Een Arabische Orestes

In this paper I point out remarkable similarities between the Orestes myth and the Arabic story of al-Zir. In addition to the parallels adduced by the Egyptian critic Louis ‘Awad (1968) and in my earlier study ‘Blood on the Wedding Bed’ (2017), I argue here that the killing of a she-camel which ignited the Arabic Basus War is a parallel to Agamemnon’s killing of a sacred deer on the eve of the Trojan War. I propose five criteria to distinguish between weak and strong parallels, and argue that there are not only similarities between single episodes from the Orestes myth and the story of al-Zir, but that the main plot line of both stories is also conspicuously similar.