There were two collections of early fables in Sanskṛit literature, called the Panćatantra and the Hitopadeśa, and during the reign of the Sassanian kings a quaint old book containing these stories was brought to the Persian court and translated into the Pahlavī tongue. This was a notable event in the history of Āryan literature, and since that time[225] this rare collection of simple stories has passed through more mutations than has the Roman Empire; it is now extant, under various names, in more than twenty languages, the Persian version being known as the Anwār-i-Suhali, or “The Lights of Canopus.”[226] It is recorded that King Nūshirvan commissioned an officer of state to procure a translation of this work, and, being obtained after years of difficulty, it was deposited in the cabinet of the king’s most precious treasures, and was regarded as a model of wisdom and didactic philosophy. But at the time of the Arabian conquest, this work, with many others, was destroyed by the vandals of the desert. More than a hundred years later the book was discovered and translated into Arabic by Almokaffa,[227] it then passed through the hands of several Arabic poets, and was afterward retranslated into Persian, first into verse, by Rudāki in the tenth century, and into prose in the twelfth century by Nasrāllah. As early as the eleventh century the Arabic work of Almokaffa was translated into Greek by Simeon, and then passed into the Italian. Again the Arabic text was translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Joel, and this Hebrew version became the principal source of the European books of fable. Before the end of the fifteenth century, John of Capua had published a Latin version, and a more elegant Persian rendering was made in the beginning of the fifteenth century by Husain Va’iz. A Turkish translation had been made early in the tenth century, but there was no Hindūstānī version until much later. The number of translations indicated the extreme popularity of the work in Europe, and in the sixteenth century it was read in German, Italian, Spanish and French. The English has not so many versions, although both Sir William Jones and Prof. Max Müller have translated the Hitapodeśa, and Prof. Eastwick has given us a faithful reproduction of Husain Va’iz’s work, the Anwār-i-Suhali.