THE
AGE OF THE GALLAND MANUSCRIPT
OF
THE NIGHTS: NUMISMATIC EVIDENCE
FOR
DATING A MANUSCRIPT? [1]
MÜnster
The importance of the
age of the Galland manuscript of the Nights derives from its being the oldest
manuscript extant of this text. There is no date of transcription in the
manuscript. In an earlier study, the present writer postulated 1426 as a date
post quem because of the mention of the coin ashrafī (first issued by al-Ashraf Barsbāy in 1426). This
date post quem has been rejected by Muhsin Mahdi, the editor of the manuscript,
in a recent publication in which he attempted to identify the ashrafī mentioned in the text with
the gold coin issued by al-Ashraf Khalīl (1290–93). This article shows
that his identification is untenable, and that the Galland
manuscript, in all likelihood, was not copied earlier than 1450.
In a few
years, the West is going to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the discovery of
the Thousand and One Nights. In recent years, some such centenaries have given cause for a new evaluation of
the celebrated event; sometimes there has been a call for a devaluation
of the event—as was the case with the 500th anniversary of the discovery of
It cannot
be said that the discovery of Alf layla
wa-layla is to be considered parallel with the discovery of
It is not
the aim of this paper to make the discovery of the Nights nor the man who discovered them for
From the
dedication of Galland’s translation of the Nights and from his correspondence,
the circumstances of the discovery of the Nights are relatively well known. In the spring of 1701, Galland
had completed his translation of the Adventures
of Sindbad the Sailor. Before the manuscript went to the press, he was
informed by Syrian friends living in Paris, that these adventures of Sindbad
the Sailor were part of a far larger Arabic collection (“recueil”) named “Les
mille et une nuits”. He tried to get a copy of this collection— “il a fallu le
faire venir de Syrie,” and in the fall of 1701, he got with the aid of “un ami
d’Alep, résident a
Since
their first appearance in
Zotenberg’s pioneering study not only introduced a pattern for understanding the
differences and variations found in the MSS and printed editions of the Nights—variations in
the repertoire of the stories, their order and
in the wording of the texts—it also gave prominence to the very MS which
Galland had purchased in 1701 from Syria.
After
Galland’s death (1715), the three volumes of this MS were given to the
Bibliothèque du Roi, later to be called the Bibliothèque Nationale (de France),
where the MS, now nos. 3609, 3610, 3611, as it seems, never was paid special
attention until Zotenberg not only observed that the wording and narrative of
this MS were far better than in most other versions, especially better than in
the parallel stories in ZER, but also realized that it was the oldest MS of the
Nights in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the oldest one at all known to him. In his judgment, which was based
on paleographic arguments, the MS was
transcribed in the second half of the fourteenth century. He published a
page of the Galland MS in facsimile, and on the basis of the facsimile of this one page, Nöldeke wrote in his review of Zotenberg’s book (WZKM 2 (1888): 170) that this date was
by no means too early.
The Galland MS and other old MSS of the Nights, the
importance of which had been established by Zotenberg, were then the object of
the research of Duncan
Macdonald. In the beginning of this century, Macdonald announced his project
for publishing a critical edition of the Galland MS as the basis for all
further research about the text of the Nights and its history. He never achieved his project. It was Muhsin Mahdi
who finally in 1984 presented this
critical edition of The Thousand and One
Nights: from the Earliest Known Sources, but we are indebted to Macdonald for some
substantial preparatory studies in this field, which were published between
1909 and 1924. His preparatory studies are highly valuable contributions to the
“demystification” of the matter: he could demonstrate that the “Breslau [53]
edition” was not based on a true oriental recension of the Nights—as its editor
says on the title page—but was a compilation made by its editor Maximilian Habicht himself, a compilation which
included, however, fragments of “authentic” recensions of the Nights; he could
further demonstrate that the text of the Calcutta II print—which is
said, on the title page, to be based on a MS
brought from Egypt—is partly expanded by passages taken from the
Calcutta I print, which is of the same recension as the Galland MS; and he
was able to classify most of the MSS of the Nights.
