a man at Caesaria in 1885; and
the epic story of the fox's adventures on pp. 238—40, told by a 12-year-old boy,
whidi Starts with the fable of the man and the serpent (= Aesopica no. 640 =
Vardan 70 and 133) and continues with the same series of adventures that we have
in the medieval Armenian fable (Vardan 133).
51
This is reprinted in W. A. Clouston's Book of Sindibad, pp. 137—141, with a
lengthy note concerning it on pp. 291—298; cf. Chauvin Bibl. des Ouvrages Arabes
VIII 143. It is also in a manuscript at Paris analyzed by R. Basset in Jour. Asiat. II
(1903) 50. Much has been written on the variants of this story-type and its diffusion
in the East and the West. Cf. J. Schick, "Das Glückskind mit Todesbrief" in his
Corpus Hamleticum, Abteilung I, Bd. l, Berlin 1912; M. Gaster, Exempla of the
Rabbis 154, 259, 320; E. Cosquin, "La Legende du Page de Sainte Elisabeth" in

variants were current in the Middle Ages, and there are two versions of it
among the Armenian fahles published by Marr, nos. 119 and 120. In briefest
outline the story of Ahmed is this: Ahmed, a foundling reared by the king in
his palace, happens to see one of the king's concubines in the arms of a slave,
and is himself seen by her. She, fearing for her own safety, accuses Ahmed to
the king of having assaulted her. The king sends Ahmed to the house of one
of his officers with a sealed letter in which he has ordered that the bearer be
put to death. Lucky Ahmed is detained on the way by the slave whom he
had seen with the king's concubine, and who does not know that Ahmed had
seen him. Hoping to be rewarded for delivering the king's message, the
guilty slave is permitted by Ahmed to do so and is put to death accordingly.
In the first two volumes of his monumental Corpus Hamleticum, J. Schick has
published, with translations, a very large number of variants on the story of
"Das Glückskind mit dem Todesbrief", from both the Orient and the Occident;
but, with all his immense erudition, he failed to note the centrally important
Armenian versions mentioned above (in the fahles ascribed to Vardan), and the
only story that he could find in Persian (vol. II 386—393, in his Supplements
to vol. I) differs greatly from the norm and is only partially parallel. Since
these Armenian stories, dating from the thirteenth or fourteenth Century, have
escaped the notice of so many erudite folklorists, i t may be worth while to
outline them here, the more so because they represent, in all probability,
something that was well known to the Persian story-tellers of an earlier time—
the texts are written in a vulgär style and contain some Persian and Arabic
words—and in a form that seems to contain more of the original motifs than
does Ahmed the Orphan.
The substance of Vardan 119 is äs follows in outline: A boy, who appears to
have been an orphan, although this is not explicitly stated, was adopted by
an aged philosopher who had become very fond of him äs a pupil on account
of his intelligence and his humble spirit. On his death-bed the philosopher
offered the boy three valuable precepts: "Give not over to evil the day of
your good fortune; travel not among the stragglers on the highway; that which
you see with your own eyes teil not to any man." After the philosopher's death
the boy wandered forth until he came to the high portal of a great man's
house in a certain city. This he swept clean and sprinkled with water each
morning for three days, after which time the master of the house, having
observed that the youngster was very charming and intelligent, took a great
fancy to him and caused him to be adopted by the king, who was childless,
äs his son and heir to the throne. One day when the royal party had gone out
to hunt, the king discovered that he had left behind, under his pillow, his
favorite ring engraved with a talisman, and he sent his adopted son back to get
it. While the young man was getting the ring, he saw one of the king's
ministers in the queen's bed, but he went away quiddy and said nothing about
Rev. des Questions Historiques 1912. In various forms and combinations of motifs
the story is still told in the East. C. G Campbell reports one version orally com-
municated to him by an Arab at Acre (Told in the Market Place, 1954, 58—62),
and another from Muscat (From T own and Tribe, 1952, 186—191). An Abyssinian
version is recorded by M. M. Morino in his Cent Fahles Amhariques (1948), 30—32.
23 Library
it to anyone. Then the queen and the minister plotted to have the young man
put to death by the king. The queen accused him of having assaulted her
when he came to get the ring, and the king believed her. Fearing the censure
of his people if he killed his son openly, the king acted in secret. He wrote a
letter to a king who was his vassal instructing him to put the bearer of the
letter to death. "And if he says, am the king's son,' or the minister, or
anything like that, pay no heed, but cut off his head and send it to me." This
letter was sealed and given to the young man to deliver. He journeyed on
the road until dusk, when, remembering the warning of his teacher not to be
among the last travelers on the road, he turned aside and knocked on the door
of a man's house. The man who came to the door in answer to his knock was
the minister whom he had seen in the queen's bed. The minister welcomed
him saying. "Rest here, eat, drink and be merry, but give the letter to me;
I will deliver it to the vassal king and report back to you." So the minister
delivered the king's letter and was beheaded. And when the king received
the minister's head from his vassal he marvelled and realized that his son
was innocent and had been saved by the grace of God.
In Vardan 120 a childless king adopts his nephew and makes him heir to
the throne. The king's minister is jealous of the young man and plots his
death by accusing him falsely before the king. He teils the nephew that his
breath smells bad and is very offensive to the king; he should always turn his
head aside in the royal presence. Then the minister goes to the king and
teils him that his nephew is plotting against him: "When he sits near you,
he always turns his face away from you; that is because he is planning to take
over your kingdom while you are still living." Thereafter the king sends for
his nephew, but the latter does not answer the call because he is afraid of
offending the king with his bad breath. When pressure is put upon him to
come, the nephew appears and sits before the king with his face turned aside.
This convinces the king that his nephew is guilty, and he plans to kill him
secretly. He sends instructions to the foreman of his iron foundry to seize and
throw into the furnace the first man who comes there, after which he
sends his nephew to the foundry. On the way the nephew stops to pray in a
church, where he spends the night, convinced that the service of God has a
prior claim over that of the king. Early in the morning the king's minister
goes to the iron foundry to make sure that the nephew has been killed; but he
himself is seized and thrown into the furnace in place of the innocent nephew.
One other book listed in the Fihnst, but no longer extant, may be mentioned
äs a reminder of the fact that many story-books of Near-Eastern origin were
current in the tenth Century. In the text immediately following his description
of the Thousand and One Nights, on p. 304, 21—26, Muhammad b. Ishaq
teils us that "Abu 'Abdallah Muhammad b. Abdus al Jahshiyäri (d. 942 A.D.),
author of the Book of the Wazirs, began the composition of a book for which
he selected one thousand night-stories (asmär) of the Arabs, the Persians, the
Greeks, and others. Each piece was independent and unconnected with the
others. He called in the story-tellers and took from them the best stories that
they knew, and he gleaned from books of stories and amusing tales whatever

pleased him. He was a skillful craftsman, and he assembled from these
materials 480 nights, eadi night containing a complete story and each story
extending to 50 pages, more or less. Then death overtook him before he could
finish bis project, which was to complete 1000 stories. I myself have seen
some of these stories, written by the band of Abu at-Tayyib, brother of as-
Shafi."52
The tendency of the foregoing digression has been to corroborate the testi-
mony of Muhammad ihn Ishaq in the Fihrist, concerning the literary-historical
badcground of story-books like the Arabien Nights and Sindbad in the Muslim
world. The tradition points definitely to western Asia and not to India, äs
the original nursery of both the literary forms of these books (paratactic
arrangement of stories on one frame, äs in Jahshiyari), and of the kind of
matter that they contain. The fact is well documented, that a rieh body of
story-lore of all kinds, orally circulated for the most part, had been at home
in the Near East ever since the time of the Assyrian kings. In the earliest
period, when literature was either poetic or in theory scientific or historical,
very little of this narrative material, other than what was epic in kind, could
be admitted into books, and what was admitted into prose writing had to be
brief and summary and subordinated to a context which was historical or philo-
sophic. In Hellenistic times, when the Greek novel was born on a low cultu-
ral level äs a story dramatically told for its own sake and meant to be read.
the number of short stories that were put into books by more sophisticated
writers, on one formal pretext or another, was much larger than it had been
previously; because the taste of those later times favored a story told on its
own account, in spite of the conventions of formal and learned literature which
forbade it. These formal conventions, by which story-books were outlawed
and looked upon äs unfit for polite literature, prevailed for centuries both in
the East and in the West; and when at last they were overcome, by the
pressure of populär taste, the wealth of story-lore that suddenly blossomed
forth into books, such äs the Arabian Nights, Sindbadt and the Gesta Roma-
norum, was due to nothing eise than the extension along its own lines into
literature of artistic tendencies and narrative materials that had always been
cultivated orally in the same regions.
It was not the importation of new stories from abroad that inspired or
made possible the production of those books, but the will on the part
of writers to cultivate that kind of material for its own sake äs literary enter-
tainment. Given that new direction in literature, that new sanction for prose
fiction, due to cultural evolution, it is easy to understand how many story-
motifs, which had been only barely outiined or briefly alluded to in the more
formal literature of antiquity, or not at all, were dramatically elaborated and
combined with other motifs so äs to produce long stories. This process could
be illustrated at length with many concrete examples. It is the artistic aim
03
Jahshiyäri's Book of Wazirs and Scribes (K. al-Wuzarawal-Ktittab) was
published in facsimile from the unique manuscript of it in Vienna by II. v. Mzik
in the Bibl. arab. Historiker und Ceographen I, Leipzig 1926, according to Brockel-
mann, GAL Sup. I p. 220. I infer from the context in which Brockelmann mentions
it, and in which it is published, that it is an historical work, not a romance.
25 Library
of the authors who employ this process, their desire to teil a story dramatically
for its own interest äs such, instead of summarizing an action in a brief
anecdote or allusion, that explains the rise of story-books in the early Middle
Ages in the West and, at an earlier period, in the Buddhistic literature of
India. In both cases the raw materials with which the authors worked were
already present locally in great abundance. There is no reason to suppose that
the Hindus knew more story-types, or invented more, than the peoples of
the Near East; but the fact that they chose to make a mudi more lavish use
of parables in religious instruction than did the early Christians, and that
their less disciplined secular literature was opened up to the exploitation of
story-lore at an earlier period than in the West, has given rise to the histo-
rically false idea, promulgated by Emmanuel Cosquin and others, that nearly
all stories originated in India and were exported westward by way of the
Persians, who acted only äs intermediators in this traffic. Those who folloxv
this theory na'ively assume that there was a kind of vacuum, äs regards story-
lore, in the Near East; that the Persians had to borrow most of their materials
from India in order to produce story-books; and that the Indians were always
the inventors and never took anything from their neighbors on the west.
This goes contrary, in part to what we well know from literary history, äs
illustrated above, and in part to a priori historical probability. There is no
reason to suppose that the Hindus were any less likely to receive and make
use of story-themes coming from abroad than were the Persians, or less
receptive in antiquity and the Middle Ages than they have been in modern
times. In all probability there was borrowing in both directions. It lies in
the nature of things that our literary documents can never teil us when
and where a particular story or type of story was first told; and it is seldom
that they can or do teil us anything, either explicitly or implicitly, about
the migration of oral tales from one part of the world to another. I prefer
to believe, owing to the greater antiquity of the first Book of Kings, and my
concept of Semitic culture, that the story about Solomon's judgment, which
appears also, in its essence, in one of the Jätakas, is of Semitic origin; but
I cannot prove that it did not pass from the inhabitants of prehistoric India
to the Sumerians and Babylonians and thence to the Hebrews; and when I
assert that it originated with one of the Semitic peoples, I am, in strict logic,
begging the question. And so it is with Emmanuel Cosquin, when he asserts
that the prologue-story of the Arabien Nights (concerning the brother kings
Shahryar and Shah Zaman) came to the Persians from India. He cannot prove
it; and the opposite supposition, that the story came originally from Persia
to India, is equally plausible.58 But even if the story in question did come
r>3
E. Cosquin, "Le Prologue Cadre des Mille et Une Nuits," reprinted from
the Revue Biblique for 1909 in the author's Ütudes Folkloriques 265—309. The story
which Cosquin believed to represent the Sanskrit original of the story about the two
kings in the prologue of the AR is found in a Chinese Buddhist book entitled Kieou
tsa p'i yu hing, by an author named Seng-houei who wrote about 250 A. D. Cosquin's
knowledge of this book, his 'docouverte capitale', was derived from a preliminary
publication of some selections from it by the distinguished sinologist E. Chavannes,
who later published the entire text in translation along with an introduction on the
author and his work in the first volume of his Cinq Cents Contes et Apologues;

from India, that fact would not by any means prove that the Persian source
of the Arabian Nights, äs a book, was translated from an Indian original, äs
Cosquin claims.54 In literary history, äs opposed to the history of folktales
äs such, we have many written documents with which to work, and from
these we can learn much about particular books and forms of books, their
time and place, authorship, nationality, literary fashions, and the indebtedness
of one author to another. But the history of the narrative substance contained
in these books is a very different matter. In that field one can only guess.
III
The Testimony of Persian and Arabic Authors that
the Book of Sindbad o r i g i n a t e d in Persia or the
N e a r Eas t
Testimony to the effect that the Book of Sindbad was Persian (or Near-
Eastern) in origin, and that it was looked upon äs an ancient book in the
tenth Century, is given us by the following Arab and Persian writers: Hamza
of Isfahan in his Annals (961 A. D.); the anonymous Persian author of the
Mujmalut-Tawarikh (1126 A. D.); the anonymous Arabic author of the
Nihäyatu'l-irab (below p. 31); Müsä b. elsä Kesrawi, who lived in the early
ninth Century and whose testimony may be inferred from what is said about
him in the books just mentioned, and in the preface of the oldest extant
version of Sindbad, namely the Greek translation from the Syriac by Andreo-
pulus (late llth Century); and Muhammad b. Ali az-Zahiri as-Samarqandi,
Extraits du Tripitaka Chinois, Paris 1910. The story in question is no. 107, on
pp. 374—376. Chavannes (p. iv), disagreeing with Cosquin, says of the book that
it is "manifestiment un recueil composo tout entier par Seng-houei ... il n'y a pas
lieu de supposer Texistence d'un ouvrage sanscrit dont celui-ci serait la version
litterale." Tne Chinese biographers, according to Chavannes (see also J. Schick,
Corpus Hamleticum II 353 f., summarizing an article by Chavannes in a Chinese
periodical), teil us that the author's family came originally from Sogdiana (part of
the old Persian Empire and later under the Bactrian Greek kingdom), that it
migrated thence into India, and, after several generations, into China. How do
we know that the story in question did not come to Seng-houei from his ancestors
in Persia? Artificially tadked onto the beginning of the main story, and irrelevant
to it, äs Cosquin observes, is another story about a beautiful young man and a
beautiful girl, eadi of whom had made an image of an ideal member of the opposite
sex and was resolved not to marry anyone who did not resemble the image. Although
the two young people lived far apart in different countries, their parents never-
theless managed to Dring them together; each proved to be the other's ideal; and
so they were married. This is only a variant, somewhat altered and damaged in
transit (like the story of the king and the beautiful young man which follows, and
in which Cosquin finds false motivation), of the story of Zariadres and Odatis, which
was famous all over Persia in the time of Alexander, äs was noted above, p. 11.
If this part of his narrative came to Seng-houei ultimately from Persia,—äs the
documents seem to indicate—why not the whole of it? On the migration of stories
from the West into India at an early date see below, n. 84.
54
Ib. 290: "le recueil persan lui meme (the Hazar Afsaneh) etait certainement
issu d'un ouvrage indien." This is a purely gratuitous and unfounded assertion.
Cosquin adduces no evidence whatever to show that the Hazar Afsaneh was a
translation, or that any Indiaa book of similar content or form existed before the
tenth Century. And, with all that, he dismisses the Statement of Muhammad ihn
Ishaq in the Fihrist concerning the origin of this and other story-books, äs "tout
gratuite."
27 Library
in the preface of his Persian Sindbad-Nama, which was written in the 12th
Century and has recently been published for the first time by Ahmed Ate§
(belowp. 34 f.).
The mention of Sindbad by Hamza occurs in a passage of his Annals
(eh. 41—42) where he is discussing the history of Persia from the death of
Alexander to the advent of the Sasanian kings.55 The following is quoted
from the editor's Latin translation:
"Alexandro mortuo cum terrae in regulorum possessionem venissent, bella
et simultates inter eos commota sunt, quia se invicem disputationum laqueis
irretire studebant. Eorum tempore libri compositi sunt qui adhuc hominum
manibus teruntur, scilicet Liber Maruc, Liber Sindbad, Liber Barsinas, Liber
Shimas, aliique eiusdem generis quorum numerus ad LXX fere accedit. Hac
ratione plures quam viginti regnavere . . . in Universum reguli erant XC
numero, inter quos in summo honore habebantur ii qui Iracam administrabant:
hi Ctesiphonte, id est in urbe Mada'in, residebant et literas, si quae mittendae
erant, ab ipsorum nominibus incipiebant."
The Statement that the Arsacid kings sought to ensnare one another with
philosophical disputations, presumably riddles, shows that Hamza, like his
predecessor Dinawari in the ninth Century (below. n. 63*), thought of those
kings on the analogy of the kings who figure prominently in the Book of
Achiqar and in the Pahlavi Shatrang Namak. This, to be sure, is somewhat
naive; but the influence of legendary concepts upon what was known in
detail in the time of Hamza, concerning that relatively remote period, is
less surprising to us than the amount of legend that entered into serious
accounts of events in the much more recent reign of Khusrau Anushirwan,
which relate to the exploits of that king's very famous, but probably mythical,
minister Buzurjmihr, äs a new Achiqar.56 If any of the four books above
mentioned by Hamza were composed in the time of the Arsacids, they must
have been written in Greek, or possibly in Syriac or Aramaic, but not in
Pahlavi, which was not used for literature in that age. What concerns us
principally is the fact that Hamza believed these books to be old in his day
and of Near Eastern or Persian origin. Nothing is known, so far äs I can learn.
about the Book of Manie.™ The Book of Barsinas (-Sanas?) may possibly have
been an Arabic version of the well-known Syriac romance dealing with the
career of Julian the Apostate and his successor Jovian, in view of the fact
that the former is called Barinus by the author of the Nihäyatul-irab in his
account of the reign of Shäpür II (Browne /RAS 1900, p. 221), and the latter,
55
Hamzae Ispahanensis Annalium Libri X, ed. J. M. E. Gottwaldt, Leipzig 1848,
II 29 f. (di. 41—42). Brodcelmann (Gesdi. d. Arab. Lit. I 145) says of Hamza: "In
seinem Gesdiichtswerke stellte er die persische Geschichte nach mündlichen Mit-
teilungen persischer Priester und nach persischen Quellen besonders eingehend dar/'
See further, E. Mittwoch, "Die literarische Tätigkeit Hamza al-Isfahäms" in Mitteil,
d. Seminars für Orient. Sprachen XII (1909), and ib. XVI 37 ff.
58
57
On this see above, n. 14.
It is mentioned also in the Mujmalu 't-Tawarikh, along with Sindbad and
Shimas, äs one of the books produced in the time of the Ashkanian kings. A Persian
story-book entitied Kitäb al-Maras is mentioned in the Fihrist (305.5); which may
possibly be an error for K. Maruc., or vice versa. In another author (below p. 31 f.) the
name is spelled Marül.

Jovian, is called Barsanus. These names may be slightly corrupted forms
of the name Barsinas, or vice versa. Jovian is the Christian hero of the
Syriac Julian-romance; and that book, composed between 502 and 532 A. D.
according to Nöldeke, was known and used äs a source book of history,
probably in an Arabic translation, by many Arab writers, including Tabari,
Ya'qubi, Mas'üdi, and Hamza himself in another passage (Annales p. 74).58
Another possibility is, that 'Barsinas' comes from a Syriac equivalent of Ibn
Shimas, whose history is outlined below. As for the Book of Shimas, it is
mentioned also by the author of the Mujmalut-Tawarikh, whose testimony
concerning it and the Book of Sindbad is the same äs that of Hamza;59 by
Mas'üdi, moreover;60 and by the author of the Fihrist (306.2), who lists it
among the books translated from Greek into Arabic. It is extant äs an in-
dependent work in ten or more Arabic manuscripts described by Zotenberg,
and we have a Version of it in the Arabian Nights (Burton IX 32 ff., Littmann
VI 3 ff.). Burton considers this tale to be "one of the two oldest in the Nights;"
and Zotenberg, who made a special study of its contents and character,01
describes it äs "une des plus anciennes acquisitions que la littorature arabe
ait faites dans le domaine de la fiction moralisante." Zotenberg further con-
cludes that it was written by a Christian author and that it came to the
Muslims from a Greek original. It contains, besides some Christian terminology,
two quotations from the Old Testament, and in one place it seems to show
the influence of Barlaam and Joasaph. It also shows the influence, very de-
finitely, of the Achiqar legend, and that again is an indication of its Near-
Eastern origin. The structural pattern of this Book of Shimas is closely parallel
to that of the Book of Sindbad and many of its episodes are similar, äs may
be seen from the following outline of its contents:
In ancient times there lived a powerful and beneficent king of India whose
name was Jali'ad. He had seventy wazirs and the chief of these was a young
man named Shimas. One night King Jali'ad, who was childless and longed for
the birth of a son, dreamed that he was pouring water on the roots of a tree
when fire burst out from it and burned up all the trees and plants by which
it was surrounded. When Shimas was called upon to mterpret this drearn he
58
For the facts here stated about the Julian romance see Nöldeke's article in
ZDMG 28.263 ff. (with an abridged translation), and his Geschichte der Perser und
Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden 59 f.; R. J. H. Gottheil, A Selecticm from the Syriac
Julian Romance (Semitic Study Series no. VII) Leiden 1906, pp. ix f.; W. W. Wright,
A Short History of Syriac Literature, Cambridge 1894, 99—101. Another Julian
romance, which may be äs late äs the seventh Century, is described by Nöldeke on
pp. 660—674 of ZDMG 28.
59
See below n. 62. The same testimony about the books mentioned in the Mudjmal,
including Shimas, recurs in the anonymous Nihäyatu -irab. for which see below,
p. 32.
00
Les Prairies d'Or IV 89 f.: "II en est de ces recueils comme des ouvrages qui
nous sont parvenu apres avoir ete traduit des textes de la Perse, de 1'Inde (hindiyah;
but some Mss. have fahlawiyah = Pahlavi) et de la Grece ... Tel est le livre intitule
Mzar efsaneh ... Tel est aussi le livre qui a pour titre Ferzeh et Simas, et qui
renferme des details sur ies rois et les vizirs de Finde; le livre de Sindbad, et
d'autres recueils de meme genre."
61
H. Zotenberg, "L'histoire de Gal'ad et Sdnmas," in Journ. Asiat., 8« Serie,
Tom. VII (1886) 97—123.
29 Library
refrained from telling the king all that it meant, in order not to distress him,
but one of the other wazirs explained to the king its füll meaning; that a son
would be born to him who would inherit his kingdom, after he himself had
lived a long life, and that this son would transgress all his ordinances and
violently oppress his subjects. Thereafter Shimas and six other wazirs seek
to encourage the king, each in turn, by praising him and telling a story. When
the son is born great care is taken with his education, and this is described
at some length. The method of instruction is much like that employed by
Sindbad. The prince becomes a master of all the arts and sciences at the
age of twelve. Shimas exhibits the boy's wisdom to the king and the assembled
sages by asking him a series of questions, to which he gives able replies.
Then the prince asks questions of Shimas, and is afterwards questioned by
one of the sages in this fashion: What is the best of this world's goods? What
is the best kind of lie, though all kinds are foul? What kind of truthfulness
is foul, though all kinds are fair? What is the foulest of foul-
nesses? Who is the most foolish of men? This style of questioning is con-
spicuous in a number of extant Pahlavi books and in Sindbad, and the whole
scene resembles the king's questioning of his son in the latter. On his
death-bed King Jali'ad urges his son to cleave fast to ten precepts äs a guide
for action throughout his life, and, when these have been stated, he adds
ten more. These decalogues remind one of the ten propositions of wisdom
which Sindbad wrote on the wall of his house for the instruction of his royal
pupil. When, after the death of his father, the prince, Wird Khan, comes
to the throne, he rules wisely and justly for a time but soon gives himself
up to private indulgence with his women, neglecting all the affairs of state
and ignoring the interests of his subjects. The latter appeal to Shimas, äs chief
of the wazirs, to remonstrate with the king, and to persuade him, if possible,
to attend to his duties and to give audience to his subjects. The king listens
patiently to the pleading of Shimas, who illustrates his point with a story,
and agrees to give his people an audience next moraing; but in the meantime
his favorite wife, also making use of a story, dissuades him from doing so,
claiming that Shimas and his fellow wazirs have no interest in his welfare
and that he is a fool to take Orders from them. After that Shimas and the
king's favorite wife take turns in telling stories to the king, äs in Sindbad,
and he dianges his mind and purpose after hearing each plea. In this way
six stories are introduced. In the end, when his subjects are threatening to
rebel, Wird Khan follows the advice given him by his favorite wife and
treacherously puts to death all his wazirs and all the principal men of the
realm, including Shimas. When a powerful king of India learns of this, he
challenges Wird Khan to build him a castle in the midst of the sea, threaten-
ing to make conquest of his now weak and defenseless kingdom unless he
can solve the problem by building the castle. Wird Khan is in great trouble
and profoundly regrets having killed Shimas and his other wise men. While
wandering about the city in disguise, he overhears two young boys discussing
the national calamity. One of these, who proves to be the son of Shimas, is
äs wise and preternaturally clever äs his father, and this boy, about twelve

