One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  113 I retain this venerable blunder: the right form is

  Samúm, from Samm, the poison-wind.

  114 i.e. for worship and to prepare for futurity.

  115 The camel carries the Badawi’s corpse to the cemetery which is often distant: hence to dream of a camel is an omen of death.

  116 Koran xxiv 39. The word “Saráb” (mirage) is found in Isaiah (xxxv. 7) where the passage should be rendered “And the mirage (sharab) shall become a lake” (not, “and the parched ground shall become a pool”). The Hindus prettily call it “Mrigatrishná” = the thirst of the deer.

  117 A name of Allah.

  118 Arab. “Kintár”=a hundredweight (i.e. 100 Ibs.), about 98 3/4 Ibs. avoir. Hence the French quintal and its congeners (Littré).

  119 i.e. “from Shám (Syria) to (the land of) Adnan,” ancestor of the Naturalized Arabs that is, to Arabia.

  120 Koran lii. 21. “Every man is given in pledge for that which he shall have wrought.”

  121 There is a constant clerical confusion in the texts between “Arar” (Juniperus Oxycedrus used by the Breeks for the images of their gods) and “Marmar” marble or alabaster, in the Talmud “Marmora” = marble. evidently from {Greek letters} = brilliant, the brilliant stone.

  122 These Ifritical names are chosed for their bizarrerie. “Al-Dáhish” = the Amazed; and “Al-A’amash” = one with weak eyes always watering.

  123 The Arabs have no word for million; so Messer Marco Miglione could not have learned it from them. On the other hand the Hindus have more quadrillions than modern Europe.

  124 This formula, according to Moslems, would begin with the beginning “There is no iláh but Allah and Adam is the Apostle (rasúl = one sent, a messenger, not nabí = prophet) of Allah.” And so on with Noah, Moses, David (not Solomon as a rule) and Jesus, to Mohammed.

  125 This son of Barachia has been noticed before. The text embroiders the Koranic chapter No. xxvii.

  126 The Bresl. Edit. (vi. 371) reads “Samm-hu”=his poison, prob. a clerical error for “Sahmhu”=his shaft. It was a duel with the “Shiháb” or falling stars, the meteors which are popularly supposed, I have said, to be the arrows shot by the angels against devils and evil spirits when they approach too near Heaven in order to overhear divine secrets.

  127 A fancy sea from the Lat. “Carcer” ( ?).

  128 Andalusian = Spanish, the Vandal-land, a term accepted by the Moslem invader.

  129 This fine description will remind the traveller of the old Haurani towns deserted since the sixth century, which a silly writer miscalled the “Giant Cities of Bashan.” I have never seen anything weirder than a moonlight night in one of these strong places whose masonry is perfect as when first built, the snowy light pouring on the jet-black basalt and the breeze sighing and the jackal wailing in the desert around.

  130 “Zanj,” I have said, is the Arab. form of the Persian “Zang-bar” (=Black-land), our Zanzibar. Those who would know more of the etymology will consult my “Zanzibar,” etc., chaps. i.

  131 Arab. “Tanjah”=Strabo {Greek letters} (derivation uncertain), Tingitania, Tangiers. But why the terminal s ?

  132 Or Amidah, by the Turks called “Kara (black) Amid” from the colour of the stones and the Arabs “Diyar-bakr” (Diarbekir), a name which they also give to the whole province — Mesopotamia.

  133 Mayyáfárikín, an episcopal city in Diyar-bakr: the natives are called Fárikí; hence the abbreviation in the text.

  134 Arab. “Ayát al-Naját,” certain Koranic verses which act as talismans, such as, “And wherefore should we not put our trust in Allah ?” (xiv. 15); “Say thou, Naught shall befall us save what Allah hath decreed for us,’ “ (ix. 51), and sundry others.

  135 These were the “Brides of the Treasure,” alluded to in the story of Hasan of Bassorah and elsewhere.

  136 Arab. “Ishárah,” which may also mean beckoning. Easterns reverse our process: we wave hand or finger towards ourselves; they towards the object; and our fashion represents to them, Go away!

  137 i.e. musing a long time and a longsome.

  138 Arab. “Dihlíz” from the Persian. This is the long dark passage which leads to the inner or main gate of an Eastern city, and which is built up before a siege. It is usually furnished with Mastabah-benches of wood and masonry, and forms a favourite lounge in hot weather. Hence Lot and Moses sat and stood in the gate, and here man speaks with his enemies.

