Eastern Dreams (22 page)

Several years later, the French orientalist Louis Mathieu Langles went further by speculating that the oldest
Nights
stories ultimately originated in India, but found their way into the Middle East to be added to regional tales. Langles was not the only one advancing the idea of multiple sources at this time. While preparing his English translation, Jonathan Scott recalled similarities between the
Nights
and other stories he'd heard during his days with the East India Company in Bengal, leading many to regard the
Arabian Nights
as “
probably a tissue of tales invented at different times, some of them entirely fictitious, others founded on anecdotes of real history, upon which marvellous additions have been engrafted … altered and varied by different reciters.”

Such mobility, it was argued, accounted for both the book's varied tone as well as similarities to such European stories as the fourteenth-century
Canterbury Tales
, where such creations as the
Nights
' “
Enchanted Horse [is] evidently [the same as] the Horse of Chaucer.” As the Napoleonic Wars raged in Europe and oriental studies assumed a structured outlook, attention was being redirected away from the
Nights
as a collection of entertaining stories, or even as literary inspiration. At last, the book was being seen as something to be studied as well as read. The gathering of more manuscripts stimulated interest in its background, in turn creating a desire for new collections and sparking fresh analysis, speculation and debate.

No one did more to bridge these trends of manuscript-hunting and inquiry than an Austrian nobleman, Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Von Hammer-Purgstall stands at the apex of the search for the Arabic
Nights
and the inquiry into the book's
history. Not only was he a searcher for a full
Alf Laila wa Laila
copy as well as a translator, he was also the most important of the
Nights
' early theorizers. His conjectures about the work's background did more for the study of the book than most other scholars combined.

His career resembles Antoine Galland's without the poverty. Born at Graz in 1774, Joseph Freiherr (“Free Lord” or Baron) von Hammer-Purgstall exhibited an early proficiency in languages, studying Turkish and Persian in Vienna before becoming an influential linguist (he eventually mastered ten languages) and oriental scholar. Like Galland, von Hammer-Purgstall spent part of his youth in Constantinople as an embassy interpreter and secretary. On his return to Europe, he was ennobled and became a privy councillor before joining the Austrian chancery under Prince Klemens von Metternich, retiring in 1835 to become a full-time writer.

Respected scholar though he is, von Hammer-Purgstall was as eccentric as William Beckford or Jan Potocki, obsessed with secret societies in general and the Knights Templar in particular. Some of his books read today like early conspiracy theories, abounding as they do in Freemasons and Templars worshipping Gnostic deities; in one he yammers on at length about alleged connections between the Knights Templars, the Jesuits, the medieval Persian sect of
Shi'a
“Assassins” and eighteenth-century French revolutionaries. Somehow, it made sense to him but, for all that, von Hammer-Purgstall can never be dismissed as a crank, since he also wrote highly regarded histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Mongol presence in Russia, made graceful translations of Persian poetry and acted as president of Vienna's Science Academy (an institution founded partly on his suggestion). Austria's oriental society, the
Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall
, is named for him.

This aristocratic man of parts is best known today for his histories as well as his pioneering contributions to
Arabian Nights
research.
Von Hammer-Purgstall is among the first oriental scholars—certainly among the first important ones—to peer behind the stories in an attempt to identify the work's origins. One of his first tasks in Constantinople was to search for a full, or at least fuller,
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscript. In this he failed, but it seems he later came upon an extensive manuscript in Cairo containing details not found in the Galland Manuscript.

Unfortunately, this text, like Galland's mystery fourth Arabic volume, was lost, but not before von Hammer-Purgstall made a French translation while still in Constantinople. This text has
also
been lost, although a German version was published in 1825. Frankly, from what can be gleaned from the German translation, von Hammer-Purgstall's version of the
Nights
was not very good, as he does the same kind of adapting and “improving” as many others, fashioning an abridged edition suitable for everyone but useless in providing anything closer to
Alf Laila wa Laila
.

Fortunately, “
the learned Baron's” contributions go further than producing a mediocre new translation. Intrigued by Louis Langles's conjecture about some stories originating in India, von Hammer-Purgstall built on Langles's theories to push things further. After studying al-Masudi's and Ibn al-Nadim's writings, he published groundbreaking articles in 1826 and 1839 issues of the French
Journal Asiatique
. These stressed the importance of Persia in the development of
Alf Laila wa Laila
, postulating that the work had absorbed Indian stories, then augmented them with indigenous Persian tales to create
Hazar Afsanah
before transferring the work wholesale to the Arabs sometime before the tenth century, where another layer of stories was added to form the earliest versions of
The Thousand and One Nights
.

