One Thousand and One Nights Totally Explained

Everything about The Arabian Nights totally explained

One Thousand and One Nights (- kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; - Hezār-o yek šab) is a collection of stories collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries. These collections of tales trace their roots back to ancient Arabia and Yemen, ancient India, ancient Asia Minor, ancient Persia (especially the Sassanid Hazār Afsān, lit. Thousand Tales), ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamian Mythology, ancient Syria, and medieval Arabic folk stories from the Caliphate era. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the fourteenth century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.
What is common throughout all the editions of The Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar (from generally meaning king or sovereign) and his wife Scheherazade (from generally meaning townswoman) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more "nights."
The collection, or at least certain stories drawn from it (or purporting to be drawn from it) became widely known in the West during the nineteenth century, after it was translated - first into French and then English and other European languages. At this time it acquired the English name The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or simply Arabian Nights. The best known stories from The Nights include "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor." Ironically these particular stories, while they're genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of the "Nights" in its Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators.

Synopsis

The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king, Shahryar, upon discovering his former wife's infidelity has her executed and then declares all women to be unfaithful. He begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning. Eventually the vizier can't find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade tells the king a tale, but doesn't end it. The king is thus forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) another. So it goes for 1,001 nights.
   The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography; the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid is a common protagonist, as are his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas and his vizier, Ja'far al-Barmaki. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly-layered narrative texture.
   The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life.
   The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life.

History and editions

Early influences

The tales in the collection can be traced to the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Arab ancient storytelling traditions. Many stories from Indian and Persian folklore parallel the tales These tales were probably in circulation before they were collected and codified into a single collection. This work was further shaped by scribes, storytellers, and scholars and evolved into a collection of three distinct layers of storytelling by the 15th century: The Jataka is a collection of 547 stories, which are for the most part moral stories with an ethical purpose. The Tale of the Bull and the Ass and the linked Tale of the Merchant and his Wife are found in the frame stories of both the Jataka and the Arabian Nights.
The influence from the folklore of Baghdad is represented by the tales of the Abbasid caliphs; the Cairene influence is made evident by Maruf the cobbler. Tales such as Iram of the columns are based upon the pre-Islamic legends of the Arabian peninsula; motifs are employed from the ancient Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh. Possible Greek influences have also been noted.

Versions

The first European version of the Book of the Thousand and One Nights (1704-1717) was translated into French by Antoine Galland from an Arabic text and other sources. This 12-volume book, Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français ("Thousand and one nights, Arab stories translated into French"), included stories that were not in the original Arabic manuscript. "Aladdin's Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" appeared first in Galland's translation and can't be found in any of the original manuscripts. He wrote that he heard them from a Syrian Christian storyteller from Aleppo, a Maronite scholar whom he called "Hanna Diab."
   Galland's version of the Nights were immensely popular throughout Europe, and later versions of the Nights were written by Galland's publisher using Galland's name without his consent.
   A well-known English translation is that by Sir Richard Francis Burton, entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885). Unlike previous editions his ten-volume translation wasn't bowdlerized. Though printed in the Victorian era it contained all the erotic nuances of the source material replete with sexual imagery and pederastic allusions added as appendices to the main stories by Burton. Burton circumvented strict Victorian laws on obscene material by printing a private edition for subscribers only rather than publicly publishing the book. His original ten volumes were followed by a further six entitled The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night, which were printed between 1886 and 1888.
   Recent versions of the Nights include that of the French doctor J. C. Mardrus, translated into English by Powys Mathers, and, notably, a critical edition based on the 14th century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, compiled in Arabic by Muhsin Mahdi and rendered into English by Husain Haddawy, by and large the best English language version to date.
   In 2005, Brazilian scholar Mamede Mustafa Jarouche started publishing a thorough Portuguese translation of the work, based on the comparative analysis of a series of different Arabic manuscripts. The first three volumes of a planned five- or six-volume set have already been released, comprising the complete Syrian branch of the book (volumes 1 and 2) and part of the later Egyptian branch (volume 3 and onwards).

Timeline

Scholars have assembled a timeline concerning the publication history of The Nights:

Oldest Arabic manuscript (a few handwritten pages) from Syria dating to the early 800s discovered by scholar Nabia Abbott in 1948.

900s AD — Mention of The Nights in Ibn Al-Nadim's "Fihrist" (Catalogue of books) in Baghdad. He mentions the book's history and its Persian origins.

900s — Second oldest reference to The Nights in Muruj Al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) by Al-Masudi.

1000s AD — Mention of the original Persian name of the One Thousands and One Nights by Qatran Tabrizi in the following couplet in Persian:
هزار ره صفت هفت خوان و رويين دژ
فرو شنيدم و خواندم من از هزار افسان
A thousand times, accounts of Rouyin Dezh and Haft Khān
I heard and read from Hezār Afsān (literally Thousand Fables)

1300s — Existing Syrian manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (contains about 300 tales).

1704 — Antoine Galland's French translation is the first European version of The Nights. Later volumes were introduced using Galland's name though the stories were written by unknown persons at the behest of the publisher wanting to capitalize on the popularity of the collection.

1706 — An anonymously translated version in English appears in Europe dubbed the "Grub Street" version.

1775 — Egyptian version of The Nights called "ZER" (Hermann Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension) with 200 tales (no surviving edition exists).

1814 — Calcutta I, the earliest existing Arabic printed version, is published by the British East India Company. A second volume was released in 1818. Both had 100 tales each.

1825-1838 — The Breslau/Habicht edition is published in Arabic in 8 volumes. Christian Maxmilian Habicht (born in Breslau, Germany, 1775) collaborated with the Tunisian Murad Al-Najjar and created this edition containing 1001 stories. Using versions of The Nights, tales from Al-Najjar, and other stories from unknown origins Habicht published his version in Arabic and German.

1842-1843 — Four additional volumes by Habicht.

1835 Bulaq version — These two volumes, printed by the Egyptian government, are the oldest printed (by a publishing house) version of The Nights in Arabic by a non-European. It is primarily a reprinting of the ZER text.

1839-1842 — Calcutta II (4 volumes) is published. It claims to be based on an older Egyptian manuscript (which was never found). This version contains many elements and stories from the Habicht edition.

1838 — Torrens version in English.

1838-1840 — Edward William Lane publishes an English translation. Notable for its exclusion of content Lane found "immoral" and for its anthropological notes on Arab customs by Lane.

1882-1884 — John Payne publishes an English version translated entirely from Calcutta II, adding some tales from Calcutta I and Breslau.

1885-1888 — Sir Richard Francis Burton publishes an English translation from several sources. His version accentuated the sexuality of the stories vis-à-vis Lane's bowdlerized translation.

1889-1904 — J. C. Mardrus publishes a French version using Bulaq and Calcutta II editions.

1984 — Muhsin Mahdi publishes an Arabic translation he says is faithful to the oldest Arabic versions surviving.

1990s — Husain Haddawy publishes an English translation of Mahdi.

The Nights in World culture

Literature

The influence of the versions of the Nights on World Literature is immense. Writers as diverse as Henry Fielding to Naguib Mahfouz have alluded to the work by name in their own literature.
Examples of this influence include:

Edgar Allan Poe wrote a "Thousand and Second Night" as a separate tale, called "." It depicts the 8th and final voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, along with the various mysteries Sinbad and his crew encounter; the anomalies are then described as footnotes to the story. While the king is uncertain—except in the case of the elephants carrying the world on the back of the turtle—that these mysteries are real, they're actual modern events that occurred in various places during, or before, Poe's lifetime. The story ends with the king in such disgust at the tale Scheherazade has just woven, that he's her executed the very next day.

Bill Willingham, creator of the comic book series Fables, used the story of The Nights as the basis of his Fables prequel, . In the book, Snow White tells the tales of the Fables, magical literary characters, to the sultan in order to avoid her impending death.

Two notable novels loosely based on The Nights are Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz and When Dreams Travel by Githa Hariharan. The children's book The Storyteller's Daughter by Cameron Dokey is also loosely derived from The Nights.

The Nights has also inspired poetry in English. Two examples are Alfred Tennyson's poem, "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" (1830) and William Wordsworth's "The Prelude" (1805).

The Book of One Thousand and One Nights has an estranged cousin: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. A Polish noble of the late 18th century, he traveled the Orient looking for an original edition of The Nights, but never found it. Upon returning to Europe, he wrote his masterpiece, a multi-leveled frame tale.

The book is often referenced in numerous works of Jorge Luis Borges.

It also greatly influence famed horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft in his early years as a child in which he'd imagine himself living the adventures of the heroes in the book. It also inspired him to come up with his famed Necronomicon.

In his criticism of mainstream cinema in "Metaphors on Vision," avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage metaphorically compares Hollywood studio film making to Scheherazade's tales, calling it the, "... heroine of a thousand and one nights (Scheherazade must surely be the muse of this art)..."

In 2005 playwright Jason Grote used the literary device of "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights" to create 1001, combining the traditional Scheherazade story with literary and pop culture allusions ranging from Flaubert in Egypt, Jorge Luis Borges, Hitchcock's Vertigo, and Michael Jackson's Thriller. The main characters alternate between playing Scheherazade and Shahriyar and the Palestinian Dahna and the Jewish Alan, who are college students in love in modern New York. The play was premiered in Denver in 2006 and opened in New York City in October of 2007 to strong reviews.

