What is the background story behind the Tale of “A Thousand and One Night”?

The Arabian Nights, also called One Thousand and One Nights, is a collection of stories and folk tales from West and South Asia that was compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. It took centuries to collect all of these together, and various translators, authors, and scholars have contributed. These stories trace back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian literature. Many of these were originally folk tales from the Caliphate Era, while others are drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān.

The original core of stories came from Persia and India in the eighth century. After being translated into Arabic, they were called Alf Layla, or The Thousand Nights. There were significantly fewer stories in the collection at that time. Somewhere in the ninth or tenth century, more Arab stories were added in Iraq, probably including ones that referred to Caliph Harun al-Rashid. In the thirteenth century, additional Syrian or Egyptian stories were added, and as the years went on, more tales were added by authors and translators until the total was indeed brought up to one thousand and one. (This ClassicNote focuses on those stories most commonly known and taught.)