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The arabian nights [a review].

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there lived a great king. When he passed, his eldest son, Shahryar, inherited his kingdom while his younger son, Shah Zaman was given a smaller kingdom of his own with a capital in Samarkand.

As the years went by, the brothers missed each other terribly until Shahryar invited Shah Zaman to visit him in his capital. However, on departing, Shah Zaman discovered his wife in bed with another man and he slew them both.

On their reunion the brothers are very happy, but Shahryar can see something is bothering Shah Zaman. No matter what, he does not seem to be able to bring joy to his brother. One day, after declining to join his brother hunting, Shah Zaman spots his brother’s wife engaged in an even more brazen act of adultery. Somewhat relieved that such a shame is not unique to him, he reluctantly tells his brother all. After witnessing the adultery for himself, Shahryar too has his wife killed and the two kings leave the capital in disguise and in shame.

At an oasis, they come across a jinn [genie] who has taken a woman captive believing that he has her all to herself. But, as she explains, when the jinn is asleep, she takes other lovers. Realising that their shame is not unique to them, that no woman can be trusted to remain faithful, the brothers return to their respective kingdoms with stronger peace of mind.

Shahryar begins the practice of demanding a new virgin bride each evening. Each morning after, he has her executed before she can bring shame to him.

He also sware himself by a binding oath that whatever wife he married he would abate her maidenhead at night and slay her the next morning to make sure of his honour; “For,” said he, “there never was nor is there one chaste woman upon the face of the earth.”

Soon his capital grows depleted of suitable virgins and his citizens are increasingly enraged by his barbarism, yet he will not be appeased to change his demands. His Wazir [Vizier], who has the responsibility of finding virgin brides for his king (lest he be executed himself) is increasingly anxious as the country’s stock of eligible virgins is reaching exhaustion.

Now [the Wazir] had two daughters, Shahrazad and Dunyazad hight, of which the elder had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by-gone men and things, indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

The Wazir’s beautiful, intelligent and resourceful daughter, Shahrazad, asks her father to marry her to the king. The Wazir is very reluctant, he prizes his daughter greatly, but she succeeds in convincing him.

The King marries Shahrazad but after he has taken her virginity, he allows Shahrazad’s younger sister, Dunyazad, into his apartments to say goodbye and Shahrazad begins telling Dunyazad a story. The story intrigues the King but Shahrazad does not get to its ending. So the King delays her execution one night so that he may hear the rest the next night but, once Shahrazad ends the first story, she simply begins a new one, again withholding the ending till the next night. And so on, delaying her execution for 1001 nights, hoping to soften the King’s heart and save her own life.

This Modern Library Classics Edition of The Arabian Nights – Tales from A Thousand and One Nights , is not a complete collection of the stories. That would be require a multi-volume collection. It is not clear on what basis the stories in this collection have been chosen. Obviously, the essential frame story of King Shahryar and Shah Zaman, Shahrazad and Dunyazad, that open the epic is included. The most famous stories such as Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp , Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves , or Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman are included. But I am not sure on what basis the majority of stories have been selected for this collection from the large source material.

[It should also be noted that for some of the most famous stories, such as Alaeddin , there is no equivalent recorded Arabic version that predates the first European publication and all subsequent Arabic versions are translations from the European versions. As far as I am aware, it is unclear if they are wholly European inventions, or, since these stories were for a long time only transmitted orally, it is just that the original Arabic version was forgotten before it was transcribed in Arabic]

I wanted to start with some of the aspects I did like in The Arabian Nights but for the sake of context it might be better to begin with some of the things I did not like. It may sound bizarre to say that I did not like the amount of magic in the tales, a bit like reading a lot of science fiction and saying you didn’t like the abundance of aliens and technology! But in both cases, much depends on how such an element is used.

Many of the tales are short. So short that there really isn’t much to them. The characters are outlines and forgettable, the themes aren’t grand and the language, which translator Sir Richard F Burton has deliberately kept in a medieval style, is often difficult, simplistic, repetitive and with too little beauty in it to look past these shortcomings.

Everything, therefore, rests on the plot and when that plot in turn hinges on a magical intervention at a convenient moment, and this happens in a similar way story after story, then the magic trick has been overplayed.

I suppose something similar could be said for fairy tales, but fairy tales seem far more endearing. Maybe because we hear them as children, maybe because they aren’t all the same. The repetitiveness of the shorter stories was the other thing I disliked. There are only so many times you can hear a short story where someone discovers a hidden underground lair, which contains treasure, or a jinn, or an imprisoned princess.

The repetition in plot was matched by repetition in dialogue and narration. There are so many obeisances and lamentations made to God, so many tired descriptions of hoards of treasure and the beauty of maidens, so many beards torn out and tears flowing down. In this respect the Nights can be as frustrating as The Shahnameh which I read last year.

The stories I liked best were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the famous ones like Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves . This may seem strange given what I’ve just said. After all, these stories also hinge on conveniently timed magic and the discovery of underground hoards. But, they are longer, more complex and characterisation becomes a feature. There is much else going on in these stories and magic is only one element.

I also could not help but notice that the tale of Ali Baba contains a rare feature in this book. Despite having the brilliant Shahrazad as storyteller, the Nights are mostly tales of male protagonists and female characters have little to say or do. However, in Ali Baba we find Morgiana – a servant of Ali Baba’s brother Kasim. Morgiana is clever, resourceful, brave and a breath of fresh air who twice saves Ali Baba’s life.

This pleasure for the more famous stories did not extend to Sinbad the Seaman . It’s telling was just too matter-of-fact, there was no real tension, character or plot development and the telling of each voyage was just too similar and repetitive. It was a poor man’s Odysseus and yet, despite all this, it was still better than many stories in the collection.

Some of the less famous stories I enjoyed include The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad , Judar and his Brethren , Julnar the Sea-Born and her son King Badr Basim of Persia , Abu Kir the Dyer and Abu Sir the Barber and The Sleeper and the Waker . These stories were mostly found in the second half of this edition and were among the lengthier stories with more original plots and better developed characters.

I am not one who believes in giving trigger warnings and I am not about to give one here. Nevertheless, in the interest of providing an honest review, there are a few things you ought to know about if you are not familiar with the Thousand and One Nights . The tales frequently include elements which, by today’s moral standards, are clearly sexist and misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic.

The opening tale which provides the entire premise of the collection – of Kings Shahryar and Shah Zaman, their respective wives and Shahryar’s penchant for bedding virgins before having them executed – should give you enough of a clue of what you will be in for. In addition to what I have already shared, the men that the wives of Kings Shahryar and Shah Zaman committed adultery with were both black slaves. The implication being that black African men have superior sexual endowments and endurance and that women, in the absence of a controlling man, are incapable of resisting their own sexual desires.

This is just the beginning. The Arabian Nights contains much that a modern reader would find difficult to stomach. Again, I say this not to condemn but to say that if, like me, you are committed to completing version that is faithful to the original, you will need a strong constitution.

This edition of The Arabian Nights includes the preface by Burton in which he addresses this issue, though, in his time, the concern was for the sexual explicitness of the Nights rather than racism or sexism:

For instance the European novelist marries off his hero and heroine and leaves them to consummate marriage in privacy; even Tom Jones has the decency to bolt the door. But the Eastern storyteller, especially this unknown “prose Shakespeare,” must usher you, with a flourish, into the bridal chamber and narrate to you, with infinite gusto, everything he sees and hears. Again, we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in England is not so in Egypt; what scandalises us now would have been a tame joke tempore Elisæ.

By the way, it must be said that Burton led an enviably extraordinary life of adventure! One that makes a pitiful comparison of any explorer from the past century or more and could never be repeated. Even to try and summarise his exploits will be a disservice by omission. I think I would like to get my hands on a good biography and some of his other writing. His collection and translation of the Nights has become a standard version owing to the quality of his translation including correcting the errors of earlier translations and especially to his extensive knowledgeable notes.

This edition also contains an Introduction by AS Byatt, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Possession . Though it was not written as an introduction to this edition but as a stand-alone essay for the New York Times Magazine , it contains several thought-provoking points. Byatt begins with the titular ‘1001’ as a symbol of the collection’s references to the infinite as well as to parallel reflection represented by, for example, its length, continuation and nesting of stories within stories. It made me wonder if the inspirational origin of the Nights can be traced further East since India is the source of Arabic numerals, the invention of zero and the infinite is an important element of Hindu and Buddhist theology. Byatt compares this to storytelling in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition which is linear with beginnings, middles and ends.

Byatt also emphasises the Night’s message of a life that is prolonged and saved by the humanising activity of storytelling. Byatt shares her thoughts on the influence the Nights has had on Western and later writers, from Dickens to Proust and Rushdie. Perhaps the biggest treat I got from reading her Introduction was of other examples of interlinked stories. Some I have already read, like The Canterbury Tales . Some I have not yet read but am aware of, like Metamorphoses and The Decameron . Some were new to me, like The Saragossa Manuscript .

I can’t say I enjoyed The Arabian Nights . It is just too boring, too simple, too repetitive, too morally backward. I can appreciate and respect its place in the history of literature and the influence it has had. For the modern reader, it is not a book I would recommend reading for the pleasure of it but rather for an appreciation of it and to say that you have read it. Even then you have to be stubborn.

To give you an idea of just how stubborn a reader I am; it was ten years ago that I first attempted this book. In fact, I got 580 pages into it before I had to leave for a holiday and decided it was not a book to take with me and when I got back I found I could not get back into it. It has been nagging me for these past ten years to read it and now I finally have, from the beginning, with full knowledge of how little I would enjoy it, just so that I can say I have read it and have never left a book unfinished. That is how stubborn I am, but not stubborn enough to dare tackle the entire One Thousand and One Nights !

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I totally disagree with you. I read the original arabic version many many times and I can say it is amazing considering the time was written. Probably the translation cant be good enough to enjoy the poems and the traditions behind every story. 1001 night is a window on a really different world full of passion , imagination, morals and human’s good and bad nature. It is true some stories kind of repeated, but I think because they have been collected in different times.

A fair and accurate assessment, though perhaps though an unfair lens. Most readers today picking up the Nights will be for the purposes of study: anthropological, mythological, even linguistic. When the stories were first compiled (not composed) in Arabic, many were adapted from earlier folk tales originating in Persia (esp.), Egypt and India, which in turn were carried forward from traditional tales of earlier cultures. References to contemporary constructs such as Islam/Saria, Ifrit, Djinn, etc., were woven in for the audience of the day. There is no argument the stories as a body are a bland, repetitive slog, regardless of the translation (including Arabic). For modern English readers, the Burton translation can make this an even rougher ride, and his embellishments may diminish it’s value as an historical text (debatable). Many reading for academic purposes will likely want to stick with the earlier Arabic translations, while modern English readers may find some of the other translations a little easier to digest. As a suggestion, the Lyons translation – freely available online – may be a good starting point for general interest readers looking to dip their toe into the pool of venerated and sometimes ancient folk knowledge that is the Nights.

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Book Reviews

The Arabian Nights: Book Review

For those 2 people who don’t know, The Arabian Nights is sort of a collection of short stories told in Arabia (which seems to include India and parts of China) waaaaaay back in the day. The framework of the story is about a sultan who caught his wife cheating on him. After he has her killed, he decides to take out his revenge on the entire sex, so he marries a different wife every day and has her killed the next morning. Scheherazade is the Grand Vizier’s beautiful, intelligent daughter. She realizes that this can’t go on, so she comes up with a plan. She asks to be the next wife of the sultan, and she starts telling him a story on their wedding night. But buried within that story is another story. The sultan is so intrigued by the story that he decides to let her live so he can find out how the story ends. She keeps stringing him along like this, theoretically for 1000 nights, until he relents and gives her a full pardon and takes her for his real wife. But that’s only a very small part of the book. The biggest part of the book is the stories Scheherazade tells the sultan. Included are Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, and others that we’ve probably all heard in one form or another.

I just picked this up because I wanted to see what it was all about. This version was very readable. It was interesting to see a slice of Arabian life. I would catch myself thinking, “They treat women so badly over there” and then I would remember that when these stories were first told, women were treated badly pretty much everywhere. But then there would be some stories where the women had surprising freedom and I would catch myself wondering where things started going bad. I can’t say that I know enough about the culture to comment on what’s changed and what hasn’t, but these stories do give you a little idea of what life is/was like in the Middle East and where they’re coming from. And in these times, a little understanding can only be a good thing.

Reviewed April 21, 2008

Friday Flashback Reviews are a weekly feature here on The Introverted Reader. These are old reviews I wrote on GoodReads . Thanks to Angieville and her Retro Friday Reviews for the inspiration and encouragement!

I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop’s , my local independent bookstore located in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books . I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.

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I have an old copy at home with many beautiful Moghul-style illustrations, but I've been wanting the B&N edition too, just because it's so gorgeous.

I watched an Arabian Nights film adaption (mini-series, maybe) a few years back. Ever since, I've been eager to read the stores and have had my eye on the B&N edition — glad to hear it's readable!

This is why I love reading what you have to say, Enbrethiliel. You just always have some fantastic insight to add. I did not know that some of these stories are folktales or that we have lost some of the real stories. I love what you say about cliffhangers because you are absolutely spot on. I am sick of cliffhangers but these are perfectly executed.

I did read the B&N edition. My husband bought me this gorgeous leather-bound edition as a gift. I bet there are better translations out there, but the B&N version was still very readable.

