THE SLAVONIC APOCALYPSE THE TWELVE DREAMS OF SHAHAISHA: An Iranian Syriac Reworking of a Second Temple Jewish Legend on Jambres

A Study of an apocalyptic work known in Slavonic only.

The most important conclusions are the following:
1. The available Slavonic work The Twelve Dreams of Shahaisha originated in the Old Bulgarian literature .
2. It was translated directly from Syriac.
3. The Syriac Christian archetype was produced in Iran, within the wide stream of the apocalyptic literature in Syriac provoked by the Arab conquest .
4. The literary frame of the Dreams is inherited from a Second Temple Jewish legend of the Jannes and Jambres cycle, where the protagonists were an unnamed Pharaoh and Jambres (under his Aramaic name mmr’), and which was dealing with a terrifying dream of the Pharaoh and its interpretation by Jambres.
5. In the Dreams of Shahaisha, the anonymous Pharaoh became the anonymous Shahanshah, whereas Jambres preserved his name in an almost unaltered form as Mamer (or, probably, *Mamerā, with further lost of the ending in Slavonic). Egypt as the place of action and the empire whose future is predicted was changed to Iran.
6. The Syriac archetype of the Dreams was produced with stuffing the ancient Jewish literary frame with different locally available sources and, most probably, some original creative production as well.
7. Some of the local sources belonged to internationally widespread folktale motives (as Veselovsky has shown for the dream Nr 5).
8. The most important sources were the written ones. One of them was a Middle Iranian legend about the serial dreams of an Indian king before the invasion of Alexander the Great into India (where Alexander was considered as one of the kings of Iran). A late avatar of this legend is preserved in the Shanameh as the story of the dreams of Kaid. This legend contributed to modify the Jewish literary frame (the unique dream was replaced with a series of dreams) and provided the contents and interpretations for, at least, two dreams, Nrs 3 and 7.
9. This Pahlavi legend had, in turn, an Indian (Buddhist or Jainist) prototype that provided to it, at least, the general frame and the contents for the same two dreams. In this legend, the king was the Indian king of Alexander’s epoch, Candragupta, the founder of the Maurya dynasty.
10. This Indian legend had, in turn, a Buddhist prototype in the Mahāsupina-Jātaka and/or similar legends concerning the dreams of the King Pasenajit .