A Thousand and One Nights (Hazar Afsana)

"The Thousand and One Nights", a book of stories. This entry records the earliest mention of it in the sources held here, not its text.

In the year 332 AH, al-Mas'udi mentioned books translated from Persian, among them "Hazar Afsana". Its Arabic meaning is "A Thousand Fables", since a fable in Persian is an "afsana". He said that people call it "The Thousand and One Nights". ²

As he describes it, the book tells the story of a king, his vizier, the vizier's daughter and her maid, who are named Shirzad and Dinazad. He mentions alongside it the book of Farzah and Simas, and the book of Sindbad. ²

Ibn al-Nadim reports that Muhammad ibn Abdus al-Jahshiyari, the author of "Kitab al-Wuzara", began to compose a book in which he chose a thousand tales from the tales of the Arabs, the Persians and the Byzantines. He gathered four hundred and eighty nights of them before death overtook him. ³

Ibn al-Nadim saw several parts of it in the hand of Abu al-Tayyib, the brother of al-Shafi'i. ³

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) describes Alf layla wa-layla, "A thousand nights and one night", as the most famous Arabian collection of fairy-tales and other stories. The fairy-tales are its most striking part. The Arabs, like other Orientals, enjoyed imaginative stories from the earliest times, but since their intellectual horizon before Islam was narrow, much of the material was borrowed from Persia and India, as the account of the merchant al-Nadr, a rival of the Prophet ﷺ, suggests. Later, when Arab civilization was richer, foreign influence was far stronger. The stories range from King Solomon and the kings of ancient Persia to Alexander, the caliphs and anachronisms such as guns and coffee, and the whole work is enclosed in a frame-story. ⁴

The European discovery of the Nights is the work of Antoine Galland. He first translated Sindbad the Sailor from an unidentified manuscript, then learned that it belonged to a great collection, and then received from Syria four volumes of a manuscript that, apart from a small fragment found by Nabia Abbott, is the oldest known and contains the best surviving text; the first three of these volumes are still in the Bibliotheque nationale, and the fourth is lost. Galland translated the first seven volumes from the three Arabic volumes, adding Sindbad and Camalzaman (Kamar al-Zaman) from unidentified manuscripts. For lack of material he stopped for three years, until his publisher, without authority, issued an eighth volume containing Ganem (Ghanim), translated by Galland, and two stories, Zayn al-Asnam and Khudadad, translated by Petis de la Croix for his Mille et un jours. ⁴

In 1709 Galland met the Maronite Hanna of Aleppo, whom the traveller Paul Lucas had brought to Paris. Recognizing an oral source of the story material, he took down Hanna's tales in Arabic and inserted abstracts of them in his Journal, and Hanna also gave him transcripts, which filled the last four volumes of Galland's translation. Hanna's transcripts have vanished, but two Arabic manuscripts of Aladdin and one of Ali Baba have since come to light; Zotenberg's study of Aladdin (1888) is the main guide to them. For more than a century Galland's French version was the Nights for Europe. ⁴

Other manuscripts connected with the Nights were used for supplements, which translators attached to Galland's text or published separately. Denis Chavis's tales from the Arabic appeared in 1788 as a supplement to the Cabinet des Fees (vols 38-41), and three separate English translations of it appeared in 1792-94. William Beloe published Arabic stories that Patrick Russell had translated for him orally (1795). Jonathan Scott translated stories from a manuscript brought from India by James Anderson (1800), and added a volume from the Wortley Montague manuscript, now in Oxford, to his English Galland (1811). Caussin de Perceval added two supplementary volumes to his Galland in 1806, and Edouard Gauttier, in his Galland of 1822-25, went much further and freely inserted tales of all kinds. ⁴

Von Hammer, whose firmer foundation was a true recension, had acquired in Egypt a manuscript of the recension now called Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension, which became through many editions the Vulgate text of the Nights. His French translation of stories absent from Galland is lost, but Zinserling translated it into German (1823), Lamb into English (1826), and Trebutien into French (1828). ⁴