I had grand plans to read this book this year, but never got to it. Glad to see that you like it. I have an edition in my Nook, but I'm not it's the recommended edition. So I was curious about which edition you tried and what you think of it?

I remember how disappointed I was when I found out that many of the original stories have been lost to us. (Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves are folktales from the same region and era, but not necessarily part of Shaharazad's thousand-night story marathon.) I still really wish we could find all of them. The cliffhanger is a much abused literary device these days, and I think these stories, which both end perfectly and yet lead to further possibilities, are excellent examples of cliffhangers done right.

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THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

A companion.

by Robert Irwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

Matching The Arabian Nights' scope and enchantment with erudition and wit, Irwin (The Arabian Nightmare, 1987) explores its elusive kingdom of stories, delving into the vast work's textual genesis, cultural history, and literary legacy. The most influential book in the Western canon that does not actually belong to it, The Arabian Nights never enjoyed the same literary status in the East, and its origins have been made only murkier by its reception in Europe. Irwin begins with the translators who popularized the Nights and, along the way, bowdlerized and warped it, or even inserted their own episodes. Most famously, Aladdin, who has no Arabic version predating his appearance in 18th-century France, may well have been the creation of translator Antoine Galland, not of Scheherazade. Irwin wryly glosses these early translations, which distortedly mirror the original Eastern exoticism with the reflections of their age's prejudices and their translators' personal eccentricities (notably the lexical, racial, and sexual obsessions of the Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Burton). The earlier Arabic compilations are no more reliable, however—Irwin devotes a separate chapter to forerunners (conjectural or lost) over several centuries, from India to Persia and Egypt. In a quixotic effort to amass 1,001 actual tales, these medieval compilers would incorporate local legends and real settings, sometimes approaching souk storytellers as sources. Throughout, Irwin's scholarly acumen illuminates these myriad worlds of the Nights, whether the cityscapes of the Mamelukes, the urban rogues' gallery of thieves and bazaar magicians, or the marvels of jinn and clockwork birds. The longest chapter is a selected roster of its literary heirs, from nursery fables and gothic novels through Proust, Joyce, and Borges, to contemporaries like Salman Rushdie and John Barth. An enchanting dragoman and chaperon for sleepless nights with Scheherazade.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-713-99105-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994

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BOOK REVIEW

by Robert Irwin

edited by Robert Irwin

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

Episodes from the life of lady mendl (elsie de wolfe).

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans

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Book Review: The Arabian Nights (Mahdi and Haddawy edition)

It’s been a long time since I wrote about this book for the first time, The Arabian Nights , better known as The 1001 Nights , and one of my readings for 2021 . Although it took me some time to be done with this book, which I began in April, to be more specific, I’m in love with it from beginning to end. Like all loves, it is far from perfect, but it gets close enough, so I can be glad I finally gave this timeless classic a chance.

Now as sumptuously packaged as they are critically acclaimed―a new deluxe trade paperback edition of the beloved stories. The stories of The Arabian Nights (and stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories) are famously told by the Princess Shahrazad, under the threat of death should the king lose interest in her tale. Collected over the centuries from India, Persia, and Arabia, and ranging from adventure fantasies, vivacious erotica, and animal fables, to pointed Sufi tales, these stories provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. No one knows exactly when a given story originated, and many circulated orally for centuries before being written down; but in the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them―a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam. This translation is of the complete text of the Mahdi edition, the definitive Arabic edition of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, which is the oldest surviving version of the tales and considered to be the most authentic.

All the stories are filled with beautiful characters, entertaining plots, uncountable twists, and magic on every page. I felt teleported to the very sands of Arabia while reading this book, discovering endless morals and teachings, but also more light-hearted messages in all the tales.

One of the things I liked the most was the initial notes before the beginning of the tales, explaining the history behind this manuscript and how this edition came to happen, along with some regarding the edition and translation process. My academic side was really happy to have some background and research to accompany all this fantasy, although not as much as I would like.

You can also expect a good dose of morals and teachings, some of them that could seem contradictory, some stories suggesting one thing and others telling the opposite, but I find this is a part of the charm. It’s better if you never expect anything with The Arabian Nights, for it is full of many twists and surprises in every story.

However, nothing is perfect, and in this case, there are two things I need to mention. First, this is not a deluxe edition as the synopsis claims; some readers have complained about the pages being too thin and the deckle edges, and these are not too bothersome for me, but the quality of the cover and back cover is terrible, losing color with time, especially the back cover, which looks awful at this point.

The second thing I don’t like is in the text as well, and it’s a matter of style and preferences. The antepenultimate tale, “The Story of Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar”, felt eternal and even tedious. I hated the style, how illogical everything seemed to be even for a fairy tale, even for fantasy literature, and the fact that it was so long made it worse. There are longer, more fantastical, and stranger stories in this book, all of them filled with magic and wonder, but this one, in particular, was the only one I didn’t like at all.

With incomparable charm, a magic of its own, and stories that will surprise all readers, The Arabian Nights will win every heart that dares to venture through its pages. Shahrazad is my favorite character of all times now, with all her knowledge and wit, her creativity and wisdom, she can beat any other protagonist I can think about. I’m sure you will agree with me once you read her story and discover the ones she has learned or created.

For now, I will keep on with my original reading list , the ones I added after , the Orphan tales , and the Satanic Verses . There is an annotated version of The Arabian Nights I want to read as well, but I need a rest after such a heavy book, so I may favor a webcomic adaptation meanwhile; I need to think about reading the original novels at the same time, though.

The Arabian Nights

Print Length: 560 pages

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; New Deluxe edition (May 17, 2008)

Publication Date: May 17, 2008

ISBN-10: 0393331660

ISBN-13: 978-0393331660

About the Editor:

Muḥsin Sayyid Mahdī al-Mashhadani was an Iraqi-American Islamologist and Arabist. He was a leading authority on Arabian history, philology, and philosophy. His best-known work was the first critical edition of the One Thousand and One Nights.

About the Translator:

Husain Haddawy was born and grew up in Baghdad, taught English and comparative literature at various American universities, wrote art criticism, and is now living in retirement in Thailand.

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The Arabian Nights

Tales of 1001 Nights, Volume 1

Anonymous, Robert Irwin, Malcolm C. Lyons, Ursula Lyons | 4.15 | 4,136 ratings and reviews

Ranked #53 in Karma , Ranked #98 in Penguin Classics

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Arabian Nights from the world's leading experts.

Marina Warner The Arabian Nights was a collection of popular, vernacular tales that was actually rather despised by scholars – the Arabic apparently is quite rough, compared to the elegance of the Farsi used in the much better known, more established and highly valued Persian romances of the time. The Nights tales were considered trifles and not looked after – the same has happened with a lot of early children’s literature. We don’t have a lot of it because no one saw fit to preserve it. (Source)

Robert Irwin What’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch. There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re getting is a pure story; the Nights is kind of like an engine of stories. It’s wonderful to see how stories work in a very nuts-and-bolts way as you work through them: how tension is managed and how... (Source)

Issandr El Amrani This translation is really significant. It is a beautiful edition of one of my favourite books. (Source)

Andrei Codrescu Burton’s extraordinary footnotes are a book on their own, and his translation, hard-going at first, takes English to amazing heights. (Source)

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The arabian nights or tales of 1001 nights, recommendations from our site.

“What’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch . There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re getting is a pure story; the Nights is kind of like an engine of stories. It’s wonderful to see how stories work in a very nuts-and-bolts way as you work through them: how tension is managed and how characters are introduced and so on” Read more...

Classics of Arabic Literature

Robert Irwin

“The Arabian Nights was a collection of popular, vernacular tales that was actually rather despised by scholars – the Arabic apparently is quite rough, compared to the elegance of the Farsi used in the much better known, more established and highly valued Persian romances of the time. The Nights tales were considered trifles and not looked after – the same has happened with a lot of early children’s literature. We don’t have a lot of it because no one saw fit to preserve it.” Read more...

Marina Warner on Fairy Tales

Marina Warner , Novelist

“ The Nights are a shared history, back and forth, on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea—they’re part of our shared heritage” Read more...

Mathias Enard on The ‘Orient’ and Orientalism

Mathias Enard , Novelist

“Burton’s extraordinary footnotes are a book on their own, and his translation, hard-going at first, takes English to amazing heights.” Read more...

The best books on Fantastical Tales

Andrei Codrescu , Novelist

“This translation is really significant. It is a beautiful edition of one of my favourite books.” Read more...

The best books on Understanding the Arab World

Issandr El Amrani , Political Commentator

Arabian Nights by Anna Milbourne - review

I really liked this book because it has lots of stories in it and they are all about different adventures and characters. The book is very funny, but also has a few scary bits. One of my favourite parts was in the story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, when Ali Baba's brother gets stuck in a magic cave with treasures in it and he forgets the password and starts shouting lots of crazy things like 'open barley!' and 'open chickpea!' – that part really made me laugh.

The scariest story was the Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor because he goes off on his fishing boat which gets shipwrecked, and some of his crew are eaten by cannibals!

This is is a really nice book with a fabric cover, but don't be put off by its 'pinkness' as it's not just for girls and would be enjoyed just as much by boys. I would recommend it for anyone between the ages of 4 and 10. It has lots of good pictures and I would give it a 5/5.

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A New Translation Brings “Arabian Nights” Home

By Yasmine AlSayyad

King Shahriyar and his brother King Shahzaman suspect their suffering to be unique in this world. Their wives have slept with other men, and this drives them to grief, to madness—Shahzaman skewers his wife and her lover with a sword—and to a quest to find someone unluckier than them. One morning, after waking up on a wooded beach, they see a woman standing next to a sleeping jinni. “Make love to me and give me satisfaction, or I will set the jinni on you,” she says. The men, reluctantly, oblige. The jinni has kept the woman locked in a glass chest, deep in the sea, but that hasn’t stopped her from sleeping with ninety-eight other men. “He thought he had me and could keep me for himself,” she says, “forgetting that what fortune has in store cannot be turned, nor what a woman wants.”

The brothers, unhinged by these words, run back to their thrones. Shahriyar begins to take a new bride each night, only to have her killed the following morning. Parents grieve; the kingdom darkens. Eventually, Shahrazad, the vizier’s daughter, comes up with a plan. She offers herself as a bride, but holds Shahriyar’s attention, night after night, with stories that end on a cliffhanger. With every dawn, the king decides to let her live, burning to know what comes next.

This is the frame story for the loose collection of tales known, in English, as “ Arabian Nights ,” as narrated in an electric new translation by the British Syrian poet Yasmine Seale. Beyond the frame tale and a few core stories, there is little agreement on what belongs in the “Nights.” The collection has no single authoritative manuscript. No known author. As the scholar Paulo Lemos Horta, the editor of this new edition, explains in an introduction, we know a book by its name was circulating, in Cairo, as early as the twelfth century, but that copy has never been found. The most famous manuscript—the “Syrian” manuscript, as it’s known to scholars—comes from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and there is a fragment of a manuscript from the ninth century, believed to be an early adaptation from Persian. (Many of the tales are believed to have travelled from India and Persia to the Arab lands where they flourished.) Most frustratingly, no Arabic manuscripts for the stories that most people know—“Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Pari Banu”—seem to exist. Their first known printing was in French, in the eighteenth century, by the Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland, and he was long believed to be their legitimate author.

Without an Arabic text to work from, contemporary translators often resist including these popular tales in their work. Seale and Horta take a different approach. For some time now, it’s been known that the French stories have an Arabic source, a man that Galland met in 1709. At the time, Galland had come out with seven volumes of his “Nights” translation, which were based largely on the Syrian manuscript. (A friend gave him the document in 1701.) The books sold terrifically well, and Galland’s publisher pestered him for more—but he had reached the end of his manuscript, and was at a loss for material. That spring, at a friend’s apartment, Galland was introduced to Hanna Diyab, a traveller from Aleppo who knew some “beautiful Arabic tales,” as Galland wrote in his diary. In the course of a month, Diyab told his stories and Galland scribbled them down. (Galland’s notes survive.) Diyab never indicated that these stories were part of the “Nights.” He never explained whether he’d heard them somewhere or whether he’d made them up.

Diyab’s memoirs were rediscovered in the Vatican Library in 1993 and published, in French, in 2015. They were finally released in English last spring. Horta and Seale’s volume, in turn, pairs Diyab’s stories with a collection of the most influential tales from Arabic manuscripts. Each page is adorned with illustrations and photographs from other translations and adaptations of the tales, as well as a wonderfully detailed cascade of notes that illuminate the stories and their settings. “Only such a selection would offer the reader, whether new to the tales or already an expert, the chance to read them meaningfully in relation to one another,” Horta writes.

I am both new to the tales and not. Translations of “Arabian Nights” have had many devoted readers, from Marcel Proust to Charles Dickens, James Joyce to Charlotte Brontë. But the stories never held much stature among Arabists. The originals are often written in what’s considered “Middle Arabic,” and they’ve rarely been embraced by the classical canon. “It is Arabic and at the same time it is not,” one scholar Horta cites insisted, in 1956. “Every connoisseur of the genuinely Arabic will feel in the complex whole of the modern ‘1001 Nights’ something diluted, impoverished, superficial and fictitious.”

