The tales and even the frame story of The Arabian Nights have their roots in many countries: India, China, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and Greece. Scholars contend that the stories circulated orally from the ninth century onward. Corroborating their contention, during the 1940s an Arab papyrus that dates back to the ninth century and apparently contains a fragment of The Arabian Nights was discovered in Egypt and acquired by the University of Chicago in the United States. Many of the work’s tales, however, do not appear to have been transcribed until the latter half of the thirteenth century, in either Syria or Egypt, forming the first more-or-less complete version. This earliest version of a complete manuscript was lost, but it served as a prototype for others, including the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript that scholars consider the purest rendition of The Arabian Nights, despite its lack of completeness. Other manuscripts, dating between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, surfaced in Egypt, containing stories not in the Syrian version. Arabic scholars have questioned the authenticity of this additional material, which includes characters—such as Sinbad—who would become famously associated with the work. It was not until the early eighteenth century that The Arabian Nights first appeared in Europe, proving immediately popular there.
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