"Volume X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burtons Version)

7. The Hunchback’s Tale (with eleven incidentals).
8. Nur al-Dнn and Anнs al-Jalнs.
9. Tale of Ghбnim bin ’Ayyъb (with two incidentals).
10. Alн bin Bakkбr and Shams al-Nahбr (with two).
11. Tale of Kamar al-Zamбn.
12. The Ebony Horse; and
13. Julnбr 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 Hulбku Khan, successor of Janghнz 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 “Sultбni oranges” (vol. i. 83) have been connected with Sultбnнyah city in Persian Irбk, which was founded about the middle of the thirteenth century: but “Sultбni” 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’alъk = asker, beggar. The Khan al-Masrъr in the Nazarene Broker’s story (i. 265) was a ruin during the early ninth century A.H. = A.D. 1420; but the Bбb 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-Amнr Baktamнr 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-Jбwali built about A.D. 1320. In Badr al-Din Hasan (vol. i. 237) “Sбhib” 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’arъf, we are apparently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first contains (Night cmlxxvii.) the word Lбwandiyah = Levantine, the mention of a watch = Sб’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’arъf the ’Бdiliyah is named; the mosque founded outside the Bab al-Nasr by Al-Malik al-’Бdil, Tъmбn 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 (judrн), 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-bбn (“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 Oxydracж 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 Mahmъd 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 Nabнz or fermented infusion of raisins well known to the prж-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 Ьмвйо, 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-{Greek letters}), 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 Rбki (raisin-brandy) or Ma-hayбt (aqua-vitж) 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-judrн, 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 (phagedжnic shanker?). In 1347 the famous Joanna of Naples founded (жt. 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 Dнas, 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 Vйrole 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 Kбfб or Kбffб province, lying south of Abyssinia proper and peopled by the Sidбma Gallas, was introduced to Mokha of Al-Yaman in A.D. 1429-30 by the Shaykh al-Shбzili 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 “Tбbah.” 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 Dakhб (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 (§ 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 formulж 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 Hazбr Afsбnah. [FN#196]

2. The oldest tales, such as Sindibad (the Seven Wazirs) and King Jili’бd, 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.