one thousand and one nights by hanan al shaykh

In 987 Ibn al-Nadīm also mentions a collection of 1,000 popular Arabic, Iranian, Greek, and other tales in his bibliographic work The Catalogue (Al-Fihrist). In his book, Meadows of Gold ( Murûj adh-dhahab ), Mas'udi says that it is the story of a king, his vizier, the vizier’s daughter and her slave, and that the last two are called Shirazad and Dinazad. The first known reference to the Nights is a 9th-century A.D papyrus fragment. The papyrus mentions two characters, Dînâzâd and Shîrâzâd-later to become Dunyâzâd and Shahrazâd-and has a few lines of narrative in which the former asks the latter to tell a story. Interestingly, there is also mention of a title that anticipates the title we now know: “The Book of Stories From the Thousand Nights.” About a century later, the text is mentioned next in 947 by al-Masʿūdī in a discussion of legendary stories from Iran, India, and Greece, as the Persian Hazār afsāna, “A Thousand Tales”. the Syrian recension whose sixteenth century manuscript was the basis of the first European translation by French archaeologist and orientalist Antoine Galland. a late Fatimid version (twelfth century) v. the frame story of “The Thousand Stories” with new Arabic stories added to it iv. a Persian core “The Thousand Stories” ( Hazâr Afsânah) ii.

Macdonald's “The Earlier History of the Arabian Nights” divides the development of the tales into five stages: i. Critics comment on how this view is supported by internal evidence-the style, mainly unstudied and unaffected, contains colloquialisms and even grammatical errors such as no professional Arabic writer would allow.

The tales’ variety and geographical range of origin-India, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and possibly Greece-make single authorship unlikely.

In an article about the collection, Professor Daniel Beaumont writes: 'Indeed, in recounting its history in the medieval period, there is no need to summarize a fairly complete account will read like a summary, since most of its medieval history is unknown and is likely to remain unknown.' His words illustrate a widely understood fact about the Arabian Nights: while some aspects of the history of the tales can be traced, a lot of it is undocumented and open to debate and speculation. Though the names of its chief characters are Iranian, the frame story is probably Indian, and the largest proportion of names in the internal stories are Arabic.

One thousand and one nights by hanan al shaykh