achievements of sinbad the Sailor
Answers
Of all the tales of “The Arabian Nights,” or the “Thousand and One Nights” those of the seven voyages of Sindbad the Sailor are perhaps the most familiar to people around the world. There have been numerous films made about Sindbad. There are many animated cartoons on Sindbad’s travels: as early as 1936, Paramount Pictures released “Popeye the Sailor meets Sindbad the Sailor,” and as late as 2003, “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas” was produced by Dreamworks Animation. There are also TV series, video games, comic books, and many other items that feature Sindbad.
However, the stories featured in those various films and publications are unrelated to the original tales that we associate with the “The Arabian Nights.” These were first introduced to Europe in 1704 in a French translation from Arabic by Antoine Galland (1646–1715), a French orientalist and archeologist. His twelve volumes, “Les Mille et Une Nuits contes arabes traduits en Francais” (The Thousand and One Nights: Arab tales translated to French ) published between 1704 and 1717, were based, in part, on a four volume 16th century Syrian manuscript, as well as on orally transmitted sources, and included the seven voyages of Sindbad.
Very soon after its publication there began a debate about the origins of many of these tales, including those of Sindbad the Sailor. Western scholars agree today, that the “Arabian Nights” were never a single work, but a composite of popular stories originating from different parts of the world (today’s Iraq, Iran, Egypt, India, Central Asia and China). At first they were transmitted orally, before being committed to writing starting as early as the 10th century and probably continuing for another 600 years to around the 16th century. According to “Encyclopedia Britannica,” “most of the tales best known in the West—primarily those of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sindbad—were much later additions to the original corpus.”
The best known translation into English is that of Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890) a linguist, writer and explorer, who wrote his wildly popular 16 volume series on “The Arabian Nights Entertainments or the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night,” published between 1885 and 1888. He was not the first though, as numerous versions of the Arabian Nights in English were published starting as early as 1785 and containing the “Seven Voyages of Sindbad.”