  139 The names of colours are as loosely used by the Arabs as by the Classics of Europe; for instance, a light grey is called a “blue or a green horse.” Much nonsense has been written upon the colours in Homer by men who imagine that the semi-civilised determine tints as we do. They see them but they do not name them, having no occasion for the words. As I have noticed, however, the Arabs have a complete terminology for the varieties of horse-hues. In our day we have witnessed the birth of colours, named by the dozen, because required by women’s dress.

  140 For David’s miracles of metallurgy see vol. i. 286.

  141 Arab. “Khwárazm,” the land of the Chorasmioi, who are mentioned by Herodotus (iii. 93) and a host of classical geographers. They place it in Sogdiana (hod. Sughd) and it corresponds with the Khiva country.

  142 Arab. “Burka’,” usually applied to a woman’s face-veil and hence to the covering of the Ka’abah, which is the “Bride of Meccah.”

  143 Alluding to the trick played upon Bilkís by Solomon who had heard that her legs were hairy like those of an ass: he laid down a pavement of glass over flowing water in which fish were swimming and thus she raised her skirts as she approached him and he saw that the report was true. Hence, as I have said, the depilatory.

  144 I understand the curiously carved windows cut in arabesque-work of marble. (India) or basalt (the Haurán) and provided with small panes of glass set in emeralds where tin would be used by the vulgar.

  145 Arab. “Bulád” from the Pers. “Pulád.” Hence the name of the famous Druze family “Jumblat,” a corruption of “Ján- pulád”=Life o’ Steel.

  146 Pharaoh, so called in Koran (xxxviii. 11) because he tortured men by fastening them to four stakes driven into the ground. Sale translates “the contriver of the stakes” and adds, “Some understand the word figuratively, of the firm establishment of Pharaoh’s kingdom, because the Arabs fix their tents with stakes; but they may possibly intend that prince’s obstinacy and hardness of heart.” I may note that in “Tasawwuf,” or Moslem Gnosticism, Pharaoh represents, like Prometheus and Job, the typical creature who upholds his own dignity and rights in presence and despight of the Creator. Sáhib the Súfí declares that the secret of man’s soul (i.e. its emanation) was first revealed when Pharaoh declared himself god; and Al-Ghazálí sees in his claim the most noble aspiration to the divine, innate in the human spirit. (Dabistan, vol. iii.)

  147 In the Calc. Edit. “Tarmuz, son of the daughter,” etc.

  According to the Arabs Tadmur (Palmyra) was built by Queen

  Tadmurah, daughter of Hassán bin Uzaynah.

  148 It is only by some such drought that I can account for the survival of those marvellous Haurani cities in the great valley S. E. of Damascus.

  149 So Moses described his own death and burial.

  150 A man’s “aurat” (shame) extends from the navel (included) to his knees, a woman’s from the top of the head to the tips of her toes. I have before noticed the Hindostaní application of the word.

  151 Arab. “Jum’ah” ( = the assembly) so called because the General Resurrection will take place on that day and it witnessed the creation of Adam. Both these reasons are evidently after- thoughts; as the Jews received a divine order to keep Saturday, and the Christians, at their own sweet will, transferred the weekly rest-day to Sunday, wherefore the Moslem preferred Friday. Sabbatarianism, however, is unknown to Al-Islam and business is interrupted, by Koranic order ([xii. 9-10), only during congregational prayers in the Mosque. The most a Mohammedan does is not to work or travel till after public service. But th
e Moslem hardly wants a “day of rest;” whereas a Christian, especially in the desperately dull routine of daily life and toil, without a gleam of light to break the darkness of his civilised and most unhappy existence, disctinctly requires it.

  152 Mankind, which sees itself everywhere and in everything, must create its own analogues in all the elements, air (Sylphs), fire (Jinns), water (Mermen and Mermaids) and earth (Kobolds), These merwomen were of course seals or manatees, as the wild women of Hanno were gorillas.

  153 Here begins the Sindibad-namah, the origin of Dolopathos (thirteenth century by the Trouvčre Harbers); of the “Seven Sages” (John Holland in 1575); the “Seven Wise Masters” and a host of minor romances. The Persian Sindibád-Námah assumed its present shape in A.D. 1375: Professor Falconer printed an abstract of it in the Orient. Journ. (xxxv. and xxxvi. 1841), and Mr. W. A. Clouston reissued the “Book of Sindibad,” with useful notes in 1884. An abstract of the Persian work is found in all edits. of The Nights; but they differ greatly, especially that in the Bresl. Edit. xii. p-377, from which I borrow the introduction. According to Hamzah Isfahání (ch. xli.) the Reguli who succeeded to Alexander the Great and preceded Sapor caused some seventy books to be composed, amongst which were the Liber Maruc, Liber Barsínas, Liber Sindibad, Liber Shimás, etc., etc.

