MS of the work are lost, we based our choice of Kitāb al-Siyāḥah as the title on Diyāb’s frequent use of the word siyāḥah (on which, see below).
2 His full name is Ḥannā ibn Diyāb (Ḥannā son of Diyāb), but Ḥannā Diyāb has become current in English.
3 Zotenberg, “Notice sur quelques manuscrits des Mille et Une Nuits et la traduction de Galland,” 194.
4 The sole exception is Lentin, “Recherches sur l’histoire de la langue arabe au Proche-Orient à l’époque moderne,” 1:48–49. After Lentin’s discovery, the first comprehensive nonlinguistic studies of the text are Heyberger’s introduction to Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris, and, from a literary perspective, Stephan, “Von der Bezeugung zur Narrativen Vergegenwärtigung” and “Spuren fiktionaler Vergegenwärtigung im Osmanischen Aleppo,” both 2015.
5 Sbath, Bibliothèque de manuscrits: Catalogue, 1:122, previously published with a slightly different description in his “Les manuscrits orientaux de la bibliothèque du R.P. Paul Sbath (Suite),” 348. See also the reference to the travelogue in Graf, Geschichte, 3:467.
6 Notable are the recent works of Bottigheimer, “East meets West: Hannā Diyāb and The Thousand and One Nights”; Marzolph, “The Man Who Made the Nights Immortal”; and Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.
7 Lucas, Troisième Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas dans le Levant, 101–2.
8 Heyberger, introduction to Dyab, D’Alep à Paris, 9, uncovers a source which reveals that in 1740, Diyāb was head of a household of twelve persons. A 1748 petition to the Maronite patriarch to protect the Aleppan monks has his signature as well as those of other family members (Fahd, Tārīkh al-rahbāniyyah, 147).
9 See Heyberger, introduction to Dyab, D’Alep à Paris, 9, on the father, who probably died when Diyāb was young.
10 See the concise overviews in Raymond, “An Expanding Community: The Christians of Aleppo in the Ottoman Era,” 84; Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism, chapters 3 and 4; and Patel, The Arab Nahḍah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement, chapter 2. On the proliferation of books, see Heyberger, Hindiyya: Mystique et criminelle 1720–1798, chapter 2.
11 Qarāʿalī, “Mudhakkirāt,” 24–26.
12 Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la réforme catholique, 110–11 and 434.
13 See the account in Qarāʿalī, “Mudhakkirāt,” 32ff. on this matter; also cf. Heyberger, Les chrétiens, 434.
14 On Lucas’s family and early travels, see Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises en Orient aux XVIIè et XVIIIè siècles, 317ff., and Commission des Antiquités, “Note sur Paul Lucas.”
15 E.g., Lucas, Deuxième Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas dans le Levant, 169.
16 For examples, see Horta, Marvellous Thieves, chapter 2.
17 Other episodes include the account of a visit to ruins near Kaftīn and of bathing at Hammam-Lif in Tunisia (§§1.35–1.36 and §5.94).
18 Lucas, Deuxième Voyage, 53.
19 Lucas, Deuxième Voyage, 197–98.
20 Lucas, Deuxième Voyage, 117.
21 Galland, Le journal d’Antoine Galland (1646–1715), 1:290.
22 Galland, Journal, 1:358.
23 Galland, Journal, 1:321.
24 Galland, Journal, 2:253.
25 For a comprehensive list of Diyāb’s stories, see Marzolph, “The Man Who Made the Nights Immortal,” 118–19.
26 Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, 14–15.
27 Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo, 1:148–49.
28 Van Leeuwen and Marzolph, Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 425.
29 Among the tales Diyāb told Galland is one about a prince who falls in love with a portrait. Here Diyāb may be reversing the motif: Instead of falling in love with the subject of a portrait, the hero paints a portrait out of love.
30 See the quotation and explanation in Görner, “Das Regulativ der Wahrscheinlichkeit: Zur Funktion literarischer Fiktionalität im 18. Jahrhundert,” 92; and the study by Peucker, “The Material Image in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” 197–98.
31 Chraïbi, “Galland’s ‘Ali Baba’ and Other Arabic Versions,” 166.
32 See Sadan, “Background, Date and Meaning of the Story of the Alexandrian Lover and the Magic Lamp.”
33 Syrian Catholic Archdiocese of Aleppo, Ar 7/25.
34 Université Saint-Joseph MS BO 645. I am grateful to Ibrahim Akel, who directed my attention to this and the previous manuscript and thus helped confirm the hypothesis that Diyāb was an owner of several books.
