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Since its eighteenth-century entry into European literature, the Thousand and One Nights has seemed quintessentially "other" to Western eyes, altogether "Arabian," giving voice to traditional Middle Eastern storytelling. In part, this assumption is justified. The first seven volumes of Antoine Galland's Nights bring together stories from several Middle Eastern sources: a fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript titled Alf Layla wa layla (A Thousand Nights and One Night)1 that ends with the opening pages of a manuscript romance about a hero named Qamar az-zamän and a manuscript collection of stories about Sindbad the Sailor, both of which have Arabic-language source texts. These tales, published between 1704 and 1706, left the public clamoring for more, and Galland's publisher obliged by filling out Galland's partly completed volume 8 with two Turkish stories from François Pétis de la Croix (Mahdi 27).2 Galland, outraged, disavowed them and changed publishers.3 At this point, Galland had only one conte arabe left, "Histoire du dormeur éveillé" (The Sleeper Awakened), of unknown provenance. He translated it and passed it around among his friends but lacked further material.
In March 1709 Galland paid a call on an acquaintance, the traveler Paul Lucas, where he met Hannä Diyäb, a Syrian from Aleppo in his early 20s.4 Later that spring Hannä Diyäb told Galland fourteen stories, which Galland used to complete his version of the Nights, including two that remain emblematic for the collection as a whole: "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba."5 Those fourteen stories reveal Hannä Diyäb's knowledge of tales from narrative repertoires of Western Europe as well as the Levant.
The Nights Narrative
It is common knowledge that the Nights opens with a story about a king, Shariyär, so maddened by his wife's infidelity that, to prevent future betrayals, he marries a virgin each evening and executes her the following morning. Eventually, the vizier's daughter Shahrazad offers to marry Shariyär. Clever woman that she is, she begins telling Shariyär a story on their wedding night but stops short of its conclusion, leaving Shariyär so eager to know its outcome that he postpones her execution. In Galland's translation the thousand and first night passes as Shahrazad completes a story about a falsely accused queen, whose innocence redeems her from years of exposure and mortification. This tale, subsequently titled "Histoire...