One Thousand and One Nights

• 1. Introduction

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  One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, and a single desperate bargain holds it together. A bride begins a story for a king and deliberately stops before the ending. If he wants to know what happens next, she has to be alive tomorrow. Night after night, that is how she buys her life. English readers often call the book The Arabian Nights, a name that comes from the first English edition of the early eighteenth century. Yet the book has no single author. Writers, translators and scholars across West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and North Africa added to it over many centuries. Even its length is unsettled, since some editions hold only a few hundred nights and others run to 1001 or more. Some of its most beloved tales were never in the original Arabic at all. So how does a work with no author and no fixed size come to feel like one book? Where did its storyteller come from, and who slipped a lamp and a band of thieves into the collection?

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• 2. The Bargain

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  Zaman, the brother of King Shahryar, sets out to visit the royal palace, then remembers something he left at home and turns back. There he finds that his wife has betrayed him. He kills her and her lover, tells no one, and continues his journey. At his brother's court he learns that the king has suffered the same betrayal, from his own wife and from many slave girls in his household. Shahryar, whose empire stretched from Persia to India, has his wife killed. Grief hardens into bitterness, and he decides that all women are alike.

  From then on the king marries a virgin and has her executed the next morning, before she can dishonor him. The vizier is responsible for finding these brides, and eventually he cannot find any more. His daughter Scheherazade offers herself as the next bride, and her father agrees only with great reluctance. The count of nights that follow gives the book its title.

  Versions of the story disagree about how it ends. In some, Scheherazade asks for a pardon. In others, the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife. In still others, something distracts him. In every version, the king pardons her and spares her life.

  In some parts of the full text, Scheherazade halts her narration in the middle of an explanation of abstract philosophical principles or a point of Islamic philosophy. Once she stops during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen. The narrator's idea of a cliffhanger is much broader than a modern reader expects. Each time, she is right to believe that the king's curiosity about the sequel will win her another day.

  The cast of her tales is stranger still. Common protagonists include the caliph Harun al-Rashid, his grand vizier Jafar al-Barmaki and the famous poet Abu Nuwas. These men lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire, in which Scheherazade's own story is set.

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• 3. Roots in Persia and India

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  The earliest mentions of the Nights describe it as an Arabic translation of a Persian book called Hezār Afsān, which means The Thousand Stories. In the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadim compiled a catalogue of books in Baghdad known as the Fihrist. He noted that the Sassanid kings of Iran enjoyed evening tales and fables. He then described the Persian book's frame. A bloodthirsty king kills a succession of wives after their wedding night, until one saves herself by leaving a story unfinished each evening.

  Al-Nadim was not impressed. He counted only 200 stories in the book and judged that "it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling".

  Al-Masudi, writing in the same century, also mentioned the Persian work in his Muruj Al-Dhahab, known as The Meadows of Gold. He said its Arabic translation was called Alf Khurafa, meaning A Thousand Entertaining Tales, but was generally known as Alf Layla, or A Thousand Nights. He named two characters, Shirāzd and Dināzād, who correspond to Scheherazade and her sister. No physical trace of the Hezār Afsān has survived, so its exact relationship to the later Arabic versions remains a mystery.

  Sanskrit literature offers another set of ancestors. Frame stories and animal fables from that tradition are seen by some scholars as lying at the root of the Nights. The motif of a wise young woman who removes a looming danger by telling stories has been traced to Indian sources. The Panchatantra and the Baital Pachisi are particularly notable influences. The Panchatantra may have arrived through a Sanskrit adaptation called the Tantropakhyana. Only fragments of its Sanskrit form survive, though translations or adaptations exist in Tamil, Lao, Thai and Old Javanese.

  The Panchatantra and tales from the Jatakas were first translated into Persian by Borzūya in 570 CE. Ibn al-Muqaffa then translated them into Arabic in 750 CE. From Arabic they passed into Syriac, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish.

  In the 1950s, the Iraqi scholar Safa Khulusi proposed, on internal rather than historical evidence, that Ibn al-Muqaffa' himself made the first Arabic translation of the frame story. He also credited him with some of the Persian stories later folded into the Nights. That would put the collection's beginnings in the eighth century.

