And then there’s the paintings: Ingres painted Turkish Baths while Delacroix sketched street scenes in Morocco. In 1721, Montesquieu published Les Lettres Persanes (The Persian Letters), Voltaire’s 1758 work Candide makes reference to the Thousand And One Nights, and in 1782 Mozart premiered his Opera Abduction from the Seraglio.

In 1704 Antoine Galland started translating and adapting the text into French, the first Western collection of these stories, and it launched a fashion for Orientalism in Europe, which lasted well into the late nineteenth century. The western fascination with the Thousand And One Nights isn’t a unique phenomenon to one day-dreaming child. The Arabian Nights were stories about rulers I had never heard of, from countries I probably wouldn’t be able to point at on a map, and which I was therefore free to imagine really did resemble the ones in the pages of the storybook.Ī magical journey, at night - from Alwyn’s copy of the Arabian Nights. I imagine this might be like what it was like to hear fairy stories before the world was so thoroughly explored, and you could believe that somewhere beyond the edge of the map you knew there really was a kingdom where girls had hair with the tensile strength to support a lovesick Prince’s weight up the tower. For me as a child that meant the near east held a mysterious draw that comes with a lack of actual knowledge, and let my imagination run wild until everything I read in storybooks seemed like it really might be out there in the desert. In fact I don’t think we ever even ventured beyond the French Borders unless Napoleon did. In school all my history lessons from the time we were done with the Egyptians and the Romans up until 1914 leaned heavily west.

Alwyn hamilton