Beatrice Gruendler will analyze what she calls “different shades of anonymity" referring to the Arabic Kalīla and Dimna having been overwritten in a multitude of copyists’ versions, irreducible to one origin. Their creators are anonymous: either their name is now lost due to -- physical -- manuscript damage. Or, they are anonymous because they did not sign their names. Furthermore, the act of signing (if it occurs at all) merely admits to copying the text not to interfering with it. In fact, a common colophon formula claims to represent a model’s “full and complete” reproduction, whereas many of the versions speak to the opposite.Copyist-redactors leave their fingerprints all over the work, that is, their writerly interventions. New versions range from selecting and combining passages from a number of different Vorlagen, to merging other works with Kalīla and Dimna as a multiple text manuscript (the added works have a kaleidoscopic range from poetic anthologies to zoology). The question is why contributing authors acted silently. Why declaring the act of copying but not the one of rewriting, which when viewed from the other direction may be called: tacit authorship.