Kalīla wa-Dimna Edition

THE EDITION

Catching a Book on the Move: Kalīla and Dimna is one of the key texts of world literature.
The numerous versions of this Book of Wisdom or “Mirror of Princes” in fable form incorporate a multitude of different stories or episodes in varying combinations.

Origins may be traced back to Indian Sanskrit traditions, handed down via Persian and Syriac. The Arabic versions originate in the 8th century when Arabic had become the lingua franca of the Near East; these then furnished the source of all further remodeling in different languages and cultures up to the 19th century and beyond. ... read more

MANUSCRIPTS

The Edition shows a part of the work – yet. It will further grow over time. The Berlin team has been able to collect 121 Arabic and Persian manuscripts of Kalīla and Dimna in digitized form. We have analyzed thousands of manuscript pages in order to study the changing structure of the book, to observe the characteristics of the text, and to identify strands of the textual tradition (groups or continua), collages, or near-verbatim copies. ...read more

COLLATIONS

The Kalīla and Dimna Edition is based on countless hours of work by the research team of collecting text witnesses, transcribing, translating, and segmenting the Kalīla and Dimna manuscript data. We originally started out with a small chapter (The Cat and the Rat, abbreviated Mc) in just seven different manuscript versions. ...read more

MANUSCRIPT DESCRIPTIONS

The Edition provides detailed information on those manuscripts used most often in our edition. The information includes codicological data (date, physical description, layout, and illustrations), as well as notes on the script and orthography and a manuscript's placement within the textual tradition. ... read more

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS

For non-specialist readers, we provide a near-verbatim English translation of one chapter (The Cat and the Rat, abbreviated Mc), which imitates features of the various witnesses such as word order and line breaks whenever feasible. ...read more

GALLERY

The Gallery shows for each manuscript featured in the Edition all pages at a glance (including those with illustrations or gaps left for illustrations) and a close-up version of any given page.

It permits quickly comparing the different lengths of each chapter, the frequency of illustrations in each manuscript, restored pages, and changes of the manuscript hand. ...read more

ILLUSTRATIONS

This view extracts only the illustrations of each manuscript organized per chapter. It permits comparing which scenes per manuscript have received illustration (i.e., its image cycle) and comparing the chosen motifs as well as their different styles of rendition.

Some manuscripts contain only gaps left for illustrations for intended illustrations that have not been inserted or completed; their points of insertion as well as any captions (such as in Paris 3466) nonetheless provide important information. ... read more