Baron Silvestre de Sacy like Prof. Galland, felt that the Thousand Nights was first composed in Syria and written in a plain dialect for the poor people. Many European authors while trying to translate the tales had lamented that they failed to find a copy of the original or an authentic manuscript. They possibly never heard of the superstition that no one could read through such a book without dying - the superstition going back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD. The other practical side was that there was no author of those stories putting down all of them together in a book. The scholars well versed with Arabia stated that the stories were strung together by men who commanded themselves to the kings and emperors by telling them only from memory.
All such tales were brought by Crusaders, by Mongol missionaries, by Gypsies, by Jews, by traders, by travellers.
In Eastern countries the often inflated code of hospitality, coupled with the exclusion of women and later gatherings of men in the cool of the evenings, had given great impetus to story-telling. Indeed, it had produced the Rawi, or professional story-teller - an important member of the community unknown in cooler latitudes, where the story-telling was almost entirely confined to the family circle. There was the warning against lust, improper aspirations, gullibility, and superstition. It showed women to be passive pawns in the games that men played.
Another lively text full of wordplay Dasakumaracharita showed incidents, matching up with those of the Arabian Nights. They gave a lively picture of wily deception, undue naivety and superstition, and disregard of human life.
On this setting the tales of enchantment were about to begin. They had been taken from the Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit texts and put in a language as close to the original style of narration as possible. The tales had the unique style of the language of signs, now and then mixed with a magic thread to stun the lovesick man.