He declared that no woman in the kingdom was as wise as Shahrazad, and he made her his queen for keeps this time, and they lived Happily Ever After.įrom the 1,001 Nights, the three best known stories are " Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," " Aladdin" and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, which include tropes traceable to Homer. But the King had fallen in love with her, and had been calmed by her entrancing stories. So Shahrazad kept up the stories for three years - in the meantime bearing Shahryar three sons - and finally, after 1,001 nights, she said that she had told all of her tales and was ready to die.
But all of the stories were so compelling that the King could never bear to order her execution without hearing the ending. Or sometimes she claimed she didn't know the ending, but had another tale that was even more intriguing than the unfinished one. Some of the stories were simple, some complex and multi-layered sometimes a character in one story would begin to tell a second story, and sometimes the story was never actually ended because Shahrazad had gone on two or three layers and never returned to wrap up. But after Shahrazad ended that story, it was still the middle of the night, and she started up another story, again ending on a cliffhanger in the morning. The awoken King was so hooked on the story that he postponed the execution for one night, in order to hear the rest. Just as planned, Dunyazad asked Shahrazad to tell her a story, but by the morning she was not finished, and ended the story on a Cliffhanger. After that and the three of them went to sleep, the sisters woke up at midnight. Even while they consummated the marriage. The King acquiesced, and allowed Shahrazad's sister, Dunyazad, to stay in the room with them until dawn. More on this in the Other Wiki.Ĭome the wedding night, once he started putting the moves on her, she feigned becoming upset, and pleaded to see her younger sister one last time. Diyab's autobiography was found in 1993 and greatly expanded our understanding of these stories. Some of these additions were based on other Arabian sources, but others, including Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, were stolen by Antoine Galland (the French translator) from Syrian Maronite writer Hanna Diyab, who recounted those tales to Galland and based them on various aspects of his own life. The 701 others were added later most of the additions were by Arab writers, but European translators added some other folktales they'd collected in their editions. In fact, early Arabic-language versions only contain about 300 nights. Jinn, evil wazirs and flying carpets all stem from its pages. It has for centuries shaped the European view of the "(Near) East" or "Orient", even though only some of the stories are widely known.
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