The Syrian Storyteller Behind Aladdin, Uncredited for 300 Years

Hanna Diab, an eighteenth-century Syrian adventurer, dreamt up one of the world's best-known stories, Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp, from the facts of his own life. Yet for three hundred years, Diab has been neglected and uncredited. According to Matthew Teller's new book Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller, archival discoveries and fresh historical research now allow us to point with confidence to Hanna as the original source of the tale that spawned legends, artworks, books, music, pantomimes and cinematic blockbusters in every major language.

Who told the story first?

Aladdin is newer than most readers imagine. Many stories in the Arabian Nights — properly, the Thousand and One Nights — originate a thousand years ago or more. But some of its most famous tales, notably Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin, appeared for the first time only in the early eighteenth century. Antoine Galland, a scholar at the court of Louis XIV, added them. He was the first to translate the Nights for European readers.

Galland's French edition, rendered from an incomplete Arabic manuscript and published in installments from 1704, was wildly successful. Within a few years it appeared in English, German and Italian, then dozens more languages. After seven volumes, Galland had translated the entire manuscript and run out of material. Help arrived by luck.

A Syrian teenager in Paris

In Aleppo, Hanna Diab had grown up running errands for European merchants dealing in silks and luxury goods. Aged eighteen, he met Paul Lucas, a charismatic explorer sent by Louis XIV to collect Middle Eastern antiquities. On the promise of a job in France, Hanna joined Lucas as guide and assistant. Their travels ran from Syria through Egypt and across North Africa to Paris, where Hanna was captivated by Versailles and by the attention of the royal princesses.

While waiting for a promised job that never came, Hanna was introduced to an old man at the Royal Library who had run out of stories to translate. Over a series of meetings in 1709, Hanna spun Antoine Galland yarn after yarn — including one about a poor boy from a far-off land, taken in by a charismatic sorcerer and led to a mysterious cave where a ring and a lamp change his destiny.

Galland took the story and published it in French to universal acclaim. Hanna's tales filled four extra volumes of Nights stories — but in none did Galland credit his source. Hanna did not discover the omission until much later. Lucas never delivered the job, and Hanna, his hopes betrayed, returned to Aleppo, married, raised a family and lived a long life trading textiles in the souk.

The cave that really held a lamp

Teller's excerpt reconstructs an episode Diab himself witnessed: the last week of March 1707, near Kaftin, west of Aleppo. Lucas ordered a shepherd boy through a crack into a hillside tomb-cave. The boy handed out charred human bones, a jawbone fragment, a plain rusted metal ring and a battered old oil lamp — to Hanna's eyes, no different from the lamps people used daily in Aleppo. Lucas pocketed the lot. Teller is direct: "the incident with the cave, the ring and the lamp actually happened."

How history finally caught up

Praise for Galland as author of the new tales only grew. Even the 1887 discovery of his handwritten diaries — in which he notes having heard "the story of the lamp" from a young Syrian named Hanna — overturned no apple carts. It took a chance find a hundred years later: a manuscript in the Vatican Library, miscatalogued as anonymous, that proved to be Hanna Diab's own memoir of his youth.

What does this change for readers of the Arabian Nights? It restores a named author to one of the world's most retold stories, and it reframes a tale long treated as anonymous folklore as the work of a single, documented storyteller whose life supplied its bones.

Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller by Matthew Teller is published by Biblioasis (2026).