Page:The Fables of Bidpai (Panchatantra).djvu/27

Rh immediately translated into Syriac by a Priest named Būd or Bōd, about 570 The history of the rediscovery of this Old Syriac version forms one of the romances of modern scholarship, which must, however, here remain untold. (See Benfey's letter, translated in Professor M. Müller’s Selected Essays, i., pp. 549-55.)

When Islam turned to science and literature, one of the earliest works translated into Arabic was the Pehlevi translation of our Fables by ‘Abdullah Ibn al-Mokaffa’, a Persian convert from Zoroastrianism to Islam, who was therefore a most appropriate intermediary. There is, however, another account how the book got into Arabic, which may be given here for its intrinsic interest as well as from the fact that it is one of the few things overlooked by Mr. Keith-Falconer. Abraham Ibn Ezra, a wandering Jew who visited many lands, England among them in 1158, and wrote on many subjects—grammar, arithmetic, exegesis, poetry, and astronomy—gave the following account of the Arabic translation in one of his astronomical tracts.