The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority of a few hundred thousand souls, living mainly in Northern Iraq, as well as Syria, Turkey and the Caucasus. Yezidis follow a highly syncretistic religion of their own, based exclusively on oral tradition. Yezidi mythology, besides showing the influence of both Sufism and a pre-Zoroastrian Western Iranian mythology, has also incorporated and adapted to its particular religious system certain myths and motifs which once enjoyed widespread popularity among the interrelated religious movements of Late Antiquity, ranging from Judaism through Christianity to Gnosticism and Manichaeism.

These myths and motifs, though long since relegated to oblivion in the West, can be found in the religious lore of the Yezidis, as well as of numerous other groups, both medieval and contemporary, in the Middle East. Hence it is argued that they are the vestiges of a common cultural substratum once shared by the people of the region. Placing these motifs within the context of a religious language originating in Late Antiquity is not only the key to a better understanding of Yezidi religion, but also to the way it developed and the working of oral tradition in the Middle East in general. In this context, establishing the late antique origins of some motifs reveals the way literacy interacted with orality in the region. Furthermore, it highlights the long lasting influence late antique religious thought had on the development of religious imagery and thinking in the area.