Seven Wise Masters

Seven Wise Masters, (“The Book of Sindbad”), a cycle of stories, presumably Indian in origin, that made its way through Middle Persian and Arabic into Western lore. In the frame story, an Oriental king entrusted the education of his son to a wise tutor named Sindbad (not to be confused with the sailor of The Thousand and One Nights). During a week when the prince was ordered by Sindbad to maintain silence, his stepmother tried to seduce him. Having failed, she tried to accuse the prince before the king and sought to bring about his death by relating seven stories. Each of her narratives, however, was confuted by seven sages, who in turn told tales of the craft of women. The prince’s lips were at last unsealed and the truth was exposed.

The oldest surviving text of the story is in Middle Arabic and is included in The Thousand and One Nights (nights 578–606 in Sir Richard Burton’s translation, vol. 6, 1886). The Arabic text gave rise to Hebrew, Syrian, and Spanish translations (13th century); the Greek version (11th century) is derived from the Syrian. Of the Persian versions the most important is that of al-Samarqandī (12th century). The tales entered Latin via the Greek version, in the 12th century, under the title Dolopathos, which was translated into French. The German, English, French, and Spanish chapbooks of the cycle are generally based on a Latin original.