A minor
result of Macdonald’s studies is of high relevance for this paper. He called
into question the date of the Galland MS: “Local Cairene references in it indicate a date considerably younger
than that assigned by Zotenberg” (1922, p. 307). In his article “The
Earlier History of the Arabian Nights” (JRAS
1924, pp. 353–397), he repeated this statement: “We shall see, I think, that
both of these estimates [of Zotenberg—second half of the fourteenth century—and
of Nöldeke—still older] make the MS too old” (p. 382). But he did not
assign any date to the MS; the most precise words are those found in his
article “Alf Laila wa-Laila” in the supplement to EI1 (1934) referring to William Popper’s
article “Data for Dating a Tale in the Nights”
in JRAS 1926, pp. 1–14: “Professor
Popper considers that the reference to the Naḳīb
Barakūt puts the story [of the Christian broker in the Hunchback cycle]
after 819 (1416). In addition to all this, time must be allowed for the stories
to have become so popular that they were taken into a recension of the Nights” (21a). This statement, however, is made in a
context where Macdonald is arguing against the supposition that the stories
which constitute the corpus of the Galland MS formed the Nights recension
already in Fatimid times. This is, maybe, the reason why later publications on
the Nights completely disregarded Macdonald’s doubts as to the age of this MS.
Elisséeff (p. 56) and Tauer (p. 128) followed Zotenberg as to the date, without any argument in favor of this
assignment or against Macdonald’s choice of a later date.
Muhsin
Mahdi’s edition appeared in 1984. The Galland MS which is at the basis of this
edition—since it is the oldest extant text—has been assigned a date of
transcription in the fourteenth century.[3]
The authority of Theodor Nöldeke which Muhsin Mahdi refers to, is of
little weight in this connection. [54] What he says about Macdonald[4]
applies even more to Nöldeke, who is likely to have seen of the Galland MS
no more than that facsimile page published by Zotenberg.
There is,
however, a hidden clue in the MS itself. When working in the early 1980s on
microfilms of the Galland MS and the Sabbagh MS for the study published by me
and my wife in 1984, we discovered in the story told by the Jewish physician in
the Hunchback-cycle a key for dating the MS—at least for defining the date post
quem. We discovered a coin. The hero
of this story, a young man from
Fa-nazalnā fī baʿḍi ʾl-khānāti
wa-waqafū aʿmāmī wa-abāʿū biḍāʿatī
wa-matjarī, fa-kasaba ʾl-dīnāru khamsatan, fa-fariḥtu
bi-ʾl-ribḥi. Wa-tarakūnī ʿumūmī
w-tawajjahū ilā Miṣra wa-qaʿadtu baʿdahum.
