The Elderly Merchant is or was a human man.
Description[]
This weary old merchant, practical but not especially open-minded, went on a trip to Agrabah with his temperamental wife and their daughter some time after Aladdin's first defeat of Jafar. He stumbled upon Jafar's Lamp, but was not taken in by Jafar's attempts to manipulate him into doing his bidding, wasting his first two wishes on futile things (a glass of cold water and some cushions) before giving the third wish to his daughter, who immediately wished they'd never gone on this rubbish trip at all.
Behind the scenes[]
The Elderly Merchant appears in the 1993 story More Arabian Nights.