The Arabian Nights is a remarkable assortment of stories collected into one volume from the ancient Middle East and parts of Asia such as Turkey, Persia, India, and Yemen.

These inventive and world-renowned tales have inspired art, music, movies and literature on a scale of great and impressive dimensions. One of the best known works of the Arabic culture, The Arabian Nights frustrates academics and scholars who try to categorize the book and find it a daunting task on many levels.

Alf Layla Wa Layla is the Arabic terminology for this work, which means “One Thousand and One Nights,” and some people know the Arabian Nights by this secondary title.

The very first formal collection of such stories appears to have been put together around 800 CE, but, incredible as it may sound, many of the stories in the Arabian Nights are far older. The epic repertoire of the Arabian Nights mirror the diverse and uniquely varied cultures of the individual regions it comes from, which makes the stories an informative cultural record in addition to a superior form of entertainment.

Legend says that these tales were inspired by Scheherazade, wife of the Persian ruler Shahryar. Shahryar had despicable habit of executing his wives just after their wedding night in mis-guided effort to get revenge on his first wife, who had cheated on him, and knowing this little tidbit of information, clever Scheherazade invented a life-saving ploy of telling Shahryar a story, ending each night on a cliffhanger thus insuring that he could not execute her--because, like anyone, he had to know 'what happens next'

This is of course, the basis of all popular fiction and Sherherazade, we might say, was the first to use the literary device.

At any event, she was granted a pardon in the end.