Arabische Märchen

When Enno Littmann was in Jerusalem during his first expedition to Syria in 1900, he met an Arabic storyteller through his servant Salim. To ensure that the storyteller was not disturbed by the presence of a European, he asked his servant to transcribe the texts in Arabic script, using the colloquial Arabic language. At that time, the presence of women with foreign men in the Near East was still considered immoral. Furthermore, I was able to write everything down much better and more calmly in Latin script and have it explained to me when my informant had a written text in front of him, rather than if he had to tell it orally and repeat certain sentences from memory while answering questions in between. It was only after the tales from the 1001 Nights that Littmann completed the translation.