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The Earlier History of the Arabian Nights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

D. B. Macdonald
D. B. Macdonald
Affiliation:
Hartford, U.S.A.
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Extract

It is unfortunate that almost all investigators of the origin and development of the Nights have been, more or less, under the spell of that quite modern recension which Zotenberg first identified and called “la redaction égyptienne” (hereafter ZER). In the numerous Egyptian prints derived from the I Būlāq edition (Būlāq, a.h. 1252=a.d. 1835), in the Calcutta edition of the same recension (II Calcutta, a.d. 1839–42), in at least two Beyrout editions (Salhani and Adabīya Press), this recension has attained to the dignity of a Vulgate, and of it most people, even most Arabists, think when they refer to the Arabian Nights. This almost subconscious assumption was the great obscuring element in Lane's mind and with De Goeje in his Britannica article on the Nights. From this point of view it is especially unfortunate that Zotenberg did not publish any further researches; he was evidently on his way to complete freedom of attitude.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , July 1924 , pp. 353 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1924

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References

page 354 note 1 There is a good outline of such a history in the first 26 pp. of J. Oestrup, Studier over tusind og en nat, 1891. See also a French résumé of this book with other notes on the Nights by the late Émile Galtier in Mémoires … de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale du Caire, t. xxvii, pp. 135–94, Cairo, 1912.

page 354 note 2 May I ask my readers to strike out, in that article, the words (p. 313, 1. 11), “In this he follows an Arabic preface to” ? I unhappily trusted my memory and it misled me. The Persian preface to I Calcutta is not represented in the Russell MS., but the Arabic introduction to I Calcutta is verbatim in that MS.

page 355 note 1 Now also in the posthumous collected volume, “Études Folkloriques,” pp. 265–347.

page 354 note 2 I do not attempt here to give details. For these, see Cosquin and Gaudefroy-Demombynes, cited below.

page 364 note 1 This raises a much wider and an exceedingly interesting question in the history of literature, but one only indirectly connected with the present subject. It illustrates, however, the interdependence of supposedly quite different fields of research. To put it shortly, the thesis could be maintained that there is evidence of the existence among the Hebrews—or Jews—of a distinct class of foreign story, of Persian origin, and that this class is much older than has been commonly supposed. The individuals in it which can at present be identified are four—Esther, Tobit, the story of Aḥīqār, the Frame Story of the Nights. These are all connected by specific links of names or events, and the date of the group is shown by the existence of Aḥīqār in Egypt and in Aramaic on papyrus fragments of the fifth century b.c. The fates of the individuals have been singularly diverse. Esther got into the Hebrew canon; Tobit into the Greek canon ; Aḥīqār still exists as a chapbook in the Near East and is in one recension of the Nights ; the fourth is our present subject. All this suggests that the transmission of the Indian folk-lore elements must lie very far back.

page 369 note 1 There is a kātib Dilān in Ibn Miskawaih's History, Gibb Memorial, vol. v, p. 574, 1. 4.

page 372 note 1 I have since found this same series of stories with another about Khurāfa in the Fākhir of al-Mufaḍḍal ibn Salama (ed. C. A. Storey, Leyden, 1915, pp. 137–40). This was evidently Sharīshī's source ; but I translate Sharīshī's text with some variants and corrections from the edition of the Fākhir. I return below to al-Mufaḍḍal's date.

page 372 note 2 For al-Mufaḍḍal's authority here see top of p. 371.

page 376 note 1 In Galtier's abstract, pp. 143, 152.

page 381 note 1 I am glad to have the approval, in this identification, of Professor William Popper, of the University of California, the editor of Ibn Taghrī Bardī.

page 381 note 2 See also p. 369 above.

page 382 note 1 For completeness I add a reference to Casanova, M. Paul, Notes sur les voyages de Sìndbàd le Marin (Paris, 1919), pp. 15Google Scholar, 65. He finds in the MS. another date, a.h. 682, which, I fear, I cannot accept.

page 382 note 2 The first part of V to fol. 87b inclusive is not directly from G but from a somewhat illegible descendant, or collateral to G. The second part, in a quite different hand, is an immediate transcript of G, and the dated colophon was added to the second part.

page 384 note 1 It is plain from Mémoire, p. 236, that De Sacy understood the passage in this way.