AnonymClassic is the first-ever comprehensive study of Kalila and Dimna (a book of wisdom in fable form), a text of premodern world literature. Its spread is comparable to that of the Bible, except that it passed from Hinduism and Buddhism via Islam to Christianity. Its Arabic version, produced in the 8th century, when this was the lingua franca of the Near East, became the source of all further translations up to the 19th century. The work’s multilingual history involving circa forty languages has never been systematically studied. The absence of available research has made world literature ignore it, while scholars of Arabic avoided it because of its widely diverging manuscripts so that the actual shape of the Arabic key version is still in need of investigation.
What we are interested in

Persian Kalīla and Dimna
Persian is one of the key languages in the global textual tradition of Kalīla and Dimna. This is true whether we mean Middle Persian (also known as Pahlavi) or New Persian (which we call simply Persian). According to the traditional origin story of Kalīla and Dimna, the book began its life in Sanskrit; was brought to Iran and translated/adapted into Middle Persian in the Sasanian period; and was, from that basis, translated into Syriac and Arabic—the latter at the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. 757 CE), an ethnic Persian secretary at the Umayyad and Abbasid courts. All subsequent versions derive from the Arabic.

Framing Narratives: New Perspectives on Premodern Textual Production in Arabic
This series of events invites discussions on how to theoretically engage with the concept of narrative framing in premodern Arabic literature and adjacent literary traditions. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive definition of «framing narratives» beyond a merely descriptive perspective, and to interrogate its function within textual production.

AnonymClassic @ Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East
The research colloquium of the "Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic" project is part of the module "Research Perspectives" of "Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East", a two-year, full-time master’s program taught in English.

Interim report on our editorial and analytical work
In medieval worlds • no. 11 • 2020, Beatrice Gruendler, Jan J. van Ginkel, Rima Redwan, Khouloud Khalfallah, Isabel Toral, Johannes Stephan, Matthew L. Keegan, Theodore S. Beers, Mahmoud Kozae, and Marwa M. Ahmed discuss various aspects of their work on the textual tradition Kalīla and Dimna. The paper is based, in large part, on a joint presentation given by the AnonymClassic team at the conference Berlin ediert!, held at the Freie Universität Berlin on April 26-28, 2019.

The Digital Kalīla wa-Dimna – an online series
The AnonymClassic project under direction of Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gruendler discusses the project’s findings in an online series in July 2020, hosted by Columbia Global Centers Amman.

Social Media Wall
To give an overall impression of the project's and seminar's social media activities, we have introduced a social media wall to our on-going scholarly communication activities.

Scholarly communication and social media
AnonymClassic takes scholarly communication and disemmination of research progress seriously. Therefore, one of our fellows has taken on the task to maintain the Twitter account and website of the project in order to give a clear and up-to-date idea of our research activities not only to fellow researchers but also to the interested public.

Workshop Animals, Adab, and Fictivity
Medieval Arabic literature (adab) is full of animals. The most famous example is Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about talking animals and humans. This text is usually described as "fables" or as a Mirror for Princes (Fürstenspiegel). However, the rich diversity of animal stories beyond Kalila wa-Dimna and the role these animal stories play in the broader adab tradition are not well understood.

How the AnonymClassic logo was created
The graphic of the project logo "AnonymClassic" is set in type "B Esfehan Bold", a modern adaptation of the Arabic Kufi script. It combines the Arabic initials of "Kalila and Dimna" (Kāf and Dāl). Both symbols, in the style of Arabic calligraphy, are combined to form a compact shape that is simultaneously open at the top and left.

Anonymous
Who was the author or the authors of Kalila and Dimna? The question of authorship is indeed an intriguing one. Kalīla and Dimna, it is true, belongs to a broad group of translations from Sanskrit (via Middle Persian) to Arabic of works that had been transmitted orally over centuries and have no known authors.

How to use a book
When he adapted the Middle Persian version of Kalīla and Dimna, at a time when the book was a newly introduced data carrier in Arabic-Islamic culture, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757) found it necessary to accompany this with a preface to explain what a book was for, and this book in particular. According to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, reading was a serious endeavor, and to be done mindfully, even though he envisaged different ways of reading by different audiences.

Digital reconstruction
The manuscript Rabat MM 3655 is one of many treasures of the Royal Library of Morocco. It has been dated by Bernard O'Kane (Early Persian Painting, London 2013) to the second part of the thirteenth century (between 1265 and 1280), which makes it one of the oldest codices of Kalīla and Dimna.

