The article deals with the unfinished ethnographic work of A. E. Krymsky "Materials for studying the language and life of Syria", which contains unknown data on the life and mythology of the Arabs of Near Asia. The main attention is paid to the issues of the culture of Christian Arabs and the role of A. E. Krymsky in the study of the etiology of Arabs. Keywords: A. E. Krymsky, ethnography, folklore, Arabs, Christians, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine. Today, most scientists pay attention to the so-called field materials - modern ethnographic studies of the culture and everyday life of the peoples of the world. But archival materials sometimes contain data that is no longer found in modern ethnographic works. Such unexplored archival legacies include the A. E. Krymsky Foundation at the Vernadsky Institute of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ukraine in Kiev (hereinafter referred to as the National Library of Ukraine), where the unfinished and unpublished ethnographic work of the scientist "Materials for Studying the Language and Everyday Life of Syria" (1930s)*is kept. * In 1918, A. E. Krymsky received an invitation from V. I. Vernadsky (1863-1945) to participate in the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. At the same time, the scientist moved a significant part of his library from Moscow to Kiev, which became the basis of the library of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, that is, the modern National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernadsky [Borisenko, 2002, p.25]. Among these books was his personal archive with manuscripts, the fate of which remained unknown after the scientist's arrest in 1941. Thus, I. Shubinsky claimed that the archival materials of A. E. Krymsky were transferred in 1958 by the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR to the Central Scientific Library named after V. I. Vernadsky (Shubinsky, 1962). But how they got to the Institute, he did not say. A. B. Khalidov believed that his archive came to the li ... Read more