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The history of Aesopic and Aesop-inspired fables in Europe outlined above follows a tradition beginning in Greece, nurtured in Rome, then expanded and brought to maturity throughout Europe, but this summary has not addressed the questions: Are similar didactic animal fables also native to cultures outside of Greece? And did such tales exist before Aesop? Both questions have affirmative answers, but supporting details are sketchy and sometimes ambiguous, as would be expected of evidence from the very distant past.
Clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia have revealed the existence of collections of proverbs and fables featuring animals as actors some 4,000 years ago, and it is assumed that these tablets are based on even older material no longer extant. Did these Mesopotamian stories find their way to Greece and elsewhere in undisclosed prehistoric times, carried orally by ancient travelers? Or did the tales travel from Greece to Mesopotamia? These questions cannot be answered definitively, although experience with other forms of folklore and common sense itself suggest that some stories with universal application may well have been invented independently in more than one area, a process called polygenesis by folklorists. Furthermore, prehistoric travelers, like their modern counterparts, carried both material goods and intellectual property in all directions, both coming and going.
A large number of European folktales (especially the magic stories commonly called fairy tales) have their origin on the Indian subcontinent. Although the prevailing scholarly opinion of today is that Greece, not India, was the ancestral home of most animal fables, some of the latter country’s most venerable literary works feature fables similar to those attributed to Aesop, and I find it hard to conceive that ancient Indian storytellers traveling abroad would omit animal fables from their repertory. In my judgment, the storytelling paths between ancient India and the Mediterranean world were two-way streets, to the mutual benefit of both cultures.
India’s arguably most influential contribution to world literature is the Panchatantra (also spelled Pañcatantra or Panca-tantra), which consists of five books of animal fables and magic tales (some 87 stories in all) that were compiled, in their current form, between the third and fifth centuries A.D. This work was based on an older Sanskrit collection, no longer extant, dating back as early as 100 B.C. It is believed that even then many of the stories were already ancient, having lived long lives as oral folktales. The anonymous compiler’s self-proclaimed purpose was to educate his readers, a goal shared by publishers of Aesopic fables from the very beginning. Although the original author’s or compiler’s name is unknown, an Arabic translation from about 750 A.D. attributes the Panchatantra to a wise man called Bidpai. His name implies “court scholar” in Sanskrit, but nothing else is known about Bidpai as a person. Discussions of the fables in the Panchatantra inevitably lead to comparisons with Aesop, and indeed, about a dozen tales (or close variants) are found in both collections. Did the ancient Greeks learn these fables from Indian storytellers? Or was it the other way around? Again, a definitive answer probably will never be known, but given the rich narrative traditions of both cultures, it is unlikely that the influence was not mutual, with each side learning from and giving to the other.
Another great collection of didactic stories from India are the Jataka tales. Part of the canon of sacred Buddhist literature, this collection of some 550 anecdotes and fables depicts earlier births and incarnations—sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a human—of the being who would become Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha. Traditional birth and death dates of Gautama are 563-483 B.C. The Jataka tales are dated between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., but many of them undoubtedly have antecedents in older folklore. A number of the Jataka fables have close parallels in Aesop.
Born and nurtured somewhat closer to Europe, and ultimately of even greater influence worldwide than the previously discussed two collections, is the great compilation of Arabic short fiction The 1001 Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. Based on Nights, also known as Arabic folklore, this work dates back about Indian, Persian, and Arabic folklore, this work dates back about 1,000 years as a unified collection, with many of its individual stories undoubtedly being even older. Although heralded primarily for its romantic tales of fantasy and magic, The 1001 Nights also contains a number of Aesop-like animal fables.