This was a giant leap in determining the work's origins. But for his troubles, von Hammer-Purgstall's theories brought him professional grief, as he entered into a rather genial theoretical
conflict with the eminent English Arabist Edward William Lane (Lane had his own theories and produced his own translation); a not-so-genial conflict with France's great scholar Sylvestre de Sacy, who felt the tales were too innately “Arabic” to have come from Persia and India; and was roundly attacked by a figure much closer to home, de Sacy's disciple Gustav Weil, whose German part-translation of the
Nights
began appearing after 1837. To some extent, this debate about the work's background continues today, but there is no mistaking the importance of Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall to the history of
The Thousand and One Nights
. By the time of his death in 1856, theories regarding the book's origins were divided between those who believed in a multicultural background and those who clung to the belief that regardless of external influences, the
Nights
is essentially a product of the Arab literary tradition. That there was a debate at all is proof that by the Victorian Age, the
Arabian Nights' Entertainments
was seen as more than the sum of its pleasing parts. By then it had grown beyond its vast readership to become a concern of the scholarly class, who to this day view the work as an evergreen creation possessing endless pathways of inquiry.

The search for the Arabic
Nights
reached a kind of climax in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the gathering of additional manuscripts led directly to the creation of the first printed texts of
Alf Laila wa Laila
. Barring some fantastic future find, four such printed works—known as Calcutta I, the Breslau, the Bulaq and Calcutta II—have become the standard Arabic editions for translators to work from, although their contents are far removed from early versions and all contain material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in the book. Be that as it may, these collections
remain the only editions of the
Nights
that are not revisions or reprints of earlier versions, with three of these “recensions”—revised texts created in a critical manner—done entirely in response to the western fascination with the
Nights
' bewitching world. Together, they finally saw the
Nights
appear in printed Arabic form, but the delay in their appearance requires a word of explanation.

Printing in Asia has a significantly longer history than in the West, even if it remained a less-developed art before the nineteenth century. By the 1400s, the idea of applying inked types to paper had spread from China to Korea, Japan and then Europe. This earliest form of printing, called “block printing” (inking multiple characters on carved wooden blocks), emerged in the eighth century CE, but within several centuries the idea of rearranging characters for each new page—adjustable or “movable” type—gained precedence and remained the chief method of printing until the arrival of digital technology in the 1980s. In Europe, and probably independent of any Asian printing developments that might have made their way west, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg spent years experimenting with hand-cranked wine and olive presses before printing two hundred copies of his famous Bible in the 1450s, accelerating the Renaissance by making printed texts available to an emerging and literate middle class. Within decades, printing presses appeared in Venice, Paris, London, even Spanish-conquered Mexico City. Soon an information explosion was underway in the West as printing progressed to the point where within a generation of Columbus's voyages, European presses were capable of producing a text using Arabic script typeface.

In the paper-rich Middle East, block-printing techniques were used routinely in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries for pamphlets and other small written works, but creating movable type based on classical Arabic script—which emphasizes calligraphy and joins the letters of some words—was difficult and decreased
readability. Most texts within the Muslim world, then, continued to be laboriously hand-copied by scribes, a time-consuming process that meant it often took months or even years to produce a single volume.

There were also cultural questions about the actual value of printing as a craft, since, unlike the western Bible, there was no single eastern work—not even the
Koran
—that was sufficiently guaranteed to have a constant market and therefore make it commercially viable to print in large quantities. (Although the
Koran
was widely read by the literate, most had to memorize
suras
by rote.) Tied to this was a belief in some circles that as a series of texts, holy books were more sacred if they were handwritten—the product of devoted human labour—and that making such works by machine lessened their hallowed worth.

For these reasons, the craft of printing in the East, while developing initially in Asia, languished behind Europe and North America until well into the nineteenth century. Many of the first presses to appear in the eastern world—such as the first Arabic press in Cairo, installed by Napoleon Bonaparte to facilitate French investigations into Egyptology during the brief French occupation—came about as a result of the European presence, but they also acted as spurs toward the later development of indigenous Asian printing and therefore affected the creation of the first-ever printed Arabic versions of
The Thousand and One Nights
.

The first important recension of Arabic
Nights
stories came about some seventy years after
Les mille et une nuits
, but it was no more than a series of handwritten works from the Egyptian branch of
Alf Laila wa Laila
tales and no copies are known to survive today. More than a century later, this was dubbed the
“Zotenberg Egyptian Recension” (ZER) after Hermann Zotenberg of France's Bibliothèque nationale, a late-nineteenth-century librarian who made an intensive study of surviving
Alf Laila wa Laila
manuscripts in Europe. Zotenberg concluded that the bulk of these texts are Egyptian in origin with a few, like the Galland Manuscript, produced in Syria. One appeared to be a copy of an actual Baghdadi text, but it has since been shown to be a clever fake put together by the copyist Michael Sabbagh from various
Nights
manuscripts in Paris.