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SUMMARY

Calendar Customs and Rituals in the Near and Middle East. Annual Cycle / Ed. By R. Sh. Djarylgasinova, M.V. Kriukov.

The book is a follow-up to the earlier volumes issued by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is dealing with the calendar festivals, customs, and rituals of the world peoples. At the same time it is another volume in a series of studies of calendar festivals in Asia.

The authors of the book consider calendar culture as well as the year cycle festivals of five peoples of the Middle and Near East: the Persians, Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Jews. Calendar culture and customs of these peoples have not been studied yet in such a peculiar aspect. The study has been carried out with the financial support of the Russian Scholar Foundation — RGNE (the Project N 94-06-19212 RGNF named «Calendar Customs and Rituals of the World Peoples»).

The monotheism at first took place in the Near East (Judaism, then Christianity and Islam); two world religions — Christianitty and Islam — emerged in that region. The above peoples are successors of the ancient civilizations of the Near and Middle East. Some features of those civilizations have been preserved in calendar culture of the Turks, Arabs, Persians, Kurds and Jews, Religion and religious prescriptions were in past (and often are at present) of great importance in the traditional culture and daily life of these peoples. Their agricultural and nomadic past made a great influence upon the customs and rites of the year cycle.

Nowadays these customs and rituals are complex phenomena which reflect various religious systems and beliefs of different people from an archaic period up to the present including many innovations. A coexistence of very ancient traditions and innovations during the ages, an influence of archaic rites upon new ones, a new interpretation of old prescriptions caused the stability and widespread popularity of calendar customs. Calendar culture has been transformed and updated mainly in the recent period. This transformation resulted from the great changes in a social, political, economic and cultural situation in the Near and Middle East.

In the late 19th — early 20th centuries all peoples of that region had evolved a national pattern of calendar festivals. Such patterns were accompanied up to this day by a great number of local and regional varieties. At the turn of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries this process in the Middle and Near East coincided with the deep transformation in political, economic, ethnic and cultural life of each people of the region. It was the period of the feudal system crisis, capitalism emergence, intensive national liberation movements’ spreading. Many elements of traditional culture were coming under review and revaluation.

The authors of the book reviewed, classified and systemized a lot of sources dealing with calendar rituals and customs of each people of the Near and Middle East — sacral texts, myths, folklore, folk music, iconographies, rites and customs. The study of the vast material as well as the comparative studies and an attempt to trace historical and cultural links and interaction confirm some typological parallels in festival culture and year cycle rituals of the Near and Middle Eastern peoples — and moreover — in the calendar rites and customs of the peoples of the world.

During the ages calendar culture kept a lot of traces of archaic beliefs and rites — the cult of the fire with its purifying, apotropaeic and fertile functions, the worship of water, mountains, animals and plants, various agricultural and nomadic rituals as well as very ancient astral and especially lunar cults. A significant