Fa-lammā sāfarū, aqamtu anā wa-sakantu fī qāʿatin
kabīratin bi-rukhāmin wa-fisqīyatin wa-ṭabaqatin
wa-khizānatin wa-māʾin yajrī ʾl-layla
wa-l-nahāra, wa-tuʿrafu bi-Qāʿat Sūdūn ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān, fī kulli shahrin bi-ashrafīyayni.[5]
“We stayed in one of
the caravansaries, and my uncles sold my goods at a profit of five dinars for each
dinar, and I was delighted by this profit. Then they left me and went on to
The word ashrafī in this text put us into
the situation of an archeologist who has
discovered a coin in an archeological layer. Coins found in an untouched layer of an archeological site or in a
hoard are indisputable indicators of the date post quem for the
origination of the layer or site or the hiding of the hoard in the ground,
provided, of course, that the coins are not obliterated
to such a degree that it is impossible to identify them. Coins mentioned
in a text can serve the same purpose, provided that, on the basis of the name
used for the coin, it is possible to identify an individual coinage. In Arabic
texts, however, this is very rarely the case: coins are mentioned [55]
mostly by their generic name, e.g., dirham
or dīnār. But the half
dirham (niṣf dirham
or simply niṣf) minted by the Mamluk sultan al-Muʾayyad Sayf
al-Dīn Shaykh al-Maḥmūdī
(815–824/1412–1421) and the dīnār minted by al-Ashraf Sayf al-Dīn
Barsbāy (825–841/1422–1437) met with
such a success as to make the name of these coinages muʾayyadī and ashrafī
synonymous for nearly a century with
their respective generic names niṣf
and dīnār. As for the muʾayyadī, to be precise, it
seems that this was the case mainly[6]—or only—among European merchants and pilgrims, who
throughout the fifteenth century and still in the sixteenth century used to
call the half dirham maydin or meidin. The word ashrafī, on the other hand, was actually used, in the later fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth
centuries, by the Arabs themselves, Egyptians
as well as Syrians, as a synonym for dinar, especially when what was
meant was the dīnār as a
gold coin, not as a monetary unit. The word was also used for the dīnārs minted by the
successors of al-Ashraf Barsbāy. European merchants and travellers, unless they called these dīnārs simply ducat, that is, by the
name of its European counterpart, used to call this coin serif, cerif or serifi, in the plural serifin,
cerifin, or the like.
The name
of this coin gave us an indisputable terminus post quem for the transcription
of the MS, since this new type of gold coin of the same weight as the Venetian
ducat had been introduced by an edict of 15 Ṣafar 829 = 27 December 1425
as a measure to replace the ducat in commercial transactions in Egypt and
between Europe and Egypt. The measure itself came into effect only in 831/1427–8, when the first installment of
the ransom (the total amount of which was 200,000 ducats) for the
Cypriot king James was paid. This provided
the Mamluk sultan with bullion for issuing a sufficient number of coins.
One has to add some years before it could again become common practice to
specify prices, rental rates, and the like by a number of coins—no longer by a
number of theoretical or fictive currency units. We thought that we had to add
at least some ten or fifteen years before this practice and the name of the new
coin would be mirrored in everyday language as exemplified by the usage of
Arabic authors of the latter part of [56] the century.[7]
So we concluded that the Galland MS could not have been copied before 1426 and
that it was copied, in all likelihood, in the second half of the fifteenth
century. This conclusion was put forward in our booklet “Die Erzählungen aus 1001 Nacht” (Darmstadt, 1984, pp. 26–27) and repeated
in a very condensed form in my article “Neglected Conclusions” (JAL 16
(1985): 85, n. 30). (This article is a slightly expanded English version of a paper I presented to the 23rd
Deutscher Orientalistentag in Tübingen in the spring of 1983).
We
overlooked at that time that the same line contains a further key for defining
a date post quem: Qāʿat Sūdūn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān,
the name of the mansion which the young man hired. There can be no doubt that
what the author or redactor of the story has in view is the Dār
Sūdūn Ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (variant: Bayt Sūdūn min
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān). This
building is mentioned by Ibn Ṭūlūn in a note of 900 H. =
1494 A.D. as the residence of the Ḥanbalite qāḍī (I, p. 161, l. 12) and in notes of 922 and 923
H. = 1516 and 1517 A.D. as the quarters of the Ottoman sultan Selim (II, p. 35,
l. 21 and II, p. 70, l. 20). In the last mentioned place, the building is said
to be al-maʿrūfa qadīman
bi-Dār Sūdūn (without Ibn
or min) ʿAbd al-Raḥmān wa-yawmaʾidhin bi-Tanim mamlūk
Sibāy, “which formerly was known as the
I cannot see exactly what consequences dating the Galland
MS in the second half of
the fifteenth century would imply for the stemma of Muhsin Mahdi. As I
understand his explanations, all development and ramification, all copying and
loss of copies could have happened in the same way, even if the Galland MS was
transcribed 100 years later than he supposed. Muhsin Mahdi, in any case,
rejected our arguments for a date of transcription in the late fifteenth
century—not openly, but in a more tacit, though unmistakable [57] way. In the third part of his edition, Introduction and Indexes, which
appeared in 1994, he published, as a kind of frontispiece, the photo of a dinar
issued in the year 690/1291 by the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalīl.
