An Invitation to Dinner for Abū Nuwās and his Friends: An Early textual witness on papyrus (Yale P. CtYBR inv. 2597(A))

Authors

• Mark Muehlhaeusler The American University in Cairo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0604-8075

Keywords:

majlis, adab, Abu Nuwas, Inan, Abbasid literature

Abstract

This article is a small contribution to the work done at Yale to create wider access to the papyrus collection. It focuses on a single literary papyrus, P. CtYBR inv. 2597(A), which contains parts of an anecdote that involves the poetess ʿInān, as hostess of a literary salon, and several of her guests, including Abū Nuwās. The same anecdote has been preserved in several later anthologies, which are known only from relatively late manuscript copies. The text is traced though the literary corpus, and the variants are analyzed.