12 - A Thousand and One Nights: a history of the text and its reception

Summary

The book known in English as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or A Thousand and One Nights bears the imprint of many different times, places and individuals. The history of its transmission, translation, expurgation and falsification is nearly as fabulous as the tales told by its most famous character, Shahrazād (Scheherezade). The oldest evidence for the work’s existence, curiously enough, only came to light relatively recently. In 1948, Nabia Abbott, the first female faculty member of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, was examining a rare piece of early medieval paper from Syria when she suddenly realized that the text she was reading was familiar. Writing in no less than six different hands covered every available space on both sides of the sheet of paper: the draft of a personal letter, a legal attestation to a contract, a crude drawing of a human figure, a few scattered phrases scribbled in the margins and the now famous passage from A Thousand and One Nights. Abbott’s painstaking analysis led not only to the deciphering of all of these texts but also to a rather precise dating for the fragment to the early ninth century The short passage from the Nights that she had discovered proved to be over 1,100 years old -the earliest physical evidence of Shahrazād’s literary existence.

Other than Abbott’s fragment, the oldest pieces of historical evidence are found in two tenth-century Arabic texts. The Baghdadi bookseller Ibn al-Nadīm (d. between 990 and 998) offers an account of the Nights and how it first appeared in Arabic literature in his Fihrist (Catalogue of Books) in the section dealing with ‘Story-tellers and Raconteurs’ (al-musāmirūn wa‘l- mukharrifūn).