A Thousand and one nights

A Thousand and One Nights is a book that includes a collection of stories in Western and South Asia as well as folk tales collected and translated into Arabic during the Golden Age of Islam. The book is also known as Arabic Nights in English, since its first English edition was published in 1706. [2]

The work has been compiled for centuries by authors, translators and scholars from West, Central and South Asia and North Africa. The tales go back to the ancient and middle centuries of the Arab, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Most of the stories were originally popular stories of the Caliphate era, others, especially the story of the frame, were probably drawn from the Persian pagan work “A Myth” (in Persian: Hazar Afsan), which in turn was partly based on Indian literature.

What is common in all versions of the nights is the prefix, the framework story about Governor Shahriar and his wife Shahrazad, which is included in all the anecdotes. Since the stories basically emanate from this story, some stories are framed within other tales, while others begin and end on their own. Some printouts contain only a few hundred nights, others include a thousand nights or more. The bulk of the text is prose style, although the style of poetry is sometimes used to express the growing emotion, sometimes used as songs and puzzles. Most poems are single or quadruple, and some are longer.

There are some famous stories that contain thousands of nights, such as “Aladdin and the magic lamp”, “Alibaba Forty-four thieves”, “Seven Sindbad’s seven voyages,” and there are some folk tales in the Middle East which are almost certain, And not part of the Thousand and One Nights in the Arabic versions, but was added by French orientalist Antoine Gallan and other European translators