Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/302

268 fiction than of the more artistic kind peculiar to the Arabs, and the frequent correspondence of the incidents with German and other popular stories, (a correspondence which, only in the most rudimentary form, is found in the genuine work), appear to stamp this MS. as being, at least as far as the latter portion (which differs greatly from any other copy known to myself) is concerned, as a modern Turkish rifacimento.

Of the remaining six interpolations, the tenth and eleventh (Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Pari-Banou and The Three Sisters) are evidently Persian and comparatively modern (as a Yankee would say) “at that.” The use of the Persian prefix, “Cogia” (Khwajeh, master or lord, Arabic equivalent ustadh or muallim), improperly applied to a ropemaker and a merchant of Baghdad, would also point to a Persian or Turkish origin of Nos. 7 and 9 (Cogia Hassan Alhabbal and Ali Cogia), as also the title “Baba” (Gaffer, Daddy, Arabic equivalent Sheikh) given to the blind man Abdalla[h] in No. 5, and the general tone of these three stories, as well as that of Sidi Nouman (No. 6), testifies to the probability of their having been composed, at a comparatively recent period, by a person not an inhabitant of Baghdad, in imitation of the legends of Haroun er Reshid and other well-known tales of the original work. It is possible that an exhaustive examination of the various MS. copies of the Thousand and One Nights known to exist in the public libraries of Europe might yet cast some light