  Other Persian tales sit in the collection too, among them the cycle of King Jali'ad and his Wazir Shimas. The Ten Wazirs, or the History of King Azadbakht and his Son, derives from the seventh-century Persian Bakhtiyārnāma. Scholars still cannot say how those stories found their way in.

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• 4. Layers of Arabic Text

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  The scholar Robert Irwin summarises a consensus that emerged from work in the 1880s and 1890s by Zotenberg and others. The earliest tales came from India and Persia and were probably translated into Arabic in the early eighth century under the title Alf Layla, The Thousand Nights. That original core was quite small. In Iraq in the ninth or tenth century, Arab stories were added, among them tales about the caliph Harun al-Rashid. From perhaps the tenth century, independent sagas and story cycles joined them.

  From the 13th century, Syria and Egypt added another layer, with many stories preoccupied by sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period, Egyptian collections swelled further, so that the text could reach the full 1,001 nights its title promised.

  The oldest surviving scrap of this history was found by the scholar Nabia Abbott in 1948. It is a few handwritten pages from the ninth century, titled The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights. The few lines it preserves show Dinazad asking Shirazad, which is to say Scheherazade, to tell her stories. The full title, The Thousand and One Nights, first appears in the 12th century. A document from Cairo mentions a Jewish bookseller lending out a copy.

  Professor Dwight Reynolds describes how the Arabic tradition transformed its Persian inheritance. Some Persian tales survived with Arabic Muslim names and new locations replacing pre-Islamic ones. Whole cycles of Arabic tales were added and apparently replaced most of the Persian material. One cycle centres on ninth-century Baghdad and includes Harun al-Rashid, who died in 809, his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki, who died in 803, and the licentious poet Abu Nuwas, who died around 813. Another cluster comes from late medieval Cairo and mentions people and places from as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  Two great Arabic manuscript traditions exist, the Syrian and the Egyptian. The Syrian tradition is represented by the Galland Manuscript, the earliest extensive manuscript of the Nights. It holds about 300 tales, far fewer than the Egyptian tradition. The Egyptian texts emerged later and gathered many more independent tales, some still being added in the 18th and 19th centuries. All substantial versions share a small common core that includes The Merchant and the Genie, The Fisherman and the Genie, and The Three Apples.

  Scholars argue over which tradition is more authentic. Muhsin Mahdi suspected that European demand for a complete version drove some of the Egyptian expansion. Yet independent tales have been added to the collection throughout its history.

  Printing added its own tangles. The first printed Arabic edition appeared in 1775, an Egyptian version known as ZER with 200 tales, and no copy of it survives. It nevertheless underlay the edition printed by the Egyptian government at Bulaq in 1835. The British East India Company printed two Calcutta volumes in 1814-1818, each with one hundred tales.

  The Prussian scholar Christian Maximilian Habicht then worked with the Tunisian Mordecai ibn al-Najjar on an edition with 1001 nights in Arabic and German, issued in Breslau from 1825. They believed one of their sources was a Tunisian manuscript. It was later revealed as a forgery by al-Najjar. The later Calcutta II edition, called the Macnaghten edition, claimed an older Egyptian manuscript as its source. That manuscript has never been found.

  Mahdi's Leiden edition of 1984-1994 returned to the Syrian manuscript. It remains the only critical edition of the Nights, and even his critics treat it as the best guide to the medieval work's original style.

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• 5. Galland's Orphan Tales

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  In 1704, the French scholar Antoine Galland began publishing the first European version of the Nights. It ran to 12 volumes under the title Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français. He worked from an Arabic text of the Syrian recension plus other sources. Some of his stories were not in that manuscript at all.

  Aladdin's Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves first appear in his translation, along with several lesser-known tales. They cannot be found in any original manuscript. Galland wrote that he heard them from the Christian Maronite storyteller Hanna Diab during Diab's visit to Paris. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, by contrast, had an independent existence before joining the collection.

  French readers were ready for the book. The vogue for contes de fées, fairy stories, had begun with Madame d'Aulnoy's Histoire d'Hypolite in 1690. That book is structured remarkably like the Nights, with its tales told by a female narrator. Galland's version spread across Europe, and by the end of the century it had been translated into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Flemish and Yiddish.

