A 1001 Nights

Sons of the Sultan of the Indies in the street with scimitars. From the painting A Tale of a 1001 Nights (1873) by Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger.

A 1001 Nights is a much-beloved collection of stories from the Middle East and India. The framing device of the whole collection is Scheherazade, a king’s bride who tells a series of tales to save herself from execution. Included in several of the stories are the characters themselves telling their own story, so it features a story-within-a-story. The tales aren’t from one specific area, but originate from a variety of places including India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia.

Andrew Lang photographed in 1901 for The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art and Life.

There are many versions of the story collection for readers. Researchers believe the tales date back to the 8th century and one of the earliest fragments was discovered by a scholar named Nabia Abbott in 1948. The first English edition of A 1001 Nights was published around 1706. Named The Arabian Nights Entertainments, the collection  introduced English readers to the now-familiar tales of Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin. When folklorist Andrew Lang had an English version of the stories published in 1898, he named it The Arabian Nights Entertainments. In the introduction of this edition, Lang writes about how his own books of fairy tales (The Color Fairy book series) feature tales for children, but A 1001 Nights was more for adults, with events supposed to be set 786-808 A.D. His own version is translated from the French edition Les mille et une nuits by Monsieur Galland. Published from 1704 to 1717, Galland’s version spanned 12 volumes, plus featured new tales of the heroics of Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin.