Donkey & Deer Backpack - Kalila wa Dimna

Handpainted
A folio from the Arabic version of Kalila wa Dimna, dated 1210. It is an expression of whoever resorts to trickery and deception must fall into someone who exercises the same role against him.

Written by indian scholar Bedba wrote it for Debshleem, the king of India. Implicitly he was advising him to beware of people who you keep close to yourself. The author used animals and birds as the main characters in it, which mainly refer to human characters.

Kalila wa Dimna was translated into Arabic in the Abbasid age specifically in the second Hijri century by Abdullah ibn al-muqaffa using his own writing style. The stories spread all over the Middle East where they became wildly popular.