Ali Baba
Sign in to savecharacter from the folk tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves"
Key facts
- Name
- Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
- Aarne thompson grouping
- AaTh 676, "Open Sesame", + AaTh 954, "The Forty Thieves" ATU 954, "The Forty Thieves"
- Region
- Middle East
- Published in
- One Thousand and One Nights , translated by Antoine Galland
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- literary character
- Gender
- male
- Image
- Ali Baba in the Wood.jpg
Show 4 more facts
- Commons category
- Ali Baba
- topic's main category
- Category:Ali Baba
- present in work
- Indigo und die vierzig Räuber
- described by source
- New International Encyclopedia
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~23 min read
Encyclopedic overview
"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" (Arabic: علي بابا والأربعون لصا) is a folk tale in Arabic added to the One Thousand and One Nights in the 18th century by its French translator Antoine Galland, who heard it from Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. As one of the most popular Arabian Nights tales, it has been widely retold and performed in many media across the world, especially for children (for whom the more violent aspects of the story are often removed).
In the original version, Ali Baba (Arabic: عَلِيّ بَابَا, romanized: ʿAliyy Bābā) is a poor woodcutter and an honest person who discovers the secret treasure of a thieves' den, and enters with the magic phrase "open sesame". The thieves try to kill Ali Baba while his rich and greedy brother Cassim (Arabic: قاسم Qāsim, sometimes spelled 'Kasim' or 'Qasim') tries to steal the treasure for himself, but Ali Baba’s faithful slave-girl Morgiana (Arabic: مرجانة Murjāna) foils their plots. His son marries her, and Ali Baba keeps the secret of the treasure.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ali Baba” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.