<P> The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques, and various forms of erotica . Numerous stories depict jinns, ghouls, apes, sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally . Common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al - Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al - Barmaki, and the famous poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire, in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set . Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture . </P> <P> The different versions have different individually detailed endings (in some Scheherazade asks for a pardon, in some the king sees their children and decides not to execute his wife, in some other things happen that make the king distracted) but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life . </P> <P> The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature . While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, and in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen--and in all these cases turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life . </P> <P> The history of the Nights is extremely complex and modern scholars have made many attempts to untangle the story of how the collection as it currently exists came about . Robert Irwin summarises their findings: "In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged . Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia . At some time, probably in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or' The Thousand Nights' . This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights . The original core of stories was quite small . Then, in Iraq in the 9th or 10th century, this original core had Arab stories added to it--among them some tales about the Caliph Harun al - Rashid . Also, perhaps from the 10th century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation (...) Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life . In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book's title ." </P>

Who compiled a thousand and one arabian nights author