Ibn al-Muqaffa

8th-century translator and man of letters (d. c. 757 CE), a Zoroastrian convert to Islam, credited with the surviving Arabic recension of Kalīla wa-Dimna — the sole surviving descendant of Borzuya's lost Pahlavi translation, and the ancestor text behind the collection's spread into Syriac, Greek, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, and Old Castilian. Matters to this vault as the single load-bearing link in the entire transmission chain in claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi: every earlier stage (Sanskrit, Pahlavi) is lost, so everything the vault knows about them is inferred backward from his Arabic text. Also the subject of the one documented dissent this vault has found on the chain's authenticity — see claim-al-yamani-disputed-kalila-wa-dimnas-indian-origin — and, per this promotion's own capture, reportedly executed c. 757 CE for alleged heresy, a detail not yet independently verified this session and left as an open lead rather than a claim.

References

• claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi
• claim-al-yamani-disputed-kalila-wa-dimnas-indian-origin
• claim-two-syriac-translations-of-kalila-wa-dimna-survive-independently
• claim-de-blois-borzuya-mission-historically-plausible-not-proven
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-borzuya-kalila-wa-dimna.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-do-tier-12-scholarly-sources-encyclopaedia-iranica-de.md