This book had its genesis in 1980 when Stanley Hochman, the editor in chief of the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, commissioned me to write forty entries, including a lengthy survey of Islamic theatre, for the second enlarged edition. Later, however, this survey was excluded on the grounds that the plan of the encyclopedia envisaged entries on either individual play wrights or on dramatic forms, and it did not fit into other of these two categories; moreover, there was a risk of overlapping or conflict with the entries on Arabic and Persian theatre. In this way, a number of pages were left in my hands, and these formed the nucleus of the present book. This study has certain objectives. Firstly, to define the basic patterns of the rituals and predramatics of the ancient cultures of the Near East. Secondly, to elucidate the forms of the earlier rituals and predramatic performances in the Turkic and Islamic countries. And thirdly, to clarify the relationship between the first and the second through extant materials and survivals. Though the expansion of Turkic and Islamic cultures spread these out centrifugally in different areas away from one another, here the focus is especially on the eastern Mediterranean regions and on Central Asia, because the repeated patterns seem so clear and so explicit. When they are considered as a whole, it seems unreasonable to think that all these similar observances are unrelated. In the course of thousands of years they developed, degenerated, simplified, or changed motives, and most survived purely as entertainment. Yet, beneath all these changes, the underlying pattern can still be detected, so I hope to demonstrate how that purportedly pagan native culture was preserved and disseminated, ultimately to become part of the cultural legacy of this area of the world. The emphasis has been on rituals and predramatic observances. These expressions of Man's spiritual and cultural life-acted out situations directly, impressively and vividly by body movements - are very valuable, since they are the seed from which artistic genres could, and would germinate. Some did indeed develop into full-fledged drama. But the investigator attempting to determine their original forms must follow a labyrinthine path, since the time span involved is so gigantic, our knowledge of the way people lived in the remote past inadequate, and Islamic culture developed out of a complex blending of cultures.

---