Aladdin's Lamp
The lamp of the tale of Aladdin, added to the Thousand and One Nights by Antoine Galland from the oral telling of the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab and first printed around 1709. Rubbing it summoned a powerful jinni who granted its holder's wishes, while its twin, the old magician's lamp, drove the plot's theft and recovery, exchanged by the sorcerer for new lamps. No medieval Arabic original of the tale survives, so the lamp is a literary invention of the folk tradition, set, like the story, in China while speaking a Syrian idiom. The image of the rubbed lamp and its wish-granting servant be