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The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10

R >> Richard F. Burton >> The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10




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 (with six).
5. The Tale of the Three Apples.
6. The Tale of Nur-al-Din Ali and his son Badr al-Din Hasan.
7. The Hunchback's Tale (with eleven incidentals).
8. Nur al-Din and Anis al-Jalis.
9. Tale of Ghanim bin 'Ayyub (with two incidentals).
10. Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar (with two).
11. Tale of Kamar al-Zaman.
12. The Ebony Horse; and
13. Julnar the Seaborn.

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.[FN#169] contains a total of two hundred and sixty-four
Hence Dr. Patrick Russell,[FN#170] the Natural Historian of
Aleppo,[FN#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,[FN#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 sue fate libelli." Galland, who preserves in
his Mille et une Nuits only about one fourth of The Nights, ends
them in No. cclxiv[FN#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,[FN#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. I69 = A.D. 785,[FN#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.[FN#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[FN#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 Hulaku Khan, successor of Janghiz 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.[FN#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 "Sultani oranges" (vol. i. 83) have been connected
with Sultaniyah city in Persian Irak, which was founded about the
middle of the thirteenth century: but "Sultani" 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.[FN#179] Here again
"Kalandar" may be due only to the scribes as the Bresl. Edit. reads
Sa'aluk = asker, beggar. The Khan al-Masrur in the Nazarene
Broker's story (i. 265) was a ruin during the early ninth century
A.H. = A.D. 1420; but the Bab 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-Amir Baktamir 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-Jawali built about A.D. 1320.
In Badr al-Din Hasan (vol. i. 237) "Sahib" is given as a Wazirial
title and it dates only from the end of the fourteenth
century.[FN#180] In Sindbad the Seaman, there is an allusion (vol.
vi. 67) to the great Hindu Kingdom, Vijayanagar of the
Narasimha,[FN#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'aruf, we are
apparently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first
contains (Night cmlxxvii.) the word Lawandiyah = Levantine, the
mention of a watch = Sa'ah in the next Night[FN#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'aruf
the 'Adiliyah is named; the mosque founded outside the Bab al-Nasr
by Al-Malik al-'Adil, Tuman 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
(judri), 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[FN#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-ban ("fire-arrow") and Shatagni ("hundred-
killer"), like the Roman Phalarica, and the Greek fire of
Byzantium, suggest explosives. Indeed, Dr. Oppert[FN#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 Oxydracae 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 Mahmud the
Ghaznevite[FN#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 Nabiz or
fermented infusion of raisins well known to the prae-Mohammeden
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'ideal, 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 , 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- ),
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 Raki
(raisin-brandy) or Ma-hayat (aqua-vitae) 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.

Syphilis also, which at the end of the xvth century began to infect
Europe, is ignored by The Nights. I do not say it actually began:
diseases do not begin except with the dawn of humanity; and their
history, as far as we know, is simple enough. They are at first
sporadic and comparatively non-lethal: at certain epochs which we
can determine, and for reasons which as yet we cannot, they break
out into epidemics raging with frightful violence: they then
subside into the endemic state and lastly they return to the milder
sporadic form. For instance, "English cholera" was known of old: in
1831 (Oct. 26) the Asiatic type took its place and now, after
sundry violent epidemics, the disease is becoming endemic on the
Northern seaboard of the Mediterranean, notably in Spain and Italy.
So small-pox (Al-judri, vol. i. 256) passed over from Central
Africa to Arabia in the year of Mohammed's birth (A.D. 570) and
thence overspread the civilised world, as an epidemic, an endemic
and a sporadic successively. The "Greater Pox" has appeared in
human bones of pre historic graves and Moses seems to mention
gonorrhoea (Levit. xv. 12). Passing over allusions in Juvenal and
Martial,[FN#186] we find Eusebius relating that Galerius died (A.D.
302) of ulcers on the genitals and other parts of his body; and,
about a century afterwards, Bishop Palladius records that one Hero,
after conversation with a prostitute, fell a victim to an abscess
on the penis (phagedaenic shanker?). In 1347 the famous Joanna of
Naples founded (aet. 23), in her town of Avignon, a bordel whose in-
mates were to be medically inspected a measure to which England
(proh pudor!) still objects. In her Statuts du Lieu-
publiqued'Avignon, No. iv. she expressly mentions the Malvengut de
paillardise. Such houses, says Ricord who studied the subject since
1832, were common in France after A.D. 1200; and sporadic venereals
were known there. But in A.D. 1493-94 an epidemic broke out with
alarming intensity at Barcelona, as we learn from the "Tractado
llamado fructo de todos los Sanctos contra el mal serpentino,
venido de la Isla espanola," of Rodrigo Ruiz Dias, the specialist.
In Santo Domingo the disease was common under the names Hipas,
Guaynaras and Taynastizas: hence the opinion in Europe that it
arose from the mixture of European and "Indian" blood.[FN#187] Some
attributed it to the Gypsies who migrated to Western Europe in the
xvth century:[FN#188] others to the Moriscos expelled from Spain.
But the pest got its popular name after the violent outbreak at
Naples in A.D. 1493-4, when Charles VIII. of Anjou with a large
army of mercenaries, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans, attacked
Ferdinand II. Thence it became known as the Mal de Naples and
Morbus Gallicus-una gallica being still the popular term in neo
Latin lands-and the "French disease" in England. As early as July
1496 Marin Sanuto (Journal i. 171) describes with details the "Mal
Franzoso." The scientific "syphilis" dates from Fracastori's poem
(A.D. 1521) in which Syphilus the Shepherd is struck like Job, for
abusing the sun. After crippling a Pope (Sixtus IV.[FN#189]) and
killing a King (Francis I.) the Grosse Verole began to abate its
violence, under the effects of mercury it is said; and became
endemic, a stage still shown at Scherlievo near Fiume, where legend
says it was implanted by the Napoleonic soldiery. The Aleppo and
other "buttons" also belong apparently to the same grade. Elsewhere
it settled as a sporadic and now it appears to be dying out while
gonorrhoea is on the increase.[FN#190]

