The set of animal fables known variously as the Panchatantra, the Fables of Bidpai, and Kalilah va Dimnah—among other titles—represents one of the most widely distributed and most translated and adapted works in the history of world literature. It is generally understood that the stories originated, in some more or less unified form, in Sanskrit, whence they were translated into Middle Persian. The latter version no longer exists, but it served as the basis for a further translation into Arabic, at the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, an ethnic Persian who held administrative posts under the late Umayyads and early Abbasids. This Arabic text, titled Kalilah wa-Dimnah, was thereafter the dominant source for a dizzying array of translations and reworkings, touching seemingly all of the written languages of the Old World. One particularly famous Persian adaptation was carried out in the mid-sixth/twelfth century by Nasr Allah Munshi, a secretary at the Ghaznavid court. By this point, the path of transmission is already complicated: from Sanskrit, to Middle Persian, to Arabic, back to New Persian. And yet the sharing of this textual tradition across languages and sociocultural contexts continued in ways that are less widely known. As Dagmar Riedel puts it, “Influence among the Syriac, Arabic, Middle Persian, [New] Persian, and Sanskrit versions [of Kalilah va Dimnah] was both multi-directional and repeated.”
This paper aims to explore a fascinating case of such multi-directionality: the Siyar al-muluk, an Arabic retranslation of Munshi’s Persian Kalilah va Dimnah, written by a certain ‘Umar ibn Dawud al-Farisi, and dedicated to one of the Ayyubid rulers of Hama, toward the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. We have only one manuscript, perhaps in the hand of al-Farisi himself; it was copied in 727/1327 and is now held at the Topkapı Palace library (with microfilms in Cairo and Tehran). I will provide an introductory overview of the Siyar al-muluk, focusing on the unavoidable question: Why would there be a demand for an Arabic translation of Munshi, given that his own source material, the Arabic attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, was widely available? What had Munshi added that was considered valuable beyond the Persianate context? And was there something exceptional about Kalilah va Dimnah that lent itself to continual back-and-forth influence?
