E118 - Scheherazade

From Lucy & Ellie · 34:57

Show by Lucy & Ellie

The seal on the jar cracks, and something begins to rise out of it, higher and higher, until it gathers itself into a shape with eyes, and it bends down to the fisherman, and it says… And that is where she stops. The lamp is burning low, the window is going grey, and the man listening has put a new bride to death every single morning. So who was the woman who bet her life on a cliffhanger, and was she ever real?Her name is Scheherazade. She married a king who trusted no one, and stayed alive by keeping a story from ending. The trail behind her is a wonderful mess: a Persian book that no one alive has seen, sixteen lines on a scrap of ninth-century paper, a great manuscript that stops at night two hundred and eighty-two, and a young man from Aleppo, in Paris, whose name very nearly vanished.We go from the frame story and the road from India, to the first bad review in a tenth-century catalogue, the lost Persian book, and whose name it really is. The jar with Solomon's seal, Sindbad the stowaway, and a sewn ship found at Belitung. Then Hanna Diyab, the storyteller from Aleppo, his meeting with Antoine Galland in Paris, Galland's diary, and where Aladdin and Ali Baba really came from. And one warm line about the eleven-volume set of the Nights that the person behind this show read as a kid and loved.Ellie Unfiltered brings Hanna's lost memoir, a lamp in a cave, and the question of whether Scheherazade is a person or a job. We end where the story always ends: one more night.☕ Buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/lucyandellie

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