The Nights, I have said, belongs to the days before coffee (A.D.
1550) and tobacco (A.D. 1650) had overspread the East. The former,
which derives its name from the Kafa or Kaffa province, lying south
of Abyssinia proper and peopled by the Sidama Gallas, was
introduced to Mokha of Al-Yaman in A.D. 1429-30 by the Shaykh al-
Shazili who lies buried there, and found a congenial name in the
Arabic Kahwah=old wine.[FN#191] In The Nights (Mac. Edit.) it is
mentioned twelve times[FN#192]; but never in the earlier tales:
except in the case of Kamar al-Zaman II. it evidently does not
belong to the epoch and we may fairly suspect the scribe. In the
xvith century coffee began to take the place of wine in the nearer
East; and it gradually ousted the classical drink from daily life
and from folk-tales.

It is the same with tobacco, which is mentioned only once by The
Nights (cmxxxi.), in conjunction with meat, vegetables and fruit
and where it is called "Tabah." Lane (iii. 615) holds it to be the
work of a copyist; but in the same tale of Abu Kir and Abu Sir,
sherbet and coffee appear to have become en vogue, in fact to have
gained the ground they now hold. The result of Lord Macartney's
Mission to China was a suggestion that smoking might have
originated spontaneously in the Old World.[FN#193] This is un-
doubtedly true. The Bushmen and other wild tribes of Southern
Africa threw their Dakha (cannabis indica) on the fire and sat
round it inhaling the intoxicating fumes. Smoking without tobacco
was easy enough. The North American Indians of the Great Red Pipe
Stone Quarry and those who lived above the line where nicotiana
grew, used the kinni-kinik or bark of the red willow and some seven
other succedanea.[FN#194] But tobacco proper, which soon superseded
all materials except hemp and opium, was first adopted by the
Spaniards of Santo Domingo in A.D. 1496 and reached England in
1565. Hence the word, which, amongst the so-called Red Men, denoted
the pipe, the container, not the contained, spread over the Old
World as a generic term with additions, like ''Tutun,''[FN#195] for
special varieties. The change in English manners brought about by
the cigar after dinner has already been noticed; and much of the
modified sobriety of the present day may be attributed to the
influence of the Holy Herb en cigarette. Such, we know from history
was its effect amongst Moslems; and the normal wine-parties of The
Nights suggest that the pipe was unknown even when the latest tales
were written.





C.



We know absolutely nothing of the author or authors who produced
our marvellous Recueil. Galland justly observes (Epist. Dedic.),
"probably this great work is not by a single hand; for how can we
suppose that one man alone could own a fancy fertile enough to
invent so many ingenious fictions?" Mr. Lane, and Mr. Lane alone,
opined that the work was written in Egypt by one person or at most
by two, one ending what the other had begun, and that he or they
had re-written the tales and completed the collection by new matter
composed or arranged for the purpose. It is hard to see how the
distinguished Arabist came to such a conclusion: at most it can be
true only of the editors and scribes of MSS. evidently copied from
each other, such as the Mac. and the Bul. texts. As the Reviewer
(Forbes Falconer?) in the "Asiatic Journal" (vol. xxx., 1839) says,
"Every step we have taken in the collation of these agreeable
fictions has confirmed us in the belief that the work called the
Arabian Nights is rather a vehicle for stories, partly fixed and
partly arbitrary, than a collection fairly deserving, from its
constant identity with itself, the name of a distinct work, and the
reputation of having wholly emanated from the same inventive mind.
To say nothing of the improbability of supposing that one
individual, with every license to build upon the foundation of
popular stories, a work which had once received a definite form
from a single writer, would have been multiplied by the copyist
with some regard at least to his arrangement of words as well as
matter. But the various copies we have seen bear about as much
mutual resemblance as if they had passed through the famous process
recommended for disguising a plagiarism: 'Translate your English
author into French and again into English'."

