Excerpt from The Story of Ah ik ar: From the Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkish, Greek, and Slavonic Versions The story of Ahikar has been long known to readers of the Arabian Nights, in the supplement to which it finds a place; but, in common with many other tales which are so liberally heaped up by Scheherezade, or which have been attached to her collection, it has escaped up to the present time from the close inspection of criticism, into the focus of which it has been slowly drifting; but, as we shall see when we consider the literature that has been quietly accumulating around it during the last few years, there has been an increasing perception that we had in this pretty romance something more and something earlier than a conventional Arab tale of the way in which Ingratitude meets its due, and that the nucleus of the tale, at all events, was Biblical or semi-Biblical in character, however wide the gulf might at first seem between the Hebrew and the Arabic literatures. And it is this perception of the imperfectly recognised debt which one branch of Semitic literature owes to another, and the rectification of ideas involved in the payment of the debt, that furnishes the main motive of the present tract. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."