are told, and there is a happy ending. History The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip is based upon the life of Persian King Bahram V, who ruled the Sassanid Empire (420–440). Stories of his rule are told in epic poetry of the region (Firdausi's Shahnameh of 1010, Nizami's Haft Paykar of 1197, Khusrau's Hasht Bihisht of 1302), parts of which are based upon historical facts with embellishments derived from folklore going back hundreds of years to oral traditions in India and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. With the exception of the well-known camel story, English translations are very hard to come by. Talmudic version A version of the fable of a camel blind in one eye is included in the Talmud, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan. While it might be seen as implying that gentiles, in comparison to Jews, are rude and defecate on the road, it is worth noting that Jewish law has strong injunctions of modesty and cleanliness, including strict injunctions against open or public urination or defecation. Zadig In chapter three of Voltaire's 1747 novel Zadig, there is an adaptation of The Three Princes of Serendip, this time involving, instead of a camel, a horse and a dog, which the eponymous Zadig is able to describe in great detail from his observations of the tracks on the ground. When he is accused of theft and taken before the judges, Zadig clears himself by recounting the mental process which allows him to describe the two animals he has never seen: "I saw on the sand the tracks of an animal, and I easily judged that they were those of a little dog. Long, shallow furrows imprinted on little rises in the sand between the tracks of the paws informed me that it was a bitch whose dugs were hanging down, and that therefore she had had puppies a few days before." Zadig's detective work was influential. Cuvier wrote, in 1834, in the context of the new science of paleontology: T. H. Huxley, the proponent of Darwin's theories of evolution, also found Zadig's approach instructive, and wrote in his 1880 article "The method of Zadig": Edgar Allan Poe in his turn was probably inspired by Zadig when he created C. Auguste Dupin in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", calling it a "tale of ratiocination" wherein "the extent of information obtained lies not so much