Is 1001 Nights and Arabian Nights the same?

No collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The original collection only contained about 40 stories and was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine Galland who got a hold of this original manuscript in the 1690s and translated it into French. They were an instant hit. But some of the most popular stories, such as Aladdin and Ali Baba didn’t appear in that original manuscript. The recent discovery of the real origin of these most famous stories has transformed our understanding of One Thousand and One Nights.

Paulo Lemos Horta is an associate professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights

Transcript

Zachary Davis: Human beings love stories. And no collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: They're incredibly influential around the world, from the Middle East, to Brazil, to China, to Africa, to the United States.

Zachary Davis: Modern editions of One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes also called Arabian Nights, contain anywhere from a few hundred stories to 1,001 stories or more. And in part thanks to a certain 1992 Disney animated film featuring Robin Williams, the most famous story in this collection is Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.

Paulo Lemos Horta: Although in reality, you know, One Thousand and One Nights is a grab bag of many different kinds of stories: historical chronicles, you know, stories featuring conflict between Christians and Muslims, very domestic stories, men who fear being betrayed by women, men telling stories against women, women telling stories against men, sometimes nicely wrapped in framing stories that pit them up against each other to to prove the guilt of the other. And they're really very different kinds of stories. And they're not all fantastical and they're not all marvelous in the way that we, in the West, often associate the canon of the One Thousand and One Nights with. 

My name is Paulo Lemos Horta. I am a professor of literature and creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. 

Zachary Davis: The original collection only contained about 40 stories. It was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine Galland who got a hold of this original manuscript in the 1690s.

Galland began translating and publishing these stories in French. They were an instant hit. But some of the most popular stories, such as Aladdin and Ali Baba didn’t appear in that original manuscript.

Paulo Lemos Horta: I thought from when I was a kid, these were the stories my mom had told me, my family had lived in the Middle East before I was born, I imagined these were authentic stories as real as the Persian carpets that I grew up with. And I was quite shocked to discover that the first inclusion of these stories, these most famous stories of the Arabian Nights happened in the early 1700s. Antoine Galland, the first French translater of the Arabian Nights, has been for three centuries, credited as being the author of the Arabian Nights, as we know them, the creator, the inventor of the Thousand and One Nights in particular, because his addition was the first to include Aladdin and Ali Baba and these most famous stories. 

Zachary Davis: Not only were these two stories not in the original Arabic manuscript, they weren’t in any Arabic manuscript. For about 300 years, it seemed they came from Galland himself. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: But I went to Abu Dhabi because I thought this could not be the case. It couldn't be the case that these stories like Aladdin and Ali Baba didn't have an authentic Arabic manuscript, that they only were added in French. This seemed to me, it was too disappointing. My childhood would have been a lie. 

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with professor Paulo Lemos Horta to discuss One Thousand and One Nights.

Today there are many editions of One Thousand and One Nights, each containing a different number of stories. But typically, they all begin with the same frame story—the story of Scheherazade. The tale begins with a woman named Scheherazade and her king, Shahryar.

PauloLemos Horta: Her misogynist, paranoid, jealous king who had been betrayed by his previous wife, had made this resolution to marry a new young virgin every night and have her killed in the morning so he can never be betrayed again. So Scheherazade volunteers, she's a vizier's daughter and she volunteers to marry Shahryar. And of course her father, the vizier, doesn't want that to happen, but she has a plan and her plan is to tell the story, but not to finish it, not to allow the story to come to an end. In fact, she must pause a story in some moment of suspense, inventing the cliffhanger many, many centuries ago. 

Zachary Davis: Scheherazade’s life hangs on her stories. If she finishes the story, king Shahryar will no longer have any use for her and will kill her the next morning. So as long as she keeps the king entertained, her life is safe. Cleverly, Scheherazade brought her sister along to the king’s palace, to help her keep the stories going. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: So her sister, who has joined her in the marital bedroom, could ask, “Oh, Scheherazade, continue your story from last night or tell a new story”, so she could live another night, basically. 

Zachary Davis: One of the main reasons these stories became famous in the West is because of the French translator Antoine Galland.

Antoine Galland was born in 1646 in northern France. He attended school in Noyon where he studied Greek and Latin. His facility with classical languages landed him a job with the French embassy on an archaeological expedition in Istanbul. 

