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. But Diab has been neglected and uncredited these last three hundred years. Intriguing archival discoveries and new historical research mean that we can now point with confidence to Hanna as the original source of Aladdin, a tale of magic and destiny that has spawned enduring legends, artworks, books and music, as well as beloved pantomimes, dramatic retellings and cinematic blockbusters in all the languages of the world.
Hanna’s own story takes us back and forth across the Mediterranean, from the souks and coffee houses of Aleppo to a locked storage unit behind Cambridge railway station, from Versailles and the Paris opera to echoing courtyards in the heart of the Vatican. Hanna survives storm and shipwreck off the Libyan coast. He confronts Corsican pirates, Egyptian hucksters, brocaded assassins in Lebanon and razor-happy barbers in Italy. And, early on, he investigates a tomb-cave sunk into a rocky hillside in northern Syria that happens to yield a ring and a lamp.
Aladdin is newer than most of us might imagine. Many of the stories in the Arabian Nights more 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. They were added by Antoine Galland, a scholar at the court of Louis XIV, who was the first to translate the Nights for European consumption.
Hanna’s tales filled four extra volumes of Nights stories—but in none did Galland credit his source.
Galland’s French edition, rendered from an incomplete Arabic manuscript source and published in installments from 1704, was wildly successful, translated within a few years into English, German and Italian, and then dozens more languages. But after seven volumes of stories, Galland had translated the entire manuscript. He had no more material. Fortunately, by an astonishing stroke of luck, help was soon at hand.
In Syria’s great trading city of Aleppo, Hanna Diab had grown up running errands for European merchants dealing in silks and luxury commodities. Aged eighteen, he happened to run into Paul Lucas, a charismatic explorer who had been sent by Louis XIV to collect Middle Eastern antiquities. On the promise of a job in France, Hanna joined Lucas as his guide and assistant. This odd couple’s adventures took them from that rocky tomb-cave—of which, more shortly—through Egypt and across North Africa, and eventually to Paris.
Alongside Lucas, who had been summoned to deliver his loot to the Sun King, Hanna found himself captivated by the splendor of Louis’s palace at Versailles—and by the attention of the royal princesses, who couldn’t get enough of the dashing young Syrian adventurer.
But fame is fleeting, and Hanna was left to cool his heels. While waiting for a job to materialize, he was introduced to an old man working at the Royal Library in Paris who had been translating the Thousand and One Nights from Arabic. The old man had run out of stories. Would Hanna happen to know any? 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 who is taken in by a charismatic sorcerer and led to a mysterious cave where a ring and a lamp change his destiny, catapulting him into encounters with majestic kings and beautiful princesses in the grandest palaces of imagination.
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 didn’t discover the omission until much later. Lucas, meanwhile, never came up with a job for his young assistant and so Hanna, his hopes betrayed, left Paris and returned home to Aleppo, where he got married, raised a family and lived a long life trading textiles in the souk.
Praise for Galland as the author of these new Arabian tales only grew. Even the discovery in 1887 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 was the chance discovery a hundred years later of a manuscript in the Vatican Library, miscatalogued as anonymous, that finally raised questions. For this slender, torn volume turned out to be Hanna Diab’s own memoir of his youth.
*
Hanna preferred the city. He needed noise and people. Sheep-bells tinkling on a wide-open hillside wasn’t quite his thing. But the sun was warm and the air smelled fresh after a day’s rain. Winter, and indecision, were over. There was excitement ahead. He just wasn’t sure exactly what was expected of him today.
His new employer Paul Lucas, sweating slightly after the journey to get here and focused on his sketching and note-taking, was conferring with Father Micolo and the Armenian in front of a rocky fissure. Hanna stood back, aware that his place was with the porters and handlers. The posse they’d brought with them from Kaftin to guard against bandits were pleasant enough company, but the odd burst of laughter told him they were unimpressed by an eighteen-year-old city boy pretending to be a dragoman. Nevertheless, he had hitched his wagon to this assertive foreigner and was content for now to work in his shadow.
Lucas broke from the others and beckoned Hanna over. He instructed him to find someone small enough to squeeze through the crack into the tomb-cave behind, one of many that dotted the hillside, and bring out whatever was inside. Hanna nodded assent. The opening was narrow. It would need someone skinny as a child, lithe and athletic.
He explained the task to the clutch of farmers who had wandered over to see what the foreigners were doing among these half-tumbled ruins. They were reluctant, he could see, elbowing and nudging each other. Then he noticed a shepherd boy at the edge of the group, younger than Hanna but not by much. The boy pretended to hang back, but the farmers started shoving him to the front.
Lucas pointed a finger and called out, “Get down into that tomb, boy, and fetch me whatever you find!”
The boy didn’t move, looking quizzically at Lucas and each of the stern-faced foreigners in turn. Hanna realized with a start that he was expected to interpret.
It was the chance discovery a hundred years later of a manuscript in the Vatican Library, miscatalogued as anonymous, that finally raised questions.
“My master instructs you in the French language to enter this cave and bring out the treasure inside it.”
The boy’s expression said that he understood Hanna’s Arabic, but he remained still. A look passed between the two youths. Hanna turned slightly. “Sir,” he said, in his distinctively accented French. “This boy asks that he be assured of a token of your appreciation for the work he is about to perform.”
Lucas waved a hand. Hanna tilted his chin. The boy adjusted his string belt and stepped forward.
*
Once inside the cave, the boy started handing items out through the crack. First came bones—charred and broken fragments, unmistakably human, though apparently larger than life-size. Lucas and Father Micolo muttered together with raised eyebrows about the biblical Land of the Giants and the Old Testament’s infamous ogre-monarch Og. A piece of a human jawbone emerged. Lucas extracted a tooth and pocketed it.
Then trinkets started to appear. Hanna spotted a ring—not fancy, of plain design, fashioned from some kind of metal now rusted. Lucas examined it, turning it over and over in his hands, rubbing at it to see if he could make out an inscription, but found nothing remarkable. Nevertheless, he kept it. Then the shepherd boy handed out an old oil lamp, also made of metal, battered and in need of a polish. Watching from a respectful distance, Hanna wondered again why Lucas thought such an item valuable: to his eyes, it looked like the lamps people used every day in Aleppo. Regardless, it, too, went into Lucas’s bag.
Having emptied the tomb, the boy squeezed back out through the crack, saucer-eyed but with a new swagger for his audience. Hanna handed him the coin that Lucas had promised, and the boy departed, pleased with his bounty.
As the visitors packed up, Lucas told Hanna to ask the farmers if they had anything to sell. One brought out a pair of dice carved from greenish stone, with the dots marked in gold. Lucas examined the dice, then added them to his bag, selected a few coins in payment and turned away.
*
Just to be clear, in light of Aladdin and everything else that develops later in this story, the incident with the cave, the ring and the lamp actually happened. It was the last week of March in the year 1707, and it was somewhere near Kaftin, a short distance west of Aleppo in northern Syria. Hanna Diab was there, alongside an imperious foreigner who seemed to possess esoteric knowledge in the mysteries of the ancients, and he saw it all.
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From Finding Aladdin: The Hidden History of a Syrian Storyteller by Matthew Teller. Copyright © Matthew Teller, 2026. Excerpted with permission from Biblioasis.
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