The Arabian Nights are not just Arabic, but Persian and Indian as well, so perhaps a better name for them is simply The Nights, one of the world's great collections of stories. The Nights are a wonderful example of Folk literature and how it develops, through the telling and retelling of stories over a long period of time. There were many creators of these stories, many re-tellers, and many rewriters. There are, consequently, many different texts of the Nights, and stories were added to the Nights for many centuries. The stories are called the Thousand and One Nights to express the idea of a large number, not necessarily exactly 1001.