This book contains the first complete list of all known Arabic manuscripts of The Thousand and one Nights as well as a list and tentative classification of the Turkish (Osmanli) manuscripts. The four tales edited are Sûl and Shumûl, one of the oldest tales divided into nights (older, indeed, than the Galland manuscript), Bayâd and Riyâd, which has now been edited using two new sources, The Sleeper Awakened, a perfectly representative tale of “the merchant’s son”, and Zayd and Kahlâ, which is remarkable for its combination of Islam and paganism. It offers new material and new interpretations (the story of Khurâfa and the syntactic unit astonishing/more astonishing still). It seeks to provide an accessible definition of what middle Arabic literature is, shining new light on the history of the Nights : analysis of the first two tales has shown that the beginning of the Zotenberg’s EgyptianRecension is older than the Syrian branch manuscripts.
