We know that in the sixth century A.D. there existed in India a Buddhist collection of fables, in which animals play the part of human beings (cf. p. 369). By the command of the Sassanian king, Khosru Anushirvan (531-579), this work was translated by a Persian physician named Barzoi into Pehlevi. Both this version and the unmodified original have been lost, but two early and notable translations from the Pehlevi have been preserved. The Syriac one was made about 570 A.D., and called Kalilag and Damnag. A manuscript of it was found by chance in 1870, and, becoming known to scholars by a wonderful chapter of lucky accidents, was published in 1876. The Arabic translation from the Pehlevi, entitled Kalilah and Dimnah, or "Fables of Pilpay," was made in the eighth century by a Persian convert to Islam, who died about 760 A.D. In this translation a wicked king is represented to be reclaimed to virtue by a Brahman philosopher named Bidbah, a word which has been satisfactorily traced through Pehlevi to the Sanskrit vidyapati, "master of sciences," "chief scholar." From this bidbah is derived the modern Bidpai or Pilpay, which is thus not a proper name at all. This Arabic version is of great importance, as the source of other versions which exercised very great influence in shaping the literature of the Middle Ages in Europe. These versions of it were the later Syriac (c. 1000 A.D.), the Greek (1180), the Persian (c. 1130), recast later (c. 1494) under the title of Anvar-i-Suhaili, or "Lights of Canopus," the old Spanish (1251), and the Hebrew one made about 1250. The fourth stratum of translation is represented by John of Capua's rendering of the Hebrew version into Latin (c. 1270), entitled Directorium Humanæ Vitæ which was printed about 1480. From John of Capua's work was made, at the instance of Duke Eberhardt of Würtemberg, the famous German version, Das Buch der Byspel der alten Wysen, or "Book of Apologues of the Ancient Sages," first printed about 1481. The fact that four dated editions appeared at Ulm between 1483 and 1485, and thirteen more down to 1592, is a sufficiently eloquent proof of the importance of this work as a means of instruction and amusement during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Directorium was also the source of the Italian version, printed at Venice in 1552, from which came the English translation of Sir Thomas North (1570). The latter was thus separated from the Indian original by five intervening translations and a thousand years of time.