The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة و ليلة Kitāb ‘Alf Layla wa-Layla, Persian: هزار و یک شب Hazār-o Yak Šab; also known as The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, One Thousand and One Nights, 1001 Arabian Nights, Arabian Nights, The Nightly Entertainments or simply The Nights) is a medieval Middle Eastern literary epic which tells the story of Scheherazade (Persian: شهرزاد Šahrzād), a Sassanid Queen, who relates a series of stories to her husband, King Shahryar (Persian:شهريار Šahryār), in order to delay her execution. The stories are told over a period of one thousand and one nights, and every night she ends the story with a suspenseful situation, leading the King to keep her alive for another day. The individual stories were created over many centuries, by many people and in many styles, and many have become famous in their own right. Notable examples include Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.
History
The nucleus of the stories is formed by a Pahlavi Sassanid Persian book called Hazār Afsānah[1][2][3]("Thousand Myths", in Persian: هزارافسانه), a collection of ancient Indian and Persian folk tales. During the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the 8th century, Baghdad had become an important cosmopolitan city. Merchants from Persia, China, India, Africa, and Europe were all found in Baghdad. It was during this time that many of the stories, which were originally folk stories, are thought to have been collected orally over many years and later then compiled into a single book. The later compiler and translator into Arabic is reputedly storyteller Abu abd-Allah Muhammed el-Gahshigar in the 9th century. The frame story of Shahrzad seems to have been added in the 14th century. The first modern Arabic compilation, made out of Egyptian writings, was published in Cairo in 1835
Editions
The work is made up of a collection of stories thought to be from traditional Persian, Arabic, and Indian stories. The core stories probably originated in an Iranic Empire and were brought together in a Persian work called Hazar Afsanah ("A Thousand Legends"). The Arabic compilation Alf Layla (A Thousand Nights), originating about 850 AD, was in turn probably an abridged translation of Hezar Afsaneh. Some of its elements appear in the Odyssey. The present name Alf Layla wa-Layla (literally a "A Thousand Nights and a Night", i.e. "1001 Nights") seems to have appeared at an unknown time in the Middle Ages.
The first European version (and first printed edition) was a translation into French (1704 – 1717) by Antoine Galland from an earlier compilation that was written in Arabic. This 12 volume book, Les Mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français ("Thousand and one nights, Arab stories translated into French") probably included Arabic stories known to the translator but not included in the Arabic compilation. Aladdin’s Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves appeared first in Galland’s translation and cannot be found in the original writings. He wrote that he heard them from a Syrian Christian storyteller from Aleppo, a Maronite scholar, Youhenna Diab, whom he called ‘Hanna’.
John Payne, Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp and Other Stories, (London 1901) gives details of Galland’s encounter with ‘Hanna’ in 1709 and of the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin and two more of the ‘interpolated’ tales. He instances Galland’s own experience to demonstrate the lack of regard for such entertainments in the mainstream of Islamic scholarship, with the result that
…complete copies of the genuine work were rarely to be met with, collections… and the fragmentary copies which existed were mostly in the hands of professional story-tellers, who were extremely unwilling to part with them, looking upon them as their stock in trade, and were in the habit of incorporating with the genuine text all kinds of stories and anecdotes from other sources, to fill the place of the missing portions of the original work. This process of addition and incorporation, which has been in progress ever since the first collection of the Nights into one distinct work and is doubtless still going on in Oriental countries, (especially such as are least in contact with European influence,) may account for the heterogeneous character of the various modern manuscripts of the Nights and for the immense difference which exists between the several texts, as well in actual *******s as in the details and diction of such stories as are common to all.
Perhaps the best-known translation to English speakers 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 was not 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 an edition for subscribers only rather than formally publishing the book. The 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.
More recent versions are 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, the most accurate and elegant of all to this date.
In 2024, 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 two volumes of a planned five or six volume set have already been released, making up for the complete Syrian branch of the book. The remaining volumes will be a translation of the later Egyptian branch.[4]
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 Book… but never found it. Upon returning to Europe, he wrote his masterpiece, a multi-leveled frame tale
و السمووووووووووحة ع القصووور
اختي روضه
ثانكس ع المرور
ان شاء الله جريب بحطها
ثانكس ع المرور