[FN#229] The number of fables and anecdotes varies in the different texts, but may be assumed to be upwards of four hundred, about half of which were translated by Lane.

[FN#230] I have noticed these points more fully in the beginning of chapt. iii.  “The Book of the Sword.”

[FN#231] A notable instance of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance.  Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal used as a Kiblah or prayer-direction (Jerusalem or Meccah), the visible means of fixing and concentrating the thoughts of the vulgar, like the crystal of the hypnotist or the disk of the electro-biologist.  And goddess Diana was in no way better than goddess Pasht.  For the true view of idolatry see Koran xxxix. 4.  I am deeply grateful to Mr. P. le Page Renouf (Soc. of Biblic.  Archaeology, April 6, 1886) for identifying the Manibogh, Michabo or Great Hare of the American indigenes with Osiris Unnefer ("Hare God").  These are the lines upon which investigation should run.  And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry:  the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as “mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity” (Prof.  Monier Williams in “Folk-lore Record” vol. iii. part i. p. 118).

[FN#232] See Jotham’s fable of the Trees and King Bramble (Judges lxi. 8) and Nathan’s parable of the Poor Man and his little ewe Lamb (2 Sam. ix. 1).

[FN#233] Herodotus (ii. c. 134) notes that “AEsop the fable-writer ( ) was one of her (Rhodopis) fellow slaves”.  Aristophanes (Vespae, 1446) refers to his murder by the Delphians and his fable beginning, “Once upon a time there was a fight;” while the Scholiast finds an allusion to The Serpent and the Crab in Pax 1084; and others in Vespae 1401, and Aves 651.

[FN#234] There are three distinct Lokmans who are carefully confounded in Sale (Koran chapt. xxxi.) and in Smith’s Dict. of Biography etc. art.  AEsopus.  The first or eldest Lokman, entitled Al-Hakim (the Sage) and the hero of the Koranic chapter which bears his name, was son of Ba’ura of the Children of Azar, sister’s son of Job or son of Job’s maternal aunt; he witnessed David’s miracles of mail-making and when the tribe of ’Ad was destroyed, he became King of the country.  The second, also called the Sage, was a slave, an Abyssinian negro, sold to the Israelites during the reign of David or Solomon, synchronous with the Persian Kay Kaus and Kay Khusrau, also Pythagoras the Greek (!) His physique is alluded to in the saying, “Thou resemblest Lokman (in black ugliness) but not in wisdom” (Ibn Khallikan i. 145).  This negro or negroid, after a godly and edifying life, left a volume of “Amsal,” proverbs and exempla (not fables or apologues); and Easterns still