Cairo and the Thousand and One Nights

Kan ya ma kan: once upon a time. Every Arabic tale begins this way, and none more famously than the Thousand and One Nights, the collection known in English as the Arabian Nights.

The frame: Shahrazad and Shahrayar

The story begins with two kings, the brothers Shahrayar and Shahzaman. Betrayed and broken, Shahrayar decides to marry a new bride every night and put her to death at dawn. The city empties, until Shahrazad, the vizier's daughter, who has read every book of history, poetry and legend, offers herself. On her wedding night she begins a tale and stops at dawn before the ending. The king lets her live one more day to hear the rest, and so it goes on for a thousand and one nights.

From Baghdad to Cairo

The oldest layer of the stories came from Persia and India and was told in Arabic in Abbasid Baghdad. But the collection kept growing for centuries, and storytellers in Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo added many tales of their own, often set in their own city, among its merchants, its markets and the Nile. Much of the Nights as we read it today passed through Cairo.

It was also in Cairo that the Nights was first printed in Arabic, at the Bulaq press in 1835. That edition became the basis of many later translations, including the French version by Joseph-Charles Mardrus, which Powys Mathers later turned into English as The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night.

The storyteller of the coffeehouse

For centuries these tales were not only read, they were performed. The hakawati, the storyteller of the coffeehouse, would recite them night after night, stopping, like Shahrazad, at the most exciting moment so that his audience would come back the next evening.

Painting the Nights

Our 1,001 Nights collection follows the frame story scene by scene: Shahrayar's Sorrow, 1000 Dawns Without Mercy, Before the First Tale and Scheherazade and Shahrayar, through to The Jinn of the Sea. Each print comes on canvas, fine art paper or Photo Rag, and each one is a night of the story.