Abstract
Earliest known Miracle Play, Mr. T. H. Gaster describes in Folk-Lore, vol. 44, pt. 4, what he believes to be the text of a mumming play or representation in action of a ritual poem from cuneiform tablets found at Ras Shamra. The text, written in a very obscure pro to-Semitic dialect, describes a combat between two gods, which it is suggested was recited by priests while a religious pantomime represented the action. As the tablets date from the middle of the second millennium B.C., if this interpretation is correct, this would certainly be the oldest extant text of a miracle play. The text describes what is apparently a ritual combat between summer and winter which is familiar in primitive and popular seasonal ritual from many parts of the world. One of the gods is Aleyan-Baal, god of rains and verdure, and the other Mot or Death, god of aridity and blight. The poem opens at the point where Mot has ousted Aleyan-Baal from his dominion. A new king is chosen and his accession to the throne is described. Through the intervention of Anat, the virgin war goddess, Mot is routed, his royal garments torn from him, he is stabbed and gashed, cast into streams, fished out and finally given dominion over the underworld. Aleyan-Baal is restored, the earth revives, sanctuaries are built in his honour, fires are lit for six days, and sacrifices offered. In Syria, Mot, although corresponding to winter elsewhere, would be the period of drought in the summer, when all vegetation dies, and the return of Aleyan-Baal would take place with the coming of rains in the autumn. It is.probable, therefore, that the festival at which the pantomime was performed took place at the ‘New Year’ in September. The details of the poem correspond with the pattern of the ritual adopted throughout the world in ceremonies of ‘Expelling the Death’.
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Research Items. Nature 133, 465–466 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133465a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133465a0