Throughout the East, professional story-tellers still spend their lives travelling about and entertaining audiences in towns and tents with poems and legends, many of the latter treating of desert feuds and battles and forming part of a collection known as the Arab Days.  With the founding of Bagdad by the Abbasides, Persian influence begins to make itself felt, not only in politics but in literature also, although Arabic was the sole language of the empire of the Caliphs.  The greatest literary work in this literature is the famous “Arabian Nights,” an anonymous collection of tales connected by a thread of narrative.  Its purport is that an Eastern monarch, “to protect himself against the craft and infidelity of women resolves that the wife he chooses him every day shall be put to death before the next.”  Two sisters devote their lives to put an end to such massacres.  The eldest, who becomes the king’s wife, begs that her sister may spend the last night of her life in their room.  At dawn the royal bride entertains her sister with a story which is cleverly left unfinished.  Such is the sultan’s curiosity to hear the end, that the bride of a night is not slain, as usual.  But as soon as one tale is ended another is begun, and for one thousand and one nights the clever narrator keeps her audience of two in suspense.  Most of the tales told in this collection are obviously of Persian origin, and are contained in the Hasar Afsana (The Thousand Tales) which was translated into Arabic in the tenth century.  But some authorities claim that these stories originated in India and were brought into Persia before Alexander’s conquests.  These tales are so popular that they have been translated into every civilized language and are often termed prose epics.

Arabic also boasts a romance of chivalry entitled “Romance of ‘Antar,’” ascribed to Al Asmai (739-831), which contains the chief events in Arab history before the advent of Mahomet and is hence often termed the Arab Iliad.

The “Romance of Beni Hilal” and that of “Abu Zaid,” which form part of a cycle of 38 legends, are popular in Egypt to this day.

THE SHAH-NAMEH, OR EPIC OF KINGS

This Persian epic was composed by the poet Abul Kasin Mansur, who sang so sweetly that his master termed him Firdusi, or Singer of Paradise, by which name he is best known, although he is also called the “Homer of the East.”  Mahmoud, Shah of Persia, who lived about 920 B.C., decided to have the chronicles of the land put into rhyme, and engaged Firdusi for this piece of work, promising him a thousand gold pieces for every thousand distichs he finished.  Firdusi, who had long wished to build stone embankments for the river whose overflow devastated his native town, begged the king to withhold payment until the work was done.