In brief
A king, betrayed by his wife, marries a new woman every night and has her killed every morning. After three years the daughter of his wazir, Shahrazad, insists on marrying him, and on her wedding night begins a story she does not finish. He lets her live to hear the end. She keeps this up for a thousand and one nights.
Everything else about the Nights is unstable. It has no author, no original and no agreed contents. The earliest surviving scrap is a few lines of the ninth century, the fullest Arabic texts were still growing in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and Aladdin and Ali Baba are in no Arabic source older than the French translation that first printed them. The useful question about any page of it is who was telling it, and to whom.
What she asks of a listener
The frame starts with two royal brothers and two unfaithful wives. Shahryar’s answer is to marry “a maiden every night” and kill her “the next morning”, “for the space of three years” (the frame). By the book’s own figures that is about a thousand women, and the telling that follows takes about as long as the killing did.
Shahrazad is introduced as a reader, said to have “collected a thousand books”, and she has had enough: “how long shall this slaughter of women endure?” Her father tries to stop her with a story, the Bull and the Ass. It does not work. The first tale in the Nights fails, and the woman it was aimed at goes on to tell all the others.
The plan needs a second person. Her sister Dunyazad is to ask for a story. At dawn comes the sentence on which the book turns: “What is this to that I could tell thee on the coming night, were I to live and the King would spare me?” The king says to himself, “By Allah, I will not slay her, until I shall have heard the rest of her tale.”
Her listener is a murderer, and for a thousand nights she does not say so to his face. She tells him stories about what he is doing. In her first tale three old men buy a merchant’s life from a jinni, a third at a time, with stories (the Trader and the Jinni). In her second a fisherman tells a jinni who means to kill him about a king who killed the healer who cured him. The tellers keep promising that a story, “were it graven with gravers on the eye corners, it were a warner to whoso would be warned”.
So a reader sits where Shahryar sits, wanting the next one, and the book asks whether wanting the next one can change anybody. The endings disagree. In the text linked here she produces three sons and begs for her life, and he answers, “I pardoned thee before the coming of these children” (Conclusion). The tenth-century summary in the Fihrist has her show him a child. In other manuscripts she tells him his own story without the names until he recognises it. Burton’s text ends with a seven-day feast and a later ruler finding the tales in his treasury in thirty volumes. The dead women get no memorial in it.
There is no original
The oldest notices describe a translation of something lost. In the tenth century the Baghdad cataloguer Ibn al-Nadim recorded a Persian book, the Hazar Afsan or Thousand Stories, with a frame in which a bloody king is held off by a clever wife, and thought poorly of it: “it is truly a coarse book, without warmth in the telling”. Al-Mas‘udi in the same century says the Arabic version was generally known as Alf Layla, A Thousand Nights. The Persian book has not survived. The oldest physical evidence is a ninth-century fragment, found by the scholar Nabia Abbott in the middle of the twentieth century: a few lines headed The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights. The full title of a thousand and one first appears in Cairo in the twelfth century.
After that come two families of manuscripts. The Syrian family is short and old. Its chief witness is the Galland manuscript in Paris, now dated to between 1450 and 1593, with 281 nights and about 36 tales; Muhsin Mahdi’s critical edition of 1984 rests on it. The Egyptian family is long and late. It was still taking in stories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and reached print at Bulaq in 1835 and in the second Calcutta edition of 1839 to 1842, which Burton’s text follows.
Mahdi suspected that European demand pushed compilers to fill the number, though adding has always been how this book lives. “Complete” means the fullest version of one late recension. A reader who takes Burton’s sixteen volumes for the true book and a reader who takes Haddawy’s short Syrian text for it are making the same mistake from opposite ends.
The orphan tales
Antoine Galland began publishing his French Mille et une nuits in 1704, working from that Syrian manuscript. On 17 March 1709 he met Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite from Aleppo who had come to Paris as servant and interpreter to the traveller Paul Lucas. That spring Galland’s diary records stories told by Hanna, probably in French, among them Aladdin and Ali Baba. They entered the printed Nights without any acknowledgement of him.
