Arabian Nights, or The Thousand and One Nights, collection of stories from Persia, Arabia, India, and Egypt, compiled over hundreds of years. Most of the stories originated as folk tales, anecdotes, or fables that were passed on orally. They include the stories of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sindbad the Sailor, which have become particularly popular in Western countries.

The stories in Arabian Nights are told by a legendary queen named Scheherazade in a broader frame story, which starts at the beginning of the collection and gives a context to the various stories it contains. The frame story begins when the sultan Schahriar finds that his wife has been unfaithful and orders her execution. He is so enraged that he resolves to marry a new woman every night and have her killed at daybreak. Scheherazade agrees to marry Schahriar despite the decree and crafts a scheme to thwart him. The night after the wedding, she tells one of the stories to her sister so that the sultan can overhear. She stops, however, before the story comes to its conclusion, and the sultan allows her to live another day so that he can hear the end. She continues this pattern night after night. After 1001 nights, the sultan relents and decides to let Scheherazade live.

The earliest record of Arabian Nights is a fragment of the collection that dates from the 800s. The collection grew during the following centuries until it reached its present form, written in Arabic, in the late 1400s or the 1500s. A scholar named Antoine Galland translated it into French between 1704 and 1717, and called it Les Mille et Une Nuits. The best known English-language versions are Arabian Nights, translated by Edward William Lane in the 1840s, and The Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Richard Francis Burton in the 1880s. The stories also have been a valuable source of information for scholars studying early Middle Eastern culture.