Moreover, the style of the several Tales, which will be considered
in a future page (Section iii.), so far from being homogeneous is
heterogeneous in the extreme. Different nationalities show them
selves; West Africa, Egypt and Syria are all represented and, while
some authors are intimately familiar with Baghdad, Damascus and
Cairo, others are equally ignorant. All copies, written and
printed, absolutely differ in the last tales and a measure of the
divergence can be obtained by comparing the Bresl. Edit. with the
Mac. text: indeed it is my conviction that the MSS. preserved in
Europe would add sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto
translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a
test. We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights
with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a
collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulae and verses
traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated
in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together
about the age of Pericles.

To conclude. From the data above given I hold myself justified in
drawing the following deductions:--

1. The framework of the book is purely Persian perfunctorily
arabised; the archetype being the Hazar Afsanah.[FN#196]

2. The oldest tales, such as Sindibad (the Seven Wazirs) and
King Jili'ad, may date from the reign of Al-Mansur, eighth century
A.D.

3. The thirteen tales mentioned above (p. 78) as the nucleus
of the Repertory, together with "Dalilah the Crafty,"[FN#197] may
be placed in our tenth century.

4. The latest tales, notably Kamar al-Zaman the Second and
Ma'aruf the Cobbler, are as late as the sixteenth century.

5. The work assumed its present form in the thirteenth
century.

6. The author is unknown for the best reason; there never was
one: for information touching the editors and copyists we must
await the fortunate discovery of some MSS.





Section II.
THE NIGHTS IN EUROPE.



The history of The Nights in Europe is one of slow and gradual
development. The process was begun (1704-17) by Galland, a
Frenchman, continued (1823) by Von Hammer an Austro-German, and
finished by Mr. John Payne (1882-84) an Englishman. But we must
not forget that it is wholly and solely to the genius of the Gaul
that Europe owes "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments" over which
Western childhood and youth have spent so many spelling hours.
Antoine Galland was the first to discover the marvellous fund of
material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he
had in a high degree that art of telling a tale which is far more
captivating than culture or scholarship. Hence his delightful
version (or perversion) became one of the world's classics and at
once made Sheherazade and Dinarzarde, Haroun Alraschid, the
Calendars and a host of other personages as familiar to the home
reader as Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver and Dr.
Primrose. Without the name and fame won for the work by the
brilliant paraphrase of the learned and single-minded Frenchman,
Lane's curious hash and latinized English, at once turgid and
emasculated, would have found few readers. Mr. Payne's admirable
version appeals to the Orientalist and the "stylist," not to the
many-headed; and mine to the anthropologist and student of
Eastern manners and customs. Galland did it and alone he did it:
his fine literary flaire, his pleasing style, his polished taste
and perfect tact at once made his work take high rank in the
republic of letters nor will the immortal fragment ever be
superseded in the infallible judgment of childhood. As the
Encyclopaedia Britannica has been pleased to ignore this excellent
man and admirable Orientalist, numismatologist and litterateur,
the reader may not be unwilling to see a short sketch of his
biography.[FN#198]

Antoine Galland was born in A.D. 1646 of peasant parents "poor
and honest" at Rollot, a little bourg in Picardy some two leagues
from Montdidier. He was a seventh child and his mother, left a
widow in early life and compelled to earn her livelihood, saw
scant chance of educating him when the kindly assistance of a
Canon of the Cathedral and President of the College de Noyon
relieved her difficulties. In this establishment Galland studied
Greek and Hebrew for ten years, after which the "strait thing at
home" apprenticed him to a trade. But he was made for letters;
he hated manual labour and he presently removed en cachette to
Paris, where he knew only an ancient kinswoman. She introduced
him to a priestly relative of the Canon of Noyon, who in turn
recommended him to the "Sous-principal" of the College Du
Plessis. Here he made such notable progress in Oriental studies,
that M. Petitpied, a Doctor of the Sorbonne, struck by his
abilities, enabled him to study at the College Royal and
eventually to catalogue the Eastern MSS. in the great
ecclesiastical Society. Thence he passed to the College Mazarin,
where a Professor, M. Godouin, was making an experiment which
might be revived to advantage in our present schools. He
collected a class of boys, aged about four, and proposed to teach
them Latin speedily and easily by making them converse in the
classical language as well as read and write it.[FN#199] Galland,
his assistant, had not time to register success or failure before
he was appointed attache-secretary to M. de Nointel named in 1660
Ambassadeur de France for Constantinople. His special province
was to study the dogmas and doctrines and to obtain official
attestations concerning the articles of the Orthodox (or Greek)
Christianity which had then been a subject of lively discussion
amongst certain Catholics, especially Arnauld (Antoine) and
Claude the Minister, and which even in our day occasionally crops
up amongst "Protestants."[FN#200] Galland, by frequenting the
cafes and listening to the tale-teller, soon mastered Romaic and
grappled with the religious question, under the tuition of a
deposed Patriarch and of sundry Matrans or Metropolitans, whom
the persecutions of the Pashas had driven for refuge to the
Palais de France. M. de Nointel, after settling certain knotty
points in the Capitulations, visited the harbour-towns of the
Levant and the "Holy Places," including Jerusalem, where Galland
copied epigraphs, sketched monuments and collected antiques, such
as the marbles in the Baudelot Gallery of which Pere Dom Bernard
de Montfaucon presently published specimens in his ''Palaeographia
Graeca," etc. (Parisiis, 1708).

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