Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/340

306 at various times and by various hands, of tales and anecdotes of all kinds and drawn from a variety of sources, some having been expressly composed or re-written for the purpose, whilst others are in whole or in part borrowed or adapted from independent works. Some of these additions, such as (almost the only survival in which story of the old Book of Sindibad appears to be the framework, the short stories for the introduction of which it serves as an excuse being, with occasional exceptions, purely Arabic in character and bearing signs of a comparatively modern redaction, subject, of course, to the limitation implied in the absence of any mention of firearms or coffee), (apparently an old Indian story which has undergone comparatively little alteration) and Seif el Mulouk are proved to have existed in an independent form before the middle of the eleventh century. is also, in all probability, a very old story of Persian origin, largely altered (especially in the two incidental tales, the and the ) by the Arab author or authors in the process of adaptation to Muslim manners and customs, and the is, to all appearance, a rearrangement of some old Bedouin romance, notwithstanding the mention therein