Muhella bi-s-Shaar, quoting from El Curtubi the story of the building of
the Houdej in the Garden of Cairo, the which was of the magnificent
pleasaunces of the Fatimite Khalifs, the rare of ordinance and
surpassing, to wit that the Khalif El Aamir bi-ahkam-illah[152] let
build it for a Bedouin woman, the love of whom had gotten the mastery of
him, in the neighbourhood of the ‘Chosen Garden’[153] and used to resort
often thereto and was slain as he went thither; and it ceased not to be
a pleasuring-place for the Khalifs after him. The folk abound in stories
of the Bedouin girl and Ibn Meyyah[154] of the sons of her uncle
(cousin?) and what hangs thereby of the mention of El-Aamir, so that the
tales told of them on this account became like unto the story of El
Bettál[155] and the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ and what resembleth
them.”
The same passage from Ibn Sa’id, corresponding in three MSS., occurs in
the famous Khitat[156] attributed to Al-Makrizi (ob. A.D. 1444) and was
thus translated from a MS. in the British Museum by Mr. John Payne (ix.
303).
“The Khalif El-Aamir bi-ahkam-illah set apart, in the neighbourhood of
the Chosen Garden, a place for his beloved the Bedouin maid
(Aaliyah)[157] which he named El Houdej. Quoth Ibn Said, in the book
El-Muhella bi-l-ashar, from the History of El Curtubi, concerning the
traditions of the folk of the story of the Bedouin maid and Ibn Menah
(Meyyah) of the sons of her uncle and what hangs thereby of the mention
of the Khalif El Aamír bi-ahkam-illah, so that their traditions (or
tales) upon the garden became like unto El Bettál[158] and the _Thousand
Nights_ and what resembleth them.”
This evidently means either that The Nights existed in the days of
Al-’Ámir (xiith cent.) or that the author compared them with a work
popular in his own age. Mr. Payne attaches much importance to the
discrepancy of titles, which appears to me a minor detail. The change of
names is easily explained. Amongst the Arabs, as amongst the wild Irish,
there is divinity (the proverb says luck) in odd numbers and
consequently the others are inauspicious. Hence as Sir Wm. Ouseley says
(Travels ii. 21), the number Thousand and One is a favourite in the East
(Olivier, Voyages vi. 385, Paris 1807), and quotes the Cistern of the
“Thousand and One Columns” at Constantinople. Kæmpfer (Amœn, Exot. p.
38) notes of the Takiyahs or Dervishes’ convents and the Mazárs or
Santons’ tombs near Koníah (Iconium), “Multa seges sepulchralium quæ
virorum ex omni ævo doctissimorum exuvias condunt, mille et unum
recenset auctor Libri qui inscribitur Hassaaer we jek mesaar (Hazár ve
yek Mezár), _i.e._, mille et unum mausolea.” A book, The Hazar o yek Rúz
(= 1001 Days), was composed in the mid-xviith century by the famous
Dervaysh Mukhlis, Chief Sofi of Isfahan: it was translated into French
by Petis de la Croix, with a preface by Cazotte, and was Englished by
Ambrose Phillips. Lastly, in India and throughout Asia where Indian
influence extends, the number of cyphers not followed by a significant
number is indefinite: for instance, to determine hundreds the Hindus
affix the required figure to the end and for 100 write 101; for 1000,
1001. But the grand fact of the Hazár Afsánah is its being the archetype
of The Nights, unquestionably proving that the Arab work borrows from
the Persian bodily its cadre or frame-work, the principal
characteristic; its exordium and its dénoûement, whilst the two heroines
still bear the old Persic names.
