Cinderella (or The Little Glass Slipper) is a folk tale with thousands of variants that are told throughout the world. The protagonist is a young girl living in unfortunate circumstances who is suddenly blessed with remarkable fortune, ultimately ascending to the throne through marriage. The earliest known version of the Cinderella story is usually considered to be the Greek story of Rhodopis, as described by the scholar Strabo sometime between 7 BC and 23 AD, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt.
The first literary Western version of the story was the Italian tale La Gatta Cenerentola, published by Giambattista Basile in his Pentamerone in 1634. The version that is now most widely known in the English-speaking world was published in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Histories, or Tales of Past Time) in 1697 as Cendrillon, and was anglicized as Cinderella.[5] Another version was later published in German as Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm in their folk tale collection Grimms' Fairy Tales in 1812.
