The Storytellers of the Thousand and One Nights

The Thousand and One Nights has no author; it is the joint creation of countless storytellers over many centuries. Its frame story and earliest tales come from a Persian collection, the Thousand Tales, translated into Arabic around the ninth century; in Baghdad, Cairo and elsewhere it went on absorbing stories from India, Persia, Arabia, Egypt and even Greece, until it took roughly its present shape by about the fifteenth century. In 1704 the French scholar Antoine Galland translated it into French, and it took Europe by storm. The tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba were added by Galland, who heard them from a Syrian storyteller.