Why Istanbul? Because it was once Constantinople, a Greek city, and Galland’s job included copying inscriptions, sketching historical monuments, and collecting coins. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: He had this amazing mind blowing experience when he was in Istanbul. He wasn't supposed to be collecting works of Arabic literature or Turkish or Persian. He was supposed to be just digging up Greek and Roman classical stuff. 

But he couldn't help himself. And contrary to the instructions that he had, Antoine Galland fell in love with books in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and started collecting them. 

He happens upon a manuscript of what we now know as Sinbad. And he asks contacts he has in the Levant for more. And that's when he gets the manuscript of the Arabian Nights. 

Zachary Davis: Galland took these manuscripts back with him to France. He translated and published the story of Sinbad the Sailor in 1701. It was a huge hit, and Galland decided to continue with the other tales. He published the first batch of stories of One Thousand and One Nights in 1704. It was the perfect moment for a book like this in France.

Paulo Lemos Horta: Mother Goose and the great French fairy tale fad and craze had just started, I mean, 10 years before in 1697. So there was an appetite for certain kinds of stories. And he was able to spin the stories of the One Thousand and One Nights, which we in the West now know as the Arabian Nights, he was able to spend them as kind of Oriental fairy tales or Oriental tales or fables. 

So Galland edited out a lot of the more mature content, the sex, the orgies, the very first frame tale begins of an orgy. He basically adapted these stories from Arabic in his manuscript, kind of made them fit a little bit, the tastes and the conventions of his own time.

Zachary Davis: The Arabic manuscript that Galland was translating wasn’t the version we know today. It only contained about 40 stories and was missing two very important tales.

Paulo Lemos Horta: The Arabic manuscript does not have Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, or Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. 

Zachary Davis: According to Galland, these stories came from somewhere else, from a man he wrote about in his private diary.

Paulo Lemos Horta: He records that a Syrian named Hanna would have come to him, and they would have met a series of times in 1709, in spring, summer of 1709, and told him these stories. 

Zachary Davis: This man was named Hanna Diyab. Galland wrote that Diyab told him the stories of Aladdin, and Ali Baba, and he published them along with the stories he translated from the original Arabic manuscript. So in his diary, he credits Diyab. But not in the published book.

Paulo Lemos Horta: When Galand published the stories, he makes no such acknowledgement, right? So these stories are passed off as sort of genuine Arabian Nights stories, or One Thousand and One Nights stories, if you will. 

Zachary Davis: So, Galland says one thing in his diary, and something else in his published manuscript. Readers didn’t know which version to believe.

Paulo Lemos Horta: So what we knew was simply that these stories appeared in French. And, yeah, there were these traces in his private diary after he died, people discovered the diary. But, you know, that could have been anything. 

Zachary Davis: But in 1993, a key piece to the puzzle was discovered.

Paulo Lemos Horta: It just so happened that now within this last generation, the manuscript came up, was discovered, more accurately rediscovered, of all places in the Vatican library. It turns out that this is the book of travels. This is the memoir of the storyteller who indeed did come from Aleppo to Paris and was in Paris in spring summer of 1709. 

Zachary Davis: This was Diyab’s personal diary—and it confirmed Galland’s private account. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: So for 300 years, all we had was the published translation making no acknowledgement of Hanna Diyab, no acknowledgement of the storyteller from Aleppo, just just presenting Ali Baba and Aladdin and a lot of these famous stories in French, no Arabic original.

And now in addition to Galland’s diary, where he did acknowledge some kind of storyteller named Hanna from Aleppo, we have Hanna’s own version of the story. So I mean, this is really what I've written about. But more importantly, it's just so exciting to see the same story of storytelling from both the French and the Arab perspective. And that's what we have now with the storyteller of Ali Baba and Aladdin.

Zachary Davis: So Hanah Diyab. What do we know about him?

Paulo Lemos Horta: So we knew very little, but now we know a lot because we know we have his book. Unfortunately, it is missing the first five folios. So we don't know exactly if his father's dead or he's just missing. But a little bit like Aladdin, he you know, he's missing his father, right, Aladdin’s father dies.

And a little bit like Aladdin, Hanna Diyab was expected to apprentice in a family trade. He had four or five older brothers and they were all apprenticing with French merchants in Aleppo—Aleppo, an incredibly important crossroads of trade between East and West, Asia and Europe at the time. And hence, a place where stories connected, and the stories traveled from from east to west and and back again. 

Zachary Davis: These French merchants helped facilitate trade between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. They were in the business of buying and selling goods like silks, spices, oils, tea, ivory, and cotton. 

