Arabian Nights Entertainments

Arabian Nights Entertainments, or The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories written in Arabic, made known in Europe by the translation of Antoine Galland (1646–1715), whose version appeared between 1704 and 1717. The most celebrated version in English is that of Sir R. Burton, published 1885–8.

The tales derive from Indian, Persian, and Arabic sources. The framework (the story of the king who killed his wives successively on the morning after the consummation of their marriage, until he married the clever Scheherazade, who saved her life by the tales she told him) is taken from a lost book of Persian fairy tales, Hazar Afsanah (A Thousand Tales), which was translated into Arabic c. ad 850. Other stories of different origins were added at various dates by professional storytellers. Burton believed that the earliest stories, including that of Sindbad, dated back to the 8th cent., and the latest from the 16th cent. Hārūn-al-Rashīd (763–809), caliph of Baghdad, figures in many of the tales together with Jaffar, his vizier, and Mesrour, his executioner.

The stories captivated the European imagination, and contributed greatly to the vogue for Oriental tales in the 18th and early 19th cents.