Baron Silvestre de Sacy[159]—clarum et venerabile nomen—is the chief
authority for the Arab provenance of The Nights. Apparently founding his
observations upon Galland,[160] he is of opinion that the work, as now
known, was originally composed in Syria[161] and written in the vulgar
dialect; that it was never completed by the author, whether he was
prevented by death or by other cause; and that imitators endeavoured to
finish the work by inserting romances which were already known but which
formed no part of the original recueil, such as the Travels of Sindbad
the Seaman, the Book of the Seven Wazirs and others. He accepts the
Persian scheme and cadre of the work, but no more. He contends that no
considerable body of præ-Mohammedan or non-Arabic fiction appears in the
actual texts[162]; and that all the tales, even those dealing with
events localised in Persia, India, China and other infidel lands and
dated from ante-islamitic ages, mostly with the naïvest anachronism,
confine themselves to depicting the people, manners and customs of
Baghdad and Mosul, Damascus and Cairo, during the Abbaside epoch; and he
makes a point of the whole being impregnated with the strongest and most
zealous spirit of Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the
popular or vulgar dialect, differing widely from the classical and
literary; that it contains many words in common modern use and that
generally it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale
he remarks:—The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour,
Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others. The
prince’s father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is named Fatimah
and when imprisoned he solaces himself with reading the Koran. The Genii
who interpose in these adventures are, again, those who had dealings
with Solomon. In fine, all that we here find of the City of the Magians,
as well as of the fire-worshippers, suffices to show that one should not
expect to discover in it anything save the production of a Moslem
writer.
All this, with due deference to so high an authority, is very
superficial. Granted, which nobody denies, that the archetypal Hazár
Afsánah was translated from Persic into Arabic nearly a thousand years
ago, it had ample time and verge enough to assume another and a foreign
dress, the corpus however remaining untouched. Under the hands of a host
of editors, scribes and copyists, who have no scruples anent changing
words, names and dates, abridging descriptions and attaching their own
decorations, the florid and rhetorical Persian would readily be
converted into the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact
Arabic. And what easier than to islamise the old Zoroasterism, to
transform Ahrimán into Iblís the Shaytán, Ján bin Ján into Father Adam,
and the Divs and Peris of Kayomars and the olden Guebre Kings into the
Jinns and Jinniyahs of Sulayman? Volumes are spoken by the fact that the
Arab adapter did not venture to change the Persic names of the two
heroines and of the royal brothers or to transfer the mise-en-scène any
whither from Khorasan or outer Persia. Where the story has not been too
much worked by the literato’s pen, for instance the “Ten Wazirs” (in the
Bresl. Edit. vi. 191–343) which is the Guebre Bakhtiyár-námah, the names
and incidents are old Iranian and with few exceptions distinctly
Persian. And at times we can detect the process of transition, _e.g._
when the Mázin of Khorásán[163] of the Wortley Montagu MS. becomes the
Hasan of Bassorah of the Turner Macan MS. (Mac. Edit.).
Evidently the learned Baron had not studied such works as the
Totá-kaháni or Parrot-chat which, notably translated by Nakhshabi from
the Sanskrit Suka-Saptati,[164] has now become as orthodoxically Moslem
as The Nights. The old Hindu Rajah becomes Ahmad Sultan of Balkh, the
Prince is Maymún and his wife Khujisteh. Another instance of such
radical change is the later Syriac version of Kalílah wa Dimnah,[165]
old “Pilpay” converted to Christianity. We find precisely the same
process in European folk-lore; for instance the Gesta Romanorum in
which, after five hundred years, the life, manners and customs of the
Romans lapse into the knightly and chivalrous, the Christian and
ecclesiastical developments of mediæval Europe. Here, therefore, I hold
that the Austrian Arabist has proved his point whilst the Frenchman has
failed.
Mr. Lane, during his three years’ labour of translation, first accepted
Von Hammer’s view and then came round to that of De Sacy; differing,
however, in minor details, especially in the native country of The
Nights. Syria had been chosen because then the most familiar to
Europeans: the “Wife of Bath” had made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem;
but few cared to visit the barbarous and dangerous Nile-Valley. Mr.
Lane, however, was an enthusiast for Egypt or rather for Cairo, the only
part of it he knew; and, when he pronounces The Nights to be of purely
“Arab,” that is, of Nilotic origin, his opinion is entitled to no more
deference than his deriving the sub-African and negroid Fellah from
Arabia, the land per excellentiam of pure and noble blood. Other authors
have wandered still further afield. Some finding Mosul idioms in the
Recueil, propose “Middlegates” for its birth-place and Mr. W. G. P.
Palgrave boldly says “The original of this entertaining work appears to
have been composed in Baghdad about the eleventh century; another less
popular but very spirited version is probably of Tunisian authorship and
somewhat later.”[166]
B.—THE DATE.
