The Arabian Nights - stories told by Queen Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights, to beguile the Sultan into deferring her execution - first began to appear in the West in the early 18th century, firing in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from Persia and Arabia and India, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi teaching tales, they provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. English translations soon proliferated. Early ones were taken from Antoine Galland's French version, but later scholars went back to the Arabic text and it is on three classic 19th-century translators - Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane and John Payne - that this anthology principally draws.
