In The Great Khan’s Tent Episode X: Special Episode II

In the Great Khan’s Tent

In this series of special episodes, I hope to highlight the historical background for the One Thousand and One Nights, by examining the history of the work, where the text drew its inspiration from, the original manuscripts, translators and translations, and how it found a new iteration in Children's Literature. In this Second special episode, I look into the brief history of oral literature, providing example from Gilgamesh and the Great Flood story, go into a surface level discussion about why my scholarly opinion disregards the monocausal hypothesis, and look into the first two inspirations from the subcontinent, the Jataka and the Panchatantra.