Series:Arabian Nights
| This is an ISFDB Bibliographic Comments page for the Arabian Nights series. This page may be used for a list of the titles in the series, bibliographic comments or extended notes about the series, or discussion on how to organize and/or record the works in the series. The link above leads to the ISFDB series record for Arabian Nights. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page.
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The stories that become the Arabian Nights developed during the 8th-12th century. The oldest extant version known is a 14th or 15th Syrian edition in the Bibliothèque National (France). The first translation into a European language was the Galland translation (of this Syrian version) into French in 1704, and is used to give the date listed for this series. The first translation into English was done anonymously in 1706 from the Galland translation. For more details, see the Wikipedia entry for One Thousand and One Nights. For more information on the Galland translation and its importance, see the Wikipedia entry for Antoine Galland. For complete details, see The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia.
Science Fiction in the Arabian Nights (from Wikipedia): "Several stories within the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) also feature science fiction elements. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam, and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction; along the way, he encounters societies of jinns, mermaids, talking serpents, talking trees, and other forms of life. In "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", the protagonist gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater submarine society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land, in that the underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist. Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them. "The City of Brass" features a group of travellers on an archaeological expedition across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city and attempt to recover a brass vessel that Solomon once used to trap a jinn, and, along the way, encounter a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants, lifelike humanoid robots and automata, seductive marionettes dancing without strings, and a brass horseman robot who directs the party towards the ancient city. "The Ebony Horse" features a robot in the form of a flying mechanical horse controlled using keys that could fly into outer space and towards the Sun, while the "Third Qalandar's Tale" also features a robot in the form of an uncanny boatman. "The City of Brass" and "The Ebony Horse" can be considered early examples of proto-science fiction."
Since the Arabian Nights per se has no copyright, it has been published in many variations in many ways, and a complete list of all publications would be excessive, and almost surely incomplete. (The OCLC lists 5,436 entries for this title as of Oct. 2011; 2,753 in English.). This title series attempts to include those editions which attempt to be reasonably faithful to the "historic original", but does not include the many books that use the "Arabian Nights" as a starting point for original story-telling, such as books that go by titles such as "The New Arabian Nights". It also does not include most books that do very limited extracts from the Arabian Nights (e.g. only "Sinbad"), but does include books with multiple stories, as well as adaptations for younger readers.
We have included all of the documented 18th century English editions, and the more important 19th century editions. In a few cases reprint edition dates may only be listed in the publication notes, and not as separate publications. 20th century editions are included when an editor chooses to add one, and no systematic effort has been taken to be comprehensive here. A good determination (and documentation) of important editions up to about 1880 can be found in an appendix to Sir Richard Burton's translation, p. 416, and we have used that as a source for some of the publications listed herein. We have attempted to include the first known editions in the 80 (known) languages into which the Arabian Nights has been translated, but generally have not included later publications in those languages. Contents for most of these editions are not available to us, so we have estimated based on page length or other available date whether they appear to include multiple stories from the Arabian Nights.
For ease of reference, the first known appearances (in publication form, i.e. not in hand-written manuscript form) for the languages into which the Arabian Nights/Thousand and One Nights has been translated, in chronological order, is shown on the left below, and an alphabetical list is shown on the right.
