Arabian Nights' Entertainments
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a famous collection of tales written originally in the Arabic language. The author is unknown, but it is supposed that they were composed about the time of the discovery of America. A French professor traveling in Asia found a manuscript copy early in the eighteenth century, and translated the tales into French. They were soon published in English and in other languages of Europe. Other Arabic manuscripts of the tales have been found since. The stories themselves are held together in a flimsy tale running to the effect that Queen Scheherazade, who was to be beheaded in the morning, began telling her liege lord an interesting tale which she broke off in the middle. Rather than miss the rest of the story, he deferred her execution until the following day; but repeating her tactics, she put off the evil day until one thousand and one nights had passed, each with its appropriate tale or portion of a tale. These tales are very delightful, and throw not a little light on the manners and customs of the Arabians. Some of the better known are The Story of the Porter; The Ladies of Bagdad, and the Three Calenders; The Story of the City of Brass; The Story of the Three Sisters; Abou Hassan, the Wag; Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; The Sultan of the Genii; Prince Houssain and the Carpet; Sinbad the Sailor; The Barber; The Man Who Repented When It Was Too Late. The Story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is usually included in the collection, but it was not in the original manuscript. The following stanza from Tennyson's Recollections of the Arabian Nights is expressive of the impressions made upon the mind of an imaginative boy by these weird eastern tales: When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free In the silken sail of infancy, The tide of time flow'd back with me, The forward-flowing tide of time; And many a sheeny summer morn, Adown the Tigris I was borne, By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold, High walled gardens green and old; True Mussulman was I and sworn, For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's guess in 1910 that the tales were "composed about the time of the discovery of America" has been pushed back by centuries: a paper fragment carrying the title Alf Layla (A Thousand Nights) has been dated to the ninth century, and the Arabic collection is now traced to a Persian book, Hazar Afsan, with stories accreting for a thousand years afterwards. The manuscript Antoine Galland worked from in the 1700s is a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian copy, and Muhsin Mahdi's critical edition of it in 1984 finally separated that core from the mass of later additions. Aiton correctly notes that Ali Baba was not in the original manuscript; scholars now say the same of Aladdin and other so-called "orphan tales," which Galland took down from a young Syrian traveller named Hanna Diyab in Paris in 1709 — Diyab's own memoir, unknown in 1910, has since been recovered and translated into English. The tales themselves remain as popular as Aiton says, though the notion that they "throw light on the manners and customs of the Arabians" is now treated warily as a European fantasy of the East.
Written for this edition, 2026.