Читать книгу The Bakhtyār Nāma. A Persian Romance онлайн

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But there was another Indian work, now apparently lost, formed on the same plan, which, if we may credit El-Mas’ūdī, the Arabian historian, who lived in the tenth century, certainly dates before our era; namely, the Book of Sindibād, of which there have been so many translations and imitations in Asiatic and European languages, and to which the Persian romance reproduced in the present volume is considered to bear some relation. El-Mas’ūdi, in his famous historical work, “Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems,” states very plainly that “in the reign of Khūrūsh (Cyrus) lived Es-Sondbād, who was the author of the Book of the Seven Viziers, the Teacher, the Boy, and the Wife of the King.” According to another Arabian writer, Sindibād was an Indian philosopher who lived about a hundred years B.C. El-Mas’ūdī does not mention the version through which the work was known in his time, but it was probably either in Arabic or Persian. The oldest version known to exist is in Hebrew, and is entitled Mishlī Sindabar, Parables of Sindabar; the change of the name from Sindibād to Sindibar, Deslongchamps conjectures to be a mistake of the copyist, the Hebrew letters D and R being very similar in form. This Hebrew version has been proved to date as far back as the end of the twelfth century. Under the title of Historia Septem Sapientum Romæ, a Latin translation was made—from the Hebrew, it is supposed—by Dam Jehans, a monk of the abbey of Haute Selve, in the diocese of Nancy, early in the 13th century. A Greek version, entitled Syntipas, the date of which is not known, was made by a Christian named Andreopulus, who states in his prologue that he translated it from the Syriac. Notwithstanding this very distinct statement, several learned scholars—Senglemann, among others—have contended that the Syntipas was made from the Hebrew version; of late years, however, a unique but unfortunately mutilated manuscript of the Syriac version, transcribed about the year 1560, was discovered by Rödiger, and reproduced in his Syriac Chrestomathie, in 1868; and a year later Baethgens published, at Leipsic, this text, together with a German translation, under the title of Sindban, oder die Sieben wiesen Meister, from which it appears certain that the Greek version of Andreopulus was made from the Syriac, the order of the stories being the same in both. Besides the Hebrew and Syriac versions of the Book of Sindibād, there exist translations or adaptations in at least two other Oriental languages, the Arabic and the Persian. The Arabian version (to which perhaps El-Mas’ūdī alluded in his mention of the work, as above) now forms one of the romances comprised in the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments”), under the title of “The Story of the King, his Son, his Concubine, and his Seven Viziers;” and an English translation of it was published, in 1800, by Dr Jonathan Scott, in his Tales, Anecdotes, and Letters, from the Arabic and Persian.^[7] Two poetical versions have been composed in Persian; one of which, entitled Sindibād Nama,^[8] by Azraki, who died, at Herat, A.H. 527 (A.D. 1132–3), is mentioned by Daulet-Shāh, in his life of Azraki, in these terms: “And they say the Book of Sindibād, on precepts of practical philosophy, is one of his compositions.”^[9] The other Persian version is known in Europe, I believe, only through Professor Forbes Falconer’s excellent analysis^[10] of a unique manuscript, entitled Sindibād Nāma, composed A.H. 776 (A.D. 1374).