Hikayet-i arba'in subh u mesa - حكايت اربعين صبح و مسا

This volume contains an Ottoman Turkish translation of the well-known tale entitled in ArabicḤikāyat arbaᶜīn ṣubḥ wa masāᵓ,by Aḥmad Maṣrī. The story is also commonly known as The Story of the Forty Viziers (Hikayet-i Kırk Vezir or Kırk Vezir Hikayesi). It is an expansion of an old Indian tale, the Persian version of which is called Kitāb-i Sindbād or Sindbād-nāmah. The main narrative is the same in both: a young prince, falsely accused by his stepmother, is under a death sentence. He is defended in turn by the king's Vezirs (seven in the original work, forty in the expanded version), who, in the morning of as many days, endeavor to allay the king's wrath with appropriate tales, while in the evening of each day, the queen strives, by similar means, to hasten the prince's demise. The groundwork is used as a convenient frame for the insertion of tales of the most varied character and origin, many of which have no perceptible bearing on the supposed object of the narrator. The original Ottoman Turkish version purports to be a translation of the Arabic original, which appears to be lost. The translator, who calls himself Ahmet Mısri in the present copy as well as in those found in Vienna, Leipzig and Saint Petersburg, is also known in other copies by his mahlas, Şeyhzade. In the preface, after praising the reigning sovereign, Sultan Murat İbn-i Mehmet İbn-i Bayezit Han (Murat II, 824-855 AH/1421-1455 CE), he says that the fittest gifts to be presented to His Majesty were books of wisdom. 'For that reason, I, Ahmet Mısri, made for the Sultan of the age a neat copy of the book entitled Hikayet-i arba'in subh u mesa and translated it from the Arabic into the Turkish tongue, so that the Padişah of the world might read with ease the graceful thoughts and phrases, the rhymes and assonances, the pertinent tales and apt quotations, etc., of my book.'. Copies of the Forty Vezirs vary considerably with regard to the subjects and the arrangement of the tales. The text in this copy substantially agrees with the translation of Behrnauer and has the same stories, with some divergences in detail. It is also, therefore, less complete than Add MS 7882. It is lacking the story of the second night. The manuscript has lost about a page at the beginning and the same amount at the end. It is also missing two folios after f 10 and one after f 13. A later hand has supplied ff 2-3. The manuscript was likely copied in the 17th century CE.

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See Rieu, Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 219.

Other copies of the same text can be found in Or 7322, Or 7323, Add MS 5968, and Add MS 7882. For more information on the Persian recensions of the same text, see Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 748; and Coulston, the Book of Sindibad (1884).

Tarih-i Kırk Vezir (Dersaadet: Matbaa-yı Ahmet Kâmil, 1325 [1909]). Other copies were also produced in Istanbul in 1283 AH (1866-67 CE) and 1285 AH (1868-69 CE). For more information on these, see Journal asiatique, 6e série, Art. XI, p. 484; and XIV, p. 87. The introduction and the tales of the first twenty days, edited by H. N. Belletête, were printed posthumously: Ahmet-i Misri, Contes turcs en langue turque, extraits du livre intitulé, Les quarante viziers, edited by Belletête, Henri Nicolas (Paris: de l'Imprimerie impériale, 1812). An incomplete French translation, by Pétis de la Croix, will be found in the Panthéon Littéraire, Contes orientaux, pp. 301-367. A German version of the whole work, from a Dresden manuscript, was published by Behrnauer: Die vierzig Veziere oder weisen Meister, edited by Behrnauer, Walter Friedrich Adolf (Leipzig: Teubner, 1851). A more complete translation is that of E. J. W. Gibb, which comprises no less than 112 tales collected from all available sources: Gibb, E. J. W., The history of the vezirs or the story of the forty morns and eves (London: Redway, 1886).