years old, drafts a reply to the enemy king's challenge, which saves the
Situation. Thereafter Ihn Shimas becomes the king's chief minister and Wird
Khan, following his advice, rules wisely, having learned a great lesson about
the evils of women from his young minister, whom he loves and trusts.
Probably no one of his day knew more about Persian history, or was more
critical in dealing with it than the Persian Hamza of Isfahan. Al-Birüni cites
him frequently and with great respect, explaining what his calculations were
and where he got his Information. He is also one of the principal sources used
by the Persian author of the Mujmalu t-Tawarikh. The latter's Statement
concerning the books written in the time of the Ashkanian kings includes
the Book of Sindbad and is the same in substance äs that of Hamza, except
that the Book of is listed in place of the Book of Barsinas.62 It is
evidence of conscious discrimination on the part of Hamza, that he does not,
like Mas'üdi and the author of the Fihrist, mention Kalilah and Dimnah along
with Sindbad; he knew that the former was not Persian in origin, in spite of
the claims made for it by some of his countrymen, otherwise he would surely
have listed it. He does not say explicitly that Sindbad was a Persian book,
but the context in which he mentions it shows clearly that he thought of it
äs having originated either in Persia or further west.
The account given by Hamza concerning the Arsacid kings, their literary
and philosophical rivalry with each other, and the books supposed to have
been written in their time, is repeated with some interesting additions and
variations in the anonymous summary of Persian and Arabic history entitled
Nihäyatu'l-irab fi akhbäri'l-Furs wa'l-'Arab, which is described and its con-
tents outlined in detail by the eminent Persian scholar E. G. Browne in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1900, pp. 195—295. This rare and,
so far äs I know, still unedited book has a great deal of material on Persian
history, much of it legendary, which is found also in Dinawari (d. 895 A. D.),
along with other material which seems to come in part from Ibnu'l Muqaffa's
lost translation of the old Sasanian Book of Kings (Khudäynämak), and in
part from Müsä b. 'Isä al Kesrawi, who is cited äs the authority for the
"story about King Baläsh (Vologeses) and his two wives, the Indian princess
and the groom's daughter."63. The testimony of the Nihäyat concerning Sind-
e2
A general account of the anonymous Mujmalu t-Tawarikh, describing the
contents and diaracter of the work, the author's method, and the sources that he
used, is given by Quatremere in the Jour. Asiat. 3e Ser. Tom. VII (1839) 246—285.
The work is an abridgment of universal history to the year A. H. 520, with special
emphasis on Persian nistory. The author speaks with discrimination of his written
sources, criticizes Tabari äs being too brief on the Sasanian period, and emphasizes
the^value of Hamza's history because it contains information derived from Müsä
b. 'Isä Kesrawi. The following passage is quoted from the translation given by
J. Mohl in an article entitled "Extraits du Modjmel Al-Tewarikh," Jour. Asiat. 4e Ser.,
Tom. I (1843) 396: "Pendant le regne des Aschkanides furent composes soixante
et dix ouvrages, dont les suivants: le Kitab Marouk, le Kitab Sindibad, le Kitab
Jousifas, et le Kitab Simas." The Book of Yosipas is listed also in the same group
by the author of the Nihäyatu'l-irab (below p. 32), but not by Hamza, who has
Kitab Barsinas in place of it. On Yosipas see above p. 21.
63
Concerning the sources drawn upon by this author, and the value of his materials,
see especially pp. 201, 258 f. o t Browne's article. Since the author refers to Kesrawi
äs one of his principal sources, and since his Statement about the books written in
31 Library
bad and other books is thus outlined by Browne, on p. 216: "To what Dinawari
(p. 41, 10—15, ed. Guirgass) says about the ntethod of settling disputes em-
ployed by the Tribal Kings,'68' it adds (f. 79 a) that they were eager after
wisdom and culture, and that in their time were written the books of Kalila
and Dimna, Sindbad, Luhräsf, Shimas, Yüsfäsf, Balühar, and Marül, 'that
is to say,' adds the author, 'in the time of ^. (? Apollonius or Pliny),
the expert on talismans.' After a brief mention of the coming of Christ . . .
and the reign of Ardawän b. Asha b. Ashgän ... there follows, on the authority
of Ibnu'l-Muquaffa', the episode of Büdäsäf, an adaption of the Buddha
legend wanting in Dinawari/' To the four books mentioned by Hamza and
the author of the Mudjmal, äs having been written under the Ashkanian kings,
three others are here added, two of which, KD and Balühar, are listed in the
Fihnst äs books of Indian origin. On Balühar see note 39. Luhräsf belongs
to the epic tradition of Persian kings.
In the oldest extant version of the Book of Sindbad, that of the Greek Andreo-
pulus, written at Melitene in the last decade of the eleventh Century, we have
what purports to be a word for word translation of the prologue in the Syriac
manuscript from which the Greek translation was made.64 According to this
the Ashkanian period is the same (except for three additions) äs the Statement
by Hamza and by the author of the Mudjmal, both of whom also cite Kesrawi, the
probabüity is increased that Kesrawi was the main source of all that is said about
this group of four books, which includes Sindbad along with Shimas, Maruc, and
Josipas or Barsinas.
The story of Baläsh äs given in the Nihäyat is outlined by Browne on p. 225.
Baläsh cotnes to the throne at the age of 20. He hears of the beauty of Harwala,
daughter of the King of India, and asks her in marriage. Her fatner urges the
princess to consent, but she refuses and teils the story of the Owner of the Pearl.
Baläsh then invades India, kills the Indian king in single combat, and summons
the princess, whereupon she teils him the story of the Diver and the Pearl. Baläsh
brings her back to Persia and treats her äs his wife for a short time, but afterwards
neglects her. She sends her nurse to find out the cause and learns of the ascendency
obtained over him by a groom's daughter. The princess makes friends with her and
learns how she managed to win and retain the king's affection, after which she
induces the king to visit her again, and succeeds in captivating him completely.
He consents to stay with her three days. On the first day she relates to him the
story of the King and the Beautiful Tree, followed by a discourse on different kinds
of beauty, and on the second day the story of the Lion, the Lioness, and the Hyena.
On the third day a servant brings an insulting message to the princess from the
groom's daughter. The king is moved by the princess' tears and gives her the
groom's daughter, who is then summoned by the princess. On her arrival the groom's
daughter argues with the princess, remonstrates with the king, and relates to him
the story of the Fox and the Birds. The princess answers with the story of the
Crow and the Pigeon, to which the groom's daughter replies with the story of the
Rat and the Lark. The discussion continues, and in the end the groom's daughter
poisons
es
herseif.
* In the passage here mentioned Dinawan says that all the kings who followed
Alexander had to defend their territories against the agressions of rival kings; "and
one did not conquer his rival except in wisdom and learning (ädäb). They sent
questions back and forth to each otner; and if the one who was challenged with
a question answered it correctly, he put a penalty upon the questioner. If one of
them encroached by force upon anotner, so that the latter suffered some loss of
territory, no account was taken of it. But if this continued they went to war, and
the kings of the nations were infected thereby." No mention is made by Dinawari
of wbooks written in the time of these kings.
Midiaelis Andreopuli Über Syntipae, ed. Victor Jernstedt, St. Petersburg 1912
(Zapiski Imperatorskoi* Akad. Nauk, Tom. XI no. 1). In the Greek translator's

prologue the story of Syntipas (i. e. Sindbad) had previously been written
by "Mousos, the Persian"—Þíôéíá äéÞãçóéí ðñïÀóôüñçóå Ìïàóïò ü ÐÝñóçò.
Since the name Moses is not Persian, but is very common in Arabic in the
form M s , since the Arabs in the tenth Century knew the book in Arabic
and regarded it s a translation, since Baethgen's Syriac text, according to
N ldeke, shows some traces of Arabic phraseology, and since two writers
named M s are listed in the Fihrist s translators into Arabic of Persian books,
N ldeke's conclusion, that 'Mousos' was the Arabic writer who translated the
book from a Pahlavi original into Arabic, is undoubtedly right.65 But who was
this M s ? It seems very probable that he was the M s b. 'Is º-Kesrawi who
this M s ? It seems very probable that he was the M s b. Isa'l-Kesrawi
who lived in the first part of the ninth Century and who is one of the
two men named M s who are included in the list of translators
from the Persian in the Fihrist.** The name Kesrawi indicates that
he was a Persian, or at least regarded s such, and this corre-
sponds to Ìïàóïò ü ÐÝñóçò, Moreover, Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz (d. 869 A. D.),
prefatory verses, preceding his prologue, it is stated that the book was composed
by the mythographer Syntipas, "according to the Syrians, or rather according to
the learned writers among the Persians." No other Interpretation of the text s it
Stands is possible, and no emendation, s suggested by Jemstedt, is needed. The
text reads: Ôïõ ìõèïãñÜöïõ Óõíôßðá êáôÜ Óýñïõò, ìÜëëïí äå Ðåñóþí ôïõò óïöïýò
ëüãïãñÜöüõò, áõôÞ ðÝöõêåí çí âëÝðåéò äÝëôïò, ößëå. Since M s b. 'Is Kesrawi
was a well-known logographer of Persian descent, s well s a translator
of Persian texts into Arabic, it is probable that Andreopulus has him in mind when
he states that the author of the book was Syntipas "according to the wise Persian
logographers."
™ N ldeke in ZDMG 33.521. This had previously been suggested by DeSacy,
Notices
66
et Extraits IX 405.
The first mentioned (Fihrist 244.27) is M s b. Khalid, who lived in the first
half of the ninth Century; the other (ib. 245.3) is named M s b. Is al Kesrawi,
if we adopt N ldeke's confident emendation of al kesrawi in place of the reading
of the Mss., d kurdi (the Kurd). This M s b. Is Kesrawi, who is often mentioned
by other writers, died, according to Hamza, in 874—5 A. D. N ldeke (L c.), to whom
we are indebted for these references, observes that either of the two M s s here
mentioned may have been the one referred to by Andreopulus; but he feels that
either conjecture is quite uncertain, because M s is a very common name, and
because there is some reason to believe that the Arabic Sindbad came into existence
before the time when these M s s wrote, in the middle of the 9th Century. Neither
of these objections has much weight. It is not just any M s who can be identified
with Ìïàóïò ü ÐÝñóçò, but only a M s Kesrawi. We know only one M s with
that cognomen; and the fact that this man was an historian s well s a translator
(cf. n. 63 above), that he is cited s a source by Jahiz, who shows an acquaintance
also with Sindbad (below), and that he is a favorite source with those two historians
who teil us that the Book of Sindbad was old and of Persian origin (Hamza and the
author of the Mujmal)—all this points very strongly, s it seems to me, to his identity
with the M s mentioned by Andreopulus.
N ldeke's supposition that the Book of Sindbad existed in Arabic translation in
the second half of the 8th Century is predicated upon the assumption that Ab n
L hiqi, who died in 815—16 A. D., had put Sindbad into verse, s stated in the
Fihrist (163.10), and that this versification was made on the basis of an already
existing Arabic version. But neither of these two propositions can be safely inferred
from our testimony. Ab n may not really have made such a version of Sindbad,
since this title is absent in the list of his writings given in the Fihrist on p. 119,
s N. remarks; and, if he did, he may have made it on the basis of the Persian
text instead of on an Arabic text. The Statement in the Fihrist (163.9—10) reads
thus: "He translated (or transcribed, or adapted, naqala) from the books of the
Persians and others what I here record: the Book of Kaliiah and Dimnah, the Book
33 Library
who composed numerous works of an entertaining kind, refers to this Musa
b. 'Isä Kesrawi äs one of bis sources in bis Almahäsin wal addäd; and in this
book Jahiz teils, äs an bistorical incident that took place between King Khusrau
Parwiz (590—627 A. D.) and one of bis foremost officers, Nachärgän, a story
that is very closely modeled on that of the Lion's Track in Sindbad (first story
of the first wazir), from which it was probably taken.67 Finally, since Hamza
often cites Müsä b. 'Isä Kesrawi äs one of bis cources, it is probable that
what he says about the Persian origin of Sindbad is derived from Müsä the
translator, whom Andreopulus calls . The latter's identity
with Müsä b. 'Isä Kesrawi is considered probable by Brockelmann (GAL I 517),
who refers to an article by V. von Rosen in Vostochniya Zamyetki, St. Peters-
burg 1895, pp. 153—91, a publication which has not been accessible to me.67a
The earliest extant Persian text of the Book of Sindbad is that of Muhammad
b. Ali az-Zahm as-Samarquandi, which is a prose Version written about the
year 1160 A. D.08 Until recently this prose Version was known only from a
single manuscript in the British Museum, which was described by Rieu in
bis catalogue;69 but the complete text has now been edited on the basis of
four other manuscripts in Turkish libraries, by Ahmed Ate§, along with an
of Zahir and Bardäsaf, the Book of Sindbad, the Book of Mazdak (cf. Browne,
Lit. Bist, of Persia I 332.1) ..." The first and last of the books here mentioned
had already been translated into Arabic by Ibnu -Muqaffa'; but there is no cer-
tainty about Sindbad, and the possibility remains, which Sprengung allows for also
in the case of Abän's KD (Am. Jour. Sem. Lang. 40.32), that the versification was
made directly on the basis of a Persian text. Did the author of the Fihrist err in
faüing to mention Sindbad in the list of Abän's writings on p. 119 (where he mentions
KD), or did he err in including Sindbad along with KD in this mention of what
Abän translated or adapted from foreign books? We cannot know; but the second
of these alternatives is, in my opinion, äs likely to be true äs the first. Finally, even
if an Arabic translation of Sindbad had been in existence in the 8th Century, it need
not have been identical with the translation ascribed to Müsä; the latter may have
made his own translation later and independently. It was Müsä's practice, accord-
ing to Brockelmann (below, n. 67 a), to use more than one source in the making
of his own text, and he was accustomed to working with Pahlavi books.
67
All this was recorded by Nöldeke (ZDMG 33.523 f.), who further observed that
the same story is told by Dinawari (d. 895) in his History. In ZDMG 65 (1911) 287 f.
J. Horowitz, apparently unaware of what Nöldeke had written, translates the story
from Dinawari and comments on its connection with the Pahlavi Sindbad. Later,
in the same volume (p. 620), S. von Oldenberg contributes a short note to the
effect that Horowitz had added nothing new, and that he himself had referred to
the matter in an article on the Persian Version of Sindbad in Festschrift zu Ehren
Baron von Rosens, St. Petersburg 1897, 2—8.
87a
Cf. Brockelmann GAL Sup. I (1937) 237, speaking of translators of Pahlavi
books: "Am unabhängigsten gingen Bahräm b. MardänaSah und Müsä b. Isä
al-Kisrawi vor, dessen Bearbeitung al-Gahiz und Hamza al-Isfahäm benutzt haben.
Sie suchten aus verschiedenen Vorlagen einen in ihrem Sinne kritischen Text her-
zustellen, den sie aus ändern Quellen unbedenklich ergänzten und änderten; von
Müsä rührt wahrscheinlich auch der Text des ins Griechische übersetzten Sindbad-
romanes her."
08
Ethe in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 258. The exact date is discussed at length,
and with much learning, by Ates. in his Sindbad-Name, pp. 70 ff.; who concludes
that as-Samarqandi wrote his Sindbad in 1160—1161 A. D.
69
Ch. Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum (London
1879—83) II 748 f., Or. Ms. 155. An account of as-Samarqandi's version, based
on a manuscript since lost, was communicated by Wm. Morley to E. W. Lane and
printed in vol. III, p. 681, of the latter's Arabian Nights (1859).

introductory study of the author and his work.70 When Rieu's description of
as-Samarqandi's version came to the notice of W. A. Clouston, in 1891, he
reaffirmed his belief that this version was the source used by the anonymous
author of the poetic Sindbad-Nama (written in 1375 A. D.) which he had
published in translation seven years before.71 The order and substance of
the two texts agree in a broad way but differ in many details, including the
presence or absence of inserted stories. Clouston is very probably right in
assuming that as-Samarqandi's book was the source of the 14th-century Sind-
bad-Nama, although Ate§ disagrees;71 but the matter is of no importance
for us in our quest for origins, since the poetical version is relatively very
late and contains nothing from the early tradition that is not found in as-
Samarqandi. The great importance of the 12th-century Persian text of
as-Samarqandi lies in the fact that it preserves the substance of certain sec-
tions of the original Pahlavi book which are found elsewhere only in the Creek
translation of Andreopulus. It is only by a comparison of these two versions,
the one Greek the other Persian, each in the main descended by a separate
line of tradition from the common source, that we can hope to reconstnict
in outline the contents of the original Sindbad. The point at which these two
70
Sindbäd-Näme Muhammed b. 'Ali Az-zahm As-Samarqandl,
Sindbäd-Name üe binikte, mukaddime ve hasiyelerle nesredon Ahmed Ates, Istan-
bul71 1948: University of Istanbul Publications no. 343.
W. A. Clouston, The Book of Sindibad, With Introduction, Notes, and Appendix,
Glasgow 1884; Athenaeum 1891, p. 355. Clouston here teils us that the anonymous
Persian poetical SN, which he translated, "is known from an unique and sadly
mutilated illuminated Ms. in the Library of the India Office (no. 3214). It was com-
posed, äs we leara from the preface, in the year 1374—5 A. D., and Prof. Forbes
Falconer published an analytical account of it in the Asiatic Journal, vols. 35 and 36,
1841 ... The Author informs us in his preface that he obtained the substance of
his work from a 'Persian of Arabian descent.'"
This last point strongly confirms Clous ton's inference that the source of the poetical
SN was as-Samarqandi's version; because, äs Ate§ points out (p. 73), as-Samarqandi
was well acquainted with the Arab poets Mutanabbi and 'Imädi, whom he quotes
in translation; and because, äs I shall show later on, as-Samarqandi has interpolated
his Persian source with material taken from a contemporary Arabkr Sindbad. All
this is what one might expect from "a Persian of Arabian descent;" but neither
Clouston nor Ates. have taken it into account for its bearing on the identity of the
source used by the author of the poetical SN. A comparison of the two books with
respect to their contents, äs made by Ate§ on p. 17 and in his table following p. 8,
is enough in itself to justify Clouston's conclusion; but the reasons alleged by Ates.
for disagreeing with Clous ton are no reasons at all. He argues that, if the author
of the later metrical version had taken his s t uff from as-Samarqandi, then his version
"would have followed the same order and pattern in füll detail;" that anyone
engaged in versifying as-Samarqandi's prose must have been too busy with other
Problems to "distort the fine order of this version;" and that, because the poet
was such a poor one, he would not attempt "to diange the stories and to give
them a new order, being entirely occupied with the difficulty of finding the proper
metres and rhyme." On grounds of literary-historical probability, I should draw
exacdy the opposite conclusion in each case. So far äs concerns tne identity of the
inserted stories and their order, there is no difference at all between the two Persian
texts throughout the first fourteen stories, and the first four of these, preceding
that of the first wazir, are not found in any other version in this location, if at all.
The order of the remaining stories (15—34) is occasionally reversed in the poetic
version, seven stories contained m as-Samarqandi are missing, and one new one
is added. See the comparative table given by Ates. after p. 8. The amount of Varia-
tion between the two Persian versions is only what one would expect, when an
author of the 14th Century rewrites an earlier text.
35Library
separate traditions converge represents a stage in the history of the book
that is anterior to anything extant in Arabic or taken directly from Arabic
sources; and the same must be true of Müsä's translation, from which the
Greek is descended via the Syriac. These matters will be explained more fully
later on. They are mentioned here by anticipation in order to emphasize the
importance that must be attached to the testimony given by as-Samarqandi
in his preface concerning the origin and history of the book.
As-Samarqandi says (text p. 23, line 14): "This is a book entitled Sindbäd.
It was composed by Persian scholars. Its pages are füll of subtle points, at
which thought and reason will wonder." From here on the author proceeds
to list some of the literary merits of his book, adding (24.15) that he has in-
cluded, by way of adornment, similitudes (or fables, amsäl), verses (ash'är),
legends (akhbär), and histories (äsär), to the end that both the learned and
the ignorant may read the book and enjoy it. From this, one may infer that
as-Samarqandi made substantial additions of his own which were not in his
principal source. As we shall see, the first part of his book is heavily inter-
polated from an Arabic source which is typified by the Seven Wazirs. Con-
cerning the origin of the Book of Sindbad, as-Samarqandi makes the following
Statement (25.4 ff.): "It should be known that this book was written in Pah-
lavi. Up to the time of the exalted and learned prince Nasiru'd-Din Abu
Muhammad Nüh b. Mansür as-Sämäni, Defender of the Faith—may God
illumine his understanding—no one had translated it. This just prince, Nüh
bin Mansür, ordered Khodja Amid Abu'l Fawäres Fanärüzi to translate it
into Persian [i. e. new Persian, or Darf] and to improve the parts which had
undergone distortion and deterioration. In the year 339 (960—61 A. D.)
Khodja Amid Abu'l Fawäres Fanärüzi performed the task and translated the
book into Dari.72 But his translation was so dull, uninteresting, and devoid
of ornamentation, that, although it was correctly written, still no attention
was given to making it beautiful and attractive, and it was quite likely that
the text would become forgotten and disappear completely. However, now
that the present task is completed, this danger is eliminated and the book
has regained its freshness äs well äs its significance." The Statement that
the Pahlavi Book of Sindbad had remained untranslated until the middle of
the tenth Century is untrue, äs Clouston noted, since we know that Müsä's
Arabic version was made in the middle or early part of the ninth Century;
but it is not surprising that a Persian writer in the twelfth Century should be
72
"Dari ist die Umgangssprache der höheren Stände, also im wesentlichen die
neupersische Schriftsprache, die aus Pärs stammte und den Chorasänera eigentlich
eine fremde Mundart war"—Nöldeke in Geiger-Kühn II 184, n. 2.
The precise date given by as-Samarqandi for the making of the Dari version,
339 A. H., is mistaken; because it does not fall within the reign of Nüh b. Mansür
(354—375 / 976—997) by whose order it was made. According to Rieu, the manu-
script in the British Museum gives the year 539 A. H., which is impossible, because
it is very close to the date of as-Samarqandfs own writing. Both 539 and 339 may
be errors arisen in the course of transmission for 359. Ates (p. 10 n. 1) thinks that
it is not the date 339 which is wrong, but the name of the king; he would substitute
Abu Muhammed Nüh b. Nasr as-Samäni, who is known to have mied from
331 A. H. to 343.

less concerned about the date of an Arabic translation, of which he may have
been unaware, than would a modern Student of the subject; and it may well
be that all he meant to say was that there had been no translation into new
Persian up to that time. He is addressing himself to Persian readers.
IV
Arguments Advanced by Modern Scholars
in Support of the Theory of Indian Origin
The testimony of the Arabic and Persian writers above cited, to the effect
that the Book of Sindbad was Persian or Near-Eastern in origin, was partly
unknown and partly ignored or dismissed without being weighed by those
scholars in the nineteenth Century who had made uptheir rninds in advance that
the book was translated from a Sanskrit original. They preferred the testimony
of Masudi, which obviously comes from the same cource in populär rumor,
generated by association with Kalilah and Dimnah, äs does that of Yaqubi
and the author of the Fihrist; and this was the documentary foundation upon
which the theory of Indian origin was built. What was added thereto in the
way of evidence by which to corroborate the initial presumption consisted
of data in the text which could be interpreted, by a tour de force and the
exercise of Imagination, äs specifically Indian.
The first to argue the case for Indian origin, instead of merely proclaiming
it, was Loiseleur Deslongchamps in bis Essai of 1838.78 He begins with the
citation of Masudi, "un historien arabe d'une grande authorite," whose State-
ment, he thinks, ought not to be questioned; but the Statement of Andreopulus
in the preface of the oldest extant Version of the book itself, that the original
was by a Persian author, is, according to Deslongchamps (p. 84), "ce qui
prouve simplement qu'Andreopule n'en savait pas davantage, et ne conclut
rien contre l'origine indienne enoncee par Magoudi." In other words, Andreo-
pulus is wrong because he doesn't give us the right testimony. In a note on
p. 80 Deslongchamps makes brief mention of the testimony of the Mujmalut-
Tawarikh and of Hamza, which means, according to him, "que le Sindabad-
nameh aurait ote rodige en persan bien avant les fables de Bidpai, et selon
toute apparence d'apres un original sanscrit, ou d'apres les traditions in-
diennes." There is no such 'appearance' in Hamza or in the Mu/maZ; but, äs
the saying goes, all things look yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Apart from the testimony of Masudi, Deslongchamps' evidence, purporting
to prove that the Book of Sindbad was translated from a Sanskrit original,
consists in citing parallels in Sanskrit literature to eight different stories in
Sindbad. These stories, to which I shall refer by numbers, are äs follows in
the Greek Syntipas: (1) the double adultery, with slave and master (= II b,
i. e. the second wazir's second story); (2) how a woman lost her rice and sugar
at the grocer's shop and how she explained it to her husband (III b); (3) the
bathman who trusted his wife to the prince, because he supposed that the
latter was impotent (IV a); (4) the mutual infidelity: how a go-between seduces
78
Essai sur les fables indiennes et sur leur introduction en Europe, Paris, 1838.
37 Library
a wife by showing her a weeping bitch who had been changed into that form
because she had spurned a lover, how the wife agrees to an assignation with
a stranger, and how her own husband is brought to her by mistake instead of
the stranger (IV b); (5) how a faithful dog who had saved the baby's life by
killing a snake was rashly mistaken for the slayer of the child and so killed
by his master (V a); (6) three wasted wishes: the first two, being foolishly
made, bring opposite calamities, while the third is used to restore the original
Status of things (VII a); (7) guests poisoned by milk into whidi a serpent had
dropped, by accident, its venom (told by the young prince in Syntipas in
answer to the question, Who would have been to blame?); (8) the man who
would learn all the wiles of women (VII b).
Stories l and 3 must be of Indian origin, we are told, because they have
counterparts in the Hitopadefa. This argument depends upon the purely gra-
tuitous assumption that the , whidi is an interpolated branch of
the Pancatantra, is either older than Sindbad, or that its contents are derived
from an unknown Indian source whidi was older. The Book of Sindbad is
cited in the ninth Century (Yaqubi) and may have been written in the sixth
or seventh; but all that the Sanskrit scholars of to-day can teil us about the
date of the Hitopadefa is that it was written at some time between 900 and
1373 A. D.74 It cannot be äs old äs Sindbad by any redconing; and the pro-
babilities are—if dates and documents and the Muslim conquest of the Panjab
in the early llth Century have any meaning in this connection—that the two
stories in question, and most of the others cited by Deslongchamps, passed
from Persia into northwest India and thence to other districts, including
Bengal. The story about the double adultery (no. 1) was taken into the Hito-
padeia from that branch of the Sanskrit tradition whidi is known äs the
'Southern Panchatantra;9 and it is, according to our best authorities on the
subject, the one story in that branch that was interpolated and that did not
belong in the original Pancatantra™
The Indian origin of story no. 2 "cannot be doubted," according to Deslong-
champs (103 f), because it is found in the Sukasaptati. What is known about
the age of the latter is thus stated by Winternitz (III 342): "Das ursprüngliche
Werk muß als rettungslos verloren gelten. Die Sanskrittexte, die uns erhalten
sind, stammen alle aus sehr später Zeit; trotzdem das Grundwerk wahrschein-
lich—beweisen können wir das auch nicht—viele Jahrhunderte älter sein
dürfte." In all probability the author of the Sukasaptati in its present form
was indebted for a number of his stories to the old Persian Tutinameh, no
longer extant, upon which Nadishabi's book of the same title, written in
1330 A. D., was based.76 It is only on that hypothesis, äs it seems to me, that
74
75
Winternitz, Gesdi. d. Ind. Lit. III 291.
See F. Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed (New Haven 1924) II 19 ff.;
George T. Artola, Pancatantra Manuscripts from South India, reprinted from the
Adyar Library Bulletin, vol. XXI (Madras 1957), pp. 30—31, 9—11. The story, given
in text and translation by Artola, relates to a cowherd's wife whose lovers were
a policeman and his son.
™ Nadishabi's Tutinameh has apparently never been published or translated,
except for the eighth of its fifty nights, which contains the frame-story of Sindbad
and six of the inserted stories. This was published by H. Brockhaus at Leipzig

we can plausibly account for the three-cornered relationship which obviously
exists between the Sanskrit book, the eighth night of Nachshabi's Tutinameh,
and the Book of Sindbad. In Nachshabi we have, along with the original
frame-story which contains them, five stories in a row which correspond re-
spectively with the second story told in Sindbad by the second, fourth, sixth,
seventh and third philosophers. All five of these stories are found also in the
Sukasaptati, but scattered about singly at wide intervals and without the
frame-story by which they are enclosed in Nachshabi äs in the Book of Sind-
bad. It is clear therefore, äs Comparetti admits (Researches p. 42), that the
grouping of stories in Nachshabi, along with the presence of the frame-story,
i s due to excerpting from Sindbad, and not from the Sukasaptati, where the
stories are scattered. Comparetti believes that the five stories which Nachshabi
has in common with the Sukasaptati were already present in the much older
Persian Tutinameh upon which Nachshabi's book was based, and that they
had been taken over into that earlier book, the Persian Tutinameh, out of the
Sukasaptati. If so, where did the author of the Sukasaptati get the six stories
which correspond with the second stories told in Sindbad by six different wise
men, five of which stories, plus the frame-story of Sindbad, recur in Nachshabi?
This correspondence cannot be accidental. The only plausible way in which
to account for it is to suppose that the author of the Sukasaptati drew bis
stories from the peculiar selection of materials (all second stories) which had
already been made by the author of the Persian Tutinameh directly from the
Persian Book of Sindbad, and which were grouped together inside the original
frame-story in that old Tutinameh, just äs they are in the later work of
Nachshabi which was derived from it. By assuming that the lost Persian
Tutinameh was the common source, for the Sindbad stories, of both the
Sukasaptati and Nachshabi's Tutinameh, we explain all the data in the case
in 1845 under the title Nachschabi's Sieben Weisen Meister, Persisch und Deutsch,
but in an edition of only twelve copies. An Italian translation of Brockhaus by E. Teza
is accessible in D'Ancona's // Libro dei Sette Savi di Roma, Pisa 1864, pp. 49—64.
In general, see Etho's account of the book in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 324, and
Comparetti's Researches, 6—7. The work äs a whole has been analyzed and its
contents described in füll by W, Pertseh in 7.OMG 21 (1867) 505—551. According
to Pertsch (515), two manuscripts of Nachshabi's preface state that the Persian source
which he used, an older Tutinameh, was "the source of the Indian book" (i. e. the
Sukasaptati); but, since this contradicts what Nachshabi had said shortly before
(? not quoted), Pertsch decides that the reading of a third Ms. is alone correct,
according to which the sources of the old Tutinameh were "Indian books." P. then
continues: "Aus diesen Worten Nachschabi's können wir weiter folgern, daß die
ihm vorliegende, ursprüngliche persische Redaction nicht nach einem indischen
'Papageienbuche' gemacht, sondern mit Zugrundelegung der Einkleidung des letz-
teren aus verschiedenen indischen Erzählungswerken." How did Nachsnabi know
what the sources of the old Tutinameh were? What he says may be nothing more
than an offhand guess, prompted perhaps by the knowledge that some of the stories
in the Sukasaptati were found also in the Tutinameh. Insofar äs I can learn, no
evidence has been adduced by anyone to show that any of the stories in the Tutinameh
were taken from Indian sources, although it is not unlikely that some of them were.
On the other hand, we have strong positive evidence to show, äs explained above,
that the author of the Indian Sukasaptati took a number of his stories, those
namely which belong to the Sindbad cycle, from the old Persian Tutinameh. Since
this is so, the presumption must be, until we learn differently from a close-up com-
parative study of the contents of both books, that such stories äs the two books
have in common were taken from the Persian book into the Indian.
39
at one stroke, and in accord with the probalities of literary history. But Com-
paretti, because he assumes that the Sukasaptati was the source of the
Tutinameh for the Sindbad stories, is obliged to introduce, in defense of bis
preconceptions about Indian origins, two new hypotheses, both of which
are gratuitous and not necessitated by anything in our data: (1) that the
author of the Sukasaptati had an original Sanskrit lesser' Book of Sindbad
at hand from which he excerpted his stories, and which contained only the
second stories told by the seven wise men in our extant versions; and (2) that
the introduction of the frame-story of Sindbad into the Persian text, and the
grouping within it of the stories, is due to Nachshabi's having altered the
haphazard arrangement of stories which he found in the old Tutinameh, taken
from the Sukasaptati, so äs to bring it into accord with the Book of Sindbad!
But the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the facts äs we
have them is, I repeat, that the old Persian Tutinameh served äs a source,
not only for Nachshabi, but also for the Sukasaptati in the relatively late form
in which we have it.
Story 4 must have come originally from India, according to D., because
there is a similar story in the Brhatkathä ("mais avec un denouement plus
moral et des circonstances fort differents"—p. 107); and because the trans-
formation of a girl into a dog (here within her own lifetime) presupposes the
peculiarly Indian doctrine of metempsychosis. On the same principle, one
might infer that the Metamorphoses of Apuleius was translated from a lost
Sanskrit original. The story from the Brhatkathä to which D. refers is pre-
served only in Somadeva's Kathäsaritsägara, written in the eleventh Century,
and there is no telling how old it is in the freely interpolated tradition of the
Brhatkathä. It is undoubtedly related to the story in Sindbad, but it is just
äs likely to have come from Persia into India äs from India into Persia.77
Deslongchamps supposes that stories 5 and are of Indian origin because,
äs he claims, they are both in the Pancatantra; but the parallel which he cites
for no. 6 is not at all the same story, since it involves only one foolish wish,
resulting in the wisher's death, and even this story, one about a weaver, is
not in the oldest texts of the Pancatantra. It is in the interpolated Version
of Pürnabhadra, written in 1199 A. D.,78 but not in the old Syriac nor in
Ibnu'l Muqaffa (hence not in the Pahlavi), nor in the oldest form of the
Sanskrit Pancatantra äs reconstructed by Edgerton.
Number 5, on the other hand, may well have been taken from the Pahlavi
version of the Pancatantra or from the old Syriac or Arabic translation of that
text. This is the only story cited by Deslongchamps whose appearance in
Indian literature previous to the ninth Century can be proved; but the Persian
author of Sindbad did not have to translate it from an Indian book.
77
On the variants of this story see the long note in Tawney-Penzer, Ocean of
Story l 167—171.
78
Cf. Winternitz, Gesch. d. Ind. Lit. III 288, and ib. n. 3: "Pürnabhadra hat 21 Er-
zählungen, die in keiner der anderen Fassungen vorkommen." For the story of 'Slow
the Weaver/ see A. W. Ryder's translation of (Pürnabhadra's) Panchatantra, Chicago
1925, pp. 449 ff.

