Although Aladdin’s tale comes from Arabic culture, the story actually takes place in a mythical city in China. China was considered an exotic and mysterious place where unusual things could happen. People in ancient cultures often believed that such faraway lands were home to magical creatures and treasures, such as the special lamp that Aladdin finds.
The story of Aladdin has an interesting history. Recent scholarship has shown that Aladdin was not actually one of the original characters in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. The original tales were versions of Arabic, Persian, and Indian stories that had changed over time and had been adapted by different storytellers for different audiences. The oldest mention of the text containing the tales dates to about the ninth century. The earliest existing manuscript, a Syrian version, dates to the fourteenth century—and contains no mention of Aladdin. By the sixteenth century, Egyptian versions of the text do contain an Aladdin story, but its origin is uncertain. The Western world was introduced to the tales in an early eighteenth-century French translation by Antoine Galland, who used the Syrian version as his source. Nineteenth-century editions combined stories from both the Syrian and Egyptian versions and included the Aladdin story. The
Ascenefrom the Disney animated film Aladdin (1992). This movie adapted the ancient Persian folktale for today’s children. THE KOBAL COLLECTION.
Folklore and fairy tales of Europe were enjoying increased popularity at the time (the Mother Goose stories and fairy tales of the Grimm brothers appeared in the nineteenth century), so Aladdin and the other tales in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights were greeted enthusiastically and remain popular to this day.
World History
