Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/374

 CAIRENE FOLKLORE.

BY THE REV. PROFESSOR A. H. SAYCE, M.A.

The longer I have lived in Egypt^ the more impressed I have been with the exhaustless extent of Egyptia.n folklore. Some of it goes back to the days of the Pharaohs, some of it is of Greek origin, a good deal of it again has been derived from the Arab conquerors of the valley of the Nile. For the folklore which has its roots in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, or in the Christianity which preceded the Mohammedan conquest, we have to look mainly to Upper Egypt ; Cairo has been from the beginning the Moham- medan capital, and its folklore accordingly is chiefly of Mohammedan growth. I say " Mohammedan" rather than " Arab," since the Arab founders of the modern capital of Egypt have long ago been absorbed by alien elements — Kurdish, Turk, Persian, and more especially native Egyptian. Like the population, therefore, the folklore of Cairo, though in great measure of Arab origin, has little about it that is distinctively Arab ; it has, on the contrary, a very marked character of its own, in which future analysis may be able to detect and distinguish Arab and foreign elements. This marked character, however, does not pre- vent it from being what we may term strongly Egyptian in colour and form ; the moulds in which it has been cast are those of ancient Egypt, and the beliefs and superstitions round which it revolves can be traced back to Pharaonic days.

The folklore of Cairo, and not of Egypt generally, is the subject of the present paper, and it is consequently of importance that its character and nature should be fully understood. It represents the folklore of the rest of Egypt only in part ; the stories told in the Cairene streets have grown up in a Mohammedan capital, though the ideas which underlie them and the beliefs they imply are in large