The Arabian Nights is a collection of many stories that have their origins in a variety of cultures: most notably Persian and Indian. Thus, many authors must have been involved in the creation of the different tales; unfortunately however, we have very little information on the writers. Likely, the stories would have initially been passed down orally, meaning that even if the original authors were known, the stories we have today were undoubtedly altered via generations of transmission.
However, most of the stories seem to suggest Persian and Indian origins. They were all first written in Arabic, but have been since translated into English and a multitude of other languages. Husain Huddawy is typically recognized as the best English translator of the stories. The first European version of the stories was translated into French by Antoine Galland, a French orientalist and archaeologist.
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...