The
legend
Ashrafi Dinar (see Night 133)
Put in circulation during the reign of al-Ashraf Khalil
B. N. Lavoix 793,
Phot. Bibl. Nat. de Fr., Paris
suggests that this coin is the ashrafī mentioned in the text, and
that we were wrong in identifying the ashrafī
of the text with the type of coin inaugurated by
al-Ashraf Barsbāy and issued
until the end of the Mamluk state in 922/1517,
when the Ottomans conquered
My
response consists of two parts. In the first part, I am going to sum up the
arguments for our identification of the “two ashrafīs” of the text with the gold coin of al-Ashraf
Barsbāy and his successors. It can be demonstrated that the text passage
quoted above (p. 54) fits very well into the usage of the later fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth
centuries. In the second part, I will demonstrate why the “two ashrafīs” of the text cannot be identified with the “dinar” of al-Ashraf
Khalīl.
First of
all, we have to take a short digression into the monetary history of the Mamluk
period. I quote Jere L. Bacharach:[8]
“The traditional Muslim coin was the dinar with a canonical weight standard,
the mithqâl, of 4.25 grams.
With the advent of Saladin’s rule in
There may have been several motives for replacing the ducat by an Islamic gold coin; in any case, making
transactions possible by count was a chief aim. In this, the Mamluk sultans
were successful. A second aim was the creation of a reliable reference unit for
values and prices. In this, they were only partly successful. Especially in
Examples
of the common usage may be found in two Arabic works from the beginning of the
sixteenth century: the Badāyiʿ
al-zuhūr fī waqāyiʿ al-duhūr of the Cairene Ibn
Iyās (1448–1524) and the Mufākahat
al-khillān fī ḥawādith al-zamān of the Damascene chronicle-writer Ibn Ṭūlūn
(1475–1546). Each author made the
final redaction of his chronicle or diary after the Ottoman conquest of his own city, but in general I think that they
reproduced their information about prices and the like from their sources or muswaddāt without any changes. The usage is also mirrored in the “Pilgrimage”
of Arnold van Harff, a German nobleman from
Ibn
Iyās, Badāyiʿ
al-zuhūr, p. 18; 858 H. = 1454 A.D.:
“In the month of Safar (February 1454), the
sultan issued a decree that Zayn al-Dīn al-Ustadār be exiled
permanently to
The word dīnār in this text means gold
coins. The common gold coin in 858 was
already the ashrafī, but dīnār, as this passage demonstrates, was still the common word in
combination with higher figures.
Ibn
Iyās, Badāyiʿ
al-zuhūr, p. 244; 859 H. = 1455 A.D.:
“In this month (Muḥarram 859 =
22.12.1454–20.01.1455), the price of gold rose so that the ashrafī dinar reached an exchange rate of 370 dirhams (= trade dirhams).”
Ibn Iyās, Badāyiʿ al-zuhūr, p. 52; 862 H. = 1458 A.D.:
“In the month of Rabīʿ I (17.01.–15.02.1458),
the exchange rates for gold and silver were made
known by official announcement. The sultan had issued new silver coins. The rate for the gold dinar was set to 300
(trade dirhams) and the rate for the new silver (as follows): 25 good niṣf ʿadadī (“intended
to circulate by number”) of fine silver for each ashrafī.”
This is
nearly the same exchange rate mentioned by Harff 40 years later (p. 94; trans.
p. 112): “by law a man must give each housewife daily three madines, which equal twenty-six to a ducat (drij madijn, der doynt seesindtwentzich eynen ducaeten).”