Image cycles
Illustrations are an essential element in the textual history of Kalīla and Dimna; they do not only increase the material value of manuscripts, but also provide an important source of information for their date and place of production and their relation to other manuscripts.

Other talking animals
Kalīla and Dimna was not only widely copied in the pre-modern period. It was also adapted and reconceived by dozens of other authors. The rich and diverse tradition of writing about talking animals beyond Kalīla and Dimna is not well known, but these adaptations informed how readers and copyists thought about Kalīla and Dimna. The May 2019 workshop, entitled "Animals, Adab, and the Abbasid Fictive Tradition," seeks to bring together leading scholars of animal writing in the Adab tradition to further explore this tradition of writing.

Cultural translation
When Kalila wa Dimna was read, copied, translated and rewritten in more than 40 languages, the structure and content underwent significant transformations, since it had to be transferred into very diverse linguistic, cultural and religious contexts. To approach these complexities adequately, AnonymClassic views translation as an active process of acculturation and adaptation, i.e. as cultural translation.

Copyist-coauthors
AnonymClassic understands the variations in Kalīla and Dimna as being part of its textual history. Its multiple and diverse versions make Kalīla and Dimna an oscillating text that calls for a redefinition of the notion of “copyist” in Arabic literary culture.

Marginal notes
Marginal notes, a common ingredient of Arabic manuscripts, are not frequent in the circa 100 manuscripts of Kalila wa-Dimna so far identified.

Indirect transmission
Short citations of Kalīla and Dimna have been identified in thirty classical works. The 9th-century century History (Ta’rikh) by Ya’qubi (d. 897), even provides an entire table of contents with a brief summary and the didactic purpose of each chapter and constitutes an early witness for the shape of the book as a whole.

World literature
AnonymClassic will challenge the prevalent Western theoretical lens on world literature conceived ‘from above’ confronting it with the view ‘from below,’ based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by the many versions of this text that circulated beyond religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. AnonymClassic will thus introduce a new paradigm of an East-Western literary continuum with Arabic as a cultural bridge.

Digital synopsis
Using LERA, instances of chapters from multiple manuscripts can be collated for close reading and comparison. Furthermore, selectable filters can be used for automatic detection of text variations some of which can be adjusted as in the shown example from the chapter “The Ascetic and His Guest,” in which words receive unique colorings if exclusively shared between exactly two manuscripts.

Syriac text versions and tradition
We know of a Syriac-Aramaic translation/redaction of the lost Middle Persian copy, and there is a Syriac-Aramaic version of a rather early Arabic text variant. Comparative analysis will lead to an insight into tradition and early stages of the book.

Theory of fictive writing
Kalīla and Dimna was a paradigmatic work of Classical Arabic belles-lettres. To understand this text's reception, we must understand how readers theorized fictive writing and how they situated this text vis-à-vis other kinds of fictive writing.
Image Credits

persian
Image Credit: Leaf 396 of Manchester, John Rylands Library, Persian MS 68, dated 616/1219.

framing
Image Credit: BNF Arabe 3465 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84229611,Topkapı Palace Library. MS R. 1022

socialmediawall_img
Image Credit: Screenshot by Victoria Mummelthei

twitter_screenshot
Image Credit: Screenshot by Victoria Mummelthei

keegan_workshop
Image Credit: CeDiS, Layout & Design: Nadia El-Obaidi

anonym
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book_binding
Image Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS arabe 3477

dig_rest
Image Credit: Rabat 3655 PDF page 4, Bibliothèque Royale of Rabat

image_cycle
Image Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS arabe 3467

raven king talking to viziers
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coauthor
Image Credit: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wetzstein II 672 KD, folio 13v

marginal
Image Credit: München Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Arab. 616, fol. 94r

dissemination
Image Credit: Kalila and Dimna — AnonymClassic, Freie Universität Berlin, Advanced Grant funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

digital_synopsis
Image Credit: Mahmoud Kozae

raven
Image Credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS arabe 3467 66v
Who we are

Oualid El Khattabi
Oualid El Khattabi is currently a master’s student at the English Studies: Literature, Language, Culture MA program at Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Martil, Morocco, and a Translation Degree (Arabic-English-French) from King Fahd School of Translation, Tangier, Morocco. He joined the “Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic” project in April 2020, and is responsible for transcribing manuscripts.

