The Story of Ahikar from the Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkish, Greek, and Slavonic Versions (Classic Reprint)

By J. RENDEL HARRIS) CHAPTER I ANTIQUITY OF THE LEGEND The story of A hikar has been long known to readers of the Arabian Nights, in the supplement to which it finds a place; but, in common with many other tales which are so liberally heaped up by Scheherezad, or which have been attached to her collection, it has escaped up to the present time from the close inspection of criticism, into the focus of which it has been slowly drifting; but, as we shall see when we consider the literature that has been quietly accumulating around it during the last few years, there has been an increasing perception that we had in this pretty romance something more and something earlier than a conventional Arab tale of the way in which Ingratitude meets its due, and that the nucleus of the tale, at all events, was Biblical or semi-B iblical in character, however wide the gulf might at first seem between the Hebrew and the A rabic literatures. And it is this perception of the imperfectly recognised debt which one branch of Semitic literature owes to another, and the rectification of ideas involved in the payment of the debt, that furnishes the main motive of the present tract.
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