The phrase first appears in writing in Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une nuits as sésame, ouvre-toi; no earlier version, Arabic or otherwise, is known, and scholars suspect Galland composed the tale himself despite claiming Aleppo informants. In the story, Ali Baba overhears the thieves; his brother Cassim, trapped inside, forgets which grain names the door and dies guessing. The literary etymologies: sesame pods pop open at maturity; Babylonian magic used sesame oil; Hebrew sisma, password, is a Greek loan attested in Mark 14:44; and simsim is also a rare Arabic literary word for gate, making the brother's fatal confusion a pun the tale's own logic supports.
The phrase became English's generic metaphor for the perfect key by 1814: the open sesame to schools, jobs, the right people. Its structure prefigures the digital credential exactly: a spoken token, no identity check, possession equals authorization, and the one who cannot reproduce the token, Cassim with his grains, is destroyed by the same door. Every password since is a sesame: arbitrary, unguessable, unforgiving, and fatally dependent on memory.
The claim: the tale encodes the spellpower thesis in miniature, the treasure is real but inaccessible, and the only asset that opens it is a word, making knowledge of the phrase the true treasure, which is why the brother with the gold and not the word dies inside the vault; information asymmetry as the moral of the oldest heist story. Verdict: the text supports it precisely, Cassim has everything except the phrase. The archive's note: every vault since, from Swiss accounts to encrypted wallets, keeps the same rule. The goods are downstream of the word. Guard the word. The grains are decoys.
If the password was a pun, what was Cassim punished for: greed, or poor philology?