Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/189

Rh the more civilised ruling classes. We have recently learnt that the Pharaonic Egyptians were intruders into the valley of the Nile, and that they had brought their culture from the East. The tombs of the older population which have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie and M. de Morgan belong to the Stone Age; when the Egyptians of history first entered the country of their adoption they were already acquainted with the use of metals. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, states that it was not until the reign of the second king of the Second dynasty that the worship of the sacred animals was introduced into the official cult; and the statement is probably correct. Ra and Osiris and the other gods of the Pantheon were the deities of the cultured immigrants from Asia; in the bull Apis or Mnevis we must see a survival of aboriginal fetishism.

this volume M. Lidzbarski has brought together in a German version a variety of popular stories and songs written in the Aramaic dialect, which prior to the spread of Arabic was spoken for centuries before and after Christ from the Mediterranean as far as the Tigris. Most of them were collected, and some even written down, for Professor Sachau during his travels in 1884 and 1888 in Syria and Mesopotamia. The sections B and D of the book are of special interest as containing some thirty-six folklore tales, many of which are similar to tales given in Æsop, Grimm, and in other collections of European stories. The first and longest tale in the collection, "The History of the Wise Chikar," is of peculiar interest, because the book of Tobit already implies its existence; and competent scholars, e.g. B. Meissner (in Z.D.M.G., 48, p. 171), have concluded that it is contemporaneous with the book of Esther.

In order to give an idea of the nature of a popular story so little known and with such a long pedigree, I append a translation of the first paragraphs of it, as it is contained in a sixteenth-century Armenian MS. (No. 2048 in the new catalogue) of the