Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/344

310 Cairo. , as well as its apparent prototype, would seem to be a story of Persian origin, composed or remodelled shortly after the date of the original work by an Arab of the metropolitan provinces, and the same remark applies to, which is apparently (in part at least) an adaptation of. may perhaps also be referred to a like date and origin, but is probably the work of some Egyptian savant of the Shafiy school, who used a conventional cadre of story, with the obbligato laying of scene in the court and time of Er Reshid, to exhibit his learning, the comparatively advanced views of anatomy, medicine, astronomy and other sciences pointing to a modern origin and the extracts (inter alia) from Coptic almanacks demonstrating, beyond reasonable doubt, the Egyptian nationality of the author. is in part a transcript or adaptation from Et Teberi and other Arabic historians and topographers, and the gross anachronisms which occur in it, (such, for instance, as the making the præ-Islamitic poet En Nabigheh edh Dhubyani a contemporaycontemporary [sic] of the Ommiade Khalif Abdulmelik ben Merwan (A.D. 685–705) and attributing to the same time the discovery of an ancient tablet deploring the fate of “him who dwelt in Tenjeh (Tangiers) whilere,” i.e. the last Edriside sovereign of Northern Africa, who was, early in the tenth century, dethroned and put to death, with all the members of his family,