The Magic Lamp

A handful of sand started it. Aladdin’s mother had looked at the filthy old lamp her son brought home, decided it might fetch more at market than the yarn she had spun, and sat down to scour it bright. The grit had barely crossed the metal when the room went dark with something enormous, a shape she had no word for, and a voice telling her it was her slave and the slave of whoever held the lamp, and not it alone but every slave of the lamp besides. She fainted where she sat. Her son, who had met one of these already that week, took the lamp out of her hand and asked for lunch. What came back was a tray of virgin silver, twelve golden platters of food, bread whiter than snow, and wine that had been kept a long time. They ate until they could not, and neither of them had the faintest idea what the tray alone was worth.

The lamp had come out of the ground the day before and had very nearly cost the boy his life. A Maghrebi sorcerer, claiming to be his dead father’s brother, walked him out of the city, built a small fire of dry chips, burned incense over it and muttered words nobody could follow. The ground cracked open. Under the smoke lay a marble slab with a copper ring set into it, and the sorcerer could not lift it, because the hoard beneath was sealed to a single name. Aladdin raised it easily, saying his own name and his parents’ aloud as instructed.

Below was a stair of twelve steps into four halls stacked with jars of gold and silver, and the instruction was to touch none of them, to let not even the hem of a gown brush them, or become black stone on the spot. Past the halls a door, past the door a garden of fruit trees, past the garden a path of some fifty cubits, and at the end of it an open hall with a ladder of thirty rungs. The lamp hung from the ceiling, burning. Aladdin climbed, lifted it down, blew it out, tipped the oil onto the ground and pushed it inside his shirt. He had no idea what he was carrying.

Nothing in the telling makes the object beautiful. It is an oil lamp with oil in it, light enough to pocket, plain enough that a starving household weighed it against a bundle of spun yarn and thought the yarn might win. That ordinariness is the whole engine of the second half of the story, because a thing that looks like nothing can be swapped for something shiny by a wife who was never told what it was.

Nobody in the tale counts wishes. The famous limit of three belongs to Western retellings of the twentieth century and has no footing in the story itself, where the jinni simply keeps producing on demand. What the lamp delivers is escalation: a meal, then dishes of precious metal to be sold off one at a time for rent and bread, then a bride worth a sultan’s second look, then a palace raised overnight that outshines the sultan’s own. Aladdin marries Badr al-Budur, full moon of full moons, and settles into a life that no tailor’s son in any city has the slightest business having.

The lamp is not the only bound thing in the tale, and the gap between the two is its quietest piece of engineering. The sorcerer had lent the boy a ring before sending him underground, and when the trapdoor slammed and Aladdin wrung his hands in the dark, he rubbed it by accident and a smaller jinni came. That one is the servant of the ring, and it can fetch, rescue and carry. It cannot undo what the lamp’s servant has done. The hierarchy holds for the rest of the story and becomes the reason the ending is difficult rather than automatic.

The real flaw is announced by the jinni himself in his first breath. He is the slave of whoever holds the lamp. Not of the finder, not of the owner, not of the deserving. The sorcerer, alive and finally certain where his lamp went, walks beneath the palace windows with a basket, calling that he will give new lamps for old. Badr al-Budur, who has never been told, thinks it a fool’s bargain in her favour and sends the battered thing down for a bright one. By evening the palace is standing in the Maghreb with her still inside it, and the ground where it had been is bare.

Recovering it takes the ring, the princess and a drug. The ring’s jinni cannot carry the palace home but can carry Aladdin to where it now stands; the princess, who has grasped the size of her mistake, plays the gracious hostess and puts something in the sorcerer’s cup. The lamp comes back, and the palace with it. The sorcerer’s brother arrives later wearing the veil of a holy woman known for her cures, gets himself installed in the princess’s own rooms, and is killed on the lamp’s warning before he can finish the job.

