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The story collection titled the One Hundred and One Nights (مائة ليلة وليلة, Mi’at layla wa-layla), is linked to its longer sister-narrative, the Thousand and One Nights (ألف ليلة وليلة, Alf layla wa-layla). The frame story in both concerns a king who, embittered and vengeful after witnessing his wife's adultery, marries a new maiden every night, and has her executed every morning. The string of murders is interrupted when the king marries Shahrazād, a vizier’s daughter. Shahrazād delays her own death and keeps the king's attention by telling incomplete stories every night, promising their resolution the following evening if the king allows her to live on. In the end, Shahrazād wins the king’s affection, and all ends happily. Both the Thousand and One Nights and the One Hundred and One Nights contain a version of the Seven Sages narrative as one of the embedded stories that Shahrazād tells the king, usually referred to in English as the Seven Viziers.

Produced in the Maghreb or Western periphery of the Muslim world (Muslim Spain or North Africa) sometime between the 10th and 14th centuries, the Hundred and One Nights differs in several respects from the Thousand and One Nights (which was composed in the Eastern region of the Islamic world, e.g. Egypt, Iran, and/or Syria). The One Hundred and One Nights contains not only fewer but also different stories than its longer analogue, and the relationship between the frame story and the embedded tales is less persistently emphasised. In fact, only two of the eighteen stories in the One Hundred and One Nights are also found in the longer text: The Ebony Horse, and the version of the Seven Sages narrative known as The Seven Viziers (Krönung 2016).

The version of the Seven Viziers contained within the One Hundred and One Nights shares about half of the embedded stories with the version found in the Thousand and One Nights. This iteration of the Seven Viziers is less embellished than that found in the Thousand and One Nights, and diverges in some notable ways: it opens with the story of the king and the elephant, told by the sage Sendebar/Sindbad, as a model of an exempla prior to the storytelling contest; it includes five new stories; and it ends with the empress-figure being pardoned (Lacarra 2009).

Such differentiations are central to critical analysis of the transmission history of the early 'Eastern' versions of the narrative, and to understanding the relationships between different branches of the tradition. For example, tracking these and other key distinctions, Bettina Krönung (2016) observes the 'striking closeness' between the Greek Syntipas, Syriac Book of Sindbad, Spanish Libro de los Engaños, the independently transmitted Arabic Seven Viziers, and the version in the One Hundred and One Nights (p. 374). On the other hand, the divergent story orders in the One Thousand and One Nights, Hebrew Mishle Sendebar, and the Persian Sindbād-nāma are distinct enough to reveal the shared 'cores' of the other 'Eastern' texts, and to suggest that they may represent something 'very close to the Middle Persian original'.

There are now modern translations of the One Hundred and One Nights in Japanese, based on the Tarshūnah edition (Hyakuichiya Monogatari: Mō hitotsu no Arabian Naito [The One Hundred and One Nights: The Other “Arabian Nights”] trans. by Akiko Sumi, Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2011) and English (One Hundred and One Nights, trans. by Bruce Fudge, Library of Arabic Literature 45, New York: NYU Press, 2016).

Identification & General Information

Title
مائة ليلة وليلة (Hundred and One Nights)

Tradition & Lineage

Branch of the tradition
East


Recorded Secondary Versions

Connected Manuscripts

Language & Composition

Regional or specific language of version
Maghrebi
Place of composition
Maghreb, Western Islamic world
Date of Composition
900 - 1350


Source for date of composition
Lerner (2018), Marzolph and Chraïbi (2012)

Modern Scholarship & Editions

Modern research literature
Lerner (2018), Grotzfeld (1984), Walther (1987), Chraïbi (2008), Ott (2012), Gaudefroy-Demombynes (1911), Lacarra (2009), Krönung (2016), Marzolph and van Leeuwen (2004)
Modern Editions
Pétis de la Croix, Les Mille et un jours (1710-12), Tarshuna, Miʾat layla wa-layla (1984), Shuraybiṭ, Miʾat layla wa layla (2005), Ott, 101 Nacht (2012)

Notes & Commentary

Note
Note: the story order below (from Nishimura) is broadly reflective of the pattern found in most exemplars of the 101 Nights, which are consistent from the beginning through story 18, Elephantinus. However, the final stories vary from text to text; BNF Arabe 3660 ends after Lac venenatum, following the order presented here, while in BNF Arabe 3662 and Leiden Or. 14.303, Nomina follows Elephantinus, then Ingenia, and in the Leiden text, is then followed by Linteum.

Pattern of Embedded Stories in This Version













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