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The Arabian Nights

From The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith

This reader is drawn from a poetic excerpt included in The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, first published in 1909. The verses are from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1842 poem 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights,' in which the poet imagines himself as a child in the Baghdad of Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (also spelled Harun al-Rashid), who ruled the Abbasid Caliphate from 786 to 809 CE, a period often celebrated as a golden age of Islamic culture, science and art. This text reflects its era; a few period terms have been modernised. The passage is worth a reader's time because it demonstrates how literature can use historical setting and sensory detail to explore universal themes of memory, loss and the longing for a past that may be as much imagined as real.

Band

Blue · Independent readers, confidentTypical starting range: ages 12–14

Length

long · about 955 words in 3 sections · 2 pictures

Source

The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales, Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, Nora Archibald Smith and Maxfield Parrish

First published

see the About page in the reader

Regions

Canada · United States

Included formats

• · Web reader and PDF
• · EPUB for e-readers
• · Home-print sheet
• · Folded booklet
• · Binder edition (8.5 × 11)
• · Worksheet
• · Quick Check (10 questions) with answer key
• · Read-aloud script
• · Teacher’s Edition (members)

Readers are engineered from the original public-domain text with AI under HummingRead’s published canon and Content Philosophy, checked by automated audit and sampled by a person. Pictures are made with AI to HummingRead’s brief for each story. How a reader is made.

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