The Fables of Pilpay

These moralistic stories within stories date back to the Sanskrit text Panchatantra (200 BC ? 300 AD). They were first translated into Arabic by a Persian named Ruzbeh who named it Book of Kalilah and Dimna and then by Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa and later Joseph Harris in 1679 and then remodeled in 1818. Max Mueller noted that La Fontaine was indebted to the work and other scholars have noted that Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont and John Fletcher were both familiar with the fables. The Fables of Pilpay are a series of inter-woven fables, many of which deploy metaphors of anthropomorphized animals with human virtues and vices. (Summary by The introduction and Wikipedia)