| Chronological order | Alphabetical Order | |
| 1704 French | Afrikaans 1921 | |
| 1706 English | Albanian 1924 | |
| 1719 German | Amharic 1957 | |
| 1763 Russian | Arabic 1764 | |
| 1764 Arabic | Armenian 1870 | |
| 1770 Dutch | Azerbaijani (possible earlier 195x translation) 1973 | |
| 1803 Greek | Basque 1993 | |
| 1816 Italian | Bengali 1853 | |
| 1824 Danish | Bosnian 1990 | |
| 1825 Tamil | Bulgarian 1927 | |
| 1829 Persian | Burmese 1906 | |
| 1832 Urdu | Chinese (a possible earlier 1914 translation) 1933 | |
| 1836 Romanian | Croatian 192x | |
| 1842 Polish | Czech 1890 | |
| 1846 Spanish | Danish 1824 | |
| 1847-49 Javanese | Dutch 1770 | |
| 1848 Gujarati | English 1706 | |
| 1850 Portuguese | Finnish 1878 | |
| 1851 Turkish | French 1704 | |
| 1852 Icelandic | German 1719 | |
| 1853 Bengali | Greek 1803 | |
| 1861 Hindi (first portion) | Gujarati 1848 | |
| 1866 Hungarian | Hausa 1924 | |
| 1870 Armenian | Hawaiian 1875 | |
| 1875 Hawaiian | Hebrew 1912 | |
| 1875 Japanese | Hindi (first portion) 1861 | |
| 1875 Swedish | Hindi (full translation) 1890 | |
| 1878 Finnish | Hungarian 1866 | |
| 1878 Malay | Icelandic 1852 | |
| 1880 Slovenian | Indonesian 1913 | |
| 1884 Yiddish | Irish 1908 | |
| 1888 Judeo-Arabic | Italian 1816 | |
| 1889 Thai | Japanese 1875 | |
| 1890 Czech | Javanese 1847-49 | |
| 1890 Marathi | Judeo-Arabic 1888 | |
| 1897 Scottish Gaelic | Karen 1906 | |
| 1897 Tatar | Kazakh 1961 | |
| 1890 Hindi (full translation) | Khmer 1930 | |
| 1905 Ukranian | Korean (copyright 1950, so that may be an earlier publication) 1978 | |
| 1906 Burmese | Kyrgyz 2002 | |
| 1906 Karen | Ladino 1912 | |
| 1906 Samoan | Latvian 1957 | |
| 1907 Norwegian | Lithuanian 1915 | |
| 1908 Irish | Macedonian 1992 | |
| 1911 Slovak | Malay 1878 | |
| 1912 Hebrew | Malayalam 1993 | |
| 1912 Ladino | Maltese 1977 | |
| 1913 Indonesian | Marathi 1890 | |
| 1913 Serbian | Minangkabau 1982 | |
| 1915 Lithuanian | Norwegian 1907 | |
| 1921 Afrikaans | Nyanja (date may be approximate) 1945 | |
| 1924 Albanian | Persian 1829 | |
| 1924 Hausa | Polish 1842 | |
| 1925 Sindhi | Portuguese 1850 | |
| 1926 Telugu | Punjabi 2002 | |
| 1927 Bulgarian | Romanian 1836 | |
| 1929 Swahili | Russian 1763 | |
| 192x Croatian | Samoan 1906 | |
| 1930 Khmer | Scottish Gaelic 1897 | |
| 1932 Sundanese (A 4 vol. series translation. v. 2-4 published in 1932-3; date for v. 1 is unknown) | Serbian 1913 | |
| 1933 Chinese (a possible earlier 1914 translation) | Sindhi 1925 | |
| 1945 Nyanja (date may be approximate) | Slovak 1911 | |
| 1946 Tagalog | Slovenian 1880 | |
| 1957 Amharic | Somali 1994 | |
| 1957 Latvian | Spanish 1846 | |
| 1961 Kazakh | Sundanese (A 4 vol. series translation. v. 2-4 published in 1932-3; date for v. 1 is unknown) 1932 | |
| 1967 Vietnamese | Swahili 1929 | |
| 1973 Azerbaijani (possible earlier 195x translation) | Swedish 1875 | |
| 1977 Maltese | Tagalog 1946 | |
| 1978 Korean (copyright 1950, so that may be an earlier publication) | Tamil 1825 | |
| 1980 Uighur | Tatar 1897 | |
| 1982 Minangkabau | Telugu 1926 | |
| 1989 Uzbek | Thai 1889 | |
| 1990 Bosnian | Tibetan 1997 | |
| 1991 Welsh | Turkish 1851 | |
| 1992 Macedonian | Uighur 1980 | |
| 1993 Basque | Ukranian 1905 | |
| 1993 Malayalam | Urdu 1832 | |
| 1994 Somali | Uzbek 1989 | |
| 1997 Tibetan | Vietnamese 1967 | |
| 2002 Kyrgyz | Welsh 1991 | |
| 2002 Punjabi | Yiddish 1884 |