As a young man, Diyab worked for the French merchants in Syria and learned to speak French and Italian. Diyab’s linguistic skills caught the attention of a mysterious Frenchman.

Paulo Lemos Horta: So this man, this mysterious man named Paul Lucas, he takes basically one look at Hanna Diyab and says, “Be my guide. Come with me, I'm in need of a guide. I used to have one who could translate for me, but I, Paul Lucas, I don't speak Arabic. I need an interpreter.” And he says, “I'll take you all the way to Paris. I'll give you a great job. You'll be the Arabic librarian for the King of Versailles.” 

And so Hannah has to make up his mind and decides perhaps against his misgivings, to join him on this adventure across the Mediterranean. And Lucas smuggles a mummy out of Egypt very illegally and all sorts of, you know, weird and fantastical things happen at least in Hanna’s mind.  

So I think there's something very genuine about the kind of miracle and magic of the stories that he related.

Zachary Davis: There is no evidence that Diyab was ever a professional storyteller, but he came from a land of stories.

Paulo Lemos Horta: We know that there were over 60 cafes in Aleppo, many of them storytelling cafes. The way you could get customers to come in was to hire storytellers. 

And the storyteller, you know, damn well better not finish his story. The storyteller should know, be smart enough to interrupt it at the moment of greatest suspense and then just make a beeline for the exit. And customers would try and tackle him and force him to finish his story. Because what they didn't want to do, is have to come back the next day and pay for another cup of coffee and listen to the rest of the story. 

And we know from traveler's reports from this period, you did not have to be a professional storyteller to have the stories in your head. 

Even those who couldn't read, there are documented instances that they had many stories in their heads and that they could go on at great length with these intricate stories, these intricate embedded stories with framing narratives and story within story within story. So Aleppo was a city of stories and they came from east and west. And, of course, merchants came from east and west. 

So the world of Aladdin, whether or not it's actually based on Hanna Diyab’s own life, it certainly comes out of the fabric of his of his life, of his city, of the mercantile values that mattered to him and Aladdin's fantasies are an overlap of his own, or there are his own, if you will. 

Zachary Davis: It seems like that mercantile culture shapes a lot of the flavor of some of the way that Hanna in particular told his stories.

Paulo Lemos Horta:  For sure. And in fact, the original Arabic stories in the manuscript that Galland would get the most recurrent protagonist is a merchant. The typical story is, you're a merchant. Your dad was fairly successful. You inherited a lot from him. And then, of course, what you do, you're young, you want to have friends, you want to be surrounded by, you know, attractive people. So you squander all your inheritance, you're left with nothing. 

So, you know, the profligate son of the successful merchant who squanders everything and has to make the money again, that's like the plot or for the stories and the original cycle of tales in the One Thousand and One Nights. 

And curiously, we tend to view the world in a very anachronistic way and imagine that Europe had some kind of position of supremacy vis a vis the Levant, right, in 1700. But we have to kind of rewind. This was like a hundred years before Napoleon invaded Egypt, before the sort of colonial enterprise. And it was the East that was associated in Versailles with luxury, with sophistication, and with luxury goods. There's even one historian that claims that the court of Versailles bankrupted itself and its need and its desire for these Eastern goods, right. 

So it's interesting that the kinds of letters of commission that Paul Lucas had on him from the court were not just official commissions from, you know, the botanist at court, or a scientist but you know, the adolescent princesses of Versaille, his patroness was this teenage girl, the Duchess of Burgundy, who wanted him to bring these massive diamonds and rubies and things like that, and these jewels back from the “Orient”. So, yeah, I mean, commerce is key. And really, it's what defined the relationship between Paris and Constantinople, now Istanbul, in those days before Napoleon, before his invasion of Egypt, before the French Revolution.

Zachary Davis: Part of the reason these stories were so popular in Europe was because they were new and exciting. And thematically, they were different from the fairy tales European audiences were used to.

Paulo Lemos Horta: A lot of fairy tales were, you know, tales of blue bloods who somehow lost their fortune, but you know, their virtue shows through, their royal blood shows through, kinds of stories. A lot of the romances and courtly love tradition in the West dealt with aristocratic characters and landowners and feudal lords and all that. And there's something about these stories of the Arabian Nights, both in the original cycle of stories that the French translator had in his manuscript, and the stories told by Hanna Diyab, the guide, the servant, these stories often deal with the middle class, right. 

