Time Depth of Pontic Folktales

Time Depth of Pontic Folktales Thursday, June 22, 2023 I've spent the day cleaning up my document on the Characteristics of Pontic tales. I last worked on this about ten years ago and had forgotten some of the details. One thing I haven’t thought about much since I started working on these recently has to do with time depth. The time-depth of our current corpus of Pontic runs about 125 years. The earliest recorded folktales are found in Savvas Ioannides' history of Trebizond, published in 1870. He was active in the region as of 1864, the earliest point at which he could have collected them. The most recent that I know of were are the tales collected by Savvas Porfiriou Papadopoulos in the 1990s and published in the Arheion Pontou. The folktales themselves, however, are much older. Some can be traced back to antiquity (e.g., Ancient Greece, “The Cyclops,” (Parharides 1885), Ancient Rome, “Androcles and the Lion,” (Papadopoulos 1996-1997), Ancient Egypt, “The Two Brothers” (Lianides 1959), Ancient China, “Cinderella” (Fostiropoulou 1938), Ancient Rome, “The Animal Husband” (Fostiropoulou 1941)<a href="#_ftn5" style="color:blue; text-decoration:underline">,</a> Ancient Israel, “The Grateful Dead” (Valavanis 1885)). A mythos (fable), The Hawk and the Fox, found in Ofis and Oinoe at least, can also be found in the archaic Greek poet Archilochus (c.650BC).. Others relate to medieval sources such as exempla (e.g., “The Pasha’s Daughter’s Dead Lover” (Dawkins 1914)) or hagiography (e.g., “Giannitsis” (Valavanis 1958)); yet others seem to derive more recent sources (e.g., “Vampires,” (Dawkins 1914), “The King and the Bell" (Dawkins 1914)).