Is there a real ring and lamp behind Aladdin?
Yes. On his first expedition with the collector Paul Lucas, in 1707 near Kaftin in Syria, Hanna Diyab watched a young goatherd sent into a tomb come out with trinkets of dubious worth, among them a ring and a lamp. Diyab’s memoir tells the episode without linking it to any tale. Bernard Heyberger, the scholar of Christianity, was also intrigued by a possible coincidence with the tale. Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves (2017) turned it into a reading of the tale: the nimble youth sent into the cave, the magician in disguise, and the young man who follows him in spite of his doubts.
“In “Aladdin,” the older man also needs a nimble youth to descend into a cave to retrieve a precious object, and the Maghrebi magician who impersonates Aladdin’s uncle might be compared to the French traveller who masqueraded as a physician. Diyab, like Aladdin, would follow this roguish father figure in spite of his skepticism about his credentials and intentions.”
Marvellous Thieves (2017), p. 58
“[Diyab, as Horta shows,] had even witnessed Lucas send a servant into a crypt and come out with a lantern and a ring, and seen a palace disappear and reappear at the Opera in Paris.”
More in Horta’s words (1)
“Strangely enough, the first tomb-raiding expedition that Diyab describes in his account of his time with Lucas yielded both a ring and a lamp.”
Introduction to Aladdin: A New Translation (2018)
More from critics and scholars (1)
“Horta does not stop there. He has closely studied Diyab’s earlier association with the collector Paul Lucas, whom he served as a translator and guide in the Middle East. Lucas scoured the Arab lands for treasures to send back to French libraries and collections. Though he posed as an antiquarian, he was more of a picaresque rogue than a scholar, and he was blessed with a fantastical imagination as well as a taste for anecdotes. It seems that some of the incidents and imagery in the orphan tales derive from Diyab’s adventures with this colourful character.”
Academic priority
- January 2017Horta, Marvellous Thieves (Harvard University Press)
- 27 November 2018Horta, Introduction to Aladdin: A New Translation (2018)
Global mainstream impact
- 1 January 2017Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
- February 2017Robert Irwin, Literary Review