concerning the New Testament period has been included in this work; for the reason that such legends ceased long ago to be local, and are most, if not all, of them elsewhere accessible, in the Apocryphal Gospels or one or other of the multiplied Lives of the Saints.
To most legends of the centuries between Christ and Muhammad, called by Moslems “the Interval,” a like objection seemed to apply. The stories of the Seven Sleepers and of the Martyrs of the Pit, of St Helen’s Dream and the consequent finding of the Cross, no longer belong to Palestine, though they are still told there. But the legend of the Tree of the Cross (sect. i. chap. vi.) and that of St George in the chapter on “El Khudr” (sect. 1.), with a tradition, given in sect. i. chap. vi., concerning some caves in Wady Isma ’in, called “the Upper Chambers of the Maidens,” undoubtedly belong to this period. The romantic deeds of ’Antar and Abu Zeyd, with all the wealth of stories ascribed to the Arabs of the Ignorance,[1] though known to natives of Palestine, have not been localised. They belong to the Arabic language and literature, and must be set down as acquired.
With the conquest of Jerusalem by the armies of the Caliph Omar ibn el Khattab begins the historical memory in this folk-lore as distinct from the
- ↑ The Time of the Ignorance is the name given to the days before Muhammad, when a majority of the Arabians were idolators when a major.
