One Thousand and One Nights

The earliest mentions of the Nights call it an Arabic translation of a Persian book, the Hezār Afsān or “Thousand Stories”. In the tenth century Ibn al-Nadim, cataloguing books in Baghdad in his Fihrist, noted that the Sassanid kings of Iran enjoyed “evening tales and fables” and described the Hezār Afsān's frame story: a bloodthirsty king kills off a succession of wives after their wedding night, until one saves herself by leaving each night's tale unfinished. He counted only 200 stories and called it “truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling”. In the same century Al-Masudi gave the Arabic translation's name as Alf Khurafa, generally known as Alf Layla, and named the characters Shirāzd and Dināzād. No physical evidence of the Hezār Afsān survives.

The Persian book relied partly on Indian elements. Some scholars see frame stories and animal fables of Sanskrit literature at the root of the Nights; the motif of the wise young woman who delays a danger by telling stories has been traced to Indian sources, and the influence of the Panchatantra and Baital Pachisi is particularly notable. The Panchatantra was translated into Persian by Borzūya in 570 and into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa in 750. In the 1950s the Iraqi scholar Safa Khulusi suggested, on internal evidence, that Ibn al-Muqaffa' made the first Arabic translation of the frame story, which would place the collection's genesis in the eighth century.

In the frame story Shahryar, a king whose empire stretched from Persia to India, learns with his brother Shâhzamân, King of Samarkand, that both their wives have betrayed them. Deciding that all women are the same, he marries a new virgin every day and has each executed the next morning. When the Vizier can find no more, his daughter Scheherazade offers herself, tells the king a tale on their wedding night and leaves it unfinished, so that he postpones her execution to hear the end; this goes on for one thousand and one nights. The versions agree that he spares her, but differ on why.

The tales include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and erotica, with jinn, ghouls, sorcerers and legendary places set among real people and geography. Common protagonists are the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki and the poet Abu Nuwas, and a character often tells a story within which another is told. The Three Apples is an early murder mystery, The Hunchback's Tale a cycle of twelve tales ending in a courtroom, and The City of Brass and The Ebony Horse can be considered early proto-science fiction. The bulk is prose, with Arabic verse for description, advice, lament and riddles.

All substantial versions share a small common core, among them The Merchant and the Genie, The Fisherman and the Genie and The Porter and the Three Ladies.

Robert Irwin summarises the view that emerged from the work of Zotenberg and others in the 1880s and 1890s. The earliest tales came from India and Persia and were translated into Arabic, probably in the early eighth century, as Alf Layla. In Iraq in the ninth or tenth century Arab stories were added, among them tales about Harun al-Rashid; from perhaps the tenth century independent sagas and story cycles joined; from the 13th century a further layer came in Syria and Egypt; and in the early modern period more stories were added to the Egyptian collections to bring the text up to the full 1,001 nights its title promised.

Dwight Reynolds adds that Persian tales may have survived with Arabic Muslim names and new places substituted, while whole cycles of Arabic tales apparently replaced most of the Persian material: one around ninth-century Baghdad, another from late medieval Cairo naming people and places of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Some stories, such as The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, had an independent existence before they were added.

Two manuscript traditions are known. The Syrian is shorter and contains little beyond the common core; the Egyptian came later and took in many more tales, some as late as the 18th and 19th centuries. Which is closer to the original is debated: Muhsin Mahdi suspected that European demand for a “complete version” drove the Egyptian additions, though tales seem always to have been added.

The stories were very popular among the storytellers known as Hakawati, but according to Robert Irwin a collection in simple prose had low status in medieval Arabic literature, and it was rarely mentioned in lists of popular literature. Irwin writes that even today, with the exception of certain writers and academics, the Nights is regarded with disdain in the Arab world. A Turkish translation was made in the 15th century, and another in 1636 on the order of Sultan Murad IV.

Its tales reached Europe early. In the 12th century Petrus Alphonsi put a version of The Tale of Attaf into Latin in his Disciplina Clericalis; motifs with parallels in the Nights appear in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron, and a Romanian translation existed by the 17th century. Its modern fame derives from Antoine Galland's French translation, which appeared from 1704 and was so successful that by the end of the century there were translations of it into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Flemish and Yiddish. An anonymous English version of about 1706–1721 first used the title Arabian Nights' Entertainments. It also provoked pseudo-Oriental imitations, among them Voltaire's Zadig (1748) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786).

Edward Lane's English translation was bowdlerized; John Payne (1882) and Richard Francis Burton (1885) made unexpurgated ones, printed for subscribers only under Victorian obscenity laws, and Burton's has been criticized for its “obsessive focus on sexuality”.

According to Ibrahim Akel's study of 2016, 114 Arabic manuscripts of the Nights are known, dating from the eighth to the nineteenth century; most are fragmentary, only 15 are complete, and two of those were forged by Mikha'il Sabbagh. The earliest known surviving fragment, a few lines of The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights from the ninth century, was found by the scholar Nabia Abbott in 1948. The most famous manuscript, of the Syrian branch and written between 1450 and 1593, holds 281 nights and about 36 tales; Galland acquired it, and it is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The Egyptian recension called ZER was possibly composed around 1775; its original is lost, but at least thirteen copies survive.

Four printed versions, all of the 19th century, became the basis for translations: Calcutta I, published by the British East India Company in 1814–1818; Bulaq, printed by the Egyptian government in 1835; Breslau, prepared by Christian Maximilian Habicht with Mordecai ibn al-Najjar from 1825, whose “Tunisian manuscript” was later revealed as a forgery by al-Najjar; and Calcutta II, which claimed an older Egyptian manuscript that has never been found. Muhsin Mahdi's Leiden edition (1984), built on the Galland manuscript, is the only critical edition to date; none has been made of the larger ZER text.

Writers as diverse as Henry Fielding and Naguib Mahfouz allude to the Nights by name, and among those it influenced are Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Gustave Flaubert, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, Salman Rushdie, Leo Tolstoy and W. B. Yeats. Coleridge and de Quincey recalled nightmares it gave them as children, Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845), and in Egypt it inspired Tawfiq al-Hakim's play Shahrazad (1934) and Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (1979).

Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba became cultural icons in the West, and genies, magic carpets and magic lamps are now common in modern fantasy. Films began with Georges Méliès' Le Palais des Mille et une nuits (1905); Robert Irwin ranks the two versions of The Thief of Baghdad (1924, 1940) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974) “high among the masterpieces of world cinema”, and Walt Disney's Aladdin (1992) is one of the best known. Egyptian television adaptations premiered each Ramadan in the 1980s and 1990s, and an Egyptian radio version ran for 26 years.

Composers from Carl Maria von Weber to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose Scheherazade dates from 1888, and Maurice Ravel set its stories, and illustrators from Gustave Doré to Edmund Dulac drew them. New translations continue, among them Husain Haddawy's of the Leiden text (1990) and Yasmine Seale's (2021).