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Concept
One Thousand and One Nights
Summary
One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah) is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (1706–1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
The work is derived from a pre-Islamic Iranian prototype that relied partly on Indian elements; some of the tales trace their roots back to ancient/medieval-era literature in Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian, along with Mesopotamian mythology. Most of the tales, however, were originally folklore from the Abbasid Caliphate and the Mamluk Sultanate, while others — especially the frame story — are probably drawn from the Pahlavi text Hezār Afsān (هزار افسان, A Thousand Tales), which in turn may be translations of older Indian texts.
Common to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryar being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade, with one tale told over each night of storytelling. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights of storytelling, while others include 1001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.
Some of the stories commonly associated with the Arabian Nights — particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" — were not part of the collection in the original Arabic versions, but were instead added to the collection by French translator Antoine Galland after he heard them from Syrian writer Hanna Diyab during the latter's visit to Paris. Other stories, such as "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", had an independent existence before being added to the collection.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
Related concepts (28)
Arabic literature
Arabic literature (الأدب العربي / ALA-LC: al-Adab al-‘Arabī) is the writing, both as prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is Adab, which is derived from a meaning of etiquette, and which implies politeness, culture and enrichment. Arabic literature emerged in the 5th century with only fragments of the written language appearing before then. The Qur'an, widely regarded as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language, would have the greatest lasting effect on Arab culture and its literature.
Abbasid Caliphate
The Abbasid Caliphate was the third caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (566–653 CE), from whom the dynasty takes its name. They ruled as caliphs for most of the caliphate from their capital in Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, after having overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate in the Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE (132 AH).
Fable
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying. A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech or other powers of humankind.