Sir Richard Burton 
Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves 

The following text has been drawn from Sir Richard Burton’s exhaustive translation of ’The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night’, more commonly known as ’The Arabian Nights’. The story of ’Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ is one of the more popular of those found in ’The Arabian Nights’ collection. It tells the story of Ali Baba who while chopping wood in the forest discovers the secret hiding place for the treasure of a band of forty thieves. The treasure is sealed in a magic cave which opens by the command ’open simsim’, or ’open sesame’. This classic tale is presented here in this edition in its original and unexpurgated form.