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50 free One Thousand and One Nights trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This One Thousand and One Nights trivia quiz covers the great Arabic story collection known in English as the Arabian Nights: the frame tale of King Shahryar and the storyteller Scheherazade, its Persian roots in the Hezār Afsān, the medieval manuscripts and the tenth-century catalogues that first mention it, and the famous tales themselves, from The Fisherman and the Jinni and The Three Apples to Sinbad's seven voyages, Ali Baba's cave and Aladdin's lamp. It also follows the book's journey west: Antoine Galland's twelve French volumes, the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab who gave him the 'orphan tales', the bowdlerised Lane and scandalous Burton translations, the Penguin Lyons edition, and the Nights' afterlife in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, The Thief of Bagdad, Pasolini and Disney. Some questions are easy for anyone who read the tales as a child; others will test literature students and translators. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the collection, its individual tales and its translators, and each explanation adds one further fact. Ideal for book clubs, world-literature classes and pub-quiz setters.
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Q 01What is the Arabic title of the collection known in English as the Arabian Nights?
Alf Laylah wa-Laylah
The English name comes from the first English edition of about 1706–1721, called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments.
Q 02Which ruler is told a story every night by his wife in the frame tale?
Shahryar
His kingdom stretched from Persia to India, and after his wife's betrayal he had been marrying a virgin each day and executing her the next morning.
Q 03Scheherazade is the daughter of which official at the king's court?
The vizier
It was her father's duty to supply the brides, and he agreed only reluctantly when she volunteered.
Q 04What is the name of Scheherazade's younger sister, who asks for a story on the wedding night?
Dunyazad
Her cue lets Scheherazade begin the first tale and leave it unfinished at dawn.
Q 05The name Scheherazade derives from Middle Persian and is usually taken to mean what?
Born of the city
Šahr means city or realm and -zād means born of; Arabic manuscripts spell it Šahrāzād.
Q 06The frame story of the Nights is probably drawn from which Persian work?
Hezār Afsān
The title means 'A Thousand Tales'; tenth-century cataloguer Ibn al-Nadim called it 'a coarse book, without warmth in the telling'.
Q 07Which tenth-century Baghdad scholar described the Hezār Afsān in his book catalogue, the Fihrist?
Ibn al-Nadim
He said it held only 200 stories; his contemporary Al-Masudi noted the Arabic version was generally known as Alf Layla.
Q 08Which real Abbasid caliph is a recurring character in the tales, often wandering Baghdad in disguise?
Harun al-Rashid
He appears with his vizier Jafar al-Barmaki and the poet Abu Nuwas, though all lived 200 years after the Sasanian setting of the frame tale.
Q 09Which two famous tales did the first French translator add, absent from the Arabic manuscripts?
Aladdin and Ali Baba
Known as the 'orphan tales', they were told to Galland by the Syrian writer Hanna Diyab in Paris in 1709.
Q 10From which city did the Maronite storyteller Hanna Diyab come?
Aleppo
Born around 1688, he visited Paris in 1709 and originated the best-known versions of Aladdin and Ali Baba.
Q 11How many volumes did the first French translation, Les Mille et une nuits, run to between 1704 and 1717?
Twelve
Borges suggested that European Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
Q 12The earliest extensive manuscript of the Nights, written between 1450 and 1593, is named after whom?
Galland
It represents the shorter Syrian tradition; Muhsin Mahdi's 1984 Leiden edition and Husain Haddawy's 1990 translation are based on it.
Q 13Whose 1840 English translation of the Nights was heavily bowdlerised?
Edward Lane
Unexpurgated versions followed from Payne in 1882 and Burton in 1885, the latter accused of plagiarising the former.
Q 21On his first voyage, the island where Sinbad lands turns out to be what?
A gigantic sleeping whale
Trees had rooted on it since the whale was young; a bonfire wakes it and it dives.
Q 22Which creature clings to Sinbad's shoulders and rides him day and night on a later voyage?
The Old Man of the Sea
Burton's footnote guessed at an orang-utan, the god Triton or an African custom of riding on slaves.
Q 23Sinbad tells his voyages to a poor man of the same name who works as what?
A porter
The porter had paused outside the rich merchant's gate to complain to God about the world's injustice.
Q 14How many volumes were in Richard Francis Burton's 1885 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night?
Ten
Six supplemental volumes followed, and Victorian obscenity law meant it was printed privately for subscribers only.
Q 15Under whose auspices did Burton publish his risqué translations of the Nights and other erotic classics?
The Kama Shastra Society
Private circulation dodged the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the campaigners Burton nicknamed Mrs Grundy.
Q 16Which husband-and-wife team produced the three-volume Penguin Classics translation of 2008?
Malcolm and Ursula Lyons
It was the first complete English rendering of the Calcutta II edition since Burton, with an introduction by Robert Irwin.
Q 17In The Fisherman and the Jinni, how many times a day does the old fisherman cast his net?
Four
After a dead donkey, a pitcher of dirt and broken glass, his last cast brings up a copper jar sealed with the seal of Solomon.
Q 18How long does the caliph give Jafar to find the killer in the tale of the chest and the young woman's body?
3 days
The tale, with its chest containing a young woman's body, is often called the earliest murder mystery in world literature.
Q 19The Hunchback's Tale cycle, a courtroom comedy in the Nights, is set where?
A fictional China
The emperor's favourite comedian chokes at a tailor's dinner and the corpse is passed from household to household.
Q 20How many voyages does Sinbad the Sailor make?
Seven
He hails from Baghdad in the early Abbasid era, and his cycle appears only in later Egyptian manuscripts.
Q 24What is Ali Baba's trade?
Woodcutter
His greedy brother Cassim had married money; Ali Baba stumbles on the thieves' cave while cutting wood.
Q 25How does Cassim's wife discover that Ali Baba has found treasure?
Wax on borrowed scales catches a gold coin
Cassim then forces the secret from his brother, forgets the password inside the cave and is killed by the thieves.
Q 26Which clever slave-girl repeatedly foils the thieves' plots against Ali Baba?
Morgiana
She pays a blindfolded tailor to sew Cassim's body back together so his death looks natural.
Q 27In the original tale, Aladdin lives in which land?
China
He is recruited by a sorcerer from the Maghreb posing as his late father's brother; the tailor father is named Mustapha.
Q 28Besides the lamp, what second magical object lets Aladdin summon a lesser genie?
A ring
The sorcerer lent it to him, and rubbing it in despair frees him from the cave.
Q 29How does the sorcerer trick Aladdin's wife into handing over the magic lamp?
Offering new lamps for old
He then has the genie carry the whole palace to the Maghreb; his even more evil brother later disguises himself as an old healer.
Q 30What is the name of the princess Aladdin marries in the original tale?
Badroulbadour
Disney renamed her for the 1992 film, which is only loosely based on the story.