On the 25th of March 1709, a French translator named Antoine Galland met with a Syrian storyteller called Hanna Diyab in Paris. This meeting marked the birth of Aladdin as a written story, yet it never appeared in any original Arabic manuscript of The Arabian Nights. Galland recorded his encounter in an unpublished diary and later transcribed the tale during the winter of 1709 to 1710. He included this story in volumes nine and ten of his translation Les mille et une nuits, published in 1710 without ever acknowledging Diyab's contribution. Scholars like Ruth B. Bottigheimer argue that Diyab should be understood as the true author of some stories he supplied. There are even parallels between Diyab's own life and the plot of Aladdin found in his autobiography. Two Arabic manuscripts containing the story were discovered much later in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. One was written by a Syrian Christian priest named Dionysios Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis. The other is supposedly a copy made by Mikhail Sabbagh from a Baghdad manuscript dated 1703. Iraq's Muhsin Mahdi proved both these manuscripts were back-translations of Galland's text into Arabic.
Narrative Structure And Plot
Aladdin dwells in one of the cities of Ancient China as an impoverished young ne'er-do-well with no prospects for wealth or status. A sorcerer from the Maghreb approaches him claiming to be Mustapha the tailor, the late father of Aladdin. This stranger convinces the boy to enter a booby-trapped magic cave to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp called a chirag. After the sorcerer attempts to double-cross Aladdin inside the cave, the boy finds himself trapped but still wearing a magic ring lent to him earlier. In despair, he rubs his hands and inadvertently activates the ring to summon a genie who releases him from the underground prison. When his mother tries to clean the lamp to sell it for food, a second far more powerful genie appears bound to the lamp holder. With this genie's aid, Aladdin becomes rich and marries Princess Badroulbadour after foiling her marriage to the vizier's son. The sorcerer returns years later tricking the princess into exchanging new lamps for old ones to steal the magical object. He orders the genie to transport the entire palace to his home in the Maghreb while Aladdin remains powerless without the lamp. Using his lesser magic ring, Aladdin travels to the Maghreb where the princess helps him recover the stolen item and slay the sorcerer. An evil brother of the original sorcerer disguises himself as an old woman with healing powers to destroy Aladdin but is slain by the hero after being warned by the lamp genie.