But I grew up in Egypt, where the stories’ influence, as cultural touchstones, is overwhelming. Between the “Nights”-based stories I heard as a child and the “Nights”-themed soap operas that flood TV during Ramadan, I assumed that many of the tales would ring a bell. In fact, very few did, and they were mostly the tales added by Galland. Even then, certain details seemed new. I didn’t know that the flying carpet belonged not to “Aladdin” but to “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Pari Banu,” nor did I know that Ali Baba is not actually the protagonist of his story. The tale that Diyab told Galland is about a female slave who saves Ali Baba, and it was originally titled “Marjana’s Perspicacity, or The Forty Robbers Extinguished through the Skillfulness of a Slave.” To my greatest surprise, I had almost no recollection of the Arabic stories.

And yet those older, unfamiliar tales felt nearer to me, their lulling cadence recalling the rhymed folk tales that thrive in Egypt’s villages to this day. The most striking feature of the Arabic tales is their shifting registers—prose, rhymed prose, poetry—and Seale captures the movement between them beautifully. Nomad warriors descend on a city “as many grains of sand, impossible to count and to withstand.” Three characters break a chest open, and find “inside a basket of red wool, and inside the basket was a stretch of carpet and, beneath it, a shawl folded in four, and, beneath it, a young woman like pure silver, killed and cut in pieces.”

Many descriptions remain distinctly Arabic. Seale, instead of idiomatically resolving them, transports us to their native soundscape. A woman's naked body is “like a slice of moon.” A character who dies is “taken to her Maker,” and another tells us that his soul is at his feet. Seale evokes the ambiguity of the Arabic prose—we see “ten couches spread with blue”—and she has an uncanny talent for preserving its strangeness, too. In one arresting passage, she enumerates the pastries at a bustling market:

Honey lattices and almond rings, dumplings filled with cream and spiced with musk, soap cakes, anemone floss, pudding and fritters, amber combs and ladyfingers, widows’ bread, eat-and-thanks, judge’s bites, pipes of plenty, broth of wind, and delicacies of every description.

Many of these sweets, including the apparently fantastical ones, are real, and can be found in medieval Arabic texts. Seale had to coin “inventive names for desserts that have no English equivalents,” a note explains. By the time we get to “eat-and-thanks,” it’s her patterning of sound, rather than her description, that helps us understand what a treat might look or taste like.

In the stories from the French, Seale tries to rescue a brisk narrative quality from Galland’s ceremonial cadence, but the stories that emerge are still much tidier than the Arabic ones. Characters are better developed, and we get a deeper glimpse of their interiority. But, read in comparison with the Arabic characters, who often break into verse, they feel flat, tonally sterile. One scholar counted 1,420 poems in the “Nights,” many of which belong to established poets from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. Famous English translators often disagreed about whether to include them; Seale, thankfully, translates dozens of them, and they’re one of the great strengths of this edition. Wrecked by escalating misfortunes, one man weeps, “My fate is like an enemy: / It shows me only hate. / If once it stoops to kindness / It soon mends its mistake.” Another character, on the edge of despair, says these lines:

Life has two days—peace and menace. One part happiness, then grief. To those who hold the blows of fate against us Ask: does fate help those it does not also test? Do you not see that storms attack Only the highest trees? Earth has many places dry and green But only those with fruit have stones to fear. And in the sky are many stars, but none Suffer eclipses like the moon and sun. You thought well of the days when they were good And did not care what fortune had in store. The nights were still and tricked you into ease Yet in the calmest night does trouble come.

For a collection so sprawling, fate is a remarkably enduring protagonist in the “Nights,” a fact at once calming and terrifying. Aladdin, a lazy ne’er-do-well, accumulates great wealth; women and men of character are driven to ruin. (“Decent, I / Did not thrive / They, deceitful, did,” a man exclaims on the brink of his execution.) I read Seale’s book at a time when I’d begun to question certain meritocratic values, the belief that success and happiness flow from hard work or inherent talent. The stories of the “Nights” were a gentle reminder that “winds don’t blow as the ships desire,” as the Arabic proverb goes. There is horror in this, but there is also license, to enjoy good tidings when they come. As one half-prince, half-stone once said, “For whom has time been fair? / For whom the world unchanged?”

An earlier version of this article misquoted an example of rhymed prose.

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The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (Modern Library Classics) Paperback – April 10, 2001

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• Print length 912 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Modern Library
• Publication date April 10, 2001
• Dimensions 5.27 x 2.02 x 7.9 inches
• ISBN-10 0375756752
• ISBN-13 978-0375756757
• Lexile measure 1320L
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Library; 1st Modern Library edition (April 10, 2001)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 912 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375756752
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375756757
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1320L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.64 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.27 x 2.02 x 7.9 inches
• #1,980 in Teen & Young Adult Classic Literature
• #11,502 in Folklore (Books)
• #31,363 in Classic Literature & Fiction

About the authors

Sir richard francis burton.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota and has previously held professorships at New York University, the University of Munich, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1997 he founded a storytelling and creative drama program, Neighborhood Bridges, in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis that is still thriving in the elementary schools of the Twin Cities.

His major publications include The Great Refusal: Studies of the Romantic Hero in German and American Literature (1970), Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (1979), Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983), The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983), Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism (1991), Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994), Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (1997), Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1066-1966 (1997), edited with Sander Gilman 1997, When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and their Tradition (1999), Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2000), Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000 (2002), edited with Leslie Morris, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller (2005), Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006), Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling (2008), The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-tale Films (2010), The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (2012), and Grimm Legacies (2014).

Regarded as a major American translator, he has published The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987), Beauties, Beasts, and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales (1989), The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (1995), and he has also edited Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (1991), The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight (1994), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000), The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (2001), and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2006). His most recent translations include Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach (2006), The Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (2008) with Joseph Russo, Lucky Hans and other Merz Fairy Tales (2008) by Kurt Schwitters, The Cloak of Dreams (2010) by Béla Balázs, and The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition (2014), all which include long introductions. In 2013 he published a major anthology of nineteenth century folk tales under the title, The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang.

Early in his career, Professor Zipes was co-founder of the important journal New German Critique, was co-editor of the journal of children's literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1992-2000, editor-in-chief of the Routledge book series Children’s Literature and Culture and co-editor with Erich Weitz of the Palgrave book series Studies in Contemporary European Culture and History. In 1997 he became the first Director of the Center for German and European Studies In addition to his administrative work, he has written numerous articles for various journals in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Canada, Italy, Slovenia, and France.

Among his many awards are the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1988-89), the Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (1992), the Storytelling World Award: Storytelling Information (1996), the Scholar of College, University of Minnesota (1997-2000), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1998-1999), the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award for exceptional service to children and their literature, Children’s Literature Association (1999), the International Brothers Grimm Award, International Institute for Children’s Literature in Osaka, Japan (1999), the McKnight Research Grant (2000-2003), Schick Lecture Award of Indiana State University, Hoosier Folklore Society (2006), Katharine Briggs Award, Folklore Society, London (2007), Read the World Award (2008), University of San Francisco (2008), Leverhulme Fellowship at the Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England (2012-13), and American Alliance for Theatre & Education's 2014 Judith Kase Cooper Honorary Research Award.

Ken Mondschein

Ken Mondschein is a college professor, scholar, fencing master, jouster, and author with expertise in subjects ranging from medieval history to contemporary politics. He was a Fulbright scholar to France, received his PhD in history from Fordham University and is certified as a master of historical fencing by the US Fencing Coaches' Association. His work includes history, fencing, introductions to works of classic literature, and other projects.

Husain Haddawy

Edward Stanley Poole

Bennett Cerf

Muhsin Mahdi

Edward William Lane

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THE WINDERMERE SERIES

The arabian nights entertainments, with illustrations by, milo winter.

RAND M c NALLY & COMPANY

Chicago new york.

Copyright, 1914, by

Rand McNally & Company

THE INTRODUCTION

The Arabian Nights was introduced to Europe in a French translation by Antoine Galland in 1704, and rapidly attained a unique popularity. There are even accounts of the translator being roused from sleep by bands of young men under his windows in Paris, importuning him to tell them another story.

The learned world at first refused to believe that M. Galland had not invented the tales. But he had really discovered an Arabic manuscript from sixteenth-century Egypt, and had consulted Oriental story-tellers. In spite of inaccuracies and loss of color, his twelve volumes long remained classic in France, and formed the basis of our popular translations.

A more accurate version, corrected from the Arabic, with a style admirably direct, easy, and simple, was published by Dr. Jonathan Scott in 1811. This is the text of the present edition.

The Moslems delight in stories, but are generally ashamed to show a literary interest in fiction. Hence the world's most delightful story book has come to us with but scant indications of its origin. Critical scholarship, however, has been able to reach fairly definite conclusions.

The reader will be interested to trace out for himself the similarities in the adventures of the two Persian queens, Schehera-zade, and Esther of Bible story, which M. de Goeje has pointed out as indicating their original identity ( Encyclopædia Britannica , "Thousand and One Nights"). There are two or three references in tenth-century Arabic literature to a Persian collection of tales, called The Thousand Nights , by the fascination of which the lady Schehera-zade kept winning one more day's lease of life. A good many of the tales as we have them contain elements clearly indicating Persian or Hindu origin. But most of the stories, even those with scenes laid in Persia or India, are thoroughly Mohammedan in thought, feeling, situation, and action. [4]

The favorite scene is "the glorious city," ninth-century Bagdad, whose caliph, Haroun al Raschid, though a great king, and heir of still mightier men, is known to fame chiefly by the favor of these tales. But the contents (with due regard to the possibility of later insertions), references in other writings, and the dialect show that our Arabian Nights took form in Egypt very soon after the year 1450. The author, doubtless a professional teller of stories, was, like his Schehera-zade, a person of extensive reading and faultless memory, fluent of speech, and ready on occasion to drop into poetry. The coarseness of the Arabic narrative, which does not appear in our translation, is characteristic of Egyptian society under the Mameluke sultans. It would have been tolerated by the subjects of the caliph in old Bagdad no more than by modern Christians.

More fascinating stories were never told. Though the oath of an Oriental was of all things the most sacred, and though Schah-riar had "bound himself by a solemn vow to marry a new wife every night, and command her to be strangled in the morning," we well believe that he forswore himself, and granted his bride a stay of execution until he could find out why the ten polite young gentlemen, all blind of the right eye, "having blackened themselves, wept and lamented, beating their heads and breasts, and crying continually, 'This is the fruit of our idleness and curiosity.'" To be sure, when the golden door has been opened, and the black horse has vanished with that vicious switch of his tail, we have a little feeling of having been "sold,"—a feeling which great art never gives. But we are in the best of humor; for were we not warned all along against just this foible of curiosity, and is not the story-teller smiling inscrutably and advising us to be thankful that we at least still have our two good eyes?

Beside the story interest, the life and movement of the tales, the spirits that enter and set their own precedents, there is for us the charm of mingling with men so different from ourselves: men adventurous but never strenuous, men of many tribulations but no perplexities. Fantastic, magnificent, extravagant, beautiful, gloriously colored, humorous—was ever book of such infinite contrasts?

THE CONTENTS

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

The sultan and his vow.

It is written in the chronicles of the Sassanian monarchs that there once lived an illustrious prince, beloved by his own subjects for his wisdom and his prudence, and feared by his enemies for his courage and for the hardy and well-disciplined army of which he was the leader. This prince had two sons, the elder called Schah-riar, and the younger Schah-zenan, both equally good and deserving of praise.

When the old king died at the end of a long and glorious reign, Schah-riar, his eldest son, ascended the throne and reigned in his stead. Schah-zenan, however, was not in the least envious, and a friendly contest soon arose between the two brothers as to which could best promote the happiness of the other. Schah-zenan did all he could to show his loyalty and affection, while the new sultan loaded his brother with all possible honors, and in order that he might in some degree share the sultan's power and wealth, bestowed on him the kingdom of Great Tartary. Schah-zenan immediately went to take possession of the empire allotted him, and fixed his residence at Samarcand, the chief city.

After a separation of ten years Schah-riar so ardently desired to see his brother, that he sent his first vizier, [1] with a splendid embassy, to invite him to revisit his [10] court. As soon as Schah-zenan was informed of the approach of the vizier, he went out to meet him, with all his ministers, in most magnificent dress, and inquired after the health of the sultan, his brother. Having replied to these affectionate inquiries, the vizier told the purpose of his coming. Schah-zenan, who was much affected at the kindness and recollection of his brother, then addressed the vizier in these words: "Sage vizier, the sultan, my brother, does me too much honor. It is impossible that his wish to see me can exceed my desire of again beholding him. You have come at a happy moment. My kingdom is tranquil, and in ten days' time I will be ready to depart with you. Meanwhile pitch your tents on this spot, and I will order every refreshment and accommodation for you and your whole train."

At the end of ten days everything was ready, and Schah-zenan took a tender leave of the queen, his consort. Accompanied by such officers as he had appointed to attend him, he left Samarcand in the evening and camped near the tents of his brother's ambassador, that they might proceed on their journey early the following morning. Wishing, however, once more to see his queen, whom he tenderly loved, he returned privately to the palace, and went directly to her apartment. There, to his extreme grief, he found her in the company of a slave whom she plainly loved better than himself. Yielding to the first outburst of his indignation, the unfortunate monarch drew his scimitar, and with one rapid stroke slew them both.

He then went from the city as privately as he had entered it, and returned to his pavilion. Not a word [11] did he say to any one of what had happened. At dawn he ordered the tents to be struck, and the party set forth on their journey to the sound of drums and other musical instruments. The whole train was filled with joy, except the king, who could think of nothing but his queen, and he was a prey to the deepest grief and melancholy during the whole journey.

