This is a collection of stories collected over thousands of years by various authors, translators, and scholars. They are an amalgam of mythology and folk tales from the Indian sub-continent, Persia, and Arabia. No original manuscript has ever been found for the collection, but several versions date the collection's genesis to somewhere between AD 800 and 900. The stories are wound together under the device of a long series of cliff-hangers told by Shahrazad to her husband to prevent him from executing her. In translating the Nights, R. F. Burton attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic. In doing so, he drew upon Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and the 1653 English translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of the first three books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1546).