No Arabic version of either tale older than Galland is known, which is why they are called orphans. Nineteenth-century scholars thought they had found the parents in two Arabic manuscripts of Aladdin in Paris, and Hermann Zotenberg printed one of them in 1888. Mahdi showed that both were back-translations of Galland’s French. Burton took his Aladdin from Zotenberg, so the Aladdin in the free text, set in “a city of the cities of China”, is English from an Arabic made from French. His Ali Baba has its “Open, O Simsim!” by another route. His foreword says his first idea was “to tender the French text into Arabic, and then to retranslate it into English”, which he found wanting, and that he then turned to versions in Hindustani.
Diyab’s own autobiography, written in 1763, came into English in 2021 as The Book of Travels, translated by Elias Muhanna. Ruth Bottigheimer and Paulo Lemos Horta argue that Diyab should be understood as the author of some of these stories, and that Aladdin draws on his own life. The balance of his invention and Galland’s rewriting is still argued over. The outline is not. The tales the world calls Arabian were told by an Arab, in Paris, to a Frenchman who left him out.
Stories inside stories
The form is the book’s engine: a story that opens into another story, because somebody in it needs to win time or make a point. Shahrazad tells of a fisherman who frees a jinni. The fisherman tells the jinni of King Yunan and the Sage Duban. King Yunan tells his wazir of King Sindibad and his falcon, and the wazir answers with a prince and an ogress. Each teller is arguing for somebody’s death or life. Shahrazad closes it with the hook that keeps the machine turning: “this is not more wondrous than the story of” the next.
- The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad. A closed house, a rule against asking questions and three one-eyed strangers, each with a tale that buys his head.
- The Three Apples. A woman’s body in a chest and a wazir given three days to find the killer or hang.
- The Hunchback. A corpse passed from house to house, then a contest of stories before the king, ending in a barber who will not stop talking.
- Sindbad the Seaman and the City of Brass. A merchant’s seven voyages, and an expedition for Solomon’s bottled jinn through a dead city.
Persia, Baghdad, Cairo
The usual account has layers: a small core of Indian and Persian stories in Arabic, probably by the early eighth century; Arab stories added in Iraq, including tales of Harun al-Rashid; and from the thirteenth century more from Syria and Egypt, many concerned with sex, magic and low life.
The Baghdad of the book is a storyteller’s Baghdad, where Harun goes down at night in disguise to “question the common folk”. The later Cairo stories are full of police chiefs and sharpers (the Chief of Police of Cairo), and the last tale is about a cobbler “who lived by patching old shoes”.
The two cities meet in a very short tale. A ruined man of Baghdad dreams, “Verily thy fortune is in Cairo; go thither and seek it.” He goes, is beaten as a burglar, and tells his dream to the police chief, who laughs and says he has dreamed of treasure in a house in Baghdad. It is the man’s own, and he goes home and digs (the Ruined Man).
Burton’s English
The free text here is the only complete English one on Project Gutenberg: Sir Richard Burton’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, ten volumes of 1885 and six Supplemental Nights of 1886 to 1888, sold to a thousand subscribers with a false “Benares” on the title pages.
Burton scorns “the bald literalism of Lane” and carries over every turn of phrase, like an army’s dust “walling the horizon”. To that end he mixes archaism, slang and foreign words: “hight”, “whilome”, “Ensorcelled”. It also draws on John Payne’s translation of 1882 to 1884; in 1906 Thomas Wright claimed three-quarters of it came from Payne, a figure others dispute.
It keeps the division into nights, the poems and the rhymed prose, and it does not hide what the Arabic says. But its voice is one Victorian’s and not the storytellers’.
