Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/325

291 of a king of the Benou Sasan or Sassanians ), the localities (the islands, i.e. peninsulas, of India and China and the kingdom of Samarcand) and of the merest thread of incident whereon to string a fable wholly Muslim in colour and circumstance. The same remarks apply to the first story, that of the Merchant and the Genie, which is probably contemporary (or nearly so) with the Introduction, but contains no trace of præ-Mohammedan colour.

In enquiring into the age of this nucleus or original of the work, we are at once confronted by two dates, between which we must fix the period of its composition. In the Tailor’s Story, a speech of the meddlesome barber identifies the day of his adventure with the unfortunate young man of Baghdad as the 10th of the month Sefer, A.H. 653 (i.e. the 25th March, A.D. 1255), that is to say, in the 14th year of the reign of El Mustazim Billah, the last Khalif of the house of Abbas, and only three years before the storm of Baghdad by Hulagou and the extinction of the Khalifate. This date is that given by three texts, i.e. those of Calcutta (1839–42) and Breslau and Galland’s MS., which agree in making the barber, by way of confirmation, date his own story in the reign of the penultimate Khalif of the Abbaside dynasty, El Mustensir Billah (father of El Mustazim), A.H. 623–640