Footnotes:
[1] This game is played on horseback.
[2] This introduction is not in the last French edition.
[3] A sort of Mahometan Monks.
[4] It is remarkable that the names of “Sindbad” and
“Hindbad” are both derived from the old Persian language.
“Bad” signifies a city; “Sind” and “Hind” are the
territories on either side of the Indus. “Sind,” indeed, is its
original name, but “Hind” is of those countries which lie
betwixt it and the Ganges. --Hole
[5] A port in the Persian gulf.
[6] These islands, according to the Arabians, are beyond China, and
are so called from a tree which bears a fruit of that name. They
are, without doubt, the isles of Japan; which are not, however, far
from Abyssinia.
[7] Mr. Hole, p. 27, says this is probably one of the three islands
near Ceylon, called Ilhas de Cavalos, from the wild horses, to which
the Dutch annually send mares to improve the breed. --Wolf’s
Account of Ceylon; but p. 256 he alters his opinion.
[8] We meet with king Mihrage in the accounts of India and China by
two Mahomedan travellers in the ninth century, and the island of
Zapage, and the Friendly Islands, answers to Borneo. --Hole.
[9] The same in one of the islands of Eolus. Perhaps the roaring of
the waves among the rocks. --Hole. Like the cave in Britain,
mentioned by Clemens Alexandrinus, where the wind produced a sound
as of cymbals.
[10] Degial, with the Mahometans, is the same as Antichrist with us.
According to them, he is to appear about the end of the world, and
will conquer all the earth, except Mecca, Medina, Tarsus, and
Jerusalem, which are to be preserved by angels which he shall set
round them.
[11] The sea serpents on the Malabar coast. --Hole.
[12] Martini mentions fishes with birds’ faces in the China seas.
--Hole.
[13] The Turkish sequin is about nine shillings sterling.
[14] Marco Paolo, in his Travels, and Father Martini, in his History
of China, speak of this bird called “Ruch,” and say it will take
up an elephant and a rhinoceros. See also Vigafetto, in Ramusio’s
Collection of Voyages, 1369. The combat between eagles and elephants
is to be found in Pliny, Solinus, and Diodorus Siculus. --Hole.
[15] Of serpents devoured by eagles, see Marco Paolo, hereafter
cited. --Hole.
[16] Epiphanius, in a treatise on the twelve stones in the Jewish
high priest’s breast-plate, tells a like story of the Jacinths in
the deserts of Scythia. Marco Paolo places it beyond Malabar, in a
situation which would suit Golconda. See also Benjamin of Tudela,
who travelled between 1160 and 1173. --Hole.
[17] Ptolemy places the island of Satyrs, inhabited by cannibals, to
the eastward of the island of Sunda. --Hole.
[18] These are described by William de Rubruquis, 1253, and supposed
to be apes. --Hole.
[19] The long-eared people, mentioned by Strabo and Pliny, vii. 2;
and Marsden’s History of Sumatra, p. 47. --Hole.
[20] Without going back to the Cyclops in the ninth book of the
Odyssey, Sir John Mandeville will furnish such one-eyed giants in
one of the Indian islands. --Hole.
[21] It would seem the Arabian author has taken this story from
Homer’s Odyssey.
[22] Possibly Timor, which Linschoten celebrates for its woods and
wildernesses of sanders. Purchas’ Pilgrims, ii. p. 1784. --Hole.
[23] Ellian, Hist. An. xvi. 16. describes tortoises fifteen cubits
long, the shells big enough to cover a house; and Mandeville says
three men might hide under them in the island of Calonah, not far
from Java. --Hole.
[24] The hippopotamus.
[25] The manatre.
[26] In the sea of Andaman, or bay of Bengal, the Mahometan
travellers, in the ninth century, mention negro cannibals. Ptolemy
places them in the same bay in the Nicobar island. -- Hole.
[27] The lotus of Homer’s Odyssey, the intoxicating “seed” of
Sumatra, mentioned by Davis, 1597; and the herb “dutroa” of
Linschoten, or “dutro” of Lobo: “dutry” and “bung,” or
“bang,” of Fryer. --Hole.
[28] Sunda islands and Sumatra produce plenty of pepper and
cocoa-nuts. -- Hole.
[29] Mandeville mentions the burying the wives alive with the dead
husband, in the island of Calanack; and Jerom, the husband with the
wives in Scythia. --Hole.
[30] He was a Mahometan, and they allow polygamy.
