In a dream, the childless sultan of Diyarbakr hears a voice telling him to take a pomegranate from his garden. Obeying the dream, the sultan eats fifty seeds from the pomegranate, and as a result, forty-nine of his fifty concubines all fall pregnant. The fiftieth concubine, Pirouze, is sent in disgrace to the sultan's brother Samer in Samaria, but it turns out that she is pregnant after all. Her son, Khudadad (or Codadad) grows up and goes to meet his father, but keeps his identity hidden. His father appoints him commander of the troops and tutor to the forty-nine princes, and he quickly becomes beloved of everyone, but the princes envy and hate him. One day they go out hunting and don't return, so the king tasks Khudadad with finding them.
He finds a castle of black marble, where a lovely lady warns him about the ghoul holding her prisoner there. He kills the ghoul, freeing the lady and also his brothers, who had also been captured. The lady explains that she is a princess of upper Egypt.
- History of the Princess of Daryabar
Khudadad marries the princess and reveals to the princes that he is their brother, but this only makes them more jealous, and they ambush him, stab him and leave him for dead. They return to their father's city. The princess goes for help, but when she comes back, Khudadad's body is gone. Grieving, she goes to the capital city, where she meets Khudadad's mother, who has come looking for him.
The sultan is about to have the princes executed for their crime, when the kingdom is attacked by an enemy army. Suddenly a third army appears, having been assembled by Khudadad, who survived the attack. Everyone is reunited.
Trivia[]
- This story, along with The Tale of Zayn al-Asnam , was added by the publisher to Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une Nuits. Galland did not know about it being added, and there is no known Arabic version before that.