Ibn Iyās, IV, p. 323; 919 H. = 1513
A.D.:
The sultan
was afflicted by a serious eye decease, and as a sign of his repentance, he
distributed alms to his soldiers:
“Monday the 15th of Jumādā I, the
sultan distributed the pay and together with it a supplemental gift. He gave
every mamluk 30 dinars, the disabled 20, the veterans 10. And he gave 5 dinars
to the mamālīk
kitābīya (i.e., those who already had a contract—kitāba—to be set free, but were at
the service of their master until the complete amount stipulated for their
liberation was paid), and to those of the orphans who were entitled to a pay of
1 ashrafī, he gave 2 ashrafīs, and to others whose pay
was 1000 (dirhams?), he gave 10 dinars. . . .”
This text
demonstrates the use of the word ashrafī
side by side with the word dīnār.
The higher amounts are specified in dinars, the book-keeping term, the smaller
ones in ashrafīs, the name of
which evokes the image of the coin itself in
the mind of the reader. The reader, so to speak, is to visualize the
sultan handing over the two gold coins to the orphans.
The same
contrast between these two words is to be observed in the work of Ibn Ṭūlūn
(I, p. 142, ll. 8–13):
[60] “A person had bought a house, the thāniyāt of which required an embellishment.[10] So, he called for construction workers, made a
contract with them, gave them the key and went to his work. When they
were working and digging in the place, a coconut shell fell upon them from the
place where they were digging. In this coconut there were 410 dīnārs, and they started
quarreling over them. The nāʾib
heard about this, and he took the gold and gave them ten ashrafīs.”
The
confiscated amount is specified by the more abstract book-keeping term dīnār, the reward for the
finders by the tangible name of the coin.
On the
other hand, there are numerous cases where ashrafī
is used simply for specifying prices, fares or taxes.
Some evidence for prices
- 3 irdabb
wheat for 1 ashrafī in Ramaḍān
896 = July 1491 (Ibn Iyās, III, p. 284)
- 1 riṭl
kumathrā (“pears” ?) for 2 ashrafīs
during a pestilence in
- 1 irdabb
wheat for 3 ashrafīs in
Rabīʿ I 903 = November 1497 (Ibn Iyās, III, p. 382)
- one ashrafī for 30 pieces of coconut
reported as a very cheap price in Mekka from Dhū ʾl-Ḥijja 895 =
October 1490 by Ibn Ṭūlūn (I, p. 135)
Evidence for fares
A very
interesting passage is Ibn Ṭūlūn, I, p. 129, ll. 14–22 (895 H.
= 1490 A.D.):
“Saturday
the 18th of Shawwāl = 04.09.1490, the pilgrims set out for Mekka. (Silver) dirhams had become very scarce,
unlike the ashrafīs and
copper coins, which were mostly (of the type called) qarābīṣ,[11]
but prices were low. A very strange thing happened. ʿAyyāsha, the
sister in law of Jaʿfar al-Miṣrī, of the relationship of the ḥājib al-kabīr, had
made a contract with a mukārī
for travelling in a shiqqa (one half,
or side, of a camel-litter) at a fare of fifty ashrafīs, with her daughter on the other side. She got in, but
when she arrived at Qubbat Yilbugha, she came down with a fever and said, “I’ll
return.” A woman said to her, “I’ll get in instead of you; I am going to [61]
write an obligation to pay the fifty ashrafīs
on my return from the Hijaz.” She did so, and
ʿAyyāsha returned to her room
(ṭabaqa, “a small room on the top floor”), looked out
of her window, fell down (to the ground) and broke her neck.”
I would like to call attention to the word ṭabaqa. It occurs in the characterization of the
Qāʿat Sūdūn which the
young man in our tale had rented. It is obvious that a ṭabaqa is an element in the architecture of a wealthy house.
The fifty ashrafīs are to be seen, I think, as the fare for first-class travelling.
