Almost three centuries have passed since the oldest manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights arrived in Europe. Since then, the Nights have occupied the minds of scholars world-wide, in particular the questions of origin, composition, language and literary form.In this book, Muhsin Mahdi, whose critical edition of the text brought so much praise, explores the complex literary history of the Nights, bringing to fruition the search for the archetype that constituted the core of the surviving editions, and treating the fascinating story of the growth of the collection of stories that we now know as The Thousand and One Nights.