On a mystery of Talmudic Zoonymy: the parrot and the myna? A reassessment of the identity of the two andrafta Bird Species.
| Author | Nissan, Ephraim |
| Position | Essay |
TERMINOLOGY The bird [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (andrafta or indrafta) is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate ljullin, 62b. The text states that this bird comes in two varieties, one of them called after Shabur ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
To put it in Aristotelian taxonomy: the genus is andrafta and the differentia specifica is association with one king rather than the other--or, more correctly, with one king's name rather than the other's. Among those kings bearing the same name, (3) reference would presumably be to the one who was culturally more focal to the originators of the Babylonian Talmud.
The great Sasanian king Shahpuhr (4) appears as Shabur in the Babylonian Talmud, where he is well regarded and is said to have been kind to certain rabbis. (5) As to Peroz this, too, is a Persian personal name, (6) and in the context of Hullin, 62b it is considered to have been the "name of a (wicked) man," to quote Jastrow's dictionary. (7) It was quite possibly King Peroz who was considered to have been wicked by the Babylonian Talmud. (8) This would have been Peroz I (r. 457-484). (9) since Peroz II was a Sasanian prince. a pretender in exile in Tang China, where he was made a general and governor. Also in Arabic the name Eiruz occurs as a woman's name (the etymon for turquoise). (10)
If the andrafta variety was actually named after King Peroz, then we have a terminus a quo for the origin of the zoonymic nominal compound Peroz andrafta. Peroz I was the seventeenth king in the Sasunian dynasty, whereas Shapur I was the second. As memory of the latter receded in time, Jewish as well as general lore about him had presumably become idealized. On the other hand, grim memories of Peroz were perhaps more vividly accurate. (11) Perois reign was marked by civil war and famine. He met a bad end while trying to quell a revolt in Armenia, (12) and perhaps this was interpreted by some as divine retribution, reinforcing a negative opinion about a monarch, the beginning of whose reign saw "the low point of Sasanian rule." (13)
What must have mattered to the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud concerning King Peroz was something quite specific: "We know there were religious persecutions, especially against the Jews, at this time and drought and famine were rampant in the empire, as well as a revolt in Armenia in 482 CE." (14) At any rate, rabbinic opinions about King Peroz, whatever they might have been, are not a necessary factor in the hypotheses made here about Piruz andrafta and Shabur andrafta.
In accordance with the Persian literal sense of the name Peroz, the names Peroz and Shapur occur together in the following:
In 243 CE, Gordian invaded Mesopotamia to retrieve what had been taken by Ardashir and his son after Alexander Severus' death. But Shabuhr tells us (according to SKZ (15)) that he was able to kill him at Misikhe in 244 CE, close to the Euphrates river which he later called The aetiology of the river name is known and is likely to have been transparent in Sasanian Mesopotamia, and there is no need to hypothesize that the river name somehow affected the opposition of the bird names Piruz andrcifta and Shahur andrafta.
THE STATE OF RESEARCH
The talmudic bird-name [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] was interpreted by Ludwig Lewysohn (1858: s.v.), a scholar who was chief rabbi of Stockholm, and 140 years later by Menachem Dor (1997: 139), as denoting parakeets, on the assumption that the name was derived from Greek (lit., 'speaking like humans'). An alternative would be a derivation from Persian. (17) Of course, Alexander Kohut, the over-Persianizing lexicographer of early rabbinic literature, opted for a Persian etymology, (18) whereas the lexicographer Jastrow, whose often dubious etymologies are usually over-Semiticizing, noted for [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "prob. Pers." ' (19) Scholarly speculation about the identification of the denotation of andrcifta, as well as about the etymology, was already ongoing in the mid-nineteenth century and percolated into attempts to renovate Hebrew zoological terminology. (20)
It is important to note that such a bird-name is undocumented in the Greek sources. One possibility is that it was *av[delta]pa[phi]a[tau][tau]a, lit. 'pigeon [like] a man', from [phi][tau][tau]na 'dove, pigeon', an Attic form for Oacsa. What made the bird humanlike was that it talks. It need not have been particularly similar to a pigeon. Another possibility is that the Greek term was *av[delta]pa[phi][tau] [...]. for '[creature] talking like a man'. The morpheme av[delta]pa-(like avapo-) for 'man' occurs in compounds. e.g., av[delta]pa[pi]o[delta]ov'slave' (
TALKING BIRDS
Parrots were certainly not the only birds known to antiquity that supposedly talked. For that matter, the early Islamic encyclopedist JAWz claimed that three species of birds were better at talking than the parrot. This is relevant for our discussion of the two kinds of andrafta, and yet it was undoubtedly the parrot that had captured the imagination in the first place. It comes as no surprise that parrots feature in tales originating in India or in Persia. Moreover, it stands to reason that a prestigious bird such as a talking bird would be associated with a major monarch of the Sasanian dynasty, as is the case of the Shahur andrafta of the Baby-lonian Talmud.
Knowledge about parrots reached the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period, if not earlier. Corey Brennan (1992) has pointed out that "[a] Greek doctor to the Persian royal family at the beginning of the fourth century B.C., Ctesias wrote an ill-informed but very interesting treatise on India. He had never seen the place: all his information is from traders passing through the Persian court. ... Speaking of birds, Ctesias also tells of one which talks like a human in the Indian language, and can speak Greek as well, if you teach it called the parrot ..." Whereas we have no information from the Talmud concerning bird species characterized by the ability to talk in a human voice (aside from fables), it stands to reason that parrots did belong to the realia of Sasanian Babylonia. Therefore, the interpretation of andrafta as a `bird talking like a human' is...
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