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Julian the Apostate tried to revive paganism and later Proclus (d. 485) himself worked in the same direction. Qùthàmà might also be one of these late philosophical pagans who followed suit and, perhaps, added local elements to their pagan world view: the society which he describes is, in any case, pagan. Yet the Biblical elements do show that he was already heavily influenced by either Judaism or Christianity, or both, in some of their forms. 63 It does not seem possible with our present state of knowledge to be more exact about the background of Qùthàmà.

One cannot but agree with Green, who writes (1992: 82): “At the same time, however, we must be careful not to overvalue the effects of religious syncretism, for (. ” In the case of the Nabatean Agriculture, we may see how philosophical astral speculation is found in the text side by side with practical magic. The philosophical layer did not eradicate the popular layer, and thus we have in the Nabatean Agriculture a document from which we can sift information concerning rural religious life, despite the more sophisticated philosophical layer superadded to it.

Brock (1977). 30 chapter one sources may well have been oral. It is also possible that Ibn Wa˙shiyya may have enlarged the text he was translating with extracts from other sources, as well as information culled from his oral sources. As the moral integrity of Ibn Wa˙shiyya is not at stake, I see no reason to deny that either he or Qùthàmà could have changed these, admittedly hypothetical, oral sources into written ones to enhance the authority of the book. In fact, we do know from the Preface that the author or the translator, or both, wanted us to believe in the great antiquity of the text, which would go well with creating ancient sources out of contemporary oral reports.