When he approached the capital of Persia he perceived the Sultan Schah-riar and all his court coming out to greet him. As soon as the parties met the two brothers alighted and embraced each other; and after a thousand expressions of regard, remounted and entered the city amid the shouts of the multitude. The sultan there conducted the king his brother to a palace which had been prepared for him. This palace communicated by a garden with the sultan's own and was even more magnificent, as it was the spot where all the fêtes and splendid entertainments of the court were given.

Schah-riar left the King of Tartary in order that he might bathe and change his dress; but immediately on his return from the bath went to him again. They seated themselves on a sofa, and conversed till supper time. After so long a separation they seemed even more united by affection than by blood. They ate supper together, and then continued their conversation till Schah-riar, perceiving the night far advanced, left his brother to repose.

The unfortunate Schah-zenan retired to his couch; but if in the presence of the sultan he had for a while forgotten his grief, it now returned with doubled force. Every circumstance of the queen's death arose to his mind and kept him awake, and left such a look of sorrow [12] on his face that next morning the sultan could not fail to notice it. He did all in his power to show his continued love and affection, and sought to amuse his brother with the most splendid entertainments, but the gayest fêtes served only to increase Schah-zenan's melancholy.

One morning when Schah-riar had given orders for a grand hunting party at the distance of two days' journey from the city, Schah-zenan requested permission to remain in his palace on account of a slight illness. The sultan, wishing to please him, consented, but he himself went with all his court to partake of the sport.

The King of Tartary was no sooner alone than he shut himself up in his apartment, and gave way to his sorrow. But as he sat thus grieving at the open window, looking out upon the beautiful garden of the palace, he suddenly saw the sultana, the beloved wife of his brother, meet a man in the garden with whom she held an affectionate conversation. Upon witnessing this interview, Schah-zenan determined that he would no longer give way to such inconsolable grief for a misfortune which came to other husbands as well as to himself. He ordered supper to be brought, and ate with a better appetite than he had before done since leaving Samarcand. He even enjoyed the fine concert performed while he sat at table.

Schah-riar returned from the hunt at the close of the second day, and was delighted at the change which he soon found had taken place in his brother. He urged him to explain the cause of his former depression and of his present joy. The King of Tartary, feeling it his duty to obey his suzerain lord, related the story of his [13] wife's misconduct, and of the severe punishment which he had visited on her. Schah-riar expressed his full approval of his brother's conduct.

"I own," he said, "had I been in your place I should have been less easily satisfied. I should not have been contented to take away the life of one woman, but should have sacrificed a thousand to my resentment. Your fate, surely, is most singular. Since, however, it has pleased God to afford you consolation, which, I am sure, is as well founded as was your grief, inform me, I beg, of that also."

Schah-zenan was very reluctant to relate what he had seen, but at last yielded to the urgent commands and entreaties of his brother, and told him of the faithlessness of his own queen.

At this unexpected news, the rage and grief of Schah-riar knew no bounds. He far exceeded his brother in his invectives and indignation. Not only did he sentence to death his unhappy sultana but bound himself by a solemn vow that, immediately on the departure of the king his brother, he would marry a new wife every night, and command her to be strangled in the morning. Schah-zenan soon after had a solemn audience of leave, and returned to his own kingdom, laden with the most magnificent presents.

When Schah-zenan was gone the sultan began to carry out his unhappy oath. Every night he married the daughter of some one of his subjects, and the next morning she was ordered out and put to death. It was the duty of the grand vizier to execute these commands of the sultan's, and revolting as they were to him, he was obliged to submit or lose his own head. [14] The report of this unexampled inhumanity spread a panic of consternation throughout the city. Instead of the praises and blessings with which, until now, they had loaded their monarch, all his subjects poured out curses on his head.

The grand vizier had two daughters, the elder of whom was called Schehera-zade, and the younger Dinar-zade. Schehera-zade was possessed of a remarkable degree of courage. She had read much, and had so good a memory that she never forgot anything she had once read or heard. Her beauty was equaled only by her virtuous disposition. The vizier was passionately fond of her.

One day as they were talking together, she made the astonishing request that she might have the honor of becoming the sultan's bride. The grand vizier was horrified, and tried to dissuade her. He pointed out the fearful penalty attached to the favor she sought. Schehera-zade, however, persisted, telling her father she had in mind a plan which she thought might put a stop to the sultan's dreadful cruelty.

"I am aware of the danger I run, my father," she said, "but it does not deter me from my purpose. If I die, my death will be glorious; if I succeed, I shall render my country an important service."

Still the vizier was most reluctant to allow his beloved child to enter on so dangerous an enterprise, and attempted to turn her from her purpose by telling her the following story: [15]

THE FABLE OF THE ASS, THE OX, AND THE LABORER

A very rich merchant had several farmhouses in the country, where he bred every kind of cattle. This merchant understood the language of beasts. He obtained this privilege on the condition of not imparting to any one what he heard, under penalty of death.

By chance [2] he had put an ox and an ass into the same stall; and being seated near them, he heard the ox say to the ass: "How happy do I think your lot. A servant looks after you with great care, washes you, feeds you with fine sifted barley, and gives you fresh and clean water; your greatest task is to carry the merchant, our master. My condition is as unfortunate as yours is pleasant. They yoke me to a plow the whole day, while the laborer urges me on with his goad. The weight and force of the plow, too, chafes all the skin from my neck. When I have worked from morning till night, they give me unwholesome and uninviting food. Have I not, then, reason to envy your lot?"

When he had finished, the ass replied in these words: "Believe me, they would not treat you thus if you possessed as much courage as strength. When they come to tie you to the manger, what resistance, pray, do you ever make? Do you ever push them with your horns? Do you ever show your anger by stamping on the ground with your feet? Why don't you terrify them with your bellowing? Nature has given you the means of making yourself respected, and yet you neglect to use them. They bring you bad beans and [16] chaff. Well, do not eat them; smell at them only and leave them. Thus, if you follow my plans, you will soon perceive a change, which you will thank me for."

The ox took the advice of the ass very kindly, and declared himself much obliged to him.

Early the next morning the laborer came for the ox, and yoked him to the plow, and set him to work as usual. The latter, who had not forgotten the advice he had received, was very unruly the whole day; and at night, when the laborer attempted to fasten him to the stall, he ran bellowing back, and put down his horns to strike him; in short, he did exactly as the ass had advised him.

On the next morning, when the man came, he found the manger still full of beans and chaff, and the ox lying on the ground with his legs stretched out, and making a strange groaning. The laborer thought him very ill, and that it would be useless to take him to work; he, therefore, immediately went and informed the merchant.

The latter perceived that the bad advice of the ass had been followed; and he told the laborer to go and take the ass instead of the ox, and not fail to give him plenty of exercise. The man obeyed; and the ass was obliged to drag the plow the whole day, which tired him the more because he was unaccustomed to it; besides which, he was so beaten that he could scarcely support himself when he came back, and fell down in his stall half dead.

Here the grand vizier said to Schehera-zade: "You are, my child, just like this ass, and would expose yourself to destruction."

"Sir," replied Schehera-zade, "the example which you have brought does not alter my resolution, and I [17] shall not cease importuning you till I have obtained from you the favor of presenting me to the sultan as his consort."

The vizier, finding her persistent in her request, said, "Well then, since you will remain thus obstinate, I shall be obliged to treat you as the rich merchant I mentioned did his wife."

Being told in what a miserable state the ass was, he was curious to know what passed between him and the ox. After supper, therefore, he went out by moonlight, accompanied by his wife, and sat down near them; on his arrival, he heard the ass say to the ox, "Tell me, brother, what you mean to do when the laborer brings you food to-morrow!"

"Mean to do!" replied the ox. "Why, what you taught me, to be sure."

"Take care," interrupted the ass, "what you are about, lest you destroy yourself; for in coming home yesterday evening, I heard our master say these sad words: 'Since the ox can neither eat nor support himself, I wish him to be killed to-morrow; do not, therefore, fail to send for the butcher.' This is what I heard; and the interest I take in your safety, and the friendship I have for you, induces me to mention it. When they bring you beans and chaff, get up, and begin eating directly. Our master, by this, will suppose that you have recovered, and will, without doubt, revoke the sentence for your death; in my opinion, if you act otherwise, it is all over with you."

This speech produced the intended effect; the ox was much troubled, and lowed with fear. The merchant, who had listened to everything with great [18] attention, burst into a fit of laughter that quite surprised his wife.

"Tell me," said she, "what you laugh at, that I may join in it. I wish to know the cause."

"That satisfaction," replied the husband, "I cannot afford you. I can only tell you that I laughed at what the ass said to the ox; the rest is a secret, which I must not reveal."

"And why not?" asked his wife.

"Because, if I tell you, it will cost me my life."

"You trifle with me," added she; "this can never be true; and if you do not immediately inform me what you laughed at, I swear by Allah that we will live together no longer."

In saying this, she went back to the house in a pet, shut herself up, and cried the whole night. Her husband, finding that she continued in the same state all the next day, said, "How foolish it is to afflict yourself in this way! Do I not seriously tell you, that if I were to yield to your foolish importunities, it would cost me my life?"

"Whatever happens rests with Allah," said she; "but I shall not alter my mind."

"I see very plainly," answered the merchant, "it it not possible to make you submit to reason, and that your obstinacy will kill you."

He then sent for the parents and other relations of his wife; when they were all assembled, he explained to them his motives for calling them together, and requested them to use all their influence with his wife, and endeavor to convince her of the folly of her conduct. She rejected them all, and said she had rather die than [19] give up this point to her husband. When her children saw that nothing could alter her resolution, they began to lament most bitterly—the merchant himself knew not what to do.

A little while afterward he was sitting by chance at the door of his house, considering whether he should not even sacrifice himself in order to save his wife, whom he so tenderly loved, when he saw his favorite dog run up to the cock in the farmyard, and tell him all the circumstances of the painful situation in which he was placed. Upon which the cock said, "How foolish must our master be. He has but one wife, and cannot gain his point, while I have fifty, and do just as I please. Let him take a good-sized stick, and not scruple to use it, and she will soon know better, and not worry him to reveal what he ought to keep secret."

The merchant at once did as he suggested, on which his wife quickly repented of her ill-timed curiosity, and all her family came in, heartily glad at finding her more rational and submissive to her husband.

"You deserve, my daughter," added the grand vizier, "to be treated like the merchant's wife."

"Do not, sir," answered Schehera-zade, "think ill of me if I still persist in my sentiments. The history of this woman does not shake my resolution. I could recount, on the other hand, many good reasons which ought to persuade you not to oppose my design. Pardon me, too, if I add that your opposition will be useless; for if your paternal tenderness should refuse the request I make, I will present myself to the sultan."

At length the vizier, overcome by his daughter's [20] firmness, yielded to her entreaties; and although he was very sorry at not being able to conquer her resolution, he immediately went to Schah-riar, and announced to him that Schehera-zade herself would be his bride on the following night.

The sultan was much astonished at the sacrifice of the grand vizier. "Is it possible," said he, "that you can give up your own child?"

"Sire," replied the vizier, "she has herself made the offer. The dreadful fate that hangs over her does not alarm her; and she resigns her life for the honor of being the consort of your majesty, though it be but for one night."

"Vizier," said the sultan, "do not deceive yourself with any hopes; for be assured that, in delivering Schehera-zade into your charge to-morrow, it will be with an order for her death; and if you disobey, your own head will be the forfeit."

"Although," answered the vizier, "I am her father, I will answer for the fidelity of this arm in fulfilling your commands."

When the grand vizier returned to Schehera-zade, she thanked her father; and observing him to be much afflicted, consoled him by saying that she hoped he would be so far from repenting her marriage with the sultan that it would become a subject of joy to him for the remainder of his life.

Before Schehera-zade went to the palace, she called her sister, Dinar-zade, aside, and said, "As soon as I shall have presented myself before the sultan, I shall entreat him to suffer you to sleep in the bridal chamber, that I may enjoy for the last time your company. If [21] I obtain this favor, as I expect, remember to awaken me to-morrow morning an hour before daybreak, and say, 'If you are not asleep, my sister, I beg of you, till the morning appears, to recount to me one of those delightful stories you know.' I will immediately begin to tell one; and I flatter myself that by these means I shall free the kingdom from the consternation in which it is."

Dinar-zade promised to do with pleasure what she required.

Within a short time Schehera-zade was conducted by her father to the palace, and was admitted to the presence of the sultan. They were no sooner alone than the sultan ordered her to take off her veil. He was charmed with her beauty; but perceiving her tears, he demanded the cause of them.

"Sire," answered Schehera-zade, "I have a sister whom I tenderly love—I earnestly wish that she might be permitted to pass the night in this apartment, that we may again see each other, and once more take a tender farewell. Will you allow me the consolation of giving her this last proof of my affection?"

Schah-riar having agreed to it, they sent for Dinar-zade, who came directly. The sultan passed the night with Schehera-zade on an elevated couch, as was the custom among the eastern monarchs, and Dinar-zade slept at the foot of it on a mattress prepared for the purpose.

Dinar-zade, having awakened about an hour before day, did what her sister had ordered her. "My dear sister," she said, "if you are not asleep, I entreat you, as it will soon be light, to relate to me one of those [22] delightful tales you know. It will, alas, be the last time I shall receive that pleasure."

Instead of returning any answer to her sister, Schehera-zade addressed these words to the sultan: "Will your majesty permit me to indulge my sister in her request?"