Dima M. Sakran
Since April 2020, Dima Sakran is a student research assistant for the ERC-project Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic. She focuses both on manuscript transcription and the implementation of data to the project’s LERA platform.

Agnes Kloocke
Agnes Kloocke read Comparative Literature, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität Munich and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She works as copy editor and freelance translator specializing in art and architecture. Her professional portfolio also includes event and exhibition management. In the AnonymClassic project, Agnes Kloocke is responsible for project management and financial administration.

Ruslan Pavlyshyn
Ruslan Pavlyshyn is a third year BA Student in Arabic Studies, majoring in Arabic and Persian. Since March 2019 he is student assistant at the Seminar of Arabic Studies and, from August 2019, also for ERC-Project Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic.

Marwa M. Ahmed
Marwa M. Ahmed is responsible for the programming of the LERA platform and other tasks related to the project’s Digital Humanities workflow.

Rima Redwan
Rima Redwan is a researcher in the AnonymClassic team where she focuses on Arabic manuscript illustrations and manuscript research. She earned her MA in Arabic Studies specializing in manuscript studies.

Victoria Mummelthei
Victoria Mummelthei is a researcher in the field of the linguistics of Arabic in Arabic literature and Arabic literature as global literature; her dissertation explores the poetry of Syrian writer Nizar Qabbani (1923–1998) from the perspective of frequencies, keywords, and topics. Both for AnonymClassic and the Arabic Studies section of the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies, Victoria Mummelthei is responsible for scholarly communication and the dissemination of research processes and results; she also answers for the cooperation with the master's program Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME), of which she is the co-coordinator and deputy academic advisor.

Mahmoud Kozae
Mahmoud Kozae was part of the project team "Kalīla wa Dimna – Wisdom Encoded“ (2015-2017), then continued on the AnonymClassic project since January 2018. His tasks focus on digital support for the project, providing the conceptual and computational framework based on the LERA programme (in cooperation with the Universität Halle) for the Digital Synopsis and Edition of the Arabic Manuscript versions.

Dr. Johannes Stephan
Johannes Stephan is a literary historian of the Arabic tradition with a PhD from the University of Bern. He has joined the AnonymClassic team in February 2019. He explores the indirect transmission of Kalila wa-Dimna in Arabic from the 9th century onward and the significance of linguistic variations within the corpus.

Khouloud Khalfallah
Khouloud Khalfallah joined the project team "Kalīla wa Dimna – Wisdom Encoded“ in September 2017 then continued on the AnonymClassic project since January 2018. In addition to the transcription and the comparison of Kalīla wa Dimna manuscripts, she focuses on the description and the codicological analyze of the Arabic manuscript versions as well as the digital restoration of parts of some manuscripts.

Theodore S. Beers
Theodore S. Beers is a Persian and Arabic philologist who joined the AnonymClassic project in April 2019. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Chicago (currently awaiting defense) on the development of Persian literary anthologies in the late Timurid and early Safavid-Mughal periods. As part of the AnonymClassic team, Theodore S. Bears focusses on the transmission, translation, and continual reworking of material connected to Kalīla wa-Dimna, with particular regard to the interplay between the Arabic and Persian traditions.

Prof. Dr. Isabel Toral
Since October 2018, Isabel Toral has led the ERC project AnonymClassic as deputy principal investigator. Her focus is on aspects of fictional storytelling and cultural translation.

Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gruendler
Beatrice Gruendler is not only an eminent scholar of medieval Arabic, a leader in her field, and an expert in the history of the book in the Islamic World, but also a capacious thinker across humanistic disciplines. As the Principal Investigator of this project, she especially draws on her philological expertise, her familiarity with Arabic palaeography and codicology as well as her interest in digital humanities for Arabic philology.
Image Credits

el_khattabi
Image Credit: privat

sakran
Image Credit: private, 2020

kloocke
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pavlyshyn
Image Credit: privat

ahmed
Image Credit: private

redwan
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mummelthei2
Image Credit: privat

kozae
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stephan
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khalfallah
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beers
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toral
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gruendler
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Events

Re-watch the Digital Kalīla Online Series, organized by the Columbia Global Centers Amman
YouTube
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walls.io
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Who we cooperate with

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Marzolph
Ulrich Marzolph served most of his professional life as a member of the editorial committee of the German-language Enzyklopädie des Märchens and adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August-University at Göttingen. His main area of interest is the study of Middle Eastern Muslim narrative culture. At the end of his career, he conducted his own research project, published in 2020 as 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition. Retired since 2019, he is currently working to finalize a number of research projects related to the study of Middle Eastern popular literature.

