Carried Across · Chapter 1
The herb that raises the dead
Sometime around the year 550, the king of kings of Iran sent his physician to India to find a herb that raises the dead.
That is the story the book tells about itself, anyway. The physician was called Burzoy, the king was Khosrow I Anushirvan, "the Immortal Soul," and the account of the mission survives in the opening chapters of the book Burzoy brought back, retold for centuries afterward in works like the Shahnama. In India, the story goes, a sage took pity on the foreign doctor and explained the riddle. The herb was a metaphor. The dead were the ignorant. The herb that raises the dead was a book of wisdom, kept in the rajah's treasury, and the rajah would not give it up. So Burzoy asked to read it. He read it by day, memorized what he read, and wrote it out from memory each night in his own language, dispatching the pages home to Iran. The book was the Panchatantra: five books of animal fables in Sanskrit, in which jackals, lions, crows and tortoises conduct seminars on power, friendship and betrayal, composed by tradition for the instruction of princes.
Scholars treat the heist with proper suspicion. François de Blois, who wrote the standard study of Burzoy's voyage, distinguishes five separate versions of the story, which disagree about almost everything except the physician, the king and the book. The frame is literature, not documentation. But the carrying itself is as solid as anything in the sixth century: a Middle Persian version of the Panchatantra existed at Khosrow's court, because everything west of India descends from it. And the detail the legend insists on is the one a historian should keep. The book did not flow to Iran. A man went and got it, at state expense, and the getting was work.
Follow what happened next and you can watch a book cross the world one pair of hands at a time.
Around 570, a cleric of the Church of the East named Bud, holding the rank of periodeutes, an itinerant supervisor a step above priest and a step below bishop, translated Burzoy's Persian into Syriac. His version still exists, the oldest surviving witness to a Persian text that is itself lost. Around 750, in the first years of the Abbasid caliphate, a Persian convert to Islam named Ibn al-Muqaffa turned the Persian into Arabic prose so good that his version founded Arabic literary prose as a genre. He added chapters of his own, including a trial scene in which one of the jackals answers for his slanders, and within a decade of finishing it he was executed, still in his thirties, for reasons that had nothing to do with fables and everything to do with court politics. His Kalila wa-Dimna became one of the most copied books in the Arabic language.
Then the chain forks. In the twelfth century a man known to us only as Rabbi Joel translated the Arabic into Hebrew; his entire biography is one sentence in someone else's preface. Around 1251 a team working for Alfonso, crown prince of Castile, translated the Arabic directly into Castilian. Between 1263 and 1278 a Jewish convert to Christianity, John of Capua, turned Rabbi Joel's Hebrew into Latin as the Directorium humanae vitae, the Directory of Human Life, and from that Latin the fables spilled into the European vernaculars. In 1678, in the preface to his second collection, Jean de La Fontaine acknowledged his debt to the sage "Pilpay," a worn-down echo of the Sanskrit narrator. A French schoolchild reciting La Fontaine today is reading, at perhaps ninth hand, a book a Persian physician memorized in an Indian treasury.
The road left fingerprints in the names. The two jackals of the Sanskrit frame story are Karataka and Damanaka. In Syriac they became Kalilag and Damnag. In Arabic, Kalila and Dimna. In Castilian, Calila e Dimna. The title of the medieval world's most translated storybook is a fossil: the sound of two Sanskrit jackals, worn smooth by passage through five languages, still audible after fifteen hundred years.
This book is about what the Panchatantra's itinerary shows: the mechanics of how ideas move.
We have a standard way of talking about this, and it is wrong in a quiet, corrosive way. We say ideas spread. We say knowledge flows, influence radiates, culture diffuses. The metaphors come from water and weather, and they smuggle in an assumption: that movement is what ideas do naturally, the way water runs downhill, and that the historian's job is just to map the riverbeds. On this picture, Greek philosophy was always going to reach Europe somehow; the Arabs happened to be holding it at the time; the details are plumbing.
Every link in the Panchatantra's chain argues otherwise. At each step there was a person who did not have to do what he did. Bud the periodeutes had churches to inspect; nothing in his office required him to render Persian court literature into Syriac. Ibn al-Muqaffa was a busy state secretary working in a dangerous court; the fables were a choice, and his additions to them were a second choice. Rabbi Joel, whoever he was, gave some part of his life to a task so thankless that history kept nothing of him but his name in another man's preface. Remove any one of them and that branch of the chain simply stops. There is no riverbed. There are only carriers.
The carriers had reasons, and the reasons were rarely the ones we would assign them. Nobody in this chain translated the Panchatantra to enrich world literature. Khosrow's court wanted the prestige of Indian wisdom; the legend's herb business says as much, dressing acquisition up as quest. Ibn al-Muqaffa was making a manual of political conduct for a new empire's administrative class, in the language that empire was teaching itself to write. Alfonso's translators were equipping Castilian, a soldiers' vernacular, to do the work of a court language. The fables were freight. The carriers were paid, or were buying standing, or were arming a language, and wisdom rode along in the hold.
This will be the pattern in every chapter that follows, and it is worth being blunt about it now. Ideas travel when somebody has a use for them, and the use is usually not the idea's own. Astronomy crossed into Arabic because a caliph wanted horoscopes that worked. Aristotle's manual of debate crossed because a different caliph staged religious disputations and wanted his side armed. The most important pharmacology book of antiquity got a thorough Spanish revision because an emperor in Constantinople sent it as a diplomatic flex, with a note implying the recipients could not read it, and the recipients took the point personally. Truth and beauty are weak engines. Utility, prestige, rivalry and piety are strong ones, and they will pull anything hitched to them, including, as it happens, truth and beauty.
None of this diminishes what the carriers did. It locates it. The wonder of the story is precisely that it had no author: no congress of civilizations ever convened to decide that Indian fables should instruct French schoolchildren, or that a Greek star catalogue should reach Oxford by way of Baghdad and Toledo. Thousands of private intentions, most of them parochial, some of them venal, summed to the largest movement of knowledge the world had seen before print. How a sum like that happens, what it needs, what it costs and how it fails: that is the subject of this book.
The chapters ahead follow the mechanics one at a time. First the object itself, the manuscript, a body that can drown, burn or be scraped for hymn paper, because nothing about carrying makes sense until you feel how mortal the cargo was. Then the carriers, the men in the middle, almost always members of communities that lived between languages. Then the buyers: caliphs, viziers, princes and bishops, whose budgets are the closest thing this story has to physics. Then the lone obsessives that economists' explanations keep failing to predict; the ways texts mutate and lie in transit; the strange fact that the whole system worked without anyone running it; what print did to the chains; and finally what the chains look like now, in a world where some of the readers are not human.
Burzoy went looking for a herb that raises the dead and came home with a book. The sage's riddle was better than he knew. A book really can wait out centuries among people who cannot use it, and then, in the hands of the right carrier, wake up. We will watch it happen, fourteen times.