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 the turbans which, in 1301, Mahommed b. Kalaʽun of Egypt commanded his Moslem, Christian and Jewish subjects respectively to wear. Again, in the story of the humpback, whose scene is laid in the 9th century, the talkative barber says, “this is the year 653” (= 1255; Lane, i. 332, writes 263, but see his note), and mentions the caliph Mostanṣir (d. 1242), who is incorrectly called son of Mostaḍī. In the same story several places in Cairo are mentioned which did not exist till long after the 9th century (see Lane i. 379). The very rare edition of the first 200 nights published at Calcutta in 1814 speaks of cannon, which are first mentioned in Egypt in 1383; and all editions sometimes speak of coffee, which was discovered towards the end of the 14th century, but not generally used till 200 years later. In this and other points, e.g. in the mention of a mosque founded in 1501 (Lane iii. 608), we detect the hand of later interpolators, but the extent of such interpolations can hardly perhaps be determined even by a collation of all copies. For the nature and causes of the variations between different copies the reader may consult Lane, iii. 678, who explains how transpositions actually arise by transcribers trying to make up a complete set of the tales from several imperfect copies.

Many of the tales in the Nights have an historical basis, as Lane has shown in his notes. Other cases in point might he added: thus the chronicle of Ibn al-Jauzī (d. 1200) contains a narrative of Ḳamar, slave girl of Shaghb, the mother of Moqtadir, which is the source of the tale in Lane i. 310 seq., and of another to be found in M‘Naghten iv. 557 seq.; the latter is the better story, but departs so far from the original that the author must have had no more than a general recollection of the narrative he drew on. There are other cases in the Nights of two tales which are only variations of a single theme, or even in certain parts agree almost word for word. Some tales are mere compounds of different stories put together without any art, but these perhaps are, as Lane conjectures, later additions to the book; yet the collector himself was no great literary artist. We must picture him as a professional story-teller equipped with a mass of miscellaneous reading, a fluent power of narration, and a ready faculty for quoting, or at a push improvising, verses. His stories became popular, and were written down as he told them—hardly written by himself, else we should not have so many variations in the text, and such insertions of “the narrator says,” “my noble sirs,” and the like. The frequent coarseness of tone is proper to the condition of Egyptian society under the Mameluke sultans, and would not have been tolerated in Bagdad in the age to which so many of the tales refer. Yet with all their faults the Nights have beauties enough to deserve their popularity, and to us their merit is enhanced by the pleasure we feel in being transported into so entirely novel a state of society.

THRACE, a name which was applied at various periods to areas of different extent. For the purposes of this article it will be taken in its most restricted sense, as signifying the Roman province which was so called after the district that intervened between the river Ister (Danube) and the Haemus Mountains (Balkan) had been formed into the separate provinces of Moesia, and the region between the rivers Strymon and Nestus, which included Philippi, had been added to Macedonia. The boundaries of this were—towards the N. the Haemus, on the E. the Euxine Sea, on the S. the Propontis, the Hellespont and the Aegean, and towards the W. the Nestus. The most distinguishing features of the country were the chain of Rhodope (Despoto-dagh) and the river Hebrus (Maritza). The former separates at its northernmost point from the Haemus, at right angles, and runs southward at first, nearly parallel to the Nestus, until it approaches the sea, when it takes an easterly direction (See Virg. Georg. iii. 351). Several of the summits of this chain are over 7000 ft. in height. The Hebrus, together with its tributaries which flow into it from the north, east and west, drains almost the whole of Thrace. It starts from near the point of junction of Haemus and Rhodope, and at first takes an easterly direction, the chief town which lies on its banks in the earlier part of its course being Philippopolis; but when it reaches the still more important city of Hadrianopolis it makes a sharp bend towards the south, and enters the sea nearly opposite the island of Samothrace. The greater part of the country is hilly and irregular, though there are considerable plains; but besides Rhodope two other tolerably definite chains intersect it, one of which descends from Haemus to Adrianople, while the other follows the coast of the Euxine at no great distance inland. One district in the extreme north-west of Thrace lay beyond the watershed separating the streams that flow into the Aegean from those that reach the Danube: this was the territory of Sardica, the modern Sophia. In the later Roman period two main lines of road passed through the country. One of these skirted the southern coast, being a continuation of the Via Egnatia, which ran from Dyrrhachium to Thessalonica, thus connecting the Adriatic and the Aegean; it became of the first importance after the foundation of Constantinople, because it was the direct line of communication between that city and Rome. The other followed a north-westerly course through the interior, from Constantinople by Hadrianopolis and Philippopolis to the Haemus, and thence by Naissus (Nish) through Moesia in the direction of Pannonia, taking the same route by which the railway now runs from Constantinople to Belgrade. The climate of Thrace was regarded by the Greeks as very severe, and that country was spoken of as the home of the north wind, Boreas. The coast in the direction of the Euxine also was greatly feared by sailors, as the harbours were few and the sea proverbially tempestuous; but the southern shore was more attractive to navigators, and here we find the Greek colonies of Abdera and Mesambria on the Aegean, Perinthus on the Propontis, and, the most famous of all, Byzantium, at the meeting-point of that sea and the Bosporus. Another place which proved attractive to colonists of that race was the curious narrow strip of ground, called the Thracian Chersonese, that intervened between the Hellespont and the Bay of Melas, which penetrates far into the land on its northern side. Among the cities that occupied it the most important were Sestos and Callipolis (Gallipoli). In order to prevent the incursions of the Thracians, a wall was built across its isthmus, which was less than 5 m. in breadth. The north-eastern portion of the Aegean, owing to its proximity to the coast of Thrace, was known as the Thracian Sea, and in this were situated the islands of Thasos, Samothrace and Imbros.

History.—The most striking archaeological monuments of the prehistoric period are the sepulchral mounds, which are found by thousands in various parts of the country, especially in the neighbourhood of the ancient towns. As Roman implements