(14) The son of the persea tree was Bitiou, born of his own faithless wife; and when he grew up he had her put to death.
Even a hasty examination of these incidents from old Egypt proves that before India was heard of in history the people of the Pharaohs possessed a large store of incidents perfectly familiar in modern marchen. Now, if one single Egyptian tale yields this rich supply, it is an obvious presumption that the collection of an Egyptian Grimm might, and probably would, have furnished us with the majority of the situations common in popular tales. M. Cosquin himself remarks that these ideas cannot be invented more than once (I. lxvii.). The other Egyptian contes, as that of Le Prince Predestine (twentieth dynasty), and the noted Master Thief of Herodotus (ii. 121), are merely familiar marchen of the common type, and have numerous well-known analogues.
From all these facts M. Cosquin draws no certain conclusions. He asks: Did Egypt borrow these tales from India, or India from Egypt? And were there Aryans in India in the time of Rameses II.?
These questions are beyond conjecture. We know nothing of Egyptian relations with prehistoric India. We know not how many aeons the tale of The Two Brothers may have existed in Egypt before Ennana, the head librarian, wrote it out for Pharaoh's treasurer, Qagabou.
What we do know is, that if we find a large share of the whole stock of incident of popular tale fully developed in one single story long before India was 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.*
* Maspero, op. cit., p. 17, note 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 Kor, 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 ancient than Egypt, or from Egypt herself. These questions are at present insoluble. We only know for certain that, when we find anywhere any one of the numerous incidents of the story of The Two Brothers, we can be certain that their original home was not historic India. There is also the presumption that, if we knew more of the tales of ancient Egypt, we could as definitely refuse to regard historic India as the cradle of many other märchen.
Thus, in opposition to the hypothesis of borrowing from India, we reach some distinct and assured, though negative, truths.