The Tale of the City of Brass

Record summary

The City of Brass tells of a journey to a deserted, wealthy and technologically wondrous city associated with Solomon’s jinn and an earlier vanished population. Its episodes include inscriptions, automata, tombs, moral warnings and encounters with uncanny remains. The tale circulated in Arabic literary collections and later became associated with The Thousand and One Nights, although its textual relationships are complicated. It matters for comparison of ruin legends, forbidden knowledge and moralized imperial memory. Archaeological searches for a literal City of Brass have not established the story’s historicity.