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Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with
a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal
pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad,
begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder
- tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the
Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of
Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of
jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will
last 1,001 nights.
On the shrouded corpse hung a tablet of green topaz with the
inscription: 'I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand
cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived
for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but
when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any
avail. You who see me take heed: for Time is not to be trusted.'
Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known
Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a
library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights
but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the
Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes,
jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle,
sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with
a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal
pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad,
begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder
- tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the
Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of
Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of
jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will
last 1,001 nights.
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with
a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal
pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad,
begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder
- tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the
Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of
Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of forty thieves and of
jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will
last 1,001 nights.
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