And there is something about making them the protagonist. And it’s them, it's not, “Oh, I'm actually, you know, I'm a rich aristocrat who fell on hard times.” No, the actual protagonist of these stories, these are stories of social ascension. It's almost uncanny to the point that a lot of researchers for a long time, until very recently assumed, “This has to be the French. Given the social upheaval of the 1700s that would lead to the French Revolution. These fantasies of social ascent, like the story of Aladdin; poor tailor’s son, goes from nothing to become a prince, this has to be just the French projecting their own social anxieties.” 

And what's fascinating is that the original stories, both in Arabic and the ones which were told by Hanna Diyab in the early 1700s, are already stories of social ascent. And they already have characters who are dealing with the fluidity of social relations in important mercantile cities. And that's something which is lovely about tales, of course, of commerce, because there's always that possibility of making it big. And some of the stories in the original Arabic core go back a millennia. And they were already these stories that were these entrancing stories of the possibility of social ascension. 

Right, Sinbad is actually a good example. The story that exists in Arabic may or may not have been part of the One Thousand and One Nights. The French translator made sure that it became part of the One Thousand and One Nights. But it's something that appeals to people in cities that do business, “the deal”. Even “the con”. Some of the protagonists are these wonderful con artists. One of them is Delilah, who's a con woman who is just amazing, one of my favorite characters in the Arabian Nights. But there is something very urban and mercantile and commercial about these stories and that really was a revolution for storytellers and readers and editors and publishers in Paris in the 1700s. 

Not just sort of sophisticated poetry for the court, for the people who have the education to understand the rhyme schemes and appreciate your variations and your improvisations upon them. Right. But entertaining stories that the average person could listen to. And we have an incredible documentation of how, if Hannah was a servant, some of the stories he told, Aladdin in particular, were memorized by illiterate servants in the 1700s, and then they would tell the story. 

And then 60 years later, there'd be all these sort of homegrown variants of the Aladdin story that had been planted by this illiterate servant who had memorized a story because she had loved it. Some of these people could read, some of them couldn't read. But they loved the stories of the Arabian Nights. So we know that those stories were not just beloved at court by the patronesses of the literary salon who may have dealt directly with a French translator, but they really traveled very quickly throughout European society. And I'm not sure that could have happened if these had been stories just of aristocrats.

Zachary Davis: What do we know about the origins of the older Arabic tales, like, how did they eventually get into that Arabic manuscript that Galland did have access to? 

Paulo Lemos Horta: We know that, in all likelihood, a Persian story collection, and perhaps even its sibling story collections were imported from Persia into the Arab world. And as early as the 9th century common era. And our oldest manuscripts, including the one that Galland had at his disposal, which coincidentally is the oldest one that we at least can prove in public holdings, it's at the Bibliothèque nationale, the national library in Paris. So we're talking about stories that existed in some written form as early as the 9th century in Arabic and written down in the manuscripts that we have. You know, through the 13th and 14th century. 

Zachary Davis: Let's now move to its afterlife in the West and then and then beyond. So, it comes out in France, and you've mentioned it was a kind of, you know, just mania for these stories. 

Paulo Lemos Horta: Scheherezade is perhaps the most powerful literary storyteller of any gender, and very famous and reclaimed over and over again by women and feminist writers from throughout history, right. So I find it fascinating that there was a widow, a publishing widow, had a hand in publishing the Arabian Nights. I find that fascinating. 

So Paris was a place where women could exert literary power as tastemakers. They did in the publishing area, and they also did in the literary salon. And we know from the French translator’s correspondents that he spent a fair amount of his time enticing them and sweetening the deal and sort of circulating the stories that would appear in the next volume in manuscript form among these patronesses of these literary salons. Right. These powerful women, in the aristocratic court before the revolution. 

So it's fascinating that he knew he had to get the sort of influencers of the day on board. Right. And they made it a sensation in the court. Even when it was just in manuscript form. And the fact that it made it into print, really allowed that interest to transcend the court. And as I mentioned, we have these documented cases of people who could read and who couldn't read, who loved these stories so much that they would memorize them and take them into small towns. And now we have these fascinating German, French, and other European variants of these stories which arrived from the oral storytelling of Hanna Diyab.

And it's fitting that they would continue to be told. What I find amazing is how quickly they entered the mainstream and they just sort of slipped into the culture. By the late 1700s, by the 1760s, these stories were published often separately, a little Aladdin chapbook, or a little Ali Baba chapbook. 

