Connections
The story contains the first mention of Abdul Alhazred, a fictional authority on the occult who would later be mentioned in most of Lovecraft's major Cthulhu Mythos stories, including "The Hound" (1922), "The Festival" (1923), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), "The Dunwich Horror" (1928), "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930) At the Mountains of Madness (1931), "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1932), "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), and "The Shadow out of Time" (1934).
In "The Nameless City", Alhazred is not yet identified as the author of the famous Necronomicon, but the "unexplained couplet" that Lovecraft attributes to him is later established as coming from that work.
"The Nameless City" is an early example of Lovecraft's technique of mixing references from history, literature and his own fiction to create a persuasive background for his horrors. At one point, the narrator recalls:
- "To myself I pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed."
In this passage, Chaldaea is a historic region in Mesopotamia, whereas Sarnath, Mnar, and Ib are places in Lovecraft's story "The Doom that Came to Sarnath".
Later in the story, a single paragraph mentions Lovecraft's fictional Arab poet, an actual 5th century philosopher, a writer from the Middle Ages, a legendary Persian king, and one of Lovecraft's favorite fantasy authors:
- In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gautier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"The unreverberate blackness of the abyss."
The paragraph goes on to quote the Irish poet Thomas Moore.
The Colossi of Memnon are also mentioned.
Read more about this topic: The Nameless City
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