The Literary History of a Mesopotamian Fable

Abstract

TWO years ago there appeared in the Penguin Classics a translation of selections from the Fables of Aesop.' In the introduction to his translation, Mr. Handford makes a most remarkable statement. Speaking of the preAesopic fables to be found in the early seventh-century Greek poets Hesiod and Archilochus, he states: These poems are several centuries earlier than the earliest known fables of any other country!2 Then he continues, There is reason to believe that some Egyptian and Assyrian fables became known to the Greeks in classical times, but no evidence exists to suggest that these influences were either early or important. As far as we can see, therefore, the fable was invented by the Greeks.3 This cavalier treatment of the* subject ignores the researches of many scholars long familiar to Classicists, extending back to the article of Hermann Diels which appeared nearly half a century ago.4 It would be an easy task to refute Handford's naive assertion, provided as we are with such a wealth of ancient Near Eastern fable material in Egyptian and especially in Sumerian and Akkadian, much of it long antedating the Greeks. However, in view of the partial and fragmentary nature of the texts at our disposal, it is not often that we chance upon a fable which can with confidence be regarded as the prototype of one familiar to us from the Aesopic corpus, such as the Akkadian fable of the gnat and the elephant.5 It is the modest purpose of this paper to trace the history of one Mesopotamian fable through Egyptian and Classical literature to the Middle Ages. The fable of the serpent and the eagle first appears in the Akkadian Legend of Etana.6 This work is preserved in three recensions, Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian, and consequently the fable imbedded in it, which may of course be much older than the tale of which it forms a part, must be regarded as going back at least to the Old Babylonian period, that is to say, to about the seventeenth century B.C. The

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