Antoine Galland

Antoine Galland (1646-1715) was a French orientalist and archaeologist, and he wrote none of the tales his name is attached to. He translated them. His twelve volumes of Les mille et une nuits, published between 1704 and 1717, are how the Thousand and One Nights entered European reading, and every western Sinbad descends from them.

He was born at Rollot in Picardy, studied Greek and Latin in Paris, and in 1670 joined the French embassy at Istanbul for his Greek. From 1673 he travelled in Syria and the Levant copying inscriptions, went back twice more, once collecting antiquities for Colbert, and was made antiquary to the king. Arabic, Turkish and Persian came out of those years abroad.

Sinbad came first. Galland found a manuscript of the tale in Constantinople in the 1690s and published it in French on its own in 1701, and that success is what sent him to the Syrian manuscript of the Nights that scholars now name after him. Aladdin and Ali Baba arrived by another road: no Arabic version of either predates his edition, and he took them down from the spoken words of Hanna Diyab, a Maronite from Aleppo. He also translated for the taste of his time, cutting the poetry and the erotic passages, which is why Richard Burton later called the result an abbreviation that in no way represents the eastern original. In 1709 he took the chair of Arabic at the College de France and held it until he died.