  154 Eusebius De Praep. Evang. iii. 4, quotes Prophesy concerning the Egyptian belief in the Lords of the Ascendant whose names are given {Greek letters}: in these “Almenichiaka” we have the first almanac, as the first newspaper in the Roman “Acta Diurna.”

  155 “Al-Mas’údi,” the “Herodotus of the Arabs,” thus notices Sindibad the Sage (in his Murúj, etc., written about A.D. 934). “During the reign of Kurúsh (Cyrus) lived Al-Sindibad who wrote the Seven Wazirs, etc.” Al-Ya’akúbi had also named him, circ. A.D. 880. For notes on the name Sindibad, see Sindbad the Seaman, Night dxxxvi. I need not enter into the history of the “Seven Sages,” a book evidently older than The Nights in present form; but refer the reader to Mr. Clouston, of whom more in a future page.

  156 Evidently borrowed from the Christians, although the latter borrowed from writers of the most remote antiquity. Yet the saying is the basis of all morality and in few words contains the highest human wisdom.

  157 It is curious to compare the dry and business-like tone of the Arab style with the rhetorical luxuriance of the Persian: p.10 of Mr. Clouston’s “Book of Sindibad.”

  158 In the text “Isfídáj,” the Pers. Isped (or Saféd) áb,

  lit. = white water, ceruse used for women’s faces suggesting our

  “Age of Bismuth,” Blanc Rosati, Cręme de l’Impératrice, Perline,

  Opaline, Milk of Beauty, etc., etc.

  159 Commentators compare this incident with the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and with the old Egyptian romance and fairy tale of the brothers Anapon and Saton dating from the fourteenth century, the days of Pharaoh Ramses Miamun (who built Pi-tum and Ramses) at whose court Moses or Osarsiph is supposed to have been reared (Cambridge Essays 1858). The incident would often occur, e.g. Phćdra-cum-Hippolytus; Fausta-cum-Crispus and Lucinian; Asoka’s wife and Kunála, etc., etc. Such things happen in every-day life, and the situation has recommended itself to the folk lore of all peoples.

  160 Another version of this tale is given in the Bresl. Edit. (vol. viii. p-8: Night 675-6). It is the “Story of the King and the Virtuous Wife” in the Book of Sindibad. In the versions Arabic and Greek (Syntipas) the King forgets his ring; in the Hebrew Mishlé Sandabar, his staff, and his sandals in the old Spanish Libro de los Engannos et los Asayamientos de las Mugeres.

  161 One might fancy that this is Biblical, Bathsheba and Uriah. But such “villanies” must often have occurred in the East, at different times and places, without requiring direct derivation. The learned Prof. H. H. Wilson was mistaken in supposing that these fictions “originate in the feeling which has always pervaded the East unfavourable to the dignity of women.” They belong to a certain stage of civilisation when the sexes are at war with each other; and they characterise chivalrous Europe as well as misogynous Asia; witness Jankins, clerk of Oxenforde; while Ćsop’s fable of the Lion and the Man also explains their frequency.

  162 The European form of the tale is “Toujours perdrix,” a sentence often quoted but seldom understood. It is the reproach of M. l’Abbé when the Count (proprietor of the pretty Countess) made him eat partridge every day for a month; on which the Abbé says, “Alway partridge is too much of a good thing!” Upon this text the Count speaks. A correspondent mentions that it was told by Horace Walpole concerning the Confessor of a French King who reproved him for conjugal infidelities. The degraded French (for “toujours de la perdrix” or “des perdrix”) suggests a foreign origin. Another friend refers me to No. x. of the “Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles” (compiled in A.D. 1432 for the amusement of the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XI.) whose chief personage “un grand seigneur du Royaulme d’Angleterre,” is lectured upon fidelity by the lord’s mignon, a “jeune et gracieux gentil homme de son hostel.” Here the partridge became pastés d’anguille. Possibly Scott refers to it in Redgauntlet (chapt. iv.); “One must be very fond of partridge to accept it when thrown in one’s face.” Did not Voltaire complain at Potsdam of “toujours perdrix” and make it one of his grievances? A similar story is that of the chaplain who, weary of the same diet, uttered “grace” as follows: —

  Rabbits hot, rabbits cold,

  Rabbits tender, and rabbits tough,

  Rabbits young, and rabbits old

  I thank the Lord I’ve had enough.

  And I as cordially thank my kind correspondents.

