The three-volume Galland Manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS arabes 3609, 3610 and 3611),[1] sometimes also referred to as the Syrian Manuscript, is the earliest extensive manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights (the only earlier witness being a ninth-century fragment of a mere sixteen lines).[2] Its text extends to 282 nights, breaking off in the middle of the Tale of Qamar al-Zamān and Budūr.[3] The dating of the manuscript has been the subject of significant debate, which has revolved, unusually, around what types of coins are mentioned in the text and what real-life coin-issues they refer to. Muhsin Mahdi, the manuscript's modern editor, thought that it was fourteenth-century, while Heinz Grotzfeld dated it to the second half of the fifteenth. It is agreed to belong to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and to originate in Syria.[4]
- ^ "Les Mille et une nuits". Bibliothèque nationale de France. Retrieved 29 September 2020.
- ^ Nabia Abbott, "New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 8.3 (July 1949), 133.
- ^ 'Manuscripts', in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, ed. by Ulrich Marzolph, Richard van Leeuwen, and Hassan Wassouf, 2 vols (Santa Barbara (CA): ABC-Clio, 2004), I, 635-57 (p. 635).
- ^ Heinz Grotzfeld, 'The Age of the Galland Manuscript of the Nights,' in The Arabian Nights Reader, ed. by Ulrich Marzolph (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 105-21, ISBN 0814332595 [repr. from Heinz Grotzfeld, 'The Age of the Galland Manuscript of the Nights: Numismatic Evidence for Dating a Manuscript', Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 1 (1996-97), 50-64].