From 1825 Maximilian Habicht published fifteen volumes that claimed to be a new translation but consisted largely of Galland, with supplements from Caussin, Gauttier and Scott and an ending from a so-called Tunisian manuscript. He also began an Arabic text, which after his death was continued by H. L. Fleischer (Breslau, 1825-43). Weil's German translation (1837-67) drew on Habicht's text, Galland, Gotha manuscripts and a printed Egyptian text. Macdonald (JRAS, 1909, and a 1922 study) judged that Habicht had created a literary myth, since no Tunisian recension of the Nights ever existed, but he also acknowledged that Habicht's texts are reproduced verbatim without correction, and so are "vulgar" in the exact sense, while all the other texts had been "improved" by learned shaykhs. ⁴

The first printed collection, issued at Calcutta under the patronage of the College of Fort William (1814 and 1818), contains only the first two hundred nights and the story of Sindbad the Sailor. The first complete Arabic edition is the Bulaq edition of 1251/1835, printed at the State Printing Office founded by Muhammad 'Ali near Cairo, from manuscripts found in Egypt. The second Calcutta edition, edited by W. H. Macnaghten (four volumes, 1839-42), was the first complete Arabic text published in India, from an Egyptian manuscript brought there by Major Turner. Reprints of the first Bulaq edition in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were numerous, and the Jesuit press at Beirut issued an independent but expurgated edition from another manuscript of the same recension. ⁴

The Bulaq and Calcutta texts are representatives of Zotenberg's "Egyptian recension", the result of a compilation by a shaykh of the 18th century, whose name is unknown; a notice in Seetzen's travels confirms the hypothesis. All the modern Western translations derive from it. Lane's translation, incomplete but with a very valuable commentary, appeared in parts from 1839 to 1841, from the first Bulaq edition. Payne's complete translation, from the Macnaghten edition and privately printed, appeared in nine volumes (1882-84), with a thirteenth volume (1889) containing Aladdin and Zayn al-Asnam. Sir Richard Burton's translation, also from the Macnaghten edition, depends very largely on Payne and often reproduces him verbatim (ten volumes, 1885, and six supplementary volumes, 1886-88). ⁴

Other translations followed: Max Henning's German version in Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek (1895-97, 24 small volumes, somewhat expurgated); J. C. Mardrus's French version (from 1899), which the article finds not very trustworthy because it incorporates tales from other collections; the Spanish version by Vicente Blasco Ibanez; the English version by E. Powys Mathers; and E. Littmann's German translation (Leipzig, six volumes, 1921-28), which follows the complete text of the second Calcutta edition. Danish, Russian and Italian translations appeared in 1927, 1934 and 1949. ⁴

When the Nights first became known in Europe they served only the entertainment of readers, but early in the 19th century scholars began to ask where they came from. Silvestre de Sacy, the founder of modern Arabic philology, argued in several studies that one author could not have written the book, and that it was composed late, without Persian and Indian elements. He therefore treated as spurious the passage in al-Mas'udi's Muruj al-dhahab (written in 336/947 and revised in 346/957) which refers to such elements. ⁴

That passage speaks of books translated from Persian, Indian, Greek and other sources, among them the "thousand tales" (Hazar afsana, in which afsana is the Persian word for khurafa); the people call the book "the Thousand Nights", and it tells of a king, his vizier, the vizier's daughter and her nurse, named Shirzad and Dinazad. Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist (377/987) also mentions the Hazar afsan and summarizes its frame-story, and adds that Ibn Abdus al-Jahshiyari (d. 331/942), author of the Book of Viziers, set out to choose a thousand tales from the Arabs, the Persians and the Greeks, but had collected only 480 when he died. ⁴

Joseph von Hammer defended the genuineness of al-Mas'udi's passage with all its consequences. William Lane argued that the whole book was the work of one author writing in 1475-1525. De Goeje returned to the question, connecting the Fihrist's statement that the Hazar afsan was written for Humay, daughter of King Bahman, with al-Tabari's report that Esther was the mother of Bahman and that Humay was given the name Shahrazad, and so tried to link the frame-story with the Book of Esther. August Muller took a freer view, distinguishing layers of composition, one Baghdadi and a larger Egyptian. Nöldeke, Oestrup (whose Studier over 1001 Nat appeared in Copenhagen, 1891), Horovitz and Littmann pursued the matter further. ⁴

