A Story to Survive the Night: Scheherazade, Her Cliffhangers and the Tangled Roots of the Arabian Nights

The One Thousand and One Nights, known in English as The Arabian Nights, is a large collection of Middle Eastern folk tales gathered in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, held together by one famous frame story: a cruel king, Shahryar, marries a new bride every day and executes her the next morning, until a clever young woman named Scheherazade stops the killing by telling him stories that she never finishes before dawn. Inside that frame are love stories, adventures, ghost stories, comedies, crime tales and fables about jinn, sorcerers and magic places, often mixed with real cities and real rulers. It is less a single book than a living library that grew over centuries, which is exactly what makes it so interesting.

Who wrote it? Nobody, and many people

The Nights has no single author. It was collected over many centuries by storytellers, translators and scholars across West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and North Africa. Some tales go back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian and Mesopotamian literature, but most were folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk periods of the Islamic world.

The frame story has a separate history. The earliest references to the Nights describe it as an Arabic translation of a Persian book called Hezār Afsān, "The Thousand Stories". Ibn al-Nadim, who compiled a catalogue of books in tenth-century Baghdad, described that Persian book's plot: a bloodthirsty king kills wife after wife until one saves herself by leaving each evening's story unfinished. No copy of the Persian book survives, so its exact relationship to the later Arabic versions is a mystery. Scholars also see Indian roots: frame stories and animal fables were common in Sanskrit literature, and the motif of a wise young woman who delays danger by telling stories has been traced back to Indian sources.

There is also no "original" text. No canonical version with a fixed set of stories in a fixed order has ever been found, and editions range from a few hundred nights to a full 1,001 or more. The oldest surviving scrap is a ninth-century fragment of a few lines titled The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights, and the full title The One Thousand and One Nights first appears in Cairo in the 12th century. So whenever you read "the" Arabian Nights, it is worth asking: which version?

The frame story in brief

King Shahryar rules an empire stretching from Persia to India. He and his brother Shahzaman discover that both of their wives have been unfaithful. Bitter and humiliated, Shahryar decides that all women are the same. He begins to marry a new young woman each day and has her executed the next morning, before she can betray him.

Eventually the vizier, whose job is to find the brides, has no one left. His own daughter, Scheherazade, volunteers, and her father reluctantly agrees. On the wedding night she begins a story but does not finish it. The king, desperate to hear the ending, postpones her execution. The next night she finishes that tale and immediately starts another, and so it goes on for a thousand and one nights.

How does it end? The versions disagree in the details, but they agree on the outcome: the king pardons Scheherazade and spares her life. In several versions she has borne him children during those nights; in the oldest summary, she reveals her strategy and the king, impressed, keeps her alive.

The tales everyone knows, and the ones they don't

Some stories are found in all the major versions, a small shared core that includes "The Fisherman and the Genie", "The Merchant and the Genie", "The Porter and the Three Ladies" and "The Three Apples". "The Three Apples" is a murder mystery with plot twists and detective-story elements, a reminder that crime fiction is much older than Sherlock Holmes.

Here is the surprise for most readers. "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", the two tales most people associate with the Nights, were not in the original Arabic versions at all. The French translator Antoine Galland added them after hearing them from Hanna Diyab, a Syrian writer who visited Paris in 1709. "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor" also existed on its own before later manuscripts and translations folded it in.

The main characters

• Scheherazade – the vizier's daughter, whose intelligence and storytelling save her own life and, by stopping the king's killing, the lives of others.
• Shahryar – the wounded, violent king whose curiosity proves stronger than his cruelty.
• Dinarzad – a woman of the court who, in the oldest surviving summary of the story, helps Scheherazade carry out her plan.
• Harun al-Rashid – the real Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, a favourite character in many tales, often with his vizier Jafar, even though he lived some two centuries after the era in which the frame story is set.

How the storytelling works

The Nights is an early and influential example of the frame story: one narrator tells a set of tales over many nights. It also uses stories within stories. A character in one of Scheherazade's tales starts telling a story, and someone in that story tells another, layer inside layer. In "Sinbad the Sailor", for example, Sinbad recounts his seven voyages to a poor porter who shares his name.

Scheherazade's cliffhangers are not always what we would expect. Sometimes she stops with the hero in mortal danger, but sometimes she breaks off in the middle of a point of philosophy or, once, a detailed description of human anatomy, and the king's curiosity still buys her another day. Running through many of the tales is a strong sense of fate: coincidences, prophecies that fulfil themselves and journeys that end where they began.

What the frame story is really about

On one level it is a simple suspense trick. On another it is a story about the power of stories. Scheherazade has no weapon and no army; she has knowledge, memory and timing. Night after night she replaces the king's single, bitter story about women with hundreds of others full of human variety, and the cycle of violence stops. Many modern readers see in her one of literature's great portraits of intelligence used to survive.

How the Nights reached the world

The Nights became famous in Europe through Galland's French translation, which began to appear in 1704. Its success was immediate, and by the end of the century it had been translated into English, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian and other languages. The scholar Robert Irwin notes that Galland shaped the collection so heavily that he has even been called, half seriously, the real author of the Nights. Later English translations by Edward Lane and Richard Burton in the 19th century took very different approaches: Lane cut material he found immoral, while Burton emphasised the sexual content.

Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba became cultural icons in the West. Disney's 1992 animated film Aladdin, loosely based on the tale, is one of the best-known adaptations. The collection even reached space: since 1982 the International Astronomical Union has named features on Saturn's moon Enceladus after characters and places from Burton's translation.

How to read it today

Do not try to read every night in order. Pick a modern translation, read the frame story first, then dip into "The Fisherman and the Genie", "The Three Apples" and the voyages of Sinbad. Keep in mind that tales such as Aladdin may sit in a different section or a separate volume, depending on the edition, because of their unusual history.

Learn with the Arabian Nights: English words and phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
open sesame	a magic key to something that is hard to get	A good degree is not an open sesame to a job.
a genie	a magical spirit that grants wishes	I wish a genie could finish my homework.
Aladdin's cave	a place full of valuable or interesting things	That old bookshop is an Aladdin's cave.
a magic carpet ride	a wonderful, effortless experience	The concert was a magic carpet ride.
a cliffhanger	an ending that leaves you in suspense	The episode ended on a cliffhanger.

Try this: Tell a short story in three English sentences that ends on a cliffhanger, using "a genie" or "open sesame".