ARABIAN NIGHTS, The. 'The Ara bian Nights,' or more property Thousand Nights and a Night' (Alf leilah wa-leilah), is a collection of stories in Arabic connected by a frame-story, probably Persian in origin and much older than most, possibly than any, of them. This frame-story, the distinctive feature of the is essentially as follows: Shah riar, King of India and China, finding his wife false and that his brother and a genii are in like misfortune, kills the unfaithful wife and afterward each successive bride on the morning following the marriage. Public dis tress induces the vizier's daughter, Sharazad, to offer herself °to be a ransom for the daughters of the Mohammedans or the cause of their deliverance) She °beguiles the wak ing hour" of the king by beginning a story which she interrupts at a point of suspense. Her life is spared that she may continue it. She repeats the device, linking tale to tale or involving one in another, till at the end of the 1,001 nights she asks her life, receives favor and is made full queen.
A Persian collection of tales with the same frame-story is mentioned by the Arabian his torian Masudi in 943; another historian, Abu Yakub al Nadim, writing in 987, says this col lection was written by Princess Homai, daugh ter of Bahman, that it counted 200 tales dis tributed through 1,000 nights, and was a °meagre and uninteresting publication."' It has perished, but it seems probable that some fifth part of the 'Nights) we know was de rived from it, though with far-reaching modi fications throughout. The frame-story is much older, possibly, if the ingenious identification of Sharazad-Homai with the Biblical Esther, attempted by the late Professor de Goeje of Leyden, be accepted, as early as 300 B.C.
Such a frame-story offers indefinite possi bilities of extension and adaptation. Few manuscripts of the agree in their version of any single tale, in the order of the stories, or even in the make-up of the collec tion. We may suppose that some favorite and favored rawi, professional story-teller, found a recorder, or was asked by some wealthy ad mirer to furnish a record of his narrations, in which professional successors would make developments, suppressions, substitutions, as conditions changed or their genius suggested. The division into was obviously con venient for the professional narrator, living by his art. It is found in manuscripts of tales that do not form part of any regular manu script of the 'Nights) known to scholars. The very popular story of Aladdin and the Wonder ful Lamp is rarely found in such manuscripts; Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, no less popu lar among the Bedawi, occurs in none of them. Sir Richard Burton, after translating one manuscript of the in 10 volumes, could fill six more with tales, often with equal literary claim to inclusion.
We have not and are not likely to have any for Arabian Nights.' The stories of Arabian Nights' are of many countries and times, but whatever their age or source all have been so transformed that they are Moslem to the core, thoroughly Arabian in temper and in spirit. The scene is sometimes in China, India, even the land of the Franks; the time is often of the 8th or 9th century, or even earlier; but the rawi is as indifferent as his auditors to anachronisms, and will speak in these very stories of cannon or coffee, neither of which were known in Egypt till late in the 14th century. In one instance he names tobacco, which was not known till the 16th. The manners and cus toms assumed throughout are those of Egypt from about 1400 to 1550, and it was during this period, probably at Cairo, that the 'Nights' took their present form.
A rawi must be ready with a tale to suit any audience. He may have to gain his bread to-day in camp, to-morrow in the bazaar or the inn, among simple folk, or, if fortune smile, at the festivities of the rich. So a col lection made from his lips or for his benefit will show wide variation in tone and theme. There are the old °Household tales,' an Arabic Cinderella among them, animal fables, like those of Bidpai and lEsop, Bedawi adventures, lovers' romances, merchant voyages to strange and distant lands, adventurous wanderings in the spirit, and now and then, almost in the letter of the Odyssey, quests in the land of the Amazons and the isles of Wak-Vslak in search of the lost beloved, tales of chivalry, taken from the historians, showing curiously the other side of the crusades and Moslem reaction to the Christian Church-Militant, some of them deadly serious, others frankly burlesque, pica roon tales of successful knavery, and finally a curious group in which the beau role is so persistently' given to women, either some Prin cess Badoura or some slave Zumroud, that they seem designed less for any male audience than for idle hours of the haremlik. In nearly all the stories the actors live and move in momentary expectation of supernatural inter vention. Any jar or well may hold an efrit or a genii, any lamp respond to a rub, any talis man to a turn, or rock to an `open-sesame.' Any day may see the pauper a prince, the prince a pauper, the °sleeper awakened.p Fancy sits here on her magic carpet and travels in a twinkling wherever she will to °expatiate free° without trammel from laws of probabil ity, gravity or economics. There, in its power to give passing release from the cares and burdens of work-a-day life, lies the primary appeal of 'The Arabian Nights' to the Arab or Egyptian who reads or more probably listens to them.