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36-623: His story is found in the 277th through 279th nights of the Tales of the Arabian Nights ( The Book of One Thousand and One Nights ) the tale described him as a universal king who ruled over the world and the one who built the city of gold. Brothers Shadīd ( شديد ) and Shaddād are said to have reigned in turn over the 1,000 Adite tribes, each consisting of several thousand men. It is said Shaddad brutally subdued all Arabia and Iraq . Many Arab writers tell of an expedition of Shaddād that caused

72-483: A chance to dishonor him. Eventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade , the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear

108-547: A few hundred nights of storytelling, while others include 1001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose , although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains , although some are longer. Some of the stories commonly associated with the Arabian Nights —particularly " Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp " and " Ali Baba and

144-451: A group of travellers on an archaeological expedition across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city and attempt to recover a brass vessel that Solomon once used to trap a jinn , and, along the way, encounter a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants, life-like humanoid robots and automata , seductive marionettes dancing without strings, and a brass horseman robot who directs

180-470: A richly layered narrative texture. Versions differ, at least in detail, as to final endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life. The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases

216-467: A small group of historical figures from ninth-century Baghdad, including the caliph Harun al-Rashid (died 809), his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki (d. 803) and the licentious poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 813). Another cluster is a body of stories from late medieval Cairo in which are mentioned persons and places that date to as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two main Arabic manuscript traditions of

252-432: A story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing their life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy , and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen —and in all of these cases she turns out to be justified in her belief that

288-524: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . The Book of One Thousand and One Nights Features Types Types Features Clothing Genres Art music Folk Prose Islamic Poetry Genres Forms Arabic prosody National literatures of Arab States Concepts Texts Fictional Arab people South Arabian deities One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabic : أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ , Alf Laylah wa-Laylah )

324-825: Is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age . It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights , from the first English-language edition ( c.  1706–1721 ), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment . The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West Asia , Central Asia , South Asia , and North Africa . Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic , Sanskrit , Persian , and Mesopotamian literature. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from

360-729: Is represented in the Nights by certain animal stories, which reflect influence from ancient Sanskrit fables . The influence of the Panchatantra and Baital Pachisi is particularly notable. It is possible that the influence of the Panchatantra is via a Sanskrit adaptation called the Tantropakhyana . Only fragments of the original Sanskrit form of the Tantropakhyana survive, but translations or adaptations exist in Tamil, Lao, Thai, and Old Javanese . The frame story follows

396-579: The Hezār Afsān has survived, so its exact relationship with the existing later Arabic versions remains a mystery. Apart from the Scheherazade frame story, several other tales have Persian origins, although it is unclear how they entered the collection. These stories include the cycle of "King Jali'ad and his Wazir Shimas" and "The Ten Wazirs or the History of King Azadbakht and his Son" (derived from

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432-742: The Abbasid and Mamluk eras , while others, especially the frame story, are probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān ( Persian : هزار افسان , lit.   ' A Thousand Tales ' ), which in turn may be translations of older Indian texts . Common to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryar being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade , with one tale told over each night of storytelling. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained. Some editions contain only

468-708: The Canaanite migration, their settling in Syria, and the Shepherd invasion of Egypt. According to the Quran , Iram of the Pillars was a city of occult worshippers of stone idols, who defied the warnings of the prophet Hud . To punish them, God sent a drought. But the people would not repent, so they were destroyed by a furious wind, from which only prophet Hud and a few believers emerged. This Islam-related article

504-455: The Nights is extremely complex and modern scholars have made many attempts to untangle the story of how the collection as it currently exists came about. Robert Irwin summarises their findings: In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights

540-728: The One Thousand and One Nights was published in 1775. It contained an Egyptian version of The Nights known as "ZER" ( Zotenberg 's Egyptian Recension) and 200 tales. No copy of this edition survives, but it was the basis for an 1835 edition by Bulaq, published by the Egyptian government. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include

576-480: The 'Leiden edition' (1984). The Leiden Edition, prepared by Muhsin Mahdi , is the only critical edition of 1001 Nights to date, believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available. Texts of the Egyptian tradition emerge later and contain many more tales of much more varied content; a much larger number of originally independent tales have been incorporated into

612-477: The Caliph Harun al-Rashid . Also, perhaps from the tenth century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation [...] Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell

648-557: The Forty Thieves "—were not part of the collection in the original Arabic versions, but were instead added to the collection by French translator Antoine Galland after he heard them from Syrian writer Hanna Diyab during the latter's visit to Paris . Other stories, such as " The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor ", had an independent existence before being added to the collection. The main frame story concerns Shahryār, whom

684-552: The Nights are known: the Syrian and the Egyptian. The Syrian tradition is primarily represented by the earliest extensive manuscript of the Nights , a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript now known as the Galland Manuscript . It and surviving copies of it are much shorter and include fewer tales than the Egyptian tradition. It is represented in print by the so-called Calcutta I (1814–1818) and most notably by

