This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion.

On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonor him.Įventually the Vizier (Wazir), whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. In his bitterness and grief, he decides that all women are the same. Discovering that his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her killed. Shahryār is shocked to learn that his brother's wife is unfaithful. The main frame story concerns Shahryār whom the narrator calls a ' Sasanian king' ruling in 'India and China'. See also: List of stories within One Thousand and One Nights and List of One Thousand and One Nights characters Scheherazade and Shahryar by Ferdinand Keller, 1880 Other stories, such as ' The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor', had an independent existence before being added to the collection. Some of the stories commonly associated with the Arabian Nights-particularly ' Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp' and ' Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'-were not part of the collection in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland after he heard them from the Syrian Maronite Christian storyteller Hanna Diab on Diab's visit to Paris. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights of storytelling, while others include 1001 or more. The stories proceed from this original tale some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained.

Ĭommon to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryar being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade, with one tale told over each night of storytelling. A Thousand Tales), which in turn may be translations of older Indian texts. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān ( Persian: هزار افسان, lit. The work is derived from a pre-Islamic Iranian prototype that relied partly on Indian elements, some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature. 1706–1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition ( c. One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabic: أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, romanized: ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah) is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age.

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