fire in the desert. They were handed down from one to another, since there were no books and both history and romance must live in man’s memory or else die. That man who had a genius for memorizing and for improvising was a great man in his tribe, and people would come from far away to hear one of these orators.
After the spoken word came the written word, as always. And so the Thousand and One Nights came finally to be written in the beautiful Arabic scrip, on fine pieces of parchment. Men still recited them, but they were usually readers then, who had memorized them. They altered them somewhat, and other collections were written, but on the whole the stories kept their form and it was always Scheherazade, or Shirazad as it is often spelled, who told them to save her life from the unjust decree of the sultan whom she had married. The stories originally numbered about 250, split up into the thousand and one parts in which the sultaness told them, but since that first definite collection other tales have been added and there have been some changes, not very important.
Europe first came to know the stories in 1704–1712, when Antoine Galland, a Frenchman, published a translation in twelve volumes. They had a great success among the rather restricted public who could get hold of the books, and gradually their fame spread. In 1811 a certain Jonathan Scott brought out a partial translation in English, which did not become generally known, and in 1840 E. W. Lane, the
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