A Morphological Study of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves of Baghdad

Stories from the Thousand and One Nights (the Arabian Nights) is one of the most ancient texts in the world’s literature. The book is a collection of various stories told by a girl called Shahrzad to a king called Shahryar. Despite its universal popularity, this great work has unfortunately not been researched well in Iran. The present article tries to do a morphological study of one of the famous stories of this collection: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves of Baghdad. First, the story is horizontally analyzed to present the reader’s view, then the main functions of the story are designated, and finally the story is vertically analyzed to represent the narrator’s view.