The next point to consider is the date of The Nights in its present
form; and here opinions range between the tenth and the sixteenth
centuries. Professor Galland began by placing it arbitrarily in the
middle of the thirteenth. De Sacy, who abstained from detailing reasons
and who, forgetting the number of editors and scribes through whose
hands it must have passed, argued only from the nature of the language
and the peculiarities of style, proposed le milieu du neuvième siècle de
l’hégire (= A.D. 1445–6) as its latest date. Mr. Hole, who knew The
Nights only through Galland’s version, had already advocated in his
“Remarks” the close of the fifteenth century; and M. Caussin (de
Perceval), upon the authority of a supposed note in Galland’s MS.[167]
(vol. iii. fol. 20, verso), declares the compiler to have been living in
A.D. 1548 and 1565. Mr. Lane says “Not begun earlier than the last
fourth of the fifteenth century nor ended before the first fourth of the
sixteenth,” _i.e._ soon after Egypt was conquered by Selim, Sultan of
the Osmanli Turks in A.D. 1517. Lastly the learned Dr. Weil says in his
far too scanty Vorwort (p. ix. 2nd Edit.):—“Das wahrscheinlichste dürfte
also sein, das im 15. Jahrhundert ein Egyptier nach altern Vorbilde
Erzählungen für 1001 Nächte theils erdichtete, theils nach mündlichen
Sagen, oder frühern schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen, bearbeitete, dass er
aber entweder sein Werk nicht vollendete, oder dass ein Theil desselben
verloren ging, so dass das Fehlende von Andern bis ins 16. Jahrhundert
hinein durch neue Erzählungen ergänzt wurde.”
But, as justly observed by Mr. Payne, the first step when enquiring into
the original date of The Nights is to determine the nucleus of the
Repertory by a comparison of the four printed texts and the dozen MSS.
which have been collated by scholars.[168] This process makes it evident
that the tales common to all are the following thirteen:—
1. The Introduction (with a single incidental story “The Bull and the
Ass”).
2. The Trader and the Jinni (with three incidentals).
3. The Fisherman and the Jinni (with four).
4. The Porter and the three Ladies of Baghdad.
5. The Tale of the Three Apples.
6. The Tale of Núr al-Dín Ali and his son Badr al-Dín Hasan.
7. The Hunchback’s Tale (with eleven).
8. Nur al-Dín and Anís al-Jalís.
9. Tale of Ghánim bin ’Ayyúb (with two).
10. Alí bin Bakkár and Shams al-Nahár (with two).
11. Tale of Kamar al-Zamán.
12. The Ebony Horse; and
13. Julnár the Sea-born.
These forty-two tales, occupying one hundred and twenty Nights, form
less than a fifth part of the whole collection which in the Mac.
Edit.[169] contains a total of two hundred and sixty-four. Hence Dr.
Patrick Russell,[170] the Natural Historian of Aleppo,[171] whose
valuable monograph amply deserves study even in this our day, believed
that the original Nights did not outnumber two hundred, to which
subsequent writers added till the total of a thousand and one was made
up. Dr. Jonathan Scott,[172] who quotes Russell, “held it highly
probable that the tales of the original Arabian Nights did not run
through more than two hundred and eighty Nights, if so many.” So this
suggestion I may subjoin, “habent sua fata libelli.” Galland, who
preserves in his Mille et une Nuits only about one fourth of The Nights,
ends them in No. cclxiv[173] with the seventh voyage of Sindbad: after
that he intentionally omits the dialogue between the sisters and the
reckoning of time, to proceed uninterruptedly with the tales. And so his
imitator, Petis de la Croix,[174] in his Mille et un Jours, reduces the
thousand to two hundred and thirty-two.
The internal chronological evidence offered by the Collection is useful
only in enabling us to determine that the tales were not written _after_
a certain epoch: the actual dates and, consequently, all deductions from
them, are vitiated by the habits of the scribes. For instance we find
the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni (vol. i. 41) placed in A.H. 169
= A.D. 785,[175] which is hardly possible. The immortal Barber in the
“Tailor’s Tale” (vol. i. 304) places his adventure with the unfortunate
lover on Safar 10, A.H. 653 (= March 25th, 1255) and 7,320 years of the
era of Alexander.[176] This is supported in his Tale of Himself (vol. i.
pp. 317–348), where he dates his banishment from Baghdad during the
reign of the penultimate Abbaside, Al-Mustansir bi ’llah[177] (A.H.