Arnold von Harff, the young German traveller, paid in 1497 a fare of two ashrafīs for a journey in a camel-litter
from
“I N.
Mokari will carry N., this Frank (so they call us who come from our countries)
from here in Cairo to the monastery lying below Mt. Sinai on a good camel, on
which he shall sit on one side in a wooden box covered with a thick pelt and
carrying on the other side his provisions and the camel’s food. I shall carry
also for him two udders, namely goat-skins, full of water for him, myself and
the camel. In addition I will assist him to get on and off the camel, and will
stay by him by day and night and attend his welfare. This Frank N. is to give
me two seraphin, namely two ducats, one at
The fare
for the journey from
Taxes
specified in ashrafīs are
mentioned specially in the last years of Mamluk rule and at the beginning of
Ottoman rule. Ibn Iyās (V, pp. 54–55; Jumādā II 922 = July 1516)
may suffice as an illustration of the attempts of Qānsūh
al-Ghawrī to mobilize the last economic resources of
I would
also like to call attention to a passage from the obituary note of
Qānsūh al-Ghawrī, who died in Ramaḍān 922 = October
1516 (Ibn Iyās, V, p. 89).
Ibn Iyās enumerates the masāwī, the bad sides
of the late sultan: his monetary
policy was the most disastrous ever; his gold and silver coins were falsified,
alloyed with copper, and debased. He imposed on the market an extra tax of
2.700 dīnārs per month—which
led to higher prices. “And he imposed further a considerable sum per month on
the mint, as a result of which they openly (jahāran)
added copper and lead to the gold and silver. When a gold ashrafī was refined, then the resulting fine gold was worth
only [62] 12 niṣf
[instead of 25 silver niṣf or
50–55 contemporary debased niṣf?].
The sultan had handed over (sallama)
the mint to a person named Jamāl al-Dīn, and this man acted
fraudulently with the property of the people. He ruined the currency, he
withdrew the gold coins of the preceding sultans and issued new coins, so that
no longer a dinar or a dirham of anyone of them was to be seen . . .
(l. 16 ff.).”
The
lamentations of Ibn Iyās over the debasement of the ashrafīs struck under this Jamāl al-Dīn seem to be
exaggerated: the exchange rates for the ashrafī
proclaimed in Damascus Tuesday 23 Rajab 923 = 11 August 1517, after the Ottoman
conquest when there was no longer any need to apply the official rates of the Mamluk sultans, were sixty (niṣf) for ḍarb Qānsūh al-Ghawrī and fifty-six for ḍarb Jamāl al-Dīn (Ibn Ṭūlūn,
II, p. 65). The rates proclaimed in Cairo in Dhū ʾl-Qaʿda 926 =
October 1520 were 50 niṣf for al-ashrafī al-dhahab al-ʿuthmānī
wa-l-ghawrī and 42 niṣf
for al-ashrafī alladhī huwa ḍarb
Jamāl al-Dīn (Ibn Iyās, V, p. 356).
In the historical
texts, the pay and the gratification of the mamluks are often specified in ashrafīs.
From some passages in Ibn Iyās, it becomes evident
that at least during the rule of Qānsūh al-Ghawrī, the official exchange rates were applied
even to the pay of the soldiers: they got instead of gold the official equivalent in silver or copper and lost in this way
20 to 25 percent. Harff, however, reports from 1497 that the mamluks who
participated in the campaign against
£Aqbardī al-Dawādār had
received “ander halff hundert ceraphin, das sijnt ducaeten, zu rustgelde
ind darzoe eyme yecklichen des maentz twelff seraphen ind dat allet wael
betzaelt” (p. 156, l. 26), “a hundred and fifty seraphin for equipment, and in
addition each month twelve seraphin well and truly paid” (trans., p. 182).