The Indian equivalent for number 7 is found by Deslongchamps in the
Vetalapancavinäati; but the original form of this book has been lost, its
date is unknown, and the extant recensions of it are all relatively late.™ The
Indian story is told äs the final episode in the life of a Brahman named
Somas*arman. While wandering about in a stränge country he is offered
hospitality by the wife of the king's minister who invites him to dinner. He
refuses to enter the lady's house, but accepts the bowl of rice which she gives
him in order to eat it outside under a tree by a lotus-pool. While he is getting
water to drink, a snake, being Strangled in the claws of a hawk, drops its
poison into the rice and the Brahman dies when he eats it. The question is
then asked, by the gobiin who teils the story, Who was to blame for the
Brahman's death? Clouston calls this the "original form" of the milkmaid
story inSindfcad,80notbecause anything in the structure orsense of thenarrative
makes it so, logically, but only because it is Indian. The same story in all
its essential features had been told in Greek by the poet Stesichorus in the
sixth Century B. C., and later, in Roman times, by Aelian; see below p. 90.
It is probable that the Indian version was derived from the Persian Sindbad.
Finally, äs the Sanskrit original from which no. 8 was derived, Deslong-
champs (p. 118) cites a story in a Persian book entitled Bahär-i-dänish (Garden
of Wisdom), which was written in the year 1651 with the aid of an Indian
Informant.81 The same story appears also in an Armenian version of the
13th Century, published by Marr, and, according to Bloomfield, in Hertel's
translation of Hemavijaya's Kathäratnäkara*2 Of these two, the Armenian
version is much closer to Sindbad and is probably derived either from that
book or from a common source in Near-Eastern folklore.83
79
80
Wintemitz III 330.
The Book of Sindibad, App. p. 264.
81
Ethe in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 325.
82
M. Bloomfield in Trans. Amer. Philol. Assn. 54.158. I have not seen Hertel's
publication and I find nothing about this Indian book or its author in Winternitz.
For the Armenian story, see n. 83.
83
Vardan no. 152, in the second volume of Marr's Sborniki Pritch Vardana, teils
how a certain man travelled about from land to land taking notes on the clever
tricks said to have been played by women on their husbands and others. His object
was to make a complete collection, a corpus artifictorum muliebrium. He was cany-
ing three large bundles of notes when he arrived at a certain city and was given
loaging by a woman who lived near the gate. She wondered what he had in those
bundles, supposing it to be valuable merdiandise, and when she persisted in
questioning nim about it he told her the truth: those bundles contained his collection
of notes on the evil doings of women and he had come to this city for the purpose
of gathering more data of the same kind. "You did well to come here," she said;
and at once she thought of a plan by which to burn up his notes. There was a large
oven in her house. She built a fire in it, fried some fish, and set them before her
guest at the table. Then, after locking the doors of the house, she put her head out
of the window and screamed loudly for help. Immediately the neighbors rushed up
armed with swords and clubs and beat upon the door. The woman said to her guest,
"Unless you give me those papers, to be burned in the oven, 11 turn you over to
this angry crowd and you'll be killed." So the man gave her the three bundles of
notes and the woman threw them in the fire. After that she opened the door and
said to the neighbors, "A cousin of mine, who has been abroad for many years, has
come to visit me. I gave him fish to eat, and a bone stuck in his throat so that he
almost died; but he is safe now." Seeing the fish on the man's plate, the neighbors
were satisfied with the woman's story and went away.
41 Library
It may be true that some of the stories in the Persian Book of Sindbad came
to the author from an Indian source, either written or oral; but this is not
certain in any one case, and even if it were true of all the stories above
mentioned, it would not be possible to infer anything from that fact concerning
the nationality of the author. It was äs easy and natural for a Persian author
to include some stories of Indian origin along with others in his Book of Sind-
bad äs it was for the authors of Indian story-books (the most important of
which are believed to have originated on the northwestern and northern
boundaries of India in regions which had often been under Greek, Persian or
Muslim rule) to include, äs they certainly did, some stories of western Asiatic
origin.84 The term 'origin' äs applied to these stories is only relative and
84
Winteraitz, Gesch. d. Ind. Lit. II 105, states the case thus: "So viele Märdien
auch ihren Weg von Indien nach Westen gefunden haben mögen, so kann es doch
kaum einem Zweifel unterliegen, daß auch manches fremdländische Märchengut nach
Indien gewandert ist." Here many examples might be cited, were the subject not too
long for the occasion, where a well-known narrative motif appears first in Greek
or western Asiatic literature and later, in a slightly different, often more elaborated
and sometimes distorted form, in the literature of India. Mention has already been
made of two Greek fables in the Pancatantra (p. 17 and n. 38), and of Solomon's
Judgment (/ Kings 3.16—28) and parts of the Achiqar story in one of the Jätakas
(note 45). In Jätakas 44 and 45 we have grotesque caricatures of the fable in Phaedrus
(V 3 = Aes. 525) about the man who slaps his bald head in trying to kill a fly and
is ridiculed by the fly for having hurt only hirnseif. In one of the Indian versions a
son Swings a 'sharp axe' on his father's head in order to kill a mosquito that was
bothering him, and in the other a daughter kills her mother in trying to kill the flies
on her head. In the Dhammapada Commentary (E. W. Burlingame, Buddhist
Legends II 258, no. 13 b) the story of Kisä Gotami, who had never seen death, seeking
mustard seed with which to eure her dead child from a house in which no one had
died, is a beautiful dramatization of a tragic theme which is told briefly by Lucian
in his Life of Demonax (eh. 25), and also by Julian (Ep. 37) who ascribes it to
Democritus in conversing with King Darius of Persia. In the same book (Burlingame
I p. 158) the story about the woman with sore eyes and the physician who blinded
her with his therapy is an altered version, lacking the wit and plausibilitv of the
Aesopic fable which was probably its source (Aes. 57). In Jätaka 481 (Cowell IV 159)
the story about the goat that uncovered the hidden sacrificial knife (also in the
Mahäbhärata; see Edgerton, 7AOS 59. 366 ff.) ist clearly a reflex of the story told by
Zenobius (I 25) to explain the origin of the Greek proverb . Benfey
(Pandi. I 127) says that the legal process about the shadow of an ass (Aes. 460, from
Plutarch) "has penetrated to India from the Occident, but the Occident has not
invented the decision itself," namely to pay for shade with shadow money and to
have one's shadow lashed. But the decision also was known in the West: Plutarch
(Demetrius 27) mentions a judgment made by the legendary Egyptian Bokchoris, that
a harlot who was suing a lover for money, because he had enjoyed her in a dream,
should be paid with the shadow of the money; and this, äs Rohde points out in a
long note (Gr. Rom.3 397 f.), was probably the ancestor of the story about the
shadow of the ass. Stories in Indian literature about adventures at sea, and about
the stränge inhabitants of the sea, are especially likelv to have been imported from
abroad, according to Winternitz (1. c.), who cites in tnis connection the story about
the gobiin women in Jätaka 196 (Cowell II 89), which is the same theme äs that of
the Sirens in the Odyssey. Another story in die Odyssey, that about the adultery
of Ares and Aphrodite, appears in all its essentials in Bk. VI of Dandin's
Daoakumäracarita. The motif of the lame man carried by the blind man and guiding
him, which L. Wallach (Journ. of Bibl. Lit. 52.333 ff.) derives from India, was told
by Hesiod (fr. 17) concerning Orion and Kedalion, and by Greek mythologists in the
Hellenistic age; cf. S. Trenkner, The Greek Novella p. 3. As Miss Trenkner observes
in another place (p. 126 f.), the motif of the story in the Pancatantra about the
Brahman who built air castles, by dreaming of the fortune he would make from the
sale of his jar of butter, has been plausibly restored by Crusius and Kaibel in a

immediate in sense, since it is rarely possible to know just when and where
any story in its elemental outlines, whether 'Indian' or 'Persian', first came to
be told. What concerns us here is the origin and nationality of a particular book,
not the ultimate origins of the folktales which it contains. These may be
regarded äs international property, whether or not they were actually such
in this or that case. As the romance of Barlaam and Joasaph is definitely a book
of Near-Eastern origin, composed originally in Greek by a Christian author
with a Christian message, regardless of its Buddhistic ideas and the fact that
the story is mainly a life of Buddha imported from India and adopted to the
author's purpose, so too the Book of Sindbad could be strictly Persian in
origin, qua book, even if it contained a great deal more Indian thought and
substance than anyone has yet succeeded, despite mudi willful effort, in
finding in it.
Apart from Deslongdiamps, only t wo other scholars of modern times, so
far äs I know, have made any serious effort to demonstrate that the Book of
Sindbad was translated from a Sanskrit original. The chief of these was
Benfey, who refers to his own conclusion on the matter, more than once, äs
a 'conjecture'. Benfey's authority in such matters was so great that those who
came after him nearly always accepted his conclusion about Sindbad in simple
trust äs one of the assured results of modern scholarship. If they criticized
anything in his exposition of the subject, or added to his arguments, it was
always within the framework of his general theory and method, and the great
sdiolar's view that the book came from a lost Indian original remained
unchallenged. Now Benfey's perspective in this whole matter of the migration
of folktales was shaped and determined by the (false) analogy of the history
of the Pancatantra and its offspring, the special subject with which he had
been closely occupied and around which his studies of comparative literature
and folklore revolved. He, and his many followers, looked at all stories and
story-books through glasses deeply colored with the analogy of Kaliiah and
Dimnah; although that book's history, instead of typifying the history of other
Indian story-books, is actually, so far äs we know, unique. It owed its fame
in the Muslim world of Masudi's time to its rarity äs a story-book imported
from India. If other such books, translated from Sanskrit Originals, had been
known in the Near East we should certainly have heard about them, considering
that the Indian origin of Kalilah and Dimnah is proclaimed explicitly in
innumerable Arabic, Greek, Persian, and other copies of the book.
fragment of a comedy of Epidiarmus, the Chytrae; and the same theme is implicit
in the soliloquy of Gripus in the Rudens of Plautus. In Jätaka 67 (Cowell I 83; also
in the Rämäyana, see Pisdiel in Hermes 28. 465 f.) it is related that a woman who
was given the choice of having the life of one of three condemned prisoners saved,
her husband, her son, and her brother, diose to save her brother's life on the ground
that she might hope to have another husband and another son, bjut not another
brother, because her parents were dead. This story had already been told about the
wife of Intaphernes by Herodotus (III 119), and Nöldeke (Hermes 29.155 f.) is
undoubtedly right in regarding it äs Persian in origin. With Herodotus it seems to be
a novelty reported among the wonders of the East; further, see Winternitz op. dt.
II 105 and Trenkner 75. The influence of Greek writings upon the form and
substance of the Milindapanha, wherein the Greek king Milinda (Menander)
questions the Buddhist sage Nagasena, is described below in n. 134.
43 Library
What Benfey had to say in support of his conjecture about Sindbad was set
forth in three successive publications, äs follows: (1) an article in the M alanges
Asiatiques tiros du Bulletin historico-philologique de l'Acad. Imp. des Sciences
de St. Petersbourg, Tom. III (1857) pp. 170—203 (on Sindbad only 188 ff.)
under the title "Nachweisung einer buddhistischen Recension und mongoli-
schen Bearbeitung der indischen Sammlung von Erzählungen, welche unter
dem Namen Vetalapancavin9ati . . . bekannt sind. Zugleich einige Bemer-
kungen über das indische Original der zum Kreise der 'Sieben weisen Meister*
gehörigen Sdiriften;"(2) at various places in his introduction to UiePancatantra,
Vol. I, 1859; and (3) an article in Orient und Occident, III (1864) 171—183,
entitled "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Verbreitung der indischen Sammlungen
von Fabeln und Erzählungen; ursprüngliche Grundlage der Sieben Weisen
Meister."
Benfey, like Deslongchamps, prefers the testimony of Masudi to that of all
others, because it teils him what he wants to believe: "dass das Original wirk-
lich aus Indien stamme ist schon nach Masudi's Angabe vernünftigerweise
kaum zu bezweifeln."85 On the contrary, we have very good reason to doubt
Masudi's Statement by itself and on the face of it, in view of the mythistorial
context in which it is made, äs was explained above at the beginning of this
essay. The willful nature of Benfey's procedure is apparent from the way in
which he brushes off the testimony of other witnesses. He completely ignores
that of Andreopulus in the oldest extant version, not even mentioning it;
and his efforts to discredit Hamza are predicated upon the assumption that
the approximate date given by that writer for the composition of the Book of
Sindbad (along with some 70 other books), namely in the period of the
Arsacid kings (c. 250 B. C.—A. D. 230), is a calculation made on the basis
of Masudi's chronology of the mythical Indian kings.85 According to this Inter-
pretation, Hamza supposed that many story-books were written in the Helle-
nistic age, not because this was historically true, äs we know and äs the
author of the Fihrist knew, but only because he had learned from Masudi
or the latter's source that 'Sindbad' wrote in the reign of King Kurush, which
would be, by Masudi's Indian chronology, some 300 years or more after
Alexander. But there is not the slightest evidence to show that Hamza had
any acquaintance with Masudi's fantastic account of the Indian kings and
their books, or that he would have paid any attention to it if he had known it.
Hamza was a Persian by birth who had made a special study of Preislamic
history in the Near East, and his approach to the subject is thoroughly critical.
Unlike Masudi he mentions no mythical kings in this period, and he cites the
principal sources from which his Information was derived. These include,
among others, Müsä b. 'Isä Kesrawi, who was probably the man who translated
Sindbad from Pahlavi into Arabic; but he makes no mention of Masudi, and
Benfey's assumption that he reckoned with that writer's Indian chronology
is not only arbitrary, but also extremely improbable in the light of what we
know about Hamza's methods.86 Benfey's aoquaintance with the testimony
85
86
Malanges p. 190.
Cf. note 55.

of Hamza seems to depend upon the short note about it in Deslongchamps
(p. 81), to which alone he refers äs bis source. He makes no reference to the
text of Hamza himself, which had been published some ten years previously
by J. M. E. Gottwaldt; and the probabilities are that he had never seen it.
His knowledge of what the Fihrist says comes from Hammer von Purgstall's
quotations from that book in his review of Deslongchamps, and is accurately
reported; but he fails to mention Hammer by name and the opinion expressed
by that well-known Orientalist, in Opposition to Deslongchamps, that the
Book of Sindbad originated in Persia.87
In support of his belief that the Book of Sindbad was translated from a lost
Sanskrit original Benfey repeats the argument made by Deslongchamps that
many of the stories recur in (later) Indian collections, "speciell in den ver-
schiedenen Recensionen des Pantschatantra, der Qukasaptati, und der Veta-
lapancavinsati." This argument has no value because, äs we noted above, the
priority of the Indian stories cannot be proved, and even if it were proved,
it would not be possible to infer with any safety from that fact that the book
was written originally in India, rather than in Persia. Would Benfey and his
disciples maintain that stories of Indian origin were never taken over singly
into the story-books of the Near East? Obviously not. In order to show that
the Book of Sindbad was originally an Indian rather than a Persian book, it
would be necessary to find in antecedent Indian literature, not merely a
number of isolated stories which had been taken into the Persian Sindbad, but
the underlying frame-story itself told in similar style and augmented by at
least a few of the stories which it was meant to contain; but this is just what
neither Benfey nor any of his followers have been able to find. They have
failed to produce any cogent evidence in favor of their preconceived theory;
and, instead of admitting their failure and opening their eyes to an abundance
of historical evidence on the other side, they grasp at straws in the effort
to prove a proposition that cannot be proved.
The remainder of Benfey's arguments may be grouped under three heads
for convenience in describing them: (1) the ingenious inferences which he
draws from the names Kurush, Sindbad, India etc. in the various extant
versions of Sindbad and in Masudi; (2) his discovery that the frame-story in
Sindbad is based on an Indian story about the Buddhist emperor AsOka, and
that the Book of Sindbad was therefore Buddhist in origin; and (3) what he
infers from the fact, first pointed out by himself, that the introduction of the
story in Sindbad is very much the same äs the introduction to the Pancatantra
87
J. Hammer von Purgstall in Jahrbüdier der Literatur (Vienna) Bd. 90 (1840)
p. 67 f.: "Wir glauben dass dasselbe [Book of Sindbad] eben sowohl als die Tausend
und Eine Nadit persischen Ursprungs, wiewohl das Fihrist den indisdien für wahr-
scheinlicher hält. Unsere Meinung fusst sidi nicht nur auf den Rahmen, sondern auch
auf den Namen, welcher zwar allgemein Sendabad oder Sendabar (nach der Analogie
des griech. Syntipas) geschrieben wird, aber weit wahrscheinlicher Sindbad lauten
muss, wie der des berühmten Seereisenden der 1001 Nacht Von einem indischen
Sindbad als einer geschichtlichen Person ist bisher nichts bekannt [here he lists some
Persians named Sindbad; cf. below p. 48] ... Sindbad ist also ein altpersischer Prinz
der zweiten Dynastie der alten persischen Könige, und der Name selbst, Sindbad
d. i. Sindwind (Wind aus der Landschaft Sind) ist persisch."
45 Library
in the Sanskrit text äs we know it to-day, and that one of these two intro-
ductions must surely have been based on the other. This last point is important
and deserves our careful attention; but the other two, unfortunately, require
more space for their exposition than they are worth äs arguments.
Benfey believes that what Masudi says about the king Kurush in Sindbad
was based entirely upon the mention of that king and bis identity and
character in the Book of Sindbad itself; and this, I think, is true in the light
of the context in which Masudi speaks.88 Beyond this, Benfey conjectures,
on the basis of a misspelling in the Hebrew version, which he mistakenly
assumes to be äs old and faithful to the original äs the Greek version,89 that
the name äs given in the Persian translation from the Sanskrit was Kai-Kurush,
this being Persian for King Kurush, which in turn was an error for King
Kuru in the Sanskrit original. It may be granted that the name Kurush
could easily have arisen in transmission from Kuru, but why must we
suppose that it did? The real, but unmentioned, reason is that an Indian
king by that name is wanted in the story of Sindbad in order to prove (äs
it would not prove) that the book was of Indian origin; but the reason given
by Benfey is äs follows: "So wie der Name Kurush an den berühmten indi-
schen König Kuru erinnert, welcher, als Stammvater der Kuruiden und Pan-
duiden, welcher an der Spitze der indischen Heldensage steht, so auch diese
Charakteristik, zumal wenn man noch die entsprechenden Stellen in der
hebräischen, der poetischen persischen und der arabischen [but not the Creek
or Syriac] Bearbeitung vergleicht, an indischen Mitteilungen über Kuru."
Masudi, äs here quoted by Benfey, says of Kurush that he introduced among
the Indians some new observances which were better suited to the needs of
bis time and which represented a departure from the beliefs of his ancestors.
Benfey does not claim, and I do not know, that anything of the kind was
attributed also by the Hindus to Kuru; but I suppose that a king who takes
the trouble to reform the mores of his people is a good king, and that this
is one of the points of resemblance that Benfey finds between Kurush and
Kuru. No less remarkable is the similarity which Benfey finds between the
characteristics of King Kurush äs described in the Seven Wazirs and in the
Hebrew version of Sindbad on the one band, and those of Kuru äs described
in the Mahäbhärata on the other. Both kings, it seems, are represented äs
having been wise, just, valiant in war and interested in the welfare of their
people, and these qualities are peculiarly Indian, forsooth, because they are
predicated of Kuru in the Mahäbhärata. No one writing in the Near East,
so Benfey seems to imply, would have imagined an ideal king of this kind,
named Cyrus, äs a character in a story-book. The name and character of the
88
Melanges 190. As was noted above (p. 4), Masudi in another place, where
he is discussing Persian history, refers to Kurush (= Cyrus the Great) äs one of the
early
89
kings of Persia.
In Benfey's day neither the original Greek translation of Andreopulus was
known, nor the date of its composition; and the Syriac version, representing in large
measure the text from which the Greek version was made, nad not yet been
published. That the Hebrew version, to which Benfey often appeals, is a freely
interpolated and rewritten version of a relatively late Arabic form typified by the
Seven Wazirs will be demonstrated below in chapter V.

king in Sindbad recalls analogies in Sanskrit literature which "zu Masudi's
Zeit viel zu unbekannt war, als dass sie ein andres Volk zu selbständigen Er-
findungen benutzen können—so spricht schon dies mit grösster Wahrschein-
lichkeit für die Existenz eines indischen Originals des Sindbad." Benfey's
premise, that the ideal virtues which he mentions were ascribed to Kurush
in the original Sindbad, is probably false; because they are absent in the
Graeco-Syriac tradition, and the Hebrew and Arabic texts in which he finds
them belong to a late form of the book which is inflated at the beginning with
mudh otiose and unoriginal matter. But even if the premise were true, the
conclusion drawn from it, that such virtues would not be ascribed to any
legendary king other than Kuru of India, is absolutely false. Those same
virtues had been prescribed for the ideal king by many writers in the Near
East ever since the time of Alexander, and any idealized king in a story-
book was bound to have them, regardless of his nationality. Virtue is not an
Indian invention.
Benfey (Mel. 191), followed by Comparetti, argues at some length, on the
basis of Statements made in the later versions of Sindbad, that the king in
the original book was represented äs a king of India, from which he infers
that the book must have been written in India. But the mention of a 'king
of India' in story-books occurs more frequently and is more to be expected
in books written outside the borders of India, especially in the geographically
imaginative world of the Muslims, who often speak about a 'king of India',
than in books written in India. In the latter we read about kings who are
assumed to be Indian and have Indian names, but whose realms or places
of residence, if mentioned at all, are usually said to be in this or that region
or city of what we, but not they, speak of äs 'India'. The calculations by
which Benfey convinces himself and his followers that the king in the original
Book of Sindbad was said to be Indian—a proposition which, if true, would do
more to refute his theory of Indian origin than to confirm it—are based on
Statements made at the beginning of the Hebrew version (12th or 13th cent.)
and of that of Nachshabi in the Tutiname (1330 A. D.), which agree with
Masudi. The testimony of the oldest extant version, the Greek, according to
which Küros was a king of Persia, is rejected by Benfey on the ground that this
Statement is made only in the preface and that the name of the realm is
nowhere mentioned in the text proper. The king's name, he says, is often
omitted in stories of the Sindbad cycle (an indication of its non-Indian origin),
but the realm is duly mentioned everywhere except in the Greek, and it was
just like the Greek author to suppress it. It must have been Indial Benfey
was not acquainted with the old Spanish version, in which the king is said to
have lived in Judea (translated "India" by Comparetti, with no comment on
the text); and he makes no mention either of Habicht's text of the Seven
Wazirs, where the king rules in China, nor of J. Scott's version of the same
book, in which neither the king nor his realm are named.90 The Persians were
quite äs self-centered in their outlook äs the Hindus "All roads lead tc
Isfahan," äs their proverb says. It is quaintly observed by Herodotus (I 134),
concerning the Persians of his day, that their respect for other nations varied
47 Library
inversely with the distance by which those nations were separated from
themselves. Allowing for exaggeration, this seems to be true in a broad way
of the cultural outlook of Persians in early medieval times, especially before
the Arab conquest. Their way of idealizing a character is to represent him äs
being far away on the horizon of time, but not of geographical distance. So,
when a Persian author speaks of a f amous or ancient king without naming bis
nationality, it goes without saying that a king of his own country is meant.
It would have been superfluous for the author of a Persian original to teil us
that Cyrus or Bahram GUT ruled in Persia, at least in a story-book. That is
probably why the name of the realm is not mentioned in the text of either
the Greek or the Syriac version.
Sindbäd U^) is most probably, äs Nöldeke pointed out,91 a slightly
altered form of the old Iranian name Sunbäd (or Sunfädh), which was pro-
nounced Sumbäd or Sumbät, according to Justi,92 and which appears in
Armenian äs Smbat. Justi lists some 61 persons of Armenian and Persian
nationality who bore this name. Among these is a legendary Persian hero
mentioned in the Garshäsp-näma (A. D. 1066) of the epic poet Asadi the
Younger,98 and Sinbädh the Magian of Nishapur, who led a rebellion against
the Caliph al-Mansür in 755 A. D.94 Nöldeke says, further, that we may
perhaps see in "Sindbadh Sohn des Bistasp, Sohnes des Lohräsp, welcher die
Befestigung des Alanan-Passes (des Passes von Dariel)*angelegt hat, Jaq. I 351,
13, einen vielleicht historischen Sempat, wie manche Armenier heissen."95 The
vocalization seems to be iincertain, and different scholars transliterate the
name differently. Vuller's lexicon gives kiflu» and ^uli , and the article
in Steingass reads " J^- sambäd, thought, reflection, name of a magician;—
sumbäd, name of a champion of Iran." The corruption of Sunbäd to Sindbäd
probably came about, äs P. Casanova explains,96 through association with the
word Sind, the name of the country along the Indus River. This was also
called Hind by the Arabs, and accordingly we have the name Hindbäd (the
90
In what is probably the oldest and least interpolated Arabic form of the story
that we have, namely the text recently published by Ate§ (see below p. 61 f.), which
is of the type of the Seven Wazirs, the king is called "a king of kings of the Persians"
(p. 348, line 7), and his wife (ib. 349. 4) was "of the daughters of Khusrau." All that
this91 means is that the Arab writer understood that Kurusn was a king of Persia.
92
ZDMG 33.525.
98
F. Justi, Iranisches Namenbuch, Marburg 1895, p. 314.
E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia II 273; E the in Geiger-Kühn,
Grundriss
94
II 233 f.
95
Browne op. dt. l 313 f.
Op. dt. 535. Yaqut, Mujamul Buldän, ed. F. Wüstenfeld (Leipzig 1866) I
351.12—14: "This fortress is called the fortress of the pass of Alan. A king of kings
of the ancient Persians built it, whose name was Sindbadh, son of Bushtäsf,
son of Luhräsf. And he established in it men to ward off the Aläni from entrance
into the mountain of al-Qabqa." A "king of the kings of Persia" named Sindbad is
mentioned in the AR (fifth night, Burton I, 50 ff.); and the story there told about him,
how his falcon saved him from drinking serpent-poison, which he mistook for
water, is cognate with the Greek story told by Stesichoros and Aelian about the
eagle and the poisoned reapers (below p. 90), and in the Book of Sindbad about the
milkmaid
96
and the poisoned guests.
P. Casanova, Notes sur les Voyages de Sindbäd le Mann, in Memoires de
l'Institut d'Archeologie Orientale, Le Caire (Imprimerie de l'Institut Frangais
d'Archoologie Orientale) 1921, p. 60.