"Freely," replied he.

Schehera-zade then desired her sister to attend, and, addressing herself to the sultan, began as follows:

[1] Vazir, Vezir—literally, a porter, that is, the minister who bears the principal burden of the state.—D'Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale.

[2] The ass and the ox in the East were subject to very different treatment; the one was strong to labor, and was little cared for—the other was reserved for princes and judges to ride on, and was tended with the utmost attention.

THE STORY OF THE MERCHANT AND THE GENIE

There was formerly, sire, a merchant, who was possessed of great wealth, in land, merchandise, and ready money. Having one day an affair of great importance to settle at a considerable distance from home, he mounted his horse, and with only a sort of cloak-bag behind him, in which he had put a few biscuits and dates, he began his journey. He arrived without any accident at the place of his destination; and having finished his business, set out on his return.

On the fourth day of his journey he felt himself so incommoded by the heat of the sun that he turned out of his road, in order to rest under some trees by which there was a fountain. He alighted, and tying his horse to a branch of the tree, sat down on its bank to eat some biscuits and dates from his little store. When he had satisfied his hunger he amused himself with throwing about the stones of the fruit with considerable velocity. When he had finished his frugal repast he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and repeated a prayer, like a good Mussulman. [3]

He was still on his knees, when he saw a genie, [4] [24] white with age and of an enormous stature, advancing toward him, with a scimitar in his hand. As soon as he was close to him he said in a most terrible tone: "Get up, that I may kill thee with this scimitar, as thou hast caused the death of my son." He accompanied these words with a dreadful yell.

The merchant, alarmed by the horrible figure of this giant, as well as by the words he heard, replied in trembling accents: "How can I have slain him? I do not know him, nor have I ever seen him."

"Didst thou not," replied the giant, "on thine arrival here, sit down, and take some dates from thy wallet; and after eating them, didst thou not throw the stones about on all sides?"

"This is all true," replied the merchant; "I do not deny it."

"Well, then," said the other, "I tell thee thou hast killed my son; for while thou wast throwing about the stones, my son passed by; one of them struck him in the eye, and caused his death, [5] and thus hast thou slain my son."

"Ah, sire, forgive me," cried the merchant.

"I have neither forgiveness nor mercy," replied the giant; "and is it not just that he who has inflicted death should suffer it?"

"I grant this; yet surely I have not done so: and even [25] if I have, I have done so innocently, and therefore I entreat you to pardon me, and suffer me to live."

"No, no," cried the genie, still persisting in his resolution, "I must destroy thee, as thou hast killed my son."

At these words, he took the merchant in his arms, and having thrown him with his face on the ground, he lifted up his saber, in order to strike off his head.

Schehera-zade, at this instant perceiving it was day, and knowing that the sultan rose early to his prayers, [6] and then to hold a council, broke off.

"What a wonderful story," said Dinar-zade, "have you chosen!"

"The conclusion," observed Schehera-zade, "is still more surprising, as you would confess if the sultan would suffer me to live another day, and in the morning permit me to continue the relation."

Schah-riar, who had listened with much pleasure to the narration, determined to wait till to-morrow, intending to order her execution after she had finished her story.

He arose, and having prayed, went to the council.

The grand vizier, in the meantime, was in a state of cruel suspense. Unable to sleep, he passed the night in lamenting the approaching fate of his daughter, whose executioner he was compelled to be. Dreading, therefore, in this melancholy situation, to meet the sultan, [26] how great was his surprise in seeing him enter the council chamber without giving him the horrible order he expected!

The sultan spent the day, as usual, in regulating the affairs of his kingdom, and on the approach of night, retired with Schehera-zade to his apartment. [7]

On the next morning, the sultan did not wait for Schehera-zade to ask permission to continue her story, but said, "Finish the tale of the genie and the merchant. I am curious to hear the end of it." Schehera-zade immediately went on as follows:

When the merchant, sire, perceived that the genie was about to execute his purpose, he cried aloud: "One word more, I entreat you; have the goodness to grant me a little delay; give me only one year to go and take leave of my dear wife and children, and I promise to return to this spot, and submit myself entirely to your pleasure."

"Take Allah to witness of the promise thou hast made me," said the other.

"Again I swear," replied he, "and you may rely on my oath."

On this the genie left him near the fountain, and immediately disappeared.

The merchant, on his reaching home, related faithfully all that had happened to him. On hearing the sad news, his wife uttered the most lamentable groans, tearing her hair and beating her breast; and his children made the house resound with their grief. The father, [27] overcome by affection, mingled his tears with theirs.

The year quickly passed. The good merchant having settled his affairs, paid his just debts, given alms to the poor, and made provision to the best of his ability for his wife and family, tore himself away amid the most frantic expressions of grief; and mindful of his oath, he arrived at the destined spot on the very day he had promised.

While he was waiting for the arrival of the genie, there suddenly appeared an old man leading a hind, who, after a respectful salutation, inquired what brought him to that desert place. The merchant satisfied the old man's curiosity, and related his adventure, on which he expressed a wish to witness his interview with the genie. He had scarcely finished his speech when another old man, accompanied by two black dogs, came in sight, and having heard the tale of the merchant, he also determined to remain to see the event.

Soon they perceived, toward the plain, a thick vapor or smoke, like a column of dust raised by the wind. This vapor approached them, and then suddenly disappearing, they saw the genie, who, without noticing the others, went toward the merchant, scimitar in hand. Taking him by the arm, "Get up," said he, "that I may kill thee, as thou hast slain my son."

Both the merchant and the two old men, struck with terror, began to weep and fill the air with their lamentations.

When the old man who conducted the hind saw the genie lay hold of the merchant, and about to murder him without mercy, he threw himself at the monster's [28] feet, and, kissing them, said, "Lord Genie, I humbly entreat you to suspend your rage, and hear my history, and that of the hind, which you see; and if you find it more wonderful and surprising than the adventure of this merchant, whose life you wish to take, may I not hope that you will at least grant me one half part the blood of this unfortunate man?"

After meditating some time, the genie answered, "Well then, I agree to it."

THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST OLD MAN AND THE HIND

The hind, whom you, Lord Genie, see here, is my wife. I married her when she was twelve years old, and we lived together thirty years, without having any children. At the end of that time I adopted into my family a son, whom a slave had borne. This act of mine excited against the mother and her child the hatred and jealousy of my wife. During my absence on a journey she availed herself of her knowledge of magic to change the slave and my adopted son into a cow and a calf, and sent them to my farm to be fed and taken care of by the steward.

Immediately on my return I inquired after my child and his mother.

"Your slave is dead," said she, "and it is now more than two months since I have beheld your son; nor do I know what has become of him."

I was sensibly affected at the death of the slave; but as my son had only disappeared, I flattered myself that he would soon be found. Eight months, however, passed, and he did not return; nor could I learn any [29] tidings of him. In order to celebrate the festival of the great Bairam, [8] which was approaching, I ordered my bailiff to bring me the fattest cow I possessed, for a sacrifice. He obeyed my commands. Having bound the cow, I was about to make the sacrifice, when at the very instant she lowed most sorrowfully, and the tears even fell from her eyes. This seemed to me so extraordinary that I could not but feel compassion for her, and was unable to give the fatal blow. I therefore ordered her to be taken away, and another brought.

My wife, who was present, seemed very angry at my compassion, and opposed my order.

I then said to my steward, "Make the sacrifice yourself; the lamentations and tears of the animal have overcome me."

The steward was less compassionate, and sacrificed her. On taking off the skin we found hardly anything but bones, though she appeared very fat.

"Take her away," said I to the steward, truly chagrined, "and if you have a very fat calf, bring it in her place."

He returned with a remarkably fine calf, who, as soon as he perceived me, made so great an effort to come to me that he broke his cord. He lay down at my feet, with his head on the ground, as if he endeavored to excite my compassion, and to entreat me not to have the cruelty to take away his life.

"Wife," said I, "I will not sacrifice this calf, I wish [30] to favor him. Do not you, therefore, oppose it."

She, however, did not agree to my proposal; and continued to demand his sacrifice so obstinately that I was compelled to yield. I bound the calf, and took the fatal knife to bury it in his throat, when he turned his eyes, filled with tears, so persuasively upon me, that I had no power to execute my intention. The knife fell from my hand, and I told my wife I was determined to have another calf. She tried every means to induce me to alter my mind; I continued firm, however, in my resolution, in spite of all she could say; promising, for the sake of appeasing her, to sacrifice this calf at the feast of Bairam on the following year.

The next morning my steward desired to speak with me in private. He informed me that his daughter, who had some knowledge of magic, wished to speak with me. On being admitted to my presence, she informed me that during my absence my wife had turned the slave and my son into a cow and calf, that I had already sacrificed the cow, but that she could restore my son to life if I would give him to her for her husband, and allow her to visit my wife with the punishment her cruelty had deserved. To these proposals I gave my consent.

The damsel then took a vessel full of water, and pronouncing over it some words I did not understand, she threw the water over the calf, and he instantly regained his own form.

"My son! My son!" I exclaimed, and embraced him with transport. "This damsel has destroyed the horrible charm with which you were surrounded. I am sure your gratitude will induce you to marry her, as I have already promised for you." [31]

He joyfully consented; but before they were united the damsel changed my wife into this hind, which you see here.

Since this, my son has become a widower, and is now traveling. Many years have passed since I have heard anything of him. I have, therefore, now set out with a view to gain some information; and as I did not like to trust my wife to the care of any one during my search, I thought proper to carry her along with me. This is the history of myself and this hind. Can anything be more wonderful?

"I agree with you," said the genie, "and in consequence, I grant to you a half of the blood of this merchant."

As soon as the first old man had finished, the second, who led the two black dogs, made the same request to the genie for a half of the merchant's blood, on the condition that his tale exceeded in interest the one that had just been related. On the genie signifying his assent, the old man began.

THE HISTORY OF THE SECOND OLD MAN AND THE TWO BLACK DOGS

Great Prince of the genies, you must know that these two black dogs, which you see here, and myself, are three brothers. Our father, when he died, left us one thousand sequins each. With this sum we all embarked in business as merchants. My two brothers determined to travel, that they might trade in foreign parts. They were both unfortunate, and returned at the end of two years in a state of abject poverty, having lost their all. [32] I had in the meanwhile prospered. I gladly received them, and gave them one thousand sequins each, and again set them up as merchants.

My brothers frequently proposed to me that I should make a voyage with them for the purpose of traffic. Knowing their former want of success, I refused to join them, until at the end of five years I at length yielded to their repeated solicitations. On consulting on the merchandise to be bought for the voyage, I discovered that nothing remained of the thousand sequins I had given to each. I did not reproach them; on the contrary, as my capital was increased to six thousand sequins, I gave them each one thousand sequins, and kept a like sum myself, concealing the other three thousand in a corner of my house, in order that if our voyage proved unsuccessful we might be able to console ourselves and begin our former profession.

We purchased our goods, embarked in a vessel, which we ourselves freighted, and set sail with a favorable wind. After sailing about a month, we arrived, without any accident, at a port, where we landed, and had a most advantageous sale for our merchandise. I, in particular, sold mine so well that I gained ten for one.

About the time that we were ready to embark on our return, I accidentally met on the seashore a female of great beauty, but very poorly dressed. She accosted me by kissing my hand, and entreated me most earnestly to permit her to be my wife. I stated many difficulties to such a plan; but at length she said so much to persuade me that I ought not to regard her poverty, and that I should be well satisfied with her conduct, I was quite overcome. I directly procured proper dresses for [33] her, and after marrying her in due form, she embarked with me, and we set sail.

During our voyage I found my wife possessed of so many good qualities that I loved her every day more and more. In the meantime my two brothers, who had not traded so advantageously as myself, and who were jealous of my prosperity, began to feel exceedingly envious. They even went so far as to conspire against my life; for one night, while my wife and I were asleep, they threw us into the sea. I had hardly, however, fallen into the water, before my wife took me up and transported me to an island. As soon as it was day she thus addressed me:

"You must know that I am a fairy, and being upon the shore when you were about to sail, I wished to try the goodness of your heart, and for this purpose I presented myself before you in the disguise you saw. You acted most generously, and I am therefore delighted in finding an occasion of showing my gratitude, and I trust, my husband, that in saving your life I have not ill rewarded the good you have done me. But I am enraged against your brothers, nor shall I be satisfied till I have taken their lives."

I listened with astonishment to the discourse of the fairy, and thanked her, as well as I was able, for the great obligation she had conferred on me.

"But, madam," said I to her, "I must entreat you to pardon my brothers."

I related to her what I had done for each of them, but my account only increased her anger.

"I must instantly fly after these ungrateful wretches," cried she, "and bring them to a just punishment; I will [34] sink their vessel, and precipitate them to the bottom of the sea."

"No, beautiful lady," replied I, "for heaven's sake moderate your indignation, and do not execute so dreadful an intention; remember, they are still my brothers, and that we are bound to return good for evil."

No sooner had I pronounced these words, than I was transported in an instant from the island, where we were, to the top of my own house. I descended, opened the doors, and dug up the three thousand sequins which I had hidden. I afterward repaired to my shop, opened it, and received the congratulations of the merchants in the neighborhood on my arrival. When I returned home I perceived these two black dogs, which came toward me with a submissive air. I could not imagine what this meant, but the fairy, who soon appeared, satisfied my curiosity.

