Tales from the crypt: On some uncharted Voyages of Sindbad the sailor

This article examines the motif of a man being buried alive with his recently deceased spouse found in the Fourth Voyage of Sindbad (El-Shamy S123.2). In 1904, D. S. Margoliouth noted that Sindbad's Fourth Voyage shared this theme with a story of a Byzantine patriarch recounted in the tenth-century collection of al-Tanūkhī Deliverance after Hardship. This article proposes one hitherto unknown textual route through which this motif traveled from Tanūkhī to Sindbad-the Maqāma Baṣriyya of al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī (d. 1556). ʿAbbāsī’s Maqāma Baṣriyya reflects Ottoman intellectuals’ anxieties over their increasing involvement in the Indian Ocean trade during the 1530s. The final section of the paper discusses the tale of Cogia Muzafffer—which appears to be a version of the ʿAbbāsī’s maqāma heard by Galland in 1673 while in Istanbul.