Dr. Rachel Peled Cuartas and Ulpán Hebreo Sefarad
Rachel Peled Cuartas works on the Hebrew versions of Kalīla and Dimna and Barlaam and Josaphat (The Prince and the Monk), translating them to Spanish and English. She is founder, co-director and teacher of Ulpán Hebreo Sefarad and its Translation Workshop, Madrid, closely cooperating with Carlos Santos Carretero.

Claudia Päffgen
Claudia Päffgen focused on the didactical side of Kalīla and Dimna and developed teaching materials for learners of all levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) from its numerous editions and versions.

Assia Soltani-Nkwo
As a part of Research Area 3, “Future Perfect” of EXC Temporal Communities, Assia Soltani-Nkwo joined the project "Premodern Anthologies" in order to further explore the use of formulae within Arabic anthologies and to integrate her own research concept into a wider comparative scope.

Dr. Doris Bachmann-Medick
Doris Bachmann-Medick, Dr. phil., Permanent Senior Research Fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Giessen/Germany; works and teaches on Cultural Theory and recent disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transnational developments in the Study of Culture.

Pascal Belouin
Pascal currently works as an IT Architect for Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), where he is responsible for the design and development of RISE & SHINE, a software suite for the secure decentralised exchange of open and licensed digital resources and which aims to facilitate and streamline humanities research through the use of digital tools.

Dr. Michael Fishbein
Lecturer in Arabic (retired), Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California Los Angeles

Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book (KITAB)
KITAB provides a digital tool-box and a forum for discussions about Arabic texts. We wish to empower users to explore Arabic texts in completely new ways and to expand the frontiers of knowledge about one of the world’s largest and most complex textual traditions.

Dr. Yoones Dehghani Farsani
As a visiting scholar associated with the AnonymClassic project for several months in both 2019 and 2020, Yoones Dehghani pursues his research on the issue of flexible textual tradition—“floating texts” as Muriel Roiland and Jacqueline Sublet call it—within medieval Arabic literature.

Dr. Jan van Ginkel
Jan has for many years been working on various Syriac projects at various universities. One central topic in most of these projects is Syriac as a bridge culture in the Middle east. Within the SFB 980 "Episteme in motion" J. van Ginkel works on the subproject "Verses and Sayings. Impetus and Range of Scholarly and Popularising Discourses in the Arabic World".

Dr. Matthew L. Keegan
Until July 2019, Matthew L. Keegan worked on the theorization of fictive writing in pre-modern Arabic. He holds a PhD from New York University and an M.Phil from the University of Cambridge, UK, and is now the Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University.

CeDiS
The Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) is the competence center for e-learning, e-research and multimedia at the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin. CeDiS supports all university institutions in the use of digital media and technologies in teaching and research.

Bibliotheca Arabica
Bibliotheca Arabica is dedicated to research on Arabic literatures dating from the years 1150 to 1850 CE, and combines literary and manuscript studies. Within this defined period of investigation, Bibliotheca Arabica focusses on literary production, transmission, and reception, and sets these in relation to the political and social transformations that were taking place at that time.

Kalîla wa Dimna BnF
The research programme "Tradition manuscrite et transmission iconographique : les manuscrits à peintures de Kalîla wa Dimna à la Bibliothèque nationale de France" aims at the description and interpretation of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of Kalila wa Dimna preserved in the Department of Manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

LERA, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
LERA is an interactive, digital tool for analyzing variations between multiple versions of a text in a synoptic manner with several differences to other well-known collation tools. It was first developed for printed texts of the French Enlightenment within the SaDA-project at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and since then adopted to other texts and languages

The Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig
Seeing in the rise of Digital Technologies an opportunity to re-assess and re-establish how the humanities can advance the understanding of the past and to support a dialogue among civilizations.
Image Credits

marzolph
Image Credit: private

peled
Image Credit: private, 2013

paeffgen
Image Credit: Claudia Päffgen

soltani
Image Credit: private

bachmann-medick
Image Credit: private

belouin
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fishbein
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kitab
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farzani
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van_ginkel
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keegan
Image Credit: private

cedis
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bibl_arab
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bnf
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LERA
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dh_leipzig
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The AnonymClassic project receives funding from the European Research
Council under the European Union’s Horizon2020 programme; project ID: 742635