And sometimes they were set in France or they were set in London. And so there was something about these stories, about these stories of social ascent, of ordinary guise and extraordinary circumstances, coming into contact with the magic mountain or that wonderful lamp, the enslaved woman who rises. These stories just caught on and they made it onto stage very quickly and they made it into collections of fairy tales. And often they were not associated with the Arabian Nights. It was just like, you know, like Jack and the Beanstalk and Aladdin. So they just made it so quickly. So it's really difficult to find a parallel, I guess, with this degree of market penetration, if you will. Really there’s no other story collection as widely disseminated perhaps other than the Bible—that other collection of Middle Eastern tales.

Zachary Davis: I mean, it seems to me that Ali Baba and Aladdin were more successfully spread around the world than any of their European counterparts, that, you know, they conquered the world through the quality of the story. Do you think that that’s true?

Paulo Lemos Horta: Yeah, and I wonder sometimes if the fact that it was an Arab storyteller and a Frenchman writing the stories down and kind of you know, they were both contributing elements of it, the Frenchmen are certainly trying to render it in his style, but the stories and the characters and the sort of interior monologue and the motivations came from the Arab. Maybe there's something about the syncretism which made the stories a bit more malleable and the settings which later might seem exotic, but it may have helped these stories travel because a lot of people from, you know, Brazil to China associate the Middle East with trade and commerce. Right. If we think about all the Lebanese and Syrians who went to Brazil in the 19th century and in the 20th century. I mean, a lot of these places associate, you know, that’s their connection to the Middle East. It's trade. 

These stories have traveled, Ali Baba and Aladdin, have traveled so widely and it's just a misunderstanding, we're so myopic in the West, we imagine, “Oh Disney is so powerful.” Well, a lot of my students first learned of Aladdin from a Bangladeshi cartoon. As much as we imagine Disney is all powerful and market share, other countries have their own traditions. What's amazing is that the Arabian Nights tends to be represented, be it the Turkish soap opera, the Brazilian soap opera, the Mexican soap opera, right, which have all dealt with the Arabian Nights and Scheherezade, and modernized it. 

People are attached to the versions of these stories that they've encountered in their cultural context, be it in Amharic or in Mandarin. And really, we also have to remember, Disney didn't invent the IP. They made a film based on Aladdin because it had been like Sleeping Beauty, one of the two or three most frequently performed stories on the English stage for over two centuries. So it's not it's not that, “Well, Disney took something that was not popular and made it popular.” No, no, no, no. They made a movie on an incredibly widely circulated story thinking, “Well, you know, maybe people are more likely to watch it because this is such a popular story.” And, you know, sometimes I just get sad when people imagine that Disney invented this story. It’s such a Eurocentric way of thinking about how stories travel. 

So I think that's really what's fascinating about these stories. It's like going into the history of Ali Baba, right? How many Bollywood versions over how many generations? You know, and there are these English film versions like Chin Chin Chow was based on the musical version of Ali Baba which was incredibly popular. And before that, there were French operas based on Ali Baba. It's been made into musicals so often. And this has not been, I should say, restricted the Western world. Musicals that were based on stories from the Arabian Nights in Beirut and you know, and what we now call Lebanon as well, right in the 19th century. So they were making Arabian Nights stories into musicals in the 19th century. Disney does it in 1992 and it's like, “Oh, Disney first had that idea.” Well, that tells us more about our ignorance than about the Arabian Nights.

Zachary Davis: How did One Thousand and One Nights change the world?

Paulo Lemos Horta: I guess it's with these tales of, you know, enslaved women and ordinary guys who, set against these extraordinary circumstances, and I would put as much weight on ordinariness, lowly social status, or common social status of many of these characters, as I would on the kind of fantastical adventures that they go on. I really think it's that relatability that is so key to their consistent appeal. 

There's something about that mix, French and Syrian at once, that perhaps allows these stories to travel so widely and so successfully. Whereas I'm not sure a purely national story could have quite become as global, you know.

Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du. Our theme song is by Ian Coss, and our branding is by Dan Pecci. We’re a member of LitHub Radio.

Writ Large is a Lyceum original production. You can find us on our website, writlarge.fm. There, you’ll find transcripts, links to the books we discussed, and more information about today’s guest.

Why is 1001 nights called Arabian Nights?

What is the other name of 1001 nights?

Are there 1001 stories in Arabian Nights?

Are Arabian Nights Persian?