Xidir Ilyas / Xidir Nebî in the Documentary Record of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This multilingual scholarly preprint presents a comparative historical and philological study of the feast and fast of Xidir Ilyas / Xidir Nebî, with particular attention to the Yezidi tradition, the Kurdish cultural sphere, the Armenian ritual complex of Surb Sargis, and the limits of comparison with Dumuzi/Tammuz traditions of the ancient Near East. Rather than assuming a single historical origin, the study disaggregates the ritual complex into independently testable elements and traces their earliest verifiable documentary or ethnographic attestations. It distinguishes between the history of the sacred figures, the history of the three-day fast, and the later documentation of ritual food, abstention from water, divinatory dreams concerning a future marriage partner, and equine and hoofprint symbolism. The study identifies Claudius James Rich’s 1821 account from Bahzani as the earliest verified field witness in the examined corpus to a three-day Yezidi fast associated with Khidder Elias. Mela Mehmûdê Bayazîdî’s 1857–1858 description provides the earliest verified composite documentation of the wider ritual complex in the Kurdish milieu of Bayazid, while S. A. Yegiazarov’s 1891 account confirms substantial elements among the Yezidis of Erivan Province and explicitly records calendrical coincidence with the Armenian feast of Surb Sargis. Armenian materials published by Ghevont Alishan and Manuk Abeghian document further structural parallels involving salty food, abstention from water, dream divination, Pokhindz, the white horse of Saint Sarkis, and the hoofprint motif. The study concludes that the evidence is best explained through historical layering within a “Regional Ritual Complex,” rather than through a demonstrable single origin or a direct line of transmission from one religious tradition to another. It also rejects direct historical continuity from Dumuzi/Tammuz while retaining limited structural comparison within the broader cultural history of the Near East. The central methodological distinction throughout is between the earliest documented witness and the historical origin of a practice. This Zenodo record contains the Arabic, English, and German versions of the same academic study, Version 1.0.