[31] See the escape of Aristomenes, in his life by Rowe. --Hole.
[32] Now Ceylon. Serendib is Ceylon, and Kela is Cala or Calabar,
where the Arabians touched in their way to China; so that it must
have been somewhere about the point of Malabar. --Renaudot.
[33] Sugar-canes, or bamboo trees.
[34] Bochart (Hieroz, vol. ii. p. 854) tells a story exactly
similar, from Demur or Damur an Arabian writer, who died in 1405.
[35] An ourang-outang. --Hole.
[36] Grapes grow in the isles of Banda. Hain’s Collect. i. 464.
--Hole.
[37] In the straits of Sunda. --Hole.
[38] This island, or peninsula, ends at the cape which we now call
cape Comorin. It is also called Comar, and Camor. The Mahometan
travellers say the king of Comar (whence they bring aloes) was
subdued by Mihrage. The inhabitants are very virtuous, and
debauchery with women, and the use of wine, are forbidden them.
Accounts of India and China, p. 63.
[39] There still is, and has been from time immemorial, a pearl
fishery in the neighbourhood of cape Comorin. See Marco Paolo.
--Hole.
[40] Mr. Ives mentions wells of fresh water under the sea in the
Persian gulf, near the island of Barien. --Hole.
[41] Such fountains are not unfrequent in India and Ceylon, and the
Mahometan travellers speak of ambergris swallowed by whales, who are
made sick by, and regorge it. --Hole.
[42] Ceylon.
[43] Geographers place it on this side the line, in the first
climate. Diodorus Siculus, and Ptolemy, place it in the same island
as Sindbad, though not the true one.
[44] The eastern geographers made a parasang longer than a French
league.
[45] Knox and Wolf confirm this account of the situation of Ceylon,
and the productions of its mountains. Pico d’Adam is the high
mountain here described.
[46] Yellow vellum, or the skin of the hog deer, from Prince’s
Island, in the straits of Sunda. The elephants, rubies, &c. are
illustrated by Mr. Hole.
[47] Ceylon is known to produce large rubies, and the Indian ocean
abounds in pearls of extraordinary size. --Hole.
[48] There is a snake in Bengal, whose skin is esteemed a cure for
external pains, by applying it to the part affected. --Hole.
[49] Solomon.
[50] An ancient king of a great island of the same name in the
Indies, and very much famed among the Arabians for his power and
wisdom.
[51] A port on the Red Sea.
[52] A town of Arabia.
[53] A regular wind that blows six months from the east, and as many
from the west.
[54] This is the last interruption the stories will receive by being
divided into portions related on successive nights. The reader is
therefore to suppose that Scheherazade now continues speaking
without being interrupted.
[55] The Bermecides were a family that came out of Persia, and of
them the grand vizier was descended.
[56] This word signifies in Arabic, Basilick, an odoriferous plant:
and the Arabians call their slaves by this name, as the custom in
France is to give the name of Jessamin to a footman.
[57] Nourreddin signifies in Arabic the light of religion.
[58] Bedreddin signifies the full moon of religion.
[59] That is to say, the sun of religion.
[60] All the eastern nations lie in their drawers, but this
circumstance will stand him in stead in the sequel of the story.
[61] The town of Moussoul is in Mesopotamia, built over against old
Nineveh.
[62] This word in Arabic signifies wonderful.
[63] That is, of the caliphs that reigned after the four first
successors of Mahomet, and were so named from one of their
ancestors, whose name was Ommiah.
[64] This prayer is always said two hours and a half before sun-set.
[65] The Mahometans having a custom of washing their hands five
times a day, when they go to prayers, they reckon they have no
occasion to wash before eating, but they always wash after eating,
because they eat without forks.
[66] This is done all over the Levant, for making their drink cool.
[67] The Mahometans give this name generally to the black eunuchs.
[68] Here the Arabian author plays upon the Jews: this ass is that
which, as the Mahometans believe, Esdras rode upon when he came from
the Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem.
[69] A bezestein is a public place, where silk stuffs and other
precious things are exposed for sale.
[70] This is called in English, Saltwort.
[71] There is a fountain at Mecca, which, according to the
Mahometans, is the spring that God showed to Hagar, after Abraham
was obliged to put her away. The water of this spring is drank by
way of devotion, and is sent in presents to the princes and
princesses.
[72] A sherif is the same with a sequin. This word occurs in our
ancient authors.
