A Thousand & One Rough Drafts

No one knows how many stories there are, told across how many nights, or who first told them, or in what language, or how long ago. Alf Layla wa-Layla, the Thousand and One Nights, accreted material over the centuries like a stalagmite. A 9th-century fragment of the title page survives. In the 10th century, both al-Mas'udi and Ibn Nadim mention the work, reporting that it derives from a Persian original. The oldest substantial Arabic version is a three-volume Syrian manuscript from the 15th century. It's from this that Antoine Galland created Les Mille et une nuits, which acquainted the broader European mind with the beautiful storyteller Shahrazad at the beginning of the 18th century. Galland's translation introduced many of the stories—Sindbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba—we associate with the Nights today, and subsequent translators have retained them. (Some have suspected Galland of inventing Aladdin and Ali Baba himself.) I see no reason Martian colonists, centuries from now, shouldn't gather up a few of their own dusty tales and insert them into the book.