50 Fun Facts About One Thousand and One Nights

What is the Arabic title of the collection known in English as the Arabian Nights?

The English name comes from the first English edition of about 1706–1721, called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

Which ruler is told a story every night by his wife in the frame tale?

His kingdom stretched from Persia to India, and after his wife's betrayal he had been marrying a virgin each day and executing her the next morning.

Scheherazade is the daughter of which official at the king's court?

It was her father's duty to supply the brides, and he agreed only reluctantly when she volunteered.

What is the name of Scheherazade's younger sister, who asks for a story on the wedding night?

Her cue lets Scheherazade begin the first tale and leave it unfinished at dawn.

The name Scheherazade derives from Middle Persian and is usually taken to mean what?

Šahr means city or realm and -zād means born of; Arabic manuscripts spell it Šahrāzād.

The frame story of the Nights is probably drawn from which Persian work?

The title means 'A Thousand Tales'; tenth-century cataloguer Ibn al-Nadim called it 'a coarse book, without warmth in the telling'.

Which tenth-century Baghdad scholar described the Hezār Afsān in his book catalogue, the Fihrist?

He said it held only 200 stories; his contemporary Al-Masudi noted the Arabic version was generally known as Alf Layla.

Which real Abbasid caliph is a recurring character in the tales, often wandering Baghdad in disguise?

He appears with his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki and the poet Abu Nuwas, though all lived 200 years after the Sasanian setting of the frame tale.

Which two famous tales did the first French translator add, absent from the Arabic manuscripts?

Known as the 'orphan tales', they were told to Galland by the Syrian writer Hanna Diyab in Paris in 1709.

From which city did the Maronite storyteller Hanna Diyab come?

Born around 1688, he visited Paris in 1709 and originated the best-known versions of Aladdin and Ali Baba.

How many volumes did the first French translation, Les Mille et une nuits, run to between 1704 and 1717?

Borges suggested that European Romanticism began when his translation was first read.

The earliest extensive manuscript of the Nights, written between 1450 and 1593, is named after whom?

It represents the shorter Syrian tradition; Muhsin Mahdi's 1984 Leiden edition and Husain Haddawy's 1990 translation are based on it.

Whose 1840 English translation of the Nights was heavily bowdlerised?

Unexpurgated versions followed from Payne in 1882 and Burton in 1885, the latter accused of plagiarising the former.

How many volumes were in Richard Francis Burton's 1885 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night?

Six supplemental volumes followed, and Victorian obscenity law meant it was printed privately for subscribers only.

Under whose auspices did Burton publish his risqué translations of the Nights and other erotic classics?

Private circulation dodged the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the campaigners Burton nicknamed Mrs Grundy.

Which husband-and-wife team produced the three-volume Penguin Classics translation of 2008?

It was the first complete English rendering of the Calcutta II edition since Burton, with an introduction by Robert Irwin.

In The Fisherman and the Jinni, how many times a day does the old fisherman cast his net?

After a dead donkey, a pitcher of dirt and broken glass, his last cast brings up a copper jar sealed with the seal of Solomon.

How long does the caliph give Jafar to find the killer in the tale of the chest and the young woman's body?

The tale, with its chest containing a young woman's body, is often called the earliest murder mystery in world literature.

The Hunchback's Tale cycle, a courtroom comedy in the Nights, is set where?

The emperor's favourite comedian chokes at a tailor's dinner and the corpse is passed from household to household.

How many voyages does Sinbad the Sailor make?

He hails from Baghdad in the early Abbasid era, and his cycle appears only in later Egyptian manuscripts.

On his first voyage, the island where Sinbad lands turns out to be what?

Trees had rooted on it since the whale was young; a bonfire wakes it and it dives.

Which creature clings to Sinbad's shoulders and rides him day and night on a later voyage?

Burton's footnote guessed at an orang-utan, the god Triton or an African custom of riding on slaves.

Sinbad tells his voyages to a poor man of the same name who works as what?

The porter had paused outside the rich merchant's gate to complain to God about the world's injustice.

What is Ali Baba's trade?

His greedy brother Cassim had married money; Ali Baba stumbles on the thieves' cave while cutting wood.

How does Cassim's wife discover that Ali Baba has found treasure?

