Tales That Were Never Arabic

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Two of the tales most closely associated with One Thousand and One Nights in the West, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, do not appear in any of the earliest surviving Arabic manuscripts of the collection. Both entered the tradition through Antoine Galland, the French orientalist scholar whose translation Les Mille et Une Nuits, published in installments between 1704 and 1717, was the first version of the Nights to reach a European readership; Galland appears to have added both stories from oral tellings he heard from a Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab rather than from any written Arabic source he could point to. Their absence from the Arabic manuscript tradition, despite their global fame, is one of the clearest illustrations of how uncertain the collection's textual history remains.