  163 The great legal authority of the realm.

  164 In all editions the Wazir here tells the Tale of the Merchant’s Wife and the Parrot which, following Lane, I have transferred to vol. i. . But not to break the tradition I here introduce the Persian version of the story from the “Book of Sindibad.” In addition to the details given in the note to vol. i., 52 {Vol1, FN#90}; I may quote the two talking-birds left to watch over his young wife by Rajah Rasálú (son of Shaliváhana the great Indian monarch circ. A.D. 81), who is to the Punjab what Rustam is to Persia and Antar to Arabia. In the “Seven Wise Masters” the parrot becomes a magpie and Mr. Clouston, in some clever papers on “Popular Tales and Fictions” contributed to the Glasgow Evening Times (1884), compares it with the history, in the Gesta Romanorum, of the Adulteress, the Abigail, and the Three Cocks, two of which crowed during the congress of the lady and her lover. All these evidently belong to the Sindibad cycle.

  165 In the days of the Caliph Al-Mustakfí bi llah (A.H. 333=944) the youth of Baghdad studied swimming and it is said that they could swim holding chafing-dishes upon which were cooking-pots and keep afloat till the meat was dressed. The story is that of “The Washerman and his Son who were drowned in the Nile,” of the Book of Sindibad.

  166 Her going to the bath suggested that she was fresh from coition..

  167 Taken from the life of the Egyptian Mameluke Sultan (No. viii, regn. A.H, 825= A.D. 1421) who would not suffer his subjects to prostrate themselves or kiss the ground before him. See D’Herbelot for details.

  168 This nauseous Joe Miller has often been told in the hospitals of London and Paris. It is as old as the Hitopadesa.

  169 Koran iv. 81, “All is from Allah;” but the evil which befals mankind, though ordered by Allah, is yet the consequence of their own wickedness (I add, which wickedness was created by Allah).

  170 The Bresl. Edit. (xii. 266) says “bathing.”

  171 This tale is much like that told in the Fifth Night (vol. i. 54). It is the story of the Prince and the Lamia in the Book of Sindibad wherein it is given with Persian rhetoric and diffuseness.

  172 Arab. “Wa’ar”= rocky, hilly, tree-less ground unfit for riding. I have noted that the three Heb. words “Year” (e.g. Kiryath-Yearin=City of forest), “Choresh” (now Hirsh, a scrub), and “Pardes” ({Greek letters} a chase, a hunting-park opposed to {Gr
eek letters}, an orchard) are preserved in Arabic and are intelligible in Palestine. (Unexplored Syria, i. 207.)

  173 The privy and the bath are favourite haunts of the

  Jinns.

  174 Arab history is full of petty wars caused by trifles. In Egypt the clans Sa’ad and Harám and in Syria the Kays and Yaman (which remain to the present day) were as pugnacious as Highland Caterans. The tale bears some likeness to the accumulative nursery rhymes in “The House that Jack Built,” and “The Old Woman and the Crooked Sixpence;” which find their indirect original in an allegorical Talmudic hymn.

  175 This is “The Story of the Old Man who sent his Young Wife to the Market to buy Rice,” told with Persian reflections in the “Book of Sindibad.”

  176 Koran xii. 28. The words were spoken by Potiphar to

  Joseph.

  177 Koran iv. 78. A mis-quotation, the words are, “Fight therefore against the friends of Satan, for the craft of Satan shall be weak.”

  178 i.e. Koranic versets.

  179 In the Book of Sindibad this is the “Story of the Prince who went out to hunt and the stratagem which the Wazir practised on him.”

  180 I have noted that it is a dire affront to an Arab if his first cousin marry any save himself without his formal leave.

  181 i.e. the flowery, the splendid; an epithet of Fatimah, the daughter of the Apostle “the bright blooming.” Fátimah is an old Arab name of good omen, “the weaner:” in Egypt it becomes Fattúmah (an incrementative= “great weaner”); and so Amínah, Khadíjah and Nafísah on the banks of the Nile are barbarised to Ammúnah, Khaddúgah and Naffúsah.

  182 i.e. his coming misfortune, the phrase being euphemistic.

  183 Arab. “Ráy:” in theology it means “private judgment” and “Ráyí” (act. partic.) is a Rationalist. The Hanafí School is called “Asháb al-Ráy” because it allows more liberty of thought than the other three orthodox.

  184 The angels in Al-Islam ride piebalds.

  185 In the Bresl. Edit. “Zájir” (xii. 286).

  186 This is the “King’s Son and the Merchant’s Wife” of the