What is offensive in it
The book is frank about sex, and adult sexual comedy runs all through it. The harder matter is who gets despised. Women are repeatedly treated as a class of traitors, which suits the king’s view even as Shahrazad disproves it. Black men are sexual threat and comic horror: the betrayals in the frame involve “a black cook of loathsome aspect” and “a big slobbering blackamoor”, and in the Three Apples the lie that gets a wife killed comes from “a great ugly black slave”. Some of this contempt belongs to the medieval tellers. Burton’s words for it are his own.
His notes add a second book of the same kind. Note 7 on the frame makes a claim about the bodies of Black men, on the strength of a measurement he says he took, and offers it as science. The Terminal Essay has a long section headed “Pederasty”, with a theory of a “Sotadic Zone” where sex between males is supposedly climatic. Some of the material there and elsewhere in the set involves the young, and any reader should skip it without guilt.
The other free versions avoid this by cutting or by stopping. Edward William Lane says in his preface, reprinted in the Gutenberg volume: “I have thought it right to omit such tales, anecdotes, &c., as are comparatively uninteresting or on any account objectionable.” Gutenberg holds only the first of his three volumes and the first four of Payne’s nine (volume I), and Andrew Lang’s is a selection for children. So the honest free choice is Burton, with eyes open.
The people
Shahrazad
Shahrazad is the only person in the book who knows what the book is for. She volunteers, plans and delivers, and it ends by praising her as “chaste, pure, ingenuous and pious”.
Shahryar
Shahryar is an audience with the power of death, and in the end he says “never, whilst I live, shall I cease to blame myself for the past”.
Readers and critics
Jorge Luis Borges saw more in the translators than anyone, in his essay of 1936, “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights”. He treats them as a hostile dynasty, each writing against the last: Lane against Galland, Burton against Lane.
In “Partial Magic in the Quixote” Borges claims that on the 602nd night the king hears the queen tell his own story, so that the telling could go round forever. Some scholars treat that night as a hoax. Evelyn Fishburn linked it to a real tale, the Two Kings and the Wazir’s Daughters, and Burton’s note says that it “is that of Shahrazad told in the third person”, though not on that night (Supplemental volume 2, note 446). The loop is in the tradition; Borges supplied the vertigo.
For the history, start with Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994). Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic (2011) follows it through European ideas of magic, and Horta’s Marvellous Thieves (2017) makes the case for Diyab.
Afterlives
Galland’s version, which played down the dark material and played up magic, shaped what Europeans meant by the book. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote his Scheherazade (1888).
Borges translated the Ruined Man as “The Story of the Two Dreamers”. Egyptian writers took the book back, with Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play Shahrazad (1934) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days (1979). Disney’s Aladdin (1992, remade 2019) means that probably the most widely known story from the Nights today is one Hanna Diyab told in Paris.
How to read it
- Know what the free text is. Burton is the one complete set on Gutenberg, across sixteen ebooks: volumes 1 to 10 and supplemental volumes 1 to 6, numbered 3435 to 3450. It is an old transcription, and stray breaks show, such as “by gone” and “pow ders”.
- Skip the notes on a first pass. They are where most of the worst of Burton lives.
- Buy a modern one if you can. Husain Haddawy (1990) translates Mahdi’s Syrian text. Malcolm and Ursula Lyons’s three Penguin volumes (2008) cover the Calcutta II text with Aladdin and Ali Baba, though they trim somewhat. Yasmine Seale’s selection in The Annotated Arabian Nights, edited by Paulo Lemos Horta (Liveright, 2021), gives Diyab his due and removes the sexist and racist references of earlier versions. N. J. Dawood’s Penguin selection (1954, revised 1973) drops the poems.
- Start here. The frame, the Fisherman, the Porter and the Three Ladies, the Three Apples, the Hunchback, then Sindbad and the City of Brass, the Ruined Man and Ma’aruf, and only then Aladdin and Ali Baba.
Read next
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (about 1349 to 1353). Stories told to hold off death, but with ten tellers, rules and a way home.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944). Fiction by the reader who understood best what an endless book does.
- Hanna Diyab, The Book of Travels (written 1763, English 2021). The man behind the orphan tales, in his own voice.