The Long Voyage of a Trickster Story from Ancient Greece to Tibet

This essay focuses on two tales involving the trickster figure of Nyi chos bzang po, that had been handed down in the Tibetan folk tradition and published in Lhasa, in the literary magazine sPang rgyan me tog. Quite surprisingly one of these two stories coincides with chapters 75-76 of the Romance of Aesop, the romanticized and stratified biography of Aesop,that had been composed most probably in Egypt, around the first century AD but was based on much older traditions disseminated throughout the Greek speaking world. In this study conjectures are made on how the Greek tale reached Tibet through Middle Eastern routes. Although the exact path of its transmission remains puzzling, this case represents an interesting case of the rich interactions that characterized the formation of Eurasian civilizations.