A Mamluk Pen Box Connected to the Thousand and One Nights and the Historian Ibn ʿAbd al-Zahir

Abstract

The article discusses a remarkable Mamluk pen box in the Louvre, focusing on its inscriptions, which consist of three poems: one by the historian Muhyi ’l-Din Ibn ʿAbd al-Zahir, another by his son Taj al-Din, and a third, anonymous poem cited in a tale of The 1001 Nights. The article tries to trace the history of the pen box and reconstruct its original layout.