One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (c. 1706–1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.
The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central and South Asia, and North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Greek, Jewish and Turkish folklore and literature.
What is common to all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others are self-contained. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion.
Some of the stories commonly associated with The Nights, in particular “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” were not part of The Nights in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland after he heard them from the Maronite Christian storyteller Hanna Diab on Diab’s visit to Paris. While others, such as “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, had an independent existence before being added to the collection.
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