The two forms of afterlife overlap to a certain extent: party-strife was one of the motives for collecting or quoting hija'; yet the distinction between the early, predominantly ' functional' stage and the ensuing 'literary' stage is an important one; a distinction not always clearly understood by the numerous participants on the discussion of hija'. In using this distinction I do not want to imply, of course, that literature is not functional: by 'literary' I mean the dominance of the 'poetic' function over the emotive, conative and referential functions in the well-known Jakobsonian schema.