One Thousand and One Nights Trivia
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50 free One Thousand and One Nights trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This One Thousand and One Nights trivia quiz covers the great Arabic story collection known in English as the Arabian Nights: the frame tale of King Shahryar and the storyteller Scheherazade, its Persian roots in the Hezār Afsān, the medieval manuscripts and the tenth-century catalogues that first mention it, and the famous tales themselves, from The Fisherman and the Jinni and The Three Apples to Sinbad's seven voyages, Ali Baba's cave and Aladdin's lamp. It also follows the book's journey west: Antoine Galland's twelve French volumes, the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab who gave him the 'orphan tales', the bowdlerised Lane and scandalous Burton translations, the Penguin Lyons edition, and the Nights' afterlife in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, The Thief of Bagdad, Pasolini and Disney. Some questions are easy for anyone who read the tales as a child; others will test literature students and translators. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the collection, its individual tales and its translators, and each explanation adds one further fact. Ideal for book clubs, world-literature classes and pub-quiz setters.
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Q 01What is the Arabic title of the collection known in English as the Arabian Nights?
Alf Laylah wa-Laylah
Alf Laylah wa-Laylah means 'a thousand nights and a night'; the oldest surviving scrap, a ninth-century fragment, calls the book only the tale of 'a thousand nights', so the extra night came later.
Q 02Which ruler is told a story every night by his wife in the frame tale?
Shahryar
Shahryar, betrayed by his first queen, resolved never to be deceived again: he married a new bride each day and had her executed the next morning, until Scheherazade's stories stayed his hand.
Q 03In the Nights' frame tale, Scheherazade is the daughter of which court official?
The vizier
The vizier had the grim duty of finding the king's brides, and he tried to talk his daughter out of volunteering by telling her a cautionary fable about a bull and a donkey.
Q 04What is the name of Scheherazade's younger sister, who asks for a story on the wedding night?
Dunyazad
Dunyazad's request is part of the plan: Scheherazade had told her sister beforehand to ask for a tale, so that the king, listening in, would let her live to finish it.
Q 05In the Nights' frame tale, Scheherazade is said to have collected a thousand what?
Books
Books of histories of past peoples and kings: she had studied the sciences too and knew the poets' verses by heart, so her memory was stocked with stories long before she volunteered.
Q 06The Nights' frame story is thought to come from the Hezār Afsān, a lost work in which language?
Persian
Persian: a tenth-century Baghdad bibliographer who described the Hezār Afsān, 'A Thousand Tales', said its thousand nights held no more than 200 stories and dismissed it as coarse and coldly told.
Q 07Which Stephen King novel, about a writer forced to keep writing to stay alive, did King liken to playing Scheherazade?
Misery
Misery traps novelist Paul Sheldon with a murderous fan who makes him write a new book just for her; like Scheherazade, he survives only for as long as the story is unfinished.
Q 08Which real Abbasid caliph is a recurring character in the tales, often wandering Baghdad in disguise?
Harun al-Rashid
Harun al-Rashid ruled from 786 to 809, more than a century after the fall of the Sasanian empire in which the frame tale is set; the stories send him out at night in disguise with his minister Jafar.
Q 09Which two famous tales did the first French translator add, absent from the Arabic manuscripts?
Aladdin and Ali Baba
Aladdin and Ali Baba are known as the 'orphan tales' because no authentic Arabic text of either has been found; the translator's diary shows he got them from a Syrian storyteller he met in 1709.
Q 10Hanna Diyab told his Nights tales to a French translator in which city?
Paris
Paris: Diyab, a Maronite from Aleppo, had come to France as a French traveller's assistant, and the memoir of the journey that he wrote in old age survives in the Vatican Library.
Q 11In the Nights' frame tale, King Shahzaman, whose visit to his brother starts the story, rules which Silk Road city?
Samarkand
Samarkand's king turns back for something he has forgotten and catches his wife with a lover; finding his brother's queen just as faithless is what sends both kings out to roam the world.
Q 12Which French scholar gave Europe its first translation of the Nights, published from 1704?
Antoine Galland
Antoine Galland's twelve volumes were such a success that Europe was reading the Nights in French a century before the book was first printed in Arabic; the manuscript he used is still its oldest substantial copy.
Q 13In the Nights, Sinbad escapes a desert island on his second voyage by tying himself to the leg of which giant bird?
Q 21In the Nights, the island where Sinbad lands on his first voyage turns out to be what?
