Hezār o yek shab Persian 2025

One Thousand and One Nights is a corpus of interlinked tales framed by Shahrazad’s nightly storytelling to Shahryar. Many of the narratives are set in Abbasid Baghdad, and the collection’s sources reflect a syncretic blend of Iranian, Indian, Arabic, Mesopotamian, and Sanskrit traditions. According to many scholars, the core narrative stratum is Iranian, commonly associated with the ancient work Hezār Afsān (“A Thousand Tales”).

Compiled collectively and incrementally over centuries, the collection reached a relatively stable form by the 13th–14th centuries CE. Genericly, One Thousand and One Nights belongs to the compendium-of-tales tradition (jāmiʿ al-ḥikāyāt), employing nested storytelling and encompassing long, short, and serial narratives (roughly 244 classical tales). Its thematic range is vast—magic, jinn, metamorphosis, love, adventure, humor, ethics, justice, and social critique—spanning courtly and urban stories of Baghdad to maritime adventures such as Sinbad the Sailor.

Debates over the collection’s origins persist: some scholars emphasize Indian antecedents, while others—among them Bahram Beyzaie—argue strongly for Iranian primacy. In Iran, influential Qajar-era Persian translations, especially that of Abd al-Latif Tasuji, helped standardize the title Hezār-o Yek Shab.

The work has exerted a profound global influence, inspiring writers and artists such as Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Naguib Mahfouz, as well as numerous cinematic and theatrical adaptations worldwide.