Around the year 750 AD The first accounts were written about 750 AD, but others were narrated hundreds of years later. Aladdin, Sindbad the Sailor, and Ali Baba are all well-known tales. The Thousand and One Nights narrates the narrative of Shahryar, the king, and his wife, Shahrazad, who reads him a portion of a story each night before dawn. When she reaches 1000 stories, she is granted one more day to go on with her story. The earliest complete copy that we know of is from Egypt around A.D. 1500. It is 14th century English translations of some Arabic stories called "Panchatantra". These stories were already more than 1,000 years old when they were translated into English! In Europe, the first printed version of the book appeared in France in 1613. It included 35 stories from The Thousand and One Nights. In America, some of the first readers of The Thousand and One Nights were American slaves who learned it from Arab merchants living in Charleston, South Carolina. It wasn't published in an American language until 1839 when Henry Richard Carothers published an English translation of the Arabian Nights. Today, The Thousand and One Nights is read by millions of children across the world. Its impact on storytelling has been enormous - everything from Pinocchio to Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter is based on stories found in The Thousand and One Nights.