All of this is younger than it sounds. No Arabic manuscript of the Nights containing Aladdin is known from before Antoine Galland printed the tale in French, in the ninth and tenth volumes of his Mille et une nuits around 1710. Galland’s diary records exactly where he got it. On 25 March 1709 he met a young Maronite from Aleppo called Hanna Diyab, brought to Paris by the traveller Paul Lucas, and on 5 May he wrote that Hanna had finished telling him the tale of the lamp. Diyab later wrote a version out in Arabic and sent it to him; Galland notes reading that manuscript in November 1710 under the title “Story of Aladdin, son of a tailor, and that which befell him with an African Magician on account of a lamp.” Diyab’s manuscript is lost.

For a century there appeared to be Arabic originals after all. Hermann Zotenberg published an Arabic Aladdin in 1888 from two Paris manuscripts, one copied in 1787 by the Syrian priest Denis Chavis and one written between 1805 and 1808 by Michel Sabbagh of Acre. Muhsin Mahdi later demonstrated that both are translations back out of Galland’s French. The Arabic text sat downstream of the French, not upstream of it.

Diyab himself was a blank for two centuries, until the memoir he wrote in old age in Aleppo turned up in the Vatican Library. It is a travel book, and one passage in it is hard to read innocently. Near Idlib, Paul Lucas pays a goatherd to go down into a tomb cut into the earth, and the man climbs back out holding a large plain ring and an old lamp, the sort, Diyab says, that the butter merchants use. Paulo Lemos Horta, reading the memoir for traces of Aladdin, also found the young Diyab at Versailles, standing in more gold than he had known was in the world. A poor boy, a hole in the ground, a ring and a dirty lamp, and a palace that should not have been possible. Most of the story was already inside the man before Galland ever asked him for one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the magic lamp in the story of Aladdin?

The magic lamp is an ordinary oil lamp that holds a jinni who appears when the lamp is rubbed and supplies whatever the holder asks for. Aladdin takes it from an underground treasury at the end of a garden of fruit trees, where it hangs burning from the ceiling of an open hall. Its power is what carries him from a tailor’s son in poverty to the owner of a palace grander than the sultan’s.

How many wishes does the magic lamp grant?

The tale sets no limit at all. Aladdin summons the jinni of the lamp repeatedly across the story, asking first for food and later for wealth, a bride-gift and a palace, and the jinni simply keeps delivering. The familiar rule of three wishes comes from twentieth-century Western retellings, not from the story of Aladdin.

What is the difference between the genie of the lamp and the genie of the ring?

They are two separate jinn bound to two separate objects, and the one in the lamp is far more powerful. The ring’s jinni, summoned first when Aladdin is trapped underground, can rescue and transport him but cannot undo anything the lamp’s jinni has done. That limit is what makes the recovery of the stolen lamp difficult rather than instant.

How does the sorcerer steal the magic lamp?

He walks beneath the palace windows offering to exchange new lamps for old. Princess Badr al-Budur, who has never been told what the battered lamp in the house is worth, sends it down and takes a shiny replacement. Because the jinni serves whoever is physically holding the lamp, the sorcerer is instantly able to order the whole palace moved to the Maghreb with the princess inside it.

Is Aladdin a genuine tale from the Arabian Nights?

Not in the sense most readers assume. No Arabic manuscript of the Nights containing Aladdin is known from before Antoine Galland printed it in French around 1710, and Galland’s diary records that he heard the tale in Paris in May 1709 from Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite from Aleppo. The Arabic versions later published by Hermann Zotenberg in 1888 were shown by Muhsin Mahdi to be translations back out of Galland’s French.

Related Entries

Djinn, Ifrit, Marid, Shaitan, Iblis, Qareen, Ghoul, Nasnas, Roc, Iram of the Pillars, Al Rakim, Cintamani (Wish-Fulfilling Jewel), Cup of Jamshid (Jam-e Jam), Draupnir, Pushpaka Vimana