  Its success had odd side effects. Galland's publisher issued later volumes under Galland's name without his consent. The stories were written by unknown persons who were hired to capitalize on the book's popularity. Robert Irwin says Galland did so much to discover the tales and shape the canonical collection that he has been called its real author.

  An anonymous 12-volume English version, nicknamed the Grub Street version, appeared in about 1706-1721 as Arabian Nights' Entertainments. It is the first known use of the common English title.

  Imitations followed. French writers parodied the style with far-fetched stories in superficially Oriental settings. Voltaire's Zadig of 1748 used a vague Middle Eastern background to attack religious bigotry. William Beckford's fantasy Vathek of 1786 had a decisive influence on the Gothic novel. The Polish nobleman Jan Potocki began his Saragossa Manuscript in 1797, with a labyrinth of embedded tales.

  In 1811, Jonathan Scott, an Englishman who had learned Arabic and Persian in India, produced a translation mostly based on Galland. Irwin calls it the first literary translation into English, in contrast to the earlier work of Grub Street hacks.

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• 6. Victorian Translators

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  Scholars hunting for a complete and original Nights turned naturally to the bulkier Egyptian texts, which soon became the standard version. Edward Lane's English translation, which began appearing in the late 1830s, excluded content he found immoral. It is notable for its anthropological notes on Arab customs.

  The next translators went the other way. John Payne published The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night in 1882, in nine volumes, with nothing expurgated. Sir Richard Francis Burton followed in 1885 with The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, in ten volumes. Some assessments hold that Burton partly drew on Payne, which led to charges of plagiarism.

  Burton emphasized the sexual imagery even further, adding extensive footnotes and appendices on Oriental sexual mores. Under strict Victorian laws on obscene material, both works were printed as private editions for subscribers rather than published in the usual manner. Burton added six more volumes, The Supplemental Nights, between 1886 and 1888. Critics have faulted his version for archaic language, an obsessive focus on sexuality and what one called an eccentric ego-trip.

  The French doctor J. C. Mardrus issued another version from 1898 to 1904, which Powys Mathers put into English in 1923. It kept the erotic material and expanded on it, but critics have found it inaccurate.

  Husain Haddawy's English translation of 1990 was based on Mahdi's Leiden edition. It has been praised as very readable and strongly recommended for anyone wanting the authentic flavour of the tales. A second Haddawy volume of popular tales absent from the Leiden edition followed in 1995.

  Penguin Classics published a three-volume translation by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons in 2008, with an introduction and annotations by Robert Irwin. It is the first complete translation of the Calcutta II edition since Burton. Malcolm Lyons describes the work as "a representation of what is primarily oral literature, appealing to the ear rather than the eye". The translation includes the poetry as plain prose paraphrase, but it streamlines and has cuts, so it is not entirely complete.

  In December 2021, Yasmine Seale published the first English translation made solely by a woman. It removes earlier sexist and racist references and includes all the tales from Hanna Diyab. It also restores stories with female protagonists, such as the tales of Parizade and Pari Banu, and the horror story Sidi Numan.

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• 7. Machinery of the Tales

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  Sinbad the Sailor tells Sinbad the Porter the stories of his seven voyages, and Scheherazade tells the whole thing to the king. That is one of the Nights' favourite devices, the story within a story, and it can run deeper. In The Fisherman and the Jinni, the Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban sits inside, and three more tales nest within that one.

  The technique goes back to Persian and Indian traditions, especially the Panchatantra. In that book, stories are introduced as didactic analogies, with a phrase such as: if you are not careful, what happened to the louse and the flea will happen to you. The Nights rarely does this. Most commonly a new story arrives as an answer to a question raised by the previous tale.

  Another of its favourite subjects is destiny. The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini observed that each tale begins with an appearance of destiny, which shows itself as an anomaly. One anomaly generates another, and the chain eventually leads back to ordinary life. He concluded that destiny itself is the protagonist.

  In The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream, a man in Baghdad is told in a dream to travel to Cairo, where he will find hidden treasure. He ends up in jail there and tells his dream to a police officer. The officer scoffs, then says he himself dreamed of a house in Baghdad with a courtyard and fountain, treasure buried beneath. The ruined man recognizes his own home. A variant later appears in English folklore as the Pedlar of Swaffham and in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Jorge Luis Borges translated it into Spanish as The Story of the Two Dreamers.