The earliest testimony to the book was found by Nabia Abbott, in a ninth-century fragment published in 1949 in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. After al-Mas'udi and the Fihrist, the Egyptian historian al-Kurti (who wrote under the last Fatimid caliph, 1160-71) knew a collection of tales called "The Thousand Nights and One Night", and al-Ghuzuli (d. 815/1412) transmitted a tale from it. A manuscript from Istanbul of the 13th or 14th century contains four stories of the Egyptian recension, and the manuscripts of the 15th to 18th centuries, including Galland's, follow. ⁴

Nabia Abbott distinguished six stages in the growth of the collection: an eighth-century translation of the Hazar afsana, perhaps entitled Alf khurata; an eighth-century Islamized version called Alf layla; a ninth-century composite Alf layla with Persian and Arabic material, including the books of Sindbad and of Shimas; a tenth-century Alf samar of Ibn Abdus; an Egyptian stage in which the title became Alf layla wa-layla, probably under the Mamluks, with Egyptian tales; and a final stage, to the early 16th century, in which heroic tales of the Islamic counter-crusades were prominent. The Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Syria and Egypt under Salim I (1512-20) ended the first chapter of the Nights in their oriental homeland. ⁴

The number 1001 is probably a change from an original "thousand" meant only as a large number, in the way that "a thousand books" is said of what Shahrazad collected. The change may owe something to a superstitious dislike of round numbers, but it was probably influenced by the Turkish idiom bin bir, "a thousand and one", used for a large number (as in Bin-bir-kilise, "1001 churches", in Anatolia). ⁴

The names in the Nights are mostly Arabic, with Indian names such as Sindbad, Persian names such as Shahrazad, Dinazad, Bahram and Rustam, Greek and European names in tales of the Muslims and the Franks, and Hebrew names such as Solomon and David. The frame-story, which is very common in India and rare elsewhere, points to Indian origin. Emmanuel Cosquin showed that it combines three originally separate tales, of which only the clever daughter of the vizier, who averts danger by telling stories, seems to have belonged to the original frame-work known to al-Mas'udi and the Fihrist. Persian origin is claimed for several fairy-tales in which spirits act independently, including the Magic Horse, Hasan of Basra, Sayf al-Muluk, Kamar al-Zaman and Budur, and Ardashir and Hayat al-Nufus. Mesopotamian material includes the story of Haykar the Wise, probably of Old Mesopotamian origin, while the Story of Sindbad found its definite shape probably in Baghdad. Egyptian origin is postulated for the tales of clever thieves and rogues, of talismans and magic objects, and of the "bourgeois" novels, which reached their present form under the Mamluk sultans and Turkish rule in Egypt, though some of their motifs go back to Ancient Egypt. ⁴

The article distinguishes six classes of stories: fairy-tales, romances and novels, legends, didactic stories, humorous tales and anecdotes. Among the romances, the longest is that of 'Umar b. al-Nu'man and his sons, and the model of an Islamic popular romance is the story of 'Adjib and Gharib. The love-stories fall into three groups: pre-Islamic Arabian life, Baghdad and Basra, and the frivolous love-novels of Cairo. The anecdotes about the rulers centre on the 'Abbasid caliphs, above all Harun al-Rashid, who became the ideal ruler in later Muslim opinion. Horovitz counted about 1,420 poems or fragments in the Calcutta edition, of which about 170 are repetitions, and showed that the insertions whose authors can be identified date from the 12th to the 14th centuries, the Egyptian period of the collection. ⁴

The bibliography, the article notes, is given throughout the text; special attention is drawn to Oestrup's Studier and Rescher's annotated translation, to N. Elisseeff's Themes et Motifs des Mille et Une Nuits (Beirut, 1949), and to Brockelmann's bibliography (II, 72-4; S II, 59-63). The article is signed E. Littmann. ⁴