Some Ancient Oriental Folklore

literatures of the Babylonians, Assyrians and Hittites, and also from the recently-discovered Ras Shamra texts, which have thrown such a flood of light upon customs and beliefs current in Syria during the latter part of the second millenium B.C.E. Up to the present, these monuments of ancient civilisation have been studied principally from the strictly philological point of view, and there has been an unfortunate tendency to ignore that wider interpretation which may be derived from a folkloristic approach. In order to remedy this state of affairs, it is necessary to recruit the services of those who may be able to bring contributions from comparative research, but before this can be done the material will have to be presented in non-technical form and divorced from the severer and more restricted discipline of purely linguistic study. The present paper is offered as an attempt along these lines. It does not pretend to be anything more than a miscellaneous hotch-potch, nor does the writer flatter himself that he has been able in every case to solve difficult problems of exegesis by simply calling snap with a folkloristic parallel. All that is here claimed is that a number of interesting points have been exhumed from places where they were previously buried, and submitted to a wider public. And it is hoped that by so doing the interest of that public may be aroused to a neglected field which has much to offer

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