Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/375

 Cairene Folklore. 355

measure of native Egyptian origin and of immemorial antiquity in the valley of the Nile.

Take, for example, what is a leading feature in the greater number of them — the prominent part played in them by women, and the genius for intrigue and for out- witting their husbands which the latter display. We are carried back to the days of pre-Mohammedan Egypt, when the woman claimed equal rights with the man, when the land could be governed by queens, and the restrictions of the harhn had not as yet prevented free intercourse between the sexes. Or take again the moral with which most of the Cairene stories end. It is characteristically Egyptian, as we know from the relics of the ancient literature of the country which have come down to us. The " oldest book in the world " is the moralising Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, and the novels of ancient Egypt, like the legends of the Christian period, were all intended to convey a moral lesson.

Most of the folklore I have collected is that of Cairo. I have filled note-books with the stories, the sayings, the superstitions, and the proverbs that have been repeated to me, and nevertheless they form but a small part of those which I have heard. I have found it impossible to tran- scribe the longer stories : I cannot write rapidly enough to keep pace with the story-teller, and I have found that if he is asked to repeat a passage he at once becomes self-con- scious and changes the words of it into that hybrid jargon which is supposed to represent polite Arabic. As my object has been to record the dialect of Cairo exactly as it is spoken, quite as much as to preserve the folklore of the Cairene, I have written down only such stories as my pen could keep pace with. For longer stories I must refer to the collections of Spitta Bey and others, who have not cared to reproduce exactly the language and pronunciation of the narrator. Among these collections the most instruc- tive and interesting is that of Yacoub Artin Pasha {Contes 2 A 2