Page:Researches respecting the Book of Sindibad and Portuguese Folk-Tales.djvu/205

in fact, the name of a Persian. Moreover, this Persian, Musa, is really the author of the most ancient text to which we are able to trace back these versions, viz., of that text from which directly, through the intermediate Syriac version, is derived the Greek text of the Syntipas, which is the most ancient, and, as results from our comparisons, the least remote from the original, of the known versions. The Syntipas, as I shall prove in the following chapter, was put into Greek by Andreopulos at the end of the eleventh century. Now if we consider that the Syriac version, from which Andreopulos translated, must naturally have been more ancient than this epoch, and that the text of the Persian Musa, from which that Syriac version was made, must have been more ancient still, we shall find, without any bold hypotheses, that this Persian Musa, author of a version in which we already find added the second tales of the viziers, may very well belong, and even be anterior, to the tenth century, in which for the first time mention is made in an Arabian writer of a greater Book of Sindibâd. How much that addition may be anterior to the last-named century it is difficult to say. But if indeed it was not made in that very century, it is not so anterior as to have thrown into oblivion the smaller collection, which we find was also known to the same Arabian writer. Masudi, who died thirty-one years before Mohammed, speaking of the Sindibâd, does not distinguish two texts of different dimensions. From this, however, nothing can be deduced, nor from his words can it be ever so little guessed which of the two redactions was known to him. In the Syntipas it is not said in what language the Persian Musa wrote, only the preface of the Syriac version is translated into Greek word for word (ὡς εἶχεν αὐταῖς λέξεσιν), and the words which have reference to this are, Ταύτην τὴν διήγησιν προϊστόρησε Μοῦσος ὁ Πέρσης. It is very likely that this