A Thousand and One Nights (Hazar Afsana)

"The Thousand and One Nights", a book of stories. This entry records the earliest mention of it in the sources held here, not its text.

In the year 332 AH, al-Mas'udi mentioned books translated from Persian, among them "Hazar Afsana". Its Arabic meaning is "A Thousand Fables", since a fable in Persian is an "afsana". He said that people call it "The Thousand and One Nights". ²

As he describes it, the book tells the story of a king, his vizier, the vizier's daughter and her maid, who are named Shirzad and Dinazad. He mentions alongside it the book of Farzah and Simas, and the book of Sindbad. ²

Ibn al-Nadim reports that Muhammad ibn Abdus al-Jahshiyari, the author of "Kitab al-Wuzara", began to compose a book in which he chose a thousand tales from the tales of the Arabs, the Persians and the Byzantines. He gathered four hundred and eighty nights of them before death overtook him. ³

Ibn al-Nadim saw several parts of it in the hand of Abu al-Tayyib, the brother of al-Shafi'i. ³