The Ancient Greek Cinderella

The story of Cinderella is a classic European folk tale that almost everyone in the western world has known since childhood. Most people here in the United States were first introduced to the story through the classic Walt Disney animated film Cinderella (1950), which was based on a French version of the story published in 1697 by the French writer Charles Perrault in his book Histoires ou contes du temps passé (“Stories of Past Times with Morals”). The story of Cinderella itself, however, is far, far older than Perrault. In fact, the oldest known version of the story of Cinderella was actually first recorded by a Greek writer in Hellenistic Egypt during the early first century AD.
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