And the Hello and welcome to Disney Story Origins episode 5A, Aladdin, part one. Oh. Oh The story of Aladdin is one of the most familiar narratives in all of literature,

a classic rags to riches tale featuring a young hero who has to learn an important lesson,

an exotic setting, a good healthy dose of magic, a beautiful heroine, and an evil villain

or two depending on which version of the story you follow.

Aladdin is part of a compilation of many stories in a large tone called Elf Lila

Wala Lila, aka 1001 Knights, aka the Arabian Knights, which were fairy tales of the far and

Middle East.

The people of Asia, Arabia, and Persia told these stories in their own way, not for kids, but

for grown-ups.

There were no novels then, no printed books.

But there were people whose job it was to entertain men and women by telling tales. They dressed the

fairy tales up and made the characters good Mohammedans living in Baghdad, India or

China. Most of the stories in the Arabian Nights were supposed to have happened during the reign of the great caliph or ruler of the faithful, Harun al-Rashid, who lived in Baghdad from 786 to 808 a.D. And the stories must have been told a long time after the Caliph died.

Around the same time Edward I was fighting Robert Bruce in Europe over who ruled Scotland,

some storyteller in the Middle East thought of writing

down the Arabian tales and fixed them into a kind of framework as if all of the different

tales had been narrated to a cruel sultan by his wife. This of course is the story of Shahadasad.

Now people in Europe knew almost nothing about the Arabian Knights till the reigns of Queen Anne

and George the first when they were translated by a French archaeologist named

Monsieur Antoine Galland. You guys thought I was going to say Bellock didn't you just admit it. Anyway, Galen was also an expert in Asian studies and the story goes

that in Constantinople during the 1690s, Galen had come across a manuscript of The Tale of Sinbad, the Saylor,

and in 1701 he published his translation of it into French.

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