The Arabian Nights: A Companion guides the reader into this celebrated
labyrinth of storytelling. It traces the development of the stories from
prehistoric India and Pharaonic Egypt to modern times. It explores the
history of the translation, and explains the ways in which its contents
have been added to, plagiarized and imitated. Above all, the book uses
the stories as a guide to the social history and the counterculture of
the medieval Near East and the world of the storyteller, the snake
charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug addict, the treasure hunter
and the adulterer.