girls,’ Whereupon the Queen said, ‘My son, thou art a very wise man.’ ”
The Arabic legends far more approach the Western (English) parallel. Sale has the following note to chap. xxvii of his translation of the Koran, which I give here, as it bears directly on our story: “Some add that Balkio (the Arabic name for the Biblical Queen of Sheba), to try whether Solomon was a prophet or not, dressed the boys (of whom there were five hundred) like girls, and the girls (same number) like boys; and sent him in a casket a pearl not drilled, and an onyx drilled with a crooked hole; and that Solomon distinguished the boys from the girls by the different manner of their taking the water, and ordered one worm to bore the pearl and another to pass a thread through the onyx. The source of this note is the Arabic commentary to the Koran by Beidharwi.”
A detailed account of the different ways of their taking the water is given by Hammer, in his Rosenoel (Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1813, pp. 160-61). Solomon ordered the table to be laid, and after dinner water to be poured out for washing the hands. The custom in the harems at that time was that the girls caught the water in the hollow of their hands, whilst the boys let it run over the outside. When the servants poured out the water the boys held their hands under, whilst the girls caught it in the hollow of their hands, as they had been accustomed to do.
So far the Eastern parallels. No less numerous are those to be found in Western writers. First, in the Annals of Glycas (iii, 8), reproduced by Fabricius (Cod. vet. Test. Apocryph., i, p. 1031-1032).
“Among other tests by which she tried the wisdom of Solomon, was also the following. She showed Solomon some beautiful boys and girls, both dressed alike, and both having the same shape of tonsure, asking him to distinguish between the two sexes. So he ordered them to wash their faces, and by that he recognised their nature, for the boys rubbed their faces in a stronger manner, whilst the girls did so more softly and more delicately. She was filled with wonder, and exclaimed: ‘More have I seen than I have heard.’ ”
From the Greek it entered into Slavonian literature. An exact parallel of this version of Glycas, combined with that in the Midrash of Proverbs, is to be found in the old Slavonic Palia from the twelfth or thirteenth century (Al. Wesselofsky, Solomon i Kitovras, St. Petersburg, 1872, p. 248). A Roumanian parallel, tallying exactly with Glycas, is contained in a hitherto unpublished manuscript Chronicle from the seventeenth century.
I have confined myself to tracing the story from the East to Europe, thus showing the literary source of the story. It remains still to connect directly the English version with the legends of the
