Textual History
Some critics believe that this story was added to One Thousand and One Nights by one of its European translators, Antoine Galland, an 18th-century French orientalist who may have heard it in oral form from a Middle Eastern story-teller from Aleppo, in modern day Syria. In any case, the first known text of the story is Galland's French version. Richard F. Burton included it in the supplemental volumes, rather than the main collection of stories, of his edition of the Thousand and One Nights, and seems to have thought it Greek Cypriot in origin.
The American Orientalist Duncan Black MacDonald discovered an Arabic-language manuscript of the legend at the Bodleian Library; however, this was later found to be a counterfeit.
Read more about this topic: Ali Baba
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)