One Thousand and One Nights, 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, which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
Jacques Cazotte was a French author and a monarchist. He predicted the Reign of Terror and was guillotined shortly after.
Arabic literature is the writing, both as prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is Adab, which comes from a meaning of etiquette, and which implies politeness, culture and enrichment.
Arabic epic literature encompasses epic poetry and epic fantasy in Arabic literature. Virtually all societies have developed folk tales encompassing tales of heroes. Although many of these are legends, many are based on real events and historical figures.
Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
Kharāj is a type of individual Islamic tax on agricultural land and its produce, regardless of the religion of the owners, developed under Islamic law.
Layla bint Abullah ibn Shaddad ibn Ka’b al-Akhyaliyyah, or simply Layla al-Akhyaliyyah was a famous Umayyad Arabian poet who was renowned for her poetry, eloquence, strong personality, and beauty. Nearly fifty of her short poems survive. They include elegies for her lover Tawba ibn Humayyir, lewd satires she exchanged with al-Nabigha, and panegyrics for the caliphs Uthman and Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan;
Muḥsin Sayyid Mahdī was an Iraqi-American Islamologist and Arabist. He was a leading authority on Arabian history, philology, and philosophy. His best-known work was the first critical edition of the One Thousand and One Nights.
One Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, is a collection of Middle Eastern stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age.
"Open sesame" is a magical phrase in the story of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" in Antoine Galland's version of One Thousand and One Nights. It opens the mouth of a cave in which forty thieves have hidden a treasure.
Les 1001 Nuits is a French-Italian fantasy film loosely based on the ancient Arabic legend One Thousand and One Nights. It is directed by Philippe de Broca and stars Catherine Zeta-Jones as Sheherazade, who has married a king, who desires to have many virgin wives, but only one at a time. As soon as the King has consummated his relationship with a new wife, he has her put to death at sunrise. Sheherazade delays this unfortunate ending by putting off the connubial event for a thousand and one nights, telling irresistible stories that are unfinished when the sun rises. In this version, Sheherazade finds a magical lamp that holds the genie Jimmy Genius who is from the 20th century. Jimmy helps Sheherazade by providing her with 20th-century technology including a parachute that is used to drop a nude Sheherazade into a man's lap.
Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français, published in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717, was the first European version of The Thousand and One Nights tales.
Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit is a 12-volume French translation of One Thousand and One Nights by J. C. Mardrus. The volumes, 298×228 mm each, were published in 1926–1932 by the Paris publisher L'Edition d'Art H. Piazza. With Morocco leather covers, the book sides were decorated with a gilt-stamped panel with oriental design different for each volume. The volumes were also decorated with gilt fleurons, triple gilt fillet and blind-stamped filet on the inside, as well as red watered silk endleaves.
Translations of One Thousand and One Nights have been made into most of the world's major languages. They include the French translation by Antoine Galland. Galland's translation was essentially based on a medieval Arabic manuscript of Syrian origin, supplemented by oral tales recorded by him in Paris from Hanna Diyab, a Maronite Arab from Aleppo.
Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes was a French Arabist, a specialist in Islam and the history of religions.
Antun Yusuf Hanna Diyab was a Syrian Maronite writer and storyteller. He originated the best-known versions of the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves which have been added to the One Thousand and One Nights since French orientalist Antoine Galland translated and included them, after which they soon became popular across the West.
Dom Denis Chavis or Dīyūnisūs Shāwīsh was a Syrian priest and monk who flourished in the 1780s. He was a key contributor to the version of the Thousand and One Nights published as Continuation des Mille et Une Nuits in Geneva in 1788–89, which had a lasting influence on conceptions of the contents of the Nights.
The three-volume Galland Manuscript, sometimes also referred to as the Syrian Manuscript, is the earliest extensive manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights. Its text extends to 282 nights, breaking off in the middle of the Tale of Qamar al-Zamān and Budūr. The dating of the manuscript has been the subject of significant debate, which has revolved, unusually, around what types of coins are mentioned in the text and what real-life coin-issues they refer to. Muhsin Mahdi, the manuscript's modern editor, thought that it was fourteenth-century, while Heinz Grotzfeld dated it to the second half of the fifteenth. It is agreed to belong to the fourteenth or fifteenth century and to originate in Syria.
Abu al-Husn and His Slave-Girl Tawaddud is a story that is first attested in medieval Arabic that, besides being well known in itself, inspired spin-offs in Persian, Spanish, Portuguese, Mayan, and Tagalog.
Claudia Ott is a German scholar of Middle-Eastern languages, literary translator and musician. She is mainly known for her 2004 German translations based on the oldest existing Arabic manuscript of the One Thousand and One Nights and similar medieval works of classical Arabic literature. In her public as well as in recorded performances, Ott has presented this genre of Arabic epic literature in the tradition of an oral storyteller, accompanied by live Arabic music.
