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]
Manuscript copies
A direct copy of the Galland Manuscript from 1592/1593 CE is preserved in the Vatican Library as the second part of the two-volume Cod. Vat. Ar. 782,[3] and has been digitised.[5]
The Galland Manuscript was also the exemplar for much of the Chavis Manuscript, an attempt in the 1780s by Denis Chavis to forge a more Arabic complete manuscript of the Nights, which was itself in turn influential on the development of editions and translations of the Nights.[6]
The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla), from the Earliest Known Sources, ed. by Muhsin Mahdi, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1984-1994), ISBN9004074287
The Arabian Nights, trans. by Husain Haddawy (New York: Norton, 1990) [repr. along with selections from The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories, trans. by Husain Haddawy (New York: Norton, 1995) as The Arabian Nights: The Husain Haddawy Translation Based on the Text Edited by Muhsin Mahdi, Contexts, Criticism, ed. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Norton, 2010)]
Tausendundeine Nacht [One Thousand and One Nights] (in German). Translated by Ott, Claudia. Munich: C. H. Beck. 2004. ISBN9783406722905.
^Nabia Abbott, "New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights", Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 8.3 (July 1949), 133.
^ ab'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, ISBN0814332595 [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].
^Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 51-61; ISBN9004102043 (repr. from parts of The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla), from the Earliest Known Sources, ed. by Muhsin Mahdi, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1984-1994), ISBN9004074287).
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