Aladdin 

(/əˈlædɪn/ ə-LAD-in; Arabic: ‫عالء الدين‬, ʻAlāʼ ud-Dīn/ ʻAlāʼ ad-Dīn, IPA: [ʕalaːʔ adˈdiːn], ATU

561, ‘Aladdin') is a folk tale most probably of Middle-Eastern origin. Despite not being part of the
original Arabic text of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights), it is one of
the best-known tales associated with that collection. It was actually added by the
Frenchman Antoine Galland, based in a folk tale that the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab told him.[1]

Known along with Ali Baba as one of the "orphan tales", the story was not part of the
original Nights collection and has no authentic Arabic textual source, but was incorporated into the
book Les mille et une nuits by its French translator, Antoine Galland.[2]
John Payne quotes passages from Galland's unpublished diary: recording Galland's encounter with
a Maronite storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab.[1] According to Galland's diary, he met with Hanna,
who had travelled from Aleppo to Paris with celebrated French traveller Paul Lucas, on March 25,
1709. Galland's diary further reports that his transcription of "Aladdin" for publication occurred in the
winter of 1709–10. It was included in his volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710, without
any mention or published acknowledgment of Hanna's contribution. Paulo Lemos Horta, in the
introduction to Yasmine Seale's translation of Aladdin, speculates that Diyab might even be the
original author of at least some of the "orphan" tales, including Aladdin.[3]
Payne also records the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris of two Arabic
manuscripts containing Aladdin (with two more of the "interpolated" tales). One was written by a
Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysios Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis. The other
is supposed to be a copy Mikhail Sabbagh made of a manuscript written in Baghdad in 1703. It was
purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale at the end of the nineteenth century.[4] As part of his work
on the first critical edition of the Nights, Iraq's Muhsin Mahdi has shown[5] that both these manuscripts
are "back-translations" of Galland's text into Arabic.[6][7]
Ruth B. Bottigheimer[8] and Paulo Lemos Horta have argued that Hanna Diyab should be understood
as the original author of some of the stories he supplied, and even that several of Diyab's stories
(including Aladdin) were partly inspired by Diyab's own life, as there are parallels with his
autobiography.[3][9][10]

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