These
figures fit well with the information of Ibn Ṭūlūn (II, p. 20;
Jumādā I 922 = June 1516) that the nāʾib of Damascus intended to pay his mamluks a jāmakīya of 50 ashrafīs, that is, 80 ashrafīs less than the mamluks of the
sultan had received for their participation in the campaign against the
Ottomans, which fact led to a revolt.
In the passage of the Nights quoted above (p. 54), the words bi-ashrafīyayn presuppose that ashrafī is a kind of currency unit. That it is a coin cannot
be demonstrated from the text.
The dinar
of Barsbāy, as was shown above, had been introduced with the intention of creating an Islamic gold coin which
could, like the ducat, circulate by number, and no longer, as had been
necessary in the case of the earlier coin-shaped ingots, by weight. And that is
just what makes the coin a currency unit. This coin was called ashrafī.
[63] From the historical texts, we know that
the ashrafī was a gold coin with
which a new weight standard was introduced (3.41 gr.). That led finally to a new definition of the unit dinar. Formerly, 1 dinar
had been equal to 1 mithqāl
(4.25 gr.) of gold. Now, 1 dinar was equal to 1 ashrafī. The words ashrafī
and dīnār occur side by
side in the texts, as in the passage quoted above,
and they seem to have been largely interchangeable. So it could happen
that people, by inadvertence, replaced the word dīnār by the word ashrafī,
even when speaking of times before the introduction of the coin ashrafī. This happens with Ibn
Iyās, who “speaking of the price of wheat in 803 A.H. anachronistically
says it reached 4 Ashrafis!”[12]
Thus, I
think we have all reason to accept the identification of ashrafīyayn in the text of
the Nights with the coin/currency unit ashrafī of the later fifteenth
century.
As regards
the dinar of al-Ashraf Khalīl, there are no reports that this sultan who
ruled for only 3 years and 57 days (689–693/1290–1293) made any attempt at a
monetary reform, so that a new coin would have been nicknamed after him. On the
contrary, his dinars display the same absence of a weight standard which was
usual in his century and the following. The weight of the coin shown in the
frontispiece of Muhsin Mahdi’s third volume is 7.51 gr. (Balog, p. 122, no.
148). The weight of al-Ashraf Khalīl’s other gold dinars listed by Balog
are 4.60, 6.42, 6.80, 7.10, and 8.41. The weight of one specimen is not
specified. Thus, the dinars of al-Ashraf Khalīl, as those of all Mamluk
sultans until al-Ashraf Barsbāy, are not coins (I quote Balog, p. 40) “in
the strict sense of the word, but only ingots (in the shape of coins), which
could not have circulated by count, but had to be weighed.” Thus the dual in
the Nights passage (which implies that these ashrafīyayn circulated by count) would make no sense with reference
to “coins” of al-Ashraf Khalīl.
There is
no argument at all to identify the ashrafī
of the Nights text with any other ashrafī
than the gold coin issued by al-Ashraf Barsbāy and his successors. Consequently,
there is no argument at all to date the Galland MS of the Nights earlier than
ca. 1450 A.D.
[64] REFERENCES
Bacharach,
Jere L. “The Dinar versus the Ducat.” International
Journal of
Balog,
Paul. The Coinage of the Mamluk Sultans
of
Elisséeff, Nikita. Thèmes et motifs des mille et une nuits;
essai de classification. Beirut, 1949.
Harff, Arnold von. Die Pilgerfahrt des Ritters Arnold von Harf
etc. hsg. von Dr. E. von Groote. Cöln:
J. M. Heberle (H. Lempertz), 1860. English translation by Malcolm Letts: The Pilgrimage of
Ibn
Iyās. Badāyiʿ
al-zuhūr fī waqāyiʿ al-duhūr. Unpublished pages of
the Chronicle of Ibn Iyās. Ed. Mohamed Mostafa.
———.
Die Chronik des Ibn Ijās. 2.
Aufl., hsg. von Mohamed Mostafa. 3–5. Teil. Bibliotheca Islamica 5, c–e.
