One Thousand and One Nights
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Book of One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories compiled over thousands of years by various authors, translators and scholars.These collections of tales trace their roots back to Ancient Arabia and Ancient Persia. Though an original manuscript has never been found several versions date the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900.
What is common throughout all the editions of The Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryar and his wife Scheherazade (Persian: شهرزاد) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred tales, while others include 1001 or more stories and "nights."
Well known stories from The Nights include "Aladdin," "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor."
Psychpopathological aspects
King Shahryar discovers his wife's infidelity and has her executed, without conscience or recognizing any defect in his own psyche, declaring all women to be unfaithful. He marries a succession of virgins only to have Scheherazade's father, the vizier, execute each one the next morning until finally he comes to Scheherazade herself, after three years of ordering the death of his brides after each wedding night. Scheherazade survives because she tells the king a story on each of the 1001 nights, which end in a cliffhanger at dawn. Shahryar's brother had earlier discovered his own first wife in bed with a cook and he butchers them both and then continued a pattern of marriage and murder like Shahryar.
The stories in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights likely began in the oral tradition before the fifth century AD. Though Shahrya was not then a stock psychopathic character the Book and its many characters, has had wide influence on writers, not only in the sex and serial murder genre. Edgar Allan Poe, for example wrote "A Thousand and Second Night", where in the story of Sinbad, Poe's king kills Scheherazade in disgust at the story she tells him.