"My dear husband," said she, "be not surprised at seeing these two dogs in your house; they are your brothers."

My blood ran cold on hearing this, and I inquired by what power they had been transformed into that state.

"It is I," replied the fairy, "who have done it, and I have sunk their ship; for the loss of the merchandise it contained I shall recompense you. As to your brothers, I have condemned them to remain under this form for ten years, as a punishment for their perfidy."

Then informing me where I might hear of her, she disappeared.

The ten years are now completed, and I am traveling in search of her. This, O Lord Genie, is my history; [35] does it not appear to you of a most extraordinary nature?

"Yes," replied the genie, "I confess it is most wonderful, and therefore I grant you the other half of this merchant's blood," and having said this, the genie disappeared, to the great joy of the merchant and of the two old men.

The merchant did not omit to bestow many thanks upon his liberators, who, bidding him adieu, proceeded on their travels. He remounted his horse, returned home to his wife and children, and spent the remainder of his days with them in tranquillity.

[3] Mussulman signifies resigned, or "conformed to the divine will." The Arabic word is Moslemuna, in the singular, Moslem; which the Mohammedans take as a title peculiar to themselves. The Europeans generally write and pronounce it Mussulman.—Sale's Koran , c. ii, p. 16. 4to, 1734.

[4] These tales are furnished throughout with a certain imaginary machinery. They have, as their foundation, the perpetual intervention of certain fantastic beings, in most cases superior to man, but yet subordinate to the authority of certain favored individuals. These beings may, for our purpose, be generally divided into genies, whose interference is generally for evil; peris, whose presence indicates favorable issues to those whom they befriend; and ghouls, monsters which have a less direct control over man's affairs, but represent any monster repugnant or loathsome to mankind.

[5] "Now this, at first sight, seems a singular, if not a ridiculous thing; but even this has its foundation in an Eastern custom. It is in this manner that prisoners are sometimes put to death; a man sits down at a little distance from the object he intends to destroy, and then attacks him by repeatedly shooting at him with the stone of the date, thrown from his two forefingers, and in this way puts an end to his life."—Preface to Forster's edition of Arabian Nights.

[6] "The Mohammedans divide their religion into two parts—Imana, faith; and Din, practice. The first is the confession, 'There is no God but the true God, and Mohammed is his prophet.' Under this are comprehended six distinct tenets,—1. Belief in God; 2. In His anger; 3. In His scriptures; 4. In His prophets; 5. In the resurrection and day of judgment; 6. God's absolute decree and predetermination of all events, good or evil. The points of practice are,—1. Prayer and purification; 2. Alms; 3. Fasting; 4. Pilgrimage to Mecca."—Sale's Preliminary Discourse , p. 171.

[7] In the original work, Schehera-zade continually breaks off to ask the sultan to spare her life for another day, that she may finish the story on which she is engaged, and he as regularly grants her request. These interruptions are omitted as interfering with the continued interest of the numerous stories told by the patriotic Schehera-zade.

[8] Bairam, a Turkish word, signifies a feast day or holiday. It commences on the close of the Ramadan—or the month's fast of the Mohammedans. At this feast they kill a calf, goat, or sheep; and after giving a part to the poor, eat the rest with their friends. It commences with the new moon, and is supposed to be instituted in memory of the sacrifice of his son by Abraham. The observance of the lesser Bairam is confined to Mecca.

THE THREE CALENDERS, SONS OF KINGS, AND THE FIVE LADIES OF BAGDAD

In the reign of Caliph Haroun al Raschid there was at Bagdad a porter, who was a fellow of infinite wit and humor. One morning as he was at the place where he usually waited for employment, with a great basket before him, a handsome lady, covered with a great muslin veil, accosted him, and said with a pleasant air, "Hark you, porter, take your basket [9] and follow me."

The delighted porter took his basket immediately, set it on his head, and followed the lady, exclaiming, "Oh, happy day! Oh, day of good luck!"

In a short time the lady stopped before a gate and knocked: a Christian, with a venerable long white beard, opened it, and she put money into his hand without speaking; but the Christian, who knew what she wanted, went in, and shortly after brought out a large jar of excellent wine.

"Take this jar," said the lady to the porter, "and put it into the basket."

This being done, she desired him to follow her, and walked on; the porter still exclaiming, "Oh, day of happiness! Oh, day of agreeable surprise and joy!"

The lady stopped at a fruit shop, where she bought some apples, apricots, peaches, lemons, citrons, oranges, myrtles, sweet basil, lilies, jassamine, and some other plants. She told the porter to put all those things into [37] his basket and follow her. Passing by a butcher's shop, she ordered five and twenty pounds of his finest meat to be weighed, which was also put into the porter's basket.

At another shop she bought capers, small cucumbers, parsley, and other herbs; at another, some pistachios, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, kernels of the pine, and other similar fruits; at a third, she purchased all sorts of almond patties.

The porter, in putting all these things into his basket, said, "My good lady, you should have told me that you intended buying so many things, and I would have provided a camel to carry them, for if you buy ever so little more, I shall not be able to bear it."

The lady laughed at the fellow's pleasant humor, and ordered him still to follow her.

She then went to a druggist's, where she furnished herself with all manner of sweet-scented waters, cloves, musk, pepper, ginger, and a great piece of ambergris, and several other Indian spices; this quite filled the porter's basket and she ordered him to follow her. They walked till they came to a magnificent house, whose front was adorned with fine columns, and had a gate of ivory. There they stopped, and the lady knocked softly. Another lady soon came to open the gate, and all three, after passing through a handsome vestibule, crossed a spacious court, surrounded by an open gallery which communicated with many magnificent apartments, all on the same floor. At the end of this court there was a dais richly furnished, with a couch in the middle, supported by four columns of ebony, enriched with diamonds and pearls of an extraordinary size, and [38] covered with red satin, relieved by a bordering of Indian gold. In the middle of the court there was a large basin lined with white marble, and full of the finest transparent water, which rushed from the mouth of a lion of gilt bronze.

But what principally attracted the attention of the porter, was a third most beautiful lady, who was seated on the couch before mentioned. This lady was called Zobeide, she who opened the door was called Safie, and the name of the one who had been for the provisions was Amina. Then said Zobeide, accosting the other two, "Sisters, do you not see that this honest man is ready to sink under his burden? Why do you not ease him of it?"

Then Amina and Safie took the basket, the one before and the other behind; Zobeide also assisted, and all three together set it on the ground, and then emptied it. When they had done, the beautiful Amina took out money and paid the porter liberally.

The porter was well satisfied, but when he ought to have departed he was chained to the spot by the pleasure of beholding three such beauties, who appeared to him equally charming; for Amina, having now laid aside her veil, proved to be as handsome as either of the others. What surprised him most was that he saw no man about the house, yet most of the provisions he had brought in, as the dry fruits and the several sorts of cakes and confections, were adapted chiefly for those who could drink and make merry.

"Madam," said he, addressing Zobeide, "I am sensible that I act rudely in staying longer than I ought, but I hope you will have the goodness to pardon me, when I [39] tell you that I am astonished not to see a man with three ladies of such extraordinary beauty; and you know that a company of women without men is as melancholy as a company of men without women."

To this he added some pleasantries in proof of what he advanced; and did not forget the Bagdad proverb, "That the table is not completely furnished, except there be four in company"; so concluded, that since they were but three, they wanted another.

The ladies fell a-laughing at the porter's reasoning; after which Zobeide gravely addressed him, "Friend, you presume rather too much; and though you do not deserve it, I have no objection to inform you that we are three sisters, who transact our affairs with so much secrecy that no one knows anything of them. A good author says, 'Keep thy own secret, and do not reveal it to any one. He that maketh his secret known is no longer its master. If thy own breast cannot keep thy counsel, how canst thou expect the breast of another to be more faithful?'"

"Permit me, I entreat thee, to say, that I also have read in another a maxim, which I have always happily practiced: 'Conceal thy secret,' he says, 'only from such as are known to be indiscreet, and who will abuse thy confidence; but make no difficulty in discovering it to prudent men, because they know how to keep it.' The secret, then, with me, is as safe as if locked up in a cabinet, the key of which is lost and the door sealed."

The porter, notwithstanding his rhetoric, must, in all probability, have retired in confusion if Amina had not taken his part, and said to Zobeide and Safie, "My dear sisters, I conjure you to let him remain; he will [40] afford us some diversion. Were I to repeat to you all the amusing things he addressed to me by the way, you would not feel surprised at my taking his part."

At these words of Amina the porter fell on his knees, kissed the ground at her feet, and raising himself up, said, "Most beautiful lady, you began my good fortune to-day, and now you complete it by this generous conduct. I cannot adequately express my acknowledgments. As to the rest, ladies," said he, addressing himself to all the three sisters, "since you do me so great an honor, I shall always look upon myself as one of your most humble slaves."

When he had spoken these words he would have returned the money he had received, but Zobeide ordered him to keep it.

"What we have once given," said she, "we never take back. We are willing, too, to allow you to stay on one condition, that you keep secret and do not ask the reason for anything you may see us do. To show you," said Zobeide, with a serious countenance, "that what we demand of you is not a new thing among us, read what is written over our gate on the inside."

The porter read these words, written in large characters of gold: "He who speaks of things that do not concern him, shall hear things that will not please him."

"Ladies," said he, "I swear to you that you shall never hear me utter a word respecting what does not relate to me, or wherein you may have any concern."

These preliminaries being settled, Amina brought in supper, and after she had lighted up the room with tapers made of aloewood and ambergris, which yield a most agreeable perfume as well as a delicate light, [41] she sat down with her sisters and the porter. They began again to eat and drink, to sing, and repeat verses. The ladies diverted themselves by intoxicating the porter, under pretext of making him drink their healths, and the repast was enlivened by reciprocal sallies of wit. When they were all as merry as possible, they suddenly heard a knocking at the gate.

Safie, whose office it was, went to the porch, and quickly returning, told them thus: "There are three calenders [10] at the door, all blind of the right eye, and have their heads, beards, and eyebrows shaved. They say that they are only just arrived at Bagdad, where they have never been before; and, as it is dark, and they know not where to lodge, they knocked at our door by chance and pray us to show compassion, and to take them in. They care not where we put them, provided they obtain shelter. They are young and handsome; but I cannot, without laughing, think of their amusing and exact likeness to each other. My dear sisters, pray permit them to come in; they will afford us diversion enough, and put us to little charge, because they desire shelter only for this night, and resolve to leave us as soon as day appears."

"Go, then," said Zobeide, "and bring them in, but make them read what is written over the gate." Safie ran out with joy, and in a little time after returned with the three calenders.

At their entrance they made a profound obeisance to the ladies, who rose up to receive them and told them [42] courteously that they were welcome, that they were glad of the opportunity to oblige them and to contribute toward relieving the fatigues of their journey, and at last invited them to sit down with them.

The magnificence of the place, and the civility they received, inspired the calenders with high respect for the ladies; but before they sat down, having by chance cast their eyes upon the porter, whom they saw clad almost like those devotees with whom they have continual disputes respecting several points of discipline, because they never shave their beards nor eyebrows, [11] one of them said, "I believe we have got here one of our revolted Arabian brethren."

The porter, having his head warm with wine, took offense at these words, and with a fierce look, without stirring from his place, answered, "Sit you down, and do not meddle with what does not concern you. Have you not read the inscription over the gate? Do not pretend to make people live after your fashion, but follow ours."

"Honest man," said the calender, "do not put yourself in a passion. We should be sorry to give you the least occasion. On the contrary, we are ready to receive your commands." Upon which, to put an end to the dispute, the ladies interposed, and pacified them. When the calenders were seated, the ladies served them with meat; and Safie, being highly pleased with them, did not let them want for wine.

When the calenders had finished their repast, they signified to the ladies that they wished to entertain them with a concert of music, if they had any instruments in the house, and would cause them to be brought. The ladies willingly accepted the proposal, and Safie went to fetch the instruments. Each man took the instrument he liked, and all three together began to play a tune. The ladies, who knew the words of a merry song that suited the air, joined the concert with their voices; but the words of the song made them now and then stop, and fall into excessive laughter. While their amusement was at its height, there was a knock of unwonted loudness at their gate.

Now, it was the custom of the sultan Haroun al Raschid sometimes during the night to go through the city in disguise, in order to discover whether everything was quiet. On this evening he set out from his palace accompanied by Giafar, his grand vizier, and Mesrour, chief of the household, all three disguised as merchants. He it was, who, in passing through the street, was attracted by the noise of the music and of the peals of loud laughter, and had desired his grand vizier to knock at the gate, and to demand shelter and admittance as for three strangers who knew not where to seek shelter for the night. Safie, who had opened the door, came back and obtained permission of her sisters to admit the newly arrived strangers.

The caliph and his attendants, upon their entrance, most courteously made obeisance to the ladies and to the calenders. The ladies returned their salutations, supposing them to be merchants. Zobeide, as the chief, addressed them with a grave and serious countenance [44] and said, "You are welcome. But while you are here you must have eyes but no tongues; you must not ask the reason of anything you may see, nor speak of anything that does not concern you, lest you hear and see what will by no means please you."

"Madam," replied the vizier, "you shall be obeyed. It is enough for us to attend to our own business, without meddling with what does not concern us." After this, each seated himself, and the conversation became general, and they drank to the health of the new guests.

