[1] The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 314, "Goldener", with an alternate introductory episode: evil stepmother persecutes hero and his horse.
Inside the city, he trades clothes with a shepherd, puts on a cap on his hair, and finds work as an assistant to the royal gardener, under the name "Baldy".
Later, war breaks out with a neighbouring king; Clever Hasan summons the marid again and asks for a suit of black armor and a powerful sword.
According to scholar Erika Taube [de], this motif occurs in tales from North Africa to East Asia, even among Persian- and Arabic-speaking peoples.
[12] Similarly, Hasan M. El-Shamy noted that the quest for the king's remedy appears as a subsidiary event "in the Arab-Berber culture area".
[13] In addition, Germanist Gunter Dammann, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, noted that the motif of the quest for the remedy appeared "with relative frequency" in over half of the variants that start with the Subtype 2 opening (stepmother's persecution of hero and horse).
[14] According to Germanist Günter Dammann [de], tale type 314 with the opening of hero and horse fleeing home extends from Western Himalaya and South Siberia, to Iran and the Arab-speaking countries in the Eastern Mediterranean.
[18] In a tale collected from a teller in Hsarat with the Lebanese title Quray‘ ("The Bald One"), a widowed king remarries and his new wife brings her two sons with her.
The prince's stepmother wants to get rid of her stepson, and consults with an old woman neighbour ways to kill him: first, she digs up a hole in the front porch and covers it with a carpet; next, she gives him a dish of poisoned food.
One day, while the monarch is away from the palace, Quray' burns one of the hairs from his horse's tail and summons it for a ride around the garden - an event witnessed by the princess.
[19] In a Middle Eastern tale titled Prince Baldpate, King Miran and Queen Zaina are the rulers of the kingdom of Jerash, both of good and benevolent character.
One day, Sinan goes to the woods to help a dying mare and rescue its colt; while he is away, the queen mother believes he was missing, which deteriorates her health, and Nordina is pointed as her personal helper.
For her actions during Zaina's illness, Nordina is rewarded with a position of custodian of the royal palace, eventually marrying the widowed king Miran and bringing Nimroud as the chief of the guard - a situation that greatly displeases Sinan.
Things come to a head when Miran approaches his son one day and tells that the royal doctors prescribed the heart of a white stallion as remedy for Nordina's bad health.
Some time later, Nimroud's forces march outside Sinan's father-in-law's kingdom, and Rawan's father orders the court to take refuge in the mountains.
Rawan joins her father, while Sinan calls out for his horse Fairy, dons a mask and goes to battle the enemy army to save the kingdom.
[20] In a Palestinian tale from Birzeit, collected by orientalist Paul E. Kahle with the title Kahlköpfchen und das Wunderpferd ("Little Baldhead and the Magic Horse"), a sultan has two wives, a son by the first and two by the second.
At a distance, the horse gives the boy seven tufts of its mane, and tells him to burn the hairs should ne nieed his help, and departs.
The horse uses its hind feet to uncover the pit to reveal the trap, and the queen feigns surprise, promising to bake her stepson a cake.
Nejm is also weeping for them, but it has a plan: plant a bloodied knife and leave a saddle and the prince's clothes near the stream, so people will think they killed themselves, and the horse will take Hamed to his destined bride in another kingdom.
They reach a beautiful ivory palace that Nejm says is under the power of a menacing Afrit he cannot hope to defeat, and a princess is captive inside.
Hamed ventures in the mountains with the skeleton and brings the locket with him, as the Afrit returns home and the princess convinces the creature to rest his sword as he sleeps.
[25] Orientalist David Heinrich Müller collected a tale in the Jibbali language with the title Begelut: a boy loses his mother and goes to cry over her grave.
[28] A similar introductory episode is attested in the Typen türkischer Volksmärchen ("Turkish Folktale Catalogue"), devised by scholars Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav.
According to their system, abbreviated as TTV, EbBo or EB, in type TTV 247, Schah Ismail (Turkish: Şah İsmail), a dervish gives an apple to a padishah; his wife gives birth to a son and his mare to a foal; some time later, the padishah's new wife has an affair with a vizier and conspires to kill her step-son, but the horse warns him; lastly, the stepmother feigns illness and asks for the horse's meat as a cure, which prompts their flight.
[29] Eberhard and Boratav also argued for the antiquity of the story, and that its "core elements" (birth of hero and foal; stepmother's adultery and threats; horse's warnings) already exist in the tale of Bey Börek.
[30] Eberhard and Boratav also indexed the episodes of obtaining lion's milk for the king and the war sequence as different tale types in the Turkish Folktale Catalogue, but they remarked they do not exist independently and that both are "closely related" to each other.
[32] In the second, titled TTV 258, Der unbekannte Krieger ("The Unknown Warrior"), war breaks out, and the hero rides into battle to turn the tide; he is injured, and his father-in-law dresses his wound.
[33] German scholar Ulrich Marzolph [de] located another narrative from the Ottoman Turkish Ferec baʿd eş-şidde ('Relief After Hardship'), an anonymous book dated to the 15th century.
A spurned suitor, the King of Morocco, takes his troops to invade the realm; the prince joins in the fight and defeats the enemy army, then marries the princess of Yemen.