The Arabian Nights

Background

• First collected stories written AD 800–900 • Stories come from the Middle East and South Asia. The

roots of many tales can be traced back to mythology and the cultures of such areas ass Arabia, Yemen, India, Persian, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria and Asia Minor.

• Some of the most famous stories appear to have been added to the collection in European editions ("Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.“) These particular stories are probably genuine Middle Eastern folk tales but were not part of the "Nights" in its Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators.

Important 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 was a 12-volume book.

• The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885) by Sir Richard Francis Burton, was ten-volume translation of Galland (he added six more volumes later). Though printed in the Victorian era it contained all the erotic nuances of the source material. He avoided strict Victorian laws on obscene material by printing a private edition for subscribers only.

• The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, edited by Andrew Lang (1898), was one volume, heavily edited for children and illustrated by H. J. Ford.

The Frame Story

• Details differ, but Scheherazade is always the daughter of the Grand-Vizier and willingly marries the sultan, thus beginning the stories.

• 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.

A collection of memorable images from The Arabian Nights

Exotic imagery excited Western minds

The Sultana Held Conversation with a Man. Arabian Nights - Illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett. Penn Publishing Company, 1928.

Ford’s Illustrations from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments

Frontispiece

Scheherazade, Dinarzade, and the Sultan

The Sultan pardon’s Scheherazade

Ford’s illustration (1898)

The Princess veils herself

when she sees the Monkey

The Genius and the Merchants

Images from Sinbad’s Voyages

More of Ford’s illustrations

The king of China looks at the ring on the princess's finger.

The genius comes out of the jar

Ford’s illustrations from Aladdin

Aladdin's mother brings the slaves

with the forty basins of gold

before the sultan.

The slave of the ring appears to Aladdin