Where did Aladdin’s palace come from?
The palace in “Aladdin” was long read as Antoine Galland’s Orientalist memory of Istanbul. In Marvellous Thieves (2017) Paulo Lemos Horta showed that it more closely resembles Versailles as Hanna Diyab described it: Diyab visited Louis XIV’s palace months before he told Galland the tale. Horta also traced the palace that appears and vanishes in the story to an opera set Diyab saw in Paris, in which a replica of Versailles disappeared and reappeared.
“Scholars have often seen the splendors of the palace in “Aladdin” as an Orientalist projection by Galland based on his experiences in Istanbul, but Aladdin’s floating palace more closely resembles the Versailles palace described by Diyab than the Ottoman palace of Topkapi.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 51
“Horta expands on this assertion with close analysis of Diyab’s memoirs and proves with significant historical evidence that the lavish descriptions of Aladdin’s palace — which to Horta seemed more Parisian than Persian — are actually the result of a cross-cultural encounter between Diyab and Galland. In other words, the baroque characteristics of Aladdin’s palace and the royal, rich lifestyle are explained by Diyab’s talented storytelling when one reads in his memoirs the episode of him being taken by the Oriental antiquarian, Paul Lucas, to the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.”
More in Horta’s words (2)
“This is also the language that was used to describe the palace of Versailles, which Diyab had recently visited to be presented to King Louis XIV. This experience may have inspired Diyab’s description of Aladdin’s palace.”
The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021), note on “the wonder of the world,” p. 472
“… for three centuries we imagined the tales added by Galland’s hand to the Nights in French reflected his stay in Istanbul, a French fantasy of the Orient.”
quoted in The Guardian, 15 December 2021
More from critics and scholars (5)
“Mr. Horta … suggests, however, that the Syrian’s voice may be more present than previously believed. In “Aladdin,” for example, the description of the young boy’s magical floating palace echoes Diyab’s description of a theatrical trick he witnessed at the Paris opera house in which a replica of the palace would repeatedly vanish and reappear.”
“[Diyab’s] breathless account of Versailles and its construction mirrors Aladdin’s orders to the jinni for a palace that is “the only wonder of the world, for nothing so grand, so rich, so magnificent has ever been seen before or since”, Horta continued.”
“Mais Lemos Horta va plus loin en soutenant notamment que certains des éléments censés émerveiller les lecteurs de l’époque ne découlent pas de l’étonnement de Galland devant les beautés de l’Orient, comme on l’a toujours répété, mais plutôt de celui de Hanna Diyab devant celles de la France.”
But Lemos Horta goes further, arguing that some of the elements meant to dazzle readers of the time stem not from Galland’s wonder at the beauties of the Orient, as has always been repeated, but from Hanna Diyab’s wonder at those of France.
“Beskrivningen av Aladdins palats påminner mer om det kungliga slottet i Versailles än om någon orientalisk förlaga.”
[In Horta’s account,] the description of Aladdin’s palace is more reminiscent of the royal palace of Versailles than of any Oriental model.
“Paulo wrote a whole book about this—Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights—and he devotes a chapter to the idea that, rather than see Aladdin as Galland’s projected vision of the East, it’s more plausible to think of it as Diyab’s vision of France.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 2018Xavier Luffin, Recherche littéraire / Literary Research
- 16 November 2021Horta, The Annotated Arabian Nights (2021)
Global mainstream impact
- 13 January 2017Charles Shafaieh, The Wall Street Journal
- March 2017Carl Rudbeck, Svenska Dagbladet
- 3 December 2017Aqsa Ijaz, Dawn
- 19 October 2018Yasmine Seale, translator of Aladdin, Publishers Weekly
- 2 November 2018Richard Lea, The Guardian
- 15 December 2021Horta quoted in The Guardian