historic, it is perfectly vain to argue that all stories were imported from historic India. It is impossible to maintain that the single centre whence the stories spread was not the India of fable, but the India of history, when we discover such abundance of story material in Egypt before, as far as is known, India had even become the India of fable.
The topic is altogether too obscure for satisfactory argument. Certainly the märchen were at home in Egypt before we have even reason to believe that Egypt and India were conscious of each other's existence. The antiquity of märchen by the Nile-side touches geological time, if we agree with M. Maspero that Bitiou is a form of Osiris, that is, that the Osiris myth may have been developed out of the Bitiou märchen.[1] The Osiris myth is as old as the Egypt we know, and the story of Bitiou may be either the detritus or the germ of the myth. This gives it a dateless antiquity; and with this märchen the kindred and allied märchen establish a claim to enormous age. But it is quite impossible to say when these tales were first invented. We cannot argue that the cradle of a story is the place where it first received literary form. We know not whence the Egyptians came to Nile-side; we know not whether they brought the story with them, or found it among some nameless earlier people, fugitives from Kôr, perhaps, or anywhere else. We know not whether the remote ancestors of modern peoples, African, or European, or Asiatic, who now possess forms of the tale, borrowed it from a people more
- ↑ Maspero, op. cit., p. 17, note 1.
