The Rája of Hind sends an envoy to Núshírwán with the game of chess, proposing certain conditions which the Sháh accepts and, with the help of Búzurjmihr, carries out. Búzur-jmihr invents the game of nard, and the Sháh sends him with it to the Rája, proposing similar conditions. The poet then tells the legend of the invention of chess—how two sons of an Indian queen quarrelled about the succession to her throne, how one of them perished and how the other, to console his mother, invented the game. Lastly the poet tells how a prince tributary to Núshírwán was sent at his own request to Hind to find the herb that restores the dead to life, and returned bringing instead the Fables of Bidpai.

§§ 1-3. Here, as in the case of the Yátkár-i-Zarírán*

and the Kárnámak,*

we are brought into contact with an extant Pahlaví Text—the Tshatrang Námak—which was undoubtedly one of Firdausí's indirect authorities. It was written, probably, about the seventh century A.D., and tells how the king of Hind— Déwasárm—sent an embassy to Núshírwán with gifts and the game of chess which he had invented. The chess-men were one half of emeralds and the other half of rubies. If the Íránians, he writes to Núshírwán, cannot explain the meaning of the game they must pay him tribute or vice versû. None can find the mean­ing till Búzurjmihr, who has been keeping himself in reserve, appears on the third day, expounds the principle of chess, and proceeds to win twelve games against Déwasárm's envoy. Búzurjmihr then invents nard, which is a form of backgammon, takes it to Hind, puzzles the sages there with it, and returns triumphant with double tribute. The similarity of the Pahlaví Text to the Sháhnáma therefore is obvious. Probably in the original story, no longer extant, the problem set was compara­tively a simple one: “What did the board and pieces represent?” And the answer would be: “A battlefield.” The misplaced ingenuity of later redactors, however, has added impossible details. A clever man of the time might guess by what the game had been suggested, but the greatest that ever lived could not have evolved the method of play from his inner consciousness, assuming of course his complete previous ignorance of the game. The Pahlaví Text gives the answer correctly and then proceeds to make Búzurjmihr win twelve games right off! In the Sháhnáma the Indian envoy himself gives away the whole thing by stating what the game represents, and then Búzurjmihr in retirement discovers the powers of the various pieces and the way in which they are manipulated—an impossible achievement. It will be observed that Firdausí describes two forms of the game —that introduced into Persia for a board of sixty-four squares, and that, which he considers to be the original, for a board of one hundred squares. The powers of most of the pieces have altered since those days. The tethered minister has changed his sex, become the king's better half, and has acquired as much liberty and preponderance as the most emancipated lady could desire, but the knight's ingenious move has passed unchanged through all vicissitudes.

The Persian word “nard” means a tree-trunk, and it seems not unreasonable to imagine that the game got its name from the re­semblance of the pieces on the board to tree-stumps. The author of the Tshatrang-Námak, however, tells us that the game was named after the founder of the Sásánian Dynasty, Nau-Ardshír, which became contracted into nard. Like chess it is symbolical and represents human life as swayed or moulded by fate or fortune whose decrees are written in the aspects of the stars and planets. Thus the board represents the earth, the thirty pieces the days of the month, the colour of the pieces the nights and days, &c. Each throw of the dice too had its proper symbolism. The first represented the Unity of Urmuzd, the second the duality of heaven and earth, the third the triad of Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds, the fourth the four temperaments—dry, damp, warm, and cold, and so forth. Later Arabic writers elaborated the symbolism considerably. The dice were taken to represent the heavens and their motions, and the markings on the dice the seven planets in as much as the numbers on the opposite sides added together always make up the number seven, one being opposite to six, two to five, and three to four. The result of a throw was the decree of fate, &c. Nard may be said therefore to surpass chess in sublimity of conception as much as chess surpasses nard in its demands upon the intellect.

Firdausí does not tell us how nard was played, and the intro­duction of the two kings, apparently on the analogy of those at chess, is quite beside the mark. The poet's whole story of the way in which chess was brought into Írán, and the invention of nard, is quite unhistorical. We have had already in this volume*

an instance of one king propounding hard questions to another, and in the next volume we shall have the problem of the mysteri­ous box, on the elucidation of which a wager depends as in the present case. According to Mas'údí, nard was invented before chess and before the days of Porus, and chess in the time of one of that king's successors, but he also states that the invention of nard has been attributed to Ardshír Pápakán.*

Elsewhere Mas'údí tells us that Núshírwán had the book of Kalíla and Dinma, chess, and a black hair-dye, brought from Hind.*

§ 3. Sháhwí, Firdausí's authority for his story of the invention of chess, perhaps may be identified with the Máhwí who collabor­ated with four others in the work of putting the Bástán-náma into modern Persian in the tenth century A.D.*

§ 4. Shádán, son of Barzín, was, it would seem, another of the five above-mentioned collaborators.*

We appear to be here on much firmer historical ground than in the corresponding stories of the introduction of chess and the invention of nard. That the Fables of Bidpai were brought from Hind to Persia in the reign of Núshírwán, and translated from the Sanscrit into Pahlaví by Barzwí, seems to be admitted generally, though of course we need not accept all the details of Firdausí's version of the transaction. He is not very accurate in what he says with regard to the later literary history of the famous book. It was not translated into Arabic for the first time in the reign of the Khalífa Mámún (A.D. 813-833) but in the previous century by Ibn Mukaffa.*

Firdausí is correct, however, in stating that the Fables were translated into Persian verse by the first great modern Persian poet, Rúdagí, who enjoyed for many years the munificent patronage of the Sámánid prince, Nasr son of Ahmad (A.D. 914-943), and of the minister Abú-l Fazl, and died in A.D. 954. Unfortunately only fragments of Rúdagí's translation survive. The poet is said to have been blind.

To compare small things with great, the Fables of Bidpai rival the Romance cycle of Alexander in the extent of their diffusion. They are said to have been translated into thirty-eight languages.*

It is not possible to enter into the subject here, but one illustra­tion of the way in which the Fables passed from one language into another may be given. The earliest English version of them is that of Sir Thomas North—the translator of Plutarch's Lives, which Shakespeare put to such good account—and it was published in 1570 under the title of The Morall Philosophie of Doni. It comes to us as Sir Walter Blunt came to Henry IV,

through which it has passed, and its provenance is as follows: “It is the English version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian original.”*

In Sir Thomas North's version, owing, it is said, to a misunder­standing of the letters when the Fables were translated from the Hebrew, Núshírwán appears as Anestres Castri.*

It is interesting to find that the wish expressed to Núshirwán by Barzwí*

has been gratified. After all the vicissitudes through which the book has passed his name and the story of his discovery of the Fables still survive. In the English version he appears as Berozias.*

We may add that apparently the Fables themselves may be traced back to the Indian Játakas or Birth Stories of Buddha,*

and that the Jewish race, to which the world is indebted for at least three religions, was the chief agent in the wide dissemination of the fables and the scientific study thereof.*