In 2005 novelist Joseph Covino Jr adapted tales from the classical 1001 Nights in two parts of an intended trilogy titled "Arabian Nights Lost: Celestial Verses 1&II."(External Link

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Film and television

There have been many adaptations of The Nights for both television and cinema.
   The atmosphere of The Nights influenced such films as Fritz Lang's 1921 Der müde Tod, the 1924 Hollywood film The Thief of Bagdad starring Douglas Fairbanks, and its 1940 British remake. Several stories served as source material for The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surviving feature-length animated film.
   One of Hollywood's first feature films to be based on The Nights was in 1942, with the movie called Arabian Nights. It starred Maria Montez as Scheherazade, Sabu Dastagir as Ali Ben Ali and Jon Hall as Harun al-Rashid. The storyline bears virtually no resemblance to the traditional version of the book. In the film, Scheherazade is a dancer who attempts to overthrow Caliph Harun al-Rashid and marry his brother. After Scheherazade’s initial coup attempt fails and she's sold into slavery, many adventures then ensue. Maria Montez and Jon Hall also starred in the 1944 film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
   In 1959 UPA released an animated feature about Mr. Magoo, based on 1001 Arabian Nights. Osamu Tezuka worked on two (very loose) feature film adaptations, the children's film Sinbad no Bōken in 1962 and then Senya Ichiya Monogatari in 1969, an adult-oriented animated feature film.
   The most commercially successful movie based on The Nights was Aladdin, the 1992 animated movie by the Walt Disney Company, which starred the voices of Scott Weinger and Robin Williams. The film led to several sequels and a television series of the same name.
   "The Voyages of Sinbad" has been adapted for television and film several times, most recently in the 2003 animated feature, featuring the voices of Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Perhaps the most famous Sinbad film was the 1958 movie The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, produced by the stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen.
   A recent well-received television adaptation was the Emmy award-winning miniseries Arabian Nights, directed by Steve Barron and starring Mili Avital as Scheherazade and Dougray Scott as Shahryar. It was originally shown over two nights on April 30, and May 1, 2000 on ABC in the United States and BBC One in the United Kingdom.
   Other notable versions of The Nights include the famous 1974 Italian movie Il fiore delle mille e una notte by Pier Paolo Pasolini and the 1990 French movie Les 1001 nuits, in which Catherine Zeta-Jones made her debut playing Scheherazade. There are also numerous Bollywood movies inspired by the book, including Aladdin and Sinbad. In this version the two heroes meet and share in each other's adventures; the djinn of the lamp is female, and Aladdin marries her rather than the princess.

Music

In 1888, Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov completed his Op. 35 Scheherazade, in four movements, based upon four of the tales from The Nights: "The Sea and Sinbad's Ship," "The Kalendar Prince," "The Young Prince and The Young Princess," and "Festival at Baghdad."

There have been several Arabian Nights musicals and operettas, either based on particular tales or drawing on the general atmosphere of the book. Most notable are Chu Chin Chow (1916) and Kismet (1953), not to mention several musicals and innumerable pantomimes on the story of "Aladdin."

1990 saw the premiere of La Noche de las Noches, a work for string quartet and electronics by Ezequiel Viñao (based on a reading from Burton's "Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night")

In 1975, the band Renaissance released an album called Scheherazade and Other Stories. The second half of this album consists entirely of the "Song of Scheherazade," an orchestral-rock composition based on the The Nights.

In 1999, power metal band Kamelot included a song on their album The Fourth Legacy called "Nights of Arabia".

In 2003, Nordic experimental indie pop group When released an album called Pearl Harvest with lyrics from The Nights.

In 2007, Japanese pop duo BENNIE K released a single titled "1001 Nights," also releasing a music video strongly based around the The Nights.

In 2007, the Finnish Symphonic Metal band Nightwish wrote a song "Sahara" on their album Dark Passion Play which relates to the 1001 nights stories.

2008 saw the birth of Australian metalcore band, Ebony Horse, named after the tale "The Ebony Horse."

Games

The setting of the 1990 EGA PC adventure game is based on The Nights.

The Nights is the basis for the story of the video game Sonic and the Secret Rings. In the story, Sonic the Hedgehog is pulled in to the story by Shahra The Ring Genie in order to save the Arabian Nights which is being erased by the main villain Erazor Djinn. Djinn was once the "Genie of the Lamp" from the story "Aladdin," who was also responsible for turning King Solomon into a skeleton. Other recurring Sonic characters turn up as characters from the Nights, such as Tails as Ali Baba, Knuckles as Sinbad, and Doctor Eggman as King Shahryār.

The first expansion set for was "," containing cards based on and inspired by One Thousand and One Nights. This included a card called "Shahrazad" which required the two players to play a separate game within the current game.

Jordan Mechner stated that The Nights was an inspiration of his popular Prince of Persia series.

The Magic of Scheherazade takes its title from the female protagonist.

1,001 Nights, a storytelling game by Meguey Baker, puts the players in the roles of courtiers in the Sultan's palace who are forbidden to leave for various reasons. To pass the time, they take turns telling stories and casting each other as various characters in the tales as they attempt to earn enough favor in the court to win their freedom.Further Information

Get more info on 'The Arabian Nights'.

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