Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/27

 SOME SYRIAN FOLKLORE NOTES GATHERED ON MOUNT LEBANON.

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fragmentary notes are derived from inquiries made on the spot from or through missionaries, English-speaking doctors, schoolmasters, government officials, &c., during the spring of this year (1897).

It must be remembered that the district of the Lebanon is not Mohammedan; it is controlled by the European Powers. Since partial autonomy was granted it, good roads have been or are being made, and everything conspires to bring the inhabitants into touch with Europe. Dress, speech, ideas, religious, social, and even legal, are altering. Cheap sea-travel induces many natives to visit America, to peddle goods peculiar to the Holy Land. They come back often with a little money, and always with superstition lessened and an independent spirit fostered. With exception of those interesting, mystical, soldierly mountaineers—the Druzes—the people are by religious profession Greeks or Maronites, with a sprinkling of Latin Catholics and Protestants. What their ethnic origin may be is not my present purpose to inquire.

If I understand the term Folklore aright, it deals as much with archaic survivals of land-tenure and communistic customs in connection with them, as with remains of prehistoric and popular superstitions.

In the Lebanon the soil is now held by individuals, and personal ownership only is recognised by government. Yet there are many evidences that this was not always so, apart from those which literature may furnish. The tendency of a centralising government to break up communistic