porter) for Sindbad äs a variant in the story of Sindbad the Sailor. Casanova
believes that the sailor's name was originally Sunbäd, and that bis reputation
äs a traveler led to the first syllable of bis name being understood by folk-
etymology äs Sind. After that, other persons named Sunbäd might be called
Sindbäd. The name is thus very easily and naturally understood äs a modi-
fication of Sunbäd, and no one looking at the simple facts in the matter would
doubt its Persian origin.
But Benfey did not want this name to be Persian. He reckoned that it was
Sanskrit in origin only because, according to bis foregone conclusion and
that of others, the Persian Book of Sindbad was translated from a Sanskrit
original. He explained Sindbad äs a reflex of the Sanskrit Siddhapati, meaning
Master of the Siddhas (i. e. Wise Men), which would be appropriate to the
role played by Sindbad äs the best of philosophers.97 That is a possible
etymology when one assumes that the original book was Indian; but it has
no value whatever äs an argument in support of that thesis. The name of
a wise man, a king, or any other character in a Near-Eastern story-book, is
much less often one made up to describe bis character or function — redender
Name —than in Indian books, where such names are very frequent.
If the Book of Sindbad had been translated from a Sanskrit original, we
should certainly find in it, äs we do in the oldest versions of Kalilah and
Oimnah, at least a few characters with patently Sanskrit names, and many
more characters to whom names are given than the two that we have in Sind-
bad. In this respect there is a wide difference between Kalilah and Dimnah
on the one band and the Book of Sindbad on the other; and this difference
points plainly and unmistakably to the non-Indian origin of the latter. In the
old Syriac KD we find easily-recognized orthographical equivalents of more
than a dozen Sanskrit words which have been retained from the original. These
include names of persons (human and animal) and places: Devasarman, a king;
Karataka and Damanaka, the jackals Kalilah and Dimnah; Sanjivaka and
Nandaka (bulls); Palita, a mouse; Arjuna and Bhima, Indian heroes; Bhärata,
a wise man; Gopäla, a prince; Daksinapatha, the 'southern region' in India
Asiatiques III 196 f.; cf. Pandiatantra I 12 f., 45 f., 422. Benfey redcons
that the epithet Siddhapati was especially appropriate to the famed medical writer
Nägärjuna, and that the Indian author may have had this person in mind when he
chose a name for his wise teadier. And, since Nägärjuna was a Buddhist by re-
putation, therefore the original Book of Sindbad-Siddhapati was Buddhist. To confirm
this identification of Sindbäd with Siddhapati with Nägärjuna he cites the statement
of Masudi that a great medical book was written in the time of King Kurush, and he
thinks that Masudi infenred from the copy of Sindbad which he read that Sindbad
was said therein to be the author of that medical encyclopedia mentioned in the
same passage.
By the harmonious weaving together of four gratuitous hypotheses (Sindbad means
Siddhapati, the association of that name with Nägärjuna, the Buddhist tendency of
the book, and the guess that Sindbad was said to be the author of the medical book)
Benfey arrived at what he thought was a probabüity. For some others, who were
not so reasonable äs Benfey, his result was a certainty. Clouston, for example,
reniarked, when he read as-Samarqandi's statement that the Book of Sindbad was
compiled by the sages of Persia (Athenaeum 1891, p. 355), "This, of course, is sheer
nonsense, if it does not mean that the Pahlavi work was translated from the Sanskrit.
The 'sages of Persia' most assuredly did not invent the tale of Sindibad." (!)
49 Library
(Deccan); Mathura and Mahiläropya, cities in India.98 A number of these
Sanskrit words appear also in the Arabic version of Ibnu'l Muqaffa'; and
both versions, unlike the Book of Sindbad, have many named characters.
This abundance of actors to whom names are given is a conspicuous feature
of all Indian story-books, and the comparative absence of such named charac-
ters in Sindbad is one more indication that the book did not come from an
Indian original. It is hard to imagine a Sanskrit version of Sindbad in whidi
the prince, the seven wise men, and the wicked stepmother were all left
unnamed, and it is very unlikely, in view of the names retained in KD, that
a Persian translator would have omitted them all if they had been in the book
which he was translating. In the oldest extant version of the Book of Sindbad,
the Graeco-Syriac, only two actors in the entire book, with all its inserted
stories, are given names, and both are Persian: Cyrus and Syntipas (Sindban).
Almost the same is true also, with only a few exceptions, of the extant Arabic
and Persian versions, and of the old Spanish, where, äs in the Greek, only
two persons are named.
"But," says Clouston,99 "the frame of the Book of Sindibad rests, äs Pro-
fessor Benfey has pointed out,100 on a story out of the life of Asoka, the
great defender of Buddhism. After the death of his first wife, Asandhimitra,
he made one of his female servants his queen. This second wife had fallen
in love with, but had been rejected by, a son of the king by another wife,
Padmavati, the name of the son being Dharmavivardhana, or (from his beauti-
ful eyes) Kunäla. The son was sent by his father against Takshasila, which
was in revolt. During the prince's absence, the king was seized with a danger-
ous malady, and determined to set Kunäla on the throne. The queen, fore-
seeing that this would be her min, promised to heal the king's disorder.
This she did; and being offered by the king any gift she might ask, she desired
the favour of exercising the regal power for seven days, and employed this
time in sending to Takshasila and having the prince's eyes put out. The blind
son comes before his father äs a lute-player, and is recognised, and the Queen
is burnt." Benfey introduces this story with the Statement that the frame-story
of the Seven Wise Masters "beruht vielmehr auf einer Geschichte aus dem
Leben des großen Beschützers des Buddhismus A<?oka;" and, after summariz-
ing the story, he concludes with these words (p. 178): "Es bedarf wohl keiner
Bemerkung, dass also auch die umfassende Literatur der sieben weisen Mei-
ster aus dem Buddhismus hervorgegangen ist.101 Ich enthalte mich jedes
näheren Eingehens, da wahrscheinlich schon eines der nächsten Hefte dieser
Zeitschrift einen Artikel über die Geschichte dieses Literaturkreises bringen
wird/' The reference seems to be to an article by Karl Goedeke in Orient und
98
On these names see F. Schulthess, Kaliiah und Dimna (Berlin 1911), vol. II,
notes 3 (p. 171), 8—10, 13, 14, 52, 122, 129, 189, 192, 193, 277, 313, 315, 388, 389,
392, 479, 489, 490, 493, 525.
99
The Book of Sindibad, p. xxix.
100
Orient und Occident III 177 f.
101
S. T. Warren (see below n. 111), who accepts Benfey's theory of Indian origin,
vigorously denies that there is anything Buddhistic in the book; and certainly neitner
Benfey nor anyone eise, including Cassel, has succeeded in showing that there is.

Occident III 385—423. Here Goedeke summarizes, in a somewhat more
critical spirit than Benfey, the data already discussed by others in support of
the theory of Indian origin. He admits that the testimony of Masudi cannot
be trusted, but asserts that the internal evidence (which we have reviewed
above) is sufficient to justify the conclusion that the book was of Indian
origin.102 Like Benfey, he cites the story about Asoka and Kunäla äs evidence
for the Buddhistic origin of the Sindbad story; but he honestly admits, thereby
weakening rather than confirming Benfey's argument, that "in der weitläufig
ausgesponnenen Erzählung, wie sie das Acoka-avadäna in Divyävadäna dar-
bietet, ist freilich weder von den Weisen, noch von einem tendenziösen Wett-
kampf mit Parabeln die Rede, auch sind die Einzelheiten anders als im Rah-
men der Sieben Meister."
The similarity between the story of Kunäla and that of the prince in Sindbad
is indeed slight, äs Goedeke indicates. A much closer parallel, and that too
Buddhist, might have been cited from the Jätakas, namely the story of Prince
Paduma, wherein the step-mother, äs in the Phaedra legend and in Sindbad,
falsely accuses the prince of having assaulted her and persuades the king to
put him to death.108 But it is futile to cite stories of this kind from India, in
a desperate effort to prove the Indian origin of Sindbad, when the same story
had been the common literary property of all the peoples in the Near East
since 1200 B. C. and earlier, and probably no people were more familiär with
it than the Persians and Arabs.10*
Benfey points out that the introduction in Sindbad, describing the basic
Situation from which the remainder of the action in the book develops, is
so closely parallel in outline with the introduction of the Pancatantra in the
Sanskrit form in which we have it to-day, that one of the two introductions
must have been modelled directly upon the other.105 This, I think, is true
and will be conceded by anyone who compares the two texts.
In Sindbad, King Cyrus, having long been diildless, though possessed of
seven wives, prays earnestly for a son and heir, and, when at last one is born,
great care is taken with his education. At first the prince is exposed to in-
102
He refers to the fact that stories similar to those in Sindbad occur in the Panca-
tantra,
103
the Vetälapancavin£ati and the Sukasaptati.
Jätaka 472, repeated in the Dhammapada (Bk. 13, story 9 a; Burlingame III 22).
See M. Bloomfield's article "Joseph and Potiphar in Hindu Fiction," Trans. Amer.
Philol
104
Assn. 54 (1923) 145—147.
The direct ancestor of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was
probably the well-known Egyptian story of the Two Brothers (Bata and Anubis),
the manuscript of which is believed to have been written about 1225 B. C. On this,
see the learned article by Ronald Williams, "Ancient Egyptian Folktales," in the
University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1958) 256 ff. In Greece we have the famous
stories of Bellerophon and of Hippolytus, in the Quran (12.23 ff.) that of Joseph,
and among the Persians the poems of Jami and of Firdausi entitled Yu$u/ and
Zulaykha. For the exploitation in the apocryphal literature of the story of Joseph
in Hellenistic times, see the excellent account in Martin Braun's History and Romance
in Graeco-Oriental Literature (Oxford 1938) pp. 47 ff. In a note on p. 88 Braun
rightly remarks that "A knowledge of the works of the great Persian poet, even in
translation only, is sufficient to make us realize that he sometimes strildngly resembles
Euripides, Seneca, Heliodorus, Apuleius, etc., in short, the Hellenistic narrative
tradition.
105
The Syntipas Romance, too, appears to be influenced by the latter."
^ 194 f.; Panchatantra I 38 ff.
51 Library
struction for three years with one unnamed teacher, but learns nothing from
him. The king then decides to entmst the education of the boy to Sindbad,
who is reported to be the ablest philosopher of the time. Sindbad promises,
with no reward being stipulated for his success, so to teach the young man,
within just six months' time, that he will become the wisest and most
accomplished man in the kingdom. And if he fails to do this, he agrees to
forfeit his life and property to the king. He undertakes the education of the
prince äs a matter of duty to the king and äs a means of showing his own
powers. A written contract is drawn up on the terms just mentioned, and
Sindbad, after taking the prince in charge, makes good his promise without
delay or initial failure. The method by which he succeeds in teaching the
prince so much in so short a time is a novel one and is carefully described,
so äs to make it plausible that the wonderful results were possible. It was
not a simple matter of story-telling, äs in the Pancatantra, but a method of
teaching ideas by means of pictures painted all over the walls of the teacher's
house, in which the pupil lived until the period of his instruction was ended.
In the oldest Sanskrit text of the Pancatantra äs reconstructed by Edgerton,
the story is äs follows (mostly in Edgerton's translation):106 "There was in the
south country a city named Mahiläropya. There dwelt a king named Amara-
sakti ... He was completely skilled in all the arts ... and he had three sons,
named Vasusakti, Ugrasakti, and Anekalakti, who were utter fools." And
"when the king saw that they were ignorant of political science, he called
his ministers and took counsel with them." After a few comments on what
a calamity ignorance is, the king asks his ministers by what means the in-
telligence of his sons may be awakened, and some of them said: 'Sire, it is
well known that the study of grammar requires twelve years; then if that be
in a measure mastered, after it the systematic study of religion, polity and
love may be taken up. So this is a sore task even for intelligent folk; how
much more for the dull-witted! Now in these matters there is a brahman
named Vi§nusarman, who knows all the facts of the science of politiy ...
summon him and let him take charge of the princes.' This plan was adopted."
The king summons Vi§nu§arman and offers to pay him a sum of money if
he will make the ignorant princes "second to none in the science of polity."
Vi§nu§arman declares that money is no consideration with him, "but in Order
to help you I will undertake this äs a trial of intellectual skill. So let this be
written down! If within the space of six months I do not make your sons
completely versed in the science of polity, then, Sir, you may show me the
door and banish me to a distance of a hundred hastas." The king is delighted
with this promise and Vi§nusarman begins to teach the three dull-witted
princes by means of the stories which follow throughout the Pancatantra.
Did Vi§nu§arman succeed in educating the princes satisfactorily, and did
he finish the task within six months? We expect an answer to this in the action
that follows, but no such apodosis is given us in the Pancatantra. The book
ends with Vi§nu§arman still telling stories to his pupils, who have said nothing
106
Franklin Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed, New Haven 1924, II
271—273.

throughout, other than to ask "How was that?" Since the princes were 'utter
fools' at the start, which is not the case with the young prince in Sindbad, and
since they were three in number instead of one, the task undertaken by
Vi§nusarman was somewhat more than three times äs difficult and hazardous
äs that undertaken by Sindbad. This exaggeration, and the absence of any
issue to the project begun by Visnusarman, are good indications that the
introduction in the Pancatantra is secondary to that in Sindbad and therefore
derived from the latter. Another indication of this is the fact that the elaborate
care taken with the education of the prince in Sindbad is better motivated
with relation to the frame-story äs such than is the education of the princes
in the Pancatantra; for the birth of a son and heir to Cyrus was a great
event, and all the king's hopes for the welfare of his kingdom and his own
posterity depended upon the right education of that only son. And these
hopes, moreover, were realized.
Benfey rightly inferred that the introduction in the Pancatantra is a deri-
vative of that in Sindbad, and that it must have been taken over into the
Pancatantra some time later than the reign of Anushirwan (A. D. 531—579),
when the Pahlavi translation was made by Burzoe under the title Kaliiah
and Dimnah. Benfey concluded that the introduction to the Pancatantra äs
described above was not in the Pahlavi version, because it is not in the
Arabic of Ibnu'l Muqaffa* which was translated from the Pahlavi; and this
conclusion is confirmed by the independent testimony of the old Syriac
translation by Büd, which was made from the Pahlavi before the end of the
sixth Century. It is true that the beginning of the book is not preserved in
the unique manuscript of Büd's translation, owing to the loss of the first leaf:
but we know exactly what it was, beyond the possibility of doubt, owing
to the preservation throughout the Syriac text of the initial Situation which
serves äs a frame for all the stories, and to the preservation of the same frame,
along with the initial Statement of it in Ibnu'l Muqaffae. The introduction
to the Pahlavi version of the Pancatantra, äs we see from its two independent
derivatives, was äs follows in substance (from the German translation of the
Arabic by Schulthess): "Dbsrm the Indian king spoke to Bidug the chief of
his philosophers, saying 'Teil me an example of how it goes with two men
who are joined together in friendship, when a treacherous deceiver alienates
them one from the other and forces them into enmity.' Bidug said, 'When
two men joined in friendship have the misfortune of letting a deceiver and
a betrayer come between them, they are alienated and draw away from each
other. An example of this is the following story: In the land of Dstb (Dak-
sinäpatha) there was once a rieh merchant,'" etc. Here we have the frame
of the Pancatantra in its earliest known form, which was, in all probability,
the original form. In it all the stories, save those which are emboxed in other
stories, are told directly to king Devasarman at his own request by a philo-
sopher whose name was something like Bidpai, or Vidyäpati.107 In the later
recension of the Pancatantra, which alone has survived in Sanskrit, a new
107
So Benfey, Panch. I 35, who believes that the name of the philosopher was
originally Devasarman.
53 Library
framework for the whole book has been substituted on the pattern of the
introduction in Sindbad, and the name of the philosopher who teils the
stories, here to three princes instead of to a king, has been changed to Vi$nu-
sarman.
Benfey was certainly justified in concluding that the Pancatantra, in the
form in which we have it, owes its frame-story in the introduction to the
Book of Sindbad; but the only way in which he could account for this fact,
without admitting the Persian origin of Sindbad, was to assume, somewhat
uneasily, that the story about the education of the princes was taken into
the Pancatantra with some modification from a hypothetical Sanskrit Book
of Siddhapati, for the quondam existence of which there is no evidence at all.
Neither on logical nor on historical grounds is there any need whatever to
introduce an unknown quantity into this problem of relationships. Objectively
considered, the facts before us admit of only one reasonable inference, namely,
that some of the narrative substance of the original Persian Book of Sindbad,
probably through the medium of an early Arabic or new Persian translation,
has migrated eastward from Persian or Muslim territory into India, where
it has been incorporated, with characteristic Hindu alterations and adaptations,
not only into the later versions of the Pancatantra and into the Hitopadesa,
but also into such other Indian story-books äs the Vetälapancavin&ati, the
Sukasaptati, and Somadeva's Ocean of Story. Many parallel cases might be
cited, where the core of a story, or a story-motif, is found first in the literature
of the Near East and appears later in an Indian collection.84 As Burton remarks
in his review of Clouston's Sindibad, "the course of literature would be from
Persia to India, not vice versa."10* One good reason for this, äs it seems to
me, lies in the fact that a story written down in a western Asiatic book was
likely to be much simpler and easier to grasp äs a whole, and on that account
more easily communicated to foreigners, than was a story in an Indian book.
There the substance of a story was often deeply interwoven with other stories
and hidden, äs it were, in a dense thicket of mixed-up motivation involving
theological and mythological characters and concepts which only a Hindu,
if anyone, could easily follow through and comprehend.109
The form of the Sindbad book from which the introduction to the Panca-
tantra was derived seems to have been that relatively early form which is
preserved only in the Graeco-Syriac version; because in that form the account
108
The Academy, Sept. 1884, p. 175.
109
The following Statement made by Thompson and Balys in the preface of their
The Oral Tales of India (Bloomington, 1958) is applicable in large measure, I think,
even to the written story-lore of India, in contrast with the more organic and better
disciplined story-books of the West: "The great mass of stories from the divergent
parts of this sub-continent are perhaps impossible ever to fit clearly into an index of
tale-types. The plots are rambling in the extreme. Motivation is often ^weak or
entirely laddng, so that a sensible Statement of a plot becomes hazardous." This is
true to some extent also of modern Greek oral tales, where ancient literary motifs
are often jumbled together in paratactic profusion; but probably no Greek or
western writer, ancient or modern, would allow himself to come so close to this
inorganic, essentially primitive, oral manner of story-telling äs do many Indian
authors of story-books. The gap between the oral and written forms of narrative in
India has always been much narrower than in the West.

of the prince's education is brief and simple, and none of the otiose expansions
which appear in all the later versions, including the Hebrew, are reflected
in the Pancatantra. One of these expansions, a dramatic absurdity, consists
in representing Sindbad s having spent variously three, six, or twelve and
a half years in a vain effort to teadi the prince anything at all, before under-
taking to teadi him everything in six months, in which he succeeds. That
period of twelve and a half years reminds Benfey of the twelve years which
are said to be necessary for the study of grammar in the Pancatantra; but
there is no traditional connection between these two references to the number
twelve. Its occurrence in the Hebrew text is unique, even among other versions
of the same inflated type, which are numerous; and the episode in which it
Stands is not in the Graeco-Syriac version of Sindbad, and was almost cer-
tainly, owing to its incongruity, not in the original form of the book.110
Since Benfey's time only one new argument has been offered in support
of the thesis that the Book of Sindbad came from an Indian original. I refer
to S. J. Warren's attempt to show, that, in the words of M. Winternitz, who
supposes it to be true, "manche verderbte und unverst ndliche Stellen im
griechischen Syntipas nichts anderes sind als ungl ckliche bersetzungen von
bekannten indischen Spruchversen/*111 The 'many passages' here mentioned
are only two in number. The first is not corrupt in the Greek text of Andreo-
pulus (Jernstedt 4.16—5.4), which was unknown to Warren; the second
originated in an expanded branch of a late Arabic reworking of M s 's text,
and is not in the Greek or the Syriac; and the proverbial substance of both
passages, instead of being specifically Indian, s Warren claims, was well
known in the Near-Eastern literature of Sasanian times.
After Syntipas has promised the lang to teadi his son everything in six
months, he ends his speech with these words: Üôïðïí ãáñ
ôçëéêáýôçí åýèáëÞ Ýðáñ÷ßáí êáé ôïéïýôïí âáóéëÝá ðëïõôïàóáí, ðÜóçò óõíÝóåùò
êáé Üã÷éíïßáò ÜíÜðëåùí, ìç öéëüóïöïí Üíäñá êåêôÞóèáé êáé áõôÞí äå ôçí
éáôñþí ôÝ÷íçí Üêñùò ÝîçóêçìÝíïí. åé ãáñ ìç ôïéïýôïò ÜíÞñ åí åðáñ÷ßá ôïéáýôç
Ýðé÷ùñéÜæïé, ïõ ÷ñÞ ôßíá ôï ðáñÜðáí Ýíäéáôñßâåéí áõôÞ. This means: "It would
be str nge if so great and so flourishing a kingdom s this, one enridied
with a king so f ll of understanding and shrewd perception, did not
possess a man who was a philosopher and also highly skilled in
the art of the physician. If no such man were resident in a kingdom like
this, one ought not to stay in it at all." Here there is no evidence of the mis-
understanding or garbling of an original text. The meaning of the words s
they stand is clear and appropriate to the context; and there is nothing to
indicate that the passage in the Syriac text, from which the Greek was trans-
lated, was any different s regards its substance or intent. The proverbial
requirements for a kingdom worth living in are usually four or five in number,
s in the Indian proverb cited by Warren from the Hitopadesa (a rieh man,
a scholar, a king, a river, and a physician); but in this oldest text of the
110
On the place or the Hebrew version in the transmission of Sindbad see pp. 64 ff.
111
S. J. Warren, "Het Indische Origineel van den Griekschen Syntipas," in
Verslagen der koninklyke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, Ser. 4
vol. V, Amsterdam 1903; Winternitz, Gesdi. d. Ind. Lit. III 349, n. 3.
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Sindbad story, the only requirement is said to be a man who is both a
philosopher and a physician. Why? Because, I suspect, the author was think-
ing of Burzöe, who was the glory of the kingdom of Khusrau Anushirwan
by populär repute, and who was just that kind of man, famous äs a physician
and äs a wise man generally. The author has adapted the proverb to bis own
conception of an ideal kingdom in which, apparently, that of Anushirwan
was uppermost: Cyrus ought to have in bis kingdom what Anushirwan was
famous for having had, a man like Burzöe, otherwise it would not be a
kingdom worth living in. "About the year A. D. 550," says Brockelmann
(GAL I 201, äs quoted in translation by Browne I 305), "Khusrau Anüshirwän
founded at Jundi-Shäpür in Khuzistän a university for the pursuit of philo-
sophical and medical studies, and this plant of Graeco-Syrian culture con-
tinued to flourish even into 'Abbäsid times." In this connecxion it may be
noted that Galen, whose writings were well known to those Persian sdiolars,
had written a book on the thesis That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher,
and this was exemplified by Galen himself in practice äs well äs in theory.
As for the proverb which shaped our author's expression, that too was Persian
no less than Indian. According to Bar Hebraeus in bis Laughable Stories
(tr. Budge p. 25), "Sapor said, 'The Ornaments of a city are these: a victorious
king, a righteous judge, a market füll of merchandise, a skilful physician and
a flowing river/" If any inference about the origin of the Book of Sindbad
is to be drawn from the passage in Syntipas cited by Warren, it can only be
that the author of it was a Persian who lived after the time of Khusrau
Anushirwan.
In two later texts of Sindbad discussed by Warren in this connection, namely
the Spanish Version and the extant Syriac, which comes from a manuscript
four hundred years younger than the one used by the Greek translator, the
corresponding passage, which is absent in all other versions, is indeed corrupt
and unintelligible äs a whole. The two texts have the same kind of corruption;
but this is not because they are lineally descended from a common archetype
which was corrupt,112 but because each scribe independently tried to bring
the original words of Sindbad, about what a good kingdom should have,
into greater conformity with the proverbial saying on that subject which was
current in the Muslim world of bis time.
The corruption in the Spanish text (derived from an Arabic version) extends
through some eight or nine lines which Comparetti omits in his translation
(p. 121), because, äs he says, they are 'hopelessly corrupt/ Herein something
is said about a righteous kingdom, wealth, justice, and a good physician; and
the conclusion is, "Si estas cosas <non> fueran en la tierra non devemos
ay morar." This attempt to expand what Sindbad had said in Müsä's version,
and in its direct Greek descendant, must have originated either in the arche-
type of the Arabic Rifacimento—see the stemma below on p. 64—or in the
modified branch of the latter which was the common source of the Spanish
112
Warren, p. 47, admits that the Arabic original of the Spanish version cannot
have been the source of the Greek or Syriac text, because there are too many
differences between them.

