The laughable stories collected by Mâr Gregory John Bar Hebræ

INTRODUCTION.
XXVII
existed in his day. Thus in No, DXLVII a simpleton
asks an astrologer to arrange that his son should be
born under the sign of Hermes, meaning that he wishes
him to be a scribe; now, the Greeks identified Hermes
with the Babylonian godNebo, who was the god oflearning
and the scribe of the gods, but the idea that a man would
become a scribe because he was born when Nebo or
Hermes was "ruling" belonged to a much older time
than that of the Greeks. Stories of the speech of
animals, likewise, have their originals in the literature
of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and if we had records of
the earliest peoples of these countries we should probably
find that such originals were derived from writers
belonging to still earlier nations, and that these in turn
had borrowed from their predecessors.