720-495: The Persian Hezār Afsān , explaining the frame story it employs: a bloodthirsty king kills off a succession of wives after their wedding night. Eventually one has the intelligence to save herself by telling him a story every evening, leaving each tale unfinished until the next night so that the king will delay her execution. However, according to al-Nadim, the book contains only 200 stories. He also writes disparagingly of

756-477: The broad outline of a concubine telling stories in order to maintain the interest and favour of a king—although the basis of the collection of stories is from the Panchatantra —with its original Indian setting. The Panchatantra and various tales from Jatakas were first translated into Persian by Borzūya in 570 CE; they were later translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa in 750 CE. The Arabic version

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792-506: The bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book's title. Devices found in Sanskrit literature such as frame stories and animal fables are seen by some scholars as lying at the root of the conception of the Nights . The motif of the wise young woman who delays and finally removes an impending danger by telling stories has been traced back to Indian sources. Indian folklore

828-457: The collection over the centuries, most of them after the Galland manuscript was written, and were being included as late as in the 18th and 19th centuries. All extant substantial versions of both recensions share a small common core of tales: The texts of the Syrian recension do not contain much beside that core. It is debated which of the Arabic recensions is more "authentic" and closer to

864-425: The collection's literary quality, observing that "it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling". In the same century Al-Masudi also refers to the Hezār Afsān , saying the Arabic translation is called Alf Khurafa ('A Thousand Entertaining Tales'), but is generally known as Alf Layla ('A Thousand Nights'). He mentions the characters Shirāzd (Scheherazade) and Dināzād. No physical evidence of

900-612: The conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques , and various forms of erotica . Numerous stories depict jinn , ghouls , ape people, sorcerers , magicians , and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally. Common protagonists include

936-503: The historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid , his Grand Vizier , Jafar al-Barmaki , and the famous poet Abu Nuwas , despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire , in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of their own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in

972-571: The king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life. A number of stories within the One Thousand and One Nights also feature science fiction elements. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam , and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction; along

1008-530: The mid-20th century, the scholar Nabia Abbott found a document with a few lines of an Arabic work with the title The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights , dating from the ninth century. This is the earliest known surviving fragment of the Nights . The first reference to the Arabic version under its full title The One Thousand and One Nights appears in Cairo in the 12th century. Professor Dwight Reynolds describes

1044-405: The narrator calls a " Sasanian king" ruling in "India and China". Shahryār is shocked to learn that his brother's wife is unfaithful. Discovering that his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has

1080-416: The original: the Egyptian ones have been modified more extensively and more recently, and scholars such as Muhsin Mahdi have suspected that this was caused in part by European demand for a "complete version"; but it appears that this type of modification has been common throughout the history of the collection, and independent tales have always been added to it. The first printed Arabic-language edition of

1116-450: The party towards the ancient city. "The Ebony Horse" features a robot in the form of a flying mechanical horse controlled using keys that could fly into outer space and towards the Sun, while the "Third Qalandar's Tale" also features a robot in the form of an uncanny boatman . "The City of Brass" and "The Ebony Horse" can be considered early examples of proto-science fiction. The history of

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1152-513: The seventh-century Persian Bakhtiyārnāma ). In the 1950s, the Iraqi scholar Safa Khulusi suggested (on internal rather than historical evidence) that the Persian writer Ibn al-Muqaffa' was responsible for the first Arabic translation of the frame story and some of the Persian stories later incorporated into the Nights. This would place genesis of the collection in the eighth century. In

1188-434: The subsequent transformations of the Arabic version: Some of the earlier Persian tales may have survived within the Arabic tradition altered such that Arabic Muslim names and new locations were substituted for pre-Islamic Persian ones, but it is also clear that whole cycles of Arabic tales were eventually added to the collection and apparently replaced most of the Persian materials. One such cycle of Arabic tales centres around

1224-712: The way, he encounters societies of jinns , mermaids , talking serpents , talking trees , and other forms of life. In another Arabian Nights tale, the protagonist Abdullah the Fisherman gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater submarine society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, in that the underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist. Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them. "The City of Brass" features

1260-519: Was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early eighth century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla , or 'The Thousand Nights'. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights . The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the ninth or tenth century, this original core had Arab stories added to it—among them some tales about

1296-584: Was translated into several languages, including Syriac, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish. The earliest mentions of the Nights refer to it as an Arabic translation from a Persian book, Hezār Afsān (also known as Afsaneh or Afsana ), meaning 'The Thousand Stories'. In the tenth century, Ibn al-Nadim compiled a catalogue of books (the " Fihrist ") in Baghdad. He noted that the Sassanid kings of Iran enjoyed "evening tales and fables". Al-Nadim then writes about

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