and Hebrew versions. The tendency in that Arabic source to alter the original
text so äs to make it conform with a proverbial saying which the writer had
in mind, is beautifully exemplified in the very next sentence of the Spanish
text, following the one quoted above: "I let thee know that kings are like
fire; if thou comest to it thou wilt burn thyself, and if thou retirest from it
thou gettest cold." In the Greek of Andreopulus we read, in accord with the
thought required by the context, the following: "I have learned that kings are
no different from fire, äs regards their tempers, and it is (therefore) necessary
that philosophers should associate with them, lest, by the boiling over of their
anger, they destroy some one of their subjects needlessly." Only the first
part of this sentence has an equivalent in the Syriac: "I have learned that
kings are like fire; when it comes in contact with men, it burns them." The
sentence in the Spanish text has been changed to conform in sense with a
widespread populär saying which was ascribed to several Greek philosophers
in antiquity, and which was taken from an Arabic source by Petrus Alphonsus
(c. 26): "dixit philosophus, 'rex est similis igni, cui si nimis admotus fueris,
cremaberis, si ex toto remotus, frigebis.'" This idea is out of place in the
context of Sindbad.
The garbled passage in the Syriac text, which contains Sindbad's remarks
on what a good kingdom should have, reads somewhat äs follows, except
for one word, which I cannot make out (p. l, lines 12—15 in Baethgen's text):
"For I have learned that a land in which a just king is born, and a king and
a king's son ... and flowing water and rieh men and poor men, and a
physician who is not unskilled, and firm in faith towards men, to pass by
that land, all these things which are provided for us in this land!" The cor-
ruption of this passage may be due to some reader or scribe having copied
into the margin of his manuscript the words of some proverbial saying such
äs that ascribed to Sapor äs quoted above, after which another copyist trans-
ferred what he could read of it into the text. No such corruption could have
been in the Syriac manuscript from which Andreopulus translated near the
end of the eleventh Century, because there is no trace of it in the Greek.
The second passage which Warren cites äs the translation of an Indian
proverb is confined to the Spanish and Hebrew versions (Comp.p. 121,Carmoly
p. 59); but it is not corrupt, in spite of its Variation from the Indian form
(Böhtlingk, Indische Sprüche 2424), and its first appearance in the Book of
Sindbad was in the same late and expanded form of the text from which the
first passage came, namely the common Arabic source of the Spanish and
Hebrew versions. See below p. 72. The Indian proverb names four things
which cannot be judged until their outcome is seen; food until it has been
consumed, a woman until her youth is gone, the warrior until he has returned
from battle, and the harvest until it is in the granary. The things named in
the Spanish Sindbad are the food until it is digested, the wife until she is
pregnant, the man in a lawsuit until the case is decided, and the harvest
before it is cut. In the Hebrew: the ship before it comes to port, the warrior
before peace is concluded, the sick man until he is cured, and the pregnant
woman before she gives birth. This proverbial formula, which varies in detail
57 Library
with almost every writer who repeats it, was well known in the Near East,
äs may be seen from its use in the old Book of Shimas (Burton IX 39): "There
are three things whereof if befitteth not the understanding to speak, till they
be accomplished; to wit, the wayfarer, till he return from his way, the man
who is in a fight, till he overcome his foe, and the pregnant woman, till she
have cast her bürden." Made on the same traditional pattern are the words
of Agur in Proverbs 30.18 ff.: "There be three things whidi are too wonderful
for me, yea, four whidi I know not: the way of an eagle in the air, the way
of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the
way of a man with a maid." And, I would add, the way of an Indologist in
dealing with a Near-Eastern story-bookl
Ho w the O r i e n t a l Versions are Related One to A n o t h e r

The Contents of the Original Book
Domenico Comparetti, in his well-known Researches respecting the Book of
Sindibady attempted to reconstruct in outline the contents of the original book,
insofar äs this could be inferred from a comparison of the extant versions
known in his day.113 The results of this comparative study are very mis-
leading and have done much to hinder and obscure our understanding of the
contents of the original Book of Sindbad, and of the relationships which exist
between the extant versions. Comparetti gives a tabulation of the contents,
episode by episode and story by story, of eight different recensions of the
book, one each in Greek, Spanish and Hebrew, three in Arabic,114 and two
in Persian. This waylays us in a mass of variants the greater part of which,
because they belong to the most fluid part of the tradition—namely, the
number, order and identity of the stories included within the frame-story—
are of little or no value äs clues to the contents of the original. It is only
by confining our attention to the underlying frame-story, where it precedes
and follows the stories told one after the other by the wazirs and the woman,
that we can hope to reconstruct the oldest form of the book; for that basic
story is common to all the versions and can be studicd comparativcly in the
light of its organic and aesthetic requirements, thereby providing us with
valuable criteria by which to judge what is interpolated or altered and what
is original, and how one version is related to another. As we shall see, there
are not eight or more independent witnesses to the archetype, äs Comparetti
assumes in reconstructing the introductory part of the book, but only two
113
Comparetti's original essay, entitled Ricerche intorno al Libro di Sindibäd,
appeared in the Transactions of the Instituto Lombardo for 1869. In the English
translation to which I refer, and which was published for the Folk-Lore Society at
London in 1882, the author has added some important notes in which he takes
cognizance of new materials and criticisms which had appeared since the time of the
original publication, particularly of Baethgen's edition and translation of the Syriac
version and Nöldeke's review of this in ZDMG 33 (1879) 513—536.
114
From different texts of the Arabian Nights in the story of the Seven Wazirs;
see115Comparetti p. 7 and below, p. 61 f.
Researches pp. 55—-58. The date and circumstances under which Andreopulus
made his translation are stated by himself in some prefatory verses preserved only

or three at the most; and these witnesses and their testimonies must be
weighed, rather than counted or added together.
Before analyzing the various versions of the Book of Sindbad with reference
to its frame-story, in order to elucidate the tradition, we must first catalogue
the texts which have to be considered in this connection; since some of these
were not known in Comparetti's time, and certain others, which he used,
are secondary and may be neglected for the purposes of the present inquiry.
I The Graeco-Syriac Tradition

S, the Greek Book of Syntipas. This was translated from the Syriac by
Michael Andreopulus near Melitene on the borders of Syria in the last decade
of the eleventh Century, s Comparetti brilliantly demonstrated beyond the
possibility of doubt.115 The original form of this translation was not published
in its entirety until 1912, by V. Jernstedt at St. Petersburg;116 but a fragment
of it, extending from the first story of the sixth philosopher to the end, was
edited by A. Eberhard in his Fabulae Romanenses Graece Conscriptae (Leip-
zig 1872) from cod. Monacensis Gr. 525, which was written at Trebizond in
the 14th Century.117 Comparetti (p. 61, note) at once recognized this frag-
mentary text s belonging to the original version of Andreopulus, in contrast
to the vulgate recension which was first published by Boissonade in 1828 and
later by Eberhard along with the Monacensis.118 The vulgate version,
appropriately called by Jernstedt the Retractatio, is a paraphrase of the
original translation made a hundred years or more after the time of Andreopulus
and written in a very vulg r and, at times, absurdly affected style. It is f ll
of corruptions and misinterpretations of the original Greek text and has inter-
in the Moscow manuscript. Comparetti identified the name of the city, whidi is
poetically paraphrased s ðüëéò ìåëþíõìïò, with Melitene on the borders of Syria,
and the Duke Gabriel who mied it near the end of the eleventh Century, and whom
Andreopulus names s the patron of his translation. Even without this explicit
testimony the approximate date of the Greek Syntipas could be inferred with
reasonable certainty from what we know now about the text tradition of the principal
Mss. in which it has been transmitted, namely Monacensis 525 and Mosquensis Bibl.
Synodalis 436 (olim 298). These two manuscripts have a unique series of popul r
texts in common, in each of which the tradition, independently studied, points to an
archetype written in the late eleventh Century; see my Studies in the Text History of
the Life and Fahles of Aesop, 185 ff.
116
See n. 64.
117
Perry, Aesopica I 512 n. 6.
118
Boissonade's text was based on two 15th-century manuscripts at Paris, anciens
fonds 2912 and Suppl. 105, and Eberhard used Vind. hist. gr. 120 in addition. Jern-
stedt^ text of the Retractatio, which he gives at the bottom of his pages below
the text of Andreopulus, depends upon the same three manuscripts. Other Mss. of
this Retractatio, unused by editors, are: Sinaiticus 1208 s. xv (Gardthausen Cat. Codd.
Sin.2 p. 253), of which I nave films; Marcianus 605, according to Krumbacher Byz.
Lit. 893; a 15th-century Ms. in the University of Illinois Library at Urbana,
described in Speculum II (1927) 473—475; codd. Athoi nos. 3293 and 4325 in the
catalogue by S. P. Lambros, I p. 301 and II 58. A third recension, written in modern
Greek, is represented by the excerpts edited by Eberhard from cod. Dresdensis D 33,
wiitten in tne year 1626. Closely related to this text, and perhaps the same in origin,
are the modern Greek versions contained in cod. Harl. 5560 (1667 A. D.), of which
I have a photocopy, and a manuscript on Mt. Athos described by Lambros in vol. II,
no. 4503.
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polated one nevv story awkwardly into the story of the man who would learn
about the wiles of women (second story of the seventh philosopher). It cannot
be trusted äs a witness to what was contained in the text of Andreopulus.
Nearly all the errors and deficiencies which Nöldeke found in the Greek
Syntipas, äs compared with Baethgen's Syriac text, originated with the author
of this Retractatio and are absent in Andreopulus.119 The text of the original
version was edited by Jernstedt on the basis of three manuscripts: the
Monacensis already mentioned, Mosquensis 436, and Vaticanus 335. There
are two others at Vienna, which are very closely related to Monacensis 525 ;120
and there was once one at Strasburg, which Nöldeke saw and identified äs
belonging to the same recension äs the Monacensis, although he erred in
supposing that this recension was later and further removed from the original
than the vulgate of Boissonade.121 The manuscript at Strassburg was loaned
to St. Petersburg in 1895, and thereby lost.122 No mention is made of it by
Jernstedt in his preface.
119
See Jernstedt's Praefatio, pp. iv—ix, where a detailed comparison of the two
recensions is made. In one place (p. 29), for example, the author of the Retractatio
misread (cat) in Andreopulus for (woman), and rewrote the whole context
accordingly! In another place (51.14), where Andreopulus has a line and a half of
text which is not in the Syriac, the Retractatio gives the same substance in seven lines.
Where Andreopulus mentions camphor and sandalwood (77.22) in agreement with the
Syriac, the author of the Retractatio substitutes stone and iron.
120
These are Vind. phil. gr. 166 of the 16th Century and 173 of the 15th. I am
indebted to the kindness of Dr. Herbert Hunger of the Staatsbibliothek for calling
my attention to the last named of these manuscripts, which seems to have been
overlooked in NesseFs catalogue of 1690, or acquired since that time. The text of
both Mss. is very closely related to that of the Monacensis and, unlike the latter,
contain the entire Book of Sindbad. No. 173 is the more valuable witness to the
text. Both Mss. also contain a text of Stephanites and Ichnelates (the Greek KD),
and the Aesopic fables ascribed to Syntipas which were translated by Andreopulus,
in all probability, from the same Syriac manuscript from which he translated the
Book of Sindbad; see Aesopica I 517 ff.
121
ZDMG 33.514. This was only an offhand conjecture on Nöldeke's part. He
obviously had made no close study of the matter, and he observed that the
relationsnips between the Greek manuscripts needed to be investigated. Krum-
bacher made the same mistake, influenced perhaps by Nöldeke; but S. J. Warren,
op. cit. 46, saw the truth clearly and proclaimed it positively, äs Comparetti had done
in 1882. Cassel, on the other hand, who made a detailed comparison of the two
recensions (op. cit. 405—414) saw the matter upside down äs usual, being misled
in this case by his ignorance of Byzantine style, äs well äs by the fog which he
cast—fumum ex fulgore—over the whole subject of Syntipas and Secundus, and in
which he wandered about far and wide, irrelevantly, without ever seeing the light.
Jernstedt's critical edition of the Greek Syntipas, completed by P. Nikitin after the
editor's death, is a truly classical work, based on a thorough study of the Mss., and
it is the only reliable source of Information at present available concerning the text.
An especially valuable feature of this edition is the complete index verborum of both
recensions which is added at the end. It is unfortunate that Jernstedt's edition is so
rare and so seldom available to scholars. The present writer hopes to edit the text of
Andreopulus anew with an English translation, äs soon äs time may be found for the
task: but he does not expect to be able to improve Jernstedt's text to any considerable
extent.
122
C. Weltz, Descriptio Codicum Graecorum (Katalog der kais. Universitäts-und-
Landesbibliothek in Strassburg, 1913) p. 2: "quare maxime dolendum est unum
insuper amissum esse, cod. gr. 5 ... qui fiberalissime a. 1895 a bibliothecae praefecto
in urbem Petropolim transmissus nunquam reportatus est."

The Arabic version of Sindbad contained in Ms. 29 of the University Library
at Bonn is a translation from the Greek made in 1801, according to Chauvin,
Bibl. des Ouvrages Arabes VIII 6, n. 2. I may add that it was made on the
basis of the Retractatio, since it has the interpolated story diaracteristic of
that recension in the second tale of the seventh philosopher. The third philo-
sopher's first story, about the drop of honey, is omitted, probably because it
is so corrupted in the Retractatio äs to be scarcely intelligible.
Syr2, the Syriac text published by Fr. Baethgen under the title Sindban
oder Die Sieben Weisen Meister, Syrisch und Deutsch, Leipzig 1879. This
is preserved in only one manuscript, namely cod. Berol. Petermanni 24, which
was written at some time before the year 1579. The Contents of this
manuscript, äs well äs the comparison of its text of Sindbad with that of
Andreopulus, show that it is descended directly from the lost Syriac book
which Andreopulus used in translating the story of Sindbad.123 A very valuable
and instructive review of Baethgen's book, which has often been cited above,
was published by Nöldeke in ZDMG 33 (1879). The Syriac text agrees very
closely with Andreopulus in substance, insofar äs the two texts are coextensive;
but the Syriac codex is defective, owing to the accidental loss of leaves. The
text breaks off in the middle of a sentence at the beginning of the story of
the sandalwood merchant told by the prince to the king, at a point
corresponding to Jernstedt 92.2. It also contains a number of short lacunas
within the text. The style of narrative is somewhat briefer and more succinct
than the Greek of Andeopulus, but it contains all the essential substance of
the latter and adds nothing to it. An English translation of this Syriac version,
by H. Gallancz, was published in Folk-Lore VIII (1897) 99—130; and there
is a French translation by F. Macler: Contes Syriaques. Histoire de Sinban . . .
Paris 1903.
[Syr1. the lost Syriac text which was the common source of Andreopulus
and Syr2.]
[Musa's translation of the Pahlavi Sindbad into Arabic, made in the early
ninth Century. See above, p. 33. This version, the parent of Syr1, has not
been preserved.]
II The Tradition of the Arabic Seven Wazirs, representing a rifadmento
of Müsä's translation from the Pahlavi, in which the frame-story is inanely
expanded at the beginning and truncated at the end, leaving off with the
punishment or pardon of the concubine, and thereby omitting the
important substance contained on pages 114—129 of the Greek text and
in the Persian text of as-Samarqandi, pp. 334 and 337—340.
A, the Arabic text in Ms. no. 2743 in the §ehid Ali Pa§a library at Istanbul,
which was first published in 1948 by Ahmed Ate§ along with the Sindbäd-
Näme of as-Samarqandi, äs cited above (n. 70). The manuscript was
transcribed in the year 1533 A. D. according to the subscript at the end
(p. 388). Ate§ (p. 9) believes that it represents a form of the Arabic book
which is intermediate between Müsä's version and the various recensions of
123
See my Aesopica, I 517, n. 22 and 522 f., for the Contents of this manuscript.
61 Library
the Seven Wazirs which have come down in the Arabian Nights. As compared
with these, in respect to the order and identity of the stories told by the wise
men and the woman, it is much closer to the Graeco-Syriac version than any
of the other extant Arabic texts, and in this respect it is very mudi like the
old Spanish version. Of the 19 stories told in S by the seven philosophers and
the woman, A has nos. l—14 in the same order, substitutes the story of the
Turtle and the Ape from KD for no. 15 (Thief rides Lion), and continues
with 16, 17 and 19, omitting no. 18 (Three Wishes). The Spanish version,
translated from an Arabic text, omits only one story in the Greek series of
nineteen and has all the others in the same order äs the Greek. On the other
hand, the frame-story in A, which is essentially the same äs in the Spanish,
differs widely from the Greek in the manner stated above, and it is this that
marks the whole group (Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew) äs a secondary recension,
inflated at the beginning and defective at the end. A is transmitted äs a
separate book, independent of the Arabian Nights, under the following title:
"Story of the Crown Prince with the King's Concubine, the Wise Sindbad
and the Seven Wazirs, Together with their Stories One and All."
ArN. Under this symbol may be included a series of Arabic texts contained
in various editions of the Arabian Nights, together with a few others which
are closely related to them but inferior and later: The story of the Seven
Wazirs in the Bulaq edition of 1836 from a Cairo Ms. (III 75—124) ;124 in the
Tunis Ms. (Habicht's translation, Breslau 1840, XV 102—172, Burton VI
122 ff.); J. Scott's translation from a Bengalese Ms.125 These three texts are
much alike in their broad outlines. They have the same type of introduction,
in spite of many small differences of detail, and they end, like A, with the
pardon or the punishment of the concubine. The chief differences are between
the two first mentioned and Scott's version in respect to the number, order
and identity of the inserted stories; for which see Comparetti's table on
p. 25.12e Two other Arabic texts of the Seven Wazirs, apparently quite late,
are described by R. Basset in the Journal Asiatique for 1903 (10me Sorie, Tom.
II 43—83). Both of these are defective at the beginning. One of them, Par.
suppl. arabe 2212, is only a fragment ending with a story of the fifth wazir;
the other, Par. suppl. arabe 1791, contains 23 inserted stories, several of which
are found elsewhere only in this or that version of the Seven Wazirs in the
Arabian Nights.121
124
I do not know this version first band, only from the report of it given by
Comparetti on p. 7: "Of these texts the most complete, äs regards the number of the
tales which it contains, is that of Boolak, which, however, is of no value at all äs
regards the fundamental story, whidi is so corrupted äs to be entirely useless. The
text which has best preserved the fundamental story is that of Habicht."
125
Jonathan Scott, Tales, Anecdotes and Leiters Translated from the Arabic and
Persian, Shrewsbury 1800, pp. 38 ff.; reprinted in Clouston's Book of Sindibad
127—214.
126
A convenient comparative table of the stories contained in the various Oriental
versions is given also in A. Hilka's Historia Septem Sapientium l, Heidelberg 1912,
p. xxivf.
127
Carra de Vaux, in his article on Sindbad in the Encyclopedia of Islam, states
that the Cent et Une Nuits which was translated by Gaudefroy-Demombynes in
1911, "contains an Arabic version of the story of the 7 Viziers older than the Persian

Sp., the old Spanish version. This was translated from the Arabic in 1253
A. D. and first published by Comparetti in bis Researches. A new critical
edition has recently appeared, prepared by J. E. Keller.128 The Arabic source
of Sp was similar to A in respect to the stories which it contained, but its
introduction seems to have been later in some ways and further expanded.
Cf. p. 70 below.
H, the Hebrew version. This text also, like the Spanish, is derived from
an Arabic original belonging to the type of the Seven Wazirs. It has been
edited and translated three times, but uncritically and with almost no reference
to the numerous manuscripts in which the book has been transmitted.129 A new
edition, based on a thorough study of all the known Mss. and accompanied
by a reliable English translation, has recently been made by Dr. Morris
Epstein of New York, and will soon, we hope, be published. I have had the
privilege of reading this in manuscript form. It brings to light much new
and important material. The date of the Hebrew translation is uncertain, but
it seems to be not far from the end of the twelfth Century. A Latin translation
of H, the only one known, was published by A. Hilka, op. dt., from a
manuscript of the early 15th Century.
III The Persian Tradition

Z. The Sindbäd-Näme composed by Muhammad b. Ali az-Zahiri as-
Samarqandi around the year 1160 A. D. and recently published by Ate§.
See above, pp. 34 ff., for a general account of this version, its relation to the
later poetical Sindbad-Name translated by Clouston, and its importance äs an
independent witness to the Pahlavi text in the concluding part of the book.
This is the only extant Persian recension whose testimony is of any value for
the early tradition. The poetical Sindbad-Name (SN) is two hundred years
later and contains nothing of the frame-story, and only one inserted story,
that is not also in Z, from which, in all probability, it was derived; and the
same is true also, except for one inserted story, of the eighth night of
Nachshabi's Tutiname, which contains only six stories and ends, äs in A and
ArN, with the punishment of the concubine (by hanging).130 Three other
Persian redactions of the Book of Sindbad are known to have been made,
but are not extant. Two of these may be neglected in our stemma, since
Versions that we possess." This book has not been accessible to me, and I do not
know whether or not it is the same äs the Berber collection of stories, translated from
the Arabic, which is mentioned under the title of Cent Nuits by Basset in Revue des
Traditions Populaires VI (1891) 452 and by Cosquin in his article on the Arabian
Nights (see n. 53). If it is the same book, I doubt that it has much value for the
tradition of Sindbad; for the reasons given by Cosquin for supposing it to represent
an old Persian tradition, antedating the Arabic translation of die Ifazar Afsaneh, are
of 128
no validity.
El Libro de los Enganos Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Univ. of N. C. Press)
1953;
129
cf. G. Artola in Modern Language Notes 71. 37 ff.
See Hilka, op. cit. pp. xiii f. for a summary of the editions; which include those
of Sengehnami, Halle 1842, Carmoly, Paris 1849, and Cassel in Mischle Sindbad,
Benin 1888. My citations of the book are from Carmoly's translation, since Epstein's
is not
180
yet available.
On Nachshabi see n. 76; on SN. n. 71.
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nothing is recorded about their sources and there is no use in guessing what
their place was in the tradition, or how they may have influenced other texts:
a poetic Version by Azraqi in the middle of the eleventh Century, and one in
prose by Daqäqi of Merv about a hundred years later.181
[Dari. This is the lost version concerning which we are told by as-Samar-
qandi, who used it äs a principal source, that it was made directly from the
Pahlavi text by one Abu! Fawäris Fanärüzi in the year 339 (960—961 A. D.),
and that it was written in a very plain and unadorned style.. See above p. 36.]
In order that the reader may follow the argument more easily, I will first
state the results of my study of the tradition in the form of a diagram, after
which the data and reasoning which have led me to these conclusions and
which, äs I believe, necessitate them, will be explained in detail.
Pahlavi Original
[Musa]-
Arabic Rifacimento [Dari]
Sp H
Syr*
0
Assuming, what is uncertain, that Abän Lähiqi (d. 815) made an Arabic version
based either directly or indirectly upon the Pahlavi, it is quite possible that his
version, rather than Müsä's, which would be later, was the principal source of the
Rifacimento. On Abän, see note 66.
"Of all the versions," says Comparetti (p. 53), "that which best and to the
greatest degree represents the original is the Syntipas (S), with the exception
of the beginning, down to where the first education of the prince is told, in
which other versions . . . abridge the original text less; through almost all the
remainder the Syntipas finds a counterpart in one or more versions, and the
comparison shows that it follows the original with greater fidelity than any
181
For these writers, see Ethe in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 258.
other." With the exception of bis exception, Comparetti has arrived at the
right conclusion, but by the wrong method. I cite bis Statement only äs
tending to show that any method of inquiry or comparison is likely to lead
to the conclusion that version S "follows the original with greater fidelity than
any other." Comparetti's method consists in assigning to the original book
almost any episode or story for which he finds a plurality of witnesses among
his eight versions, which do not include the Syriac. To the age of the different
versions, their relationships to each other, the literary environment in which
they were produced, the obvious tendency of narrative literature to expansion
and Interpolation from the tenth Century onward among Arabic and Persian
writers, and to the organic value of the episodes per se within their context,
Comparetti very seldom gives any thought. He says, for example (p. 12), that
all the versions except SN (which is the latest of all and the most freely
interpolated) 'suppress' either the first or the second of two unsuccessful
ajttempts to teach the prince; but he does not explain why there should be
two such failures, or why the testimony of SN in the fourteenth Century should
outweigh that of S in the eleventh. Even one failure on the part of Sindbad
was contradictory to the context of the frame-story, and is organically useless
äs motivation for anything. Indeed everything relating to the birth and
education of the prince in the later versions, beyond what is stated in the
Greek and Syriac, is otiose and absurd, and cannot, by any reckoning based
on literary-historial, aesthetic, or logical grounds, be assigned to the original
composition. In the latter only the perfection of the prince's education was
in point, äs leading to his adventure with the concubine and his performance
äs a sage in the later part of the book, where he instructs the king and his
court in the essence of wisdom; but in the later version, that is in group II
(the Rifacimento), the writer's point of view has shifted, and what he aims at
is something tangential to the primary story. The brief mention in the original
of the prince's failure to learn anything in three years from his first (unnamed)
teacher, due to the latter's incompetence (—"my boy would learn nothing
from that teacher, though he stayed with him many years"), has prompted a
later writer to expatiate on the great difficulty of educating the prince at all,
and to dramatize, äs an end in itself, the grandiose procedure of the king
in selecting a teacher for his son, and the failure of the wisest man in the
realm to teach him anything after years of effort. Narratives written in the
Sasanian period, whether in Pahlavi, Syriac, Armenian or Greek, are not thus
idly prolonged dramatically; instead they are, äs a rule, conspicuously plain,
brief, succinct, and concisely told äs compared with later versions of the
same or similar stories or epics literarily exploited by Arabs and Persians after
the tenth Century. This is especially true of the extant Pahlavi writings. What
as-Samarqandl teils us about the style of the Dari version of Sindbad, trans-
lated from the Pahlavi in the mid-tenth Century (above p. 36), implies that
even that version, though it was meant to improve the Pahlavi, was very plain
and succinct äs compared with his own, and thereby more like the Graeco-
Syriac version than like any of the extant Arabic or Persian elaborations of
the book. The 'improvements' made by as-Samarqandi in the substance of
es
5 Fabula 3
the introductory narrative consist chiefly, äs we shall see, in wholesale Inter-
polation from the Arabic Rifacimento, and in the insertion of three new stories
into that already interpolated context.
An analysis of the contents of the frame-story in the principal versions, along
with a few comments on the nature of the variants, will enable the reader to
judge for himself whether this or that episode has been 'suppressed' in the
Greek and Syriac versions, or interpolated in the later Arabic texts and their
derivatives in Spanish and Hebrew. As typical of the last mentioned texts,
which all differ fundamentally and in the same way from the Greek, I cite
only A in füll; although these texts, including A, Sp, ArN, and H, show many
smaller differences among themselves, some of which will be noted. It is to be
understood that Syr2 agrees with S (the Greek Syntipas of Andreopulus) unless
a Variation is explicitly mentioned.
1. S: There was a king named Cyrus who had seven wives, but he was
childless. He longed for a son. (Syr2 states also that he had grown old, but
does not mention his longing.)
A: There was in early times and bygone ages a king of kings among the
Persians. They called him the crowned king. He was old and God had given
him no son. And he thought within himself that day and said, "I have come
to this time of life and I have no son to carry on my name and to be king
after me," and he was very sad.
Sp: A king in Judea named Alcos, who was powerful, loved his people, and ruled
them justly. He had 90 wives but no son, and was sorrowful.
H: A king in India named Bibor, powerful in war, just, and beloved. He was one
of the sages of India. He was 80 years old and had 80 wives, but no offspring. He
spent one week with each of his wives in turn.
ArN: A king among the kings of China long ago, who ruled mightily over many
subjects with wisdom and justice. He was old and had no son. He brooded over his
childlessness and secluded himself in his palace.
Z: A king in India named Kurdis, powerful, just and famous for his wisdom.
He liked to read and learn about the kings of the past. His main concern since
childhood had been the welfare of his people. What would happen in a country
where the king did not have such virtues äs this king? Hypothetical examples.
King Kurdis was greatly disturbed by the fact that he had no heir to succeed
him. (The number of the king's wives is not stated in Z; in Clouston's Sindbad-
name there are 100).
2. S: He prayed long and earnestly for a son, and finally one was born.
Syr2: Then he rose up, prayed, made a vow, and annointed himself. And it
pleased God to give him a son.
A: He had seven wazirs, who were wise and learned men. They had read
all the sciences. He ordered them into his presence and explained the Situation:
"I am soon to die and pass away from this residence to the eternal dwelling
place. I am without a son to carry on my name among the kings, and I have
no brother to rule over rieh and poor" . . . Then the eldest of the wazirs came
forward and said, "O King, may God prolong your days . .. ask what you will,
that we may consider it." Said the king, "O wazir, what I want can never be,

