Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is a tale of secret access, dangerous wealth and repeated failures of recognition. This article follows The Forty Thieves in Andrew Lang's edited The Blue Fairy Book. Although Ali Baba names the familiar story, Morgiana performs much of the work that keeps his household alive.

Story summary

Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter in Persia, hides from forty robbers and overhears the words that open their storehouse in a rock. After they leave, he enters and takes gold. A coin stuck to a borrowed measure reveals the wealth to his rich brother Cassim's household. Cassim demands the secret, enters with a much larger carrying capacity, and forgets the opening word. The returning robbers kill him.

Ali Baba brings the body home. Morgiana, enslaved in Cassim's household, arranges a concealed repair of the body and a funeral that disguises the manner of death. The robbers trace the house through the cobbler who helped her. Twice Morgiana defeats their marking system by copying its mark onto neighbouring doors.

The captain then memorises the house and arrives disguised as an oil merchant, with armed men concealed in jars. Morgiana discovers them while seeking oil for a lamp and kills the hidden attackers with boiling oil. Ali Baba grants her freedom. The captain returns under another commercial identity, but she recognises him, notices his concealed weapon, and kills him during a dagger dance. Ali Baba arranges her marriage to his son. The cave's wealth and password pass down the family.

Access is only one part of safety

The famous password is a remarkably small part of the tale's practical intelligence. It admits anyone who knows the words. It neither distinguishes a rightful owner from an intruder nor protects someone who cannot remember how to get out. Cassim has the information when he enters; his failure is to retrieve it under changed conditions.

The following observations are editorial analysis, not claims about the historical practices of a whole region.

Ali Baba: recognition and concealment

Detail	What changes
The borrowed measure	A domestic object carries an unintended trace. A secret becomes visible through a small material residue.
The marked doors	Copying the sign removes its power to identify one house. Morgiana defeats its selectivity without needing to remove it.
The remembered building	The captain adapts after the marking scheme fails. The household faces a new method rather than an identical repeated test.
The oil jars	Containers admitted as goods conceal people. The category assigned to the contents controls the response.
The dagger dance	An apparent entertainment conceals an intervention, reversing the attacker’s use of disguise.

Ali Baba repeatedly welcomes a person whose intention he does not recognise. Morgiana attends to discrepancies between the offered explanation and what she encounters. The story therefore separates hospitality from reliable knowledge of a guest. Her discovery is also connected to work: needing oil takes her to the containers that the host has accepted without examination.

When the robbers return to identify the marked house, the narrator reports the result of Morgiana’s intervention:

five or six of the houses were chalked in the same manner.

Excerpt from the narrator, “The Forty Thieves”, in Lang’s edited collection.

Morgiana has copied the mark onto neighbouring doors. The original sign remains visible, but it no longer separates one building from the others. Its failure is therefore a loss of selectivity, not a failure of visibility. The captain subsequently changes his method and memorises the house instead, showing that the successful defence answers a particular way of finding the target. For comparison, a label can be clearly displayed and still fail to identify anything uniquely. The episode also makes Morgiana’s observation and practical work central to the household’s survival.

Archetypes and the distribution of agency

Ali Baba is a fortunate discoverer, Cassim a rival whose appetite exceeds his caution, and the captain an adaptive intruder. Morgiana combines observer, strategist, protector and performer. Calling her merely a helpful servant would obscure that she generates the decisive solutions.

The household's dependence on an enslaved woman is a central tension. Freedom follows her rescue of its members, and marriage then incorporates her into the family. These are the tale's rewards; they also leave room to ask why her security depends on exceptional service. Her intelligence matters before anyone formally acknowledges it.

A moral reading often contrasts limited taking with greed. Yet Ali Baba also removes stolen wealth, including when recovering his brother's body, and the ending does not restore it to its original victims. The narrative rewards him without settling every question about ownership. Distinguishing narrative approval from a complete ethical justification makes the analysis more precise.

The violence should also remain visible. Morgiana saves lives by killing, while the captain executes failed subordinates. These are asymmetrical situations, but neither is adequately described by a vague statement that cleverness wins. Ask whose survival a clever act secures and what it costs others.

Idioms and allusions

Open sesame names a particularly effective means of obtaining a desired result or gaining access. Dictionary.com traces the expression to the words opening the robbers' cave. This is a documented story connection, unlike an idiom merely used to compare a tale with modern experience.

Original example: She expected the introduction to be an open sesame to every archive. The phrase treats access as though a simple formula could unlock it. The story itself adds a useful complication: entrance is not the same as safe departure, and possession of the password does not settle entitlement.

An oil-jar comparison would be a more specialised literary allusion to concealed occupants or danger. It needs explanatory context. It should not be confused with Aladdin's lamp, nor should the password be assigned to Aladdin merely because both stories involve hidden treasure.

Transmission and cultural influence

The Library of Arabic Literature identifies Hanna Diyab as the teller who supplied both Ali Baba and Aladdin to Antoine Galland. Their familiar placement in the Arabian Nights thus reflects the history of that collection's expansion and translation.

The Victoria and Albert Museum documents Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves among the pantomimes inspired by English translations of the Arabian Nights. Stage tradition and the surviving everyday password are distinct forms of influence: one continually remakes a story for performance, while the other compresses a remembered event into a reusable expression. Comparing a particular pantomime would require its own script or production record, since the title alone does not establish how it treats Morgiana.

Reading question: Who is credited with finding the treasure, and who actually makes it possible for the household to survive possessing it?

Related pages

• Aladdin
• Locks and Keys
• Doors, Gates and Thresholds
• Inside and Outside: Shelter, Confinement and Belonging
• The Brave Little Tailor
• Bluebeard

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Fairy Tales, Idioms and Everyday Speech | Reading Fairy Tales: Archetypes, Motifs and Narrative Roles | Stories and literature | Subject index