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Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ tells a story about his role as author that echoes Barzawayh’s story of conniving to obtain the original tales then, on the next tier down, in the inset narrative, we find the manuscript Barzawayh managed to purloin, which follows a king and a philosopher in dialogue about the proper way to conduct oneself. The same structure recurs on every level, as the themes both progress and intersect. The building blocks aren’t however dressed stone but stories, scores of stories laid end to end along each tier. Imagine a stepped pyramid inverted: Kalīlah wa-Dimnah proceeds down from tier to tier in five main sections. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ worked from a lost Pehlevi (Middle Persian) composition by a writer called Barzahwayh, which he treated freely, mixing into the Panchatantra’s original fables four more tales, and a highly circumstantial and persuasive explanation of how the manuscript was obtained he also added a crucial dramatic chapter about Dimnah’s trial, self-defence, and ultimate punishment.Īs in One Thousand and One Nights, the complex and exciting frame story sets up the themes in many of the tales that follow, which are dominated by alliances and treachery, selflessness and malice, cunning, deceit, and double-dealing. 139/757), who translated and compiled Kalīlah wa-Dimnah. Two significant branches grew from this trunk: first, a collection often attributed to a legendary Indian sage, known as Bidpay or Pilpay, and second, the Arabic branch, beginning in the eighth century with the work of the scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d.

The Arabic stories’ rich history ranges from Benares to Baghdad and Basra and Rome and beyond, appearing in numerous iterations over centuries, moving across borders, carrying the sparkling hope and mordant cynicism, the canniness and the wit of a form of wisdom literature that originated in the Sanskrit Panchatantra (The Five Books, or Five Discourses) and the Mahabharata, sometime in the second century BCE. Most of all, the story of the two jackals Kalīlah and Dimnah, and the tales told in the course of their adventures, are travelling tales, which have been travelling for a long while, migrating from language to language, culture to culture, religion to religion.

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