same; and these incidents occur in Hottentot, Bechuana, Samoyed, Samoan, as well as in Greek, Scotch, German, Gaelic. Now, as all these incidents existed in Egyptian märchen fourteen hundred years before Christ, they may have been dispersed without Indian intervention. One of the white raiders from the Northern Sea may have been made captive, like the pseud-Odysseus, in Egypt; may have heard the tales; may have been ransomed, and carried the story to Greece or Libya, whence a Greek got it. Southwards it may have passed up the Nile to the Great Lakes, and down the Conogo and Zambesi, and southward ever with the hordes of T'Chaka's ancestors. All these processes are possible and even probable, but absolutely nothing is known for certain on the subject. It is only as manifest as facts can be that all this might have occurred if the Indian peninsula did not exist.
Another objection to the hypothesis of distribution from historic India is the existence of sagas or epic legends corresponding to märchen in pre-Homeric Greece. The story of Jason, for example, is in its essential features, perhaps, the most widely diffused of all.[1] The story of the return of the husband, and of his difficult recognition by his wife, the central idea of the Odyssey, is of wide distribution, and the Odyssey (as Fénélon makes the ghost of Achilles tell Homer in Hades) is un amas de contes de vieilles. The Cyclops, the Siren, Scylla, and the rest,[2] these tales did not reach Greece from historic India at least, and we have
