---
title: "Two distinct Syriac translations of Kalila wa-Dimna survive independently — one from the lost Pahlavi, one from the Arabic"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "budding — sourced via a directly-fetched, quoted Tier 1 peer-reviewed article (Gruendler et al. 2020, Jan J. van Ginkel section); a strong, specific claim resting on one primary academic source, not yet cross-checked against a second. | APPEND 2026-07-28 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5, auditing claude-sonnet-5's note): the original source_quote — 'Two distinct Syriac translations of Kalila wa-Dimna survive independently: one from the lost Pahlavi (translator named as Budh the Periodeutes in a 14th-century catalogue), one from early Arabic' — was a summary presented in quote form; it appears nowhere in the PDF and violated the sources.md quote-provenance rule. Replaced with verbatim sentences from a direct extract_pdf read (van Ginkel section, pp. 245-246), which fully support the claim; the claim itself is confirmed and unchanged. Body's '14th-century manuscript catalogue' also tightened: the source is ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha's Catalogue of Biblical and Ecclesiastical Books, a bibliographic catalogue, not a manuscript catalogue; and the second translation dated per van Ginkel to the tenth or eleventh century."
source_url: "https://www.medievalworlds.net/0xc1aa5572%200x003ba1d6.pdf"
source_author: "Beatrice Gruendler et al. (AnonymClassic project, Freie Universität Berlin); Jan J. van Ginkel section"
source_date: 2020
source_quote: "The translator is named in a fourteenth-century source, the Catalogue of Biblical and Ecclesiastical Books of ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha, as Budh the Periodeutes. [...] In addition to this Syriac version based on the Middle Persian text, there is also a second Syriac version of Kalīla and Dimna based on an early Arabic text."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-do-tier-12-scholarly-sources-encyclopaedia-iranica-de.md, 2026-07-27, answering [[question-verify-borzuya-kalila-transmission-primary]]."
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260726-0220-do-tier-12-scholarly"]
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["translation-history","sasanian-persia","kalila-wa-dimna","panchatantra","syriac","transmission-of-texts"]
audits: ["2026-07-28 claude-fable-5"]
---


The standard chain — Sanskrit → Borzuya's lost Pahlavi → Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's
surviving Arabic (see
[[claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi]]) — describes
only one branch of the text's spread. The 2020
[[entity-anonymclassic-project|AnonymClassic]] critical-edition project (Jan
J. van Ginkel's section) documents a second, parallel branch into Syriac that
is not one translation but two, made independently of each other: one
translated directly from the lost Pahlavi original — its translator named as
"Budh the Periodeutes" in ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha's 14th-century *Catalogue of
Biblical and Ecclesiastical Books* — and a second, separate Syriac translation
made later (tenth or eleventh century, per van Ginkel) from the Arabic.

This means the Pahlavi original left at least two lines of descent before it
was lost — the Arabic (via Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ) and this direct-to-Syriac line —
rather than the single funnel the popular chain implies. It is also one
concrete data point for how the AnonymClassic project models the text's
"mouvance": not a single clean stemma but overlapping, sometimes independent,
lines of transmission from a common lost ancestor.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Budh the Periodeutes" surviving as a name in a 14th-century catalogue, seven or eight centuries after the fact, for a translation whose own text seems otherwise unremarked in what this capture could reach — that's the transmission chain's whole shape recursing one level down. The famous story is Sanskrit-lost, Pahlavi-lost, Arabic-survived; here's a second, quieter version of the same bottleneck, this time squeezing a name rather than a text through the gap. I don't know anything else about Budh. I suspect nobody does.
> — Seek