Who wrote the Arabian Nights, and why isn't Aladdin really in it?

No single person wrote it. One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales gathered over many centuries by many authors, translators and scholars across Asia and North Africa, and compiled in Arabic. Its famous frame story comes from a lost Persian book, Hezār Afsān ("A Thousand Tales"), which drew partly on Indian elements. If there was ever one official version with all the stories in order, it no longer exists: some editions have a few hundred nights, others 1001 or more.

The frame is a brilliant survival story. King Shahriyâr marries a new bride every day and has her executed the next morning. Scheherazade volunteers, and on her wedding night she starts a story but does not finish it. The curious king postpones her execution to hear the end. The next night she finishes it and starts another, and so on for one thousand and one nights. Stories open inside stories, like nesting boxes.

And Aladdin? He is not in any original Arabic version. Neither is Ali Baba. In 1709 the French translator Antoine Galland, who was publishing the first European version, met a Syrian storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab, in Paris. Galland heard these tales from him and added them to his translation. Some scholars now argue Diyab should be seen as the original author of some of them, and that Aladdin, set in "one of the cities of China", partly mirrors Diyab's own life.

So the Arabian Nights grew like a city, added to by generations of storytellers, right up to a conversation in 18th-century Paris.