Alfred Guillaume first noted the differing accounts of Tubba?’s aborted attack on Mecca as recorded by Ibn Ish?a?q’s acolytes al-Bakka??i?, Ibn Bukayr, ?Uthma?n b. Sa?j, and Salamah b. al-Fad?l. Guillaume attributed these differences to unimportant lexical variations and to Ibn Hisha?m’s later redactions of al-Bakka??i?’s copy. In doing so, Guillaume treats the Ibn al-Fad?l and al-Bakka??i? copies as largely the same and examines any new information found in Ibn Sa?j and Ibn Bukayr only in so far as he thinks it has historical merit. In fact, most discussions of Ibn Ish?a?q focus on his historical reliability and ignore the rather copious evidence that Ibn Ish?a?q’s collection was designed to entertain, edify, and enrich. I argue that the Tubba? stories gives us a window into the work’s compositional history and demonstrates that the majority of variations between witness traditions are due to changes made by Ibn Ish?a?q as he traveled across the early ?Abba?sid world performing stories drawn from a collection of scripts that he developed since his youth. While the narrative structure of these stories remained fairly stable, Ibn Ish?a?q inserted and removed material to cater to the tastes of his various audiences. Over the past decade I have reconstructed all or part of 60 performances and reconstructed substantial portions of 14 “generic copies” produced for followers such as Ibra?hi?m b. Sa?d, al-Bakka??i?, Ibn al-Fad?l, and others. The total corpus of Ibn Ish?a?q material contains almost 750,000 words of material, and this body of material has served as the key basis for modeling text reuse by the team. The paper will demonstrate that the al-Bakka??i? and Ibn al-Fad?l versions are more similar because each was composed from a fairly fixed “base” document. To understand these copies, it is necessary to examine the relationship between names, events, and ideas found in other portions of the larger work. The Ibn Sa?j and Ibn Bukayr versions were copies of performances made for audiences in specific locales and were told in local dialects in such a way that no wider frame of reference was necessary, using names and ideas important to each audience. While there may be some value to Ibn Ish?a?q as a record of historical information its value is the text’s capacity to teach us about the world of Ibn Ish?a?q and his audiences.