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, a figure in the Thousand and One Nights . As E. Cosquin has shown, the motif of the wise young woman who tells stories in order to put off, and at length remove a danger, comes from India. The name, confirming Ibn al-Nadīm’s statement about the Iranian source of the Nights [see alf layla walayla ], is Persian, derived from čihrāzād “of noble appearance/origin.” In Ibn al-Nadīm’s report, S̲h̲ahrazād is of royal blood; in al-Masʿūdī’s, she is the daughter of a vizier. Of greater interest are the variations at th…

, “The city of brass,” a story within the Thousand and one nights [see alf layla wa-layla ]. This story, that found its way, somewhat variably, into the 19th-century editions of the Nights (on the 18th-century manuscripts in which it appears, see the excellent discussion by D. Pinault, Story - telling techniques in the Arabian Nights , Leiden 1992, 150-80), is the most elaborate narrative about a city of copper, brass or bronze (on the proper meanings of nuḥās and ṣufr , and their indiscriminate use in non-scientific discourse, see M. Aga-Oglu, A brief note on Islamic terminology for bronz…

(a.), anthology, selection of poetry. 1. In Arabic. Mediaeval tradition holds that the oldest anthology of Arabic poems is the small collection of celebrated pre-Islamic ḳaṣīda s variously known as “the seven long poems”, al-Muʿallaḳāt [ q.v.], al-Sumūṭ , etc. It is probably the oldest in conception. The early ʿAbbāsid period saw the compilation of the celebrated Mufaḍḍaliyyāt [ q.v.]. Al-Aṣmaʿī’s anthology of 92 ḳaṣīdas by 71 poets (44 of them D̲j̲āhilī), the Aṣmaʿiyyāt , received relatively little attention from mediaeval writers. A comment in the Fihrist ,…