The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume 4 (Electronic book text)

One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries across the Arab World. These collections of tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature. In particular, many of tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era and some believe a few of the tales were tales from the Sassanid-era Pahlavi work Hazar Afsan. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to around the 9th century.