Detail map

Egypt

3 entries in 3 subareas: 2 at grade A, 1 at grade C. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.

Countryside of the Delta and irrigation canals; the strongest written attestation comes from the governorate of Sharqiyya

CNaddāhaEgypt — Countryside of the Delta and irrigation canals; the strongest written attestation comes from the governorate of Sharqiyya

Urban and rural Egypt; ethnographic documentation collected in Cairo in the 1830s

AʿIfrītEgypt — Urban and rural Egypt; ethnographic documentation collected in Cairo in the 1830s

Egypt, with the rural documentation collected in Upper Egypt and the urban documentation of the zār rite in Cairo

AQarīnEgypt — Egypt, with the rural documentation collected in Upper Egypt and the urban documentation of the zār rite in Cairo

The entries, in brief

The folklore of Egypt documented in this atlas: ʿIfrīt, Qarīn and Naddāha. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (2 at grade A, 1 at grade C), with the sources it comes from. The 3 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.

Qarīn A
Every person has an invisible double, and in Egyptian popular belief it is of the opposite sex: a man's qarīna, a woman's qarīn. It is jealous. The mother's qarīna envies the human children and makes them fall ill or die; Umm…

ʿIfrīt A
In modern Egyptian usage the ʿafrīt is the ghost, the spirit of a dead person — and the dangerous one is the spirit of a person who has been killed. Whoever dies a natural death does not generate an active one; the ʿifrīt forms…

Naddāha C
At night, by the Nile or more often by an irrigation canal, a very tall and very beautiful woman, hair loose and clothes pale, calls a man by name. Only he hears her: any companion remains immune and looks on helpless. The one…

← Back to the world map · Search the whole atlas · How the grades are assigned