Gfyuki

In the original 1001 Nights' (a.k.a. Arabian Nights) story "Aladdin" the titular character gets a lamp that contains a magical being called a "genie" that grants wishes. This is fairly common knowledge nowadays with the Disney movie of the story. However, in the original story, there is no limit to the wishes made. Whoever controls the lamp, is the master of the genie and has (seemingly) no limitation of what they can wish for. If there is a restriction it would be a on what the genie is capable of.

Yet, the Disney movie shows that the genie only grants three wishes and three wishes only per master. Many depictions of lamp genies have a similar limitation - three wishes for the owner of the lamp. It's quite ingrained into popular culture with a lot of jokes and/or setups that implicitly have this three wish limit imposed. For example, if three people somehow find the lamp, they might get one wish each or one person could use his wishes to try and create a loophole for infinite wishes.

The amount is really not surprising - three is a very common number when it comes to folk stories and a setup of three is very standard in short stories (like jokes). Three wishes even show up in a lot of folklore outside genies.

My question is not why we got to three wishes but when. Is there something concrete we can point to that combined "three wishes" and "genies"? Perhaps in particular lamp genies but perhaps it started with other genies.

For the record, there are many other genies that show up in 1001 Nights and the lamp genie from Aladdin is the only one of its kind - bound to a lamp as a servant to its master and grants wishes. For example, there is also a ring genie in the same story that is very similar - it again has no limitation on the amount of wishes - it's mentioned that it's less powerful than the lamp genie. Most other genies that show up in other stories from the collection are free and don't grant wishes to mortals.

According to Wikipedia:

"The Fisherman and the Jinni" is the second top-level story told by Sheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights.

According to the synopsis, in the third century that the Jinn (genie) was imprisoned he swore to give whoever freed him three wishes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fisherman_and_the_Jinni

Therefore, the concept of an imprisoned genie granting three wishes to the person who released him goes back to the first creation of "The Fisherman and the Jinni", or at least to the hypothetical later addition of that detail to the story, and possibly much earlier. Though in "The Fisherman and the Jinni" granting three wishes was something the genie decided to do and not some magical commandment he had to obey.

So a study of the history and various versions of "The Fisherman and the Jinni" may be able to indicate when the idea of genies (sometimes) granting three wishes appeared.

According to Wikipedia, "The Fisherman and the Genie" is one of the few stories included in every known manuscript of the 1001 Nights.

The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Greek, Indian, Jewish and Turkish[3] folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎, lit. A Thousand Tales), which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.[4]

There is an existing 14th century Syrian manuscript with 300 stories, so "The Fisherman and the Genie" should go back at least to the 14th century (1301-1400).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights1