Aladdin’s mother is the one who first rubs the lamp and releases the genie. His father, a tailor, is dead, but his mother, a poor widow, still lives. Unlike the Disney films, Aladdin isn’t an orphaned 'street rat' in The Arabian Nights. The setting and the characters’ ethnicity begins to shift west to Arabia and the Middle East when the story is told on the big screen in the early 20th century.

In the both Galland’s text and Richard Burton’s popular 1885 English translation, Aladdin lives “in a city of the cities in China.” Illustrations of the tales from the Victorian era depict the story and its characters as Chinese. Galland added several new stories told to him by a Syrian named Ḥanna Diyab from Aleppo “Aladdin and the Magical Lamp” was one of them. In 1712, French scholar Antoine Galland translated an Arabic version of the tales into French. The stories circulated for centuries, with new folk tales and renditions being added to the mix over the years. In 947 Arab historian Al-Masudi, for example, describes a large collection of a thousand tales from all over the ancient world that he calls the Persian Hazar afsana (A Thousand Stories). The Arabian Nights aren’t just from Arabia.ĭating back as far as the 10th century A.D., these tales have origins in North African, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Indian, and East Asian cultures. Some of the most famous tales are not only of Aladdin but also Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. Night after night, cliffhangers compel the curious king to delay Scherherazade’s death to find out what happens next. To save her life, she spins a story every night (“Aladdin” is one of many) for her husband, leaves out the ending, but promises to finish it later.

The heroine, Scherherazade, is married to a murderous king, who kills his new wives one day after wedding them. Aladdin is only one of 1,001 tales.Īladdin is part of a centuries-old stories-within-a-story called The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian Nights). But how much does the big screen Aladdin resemble its source material? (The Walt Disney Company is majority owner of National Geographic Partners.) 1. The movie became a classic, spawning a Broadway musical and a live-action remake that hits theaters this weekend. In 1992, Disney’s animated Aladdin hit the big screen, and audiences fell in love with the adventures of an orphan-the “Diamond in the Rough”-who crossed paths with a flying carpet, a powerful genie, and an independent princess.

Aladdin did you rub my lamp