The Arabian Nights

One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of stories collected over
many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars in various countries
across the Arab World. These collections of tales trace their roots back to
ancient and medieval Arabic, Indian, Persian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian
literature. In particular, many of tales were originally folk stories from the
Caliphate era and some believe a few of the tales were tales from the
Sassanid-era Pahlavi work Hazar Afsan. Though the oldest Arabic manuscript dates
from the 14th century, scholarship generally dates the collection's genesis to
around the 9th century.

— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.