^By the guy who first translated the corpus in the early 1700s actually - he got Aladdin and Ali Baba from a Syrian Christian storyteller who visted Paris. The history of the whole compilation is... kind of a story in itself and it's not like it was particularly internally consistent anyway - witness for example the framing story of King Shahryar and Schererazade being explicitly set during the pre-Islamic Sassanian dynasty yet figures like the 5th Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid (from over a century after the Muslim conquest thereof) merrily make repeat appearances anyway...
In other words people who made a living spinning yarns didn't sweat the small stuff too much. No surprises there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
last edited at Mar 12, 2022 12:03PM