The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

by Martin Puchner

When did you first encounter One Thousand and One Nights? I don’t remember when I did; it feels as if I have always known some of the stories. Perhaps it was Popeye meeting Ali Baba? Sinbad the Sailor in a children’s book? Or someone saying “Open sesame”? One Thousand and One Nights is everywhere. Like a Jinni,

For the longest time, storytelling had existed prior to and then below the radar of literature. Stories were told orally by professional storytellers or amateurs, and only on rare occasions did stories insinuate themselves into the exclusive world of literature. But ultimately, more and more popular stories found scribes willing to preserve them and assemble them into larger collections.

Scheherazade not only told the stories but also selected, arranged, and adapted them to the situation in which she found herself, faced with a king who had gone mad. In this she resembled the scribes who selected, arranged, and adapted the stories they had heard from all over the world, wrote them down, and put them into this and other story collections.