Editing One Thousand and One Nights (section)

===Evolving Arabic versions===
[[File:Princess Parizade Bringing Home the Singing Tree.jpg|thumb|[[The Sisters Envious of Their Cadette|The story of ''Princess Parizade'' and the ''Magic Tree'']] by [[Maxfield Parrish]], 1906<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=ATkQAAAAYAAJ&dq=princess+parizade&pg=PA543 The Thousand and One Nights; Or, The Arabian Night's Entertainments – David Claypoole Johnston – Google Books]. Books.google.com.pk. Retrieved on 2013-09-23.</ref>]]

In the mid-20th century, the scholar [[Nabia Abbott]] found a document with a few lines of an Arabic work with the title ''The Book of the Tale of a Thousand Nights'', dating from the ninth century. This is the earliest known surviving fragment of the ''Nights''.{{sfn|Irwin|2004|p=51}} The first reference to the Arabic version under its full title ''The One Thousand and One Nights'' appears in Cairo in the 12th century.{{sfn|Irwin|2004|p=50}} Professor Dwight Reynolds describes the subsequent transformations of the Arabic version:

{{blockquote|Some of the earlier Persian tales may have survived within the Arabic tradition altered such that Arabic Muslim names and new locations were substituted for pre-Islamic Persian ones, but it is also clear that whole cycles of Arabic tales were eventually added to the collection and apparently replaced most of the Persian materials. One such cycle of Arabic tales centres around a small group of historical figures from ninth-century Baghdad, including the caliph [[Harun al-Rashid]] (died 809), his vizier [[Ja'far ibn Yahya|Jafar al-Barmaki]] (d. 803) and the licentious poet [[Abu Nuwas]] (d. c. 813). Another cluster is a body of stories from late medieval Cairo in which are mentioned persons and places that date to as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.<ref name="Reynolds p.270">Reynolds p. 270</ref>}}

Two main Arabic manuscript traditions of the Nights are known: the Syrian and the Egyptian. The Syrian tradition is primarily represented by the earliest extensive manuscript of the ''Nights'', a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript now known as the [[Galland Manuscript]]. It and surviving copies of it are much shorter and include fewer tales than the Egyptian tradition. It is represented in print by the so-called ''Calcutta I'' (1814–1818) and most notably by the 'Leiden edition' (1984).<ref name=beaustyle>Beaumont, Daniel. Literary Style and Narrative Technique in the Arabian Nights. p. 1. In ''The Arabian nights encyclopedia'', Volume 1</ref>{{sfn|Irwin|2004|p=55}} The Leiden Edition, prepared by [[Muhsin Mahdi]], is the only [[critical edition]] of 1001 Nights to date,<ref name="Marzolph, Ulrich 2017">{{Cite encyclopedia|author=Marzolph, Ulrich|title=Arabian Nights|encyclopedia=Encyclopaedia of Islam|edition=3rd|editor1=Kate Fleet|editor2=Gudrun Krämer|editor3=Denis Matringe|editor4=John Nawas|editor5=Everett Rowson|publisher=Brill|year=2017|doi=10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_0021}}</ref> believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available.<ref name=beaustyle/>{{sfn|Irwin|2004|p=55}}

Texts of the Egyptian tradition emerge later and contain many more tales of much more varied content; a much larger number of originally independent tales have been incorporated into the collection over the centuries, most of them after the Galland manuscript was written,<ref name="sallis">[[Eva Sallis|Sallis, Eva]]. 1999. Sheherazade through the looking glass: the metamorphosis of the Thousand and One Nights. pp. 18–43</ref> and were being included as late as in the 18th and 19th centuries.

All extant substantial versions of both [[recension]]s share a small common core of tales:<ref>{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.172872|title=The Book Of Thousand Nights And One Night |volume=IX |last1=Payne|first1=John|date=1901|location=London|page=[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.172872/page/n317 289]|access-date=19 March 2018}}</ref>

* The Merchant and the Genie
* [[The Fisherman and the Jinni|The Fisherman and the Genie]]
* The Porter and the Three Ladies
* [[The Three Apples]]
* [[s:Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and His Son Badr al-Dín Hasan|Nur al-Din Ali and Shams al-Din (and Badr al-Din Hasan)]]
* Nur al-Din Ali and Anis al-Jalis
* Ali Ibn Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar

The texts of the Syrian recension do not contain much beside that core. It is debated which of the Arabic recensions is more "authentic" and closer to the original: the Egyptian ones have been modified more extensively and more recently, and scholars such as [[Muhsin Mahdi]] have suspected that this was caused in part by European demand for a "complete version"; but it appears that this type of modification has been common throughout the history of the collection, and independent tales have always been added to it.<ref name="sallis" /><ref>Pinault, David. Story-telling techniques in the Arabian nights. pp. 1–12. Also in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, v. 1</ref>