[FN#173] The numbers, however, vary with the Editions of Galland: some end the formula with Night cxcvii; others with the ccxxxvi. : I adopt that of the De Sacy Edition.
[FN#174] Contes Persans, suivis des Contes Turcs. Paris; Béchet
Ainé, 1826.
[FN#175] In the old translation we have “eighteen hundred years since the prophet Solomon died,” (B.C. 975) = A.D. 825.
[FN#176] Meaning the era of the Seleucides. Dr. Jonathan Scott shows (vol. ii. 324) that A.H. 653 and A.D. 1255 would correspond with 1557 of that epoch; so that the scribe has here made a little mistake of 5,763 years. Ex uno disce.
[FN#177] The Saturday Review (Jan. 2nd ’86) writes, “Captain Burton has fallen into a mistake by not distinguishing between the names of the by no means identical Caliphs Al-Muntasir and Al-Mustansir.” Quite true: it was an ugly confusion of the melancholy madman and parricide with one of the best and wisest of the Caliphs. I can explain (not extenuate) my mistake only by a misprint in Al-Siyúti (p. 554).
[FN#178] In the Galland MS. and the Bresl. Edit. (ii. 253), we find the Barber saying that the Caliph (Al-Mustansir) was at that time (yaumaizin) in Baghdad, and this has been held to imply that the Caliphate had fallen. But such conjecture is evidently based upon insufficient grounds.
[FN#179] De Sacy makes the “Kalandar” order originate in A.D. 1150, but the Shaykh Sharíf bú Ali Kalandar died in A.D. 1323-24. In Sind the first Kalandar, Osmán-i-Marwándí surnamed Lál Sháhbáz, the Red Goshawk, from one of his miracles, died and was buried at Sehwán in A D. 1274: see my “History of Sindh” chapt. viii. for details. The dates therefore run wild.
[FN#180] In this same tale H. H. Wilson observes that the title of Sultan of Egypt was not assumed before the middle of the xiith century.
[FN#181] Popularly called Vidyanagar of the Narsingha.
[FN#182] Time-measurers are of very ancient date. The Greeks had clepsydræ and the Romans gnomons, portable and ring-shaped, besides large standing town-dials as at Aquileja and San Sabba near Trieste. The “Saracens” were the perfecters of the clepsydra: Bosseret (p. 16) and the Chronicon Turense (Beckmann ii. 340 et seq.) describe the water-clock sent by Al-Rashid to Karl the Great as a kind of “cockoo-clock.” Twelve doors in the dial opened successively and little balls dropping on brazen bells told the hour: at noon a dozen mounted knights paraded the face and closed the portals. Trithonius mentions an horologium presented in A.D. 1232 by Al-Malik al-Kámil the Ayyubite Soldan to the Emperor Frederick II: like the Strasbourg and Padua clocks it struck the hours, told the day, month and year, showed the phases of the moon, and registered the position of the sun and the planets. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Gaspar Visconti mentions in a sonnet the watch proper (certi orologii piccioli e portativi); and the “animated eggs” of Nurembourg became famous. The earliest English watch (Sir Ashton Lever’s) dates from 1541: and in 1544 the portable chronometer became common in France.