  The Tale of Attaf shows reverse causation. Harun al-Rashid reads a random book in his library, laughs and weeps, and sends his vizier Ja'far away. Ja'far flees Baghdad for adventures in Damascus. Back home, he reads the same book and finds it describes his own adventures. Harun's reading caused the very events the book recounts.

  The collection also contains early crime fiction. In The Three Apples, Harun al-Rashid receives a chest containing the body of a young woman. He gives Ja'far three days to find the culprit or be executed. Two men come forward, each claiming to be the killer. The husband is guilty, but a slave who took one of the titular apples shares the blame. Ja'far gets three more days, fails, and says goodbye to his family. Then he finds his own daughter holding the apple, which she got from his slave Rayhan.

  The Hunchback's Tale is a comedy of errors. In a fictional China, the emperor's favourite comedian chokes while laughing at dinner with a tailor and his wife. Fearing the emperor's anger, they leave the body at a Jewish doctor's clinic. The doctor trips over it and believes his fall killed the man. The cycle runs to twelve tales before everyone ends up in a courtroom, each with a different claim about the death.

  The Nights is almost certainly the earliest surviving literature that mentions ghouls. In The History of Gherib and His Brother Agib, the outcast prince Gherib fights off a family of ravenous ghouls. In The City of Brass, travellers cross the Sahara in search of an ancient lost city and a brass vessel Solomon once used to trap a jinni. On the way they meet a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants, lifelike humanoid robots and a brass horseman that points the way.

  The Ebony Horse features a mechanical flying horse steered with keys, which can rise into outer space and toward the Sun. In The Adventures of Bulukiya, a quest for the herb of immortality takes the hero across the seas and even across the cosmos, among talking serpents and talking trees.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Robert Irwin reports that there is little evidence the Nights was particularly treasured in the Arab world. Few manuscripts from before the 18th century exist. Fiction had a low status among medieval Arabs compared with poetry, and the tales were dismissed as khurafa, improbable fantasies fit only for entertaining women and children. Irwin writes that even today the stories are regularly denounced as "vulgar, improbable, childish and, above all, badly written".

  Still, Egyptian authors answered back. Tawfiq al-Hakim wrote the play Shahrazad in 1934, and Taha Hussein wrote Scheherazade's Dreams in 1943. Naguib Mahfouz published Arabian Nights and Days in 1979. Egyptian radio broadcast an adaptation called Alf Leila Wa Leila for 26 years, with Zouzou Nabil as Scheherazade. Egyptian television adaptations aired in each Ramadan between the 1980s and early 1990s.

  The tales may have reached Europe centuries before Galland. In Chaucer's Squire's Tale, the hero travels on a flying brass horse, echoing the Ebony Horse. Echoes in Boccaccio's Decameron and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso suggest that the story of Shahryar and his brother was known there too.

  Romantic writers felt the book's pull. According to A. S. Byatt, the Nights stood in British Romantic poetry for the wonderful against the mundane. Coleridge and de Quincey both wrote of nightmares the book caused them as children. Charles Dickens let its atmosphere pervade the opening of his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade in 1845, in which the king is so disgusted by her latest tale that he has her executed the next day.

  In July 1934, W. B. Yeats was asked which six books satisfied him most. He placed the Arabian Nights second only to Shakespeare. H. P. Lovecraft credited some of his creations to his childhood love of the book.

  In 1982, the International Astronomical Union began naming features on Saturn's moon Enceladus after characters and places in Burton's translation. The surface was so strange and mysterious that the Nights seemed a fitting name bank.

  Film took up the tales early. Georges Méliès made Le Palais des Mille et une nuits in 1905. Irwin ranks the 1924 and 1940 versions of The Thief of Baghdad, along with Pasolini's Il fiore delle Mille e una notte of 1974, among the masterpieces of world cinema. India produced Alif Laila in 1933, and Disney's animated Aladdin followed in 1992. Composers answered too, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade Op. 35 of 1888 to Ravel's Shéhérazade of 1898.

  The bargain at the heart of the book has even become a game. Sultan's Game, released on Steam in 2025, has a Sultan command players to draw a card each week and complete its challenge within seven days. The game passed one million copies sold just over three months after release.

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