1 Introduction1
Kalila wa-Dimna is a collection of exciting moral stories written in a unique style, both in terms of narration and its technique of maintaining suspense.2 The stories in Kalila wa-Dimna are based on an imaginary dialogue between animals, and each story holds another internal story, which holds another, and so on.3 The book dates back roughly to the third or fourth century BCE, and it was originally written in Sanskrit. In the eighth century, a Persian version was translated into Arabic by ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (died ca. 756 or 759 CE). The original Persian copy has been lost though. Kalila wa-Dimna eventually became exceptionally popular throughout the world, which resulted in various copies and many translations, of which Hebrew, French, and Greek were among the oldest, produced around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The manuscript under the classmark BNF Arabe 3465, which is currently held in Paris, in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, is considered one of the oldest extant Arabic copies of this famous book. It dates to the early thirteenth century (1220 CE). The Cairo Genizah—which should be considered a plentiful source for the study of Arabic literature—holds fragmentary works and numerous pieces of otherwise lost Arabic literary texts, including Kalila wa-Dimna manuscripts from the same period as BNF Arabe 3465. For instance, the well-known fragment T-S Ar.51.60 comes from a magnificent, illustrated Arabic copy of Kalila wa-Dimna (Baker & Polliack 2001, no. 7533 and plate 19), likely from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. T-S Ar.40.9 is from a separate illustrated Arabic copy (Khan 1986, 60), which likely predates T-S Ar.51.60.
In their catalogue of the T-S New Series, Shivtiel and Niessen (2006) spotted a single bifolium of Kalila wa-Dimna in Judaeo-Arabic: T-S NS 97.16, copied probably in the 12th–13th century. The newly identified Judaeo-Arabic manuscript for this article is T-S Ar.6.32. Its discovery doubles the number of known copies of the Kalila wa-Dimna that are written in Arabic in Hebrew characters in the Genizah. A more extensive find, it consists of six leaves (three bifolia), including headings of sections/chapters. This fragment was apparently part of a complete copy of the book of Kalila wa-Dimna in Judaeo-Arabic, which is now lost. Comparing the text in T-S Ar.6.32 to BNF Arabe 3465 reveals that the Genizah fragment preserves text from the story of Ilāḏ, Balāḏ, and Irāḵt, story nine in the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna.
2 Judaeo-Arabic Excerpt
Reading the Judaeo-Arabic text, one can easily spot differences in comparison to the oldest Arabic copy preserved in Paris. To give an example, I compare here some lines from the two copies, first giving the Genizah fragment in its original form alongside a transcription into Arabic script:
T-S Ar.6.32 P2 f. 2 recto
|
Translation |
Arabic transcription |
Hebrew script |
Line |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The king addresses Bmābrūn: |
|
|
13 |
|
“I was asleep on the back of my clothes until I heard six voices |
|
|
14 |
|
coming from the ground. Then I continued my sleep |
|
|
15 |
|
and I had 8 dreams, which I told the Brahmin about. They interpreted them for me |
|
|
16 |
|
and I am worried about this, and I did not wish to be extinct and to lose my |
|
|
17 |
|
kingdom”. He told him about his dream, and so Bmābrūn interpreted it |
|
|
18 |
|
for him: “You should not be sad, my Lord, for what you saw, |
|
|
19 |
|
and you should not let worries arise in your heart because of this dream. Because, there is nothing |
|
|
20 |
|
going to harm you or reach you. As for the two fishes … |
|
|
21 |
We find the same part of the story in the following pages of BNF Arabe 3465:
BNF MS. Arabe 3465, fol. 132r:
فقال له الحكيم :ما بالك أيها الملك وما لي أراك متغير اللون فقال له الملك إني رأيت في المنام ثمانية أحلام فقصصتها
BNF MS. Arabe 3465, fol. 132v:
على البراهمة وأنا خائف أن يصيبني من ذلك عظيم أمر مما سمعت من تعبيرهم لرؤياي وأخشى أن يغصب مني ملكي أو أن أغلب عليه فقال له الحكيم إن شئت اقصص علي احلامك وان شئت قصصتها عليك واخبرتك بما رايت جميعه قال الملك بل من فيك اخبر فقال لا يحزنك أيها الملك هذا
BNF MS. Arabe 3465, fol. 133r:
الأمر ولا تخف منه أما تفسير السمكتين …
Although the main storyline remains the same in the two versions, the comparison reveals considerable differences between the two texts. Personal names are among the main differentiators here. Take, for example, the name of the wise man (al-Ḥakīm), who was called
3 Conclusion
Hopefully, further investigation will reveal more distinctive features of the Judaeo-Arabic text. The initial analysis suggests that the Judaeo-Arabic text might have been copied from another Arabic-script copy, but it could be that it was directly translated into Judaeo-Arabic from a text written in a non-Arabic language. All in all, the Judaeo-Arabic version opens new avenues for questions about the original Kalila wa-Dimna text and the versions through which it was transmitted during the Middle Ages.5
The present author would like to thank Dr Ben Outhwaite for reading a draft of this Fragment of the Month. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 851411 APCG).
* This article was originally published as the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit’s Fragment of the Month for February 2021, where it appeared with the title: ‘Kalila wa-Dimna: T-S Ar.6.32 part of the Arabic book Kalila wa Dimna, story nine—ʾIlāḏ, Balāḏ and Iirāḵt’ (
Editor’s note: On other Arabic folk tales in the Cairo Genizah, see in the present volume, ‘Qiṣṣat al-Ğumǧuma: An Arabic-script Version of ‘The Story of the Skull’ in the Cairo Genizah Collections’ by Magdalen M. Connolly.
This could be read as an abbreviation of
The present author is working on a complete edition of the leaves under the classmark T-S Ar.6.32, with English translation and analysis.
References
Baker, Colin F., and Meira R.P. Polliack. 2001. Arabic and Judeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Taylor-Schechter Arabic Old Series (T-S Ar.1a–54). Cambridge Genizah Series 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shivtiel, Avihai, and Friedrich Niessen. 2006. Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Taylor-Schechter New Series. Cambridge Genizah Series 14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.