?
Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat: The Tales of the Fabled Hero in Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic Oral Sources
The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded
many folklore texts. During the author’s fieldwork (together with Christina Benyaminova) with
one speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the sophisticated plot of a folk story with a hero named Mirza
Pamat attracted his attention. A comparison of this story with other Neo-Aramaic field corpora
has revealed not only that the plot of this story has clear parallels, but that the hero of the story is
popular among several Christian groups of Neo-Aramaic speakers. Further research has shown
that Mîrza Mihemed as a folktale hero is not restricted to the oral tradition of Aramaic-speaking
Christians. Similar names may be found in Persian, Arabic, and Azerbaijani folk traditions, but
the hero with the name Mîrza Mihemed or Mîrza Mehmûd is especially popular in the Kurdish
oral tradition of fairytales. This suggests that the corpus of Kurdish tales about Mîrza Mihemed
is the possible source of the Neo-Aramaic fairytales with this name of a hero.