Ibn
Ṭūlūn, Mufākahat
al-khillān fī ḥawādith al-zamān. The Chronicle of
Ibn Tulun. Ed. Mohamed Mostafa. Parts 1–2.
Lane,
Edward William. The Manners and Customs
of the Modern Egyptians. Everyman's Library, no. 315.
Maqrīzī.
Shudhūr al-ʿuqūd fī
dhikr al-nuqūd. Ed. al-Sayyid Muḥammad Baḥr al-ʿUlūm.
Najaf: al-Maktaba al-Ḥaydarīya, 1387/1967.
Popper,
William. Egypt and Syria under the
Circassian Sultans, 1382–1468 A.D.:
Systematic Notes to Ibn Taghrî Birdî’s Chronicles
of
Tauer, Felix. “Tausendundeine Nacht im Weltschrifttum als
Gegenstand der Lektüre und der Forschung”. In Irrgarten der Lust. Insel Almanach auf
das Jahr 1969 (Frankfurt/Main, 1968), pp. 122–147.
Wild,
Johannes. Neue Reysbeschreibung eines
Gefangenen Christen etc. Nürnberg,
1623.
[1] Slightly
condensed version of a public lecture held September 12, 1995, in the Orient-Institut
der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,
[2] As late
as 1683, Qara Mustafa had besieged
[3] “Hiya
ghayru muʾarrakha, . . .
wa-lākinna waraqahā wa-khaṭṭahā
yadullu ʿalā
annahā nusikhat fī ʾl-qarni ʾl-thāmini mina ʾl-hijrati
(al-qarni ʾl-rābiʿi ʿashara mina ʾl-mīlādi).”
I, p. 29. More detailed vol. II, pp. 239–240.
[4] “Ammā
Macdonald, fa-lam yaqṭaʿ fīhā raʾyan wa-lam yakun qad
faḥaṣa waraqa ʾl-nuskhati faḥṣa khabīrin. . .
. Wa-lā yazharu annahu raʾāhā bi-ʿaynihi aw faḥaṣahā
bi-diqqatin.” II, p. 239.
[5] Mahdi notes
the presence of an anomalous second alif
after the bi- in bi-ashrafīyayni, but retains it in his text. It could be
even bi-ashrafayni, with the extra alif and only one yāʾ.
[6] Lane, Manners and Customs, Appendix B (p. 579
of the Everyman’s Library edition) says that the smallest silver coin “faḍḍah” was called “nuṣṣ,” and adds
that it was also called “meyyedee.” Johannes Wild, in whose few quotations of
Arabic words the colloquial usage of the beginning of the seventeenth century
is mirrored, speaks only about “nuss” (Neue
Reysbeschreibung eines Gefangenen Christen etc., Nürnberg, 1623, passim).
[7] Maqrīzī
has devoted in his treaty Shudhūr
al-ʿuqūd fī dhikr al-nuqūd, completed in Ramaḍān
841 = March 1438, a long passage to the dirham muʾayyadī (ed. al-Sayyid Muḥammad Baḥr
al-ʿUlūm, pp. 32–36) in which he appreciates the reform aspect of
this minting. On the other hand, he does not mention at all the ashrafī, which fact makes it
evident that, as late as February 1438, the importance of Sultan al-Ashraf’s
monetary reform was not obvious for him.
[8] “The Dinar
versus the Ducat,” International Journal
of Middle East Studies, 4 (1973): 84; cf. also the remainder of the article
(pp. 77–96).
[9] Ibid., pp. 87–88.
[10] I do not
know the meaning of the architectural term thāniyāt.
Belot has thāniya “poutrelle.”
[11] Ibn Ṭūlūn
(I, p. 286) relates the ibṭāl
al-qarābīṣ al-nuḥās min al-fulūs, the
proclamation of discontinuing these copper coins in Shaʿbān 910 =
January 1505. But I do not know exactly what kind of fils this is.
[12] Popper,