Passage: Layla and Majnun (Arabic: مجنون ليلى‎), also Leili o Majnun (Persian: ليلى و مجنون‎), is a narrative poem composed in 584/1188 by the Persian poet Niẓāmi Ganjavi based on a semi-historical Arab story about the 7th century Nejdi Bedouin poet Qays ibn Al-Mulawwah and his ladylove Layla bint Mahdi (or Layla al-Aamiriya). Nizami also wrote  Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian tragic romance, in the 12th century. It is a popular poem praising their love story. It is the third of his five long narrative poems, Panj Ganj (Persian: پنج گنج) (The Five Treasures). Lord Byron called it “the Romeo and Juliet of the East.”Qays and Layla fall in love with each other when they are young, but when they grow up Layla’s father doesn't allow them to be together. Qays becomes obsessed with her, and his tribe Banu 'Amir and the community gives him the epithet of Majnūn (مجنون "crazy", lit. "possessed by Jinn"). Long before Nizami, the legend circulated in anecdotal forms in Iranian akhbar. The early anecdotes and oral reports about Majnun are documented in Kitab al-Aghani and Ibn Qutaybah's al-Shi'r wal-Shu'ara'. The anecdotes are mostly very short, only loosely connected, and show little or no plot development. Nizami collected both secular and mystical sources about Majnun and portrayed a vivid picture of the famous lovers. Subsequently, many other Persian poets imitated him and wrote their own versions of the romance. Nizami drew influence from Udhrite love poetry, which is characterized by erotic abandon and attraction to the beloved, often by means of an unfulfillable longing.Many imitations have been contrived of Nizami's work, several of which are original literary works in their own right, including Amir Khusrow Dehlavi's Majnun o Leyli (completed in 1299), and Jami's version, completed in 1484, amounts to 3,860 couplets. Other notable reworkings are by Maktabi Shirazi, Hatefi (d. 1520), and Fuzûlî (d.1556), which became popular in Ottoman Turkey and India. Sir William Jones published Hatefi's romance in Calcutta in 1788. The...

Question: When did the variety of anecdotes start to increase?
twelfth century