[73] This year 653 is one of the Hegira, the common epocha of the
Mahometans, and answers to the year 1255 from the nativity of
Christ; from whence we may conjecture that these computations were
made in Arabia about that time.
[74] As for the year 7320, the author is mistaken in that
computation. The year 653 of the Hegira, and the 1255 of Christ,
coincide only with the 1557 of the era or epocha of the Seleucides,
which is the same with that of Alexander the Great, who is called
Iskender with two horns, according to the expression of the
Arabians. This name he has from his father, Jupiter Ammon, in memory
of whom he is represented sometimes with the horns of a ram on his
head.
[75] A public place in the towns of the Levant, where strangers
lodge.
[76] He was raised to this dignity in the year of the Hegira 623,
and Anno Dom. 1226, and was the 36th caliph of the race of the
Abassides.
[77] The Barmecides, as has been said already, were a noble family
of Persia, who settled at Bagdad.
[78] The Easterns, and particularly the Mahometans, do not drink
till after meals.
[79] Or vagabond Arabs, who wander in the deserts, and plunder the
caravans when they are not strong enough to resist them.
[80] This word signifies in Arabic, “the sun of the day.”
[81] The Arabians, Persians, and Turks, when they write, hold the
paper commonly upon their knee with their left hand, and write with
their right, with a little reed or cane, cut and slit like our pens.
The cane is hollow, and resembles our reeds, but is harder.
[82] A city on the Tigris, 20 leagues below Bagdad.
[83] That is to say, in Persian, King of the Time, or King of the
Age.
[84] A scheme of her nativity, drawn from the constellations of
heaven.
[85] There is an adventure like this in the romance of Peter of
Provence and the fair Magdalena, which was taken from the Arabic.
[86] This is an Arabic word, which signifies the life of the soul.
[87] This incident is also much the same in the romance of Peter of
Provence and the fair Magdalena.
[88] A famous player on the lute, who lived in Bagdad in the reign
of the caliph.
[89] Gulnare, in Arabic, is a rose or pomegranate flower.
[90] Saleh, in Arabic, signifies good.
[91] “Giauhara,” in Arabic, signifies a “precious stone.”
[92] Sequins.
[93] “Mobarec” is the name of a Mahommedan saint, and of several
Arabian writers mentioned by l’Herbelot.
[94] Given of God.
[95] Master of the world above and below.
[96] Ballas rubies are rubies of the brightest colour.
[97] Which is to say, the Full Moon of Full Moons.
[98] “Reml” or “Raml” signifies “sand prepared,” or a
preparation of sand, on which are marked certain points serving for
a kind of divination, which we call “Geomancy;” and the Arabs,
Romans, and Turks, “e’ con alraml.” These points, disposed in
a certain number on many unequal lines, are described also with a
pen on paper; and the person who practises divination by this art is
called “Rammal.” --D’Herbelot, art. Raml.
[99] In the French it is Sidi Noman, and Noman is the name of a king
of one of the dynasties in Herbelot.
[100] “Sesame” is a sort of corn.
[101] “Nevrouz,” or the New Day, is the name which the ancient
Persians gave to the first day of their year, which was solar.
Giarischid, king of the first dynasty of the Pischdadians,
instituted the solemnity of the Nevrouz, which is still celebrated
by the Persians, though they are Mahometans, and consequently
obliged to use the Arabian year, which is lunar. The first day was
fixed in the vernal equinox, at the point when the sun enters into
the first degree of Aries. There is another Nevrouz of the autumnal
equinox. --D’Herbelot.
[102] Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, the poem by which Milton
describes and characterises him, is founded on this adventure. The
imagination of this story consists in Arabian fiction, engrafted on
Gothic chivalry. Nor is this Arabian fiction purely the sport of
arbitrary fancy; it is, in a great measure, founded on Arabian
learning. The idea of a horse of brass took its rise from the
mechanical knowledge of the Arabians, and their experiments in
metals. The poets of romance, Lydgate, and Gower, who deal in
Arabian ideas, describe the Trojan horse to be made of brass.
--Wharton’s Hist. of English Poetry, vol. i. p. 398-400. Chaucer
has borrowed only the description of the horse and the two pins, the
ascending one in his ear, and the use to be made of him. That
Chaucer never finished the story is more than probable, from
Milton’s speaking of it as ‘left untold,’ which does not apply
to loss after finishing.
[103] Two Persian words, which signify the same, the “female
fairy,” or “genie.” See the preface.
