Syrian storyteller revealed as source of aladdin legend

Researchers and historians recently identified Hanna Diab, a 18th-century storyteller from Aleppo, Syria, as the man who provided the story of Aladdin to French orientalist Antoine Galland.

Hanna Diab was born in Aleppo in 1688. He worked with French merchants and traveled to France as a translator and assistant to Paul Lucas. During his stay in Paris, Galland met Diab in 1709 and listened to him tell various Arabic tales.

Galland included the story of Aladdin in his famous French translation of One Thousand and One Nights, but he did not credit Diab as the source. Diab returned to Aleppo in 1710 and later wrote his memoirs in 1764 at the age of 75. The memoirs remained in his family for decades before moving into the collection of Paul Sabbath, a priest who gathered 1325 manuscripts. Sabbath sold a large portion of his collection to the Vatican Library in 1927.

For years, the memoirs sat in the Vatican as an anonymous work. In the 1970s, American researcher Paul Lundy discovered the manuscript and spent 40 years attempting to decode its contents before his death in 2016. Other researchers eventually identified the author by matching the text's descriptions of Galland's work with Galland's own diaries. These memoirs provide a rare look at daily life in Ottoman and European cities during the 1700s.

The document features a mix of spoken Arabic and formal language, reflecting the commercial and cultural crossroads of Aleppo. The memoirs were finally published in Arabic and French in recent years, allowing the public to see the history of the man who shaped a global legend.