save by the will of the Almighty." Said the wazir, "O my master, look to God,
pray, and what you want will be given. And get busy with the women. We
hope God may give you what is best, a male child ..."
[The foregoing consultation of the king with seven wazirs on the subject of his
childlessness is not in any other version. The introduction of these wazirs is an
anticipation of the seven wise men who later dissuade the king from putting his son
to death. Such anticipations of things mentioned later on in the original are typical
of an interpolator's method. Other cases will be noted below.]
The king had a wife, one of the daughters of the line of Khosru. She was
prudent, intelligent, devoted and very beautiful. She arose betimes, washed,
kneeled twice and prayed. She put her trust in God and prayed that He
would give her and the king a male child. Soon afterwards she became
pregnant and infonned the king. The king, by way of thanksgiving, gave alms
to the poor, to the widows and orphans, and all who were hungry. This he
continued to do until the ninth month, when his wife bore a child beautiful
äs the füll moon on the fourteenth (so ArN). And the people of his kingdom
rejoiced.
Sp (from Comparetti's translation): And there came to him one of his wives whom
he most loved, and she was sensible and judicious ... She came to him because she
saw that he was sorrowful, and said to him that he was honored and loved by those
of his kingdom and by his own people: "Why do I see thee sorrowful and füll of
care? If it is from fear, or if anyone does thee wrong, let me know and condole with
thee. And if it is aught eise, thou oughtest not to feel much annoyance for, thanks to
God, thou art beloved of thy peoples ... and may God never permit thee to have
sorrow, but help thee with his blessing." Then said the king to his wife, Tious and
blessed woman, you have ever comforted me ... but all the power I have and all that
there is in my kingdom are powerless to provide a remedy for my grief. I would fain
leave an heir when I die ..." And the woman said to him, "Ask of God ... to give
thee a son ... for he has not wearied of showing mercy, and thou never askedst aught
of him that he did not give thee ... I think it good, if thou art pleased, that we
should rise and pray to God with our whole heart, and ask him to grant us the favour
of a son who shall be an heir after us; for I feel confident that ... and know that all
power is of God and is in his hand, and some he likes to deprive, to some he likes to
give more." And after she had said this ... they both arose and did so; and they
returned to their bed, and the king lay with her and she was with child forthwith, and
after they knew it for truth they praised God for the fävor which he had done them.
And when nine months were completed she was delivered of a healthy son; and the
king had great joy and gladness and was pleased therewith, and the wife praised God
therefor.
[H and ArN are very much like Sp and equally long and verbose, äs compared with
A, in describing this scene between the king and his favorite wife. The latter is
called Beria in H. She prepares a great banquet for the king and his court, tries to
console the king, and urges prayer and public fasting, after which she becomes
pregnant and bears a son. In ArN the favorite wife teils the king of a dream in which
it was foretold to her that if the king should have a son, it would be by herseif, and
that this son would undergo much trouble and annoy, although he would come
through it without losing his life. This anticipates the forecast made by the king's
astrologers immediately after the birth of the prince in A, ArN, Sp, and H; which in
turn was an anticipation of the horoscope taken by Sindbad after the prince's edu-
cation had been completed and just before he was returned to the king.]
Z: One of the king's favorite wives tries to console him and urges him to
put his faith in prayer. After much speech-making, praying and fasting, a
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düld is born. This scene occupies four pages in the Persian text (pp. 37—41)
and is the same in broad outline äs in A, Sp, and Clouston's SN. At the
beginning, before the child is born, the king sends gifts to his priests and holy
men, who were praying for him. "Then after sunset he went to a holy spot
and began praying ... and after sunrise he returned to his wife, and they were
alone for a long time," etc.
3. S: The boy was nursed and grew up in youth like a blooming tree.
Syr2: "The boy grew and shot up like a cedar" (äs in the Syriac Adiiqar).
A: The king summoned his wise men and astrologers and asked them to
foretell the fortune of his son. They reported that he would be good and happy
but that he would incur a misfortune at some time (when is not stated), from
the danger of which, however, he would safely emerge. When the king heard
these words he was greatly worried, but the oldest and most learned of the
astrologers said to him "Don't worry, only praise God, who wills that the
future of your son be good." Then the king was cheered and rewarded his
wise men.
[Sp, H, and ArN all agree substantially with A in relating the foregoing incident.
In Sp and H the astrologers foretell that the prince will incur danger in his twentieth
year, but in ArN no time for this crisis is stated except "in his youth." In ArN, äs in A,
but not in Sp, the astrologers are honored with presents at the end; but in H these
presents are given to all the sages of India before the boy's fortune is foretold, and
before the seven wise men who make the forecast are diesen by an elaborate System
of elimination from all the sages of India. This choosing of seven wise men out of
many, for the immediate purpose only of foretelling the babe's fortune, is an awkward
anticipation of the same kind of process whidi is later employed in A ArN, but not in
Sp or H, for choosing the boy's teadier; for which see below.]
Z: Shortly after the birth of the boy, all the astrologers and learned men in
the kingdom are ordered to forecast his fortune. They do so and report that
the young prince is destined to uphold and preserve the name and glory of
the king's family for years to come. He will live long and will conquer the
world, and will surpass all other kings on earth in knowledge, justice and
noble character. A few years hence his life will be endangered, but, by God's
grace, he will escape härm.
4. S: In early childhood the boy was sent to school by the king, his father,
to learn the lessons of wisdom. After spending three years in school he learned
nothing at all. His father, perplexed at this, said: "Even if he were to stay
many years with that teacher, he would learn nothing from him; but I will
give him over to Syntipas the philosopher, since I have heard that he is a very
wise man and that he excells all others in his discourse." So saying, he im-
mediately sent for Syntipas and said to him, "How long do you think it will
take to educate my son thoroughly, Mr. Philosopher?" Syntipas answered the
king and said, "I am prepared to educate your son thoroughly in no more than
six months, and to fill him with such wisdom that no one may be found wiser
than he. And if I fail to deliver him to you thus conditioned within that fixed
time, let my life be forfeited, O King, and let all my estate be made over to
your Majesty. It would be stränge if such a flourishing kingdom äs this, and
one enriched with such a king, did not posses a philosopher who was, at the

same time, highly skilled in the art of the physician. If there were no such man
resident in such a kingdom, one ought not to stay there at all. For I have
learned that kings are no different from burning fire, äs regards their tempers,
and that they need philosophers to converse with them, lest, when their anger
boils, they destroy some one of their subjects without any need for so doing.
If, therefore, O King, I shall make your son perfect among philosophers, in
accordance with my promise, then your kingdom ought to grant me in friendly
wise what I shall ask of it." Said the king to the philosopher, "What would be
your request? Teil me, and if I have it, I will readily promise it to you. But if
it is something impossible for me, I will not be your debtor for something that
I do not posses." Syntipas, in order to make the king attentive and obedient by
means of bis words, äs by an example, said to him, "O King, what you do not
want anyone to do unto you, be unwilling to do unto another." To this the king
agreed and encouraged the philosopher with good hopes, saying, "Everything
that you may ask of me shall be readly given to you." After this conversation
had taken place between the two, the philosopher put a written contract bef ore
Cyrus, in whidi it was stipulated that after six months and two hours the boy
would be returned to the king completely educated; and that, if the fulfillment
of the terms of the contract should be delayed beyond the specified time,
Syntipas would submit to being beheaded.
Syr2 agrees very closely with S throughout this passage, except for a few
slight variations, and the corruption of the text of Sindbad's speech in the
passage corresponding to the words "It would be stränge—I have learned"
in the Greek. Baethgen's translation of this passage reads äs follows: "Denn
ich habe erfahren, daß ein Land, in dem ein gerechter König geboren wurde ...
Denn ich habe erfahren, daß die Könige wie Feuer sind, wenn es den Men-
schen berührt, so verbrennt es ihn." Here 26 words in the Syriac text are left
untranslated, äs being hopelessly corrupt. The sense of these words has been
discussed above (p. 57) in connection with S. J. Warren's unsuccessful attempt
to find in them the remains of an Indian proverb. The terms of the contract
in the Syriac are exactly the same äs in the Greek; but Baethgen, who seems
to have been nodding at the moment, falsely writes "nach drei Jahren und
sechs Monaten" (!) in place of the correct translation: nach sechs Monaten
und zwei Stunden (Syr. text p. 2, first line).
A: When the boy was seven years old, the king summoned 300 wise men
from all over the realm and, after entertaining them, asked "Do you know
why I have summoned you?" "No," they answered. Then the king explained
that they were to choose the best fifty men from among themselves, that
these fifty were to choose the best twenty from their own number; these,
in turn, to choose the best ten, and these ten to choose the one best and
wisest man of them all, who would teach the young prince all knowledge.
The wise men answered and said "O King, there is no one among us more
wise than al-Sindbädh, the sailor, the sage. Summen him." The king did so,
and said to Sindbad (äs in ArN), "Know that I called this assembly of wise
men and asked them to choose a man among them to teach my son all
possible knowledge, and they have chosen you unanimously ..." And Sindbad
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replied, "Know, O King, that the son is the fruit of the father's heart, the
heart's fondest desire." Then the king gave his son to Sindbad, to be educated
in three years. At the end of that time the king sent for his son and found,
upon examining him, that he had learned very little. Being greatly disturbed,
he again summoned all the wise men and, after explaining the case to them,
asked their advice. They told him to call in Sindbad and to ask him what
was the matter. The king did so and the wise men said to Sindbad, "O wise
and good man, what prevented you from teadüng the prince in this length
of time?" Sindbad answered, "O ye wise men, the king's son is too young to
learn. He has no feeling for it. I was afraid of comipting his mind, because
it is so delicate. However, if the king wishes me to teach his son in the easiest
way, I will make an agreement with him; I will teach his son in seven months
such knowledge äs would require seven years for him to learn from anyone
eise." The king said, "I agree; what are your conditions?" The wise man
said, "I want three things from you ... first that you desire for the people
what you desire for yourself; second, that you do nothing in great haste;
and third, if you can, forgive the condemned and accept the repentance of
his heart." Said the king, "I accept these terms; and all ye wise men who
are present in this place bear ye witness to it."
[ArN agrees with A throughout this section in almost every de tau; including
the age at whidi the schooling begins (7 years), the method proposed by the king
for choosing the boy's teacher (50 from 360, 10 from 50, l from 10), the immediate
nomination of Sindbad by the assembled wise men, Sindbad's failure to teadi the
prince anything in three years, the second summoning of the wise men, Sindbad's
explanation to them of why he had failed and his promise, accepted by the king,
to teach the prince everything in seven months (sie), on condition that the king will
observe the same three moral precepts äs stated in A.
Sp and H represent a dramatic Prolongation, made on the same general pattern,
but with many variations in detail, of the narrative äs given in A ArN. At age nine
in Sp, seven in H, the prince is given to Sindbad to be educated. Sindbad f aus to teach
the boy anything in a period of six years according to Sp, in a period of twelve and
a half years according to H. Again the king calls in all his wise men. In Sp these
are 900 in number, but in H no number is mentioned. In both versions these wise
men have much to say individually about learning in general, they reprove Sindbad
for his failure, and there is an extended dialogue of rivalry between the two parties.
In H each of three wise men promises to teach the prince perfectly in five, two,
or one year respectively, and Sindbad outbids them all by promising to do it in
six months. Sp and H have much in common which is not in A ArN, but the course
of events is essentially the same in broad outline. Both versions are inanely expanded,
äs compared with A ArN, and both contain many additional absurdities and
exaggerations.]
Z: When the prince was twelve years old he was assigned to an unnamed
teacher, to be instructed in all the arts. Ten years passed, and the boy learned
nothing. The king, on learning of this, was greatly disturbed and called in
all his wise men. They were 1000 in number. The king addressed them briefly
on the subject of education in general: everyone needs it, especially a prince.
The latter is like the white eagle, the king of birds, who is trained to qualify
for association with kings, and to ride on the king's band when he goes hunt-
ing (eagle confused with falcon). The sages applauded the king's speech and
assured him that his son would be able to learn, considering his endowment
70
of genius by birth. Then the king appointed a committee of seven sages,
who discussed the problem of the prince's education for three days. With
one exception, all of them considered the case to be hopeless; there was no
use in making any further efforts to educate the prince; if he couldn't learn
anything in ten years, when he was young and his mind easily moulded, how
could he be expected to learn anything in the future? A tree will never grow
straight unless it is straight at the start. But the seventh sdiolar, whose name
was Sindbad, expressed a different opinion. He thought it was possible to
educate the prince and agreed to undertake the task himself. The other
scholars praise him for this, and Sindbad, deprecating their praises, teils the
story of the Ape and Fox (= Clouston's SN p. 13 f.), to illustrate how easily
one may be deceived and ruined by listening to flattery. Again Sindbad is
praised by the other sages, and he replies, "I will not claim that I am superior
to you, but only that I am not inferior. I am like the camel in the story of
the Camel, the Wolf, and the Fox." After this story has been told (= Clou-
ston 15 f.), the sages again express their admiration for the wisdom of Sindbad
and agree that he alone is capable of teaching the prince. They report this
to the king. The king then summons Sindbad into his presence, along with
the other sages, and expatiates on the importance of teaching the prince.
Sindbad promises to do his best. For a long time—how long is not stated—
Sindbad tries in vain to teach the prince; and, when his failure had become
apparent, the king summoned him and asked why. Sindbad replied that
he had spared no effort, "but nothing can succeed unless God wills it so.
When I think it over, the story of my experience is very similar to that about
the King of Kashmir and his Elephant-keeper." After telling this story
(= Clouston's SN, pp. 17—20), Sindbad draws the moral that there is no use
in struggling against the will of God. In the past all his efforts to teach the
prince had been thwarted by the divine will, but now at length it appears
that God no longer opposes the undertaking. "I have been waiting for this
moment for a long time. I promise to teach the prince, within six months,
every kind of knowledge. And if I fail, I shall deserve any punishment that
the king may decree." All those present were surprised on hearing this, and
they said, "What was not done in 12 years, how can you do it in six months?"
And the king said, "This is a very big claim. The wise men have said that
any word that is not put into action is like a cloud without rain, or a tree
without fruit." Said one of the ministers, "There are four things which cannot
be evaluated before the action is over: food before it is digested; a pregnant
woman before she has given birth to her child; the hero before he has emerged
from the fight; and the farmer before he takes up his crops from the field."
Another minister praised Sindbad, saying that there was a right time for
everything; and the king, encouraged by what had been said, once more
entrusted his son to Sindbad to be educated, this time in only six months.
Z's practice of interpolating new material into the old Dari version, which
was his primary source, is seen irom the fact that he has put three stories
into the mouth of Sindbad which are not found in any other version of the
book, except in the poetical SN, which ist based directly upon Z (above p. 35)
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and which carries the process still further. This proves that the sources drawn
upon by Z in the making of bis book were various. That he conflated bis
primary source, the old Dari version, with material taken from the Arabic
Rifacimento, is evident from the fact that he teils of two failures to teach the
prince in place of only one in the Graeco-Syriac, and only one in the Rifa-
cimento (A ArN Sp H). The first of these failures in Z is made by an unnamed
teacher, äs in the Greek and Syriac. That came from the Dari version; although
the length of time, during which this teacher labored in vain, is exaggerated
from three years to ten, possibly due to the influence of the Arabic versions.
The second failure in Z is made by Sindbad and comes from the Rifacimento;
where the three-year failure by an unnamed teacher, mentioned in the Greek,
was wrongly represented äs a three-year failure on the part of Sindbad in
A ArN, but äs a six-year failure by Sindbad in Sp, and a 12%-year failure
by Sindbad in H. Closest to S and to Müsä's Arabic in this episode is A ArN;
Sp and H, on the other band, represent an Arabic text that is later and further
removed from the original, and this text was closer to the source of Z's inter-
polations than is A ArN. Among the pecularities which Z has in common
with SpH, and which are not in A ArN, nor in S Syr,2 is the assertion that
the words of Sindbad are like clouds (thunder, lightning) which bring no
rain (Sp in Comparetti p. 120, H. in Carmoly p. 57) and the declaration by
one of the sages that there are four things which cannot be judged before their
outcome is seen (Sp in Comp. p. 121, H in Carm. p. 57 f.).
5. S: "On these conditions the lang put bis son in the hands of the philo-
sopher, and Syntipas, taldng the prince by the hand, conducted him to his
own house. First of all he built a new and very spacious apartment for him,
which was artistically decorated and varnished on the inside with bright and
cheerful colors; and he painted on the walls of the apartment everything that
he intended to teach the youngster. Then he said to him, 'Let all your living,
young man, be inside this apartment, until you learn thoroughly everything
that has been painted by me on the walls/ Thereafter the philosopher sät
down beside the boy and spent all his time with him, teaching him what
was represented in the paintings. Their food and drink was sent in to them
by the king. Thus, taking great pains with his pupil, he finished the task
of instruction before the expiration of the six months, so that it extended
not a single hour beyond the appointed time. And the boy acquired such know-
ledge äs no one eise could."
The substance of the foregoing description in S is retained in all the other
versions with only a few small omissions, additions, or alterations of detail
in this or that version. Sp is closest to S; A is briefer; ArN alters the regimen
of instruction by representing Sindbad äs locking his pupil in the house and
visiting him only every third day; and Z and SN expand the passage by
naming the subjects which were depicted on the walls.
From this point on to the place in the text where the prince has just
finished telling the story of the Sandalwood-Merchant (p. 103 in S, ed. Jern-
stedt), the course of events in the primary story of Sindbad is the same
in all the versions, except for a few small and insignificant variations of detail.
72
In this section of the book twenty-three stories are inserted into the frame
in S, of which fourteen are told by the seven wise councillors, five by the
woman, and four by the prince. Little or nothing can be learned about the
relative antiquitiy or kinship of this or that Version äs a whole by comparing
the several versions with each other in respect to the number, order, and
identity of the stories that they contain; for these could be added, substituted
or transposed at will by any editor, early or late, without leaving any traces
of organic disturbance by which one might infer that this or that version was
secondary to another, or, except in the case of Z—SN, related to it. There are
äs many different combinations of story-materials in the Arabic versions and
their derivatives äs there are texts. No two of them agree throughout, or even
in small sections, äs regards the pattern of their divergence from the Greek
in this respect. For this reason our comparative study is confined to the
underlying frame-story. We continue at the point mentioned above, in the
passage following the story of the Sandalwood Merchant:
6. S: The king asks his son why it was that he learned nothing in the first
three years of his schooling, but has acquired great knowledge within the last
six months. The prince replies in effect that he was too young at first and
that his mind was too much given up to play. Sindbad, his teacher, realizing
his immaturity, did not ply him with difficult, abstract ideas all at once, so äs
to repel him and discourage him, but led him on gradually by skillful means
until he was capable of apprehending the concepts of philosophy and logic,
after whidi his progress was very rapid. This is told on pp. 103, 104 of the
Greek text.
Z: There is a lengthy equivalent of the foregoing passage in Z, which corre-
sponds closely in substance to the poetical SN in Clouston, pp. 91—93,
including the added story of the Careless Mother; but there is no equivalent
for this passage in any known text of the Arabic Rifacimento (A, ArN, Sp, H).
This means that as-Samarqandi must have taken it, or adapted it, from the
Darf version, which was his primary source; and that it was transmitted to
that version, äs well äs to S through Müsä, from the original Pahlavi took.
Its absence in Syr2 is due to the accidental loss of leaves in the manuscript,
which breaks off in the middle of a sentence at the beginning of the story
of the Sandalwood Merchant. In Z SN the passage in question follows the story
of the Poisoned Guests, and the ans wer to the king is made partly by Sindbad
and partly by the prince himself; but these variations from the Greek are
probably due to innovation on the part of the Persian writers.
7. S (105—107): The wicked concubine confesses her guilt and teils why she
acted äs she did. The king asks his advisers how she should be punished. One
proposes that her hands and feet be amputated, another that her heart be
pulled out; another that her tongue be cut out. Thereupon the woman relates
the story of The Fox, which refers allegorically to the mutilations of herseif
proposed by her judges.
A (387.18 ff.): "Then he commanded the slave girl to be brought in, who
had lied against his son. And when she appeared the king said to her, 'What
made you do this?' And she answered 'My lord, it was the Devil and my
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desire. God has revealed the truth.' The king looked to those of the wise
men and scholars who were nearby and said 'What ought to be done with
this woman?' And all of them replied that vengeance should be done upon
her." The woman's story of the fox is omitted.
ArN (Burton 6.211 f.): The king said "How shall we put this damsel to death?"
Some counselled him to cut out her tongue and some others to burn it with fire;
but when she came before the king she said to him "My case with thee is like
unto ... the tale of the fox and the folk." And she teils the story.
Sp has no equivalent for this scene; cf. Comparetti p. 164.
H (Carmoly p. 145): The king Orders the woman to be brought in and asks his
advisers what her punishment should be. One says "Cut off her hands," another
"Put out her eyes," and another "She must die." The decision is made to put her
to death, and she then teils the story of the fox.
Z: The slave girl (concubine) confesses her guilt, and the king asks his
ministers what punishment should be given her. "One of them said 'Pluck out
her eyes, because they are the most dangerous thing she has, and people do not
go after what they cannot see ...' A second one of them said 'Pull out her
tongue, so that she can no longer make false accusations against people, or
insult them and work their ruin.' Another said 'Cut off her feet, so that she
can no more follow the path of her widced desires, nor fall into the deep sea
of her passions which are fatal to her.' Another said 'You should pull out her
heart, so that she won't have these widked desires any more, because the
heart is the seat and the center of Imagination and wishful thoughts.' The
slave girl said 'My story is much like that of the fox, the shoemaker, and the
people of Shahrestan.' And the king said 'How was that? Teil me all about
it ...'" Here follows the story of the fox, äs in S.
The three mutilations proposed in S are elsewhere mentioned together only
in Z. They must, therefore, have come from the Pahlavi original, through the
Dari version and through Müsä. Only one of them is retained in ArN, only
one in H, and none in A or Sp. Moreover, since the mention in Z of a fourth
mutilation, namely blinding, is elsewhere attested only in H, we must here
recognize another case in which Z has interpolated material from the Arabic
Rifacimento. As we noted above (p. 72) Z's source in that recension was pecu-
liarly close to H.
8. S: The prince recommends mercy for the woman and proposes the
following punishment, which is carried out: "Let her head be shorn of its
hair, her face blackened with soot, and a bell fastened to her neck. Then
mount her on a donkey, facing backwards, and parade her throughout the
city. Let two heralds accompany her, one preceding, the other following
behind, who shall proclaim loudly, for all to hear, what crime it is that the
woman has committed."
A: The woman is forgiven on the prince's recommendation, and not
punished.
ArN: The woman is forgiven, on the prince's recommendation, and banished. In
Scott's Seven Wazirs she is thrown into the sea with a heavy stone tied to her feet.
Sp: "And the king ordered her to be burnt in a dry caldron."
H: The woman is pardoned on the prince's recommendation, and not punished.
[In Nachshabi she is hanged.]

Z (p. 330): "The king asked bis son what punishment the slave girl should
receive. He said . . . think that the most appropriate punishment for her is to
cut off her hair, blacken her face, put her on a black donkey, and lead her all
around town, proclaiming to the people that this is the punishment for
whoever acts treadierously against his master and bis king/ So they brought
retribution upon her and punished her treadiery in this way."
The account given in SZ of the manner in whidi the concubine was punished
can be derived only from the Pahlavi text. It came to Andreopulus (S) from
Müsä's translation, by way of the Syriac; and to as-Samarqandi (Z) from the
Dari translation of the Pahlavi. The passage describing this punishment has
been lost in the manuscript of the poetical SN; but in the scene in which the
damsel appears before the king and confesses her guilt (Clouston p. 111,
Z p. 322) the king says to her. "Why hast thou blackened thy own face?" On
this Persian way of speaking Clouston comments äs follows: "In other words,
'Why hast thou disgraced theyself?' In Persia criminals are often led through
the streets with their faces blackened. When an ambassador has returned
from a successful mission, or a general from a brilliant campaign, he is said
to have 'made his face white before the king/ This, äs well äs the other
phrase, must be familiär to readers of Morier's /i Baba."1**
182
Cassel, Misdile Sindbad 415—424, has an interesting and instructive excursus
on the kind of punishment above mentioned, entitled "Esel- und Kameelsritte, Ein
Beitrag zu Bürgers Kaiser und der Abt und Syntipas." He cites historical examples,
from tne Near East, Greece, France, and Germany, of persons punished by being
made to ride through the streets on a donkey facing backwards and Holding the tail
in his band. The practice seems to have been not uncommon in the Middle Ages and
was probably ancient. Cf. Plut Aet. Gr. 291 f., and Liebrecht ZurVolksk. 387, 429, 509.
The symbolizing of guilt by bladoiess of face is featured in tbe Persian story of
The Journey of the Three Sans of Giaffer, in the account of the Mirror of Justice,
whicb, according to the story, was invented by the philosophers of Persia and had
been the priceless possession of King Babram and his predecessors in the golden
days wben justice prevailed in tbe realm. Such was tbe virtue of this mirror that,
when two litigants and their judge looked into it, they saw tbat tbe face of tbe
guilty party had turned black, while that of tbe innocent party remained wbite.
"You make my face black" (sev yeres hanes) is a colloquial Armenian expression
meaning "you disgrace me." In one of the Armenian fahles (Vard. 150, Marr II p. 177)
an angel says to an unrepentent sinner: "If you bad repented for just one day, God
would not have remembered your sins, and I would have taken you away when your
face was wbite; but, since you did not . . . come now I shall take you wbile your face
is black" (i. e., in the midst of your guilt). In tbe Near-Eastern variants of the
folktale discussed by W. E. Roberts in Fabula I 81 f., the evil stepsister at tbe end of
the story "is made black, or she gets a born or a donkey's tail on her forebead, or
something similar;" but in tbe Indian versions "the bad girl is made ugly or is
covered with sores."
The Peregrinaggio di tre Giovani, Figliuoli del Re di Serendippo, published at
Venice by Micbele Tramazzino in 1557 is, according to its dedicatory preface, the
translation of a Persian book made by one Christororo from the city of Tauris in
(Cilician) Armenia, and dedicated to bis patron, the Venetian Senator Marc Antonio
Giustiniano, Procurator of San Marco. The Italian text was translated into German
by Johann Wetzel in 1588 and this version is edited with a commentary on the folk-
tales by H. Fischer and J. Bolte, Tübingen 1897. A German translation made by
Benfey has been published in FFC no. 98, Helsinki 1932. Near the end of the main
story, after the three sbarp-witted brothers have returned from their mission in
India to Persia, they find King Behram, whom they served devotedly, seriously ill
and unable to sleep owing to his remorse for having mistreated and banished his
mistress Dilaramma (elsewhere famous in Sasanian tradiü'on; cf. Browne, op. dt.
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In A, ArN, Sp, H and the 8th night of Nachshabi's Tutinameh the story
of Sindbad ends with the punishment of the concubine. What followed in the
original Pahlavi book is preserved only in S, Z and SN. The actions related
in this concluding part of the book are often forgotten or ignored by students
of Sindbad, owing to their preoccupation with the stories told by the seven
wise men; but they have a special claim upon our attention here, because
certain ones of them are characteristically Persian in form and conception, and
are clearly related to certain earlier books of a populär nature whidi were
widely current in the Near East, and by which the creator of the Book of
Sindbad must have been influenced, either directly or indirectly.
9. S (112—119): The king asks Syntipas to explain why it was possible for
his son to attain such consummate wisdom; Was this due to his natural inherit-
ance by birth, or rather to the care with which he was trained by his teacher?
Syntipas replies that the prince's native intelligence was a gif t from on high,
and that the fortune of his birth gave him ad vantage; but, in addition to that,
his unrivalled knowledge was due in large measure to the zeal and painstaking
of his teacher. Then, to illustrate the power of destiny, which predetermines
what a man will be, and the fulfillment of which cannot be avoided by any
human means, Syntipas teils the story of the philosopher who tried in vain
to prevent his son from becoming a robber when he grew up, äs an astrologer
had predicted.
The same story, relating to a king of Kashmir, his minister and his chief
astrologer, is told also in Z (331—334) and with the same kind of introduction.
It must also have stood in the poetical SN; because some remarks by Sindbad
on the impossibility of avoiding destiny follow immediately after a long lacuna
I 12, II 409 f.). For the purpose of healing the king, the three brothers direct him to
build seven palaces, to live in a different palace every day for a week, and to provide
each palace with a beautiful girl and the best possible story-teller to teil him a story
every night. The king does this, and seven stories follow in a typical Persian frame,
which is also that of the Haft Paikar of Nizami of Ganja, (d. ca. 1200 A. D.). The
legend told by Nizami, about the adventures of King Bahram GUT (A. D. 420—438)
and the seven stories told him by his seven queens, was one of the three or four main
components which went into the making of the composite romance about the Journey
of tne Three Sons of Giaffer, and which are elsewhere told äs separate stories.
The first of these stories, the one which serves äs the underlying framework of the
whole romance, is a very widespread and well-known folktale relating to three royal
brothers, one of whom is usually a thief or a bastard, who, after their father's death,
travel to another kingdom in order to be tried by a wise judge who may determine
which one of the three is the guilty or illegitimate son. On the way, and upon arrival
at the house of the foreign judge or king, the three brothers display marvellous
powers of deducing facts, which seem impossible for them to know, from the sharp
observation of signs. For the literature on this motif and mention of many variants
see M. Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis, pp. 63 and 195 ff. Typical is the story
of "The Sultan of Al-Yaman and his Three Sons" in the Arabian Ntehts (Burton
Suppl. Nights V 2 ff.). Not noted hitherto is a Version from the homeland of Christo-
foro Armeno himself, written in the medieval dialect of Cilician Armenia, namely
fable nos. 168 and 168 a in Marr's Sborniki Pritdi Vardana, II pp. 199 ff., "The Three
Brothers and the Precious Stone." No. 168 a, consisting of 88 lines, is almost twice
äs long äs 168 and is much the better version of the two. Two other versions, recently
recoraed from oral recitation, are these: "The Story of the Son who was not from his
Father" (Arabian), in C. G. Campbell's From Town and Tribe 171—179, and "Les
Trois Philosophes," in M. M. Marino's Cent Fahles Amhariques, no. i v, p. 19.

