Hanna Diab, a Syrian adventurer from the eighteenth century, conceived one of the globe’s most familiar tales, Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp, drawing from real chapters of his life. Yet Diab has gone unrecognized and overlooked for three centuries. Fresh archival findings and new scholarly inquiry now allow us to identify Hanna with confidence as the original origin behind Aladdin, a story woven with magic and fate that has given rise to lasting legends, artworks, literature, and music, as well as cherished pantomimes, transformative adaptations, and blockbuster cinema across countless languages.
Hanna’s life story moves back and forth across the Mediterranean, from the bustling souks and coffee houses of Aleppo to a sealed storage chamber behind Cambridge’s railway station, from the opulence of Versailles and the Paris Opera to echoing courtyards inside the Vatican. He survives storms and shipwreck off the Libyan coast. He faces Corsican raiders, Egyptian hucksters, silk-embroidered assassins in Lebanon, and razors-edged barbers in Italy. Early on, he investigates a tomb-cave sunk into a rocky hillside in northern Syria, a place that yields a ring and a lamp.
Aladdin is not as ancient as many might suppose. A good many tales in the Arabian Nights—properly named the Thousand and One Nights—originate a thousand years ago or more. Yet some of its most famous stories, especially Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin, first appeared in the early eighteenth century. They were added by Antoine Galland, a scholar at the court of Louis XIV, who introduced the Nights to European readers for the first time.
Hanna’s tales filled four extra volumes of Nights stories—but in none did Galland credit his source.
Galland’s French edition, drawn from an incomplete Arabic manuscript and released in installments beginning in 1704, enjoyed extraordinary popularity, and within a few years was translated into English, German, Italian, and many dozens more languages. Yet after seven volumes, Galland had exhausted the manuscript’s material. He had nothing left to translate. Fortunately, by a remarkable stroke of luck, assistance soon arrived.
In Syria’s great trading city of Aleppo, Hanna Diab had grown up delivering errands for European merchants trading in silks and other luxury goods. When he was eighteen, he happened to encounter Paul Lucas, a charismatic explorer who had been sent by Louis XIV to collect Middle Eastern antiquities. Enticed by the prospect of work in France, Hanna joined Lucas as his guide and aide. This unlikely pair’s adventures carried them from that rocky tomb-cave—more on that shortly—through Egypt and across North Africa, and eventually to Paris.
Alongside Lucas, who had been summoned to deliver his discoveries to the Sun King, Hanna found himself enthralled by the splendor of Louis’s Versailles palace—and by the attention of the royal princesses, who could not get enough of the dashing young Syrian adventurer.
But fame is fleeting, and Hanna was left to wait. While a fresh opportunity did not materialize, he met an old man laboring at the Royal Library in Paris who had been translating the Thousand and One Nights from Arabic. The elderly translator had run out of stories. Might Hanna know any? Over a series of meetings in 1709, Hanna spun tale after tale for Antoine Galland—including one about a poor boy from a distant land who is taken in by a charismatic sorcerer and led to a mysterious cave where a ring and a lamp alter his fate, steering him toward encounters with kings and princesses in the grandest palaces of the 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 found a role for his young assistant and so Hanna, his hopes betrayed, left Paris and returned to Aleppo, where he married, raised a family, and spent a long life trading textiles in the souk.
Praise for Galland as the author of these new Arabian tales only grew. Even the 1887 discovery of his handwritten diaries, in which he notes hearing “the story of the lamp” from a young Syrian named Hanna, did not overturn the prevailing narrative. It was the later discovery, a century on, of a manuscript in the Vatican Library miscatalogued as anonymous that finally sparked questions. That slender, torn volume proved to be Hanna Diab’s own memoir of his youth.
*
Hanna had a preference for the bustle of city life. He thrived on noise and crowds. The quiet of a hillside with sheep bells wasn’t really his scene. Yet the sun felt warm, and the air carried the scent of rain after a shower. Winter’s hesitation was over. Ahead lay excitement, though he could not quite say what was expected of him that day.
His new employer Paul Lucas, a touch sweaty from the journey and absorbed in his sketches and notes, conferred with Father Micolo and an Armenian man beside a rocky fissure. Hanna kept his distance, aware that his duties lay with the porters and laborers. The guard party brought along from Kaftin to deter bandits was genial enough, but their loud laughter suggested they did not yet take seriously the eighteen-year-old city boy posing as a dragoman. Still, he had joined forces with this forceful foreigner and chose to work in his shadow for the moment.
Lucas stepped away from the others and signaled Hanna to come closer. He tasked him with finding someone small enough to slip through the crack into the tomb-cave behind, one of many along the hillside, and to haul out whatever lay inside. Hanna nodded in agreement. The opening was narrow, demanding someone as slender as a child, nimble and athletic.
He explained the mission to the cluster of farmers who had gathered to watch the foreigners among these partially ruined structures. They hesitated, shoving one another. Then a shepherd boy at the edge—younger than Hanna, though not by much—pretended to hang back, but the farmers pressed him forward.
Lucas pointed a finger and commanded, “Descend into that tomb, boy, and bring out whatever you locate!”
The boy froze, meeting Lucas’s gaze and the stern faces of the others in turn. Hanna immediately realized he was being asked to translate.
It was the later discovery, a century on, of a manuscript in the Vatican Library miscatalogued as anonymous, that finally raised questions.
“My master asks you to enter this cave and fetch what lies within, using the French language to guide you.”
The boy’s expression told Hanna that he understood his Arabic, yet he remained motionless. A look passed between the youths. Hanna shifted slightly. “Sir,” he said in a French that bore a strong accent, “this boy asks that you reward him for the work he is about to perform.”
*
Inside the cave, the boy began to hand out objects through the thin opening. First came bones—charred, fractured fragments, unmistakably human, though larger than life. Lucas and Father Micolo exchanged glances, muttering about the biblical Land of the Giants and the Old Testament’s ogre-king Og. A piece of a jawbone appeared. Lucas pulled out a tooth and pocketed it.
Then trinkets appeared. Hanna spotted a ring—plain in design, forged from metal now corroded. Lucas examined it, turning it from side to side, rubbing at it to reveal any inscription, but nothing stood out. Still, he kept it. Then the shepherd boy produced an old oil lamp, metal, battered and in need of polishing. From a respectful distance, Hanna wondered why Lucas valued such an item: to him, it resembled the lamps used every day in Aleppo. Regardless, it joined Lucas’s collection.
Having emptied the tomb, the boy wriggled back through the crack, eyes wide but with a new swagger before his audience. Hanna handed him the coin Lucas had promised, and the boy departed, pleased with his prize.
As the visitors prepared to leave, Lucas told Hanna to ask the farmers if they had anything else for sale. One offered a pair of dice carved from a greenish stone, with the pips inlaid in gold. Lucas studied the dice, added them to his sack, paid a few coins, and moved on.
*
To be clear, given Aladdin and all that follows in this tale, the cave incident with the ring and the lamp did occur. It happened in the final week of March 1707, near Kaftin, a short distance west of Aleppo in northern Syria. Hanna Diab stood there with an imperious foreigner who seemed to possess arcane knowledge of ancient mysteries, and he witnessed the whole event.
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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.