623–640 = 1225–1242), and his return to Baghdad after the accession of
another Caliph who can be no other but Al-Muntasim bi ’llah (A.H.
640–656 = A.D. 1242–1258). Again at the end of the tale (vol. i. 350) he
is described as “an ancient man, past his ninetieth year” and “a very
old man” in the days of Al-Mustansir (vol. i. 318); so that the
Hunchback’s adventure can hardly be placed earlier than A.D. 1265 or
seven years after the storming of Baghdad by Huláku Khan, successor of
Janghíz Khan, a terrible catastrophe which resounded throughout the
civilised world. Yet there is no allusion to this crucial epoch and the
total silence suffices to invalidate the date.[178] Could we assume it
as true, by adding to A.D. 1265 half a century for the composition of
the Hunchback’s story and its incidentals, we should place the earliest
date in A.D. 1315.
As little can we learn from inferences which have been drawn from the
body of the book: at most they point to its several editions or
redactions. In the Tale of the “Ensorcelled Prince” (vol. i. 77) Mr.
Lane (i. 135) conjectured that the four colours of the fishes were
suggested by the sumptuary laws of the Mameluke Soldan, Mohammed ibn
Kala’un, “subsequently to the commencement of the eighth century of the
Flight, or fourteenth of our era.” But he forgets that the same
distinction of dress was enforced by the Caliph Omar after the capture
of Jerusalem in A.D. 636; that it was revived by Harun al-Rashid, a
contemporary of Carolus Magnus and that it was noticed as a long
standing grievance by the so-called Mandeville in A.D. 1322. In the Tale
of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad the “Sultáni oranges” (vol. i.
83) have been connected with Sultáníyah city in Persian Irák, which was
founded about the middle of the thirteenth century: but “Sultáni” may
simply mean “royal,” a superior growth. The same story makes mention
(vol. i. 94) of Kalandars or religious mendicants, a term popularly
corrupted, even in writing, to Karandal.[179] Here again “Kalandar” may
be due only to the scribes as the Bresl. Edit, reads Sa’alúk = asker,
beggar. The Khan al-Masrúr in the Nazarene Broker’s story (i. 265) was a
ruin during the early ninth century A.H. = A.D. 1420; but the Báb
Zuwaylah (i. 269) dates from A.D. 1087. In the same tale occurs the Darb
al-Munkari (or Munakkari) which is probably the Darb al-Munkadi of
Al-Makrizi’s careful topography, the Khitat (ii. 40). Here we learn that
in his time (about A.D. 1430) the name had become obsolete, and the
highway was known as Darb al-Amír Baktamír al-Ustaddar from one of two
high officials who both died in the fourteenth century (circ. A.D.
1350). And lastly we have the Khan al-Jáwali built about A.D. 1320. In
Badr al-Din Hasan (vol. i. 237) “Sáhib” is given as a Wazirial title and
it dates only from the end of the fourteenth century.[180] In Sindbad
the Seaman, there is an allusion (vol. vi. 67) to the great Hindu
Kingdom, Vijayanagar of the Narasimha,[181] the great power of the
Deccan; but this may be due to editors or scribes as the despotism was
founded only in the fourteenth century (A.D. 1320). The Ebony Horse
(vol. v. 1) apparently dates before Chaucer; and “The Sleeper and The
Waker” (Bresl. Edit. iv. 134–189) may precede Shakespeare’s “Taming of
the Shrew”: no stress, however, can be laid upon such resemblances, the
nouvelles being world-wide. But when we come to the last stories,
especially to Kamar al-Zaman II. and the tale of Ma’arúf, we are
apparently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first contains
(Night cmlxxvii.) the word Láwandiyah = Levantine, the mention of a
watch = Sá’ah in the next Night[182]; and, further on (cmlxxvi.), the
“Shaykh Al-Islam,” an officer invented by Mohammed II. after the capture
of Stambul in A.D. 1453. In Ma’arúf the ’Ádiliyah is named; the mosque
founded outside the Bab al-Nasr by Al-Malik al-’Ádil, Túmán Bey in A.H.
906 = A.D. 1501. But, I repeat, all these names may be mere
interpolations.
