The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
I do not know that the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves has been the subject of special examination, and I would venture to suggest to some student of folk-tale more fortunately endowed with leisure than myself that an investigation of its varieties might lead to interesting conclusions.
I am not sure that I understand Professor Sayce's note in Folk-Lore, xxxi. p. 197, to the Cairene version recorded by him. The story of the Forty Thieves inevitably opens with the story of the rich and poor brothers in the Arabian Nights no less than in the Cairene variant. The purchase of a house by the rich brother for the poor brother's wife is new to me and appears to be an intrusive element. But if the suggestion is that this shows evidence of relationship with the XIXth dynasty Egyptian story of the two brothers, Anpa and Batu (Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt, p. 1; Flinders Petrie, Egyptian Tales, second series, p. 36), do the modern and ancient stories really coincide? It may be noted that the ancient Egyptian story has nothing about the purchase of the house, while the modern lacks the essential feature of the attempted seduction and subsequent denunciation of the good younger brother by his sister-in-law. But if I have the temerity to suspect Prof. Sayce of a lapsus calami, I am not in a position to throw stones; for I should like to take this opportunity of apologising for the foolish and careless slip by which in Dawkins, Modern Greek in Cappadocia, p. 241, I attributed the miscounting incident to the story in the Arabian Nights.
For quite apart from any question of the Two Brothers, it is true that there are two distinct types of the Ali Baba story, and that Prof. Sayce's Cairene version belongs to a different variety to that of the Arabian Nights. For variants of the story differ not merely in the retention or omission of individual incidents, a difference which may be due to accidents of narration, but also in structure. Two types are clearly distinguishable: A, in which the catastrophe is brought about by the forgetting of a password (e.g. Arabian Nights); B, in which the cause is due to miscounting the number of robbers who are seen leaving the cave (e.g. Prof. Sayce).
