ge and style it has remained a classic work. The _Book of the 1001
Nights_ (_Arabian Nights_) also has its basis in translations from the
Indian through the Persian, made as early as the 9th century. To these
stories have been added others originating in Bagdad and Egypt and a few
others, which were at first in independent circulation. The whole work
seems to have taken its present form (with local variations) about the
13th century. Several other romances of considerable length are extant,
such as the _Story of 'Antar_ (ed. 32 vols., Cairo, 1869, &c.,
translated in part by Terrick Hamilton, 4 vols., London, 1820), and the
_Story of Saif ibn Dhi Yezen_ (ed. Cairo, 1892). (G. W. T.)

_Historical Literature._--Arabian historians differ from all others in
the unique form of their compositions. Each event is related in the
words of eye-witnesses or contemporaries transmitted to the final
narrator through a chain of intermediate reporters (_rawis_), each of
whom passed on the original report to his successor. Often the same
account is given in two or more slightly divergent forms, which have
come down through different chains of reporters. Often, too, one event
or one important detail is told in several ways on the basis of several
contemporary statements transmitted to the final narrator through
distinct lines of tradition. The writer, therefore, exercises no
independent criticism except as regards the choice of authorities; for
he rejects accounts of which the first author or one of the intermediate
links seems to him unworthy of credit, and sometimes he states which of
several accounts seems to him the best.

A second type of Arabian historiography is that in which an author
combines the different traditions about one occurrence into one
continuous narrative, but prefixes a statement as to the lines of
authorities used and states which of them he mainly follows. In this
case the writer recurs to the first method, already described, only when
the different traditions are greatly at variance with one another. In
yet a third type of history the old method is entirely forsaken and we
have a continuous narrative only occasionally interrupted by citation of
the authority for some particular point. But the principle still is that
what has been well said once need not be told again in other words. The
writer, therefore, keeps as close as he can to the letter of his
sources, so that quite a late writer often reproduces the ver