Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/313

279 work above mentioned, Mesoudi states, in a passage that is a mainstay of Von Hammer’s theory, that there existed in his time a book of Persian stories, called Hezar Efsan or The Thousand Romances, being the history of an Indian King, his Vizier, the Vizier’s daughter Shirzad and her nurse or duenna Dunyazad, and adds that the book in question had been translated into Arabic and was called in that language The Thousand Tales or (more commonly) The Thousand Nights. He also mentions, as similar Persian or Indian collections, the story of Jelkand (Jelyaad) and Shimas, or the Indian King and his Ten Viziers, and Sindibad, and allows us to suppose that the Hezar Efsan was translated into Arabic by order of El Mensour (grandfather of Er Reshid and second Khalif of the Abbaside dynasty), who reigned from A.D. 754 to A.D. 775. It would appear also, from a preface to the great epic poem of Persia, the Shah namehShahnameh [sic] of Firdausi, and from other sources, that the original authorship of the Hezar Efsan was attributed to a Persian litterateur in the service of one of the early sovereigns of Persia, for whom he composed it, a semi-mythical personage by name Queen Humai, daughter of Ardeshir Behman (Artaxerxes Longimanus, B.C. 465–425) and mother of Darab (Darius) II. (B.C. 423) and that the prose original was in the eleventh century versified (or perhaps only rearranged) by a certain Rasti, court poet to the Ghaznevide Sultan Mehmoud of Persia. The passage from the Fihrist which Von Hammer afterwards brought forward, in confirmation of his citation from Mesoudi, is (briefly) to the following effect. “The