The descriptions he uses were very similar to the descriptions of the lavish palace that ended up in Galland’s version of the Aladdin story. In that memoir, Diyab describes his own hard-knocks upbringing and the way he marveled at the extravagance of Versailles. Lentin and fellow historian Bernard Heyberger published a French translation by Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, in 2015, and a new English translation of this travelogue and analysis of the text by Elias Muhanna and Johannes Stephan is expected to come out in 2020. Historian Jérôme Lentin found this document in the Vatican’s library in 1993, but it didn’t become more widely known until more recently. In it, he recalls telling Galland the story of Aladdin. Though Galland never credited Diyab in his published translations of the Arabian Nights stories, Diyab wrote something of his own: a travelogue penned in the mid-18th century.
Many scholars now think that that man could be Diyab himself. “Now a lot of new research being done about the man behind Aladdin,” says Razzaque. We came up with a few alternates.” He also debunked rumors that Agrabah was “post-apocalyptic, futuristic or in some other time.”ĭespite the fantastical elements of the story, scholars now think the main character may actually be based on a real person’s real experiences. Roy Disney said, ‘This can’t be in Baghdad.’ So, I took letters and did a jumbled anagram and came up with Agrabah. As one of the directors of that film John Musker has explained: “We kept it Baghdad in our first treatment, and then the Gulf War happened - the first Gulf War. Early British depictions of the Aladdin story in pantomime theater productions and Victorian illustrated texts depicted Chinese elements too, reflecting Brits’ fascination with the region around the time when the British were fighting opium wars there.ĭisney’s 1992 animated musical version was originally supposed to be set in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, but current events prompted filmmakers to switch gears. Razzaque, a research associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, points out that early Arabic descriptions of an exotic, faraway land were often about China. “The very fact of a genie coming out of lamp means the story has been thoroughly Arabized.” (Genie, or jinni, mythology has its own long history.)Īrafat A. “The characters live in a society defined by Muslim practices,” says Horta. Galland’s Aladdin story is explicitly set in China, but the world it describes doesn’t seem to match up with the real place. In the newest film adaptation, the design of the Sultan’s palace is inspired by a Burmese temple. Scholars have seen a mix of different places in the Aladdin story. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Where does Aladdin take place? “We don’t know whether Diyab created the story by combining elements that he learned from hearing other storytellers - in Aleppo or on the journey through the Mediterranean to Paris - or whether he heard the whole story in this form and recorded it in a manuscript or whether he found a now lost manuscript of the story and passed it on to Galland,” says Paulo Lemos Horta, author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, who edited a translation of Galland’s Aladdin by Yasmine Seale that came out in 2018. Scholars have long known that Diyab gave Galland the story of Aladdin, but they don’t know exactly where Diyab heard the story in the first place. These stories ended up in volumes nine through 12 of Galland’s translation of the One Thousand and One Nights, completed in 1717.
#ALADIN 1993 SERIES#
Over a series of one-on-one meetings, Diyab told Galland the story of Aladdin, in addition to other now-famous tales such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. When Galland asked the young Syrian if he knew any “Arabian Nights” stories, Diyab said he did.
#ALADIN 1993 FULL#
Lucas’ apartment, full of his collections, had become a tourist destination in its own right, and it was there that Galland first met Diyab, who accompanied Lucas as a travel companion and interpreter, on Mar. Perhaps in search of more clues, Galland went to the apartment of his friend and rival Paul Lucas, a “tomb raider,” who traveled back and forth between Paris and the Middle East to satisfy Louis XIV’s taste for jewels and other precious objects from the region.
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