in the manuscript, and what comes next is the same s what we have in Z.
See Clouston, p. 112.
10. The Sum of Wisdom in Ten Propositions.
S (119—121): The king inquires of his son what the methods were by which
his teacher Syntipas had succeeded in teadting him so much. In reply the
prince teils of the apartment which Syntipas had built with the pictures on the
walls, and adds that on those walls were inscribed "the ten topics of wisdom,
knowledge, and instruction." —
ôá äÝêá êåöÜëáéá ôçò ôå óïößáò ôçò ãíþóåùò êáé ôçò äéäáóêáëßáò.
"The first topic deals with the slanderous man who stirs iip quarreis between
kinsmen and friends.
The second topic relates to the philosophic man, who greatly benefits his
friend.
The third topic teils about the crafty and deceitful man, who never leaves
off devising plots and mischief against his fellow man, when the latter is not
aware of it.
The fourth topic is about the man who indecently censures another because
of some inherent bodily defect, such s might be due to leprosy.
The fifth topic relates to the proposition that one ought not to proclaim a
matter, or an accusation, before he has firmly established the truth of it.
The sixth topic relates to the proposition that one ought not to put trust in
a foolish man, or in any ordinary man of the crowd.
The seventh topic teaches us about the envious man, who is jealous of other
men because they are reaping the benefit of some good thing, or happen to
have a share in some praiseworthy privilege. He grudges them their good
fortune, is secretly pained by it, and wastes away with envy; but thereby
he does not in any way hurt those whom he envies.
The eighth topic is about the proposition that one ought to love all men,
and not to requite with evil him who has done evil.
The ninth topic presents the proposition that one should do unto others
s he would have others do unto himself.
The tenth topic is about the proposition that one ought not to make a friend
of anyone, nor to think like him, who acts impiously and tyrannically and
seeks profit by unjust means."
Z (337 f.): After praising Sindbad and thanking him, the king turns to his
son and says, "Teil me, how did you learn such a vast amount of knowledge
in such a short period of time?" The son said, "The origin of all knowledge
is wisdom and reason, and any person who is given a share of these can solve
every difficult problem. Moreover there is a time for everything. When the
sufficient period of time elapses, and the moment for any given event arrives,
the most difficult things become easy and simple. And all knowledge is derived
from these words, which are written on the wall of the porch of the palace of
Feridun." The king asked, "What are those words? Teil me." The son said,
"First, anyone who listens to gossip and flattery, and acts accordingly will fall
into such great troubles that he will never be able to compensate and make up
for what he loses. Second, those who have a share of intelligence and wisdom,
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should never lose sight of what härm an enemy can do to them, because an
enemy is like a snake who will never become friendly. Third, one should
not leave and forget his friends because of some slight discord and disagree-
ment that may appear to exist between him and them. This is a sign of
ignorance. Fourth, if one of your friends changes, so äs to become your enemy,
try to be äs kind and friendly to him äs you can, so that the tree of friendship
which has gone dry and fruitless will become fresh and fruitful again. Fifth,
consult with a learned man, that you may be immune from the consequences of
accepting poor advice. Sixth, be aware of the enemy in your own house, for
he can do you more härm than any other enemy can. Seventh, do not trust
any person whom you have not tested, for the learned have said that tmsting
a devil whom you have tested is far better than trusting a human being whom
you have not tested. Eighth, do not speak up before you have meditated upon
what you are going to say."
SN (Clouston 133 f.) has equivalents for all but one of the eight pro-
positions or precepts in Z, and in the same order; but no. 4 is omitted and a
new precept is added after no. 6: "Leave not thorns in the highway lest
perchance thy own foot be wounded unaware." Only four of the ten pro-
positions in S, namely nos. l, 3, 5, 6, seem to have an equivalent in Z, respecti-
vely l, 2, 8, 5. These four must have had corresponding equivalents in the
Pahlavi original, but the other six are of doubtful provenience and may have
originated in part with Andreopulus or Müsä. However this may be, it seems
probable that the original number of propositions was ten, äs is stated
explicitly in S. In Z the total number is not stated but each proposition is
numbered, äs in S, and the first is the same in both texts.
The idea of summing up wisdom or ethical advice in the form of a decalogue,
äs in the Ten Commandments, had long been familiär in the Near East. We
noted two such decalogues above in the Book of Shimas (p. 30), wherein many
of the precepts relate to the conduct and policy of a king. Plutarch and Arrian
report a tradition, derived from the contemporaries of Alexander, that the
latter, when he came into India, put ten sophistic questions to the so-called
Gymnosophists, in order to test the cleverness of their replies. At first these
questions, äs reported, were all puzzles (aporiai), but later in the tradition
there were substituted or added a few questions relating to kingship. This
was due, äs W. W. Tarn points out, to the influence of books written in the
third Century B. C. on kingship. At that time, says Tarn, nearly every Greek
philosopher wrote a äs a matter of course.183 The subject was one
of great topical interest, because kings were something new in the Greek
world of that day. One book in that tradition, which is no longer extant but
which can be inferred with reasonable certainty from the famous letter of
Pseudo-Aristeas (ca. 100 B. C.), for which it served äs a source and model,
represented Ptolemy II asking questions, ten at a time, concerning the conduct
of kingship, from seventy Jewish eiders on seven successive nights on which
iss w w Tam> The Qreeks jn ßactria and India (Cambridge 1938) p. 426, in an
excursus entitled "The Milindapanha and Pseudo-Aristeas," the results of which
in part are outlined below.

he entertained them. In their replies these Jewish wise men, äs we see from
Pseudo-Aristeas, laid emphasis on principles which were commonplace in third-
century discussions of kingship, namely beneficence, equity, good will unto
all men, and especially love of one's subjects, which is said to be the most
necessary of all possessions for a king. The convention of ten questions
addressed by a great king to foreign sages, äs seen in Pseudo-Aristeas and bis
source, was undoubtedly shaped on the story of Alexander's famous conver-
sation with the Indian ascetics, the Gymnosophists; and this formal tradition
has likewise had a definite influence, äs Tarn clearly demonstrates, upon
the Pali Buddhist work known äs the Milindapanha, or the "Questions
of Milinda."134 Section 289 in Bk. III of the Pahlavi Denkart (Acts of the Reli-
gion) contains, according to West,135 "the ten admonitions of Yim to mankind,
and the ten counter-admonitions of Dahäk;" and another Pahlavi religious
text (West pp. 105, 113 f.) has "The Five Dispositions" (of priests) and "The
Ten Admonitions" (for disciples). Masudi relates that Khusrau Anushirwan
one day assembled bis wise men and asked them to give him advice for the
welfare of himself äs ruler and of bis people. After all the others had spoken
Buzurjmihr declared that he could say in twelve sentences all that the king
needed to know; and, when he had delivered these precepts, which Masudi
quotes, the king ordered them to be written in letters of gold.186 A story about
Buzurjmihr which seems to show the formal influence of the letter of Pseudo-
184
For a good general account of the Melindapanha see Winternitz II 139 ff.;
for its relation to the Greek tradition, äs stated above, Tarn op. cit. 432—436. In the
first part of the Milindapanha the powerful Greek king Milinda (= Menander), who
mied over Bactria and part of India in the second Century B. C., asks questions of a
Buddhist sage named Nägasena with a view to winning a dialectical victory over
him, äs Alexander had sought to outwit the Gymnosophists; but in the second part
of the work, which is a later addition (cf. Winternitz II 141), Menander has become
a Buddhist convert, humbly seeking knowledge from Nägasena on religious doctrine.
The author's awareness of the ten-question formula, employed by Alexander and
Ptolemy II in earlier Greek books, is revealed in the first part of the book (Rhys Da-
vids' trans. in Sacred Books of the East xxxv 47) where Milinda and his friends are
discussing how many of his brethren Nägasena shall bring with him to the banquet;
one of these friends, Sabbadinna, says, "Let him come with ten," and he insists on
this point until the king has said three times that Nägasena shall bring äs many äs
he likes. Here the number ten can have meaning, according to Tarn, only in reference
to the Alexander questions: "What Sabbadinna in effect says is 'You ought to follow
the Greek tradition,' and Milinda says 'No.' " Still more striking is the similarity, to
which Tarn calls attention, between the beginning of the Milindapanha and the
introduction to Pseudo-Aristeas, which came from a third-century Questions of
Ptolemy II. In Pseudo-Aristeas four friends of Ptolemy play a part, who are named
Demetrius the librarian, Aristeas, Ardiias, and Sosibios, and the principal part is
given to Demetrius. In the Milindapanha likewise four friends of Milinda are
introduced and the first mentioned of these and the one to whom the principal part
is given is also Demetrius. From this and other evidence, which cannot here be
reviewed, Tarn concludes, with much probability äs it seems to me, that the first
part of the Milindapanha was modelled on a Greek work in which Menander had
auestioned a Buddhist sage, Nägasena, in the style in which Alexander had questioned
tne Gymnosophists.
135
E. W. West in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss II 92. Here West is describing the
contents of sections in Bk. III which had not yet been published when he wrote.
186
Barbiere de Meynard et Pavet de Courteille, , Les Prairies d'Or,
II 205. For other collections of the sayings of Buzurjmihr, including one in which
the sage answers questions addressed to him by King Khusrau, and which was said
to have been written at the king's request, see n. 14 and Christensen op. cit. 97—9.
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Aristeas (in which seventy wise men deliver their precepts ten at a time) is
contained in the Nihäyatu'l-irab (see above p. 31). Herein we have, according
to Browne (p. 232) "a long account of Buzurjmihr the son of Böktagän, Veh-
Sahpühr the diief priest, and Yazdgard the chief scribe, who with seventy
other wise men, were in constant attendance on the King—how Buzurjmihr
first comes to the King's notice, specimens of his philosophical aphorisms
and ... ten aphorisms apiece from the three wise men above mentioned."
Fourteen precepts for the guidance of kings, ascribed to King Hushang, are
introduced for the first time into the story of Kalilah and Dimnah by the
Persian author of the Anwar-i Suhaili;191 and ten precepts for the guidance of
life, ascribed to the kings of Persia, are given by a mother to her son just
before their parting in the Marzuban-Name.1**
Mention has been made of these summaries of worldly wisdom in ten or
more propositions, in order to show that the form-pattern äs such was old
and familiär in the Near East and in Persia. It is one of those features of the
book that points to its Persian origin.
11. The King asks Twenty Questions of his Philosopher-Son
S (122—129, in summary):
1. Does what happens to a man come about by Fate? Answer: No, the
troubles of men are caused by their own folly and injustice. They fail to
heed the philosopher and do not recognize him äs such unless he has money
and is publicly honored.
2. What kind of man ought to be king? The intelligent and prudent man,
who governs his subjects well, who does not allow injustice among them,
who does not condemn anyone until the truth is lawfully established, who
returns good to the good, and grievous punishment to the evil, who fears God
and holds nothing more in honor than justice.
3. What kind of kingly rule is most firm and secure? The kind that reveres
God and pursues justice, that pities the poor, and resuscitates and helps
those of its subjects who are oppressed by misfortune.
4. In what kind of kingly rule do men take pleasure? In the kind that
comes from divine foresight, that is administered justly, and aims at the welfare
of those who are ruled.
5. Does the wisdom of philosophers prevail over the evil-doing of others?
Yes, knowledge can prevail over evil, because it knows what is good and bad
by nature, and evil is ignorant.
6. Why is it that philosophers show no feeling of reverence for anyone,
but are bold in putting forth their teadiing to everybody? They are unabashed
because they are eager to teach everybody, especially intelligent men and
those who seek wisdom.
7. Who are they who are hated by the philosophers? All who do not hearken
to their teadiing and cannot bear being refuted by them.
187
Pp. 36 f. in Eastwick's translation, summarized in F. F. Arbuthnot's Persian
Portraits
138
p. 99.
Chauvin, Bibl. des Ouvrages Arabes II 215.

8. What kind treasure is better than all others? The treasure of good
deeds.
9. What does one need against one's adversaries? Trust in God.
10. Who is really the riebest man? He who trusts in God and does good
deeds.
11. What kind of man has the best repose? He who grudges nobody, who
blames himself and does not condemn another.
12. Who is really foolish? He who does not perceive his own error and
does not heed one who advises him well.
13. What kind of man has the best and most friendly disposition? He who
bothers no one and is not jealous of anyone.
14. What kind of reckoning is loathesome to God? That which is haughty
and presumptious; but folly is also detested by Him, and unseemly chatter.
15. What shameful deed brings the greatest guilt upon the doer of it? Envy
and bearing false witness, insatiable greed and love of gain, falling short of
one's desires through not fearing God nor being ashamed before men.
15 a. Who does not know this? The man who is insatiable and covetous
in all things.
16. Whom ought one to fear? The man who makes unjust judgments, and
who has no respect for religion or for authority greater than his own. But one
must also fear the friend who is treacherous and hypocritical.
17. Why do men hate each other more than they dierish each other's
friendship? Because it is easier to do härm than to do good.
18. Why is it that the sick man gladly heeds the physician's Orders, even
when they seem burdensome, but that men bear it ill when the truth is told to
them? The sick man welcomes medicine even when bitter, because he expects
it to bring him health; but the fool resents being told the truth and is angry
with it, because he is not, like the sick man, in pain. Refute a wise man, and
he will love you; but don't refute a fool, lest he hate you.
19. Why is it that a man who has eaten abundantly is immediately satisfied,
while the man who pursues ridies never satisfies his urge? The belly, after
receiving a rieh feast, is satisfied and refuses to take on more food; but the eye
of man is gluttonous, and the more it looks at money the more it yearns for it.
It is never satisfied until its vision is hidden beneath the earth by death.189
20. Of what sort is the death of a malicious and envious man? The death
of such a man is a gain to others. Nothing is worse for a man than this envy,
and he is happiest who is free from it.
Z (339 f. in summary): Then the king asked him (1), Who is most highly
valued in the state? The prince said, The man who knows the value of other
persons in the government, what the assets and liabilities are of each one.
The king asked (2), Which characteristics or attributes are most becoming to a
king? The prince replied, Not being in a hurry in executing important
decisions, being kind to his subjects, and being just. The king asked (3), What
139
Compare the words of Achiqar in the Syriac version (F. C. Conybeare, J. Rendel
Harris and Agnes Smith Lewis, The Story of Ahikar.2 p. 108): "My son, the eye of
man is like a fountain of water, and it is not satisfied with ridies until filled
with dust."
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Fabula 3 Authenticated | 130.209.6.50
characteristics are most disliked in a human being? The prince answered,
Hurry and stinginess. Then the king asked (4), Who is the person for whom
it is most difficult to die? The person who has been engaged in evil-doing.
The impatience of Z with this questioning of the prince by the king is
evident from the perfunctory way in which he treats it and by the fact that
he gives only four questions and answers. Since the Graeco-Syriac tradition
nowhere expands the original story, insofar äs we can test it, either by internal
evidence or by comparison with other texts, it follows with much probability
that there were twenty questions also in the Pahlavi original, although the
substance of those questions and their answers may have been altered here
and there in the course of transmission to S, or in S itself.
The literary form-pattern, of which this quesüon-and-answer dialogue
between the king and his philosopher-son is typical, appears first in the time
of Alexander the Great, äs we have seen; and much use was made of it for
various purposes in later Graeco-Roman antiquity and in the medieval period,
either for serious instruction in both religious and secular disciplines, or äs
wisdom literature on a low populär level.140 It is especially prominent in the
extant Pahlavi literature. I find nine examples of it in the Pahlavi books
described by E. W. West in Geiger-Kühn.141 The majority of these serve the
purpose of instruction in religion or ethics, but some of them deal with philo-
sophical questions, or puzzles, or mere matters of curiosity. Ebedjesu in his
catalogue (Assemani, Bibl Orient. III l, p. 220) says that Büd, the Syrian
translator of KD in the sixth Century, also translated "Greek questions." A
favorite type of question in the Pahlavi books relates to the Superlative quali-
140
For a comprehensive survey of this literary form, indicating the various uses
to which it is put, and with reference to many examples, see L. W. Daly, "The Alter-
catio Hadriani Augusti et Epicteti Philosophi and the Question-and-Answer Dialogue"
in Illinois Studies in Language and Literature XXIV (1939) no. I. In the same
volume, no. 2, W. Suchier edits, with critical notes and commentary, the Altercatio
Hadriani et Epicteti in various recensions, the Disputatio Pippini cum Albino, and
the Latin translation of Secundus by Willelmus (ca. 1167 A. D.). Recently Suchier
has reedited these texts: Das mittellateinische Gespräch Adrian und Epictetus nebst
verwandten Texten (loca Monachorum), The Haßue, 1955. The final stage of this
literary history, in the West, is well representea by two medieval French books
which once passed current äs epitomes of Knowledge, and were very populär through-
out Europe in the fourteenth Century, namely the Dialogue de Placide et Time o and
Sidrach, tor which see . R.' and . P/ (sc. Gaston Paris) in the Histoire Litt&raire
de la France, XXX (1888) 567—95, and XXXI 285—318. Sidrach is here described
äs a "catochisme de omni re scibili et de quibusdam aliis ... ces deux ouvrages
etaient destinees ä satisfaire une curiosito bien naive." According to the prologue,
which gives a long history of the book, Sidrach was a descendant of Taphet who nad
received, by Inspiration trom God, knowledge of all sciences, and of the mystery of
the Holy Trinity in advance. Sidrach taught this mystery to an infidel king, Boctus,
who, being converted, asked the philosopher Sidrach a series of questions, to which
the latter replied admirably. King Boctus then had a book made of these questions
and answers which was entitled "The Fountain of All the Sciences/' Critical
literature on the subject of Sidrac is reviewed by J. F. J. VanTol in the introduction
of his Het Boek van Sidrac in de Nederlanden, Amsterdam 1936. One theory, put
forth by I. Pizzi (VanTol p. xxxi), but with very little probability, is that the
book was Persian in origin, having originated äs a reworking of the Pandnamak
ascribed to Buzurjmihr.
141
Grundriss d. Iran. PhÜol. II 91 f., 93, 103, 107, 108, 109 (bis), 110, 118; all
in different books.

ties of things. Thus, one short text (West p. 109) gives the answers of a learned
Greek, a Hindu, and a Persian sage to questions asked by the king of kings
regarding the best and worst of things. In another, the story of Khusrö-i
Kavatan and his Page, the page, who is highly skilled in all the arts and
sciences, informs the king, in reply to the latter's questions, about what are
"the pleasantest foods, the handsomest birds, the nicest meats, ... the most
delicious fruits, the wholesomest grains, the best wines, the most pleasing
tunes, the seven best ingredients of soup, the sweetest-scented flowers, the
best of women, and the best steeds." Six of the twenty questions in S, and all
four of those in Z, are formally on this pattern; and so likewise are many of
those in the Book of Shimas (above p. 30).
As we shall see later on, the idea f or this whole scene between the king and
his philosopher-son must have come to the Persian author of Sindbad directly
or indirectly from the Greek Life of Secundus, wherein a philosopher, who has
narrowly escaped death in consequence of his refusal to speak, thereafter
answers twenty questions put to him by the lang who had threatened his life.
In S the story of Sindbad ends with the prince's remark that the answers to
the twenty questions, whidh he has just given, are sufficient äs a guide to the
best way of life for intelligent men and those about the king who incline to
philosophy. Beyond this, nothing is added to the main story in A or Sp; but
in H (Carmoly p. 150, after the pardoning of the concubine and a few words
by and about Sindbad) it is stated very briefly that the prince succeeded his
father on the throne and became the wisest and most famous of all the kings
in the world. In ArN (Burton VI 212) the following is added to the original
story, immediately after the banishment of the concubine: "Therewith the lang
rose from his throne of estate and, seating his son thereon, crowned him with
his crown and bade the Grandees of his realm swear fealty and commanded
them do homage to him. And he said, folk, indeed, I am stricken in years
and desire to withdraw apart and devote myself only to the Service of my
Lord; and I call you to witness that I divest myself of the kingly dignity, even
äs I have divested myself of my crown and set it on my son's head.' So the
troops and officers swore fealty to the Prince, and his father gave himself
up to the worship of his Lord nor stinted from this, whilst his son abode in his
kingship, doing justice and righteousness; and his power was magnified and
his Sultanate strengthened and he abode in all delight and solace of life, till
there came to him the Certainty."
The substance of the foregoing passage in ArN is freely elaborated and
greatly expanded in Z (341—345), where the actions described are the same
in broad outline äs in Clouston's SN, pp. 116—120. Since it is very unlikely
that this conclusion was in the Pahlavi original, owing to its absence in S and
its non-functional nature äs a postscript, we are bound to infer that this is
another instance in which as-Samarquandi has expanded the story on the
basis of something which he found in an Arabic text similar to ArN and the
source of H.
As was noted above, the Arabic text used by Z ordinarily has more in
common with H Sp, and especially with H, than with A or ArN. This
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relationship is further indicated, and very positively, by the transposition of
two stories from their original location which is peculiar to H and Z SN. In S,
A and Sp, the story of the faithful dog mistakenly killed by bis master is told
by the fifth philosopher äs bis first Illustration; but in H, Z, and the latter's
derivative SN, äs in no other text, this story is the first one told by the third
philosopher. And again, what is the first story of the sixth philosopher in S, A,
and Sp, namely that about the two pigeons, is the first story of the second
philosopher in H, Z, and SN. In ArN the story about the dog has been omitted,
and that about the pigeons has been given to the concubine äs her sixth story.
The fact that more of the substance of Z's conclusion is found in ArN than in H
may be due to the contamination of ArN with the source of H, and the
abbreviation of that source in H. There is no equivalent for this postscript in A
or Sp, and there may have been none in the archetype of the Rifacimento.
It should be clear, from the analysis of the frame-story in the various Oriental
versions of Sindbad which we have made, that the sources of the Persian Z
were twofold. One of these was a text of the Arabic Rifacimento peculiarly
close to the common source of HSp, and the other was the Dari version of
which as-Samarqandi speaks in his preface. Even if one were to assume,
äs Clouston for no good reason does, that the Dari version was made from
Müsä's Arabic, instead of directly from the Pahlavi, äs is stated explicitly in
Z,—even so, the nature of the tradition äs we mapped it above (p. 64) would
remain essentially the same. In that case the whole early tradition would
depend upon Müsä alone, and the tenth-century Dari version, used by Z,
would be only another witness to the text of Müsä äs we have it in S.
Clouston's stemma, on the other band, is fundamentaUy wrong in that it
represents all the texts of what I call the Rifacimento äs independent witnesses,
parallel with S and the Dari, to what Müsä translated from the Pahlavi. On
the contrary, only S and Z can be of any value in reconstructing the substance
of Müsä and the Pahlavi original, and Z only when it agrees with S; everything
extant in Arabic, Spanish, or Hebrew comes from a freely rewritten version
whose testimony for the early tradition is worthless.
VI
Positive Evidence that the Book of Sindbad
Originated in Persia or the Near Bast
The Near Eastern origin of the Book of Sindbad is clearly indicated by data
of the following kinds, considered in their aggregate; by the identity of the
story-books which shaped its framework or otherwise influenced its substance;
by the previous history of some of its stories and certain of the author's ideas;
by its form-patterns in contrast with those of Kalilah wa Dimnah and the
Pancatantra (above p. 17); by the names of the principal characters in the
oldest extant versions; and by the absence of any Indian names, of which there
are many in KD (above p. 49).
The book whose influence was most decisive in shaping the frame-story
of Sindbad was the Greek Life of Secundus, a romantic biography written
for the edification of naive readers by an unknown author concerning a philo-
84
sopher who lived in the time of Hadrian, but whose identity is unknown
to us. This once populär book, which is shown by the Tischendorf papyrus
to have been in existence by the end of the second Century after Christ,142
was widely circulated thereafter in the languages of the Near East, in all
probability before the sixth Century. It was known to Masudi in the tenth
Century.143 We have Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, and Aethiopic versions of it.
The Syriac text, which is only a fragment, comes from a ninth-century manu-
script in the British Museum; and the Armenian translation, published by
Dashian in 1896, is assigned by that learned editor, on linguistic and historical
grounds, to the fifth Century.144 These two translations, the Syriac and the
Armenian, follow the substance of the Greek text quite closely except for
some passages where the latter is very corrupt, and insofar äs their own texts
are preserved. The Arabic version, upon which the Aethiopic depends, has
never been published but is extant in six or more manuscripts of the fifteenth
Century and later.145 In its present form this Arabic Life of Secundus is later
than the Book of Sindbad, from which the story of the poisoned milk has been
interpolated. It is a greatly expanded version; both in the narrative part,
where, except for the Interpolation just mentioned, nothing new in substance
is added to the outline of the Creek story, and in the series of questions and
answers, where 33 new questions have been added, making a total of 53 in
place of 20 in the Greek. After working over this text in the process of editing
and translating it, I can find nothing in it to indicate whether it was based
directly on the Greek text or on some other version. It is possible also, but
not demonstrable, that the Arabic text in its present form, which is later than
Ibnu'l Muqaffa', is an expanded version made on the basis of an older Arabic
version which was simpler and followed the Greek more closely.146
The Greek story of Secundus is äs follows in outline: "Secundus was a
philosopher who chose the Pythagorean way of life, studiously observing
142
G. Zereteli und O. Krueger, Papyri Russischer und Georgischer Sammlungen
(Tiflis 1925) I 105—14. This papyrus was previously published, but imperfectly,
by H. Sauppe in Philologus 17 (1861) 150—53.
148
Masudi mentions it in his Kitäbul Tanblh wal Ishraf (ed. De Goeje, p. 128),
which I here quote in the translation of B. Carra de Vaux, Ma$oudi, Le Livre de
l'Avertissement et de la Revision (Paris 1897) p. 180. In this passage Masudi is
listing the emperors of Rome and is speaking about Hadrian: "Sous le regne de
ce prince vocut Secundus, le philosophe silencieux; nous avons parles des relations
qu'il eut avec l'empereur et d'autres personnages, de ses signes et de ses enigmes,
dans le livre du Memorial des Evenements des anciens Äges." The book here men-
tioned
144
(Istidkär) is often cited by Masudi, but it seems not to be extant.
The Syriac fragment was published by E. Sachau in his Inedita Syriaca (Vienna
1870) 84—88, and the Armenian, with a translation and commentary, by P. J. Dashian
in Denhschr. d. kais. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Wien, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 44 (1896), nr. 3.
146
Pending the publication of this text along with an English translation in my
Secundus the Silent Philosopher, whidi is now nearing completion, the reader may
get a fair idea of the Arabic version from J. Bachmann's Latin translation of its
Aethiopic derivative: Secundi Philosophi Taciturni Vita ac Sententiae, Berlin 1887.
146
One of the added questions, the last, relates to the growth of the human fetus
in the womb; and the ans wer, a detailed explanation in some 300 words, is obviously
based on a passage in Burzoe's introduction to KD in the Arabic version of Ibnu l
Muqaifa', for whidi see p. 22 of Nöldeke's study entitled "Burzoe's Einleitung zu
dem Buche Kalila wa Dimna" (= Schriften der Wiss. Gesellschaft in Strassburg
XII, 1912). This discourse on the fetus is in DeSacy's text, but was omitted by
Knatchbull in his translation (p. 79).
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silence all the time. The reason for bis silence was this .. ." From here the
author goes on to say that Secundus, when still a child, was sent away from
home to be educated, and that, while he was away, his father died. In the
course of his studies he came across the following written proposition: "Every
woman can be bought; the chaste one is she who escapes notice or temp-
tation."147 This idea sank deep into the mind of Secundus and he resolved
to test the truth of it by making trial of his own mother. After twenty years'
absence he returned to his native city in the guise of a Cynic philosopher
and took up residence s a stranger in an apartment of his own father's
house. With the help of a maidservant s intermediary, he made an assignation
with his mother, who consented to spend a night with him and accepted
fifty gold pieces in payment. Secundus, of course, refrained from carnal inter-
course and, when his mother asked why, he explained that he was her own
son. God forbid! Then his mother was so mortified that she hanged herseif.
Secundus concluded that his talking was to blame for this, and resolved never
to utter another word the rest of his life. This silence brought him within a
hair's breadth of being put to death by the Emperor Hadrian. For the latter,
while visiting in Athens, had heard about the great wisdom of Secundus and
summoned the philosopher into his presence, in order to converse with him.
Secundus came and was received with great honor; but his stubborn refusal
to utter a single word exhausted the patience of Hadrian, who publicly ordered
an executioner to make Secundus talk, otherwise to put him to death. Privately,
however, he told the executioner to kill Secundus if he succeeded in making
him talk, but to spare his life and bring him back if he maintained silence
to the last. That is what happens. When Secundus was brought back, Hadrian,
respecting his vow of silence unto death, asked him to write out for him on
a tablet the answers to twenty philosophical questions. Secundus did so; and
these twenty questions with their catediistic answers form the second half
of the Secundus book in both its Greek and its oriental versions.148
147
ÐáóÜ ãõíÞ ðüñíç, Þ äå ëáüïàóá óþöñùí. Cf. Ovid Am. I 8.43, castast quam
nemo rogavit, and medieval proverbs to the same effect cited by S. Singer in his
Spri&w rter des Mittelalters, III 55 f. Bar Hebraeus, Laughable Stories (Budge
p. 67): "Another learned man said, ¢ good woman is like a raven with white legs/
that is to say, she cannot be found."
148
The Greek Life of Secundus has never been printed in its entirety, but always
apart from the questions which belong within its framework. This is due to the fact
that its first editor, J. A. Schier (Demophili et Democratis Vet. PMos. Sententiae ...
Lips. 1754, pp. 71—77 and 84—96), falsified the nature of the text which he copied
from Gude's manuscript (now at Wolfenb ttel, cod. Gud. 79, saec. 17) by omitting
the questions from the body of the text without saying anything about it; and to
the fact that all the subsequent editors (J. C. Orelli, Opuscula Graec. Veter. Sen-
tentiosa, Lips. 1819, I 216—26 and 227—39; F. G. A. Mullach, Frag. PhOos. Gr. II,
Paris 1865, pp. xxvu—xxix and I 512—15; and P. Cassel, Mischte Sindbad, Berlin
1891, 348—353) have depended entirely upon Schier, or upon one of his heirs, without
ever having looked into a Greek manuscript of the book. Deceived by these editors,
all those who have written about the literary history of Secundus have assumed,
enroneously, that in the Greek tradition the twenty questions have no connection
with the biographical narrative but have been transmitted separately. The fact is
that every Greek manuscript which contains the biography of Secundus, except
the papyrus fragment, contains the twenty questions within its framework, followed
by a short paragraph at the end—exactly s in the Oriental versions and in the
Latin translation from die Greek. The entire Greek tradition of the biographical

