Where Did The Story Of Aladdin And The Magic Lamp Come From? Not 'The 1,001 Nights', It Turns Out
In fact, writes Michael Dirda, the tale came from one Antoine Galland, an early-18th-century Orientalist who was the first Westerner to translate the actual Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. He was working from a manuscript that had only 35 stories in it " and, when his translations became hits, he (not unlike Sheherazad […]