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''One Thousand and One Nights'' ((アラビア語:كِتَاب أَلْف لَيْلَة وَلَيْلَة) ''kitāb ʾalf layla wa-layla'') is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the ''Arabian Nights'', from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as ''The Arabian Nights' Entertainment''.〔See illustration of title page of Grub St Edition in Yamanaka and Nishio (p. 225)〕 The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Egyptian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work ''Hazār Afsān'' ((ペルシア語:هزار افسان), lit. ''A Thousand Tales'') which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.〔 〕 What is common throughout all the editions of the ''Nights'' is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār (from (ペルシア語:شهريار), meaning "king" or "sovereign") and his wife Scheherazade (from (ペルシア語:شهرزاد), possibly meaning "of noble lineage"〔There is scholarly confusion over the exact form and original meaning of Scheherazade's name, see the note in Scheherazade's own Wiki article on this point〕) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer. Some of the stories very widely associated with ''The Nights'', in particular "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of ''The Nights'' in its original Arabic versions, but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.〔John Payne, ''Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp and Other Stories'', (London 1901) gives details of Galland's encounter with 'Hanna' in 1709 and of the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin and two more of the added tales. (Text of "Alaeddin and the enchanted lamp" )〕 ==Synopsis== The main frame story concerns Shahryar, whom the narrator calls a "Sasanian king" ruling in "India and China".〔''The Arabian Nights'', translated by Malcolm C. Lyons and Ursula Lyons (Penguin Classics, 2008), Volume 1, page 1〕 He is shocked to discover that his brother's wife is unfaithful; discovering his own wife's infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her executed: but in his bitterness and grief decides that all women are the same. Shahryar begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonour him. Eventually the vizier, whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and ''only'' begins) a new one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion, postpones her execution once again. So it goes on for 1,001 nights. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict jinns, ghouls, apes,〔(The Third Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman – The Arabian Nights – The Thousand and One Nights – Sir Richard Burton translator ). Classiclit.about.com (2013-07-19). Retrieved on 2013-09-23.〕 sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally; common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, and the famous poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture. The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life. The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「One Thousand and One Nights」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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