The Arabian Nights: A Family Guide to the Thousand and One Nights

The Arabian Nights is a very old collection of stories, first gathered in Arabic. It is also called One Thousand and One Nights or The Thousand and One Nights, and in Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla. All the stories sit inside one big story: clever Scheherazade tells a new tale to King Shahryar every night, to save her life and change his heart.

What is the Arabian Nights about?

The book begins with a frame story. King Shahryar has been hurt by people he trusted, and he makes a cruel law against his brides. Scheherazade, the daughter of his vizier, marries him anyway. Each night she tells him a story and stops at an exciting moment when the sun comes up. The king spares her for one more day so he can hear the end. You can read it in our prologue.

Inside that frame are tales of every kind: magic and jinn, sea voyages, clever thieves, kings in disguise, love stories, funny stories and fables about animals. Often a character in one story starts telling another story, like boxes inside boxes.

Who wrote the Arabian Nights?

No single person wrote it. The stories were told, copied and changed by many storytellers and scribes over hundreds of years. Writers in the 10th century, Ibn al-Nadim and al-Mas'udi, describe it as an Arabic version of an older Persian book called Hazar Afsan, "A Thousand Tales". That Persian book has not survived.

When was the Arabian Nights written?

There is no single date. The oldest piece we have is a scrap of paper from the 9th century with the title and the first lines of the book. The scholar Nabia Abbott studied it and published it in 1949. The oldest fairly complete manuscript, used by the French translator Antoine Galland, was written between 1450 and 1593, according to Wikipedia's summary of the research. The title One Thousand and One Nights is first recorded in 12th-century Cairo.

Where do the stories take place?

All over the medieval world, and in lands of pure fantasy. The frame story is set among the Sasanian kings of Persia, who ruled from 224 to 651, and Shahryar's brother rules Samarkand. Many famous tales happen in Baghdad in the time of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, who ruled from 786 to 809. Later tales are set in Cairo in the 13th and 14th centuries. Others travel to Basra, Damascus, India, China and the seas between them.

How many stories are in the Arabian Nights?

The answer depends on the edition. Some old manuscripts have only a few hundred nights. The Arabic Bulaq edition, printed in Cairo in 1835, has about 200 tales. Richard Burton's English translation spreads the stories over all 1,001 nights in ten volumes (1885), with six more volumes of Supplemental Nights (1886 to 1888). We follow Burton's order, one night at a time.

Are Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad in the book?

Sinbad is. In Burton's translation, the seven voyages of Sindbad the Seaman fill Nights 537 to 566. Aladdin and Ali Baba are not in the old Arabic manuscripts. Antoine Galland added them to his French translation (1704 to 1717) after hearing them in Paris in 1709 from Hanna Diyab, a storyteller from Aleppo. Burton later included both in volume 3 of his Supplemental Nights (1887).

Famous translations

• Antoine Galland, French, 12 volumes, 1704 to 1717: the version that made the book famous in Europe.
• Edward William Lane, English, 1840: toned down, with many passages left out.
• John Payne, English, nine volumes, 1882.
• Richard F. Burton, English, ten volumes, 1885, plus six supplemental volumes. It is now in the public domain, and it is the text we retell. You can read it free on Project Gutenberg.
• Muhsin Mahdi's Leiden edition (1984 to 1994): the only critical edition of the Arabic text so far.

How we retell it for children

Burton's translation was written for adults. Some stories have violence, cruelty or grown-up themes, and some old descriptions of people are unkind and wrong by today's standards. We keep each night's plot, characters and setting, use simple words, and leave out or soften what is not right for children. Every night links to the original text, so you can always compare. Our guide for parents explains more, and you can start reading at Night 1.