Arabian Nights Entertainments

The _Arabian Nights_ was introduced to Europe in a French translation

by Antoine Galland in 1704, and rapidly attained a unique popularity.

There are even accounts of the translator being roused from sleep by

bands of young men under his windows in Paris, importuning him to tell

them another story.

The learned world at first refused to believe that M. Galland had not

invented the tales. But he had really discovered an Arabic manuscript

from sixteenth-century Egypt, and had consulted Oriental

story-tellers. In spite of inaccuracies and loss of color, his twelve

volumes long remained classic in France, and formed the basis of our

popular translations.

A more accurate version, corrected from the Arabic, with a style

admirably direct, easy, and simple, was published by Dr. Jonathan

Scott in 1811. This is the text of the present edition.

The Moslems delight in stories, but are generally ashamed to show a

literary interest in fiction. Hence the world's most delightful story

book has come to us with but scant indications of its origin. Critical

scholarship, however, has been able to reach fairly definite

conclusions.

The reader will be interested to trace out for himself the

similarities in the adventures of the two Persian queens,

Schehera-zade, and Esther of Bible story, which M. de Goeje has

pointed out as indicating their original identity (_Encyclopædia

Britannica_, "Thousand and One Nights"). There are two or three

references in tenth-century Arabic literature to a Persian collection

of tales, called _The Thousand Nights_, by the fascination of which

the lady Schehera-zade kept winning one more day's lease of life. A

good many of the tales as we have them contain elements clearly

indicating Persian or Hindu origin. But most of the stories, even

those with scenes laid in Persia or India, are thoroughly Mohammedan

in thought, feeling, situation, and action.

The favorite scene is "the glorious city," ninth-century Bagdad, whose

caliph, Haroun al Raschid, though a great king, and heir of still

mightier men, is known to fame chiefly by the favor of these tales.

But the contents (with due regard to the possibility of later

insertions), references in other writings, and the dialect show that

our _Arabian Nights_ took form in Egypt very soon after the year 1450.

The author, doubtless a professional teller of stories, was, like his

Schehera-zade, a person of extensive reading and faultless memory,

fluent of speech, and ready on occasion to drop into poetry. The

coarseness of the Arabic narrative, which does not appear in our

translation, is characteristic of Egyptian society under the Mameluke

sultans. It would have been tolerated by the subjects of the caliph in

old Bagdad no more than by modern Christians.