While the vizier Giafar entertained them, the caliph ceased not from admiring the beauty, elegance, and lively disposition of the ladies; while the appearance of the three calenders, all blind of the right eye, surprised him very much. He anxiously wished to learn the cause of this singularity, but the conditions they had imposed upon him and his companions prevented any inquiry. Besides all this, when he reflected upon the richness of the services and furniture, with the regularity and arrangement everywhere apparent, he could hardly persuade himself it was not the effect of enchantment.

The guests continued their conversation, when, after an interval, Zobeide rose up, and taking Amina by the hand, said to her, "Come, sister, the company shall not prevent us from doing as we have always been accustomed."

Amina, who perfectly understood what her sister meant, got up, and took away the dishes, tables, bottles, glasses, and also the instruments on which the calenders had played. Nor did Safie remain idle; she snuffed the candles, and added more aloewood and ambergris. Having done this, she requested the three calenders to [45] sit on a sofa on one side, and the caliph and his company on the other.

"Get up," said she then to the porter, looking at him, "and be ready to assist in whatever we want of you."

A little while after, Amina came in with a sort of seat, which she placed in the middle of the room. She then went to the door of a closet, and having opened it, she made a sign to the porter to approach.

"Come and assist me," she cried. He did so, and went in with her, and returned a moment after, followed by two black dogs, each of them secured by a collar and chain. They appeared as if they had been severely whipped with rods, and he brought them into the middle of the apartment.

Zobeide, rising from her seat between the calenders and the caliph, moved very gravely toward the porter.

"Come," said she, heaving a deep sigh, "let us perform our duty."

She then tucked up her sleeves above her elbows, and receiving a rod from Safie, "Porter," said she, "deliver one of the dogs to my sister Amina, and bring the other to me."

The porter did as he was commanded. Upon this, the dog that he held in his hand began to howl, and, turning toward Zobeide, held her head up in a supplicating posture; but Zobeide, having no regard to the sad countenance of the animal, which would have moved any one else to pity, nor to its cries that resounded through the house, whipped her with the rod till she was out of breath; and having spent her strength, threw down the rod, and taking the chain from the porter, lifted up the dog by her paws, and looking upon her with [46] a sad and pitiful countenance, they both wept. After this Zobeide, with her handkerchief, wiped the tears from the dog's eyes, kissed her, returned the chain to the porter, and desired him to carry the dog to the place whence he took her, and to bring the other. Then taking the whip, she served this in the same manner; she then wept with it, dried its tears, kissed it, and returned it to the porter.

The three calenders, with the caliph and his companions, were extremely surprised at this exhibition, and could not comprehend why Zobeide, after having so furiously beaten those two dogs, that by the Mussulman religion are reckoned unclean [12] animals, should weep with them, wipe off their tears, and kiss them. They muttered among themselves; and the caliph, who, being more impatient than the rest, longed exceedingly to be informed of the cause of so strange a proceeding, could not forbear making signs to the vizier to ask the question. The vizier turned his head another way; but being pressed by repeated signs, he answered by others, that it was not yet time for the caliph to satisfy his curiosity.

Zobeide sat still some time in the middle of the room, where she had whipped the two dogs, to recover herself of her fatigue; and Safie called to her, "Dear sister, will you not be pleased to return to your place, that I may also act my part?"

"Yes, sister," replied Zobeide, and then went and [47] sat down upon the sofa, having the caliph, Giafar, and Mesrour on her right hand, and the three calenders, with the porter, on her left.

The whole company remained silent for some time. At last Safie, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, spoke to her sister Amina: "Dear sister, I conjure you to rise; you know what I would say." Amina rose, and went into another closet near to that where the dogs were, and brought out a case covered with yellow satin, richly embroidered with gold and green silk. She went toward Safie and opened the case, from whence she took a lute, and presented it to her; and after some time spent in tuning it, Safie began to play, and, accompanying the instrument with her voice, sang a song about the torments that absence creates to lovers.

Having sung with much passion and action, she said to Amina, "Pray take it, sister, for my voice fails me; oblige the company with a tune and a song in my stead."

"Very willingly," replied Amina, who, taking the lute from her sister Safie, sat down in her place. Having sung most delightfully, the caliph expressed his admiration. While he was doing so, Amina fainted away; and on opening her robe to give her air, they discovered that her breast was covered with fearful scars.

While Zobeide and Safie ran to assist their sister, the caliph inquired of the calender, "Cannot you inform me about these two black dogs, and this lady, who appears to have been so ill-treated?"

"Sir," said the calender, "we never were in this house before now, and entered it only a few minutes sooner than you did."

This increased the astonishment of the caliph. [48] "Perhaps," said he, "the man who is with you can give you some information?"

The calender made signs to the porter to draw near, and asked him if he knew why the black dogs had been beaten, and why the bosom of Amina was so scarred.

"Sir," replied the porter, "if you know nothing of the matter, I know as little as you do. I never was in the house until now; and if you are surprised to see me here, I am as much so to find myself in your company."

The caliph, more and more perplexed at all he heard, determined that he would have the information he required for the explaining these mysterious proceedings. But the question was, who should first make the inquiry? The caliph endeavored to persuade the calenders to speak first, but they excused themselves. At last they all agreed that the porter should be the man.

While they were consulting how to put the question, Zobeide herself, as Amina had recovered from her fainting, approached them, and inquired, "What are you talking of? What is your contest about?"

The porter then addressed her as follows: "These gentlemen, madam, entreat you to explain why you wept with those dogs, after having treated them so ill, and how it has happened that the lady who fainted has her bosom covered with scars."

At these words Zobeide put on a stern look, and turning toward the caliph and the rest of the company: "Is it true, gentlemen," said she, "that you desired him to ask me these questions?"

All of them, except the vizier Giafar, who spoke not a word, answered "Yes." She thereupon exclaimed, in a tone of resentment: "Before we granted you the [49] favor of receiving you into our house, and to prevent all occasion of inquiry from you, we imposed the condition that you should not speak of anything that did not concern you, lest you might hear that which would not please you; and yet, after having received our entertainment, you make no scruple to break your promise. Our easy compliance with your wishes may have occasioned this, but that shall not excuse your rudeness."

As she spoke these words, she gave three stamps with her foot, and clapping [13] her hands as often together, cried, "Come quickly!"

Upon this a door flew open, and seven black slaves [14] rushed in; each one seized a man, threw him to the ground, and dragged him into the middle of the room, brandishing a scimitar over his head.

We can easily conceive the alarm of the caliph. He repented, but too late, that he had not taken the advice of his vizier, who, with Mesrour, the calenders, and porter, were, from his ill-timed curiosity, on the point of forfeiting their lives.

Before they gave the fatal stroke, one of the slaves said to Zobeide and her sisters, "Would it not be right to interrogate them first?" On which Zobeide, with a grave voice, said: "Answer me, and say who you are, otherwise you shall not live one moment longer. I cannot believe you to be honest men, or persons of authority or distinction in your own countries; for, if you were, you would have been more modest and more respectful to us."

The caliph, naturally warm, was infinitely more [50] indignant than the rest, to find his life depending upon the command of a woman: but he began to conceive some hopes, when he found she wished to know who they all were; for he imagined that she would by no means take away his life when she should be informed of his rank. He whispered to his vizier, who was near him, instantly to declare who he was. But this wise vizier, being more prudent, resolved to save his master's honor, and not let the world know the affront he had brought upon himself by his own imprudence; and therefore answered, "We have what we deserve."

But if he had intended to speak as the caliph commanded him, Zobeide would not have allowed him time: for having turned to the calenders, and seeing them all blind with one eye, she asked if they were brothers.

One of them answered, "No, madam, no otherwise than as we are calenders; that is to say, as we observe the same rules."

"Were you born blind of the right eye?" continued she.

"No, madam," answered he; "I lost my eye in such a surprising adventure, that it would be instructive to every one to hear it."

Zobeide put the same question to the others in their turn, when the last she addressed replied, "Pray, madam, show some pity on us, for we are all the sons of kings. Although we have never seen each other before this evening, we have had sufficient time to become acquainted with this circumstance; and I can assure you that the kings who have given us birth have made some noise in the world!" [51] During this speech Zobeide became less angry, and said to the slaves, "Give them their liberty a while, but remain where you are. Those who tell us their history, and the occasion of their coming, do them not hurt, let them go where they please; but do not spare those who refuse to give us that satisfaction."

The three calenders, the caliph, the grand vizier Giafar, the captain of his guards, and the porter were all in the middle of the hall, seated upon a carpet in the presence of the three ladies, who reclined upon a sofa, and the slaves stood ready to do whatever their mistresses should command.

The porter spoke first, and briefly related the adventures of the morning with Amina, and the kind favors to him of herself and her fair sisters in the evening, which he declared to be the whole of his history.

When the porter had concluded, Zobeide said, "Save thyself and begone, nor ever let us see thee again."

"I beg of you, madam," replied he, "to let me remain a little longer. It would be unfair that I should not hear their histories, after they have had the pleasure of hearing mine."

Saying this, he took his place at the end of the sofa, truly delighted at finding himself free from the danger which so much alarmed him.

One of the calenders, addressing himself to Zobeide, next spoke.

THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST CALENDER

Madam, I am the son of a sultan. My father had a brother, who reigned over a neighboring kingdom. [52] His son, my cousin, and I were nearly of the same age. I went regularly every year to see my uncle, at whose court I amused myself for a month or two, and then returned home.

On one occasion I arrived at my father's capital, where, contrary to custom, I found a numerous guard at the gate of the palace. They surrounded me as I entered. The commanding officer said, "Prince, the army has proclaimed the grand vizier sultan, instead of your father, who is dead, and I take you prisoner in the name of the new sultan."

Astral Codex Ten

Book Review: Arabian Nights

One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.

Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries - and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you're black, don't worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It's a weird constant. Maybe it's the author's fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people - from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story.

Our tale begins in Samarkand. One day the king, Shah Zaman, comes home unexpectedly and sees his wife cheating on him with a black man. He kills her in a rage, then falls sick with grief, and is taken to the palace of his brother, King Shahryar of Persia. While there, he sees King Shahryar's wife cheat on him with a black man. He tells King Shahryar, who kills his wife in a rage too, then also falls sick with grief. The two grief-stricken kings decide to wander the world, expecting that maybe this will help in some way.

They come across a mighty king of the genies, and the brothers hide lest he see them and kill them. The genie falls asleep, and the genie's wife finds them and demands they have sex with her or she'll kill them. They have sex, and all the while, the genie's wife is boasting about how even the king of the genies can't prevent his wife from cheating. The two kings find this experience salutary - apparently the problem isn't specific to them, it's just an issue with the female sex in general. So they go back to the palace and everyone lives happily ever...no, actually, King Shahryar vows that he will bed a new woman every night, then kill her the following morning, thus ensuring nobody can ever cheat on him again.

So for however many years, King Shahryar beds a new woman every night, then kills her in the morning. After a while the kingdom begins to run dangerously low on women. The vizier frets over this, and his daughter Scheherazade hears him fretting. She develops a plan, and volunteers to be the king's victim that night. After having sex, she tells the king a story. At the end, she says it's too bad she's going to die the next morning, because she knows other stories which are even better. Perhaps if the king spared her life for one night she could tell some of those too.

(I'd always heard that she leaves him at a cliff-hanger and makes him spare her to find out how it ends, which I think makes a better story, but this isn't how the real Arabian Nights works).

Scheherazade's stories are set in an idealized Middle East. The sultans are always wise and just, the princes are always strong and handsome, and almost a full half of viziers are non-evil. Named characters are always so beautiful and skilled and virtuous that it sometimes gets used it as a plot device - a character is separated from his family member or lover, so he wanders into a caravanserai and asks for news of someone who is excessively beautiful and skilled and virtuous. "Oh yes," says one of the merchants, "I talked to a traveler from Cairo who said he encountered the most beautiful and skilled and virtuous person he'd ever seen in a garden there, he couldn't shut up about them for days" - and now you know your long-lost brother must be in Cairo. In one case, a woman went searching for her long-lost son, tasted some pomegranate jam in Damascus, and immediately (and correctly!) concluded that only her son could make pomegranate jam that good. She demanded to know where the merchant had gotten the jam, and the trail led to a happy reunion.

The most common jobs in Idealized Middle East are sultan, merchant, poor-but-pious tailor, fisherman, merchant, evil vizier, sorcerer, merchant, thief, person who gets hired to assist a sorcerer because they have the exact right astrological chart to perform some otherwise-impossible ritual, and merchant. Of these, merchant is number one. Whatever else you're doing - sailing, stealing, using your perfect astrological chart to enter a giant glowing door in the desert mysteriously invisible to everyone else - you're probably also dealing goods on the side. The only exceptions are Moroccans (who are all sorcerers), Zoroastrians (who are all demonic cannibals), and Jews (who are all super-double merchants scamming everyone else). Also maybe the 5 - 10% of the Middle Eastern population who witches have turned into animals at any given time.

Merchanting has a gratifyingly low barrier to entry. Often a character who comes across a little bit of money will use it to buy goods, travel a bit, then sell the goods in the marketplace of some other town at a profit. There's a cute story where a poor man's father dies and leaves him a small inheritance. He uses it to buy glassware, sets up a glassware stall at the market, and then gets lost in a daydream about how much money he's going to make. People will buy his glassware at a 2x markup, and then he'll use it to buy more glassware, and sell that at a 2x markup, and he'll keep repeating the process until he's the city's most prosperous glassware merchant, and the sultan will ask him to marry his daughter, the most beautiful woman in all the land. But he'll be so rich that this will mean nothing to him, and he'll play hard-to-get to show just how little he cares about the Sultan's daughter, and when she leans in to embrace him he'll kick her like a common...and then, in his daydreaming, he kicks his stall, and all the glass falls over and breaks, and he loses everything.

The most common hobby in the Idealized Middle East is telling and listening to stories. Whenever something interesting happens in the city, the people involved are brought before the sultan to tell the story. If an especially beautiful and skilled and virtuous person is spotted in the city, they are recognized as a likely protagonist, and brought before the sultan to tell their story. Sometimes when criminals are brought to the sultan, the police will read off their ridiculous convoluted crimes, and the sultan will say "What a wondrous story!", and the criminals will say "O Sultan, if I can tell you a story even more wondrous than that, will you pardon me?" and the sultan always says yes. The sultan is always amazed, and pardons the criminal, and states that the story should be written in letters of liquid gold for the edification of future generations. Sultans are such suckers for stories that they basically never get a chance to rule, which I assume is why government is mostly run by evil viziers.

It's actually worse than this, because the stories usually contain other stories. You'll be telling a story to the sultan, and the main character will encounter his sultan and start telling him a story, and the main character of that story will encounter her sultan and have to tell him a story, and so on. I think the worst offender is The Fisherman's Tale , where Scheherazade tells a story about a fisherman and a genie, in which the genie tells the fisherman a story about a king and a vizier, in which the vizier tells the king a story about a prince and an ogre, in which the prince tells the ogre a story about his past travels. The recursion does stop there, and we eventually get to hear the end of the fisherman/genie story (the genie, the fisherman, and the sultan to whom the fisherman tells his story end up saving a prince who was turned to stone after his wife cheated on him with a black man). But it's touch-and-go for a while, and you start to worry that one of these stories will have a branching factor > 1, and you'll just keep getting into deeper and deeper frame stories forever. Maybe this is how the Abbasid Caliphate fell.

But this is just a small taste of the wonders of the Idealized Middle East, which also include:

Genies: These are everywhere, so much so that barren islands are sometimes described as "inhabited neither by men nor genies". Most genies are free and want to kill you, though if you're protagonisty enough they might be convinced to give you a break. Other genies have been trapped in jars by King Solomon. Supposedly if you let them out they grant you wishes, but this seems to be a spontaneous expression of gratitude rather than an obligation. In The Fisherman's Tale , one genie was angry about being trapped too long, and decided to kill whoever let him out instead. Still other genies have been bound to lamps or rings by sorcerers, and are under the command of whoever owns the lamp or ring.

"Three wishes" doesn't show up as a theme in the stories I read; either a genie is bound to you, in which case you have infinite wishes as long as it stays bound, or it's free, in which case it does what it wants. Characters in the Nights only ask genies for very concrete things, usually riches. If you want to win the heart of the sultan's daughter, you ask the genie for really good clothes and perfumes, so that the sultan's daughter will fall in love with you naturally. There's no hint of anyone wishing for world peace or eternal life or anything like that, and no suggestions that genies could or would grant it.

Magic: Usually practiced by sorcerers, whose natural habitat is Morocco (I don't know where this stereotype comes from). Sorcerers cast "geomantic tables", which tell them whatever they need to know. Usually this is that the treasure they seek can only be found by some random virtuous poor person with the right astrological chart; Disney's Aladdin's "diamond in the rough" plot point is very faithful here. Some sorcerers are nice to their astrological patsies and usually do well. Others try to double-cross them, and get their comeuppance. The big prize for a successful sorcerer is a ring with a genie bound to it; once you've got one of those, you've got it made.

Diversity: Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans (always sorcerers), suspiciously Arabic-seeming Chinese, and blacks. This last group is mostly found as slaves, which felt anachronistic until I looked it up and learned more about the massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East. In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude. Of course, the author is very concerned about the excessive masculinity of black slaves, especially the fact that your wife is probably cheating on you with one. When one adulterer is late to a meeting with her slave beau, he swears "an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and don't think that our manliness is like the poor manliness of white men)" to ignore her from then on unless she is more timely. I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence. Elsewhere in diversity: Jews are usually doctors or merchants, but everyone's a merchant so this isn't so remarkable. The one time a Christian appears in the stories I read, he's a drunkard - which wasn't the stereotype I was expecting, but which I guess makes sense under the circumstances.

Allah: The real hero of most of the stories. If a character survives, it's always because "Allah had not fated them to die that day"; if they make an unusually large profit, it's because "Allah is most merciful". The only fault one can possibly find with the Allah of the Arabian Nights is that He seems a little exploitable. If someone is trying to hurt you, you can say something like "If you spare me, Allah will certainly spare you; but if you do not spare me, Allah will not spare you", and then they have to let you go or else be cursed to die in some kind of ironic way. Prayer to Allah is kind of a get out of jail free card, sometimes literally, and everyone who follows Allah's ways prospers proportionally.

The only, very weak exception is poor Judar. His evil brothers scam him out of his inheritance, then beat and eject him and their mother. He makes more money, supports his aging mother, and when his brothers run low on their own funds, he forgives them, takes them in, and gives them everything they need. His brothers steal all his stuff again, beat him again, and eject him and his aging mother again. The cycle repeats three-ish times, with Judar getting richer and richer each time, the brothers getting more and more duplicitious over time, and Judar always forgiving their previous betrayals and taking them back in again. By the end of the third round, Judar has achieved the Arabian Dream - met a Moroccan sorcerer, happened to have exactly the right astrological chart, uncovered a hidden treasure, and used it to marry the Sultan's daughter. Then his brothers kill him and take all his stuff. The moral of the story seems to be something like - Allah will bless you if you are generous and forgiving, but at some point He would also like you to develop at least some tiny shred of common sense or self-preservation.

Witchcraft: Totally different from sorcery. Sorcery is always performed by men, witchcraft by women. Sorcerers are always from Morocco, witches can be from anywhere. Sorcerers dig up genie-associated treasures, witches turn people into animals. In order to perform witchcraft, chant some spells over a jug of water, then sprinkle the water on someone and say "Turn into a [type of animal!]" In some forms of witchcraft, this only works if you can make the victim eat cursed food beforehand, so don’t eat any food prepared by suspected witches.

If you do get turned into an animal, don't panic. Find a good witch, and bleat or bark or neigh at them until they get the message and change you back (if you don't know where to find a good witch, don't worry - by coincidence, the first woman you approach will probably be one). As for marrying a witch, it might sound exciting at first, but be careful: her witchcraft will open up a whole new level of cheating opportunities. One witch turned the black men she wanted to have affairs with into blackbirds. Then whenever she wanted sex, she turned herself into a bird and had sex with them, with no one the wiser.

Flying Carpets: I understand these show up somewhere in the full 30-volume edition, but there was not a single flying carpet in all 580 pages of my abridged version. Long-distance travel, when needed, was usually performed by genie. There was also a mechanical flying horse invented by a Persian sage. When you pressed a button on the right side of its head, a bag would inflate and it would fly into the air; when you pressed an identical button on the left, the bag would deflate and it would land. This sage got angry at a prince and came up with a plot to kill him; he showed the prince his flying horse and told him to try riding it by pressing the button on the right. The sage figured that the prince would press the button on the right, lift off into the heavens, and - not knowing the secret of landing - never return. Of course, it took the prince three seconds to think "maybe if the button on the right makes it go up, the one on the left will make it go down", and it did, so the prince landed easily. The sage was put in prison for attempting to assassinate the prince, and everyone lived happily ever after, plus the prince kept the mechanical horse and went on cool adventures. I have no idea how you can be smart enough to invent a personal flying machine in 800 AD, but also dumb enough to devise an assassination scheme predicated on your victim not figuring out to press the down button.

Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels in Heaven praising Allah, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you. So far nobody in the Idealized Middle East has come up with a good solution to this, and the FAA currently recommends avoiding demon-bird-men and sticking with mechanical flying horses instead. Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.

Pessimistic realism: Western fairy tales end with "and then they all lived happily ever after". Stories in the Arabian Nights end with "and they lived a pleasurable and delightful life, until they were visited by the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies."

After 1001 nights of this (not 1001 stories, most stories take multiple nights), King Shahryar marries Scheherazade. The version I'd heard as a child said he'd fallen in love with her for her storytelling ability. Probably there was some of that, but the book emphasizes that they'd had three sons together by this time, and she explicitly asked the king to spare her life for the sake of the children.

But the text also hints that she was, I guess you could say, feeding him training data. The king's wife cheated on him. What did he do? In psychiatry-speak, we call it splitting, or black-and-white thinking. He decides all women are wicked and untrustworthy. This is the kind of thing you do when you have no training data, no discrimination ability, no intuition. You have no categories that can limit the damage, tell you "this has gone badly, but things on the other side of this bright line could go well". So you condemn the entire category, throw out the baby with the bathwater. This king probably led a sheltered life, never had anything bad happen to him before, never had anyone cross him. His psyche is a ship without bulkheads; a single leak and the whole thing is inundated. Since everything (or at least all women) stand infinitely condemned, he can't come up with a better solution than killing everyone he sleeps with.

Scheherazade isn't just telling him stories. She's giving him examples to teach him to build categories. This is the non-joking reason why so many of her stories are about adultery. But also about kings, criminals, love, and betrayal. A common theme of her stories is who deserves to be forgiven and when (eg the story of poor Judar who forgave his brothers too many times and ended up getting killed by them). At the end of all this, the king has a decent model of the wide varieties of good and bad people, the nature of women (there are lots of them! they're all different! sometimes they'll cheat on you, but other times they won't!), and the various situations where trusting people goes well vs. badly. Also, he knows that whenever someone tells you a good enough story, you must pardon them, then write down the story and place it in your treasury to edify future generations. We are all very grateful.

Or maybe it was something more.

There's an old Rationalist legend about the starving college student and the supercomputer. The starving college student fantasizes about being wealthy, so he gets access to the school supercomputer and runs a simulation of his life where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. This has two unexpected results.

First, it takes much more compute than he was expecting. He investigates, and finds that simulated-him also fantasized about being wealthy, got access to the local supercomputer, and started running simulations where he wins the lottery the day he graduates college. In retrospect this was predictable - it just means the simulation is high-fidelity. In fact, the simulated simulation is also high fidelity, and the problem keeps repeating. The chain of higher-level-him simulating lower-level-him, and making lower-level-him win the lottery on the last day of college, is at least hundreds of layers deep. He can't even trace how deep it goes.

Second, he wins the lottery on the day he graduates college. Which is pretty odd, since he doesn't remember buying a ticket.

What happened? Well, suppose he observes the chain of simulations and finds that it's, let's say, 209 layers deep. Each version of him thinks it's the real version, and has no clue that he's living in a simulation. From a standpoint of humility, he should ask something like "In each of the 209 layers below me, the version of me thinks it's in base-level reality, and is wrong. I am in exactly the same epistemic position as each of them. So what's the chance I'm in base-level reality?" Phrased this way, the answer is obvious.

Suppose you’re a starving college student with access to a supercomputer, and you want to win the lottery. What if you deliberately set up this situation? I'm really not sure how to think about this, but who knows, it might work?

Okay, now suppose that you're in 10th century Persia. There's no such thing as supercomputers, and also you're a teenaged girl, and also the king is going to kill you tomorrow morning. What do you do?

How high-fidelity do you have to simulate somebody for this scheme to work? What if you're just a really good storyteller with a vivid imagination?

Instead of simulating someone simulating someone simulating someone..., you tell a story about someone telling a story about someone telling a story. At every layer, the story is suspiciously similar to your current situation. It always takes place in the Middle East. It always involves mighty sultans, beautiful women, grisly punishments, and interracial cuckoldry. It always ends with a sultan pardoning someone because they told such good stories. And they always live happily ever after (until the Destroyer of Delights etc etc).

And once you're telling a story about a genie telling a story about a vizier telling a story about a prince, then, well, all you know is that it goes at least three levels deep. What's the chance that you're on the highest level?

There are two ways Scheherazade can go from here.

The first is to threaten King Shahryar. Tell him - look, there's a pretty good chance you're in a fable. You should start with a high prior on this, given that you’re part of a long chain of people who are in fables without realizing it. But on top of that, you're the king of a fantastically rich but yet curiously unidentifiable sultanate, who's being courted by a beautiful and clever noblewoman. Seems kind of fabulous to me. Also, didn't you say that you and your brother met the king of the genies once? Isn't that the kind of thing that happens more often in fables than in real life? Given that you're probably in a fable, the fact that you've been killing a bunch of women seems really bad. Probably the sort of thing that ends up with a horrible yet ironic punishment. Your best hope is to repent your transgressions, marry me now, and treat me well forever, and then it can be a story about change and forgiveness, and we can both live happily ever after.

If I were the king, I would be convinced by that threat.

But there's no record of Scheherazade saying this. That makes me think she took the second path and trusted in Allah - or whatever God rules the level above hers. She didn't just try to con the king into thinking he was in a fable. She truly believed that she was in a fable. She married the king and lived happily ever after for the same reason the college student above won the lottery: because she had created a chain of universes in which that kind of thing always happened, and wasn't the highest link in the chain.

And you, o reader, know that Scheherazade was indeed part of a fable. Are you sure the chain ends there? Remember: don't eat food prepared by witches, be careful around Moroccans, and press the button on the left side of the mechanical horse if you need to land in a hurry. And may Allah protect you in your journeys!

Ready for more?