narrative depends on a single manuscript which is supposed to be lost, and whidi
is said to have once been in the Medicean Library at Florence. It is not there now.
It is in the Vatican: cod. Reginensis 10, written in the llth Century. This manuscript
was brought from Constantinople to Saint-Denis in 1167 by Willelmus Medicus,
later bishop, who translated it into Latin. For the text of the Latin translation see
W. Suchier op. dt. (1939) 147 ff. On pp. 160 f. Suchier lists the Greek manuscripts
of Secundus, apparently on the basis of printed catalogues only, but his list is
incomplete. The codex Reginensis (R) became the property of Isaac Vossius in the
17th Century and passed thence to the Queen of Sweden, and thence to the Vatican.
Vossius himself made an exact copy of it which is now at Leiden (Voss. Gr. 0. 7);
another copy was made by Marquand Gude (G), and there are two other copies,
either of G or of R, at Oxford (Bod. Dorvillianus 131) and at Göttingen (Cod.
Philol. 2) respectively. The questions were excerpted from the biography at an
early date and are separately transmitted in nine manuscripts. One of these was
the basis of Holsten's edition of the Questions in 1639. Holsten's text was repeated
by Schier (pp. 84—96), and it was for that reason, presumably, that Schier omitted
the Questions from the context of the biography; his intention was only to supple*
ment what Holsten had published by adding tne narrative part of the biography,
hitherto unedited, and he did not want to repeat the text of the Questions. The
following diagram shows the main lines of the entire tradition:
Life of Secundus the Silent
__ Tischendorf papyrus ca. 200 A. D
Armenian trans.
Syriac_ trans. (fragmentary)
R (cod. Vat. Reg. 10, llth cent. Life including

Questions. This MS, supposed to be a "lost
Excerpted Questions Medicean," has never been seen by editors.
W (Latin trans. by Willelmus Medicus at Saint-
Denis ca. 1167 A.D. + 51 questions inter-
9 Greek MSS polated from the Disputatio Pippini cum Al-
bino Scholastico).
ca. 108 Latin MSS Arabic trans.
Ed. Holsten (1639;
from cod. Par. 854,
the only MS so far Aethiopic
used by editors, a-
part from G G
(Gude's copy of R, ca. 1662. Life with the Questions
l inside its framework)
Editio princeps of the Life by Schier, 1754, with Questions taken from Holsten and
printed apart from the Life, with notation of variants in G
Editions by Orelli, Mullach and Gassei

Except for a few corrections supplied by the papyrus, the Greek text of the
biograpny, apart from the questions, depends entirely on R, which is very corrupt
in places. The more radical and conspicuous of these corruptions are either shared,
or their corresponding passages omitted äs hopeless, by W and by all the Oriental
versions. The entire Latin tradition depends on W, which translates R very faithfully
wherever the latter is intelligible. R is the identical MS used by Willelmus and has
his handwriting in Latin letters upon it. The source of the Arabic version cannot be
detennined; it may have been either a Greek or a Syriac text.
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Now in the original text of the Sindbad story, äs attested by S and Z, we
have almost the same Situation: for there too a king asks and receives the
answers to twenty questions from an accomplished philosopher, who happens
in this case to be his own son taught by Sindbad, and who, like Secundus,
has faced death by order of the king, owing to his maintenance of silence.149
In the second-century Greek story of Secundus the silence of the philosopher
is well grounded in the contemporary notions of Pythagorean asceticism, and is
further explained by a tragic event resulting from the philosopher's own study
and experiment. By contrast, the motivation for this silence in the Sindbad
story is purely mechanical and arbitrary; for there i t depends only upon a
horoscope made at the last moment. Likewise the motivation for the twenty
questions is much better in Secundus than it is in Sindbad; for in the latter
they are anticlimactic to the series of stories told by the wise men—the raison
cFetre of the book—and to the long-delayed final rescue of the prince from
his death sentence, whereas in Secundus these questions are the natural out-
come of the encounter with Hadrian. The emperor had summoned the phil-
osopher for no other purpose than to sample his wisdom in this fashion.
Another point of similarity between the two books, significant chiefly be-
cause it is combined with the two just mentioned, is the prominence in both
of the disparagement of women in general. The dramatic demonstration in
Secundus of the sensational proposition that no woman is chaste must have
made a deep impression upon the minds of Arab and Persian readers; and
this may well have exercised a direct influence both upon the author of
Sindbad in writing his book about the evils of women, and, at the same time,
upon the Persian author of the frame-story of the Arabian Nights (Hazar
Afsaneh), wherein King Shahryar (Burton I 14) explains his resolution, hence-
forth to kill every wife he marries after one night, by saying "There never
was, nor is there, one chaste woman upon the face of the earth." It is the
dramatic exploitation of this thesis in the widely circulated story of Secundus,
not its peculiarity äs an idea or a sentiment, which makes it probable that
both the author of Sindbad and the author of the Hazar Afsaneh were in-
fluenced by it specifically.
To sum up, the similarities in ideas and substance between the story of
Secundus on the one hand, and the Book of Sindbad on the other, are, I sub-
mit, so fundamental and, in their threefold combination so peculiar, that
they cannot be explained äs fortuitous. One of the two books must have
had a direct and decisive influence upon the invention of the other; and the
older of the two, äs well äs the more original in its motivation of the silence
and of the twenty questions, is undeniably Secundus.1*0 The writer who in-
149
In Syntipas (p. 61) the seventh wise man with his companions stop the
executioner from slaying the prince at the very moment when he has drawn his
sword and is about to strike off the prince's head. This recalls the scene in Secundus
whidi describes dramatically how the executioner—especially in the Arabic version,
but also in the Syriac and Greek—waves his sword before the face of Secundus
in 150
order to frighten him into talking.
P. Cassel (Misdile Sindbad 313 ff.) was the first to point out the similaritv of
the story of Secundus to that of Sindbad and to maintain that one of the two authors
must have made use of the other's book. His conclusion (p. 345), that the story of

vented the story of Sindbad was certainly a man who was familiär with
the Greek biography of Secundus. As we have seen, this biography was well
known in the Near East, through its Oriental versions, from the fifth Century
onward, if not earlier; but no form of it, insofar äs I can learn, is known to
have been current in India; and the only citations of its principal narrative
motif in Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature—T 412.2, "Incognito
son tempts mother to see whether all women are wicked"—are from immediate
derivatives of the Latin translation of Secundus.161
Another book, with which the author of the original story of Sindbad was
familiär, is the Book of the Wise Adiiqar. This had circulated in written form in
the Near East ever since its origin in Assyria in the sixth or seventh Century
B. C. It has been transmitted in Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic versions, among
others; and its influence on Persian literature and legend between the time
of Khusrau Anushirwan and that of Firdausi is evident in the Pahlavi Shatrang
Namak, and in other stories told about Buzurjmihr by Tha'älibi in his history
and by Firdausi in the Shahnama.1*2 The most obvious passage, but not the
only one in Sindbad which shows an acquaintance on the author's part with
the Book of Adiiqar, is at the beginning, where one reads of the king's child-
lessness in spite of his being old and of his having seven wives, his ardent
praying to God for the birth of a son, and the Statement that his son, who
was born thereafter in answer to his prayers, "shot up like a cedar." In view
of this parallelism between the two stories at the beginning, the English
editors of Adiiqar go so far äs to say that "Ariikar is äs truly a model for
Syntipas äs he was for Tobit."158 F. Nau has also recognized a relationship
of this kind between the two books.154 Apart from the introduction, another
borrowing from Adiiqar may be seen in the prince's reply to the nineteenth
question put to him by the king, which was quoted above (note 139).
Secundus is "eine manichäische Verarbeitung der Sindbadsage" originally written

in Syriac, is too absurd and preposterous to merit any discussion here. It is disproved
by the fact, ignored by Cassel, that the Greek text was in existence before Mani
was born (ca. 216 A. D.), äs we see from the Tischendorf papyrus. There is no
religious or ascetic tendency, Buddhist or Manichaean, in either Secundus or Syntipas.
L. W. Daly (op. cit. 51), after reviewing Cassel's theory of relationships, inclines
to the opposite conclusion: "I am not bold enough to suggest that 'Sindbad' is
actually derived from 'Secundus' but I do believe that Cassel's position in asserting
the opposite hypothesis is not at all well founded. One need not, in fact, go outside
the realm of Greek literature of unquestionable origin to find something very similar
in form and spirit to the 'Secundus Life.9 I refer to the so-called 'Acts of the
Heathen Martyrs.' The Situation which is envisaged in them is strikingly similar
to that in the 'Life;' the principal is haled in before the emperor and subjected to
questioning which elicits answers indicative of his resignation and defiant impudence
to the emperor in the face of death. In one instance the emperor involved seems
also to be Hadrian. To suggest that the Secundus 'Life* is related to, or even an
outgrowth of, such contemporary literature äs the 'Acts' offers a much more natural
and plausible explanation of its origin than does the theory of Cassel, which raises
more questions than it settles." For diese Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, see now the
fundamental work of H. A. Musurillo, by that title, Oxford 1954.
151
Namely, Scala Celi, 87 a, no. 509 and H. Gering's Islendzk Aeventyri 7, no. 1.
152
See note 14.
153
Op. cit. (n. 139) p. Ixxxii.
154
Histoire et Sagesse d'Ahikar, p. 120.
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The first story told by the fifth philosopher in Sindbad, that about the
soldier who mistakenly killed his dog after the dog had faithfully guarded
the baby from a snake, is a developed form, two stages removed on its way
west, from the story of the Brahman and the Mongoose in the Pancatantra
(V 1). The Pahlavi version of this story, äs we see from its derivatives in the
old Syriac of Büd and in Ibnu'l Muqaffa, is much closer to the Sanskrit source
than the form given in Sindbad. In the Pahlavi translation the Brahman be-
came a Magian or a religious man and the mongoose a weasel, and the wife
left the house, äs in the Pancatantra, in order to bathe; but in Sindbad the
religious man has become a Professional soldier, the weasel a dog, and the
wife leaves the house in order to visit her parents. That the author of Sindbad
got this story either from the Pahlavi version of KD or from one of its deriva-
tives, and not from India, is evident from the fact that he has taken from the
same source another story, that about the two pigeons told by the sixth philo-
sopher, whidi is not to be found, insofar äs I can learn, in any known Sanskrit
version of the Pancatantra. Its earliest known occurence is in Büd and Ibnu'l
Muqaffa'. From these facts we may infer, with some approach to certainty, that
the Book of Sindbad was written after the time of Burzöe, who wrote in the
sixth Century under Anushirwan. What looks like a reference to Burzöe in
the Greek and Syriac texts of Sindbad was noted above (p. 56), in the
passage where Sindbad remarks that it would be stränge if there could not
be found, in so great a kingdom äs that of Cyrus, a man who was at the same
time a philosopher and a highly skilled physician. Burzöe was famous for
having been just such a man in the Persian realm of Anushirwan.
Three of the short stories told in the original Sindbad can be traced to
Graeco-Roman antiquity: the story about the poisoned guests; about the
three depositors, the old woman, and the boy of five years; and how the
sandalwood merchant met his Obligation to drink up the sea by demanding
that his Opponent first stop the rivers from flowing into it. The last mentioned
of these stories is told dramatically and at length in the Greek Life of Aesop,
which was written in the first Century and came into Persia in Sasanian
times.155 It is also related, though briefly, by Plutarch in his Banquet of the
Seven Sages (151 b—-d), where it pertains to a contest in wisdom between
Amasis, King of Egypt, and an Aethiopian king. I have not yet learned of any
Indian parallel. The story about the poisoned guests has its central theme in
common with one told by Aelian (H. A. xvii 37), who informs us that Stesi-
chorus, in the sixth Century B. C., had dealt with it in a poem. In Aelian the
story runs thus: Sixteen thirsty reapers sent one of their number, a servant,
to fetch water from a spring. Arriving there, the servant found an eagle
struggling vainly in the coils of a serpent and set him free by killing the
serpent. As he did so, the serpent exuded his venom into the spring, without
the man's noticing it, and the water which he carried back to the reapers
was thereby poisoned. As he himself was about to drink of the water, after
having served the others, the eagle, out of gratitude, flew down and knocked
the cup out of his hand. Wondering at this, the man looked around and saw
155
See above p. 15.

that bis fellow-reapers were dying from the poisoned water. Then he under-
stood that the eagle had saved his life. A Condensed form of this story appears
among the fahles of Aphthonius (Perry, Aesopica no. 395). The prototype of
the story about the three depositors and the old woman is found in the Facta
et Dicta Memorabilia of Valerius Maximus (vii 5, p. 346 ed. Halm): Two
men made a deposit of money with an old woman on the understanding that
she was to return it only when both men appeared in person and demanded
it. Some time afterwards one of the depositors presented himself and claimed
the deposit on the pretense that his companion was dead, and the old woman
was deceived and gave it to him. Later the second depositor arrived and
demanded the money, and the old woman, unable to produce it and fearing
the outcome of legal prosecution, was greatly distressed and thought of
suicide. Demosthenes came to her rescue by saying to the plaintiff: "The
woman is prepared to return the deposit in good faith, but she cannot do so
unless you produce your partner; for that was the stipulation, äs you yourself
are proclaiming, that the money should not be paid to one of the depositors
without the other being present."106
The representation of Seven Sages surrounding King Cyrus in Sindbad is
traditionally connected, äs Wilamowitz and Krumbacher have remarked, with
the famous legend about the Seven Wise Men of Greece who gathered at
the court of King Croesus.157 This legend begot a similar one about the Em-
press Eudocia (nee Athenais, daughter of the sophist Leontius) in the fifth
Century, that she, famous for her own learning, was escorted to Constantinople
by seven Athenian philosophers ;1M and, in the sixth Century, seven Greek
philosophers were welcomed by King Khusrau Anushirwan, when, after the
ciosing of the pagan schools of Athens by Justinian, they sought refuge and
tolerance for their intellectual pursuits in Persia. They were soon disillusioned
with conditions in Persia, which they had imagined to be those of an ideal
kingdom ruled by a philosopher, and they returned to Greece. But from this
journey, says Gibbon, "they derived a benefit which reflects the purest lustre
on the character of Chosroes. He required that the seven sages, who had
visited the court of Persia should be exempted from the penal laws which
Justinian enacted against his pagan subjects; and this privilege, expressly
stipulated in a treaty of peace, was guarded by the vigilance of a powerful
löe
Many parallel versions of this and other stories told in Sindbad are cited or
outlined by W. A. Clouston in the Appendix of his Book of Sindibad, pp. 217—326,
and by R. Basset in Jour. Asiat. Ser. 10, Tom. l (1903) 55—83. On the three stories
above mentioned see Clouston 263 ff., Basset 81; Clouston 266 ff.; Basset 82. But
these are all from texts later than Sindbad.
107
Wilamowitz in Hermes 25 (1890) 198 f.: "Denn es liegt auf der Hand, dass
das Buch der sieben Meister, ein Lieblingsbuch des Volkes im Orient und Occident
während vieler Jahrhunderte, ein Nachkomme ist von der Vereinigung der Sieben
an König Kroisos' Hofe, wie sie z. B. Ephorus erzählt (fr. 101) ... lonien die wirk-
liche Heimath des Novellenschatzes ist, mit dem der Orient gewuchert und den
er im Mittelalter dem Occident zurückgegeben hat. Syntipas ist durch das nach ihm
benannte Volksbuch als ein Fremder seiner Heimath zurückgegeben." Krumbacher,
Gesdi. d. Byz. Lit* 894.
1M
See F. Gregorovius, Athenais, Geschichte einer byzantinischen Kaiserin (Leipzig
1882) 65 ff., for on account of this legend and its sources.
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mediator."159 The number seven had been especially prominent in Persian
ways of thinking from the time of the Achaemenian kings onward, and it had
many associations with legend, and especially with scientific and religious
formulas in the Sasanian period.100 After the time of Anushirwan, it would
seem that no Outsider was quite so likely to write a book about a king sur-
rounded by seven wise men äs was a Persian author; although anyone, of
course, may have done so regardless of bis nationality. The idea of seven sages
had long been at hörne in the Near East, more so than in India or elsewhere.
The manner in which the concubine was punished in the Pahlavi text of
Sindbad is peculiarly Persian in conception, äs we noted above (p. 75), and
this again points to the invention of a Persian author.
The scheme of motivating a series of stories by representing them äs told
to a king for the purpose of inducing him to spare someone's life, or to change
his mind or postpone an action, had been employed in Persian literature,
in all probability, before the Book of Sindbad was written. I refer to its use
in the famous Hazar Afsaneh, wherein Shiräzäd saved her life and won the
affection of King Shahryar by telling him stories for a thousand nights in
succession. The Hazar Afsaneh was very probably one of the many books
whidi, Mas'üdi teils us, were translated into Arabic from Pahlavi, Greek and
Syriac Originals in the reign of al-Mansür (754—75 A. D.)·161 The author of
the Fihrist (above p. 7) states that it was the oldest of all the story-books,
and that it had been used by the kings of Persia ever since the time of the
Arsacids. From this testimony we may safely infer, I think, that the original
Hazar Afsaneh» containing the frame-story of Shiräzäd, was at least äs old
äs the reign of Anushirwan (531—578 A. D.), i. e. äs old äs KD; whereas the
Book of Sindbad must be later, because, äs we have seen, the author took
one of his stories from Burzöe's Pahlavi version of KD.
Just äs the wise men in Sindbad alternate with the concubine in telling
stories to the king, in order to persuade him to spare his son, while she urges
his condemnation, so Shimas, in the book of that name, takes turns with the
159
E. Gibbon, Dedine and Fall of the Roman Empire, eh. 40. The story is told by
Agathias in his History, U 30—31.
160
See Geiger in Geiger-Kühn, Gnindriss II 579, and Browne, Lit. Bist, of Persia
I 408 ff. Among the legends and story-books of the Near East one thinks of the
account in Herodotus of the seven noble Persians, including Darius, who overthrew
the usurper Smerdis, the seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the seven voyages of Sindbad
the Sailor, the seven wazirs in the Book of Shimas telling stories to King Jalad, and
the seven queens in the Haft Paikar of Nizami and the seven stories tnere told to
King Bahram. On "The Heptad äs an Element of Biblical and Rabbinic Style," see
R. Gordis in Jour. of Bibl Lit. 62, 17 ff.
lttl
Mas'üdi, Les Prairies a"Or VIII 291. Among the translations here mentioned
only that of Kaliiah wa Dimnah is a story-book; the others are on scientific and philo-
sophical subjects, including works by Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. Nevertheless,
it is now practically certain, in view of the epoch-making publication by Professor
Nabia Abbott of a manuscript Fragment of the Thousand Nights written in the
earlv ninth Century (Jour. of Near-Eastern Studies VIII, 1949, 129—164), that an
Araoic version of the Hazar Afsaneh was in existence in an already modified form
before the end of the eighth Century, and that the original, presumably literal
translation of die Pahlavi book, must therefore have been made either in the reign
of Mansür or very shortly thereafter, See Abbott pp. 153 f. and 163.

king's favorite wife in telling him stories in order to offset the wicked wife's
influence, while the king changes bis mind after Hearing each plea (Burton IX
93—107). This is one of six or eight features of the Book of Shimas which are
closely paralled in the Book of Sindbad. Indeed the resemblance between
the two books in respect to their structural patterns and narrative motifs is
so manifold and fundamental that there can be no doubt that one of them
has influenced the composition of the other.
Which was the older of these two books? There seems to be no objective
evidence by which either alternative might be proved. The Book of Shimas,
in its present form at least, is certainly later than the reign of Anushirwan,
considering that one of its fables, the Fakir and his Jar of Butter (Burton IX
40 f.), must have come to the Greek author from some Near-Eastern version
of KD, rather than directly from the Sanskrit Pancatantra. Unlike Sindbad,
wherein the wisdom of the sages is secular in kind, the Book of Shimas, by
contrast, is füll of disquisitions on theological or religious subjects, such äs
the nature of God, the creation, free will, the origin of sin and evil, the vanity
and instability of all earthly things, the eternity of the world to come after
death, and the importance of preparing for it. This spirit of otherwordliness
and of renunciation reminds one strongly of the similar, but more intense
and more specifically Christian asceticism that prevails in Barlaam and
Joasaph. For this reason I would conjecture that the Book of Shimas was
written not long after the middle of the eighth Century. By that time the
ascetic romance of Barlaam and Joasaph, written by St. John of Damascus,162
was populär in western Asia; and, in that environment of religious thought,
and under the Stimulus of that particular romance, with its many inserted
apologues, the appearance of a new book with a similar religious tendency,
such äs that of Shimas, was natural and might be expected.
There is nothing in the substance of the Book of Sindbad which would
forbid our dating its composition between 579 and 650 A. D.; but so early
a dating seems improbable in the light of what little is known about the
history of Pahlavi literature and the kind of books that were produced in that
language previous to the Abbäsid period, beginning in 750 A. D. The Sasanian
narrative literature seems to have been mainly epic, and literary conditions
in Persia for a hundred years after the Arab invasion (651) were not at all
favorable for the production of books of entertainment, or indeed for books
of any kind. In the reign of Mansür (754—775) there was much activity on
the part of Persian-born scholars and poets writing in Arabic or translating
from their own and other languages, but the only story-books that we know
to have been translated from the Pahlavi in this period, namely KD and the
epic Khudhäy-nämak, were not of contemporary production but originated
in Sasanian times, and the same is probably true of the Hazar Afsaneh, which
must have been current in an Arabic translation before the end of the eighth
Century.161 The composing of new books of entertainment by Persian authors
162
This is firmly established, on the basis of a very thorough study of the tradition
and the author's style, by F. Döleer: Der griechische Barlaam-Roman, ein Werk des
H. Johannes von Damascus, München 1953 (Studia Patristica et Byzantina Heft 1).
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is more to be expected, and would be more fashionable, in the last quarter
of the eighth Century and the first of the ninth, when Persian influence at
the court of the caliphs was at its height and more books of a secular character
were being written, than under Mansür. The Pahlavi book entitled Pandnamak
containing the maxims of Buzurjmihr, which purport to have been written
by that minister at the request of Khusrau Anushirwan, dates from the late
ninth Century, according to Christensen;168 and the composition of the Sha-
trang Namak may not be much earlier, since the legend of Buzurjmihr with
which it deals presupposes the lapse of many years since the reign of Anushir-
wan. If such books äs these were composed in Pahlavi in the ninth Century,
the Book of Sindbad may well have been among them. The death of Müsa
b. Isä al-Kesrawi in 874 marks a terminus ante quem for the date of the
earliest known Arabic version of Sindbad; but Müsä's version may not have
been the first or the only Arabic translation to be made of the earlier Pahlavi
original. If it is true that a different version had already been made by Abän
Lähiqi (d. 815),66 it would follow that the original book was written at some
time before 800 A. D., and possibly äs early äs the reign of Mansür. I think it
probable, however, for the reasons mentioned above, that the Book of Sindbad
is of somewhat later date than the Book of Shimas, and that it has been in-
fluenced by the latter. If so, its composition might be referred to the last
quarter of the eighth Century or the first decade of the ninth. It is historically
more plausible to assume that the Persian author of Sindbad had read Shimas
in a Greek or Syriac or Arabic version, than it is to assume that the Greek
author of Shimas could have read the Pahlavi original of Sindbad or, at so
early a date, a translation of it.
161
Op. dt. (n. 14) p. 109.


(B. E. Perry) The Origin of The Book of Sindbad

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Nöldeke in Geiger-Kühn, Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie II 132 f.: "Übrigens

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™ "Greek Form Elements in the Arabian Nights" in 7AOS 62 (1942) 277—292;

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Ho w the O r i e n t a l Versions are Related One to A n o t h e r

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I The Graeco-Syriac Tradition

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III The Persian Tradition

Arabic Rifacimento [Dari]

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Secundus is "eine manichäische Verarbeitung der Sindbadsage" originally written

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