Cassim then forces the secret from his brother, forgets the password inside the cave and is killed by the thieves.

Which clever slave-girl repeatedly foils the thieves' plots against Ali Baba?

She pays a blindfolded tailor to sew Cassim's body back together so his death looks natural.

In the original tale, Aladdin lives in which land?

He is recruited by a sorcerer from the Maghreb posing as his late father's brother; the tailor father is named Mustapha.

Besides the lamp, what second magical object lets Aladdin summon a lesser genie?

The sorcerer lent it to him, and rubbing it in despair frees him from the cave.

How does the sorcerer trick Aladdin's wife into handing over the magic lamp?

He then has the genie carry the whole palace to the Maghreb; his even more evil brother later disguises himself as an old healer.

What is the name of the princess Aladdin marries in the original tale?

Disney renamed her for the 1992 film, which is only loosely based on the story.

Which composer's 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade is based on the Nights?

Its dazzling orchestration and Orientalist colour are typical of Russian music of the period; Ravel wrote his own Shéhérazade in 1898.

Critic Robert Irwin ranks which two Thief of Bagdad versions as world-cinema masterpieces?

Raoul Walsh directed the Douglas Fairbanks silent; Alexander Korda produced the Technicolor remake.

The 1940 Thief of Bagdad, an Oscar winner for special effects, marked the first use of what?

Miklós Rózsa's score was the first from a British film to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Which Italian director's 1974 Il fiore delle Mille e una notte is called the most faithful Nights adaptation?

Michael James Lundell praised its emphasis on sexuality; Pasolini himself remarked on the tales' theme of fate.

Which two English Romantic writers recalled nightmares the Nights had given them as children?

A. S. Byatt wrote that for the Romantics the book 'stood for the wonderful against the mundane'.

The tale of Bulukiya, whose hero seeks immortality and visits other worlds, is cited as early what?

He meets jinn societies, mermaids and talking serpents; The City of Brass, by contrast, is a ghost-town horror story.

In The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream, a Baghdad man seeks treasure in which city?

Jailed there, he learns from a mocking officer that the real treasure lies under his own house back home.

The 1933 Hindi fantasy film Alif Laila took its title from what?

Directed by Balwant Bhatt and Shanti Dave, it came from the earliest era of Indian cinema.

Which German composer's 1811 opera Abu Hassan is based on a Nights tale?

The Nights inspired dozens of musical works, from Ravel's song cycle to Rimsky-Korsakov's suite.

According to Ibn al-Nadim, how many stories did the Persian Hezār Afsān actually contain?

Despite the title's promise of a thousand, he counted far fewer and thought little of their quality.

Which two Arabic manuscript traditions of the Nights are recognised by scholars?

The longer Egyptian recension became the 'standard version' and is printed as Calcutta II, also called the Macnaghten edition.

Which Egyptian Nobel laureate is among the writers who allude to the Nights by name in their own works?

Others influenced include Borges, Calvino, Angela Carter, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle.

How does Scheherazade sometimes break off a night's story, to the surprise of modern readers?

In one case she stops during a detailed description of human anatomy; the cliffhanger standard was broader than ours.

Most of the poems scattered through the Nights take which form?

The bulk of the text is prose, with verse reserved for songs, riddles and moments of heightened emotion.

Which Sanskrit fable collection is seen as a particular influence on the Nights' animal stories?

Borzuya translated it into Persian in 570 CE and Ibn al-Muqaffa into Arabic in 750 CE.

Where were the Nights first printed in Arabic, by the British East India Company in 1814-1818?

The two-volume 'Calcutta I' edition held one hundred tales per volume and drew on the Syrian manuscripts.

The 1835 Bulaq edition, the first printed in an Arab country, was published by which government?

It was based on the Egyptian manuscript branch known as ZER and contained 200 tales.

Who compiled the Leiden text (1984-1994), a critical edition of the Syrian recension?

Mahdi argued it is the earliest extant version, a view most scholars have since accepted.

In which Canterbury story does the hero ride a flying brass horse, echoing a Nights motif?

Parallels with the Nights also turn up in Boccaccio's Decameron and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

Which issue of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, titled 'Ramadan', draws on the Nights?

P. Craig Russell drew the 1993 issue, set in Harun al-Rashid's Baghdad.