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From the General Preface. Hardly at all is it recognized to how remote a date the first collecting of Folklore goes back; how very remarkable, and, indeed, revolutionary, have been the chief Epochs of the collecting of especially mythical and historical traditions; and how clear a periodicity may be traced in the recurrence of the greater of these Epochs. How far the oldest monuments of Culture-lore, the oldest Sacred Books of Egypt and Chaldea in their primitive forms, incorporated Folklore may remain doubtful. Perhaps they had exclusively for their contents the Kosmical, and particularly the Astronomical Observations and Theories, the Historical Traditions, and the Sacred Songs and Ritualistic Observances of the Ruling White Race of these River-valleys. Unquestionably Folk-belief and Folk-custom influenced, at a very early period, both the doctrines and the rites of the Religions of which men of the Higher Race constituted themselves the systematisers and hierophants. But, so far as we as yet know, it was not till a later Age, though still as early as from the Third Millennium B.C., that Folklore was definitely collected, and, in a more or less transformed shape, presented in Culture-lore -- as in the great Chaldean Epic, of which the Flood-story is an episode (2300 B.C.), and in the earliest collections of Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian Folk-tales. It was not, however, till a still later Age -- the Age that must be dated from that great Asian-European Revolution of the Sixth Century B.C., which broke up the Ancient, and initiated New Civilizations, in which all our modern conflicts are already found in germ -- it was not till this Age that the interaction of Folklore and Culture-lore became more definitely historical, and more socially and politically important. And in both Sacred and Secular Literatures there are found, not only at this great Epoch, but thereafter at regularly recurring Epochs, characteristic manifestations of the recordation of Folklore by, and its influence on, the Cultured Classes.

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