On the other hand, a study of the vie intime in Al-Islam and of the
manners and customs of the people proves that the body of the work, as
it now stands, must have been written before A.D. 1400. The Arabs use
wines, ciders and barley-beer, not distilled spirits; they have no
coffee or tobacco and, while familiar with small-pox (judrí), they
ignore syphilis. The battles in The Nights are fought with bows and
javelins, swords, spears (for infantry) and lances (for cavalry); and,
whenever fire-arms are mentioned, we must suspect the scribe. Such is
the case with the Madfa’ or cannon by means of which Badr al-Din Hasan
breaches the bulwarks of the Lady of Beauty’s virginity (i. 223). This
consideration would determine the work to have been written before the
fourteenth century. We ignore the invention-date and the inventor of
gunpowder, as of all old discoveries which have affected mankind at
large: all we know is that the popular ideas betray great ignorance and
we are led to suspect that an explosive compound, having been discovered
in the earliest ages of human society, was utilised by steps so gradual
that history has neglected to trace the series. According to
Demmin[183], bullets for stuffing with some incendiary composition, in
fact bombs, were discovered by Dr. Keller in the Palafites or Crannogs
of Switzerland; and the Hindu’s Agni-Astar (“fire-weapon”), Agni-bán
(“fire-arrow”) and Shatagni (“hundred-killer”), like the Roman
Phalarica, and the Greek fire of Byzantium, suggest explosives. Indeed,
Dr. Oppert[184] accepts the statement of Flavius Philostratus that when
Appolonius of Tyana, that grand semi-mythical figure, was travelling in
India, he learned the reason why Alexander of Macedon desisted from
attacking the Oxydracæ who live between the Ganges and the Hyphasis
(Satadru or Sutledge):—“These holy men, beloved by the gods, overthrow
their enemies with tempests and thunderbolts shot from their walls.”
Passing over the Arab sieges of Constantinople (A.D. 668) and Meccah
(A.D. 690) and the disputed passage in Firishtah touching the Tufang or
musket during the reign of Mahmúd the Ghaznevite[185] (ob. A.D. 1030),
we come to the days of Alphonso the Valiant, whose long and short guns,
used at the Siege of Madrid in A.D. 1084, are preserved in the Armeria
Real. Viardot has noted that the African Arabs first employed cannon in
A.D. 1200, and that the Maghribis defended Algeciras near Gibraltar with
great guns in A.D. 1247, and utilised them to besiege Seville in A.D.
1342. This last feat of arms introduced the cannon into barbarous
Northern Europe, and it must have been known to civilised Asia for many
a decade before that date.
The mention of wine in The Nights, especially the Nabíz or fermented
infusion of raisins well known to the præ-Mohammedan Badawis,
perpetually recurs. As a rule, except only in the case of holy
personages and mostly of the Caliph Al-Rashid, the “service of wine”
appears immediately after the hands are washed; and women, as well as
men, drink, like true Orientals, for the honest purpose of getting
drunk—la recherche de l’idéal, as the process has been called. Yet
distillation became well known in the fourteenth century. Amongst the
Greeks and Romans it was confined to manufacturing aromatic waters, and
Nicander the poet (B.C. 140) used for a still the term ἄμβιξ, like the
Irish “pot” and its produce “poteen.” The simple art of converting salt
water into fresh, by boiling the former and passing the steam through a
cooled pipe into a recipient, would not have escaped the students of the
Philosopher’s “stone;” and thus we find throughout Europe the Arabic
modifications of Greek terms Alchemy, Alembic (Al-ἄμβιξ), Chemistry and
Elixir; while “Alcohol” (Al-Kohl), originally meaning “extreme tenuity
or impalpable state of pulverulent substances,” clearly shows the origin
of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H. 428 = 1036, nearly two
hundred years before we read of distillation in Europe, compared the
human body with an alembic, the belly being the cucurbit and the head
the capital:—he forgot one important difference but n’importe. Spirits
of wine were first noticed in the xiiith century, when the Arabs had
overrun the Western Mediterranean, by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who dubs
the new invention a universal panacea; and his pupil, Raymond Lully
(nat. Majorca A.D. 1236), declared this essence of wine to be a boon
from the Deity. Now The Nights, even in the latest adjuncts, never
allude to the “white coffee” of the “respectable” Moslem, the Ráki
(raisin-brandy) or Ma-hayát (_aqua vitæ_) of the modern Mohametan: the
drinkers confine themselves to wine like our contemporary Dalmatians,
one of the healthiest and the most vigorous of seafaring races in
Europe.