A gigantic sleeping whale
A gigantic sleeping whale: trees had taken root on its back over the years, and when the sailors light a cooking fire the heat wakes it and it dives, leaving Sinbad adrift in the open sea.
Q 22Which creature clings to Sinbad's shoulders and rides him day and night on a later voyage?
The Old Man of the Sea
The Old Man of the Sea locks his legs round Sinbad's neck and will not let go; Sinbad frees himself at last by getting the creature drunk on wine he has fermented in a gourd.
Q 23In the Nights, Sinbad the Sailor tells the story of his voyages to a poor man who works as what?
The roc
The roc carries him, lashed on with his own turban, to a valley floored with diamonds and patrolled by giant snakes, where merchants gather the gems by throwing down meat for the birds to fetch.
Q 14Films give Aladdin's genie a three-wish limit, but in the original tale his mightiest genie must obey whom?
Whoever holds the lamp
Whoever holds the lamp commands the genie without limit, which is why losing it is a catastrophe: the sorcerer simply orders the palace, princess and all, carried off to Africa.
Q 15Under whose imprint did Burton issue his unexpurgated Nights to private subscribers?
The Kama Shastra Society
The Kama Shastra Society was Burton's own device: he and a friend created it so that works too risky to publish openly, the Nights and the Kama Sutra among them, could be printed for subscribers only.
Q 16In the Nights, Sinbad blinds a man-eating giant with red-hot spits on his third voyage, echoing which ancient epic?
The Odyssey
The Odyssey has Odysseus blind the Cyclops Polyphemus with a heated stake; Sinbad's giant is likewise blinded as he sleeps, and the survivors flee on rafts while rocks are hurled after them.
Q 17In The Fisherman and the Jinni, what gets the jinni back into its jar?
A dare
A dare: the fisherman says he cannot believe so huge a jinni ever fitted in the jar; eager to prove him wrong, it turns to smoke and pours itself back inside, and he claps the stopper on at once.
Q 18In The Three Apples, often called an early murder mystery, how does the caliph's minister finally find the culprit?
By sheer chance
By sheer chance: given three days to find the culprit or die, Jafar does no detecting at all, and is saying farewell to his family when he finds the stolen apple on his own daughter.
Q 19In The Hunchback's Tale, a tailor, a doctor and two other men each confess in turn to what?
Killing the same man
Killing the same man: the hunchback chokes at the tailor's table and each terrified finder dumps the body on a neighbour, until a barber pulls a bone from his throat and he sits up alive.
Q 20How many voyages does Sinbad the Sailor make?
Seven
Seven voyages, each begun because the rich merchant grows restless at home; the cycle circulated as a separate book of sea stories and was folded into the Nights only late in its history.
A porter
A porter, who had set down his load outside the rich man's gate and complained aloud that some toil and stay poor; Sinbad overhears, invites him in and sends him home each evening with gold.
Q 24What is Ali Baba's trade?
Woodcutter
Woodcutter Ali Baba is at work in the forest when forty horsemen ride up; he hides in a tree and overhears the words that open their cave, while his rich brother Cassim knows nothing of it.
Q 25Cassim's wife learns of Ali Baba's treasure when what comes back stuck to the measure she lent his wife?
A gold coin
A gold coin: wondering what such poor relations could need to measure, she had smeared grease inside before lending it, and the coin that stuck sent the greedy Cassim to the cave and his death.
Q 26Which clever slave-girl repeatedly foils the thieves' plots against Ali Baba?
Morgiana
Morgiana first saves the household when a thief chalks a mark on her master's door: she chalks the same mark on the neighbouring doors, so the gang cannot tell which house is his.
Q 27In the original tale, Aladdin lives in which land?
China
China here is a storybook land at the edge of the known world: its ruler is called a sultan, its people are Muslims, and the villain comes from the far end of the map, the Maghreb.
Q 28Besides the lamp, what second magical object lets Aladdin summon a lesser genie?
A ring
A ring lent to him by the sorcerer saves Aladdin first: sealed in the cave and wringing his hands in despair, he rubs it by accident, and the genie that appears carries him out.
Q 29How does the sorcerer trick Aladdin's wife into handing over the magic lamp?
Offering new lamps for old
Offering new lamps for old works because Aladdin never told his wife what the battered lamp was: thinking the pedlar a fool, she laughs and lets it go in exchange for a shiny one.
Q 30What is the name of the princess Aladdin marries in the original tale?
Badroulbadour
Badroulbadour, renamed Jasmine by Disney, first catches Aladdin's eye when he hides behind the bathhouse door to glimpse her unveiled, although looking at her was forbidden.