The Siyar al-mulūk of ʿUmar b. Dāwūd al-Fārisī: A Quasi-Plagiaristic Translation of Kalīla and Dimna

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we carry out an introductory study of a little-known text titled Siyar al-mulūk, written in the late seventh/thirteenth century by an author named ʿUmar b. Dāwūd al-Fārisī, and dedicated to an Ayyubid amīr of Hama. There is only one known extant copy of this work, which belongs to the collection of the Topkapı Palace Library and dates to 727/1327. ʿUmar b. Dāwūd presents what he has written, confusingly, as an “arabicization” (taʿrīb) of the classic book of fables, Kalīla and Dimna — one of the most famous versions of which was already in Arabic. In fact, the Siyar al-mulūk is a translation; but it is derived from the sixth/twelfth century Persian rendition of Kalīla and Dimna by Naṣr Allāh Munshī. Analyzing how this text relates to its sources is made somewhat more difficult by ʿUmar b. Dāwūd’s decision not to name any of them. Once the connection to the work of Naṣr Allāh is recognized, however, the Siyar al-mulūk emerges as a case study in both the evolution of Kalīla and Dimna as a global textual tradition and the transmission of Persian literature and scholarship to the Arab lands in the Mongol-Ayyubid-Mamluk period.