Khidr Ilyas and Khidr Nabi in the Documentary Record: Fasting, Dream Divination, Ritual Food, and the Horse's Trace across Kurdish, Yezidi, and Armenian Traditions

This study reconstructs the documentary history of practices associated with Khidr Ilyas and Khidr Nabi and examines the limits of comparison with Armenian traditions of Saint Sarkis and selected ancient Mesopotamian materials. It distinguishes between the history of names and sacred figures, on the one hand, and the documentary history of ritual practices, on the other. The analysis treats fasting, calendrical position, ritual food, thirst or water abstention, marriage divination through dreams, and signs associated with a sacred horse as separate evidentiary variables. Its principal documentary corpus includes Claudius James Rich’s account from Bashiqa in December 1820, Mela Mahmud Bayazidi’s Kurdish material as published by M. B. Rudenko, S. A. Yegiazarov’s 1891 study of the Yezidis of the Erivan region, and Manuk Abeghian’s 1899 collection of Armenian popular belief. These witnesses are supplemented by Islamic and Persian narrative traditions, the late-thirteenth-century Uyghur inscription at Mar Behnam, Yezidi religious and ethnographic texts, and selected Sumerian compositions. The study identifies significant descriptive convergence, especially in marriage-related dream divination and signs associated with the horse, while also documenting substantial differences in food preparation, domestic setting, water instructions, calendrical rules, terminology, and source provenance. The evidence therefore supports a differentiated regional historical model rather than the transmission of an intact ritual complex or a single line of historical descent. This Zenodo record contains three complete versions of the study: English (canonical scholarly version), Arabic, and German.