I was just
Arabian Nights & I found some interesting info, or I think its interesting information:
For one thing, I was quite shocked to learn from
this Timesonline article that that the most popular stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin & Singbad didn't belong to the original collection at all, infact they did not belong to the Arabic text until Antoine Galland added them there. There is, in fact, no known Arabic text of the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories that predates Galland, and elements in the story of Aladdin suggest that it may have been a European fairy tale rather than an Arabic one.
Then, in Europe three centuries ago, the Nights rose to the pinnacle of critical esteem when Antoine Galland produced his French translation, which spawned numerous other European versions. The Nights came to belong to World Literature, loved by children, novelists, poets and the general reading public, in the process contributing much to the formation and malformation of the Middle East in Western eyes. Galland did more than merely translate: he shaped the text into what became a more or less canonical form; as a result the Nights are as much a part of Western literature as of Arabic. To Western readers, the stories of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad belong to the core of the Nights and are among the best-known tales; but they did not belong to the Arabic text until Galland added them. There is, in fact, no known Arabic text of the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories that predates Galland, and elements in the story of Aladdin suggest that it may have been a European fairy tale rather than an Arabic one. It would be unthinkable, however, to publish the complete Nights without its two most popular tales, which is why in the present work they have been translated, by Ursula Lyons, from Galland?s French, as is an alternative ending of a Sindbad story. It was only in the course of the twentieth century that the Arabs themselves, in the wake of the Westerners, came to consider the Nights as something to be proud of and to study seriously instead of enjoying it in secret as a guilty pleasure. Many reactionary Muslims still consider it an unedifying text that ought to be banned or at least expurgated; but on the alwaraq.com website, where a wealth of Arabic texts may be consulted and searched, the Nights have the highest number of hits (I should add that the Koran is not listed there).
The frame story of Arabian Nights-the cruel, cuckolded King & the clever Sheherazade is also extremely well known, apart from the Galland interpolated trio of Singbad, Ali Baba & Alladin, & both the
Wikipedia article &
this book says that the frame story comes from the Persian, Pre Islamic
Hazaar Afsana which in its turn owe its origin to India.-both countries overrun by Arabs.
Wikipedia also speaks of the narrative devices these stories use, which were borrowed from Indian stories.
In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Sassanid Persia's Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. Thousand Tales). Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.
What is common throughout all the editions of The Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar (from Persian: شهريار generally meaning king or sovereign) and his wife Scheherazade (from Persian: شهرزاده generally meaning townswoman) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more "nights."
The collection, or at least certain stories drawn from it (or purporting to be drawn from it), became widely known in the West from the eighteenth century, after it was translated ? first into French and then English and other European languages. Sometime in the nineteenth century it acquired the English name, The Arabian Nights' Entertainment or simply Arabian Nights, by which it is still best known to English speaking people.
[edit] Frame story
An early example of the frame story, or framing device, is employed in the One Thousand and One Nights, in which the character Scheherazade narrates a set of tales (most often fairy tales) to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. Many of Scheherazade's tales are also frame stories, such as the Tale of Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman being a collection of adventures related by Sindbad the Seaman to Sindbad the Landsman. The concept of the frame story dates back to ancient Sanskrit literature, and was introduced into Persian and Arabic literature through the Panchatantra.[edit]
Story within a story
An early example of the "story within a story" technique can be found in the One Thousand and One Nights, which can be traced back to earlier Persian and Indian storytelling traditions, most notably the Panchatantra of ancient Sanskrit literature. The Nights, however, improved on the Panchatantra in several ways, particularly in the way a story is introduced. In the Panchatantra, stories are introduced as didactic analogies, with the frame story referring to these stories with variants of the phrase "If you're not careful, that which happened to the louse and the flea will happen to you." In the Nights, this didactic framework is the least common way of introducing the story, but instead a story is most commonly introduced through subtle means, particularly as an answer to questions raised in a previous tale.
This
bit about the Persian King Shahryar from wikip also leads one to believe that the story is Pre Islamic Persian.
Persian: شهريار, meaning The Great King) is the fictional Persian Sassanid King of kings in One Thousand and One Nights, who is told stories by his wife, Shahrazad.
He ruled over a Persian Empire extended to India, over all the adjacent islands and a great way beyond the Ganges as far as China, while Shahryār?s younger brother, Shāhzamān (شاهزمان) ruled over Samarkand. There is an anomaly in the story, for the King Shahryār is a Sassanid, and thus a Zoroastrian and not a Muslim as most of the stories' characters are.
So the frame story seems to be from the Sassanid Hazaar Afsana with some Indian roots, while the three most popular stories-which are perhaps the
only stories most people have heard of, are interpolations of 18
th century Frenchman Antoine Galland-just thought all this interesting.
The
Wikipedia article on Antoine Galland says that many speculate that Antoine Galland invented the stories of Ali Baba & Alladin himself.
Galland had come across a manuscript of The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor in the 1690s and in 1701 he published his translation of it into French. Its success encouraged him to embark on a translation of a 14th-century Syrian manuscript of tales from the The Thousand and One Nights. The first two volumes of this work, under the title Les mille et une nuits, appeared in 1704. The twelfth and final volume was published posthumously in 1717. Galland translated the first part of his work solely from the Syrian manuscript, but in 1709 he was introduced to a Christian Maronite monk from Aleppo, Hanna Diab, who recounted fourteen more stories to Galland from memory. Galland chose to include seven of these tales in his version of the Nights.
Mystery still surrounds the origins of some of the most famous tales. For instance, there are no Arabic manuscripts of Aladdin and Ali Baba which pre-date Galland's translation, leading some scholars to conclude that Galland invented them himself and the Arabic versions are merely later renderings of his original French
.
Topic: Arabian Nights, Interpolations of Most Popular Stories & Hazaar Afsana