Read Online Eastern Dreams by Paul Nurse - Free Book Online

accounts it is possible to construct a timeline of the book’s progress in the Muslim world from its ancient origins to the moment it first appeared in the West.
    The core of the
Arabian Nights
lies in the lost Persian storybook
Hazar Afsanah
, which itself incorporated Indian tales carried to Persia. This core was almost certainly quite small—perhaps just a few dozen stories at most. Once the text was translated into Arabic, sometime in the eighth or early ninth centuries, it was given the title
Alf Khurafa
—“A Thousand Stories”—but was more commonly called
Alf Laila
—“A Thousand Nights.” At around the same time, Arabic stories were added, beginning in Iraq, superimposing an Arab layer onto the existing Indo-Persian base and providing the first of several
Nights
ironies. Rather than being “Arabian” Nights originating on the Arabian peninsula, the heart and soul of thework hails from Persia, with contributions from India and perhaps other lands. Indigenous Arabian stories and Arab modifications came only later, adding their own cultural contributions to a preexisting collection without being part of the work’s original source.
    A third layer of stories looks to have sprung from Egypt between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; many of these are set in Cairo, and a number contain narrative threads dating back to ancient Egypt. Those tales in the
Nights
featuring demons, magical objects, talismans and trickster-figures probably arose from this most recent source, as did many of the romantic and sexual stories. This makes it possible to render some tentative differentiations among the tales. Those fables concerning animals are generally thought to have come from India, while most of the fairy stories (such as “The Trader and the Genie” and “The Fisherman and the Genie”) look to have originated in Persia. Anecdotes and moral fables are chiefly Arab, while other stories not belonging to these three basic groups probably arose from further afield; Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Turkey, China, even Japan are all possible sources for stories so closely associated with Arabia.
    By the late twelfth century, the work had become known as
The Thousand and One Nights
, assuming much of its present form as it wound its way through Egypt and Syria, where still more stories were added along with additional modifications to create what became the source material for the first western translation of the
Nights
, appearing in the eighteenth century. Some researchers speculate that there may be still
another
layer to the work dating from the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries, when material from popular Muslim epics and counter-crusade stories, along with later Egyptian and Turkish tales, was introduced.
    The long period over which the work was compiled definitely swelled its contents far beyond its original size. If
Hazar Afsanah
and
Alf Khurafa
were small selections of stories, then over thecenturies the attachment of different layers added to the work’s oeuvre until the early modern age, when the cumulative contents of
Alf Laila wa Laila
probably reached the 1001 Nights promised in the work’s now-common title. From the original eighth-century Persian core, Arab stories were added, as were independent story cycles like the
Sindibadnama
(also known as “The Craft and Malice of Women” or “The Seven Viziers,” but having nothing to do with Sindbad the Seafarer) and longer, self-contained tales such as “The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan.” By the early Renaissance, the totality of the Arabic
Nights
had become the original
Alf Laila
on steroids.
    This long period over which the
Nights
was gathered also makes for a frankly bizarre, even impossible timeline, if Scheherazade’s stories are taken literally. In the frame tale, Scheherazade and Shahryar are presented as