[104] An Arabian word that signifies “daylight.”
[105] This circumstance has been also brought into Europe, and
copied by the Normans. Duke Richard, surnamed “Richard sans
peur,” walking one evening in the forest of Moulineaux near one of
his castles, on the banks of the Seine, with his courtiers, hearing
a prodigious noise coming towards him, sent one of his esquires to
know what was the matter, who brought him word, that it was a
company of people under a leader or king. Richard, with five hundred
of his bravest Norman, went out to see a sight which the peasants
were so accustomed to that they viewed it two or three times a week
without fear. The sight of the troop, preceded by two men who spread
a cloth on the ground, made all the Normans run away, and leave the
duke alone. He saw the strangers form themselves into a circle on
the cloth, and on asking who they were, was told, they were the
spirits of Charles V. king of France and his servants, condemned to
expiate their sins by fighting all night against the wicked and the
damned. Richard desired to be of their party, and receiving a strict
charge not to quit the cloth, was conveyed with them to mount Sinai,
where leaving them without quitting the cloth, he said his prayers
in the church of St. Catherine’s abbey there, while they were
fighting, and returned with them. In proof of the truth of this
story, he brought back half the wedding-ring of a knight in that
convent, whose wife, after six years, concluded him dead, and was
going to take a second husband.
[106] From such a story as this was probably borrowed the strange
knight’s ‘Mirror of Glass,’ mentioned by Chaucer in the
Squire’s Tale, brought with the Indian with the wonderful horse.
The virtues of that mirror were, that men might see when any
adversity befell the kingdom or the king, and who is a friend, or
foe; and any lady might see if the object of her love were false.
This mirror was carried up into the principal tower, and there fixed
for use. Such an one Gower ascribes to Virgil, who set it upon a
marble pillar at Rome for similar purposes; and with this
corresponds Merlin’s Glassie Mirror, in Spenser, F. Q. ii. 24, and
the globe shown to de Gama in the Lusiad. Warton’s History of
English Poetry, i. 406, 407. Such a mirror is said by the oriental
writers to have been possessed by Giamschid, one of their kings, by
which he and his people knew natural and supernatural things.
(Herbelot in voce.) Our great countryman, Roger Bacon, in his
‘Opus Majus,’ a work entirely founded on the Aristotelian and
Arabian Philosophy, describes a variety of specula, and explains
their construction and uses. This is the most curious and
extraordinary part of Bacon’s book, written about 1270. His Optic
Tube, in which he pretended to see future events, was famous in his
time, and long afterwards, and chiefly contributed to give him the
name of a magician. He asserts that ‘all things are known by
perspective.’ A mirror in the head of a monstrous fowl showed the
Mexicans their future invaders the Spaniards; and C. Agrippa, in
such a mirror, showed the earl of Surrey, Geraldine sick on a couch.
Warton, ib.
[107] ‘Sogd Samarcand,’ or the plain of Samarcand, is on the
north side of that city, and from it the province called by the
ancients ‘Sogdiana’ took its name. The oriental writers say,
that this plain or valley is one of the four paradises or most
delightful places in the world, as well as the plain and valley of
Damascus, which is called ‘Gauthah.’ They make it eight days
journey in extent; and it is covered on every side with gardens full
of fruit of admirable beauty and variety, or corn-fields and
pastures ever green, the soil being watered by springs and rivulets
issuing from a large and principal river called ‘Cai,’ running
through the middle of the plain. A number of populous towns and
villages, full of industrious cultivators of the soil, over-spread
this rich valley. --Herbelot.
[108] Nourgihan signifies ‘Light of the world,’ and was the name
of the wife of Gehanghir, son of Akbar, king of India, whom she
governed by her prudence. --Herbelot.
[109] ‘Khosrou,’ ‘Khosrau’ or ‘Khosrev,’ is a name
common to many kings of Persia, and the ‘Chosroes’ of the Greek
historians.
[110] “Bahaman” was the name of the sixth king of Persia of the
second dynasty of the Caianides, and signifies “just” and
“beneficent,” being, according to some writers, only an epithet
of “Ardschir Dirazdest” or “Artaxerxes Longimanus.” He is
said to have reigned 112 years, and to have been contemporary with
Hippocrates and Galen. --Herbelot. “Parizadeh,” the
“Parisatis” of the Greeks, signifies “born of a fairy.”
--Idem. “Pervis” has the same origin.