Greek mythology is famous for its bizarre and fascinating creatures. Nearly everyone has heard of the serpent-haired Gorgon Medusa with her stony gaze, the bull-headed Minotaur in its Labyrinth, the malicious harpies with the heads of women and bodies of birds, and so forth. This list, however, is not about any of those creatures.
The familiar creatures that everyone knows are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the strange beings that haunt the much broader world of ancient Greek folklore. Even more bizarre and fascinating creatures can be found mentioned in obscure passages of Greek and Roman literature. Here is a list of some truly bizarre creatures from ancient Greek folklore that definitely weren’t mentioned in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.
Hippalektryon
The Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto famously invented the hippogryph, a creature with the front half of an eagle and the back half of a horse, for his epic poem Orlando Furioso, which he composed between 1506 and 1532. The hippogryph, however, has a much more obscure and much more ancient cousin: the hippalektryon, which has the front end of a horse and the back end of a rooster.
The ancient Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) mocks the hippalektryon’s appearance in his comedy The Frogs, which was originally performed in Athens at the City Dionysia in 405 BCE, in lines 930–938. He characterizes the hippalektryon as a strange-looking creature whose image adorned the sails of Athenian ships. The following exchange takes place in the play between the god Dionysos and the playwright Aischylos:
Διόνυσος: “νὴ τοὺς θεοὺς ἐγὼ γοῦν
ἤδη ποτ᾽ ἐν μακρῷ χρόνῳ νυκτὸς διηγρύπνησα
τὸν ξουθὸν ἱππαλεκτρυόνα ζητῶν τίς ἐστιν ὄρνις.”Αἰσχύλος: “σημεῖον ἐν ταῖς ναυσὶν ὦμαθέστατ᾽ ἐνεγέγραπτο.”
Διόνυσος: “ἐγὼ δὲ τὸν Φιλοξένου γ᾽ ᾤμην Ἔρυξιν εἶναι.”
This means, in my own English translation:
Dionysos: “By the deities! I at least
once lay awake at night for a long time
wondering what sort of bird the nimble hippalektryon is!”Aischylos: “You freaking idiot! It’s a symbol that’s written on the ships!”
Dionysos: “Oh, well, I thought that it was Eryxis, the son of Philoxenos.”
The name of this creature is sometimes Latinized as hippalectryon.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a terra-cotta figurine dating to between c. 500 and c. 470 BCE, discovered in the Greek polis of Thebes, depicting a warrior riding on the back of a hippalektryon
Giant flying dung beetle
The hippalektryon is a strange creature, but an even stranger beast appears in Aristophanes’s comedy Peace, which was first performed in Athens at the City Dionysia in 421 BCE, shortly before the approval of the Peace of Nikias. The protagonist of the play is a middle-aged Athenian citizen named Trygaios. The play begins with a scene of Trygaios’s slaves feeding excrement to a giant, flying dung-beetle. The slaves explain that their master has procured the dung beetle from the region around Mount Etna in Sicily.
Later in the play, Trygaios flies on the back of this giant dung beetle to the home of the deities to persuade them to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War. Upon reaching the home of the deities, however, Trygaios discovers that the gods are all gone and they have given the rule of the cosmos over to War.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ordinary dung beetle
Kerkopes
The Kerkopes were two mischievous monkey-like creatures who were said to inhabit Lydia and western Anatolia and were known for stealing things and causing trouble. Their name in Greek is Κέρκωπες (Kérkōpes), which appears to be derived from the Greek second-declension feminine noun κέρκος (kérkos), which means “tail.” The name therefore appears to mean “Tailed Ones.” (The Greek word κέρκος, however, was also a common slang word for “penis,” so make of that what you will.) Their name is sometimes Latinized as Cercopes.
The story goes that the Kerkopes once stole Herakles’s weapons and ran off with them. Herakles chased them to the city of Ephesos in Asia Minor, where he caught them and tied them by their feet to a yoke, which he carried over his shoulders, leaving them dangling upside-down behind him. A metope from the treasury at the mouth of the river Sele at Paestum, dating to the early sixth century BCE, depicts Herakles carrying the Kerkopes in this manner.
The Kerkopes were apparently well known in late antiquity as mythological tricksters, as evidenced by the fact that the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) cites them in a list of notorious cheats and scoundrels in his satirical treatise Alexandros the False Prophet, chapter four. He writes, as translated by Lionel Casson:
“. . . he [i.e., Alexandros] was worse than the Kerkopes, worse than Eurybatos or Phrynondas or Aristodemos or Sostratos.”
The story of Herakles’s capture of the Kerkopes is referenced, but not told in full, in Pseudo-Apollodoros’s Bibliotheke 2.6.3, a Greek mythographic work that was most likely composed in around the second century CE.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a metope from the treasury at the mouth of the river Sele at Paestum, dating to the early sixth century BCE, depicting Herakles carrying the Kerkopes upside-down, tied to a yoke over his shoulders
Empousa
Like people in other cultures all over the world and throughout history, the ancient Greeks told many stories about the terrifying demons and bogeymen that are supposed to haunt the night. One of the most bizarre and terrifying such bogies was the empousa, a fearsome shape-shifting demoness.
In Aristophanes’s comedy The Frogs, the god Dionysos and his slave Xanthias encounter the empousa in the Underworld. Xanthias says that the demoness takes various forms (including a bull, a mule, a beautiful woman, and a dog), that she has one leg made of bronze and another made of cow feces, and that her face is a ball of fire. The following exchange takes place between Xanthias and Dionysos in lines 287–296:
Ξανθίας: “καὶ μὴν ὁρῶ νὴ τὸν Δία θηρίον μέγα.”
Διόνυσος: “ποῖόν τι;”
Ξανθίας: “δεινόν: παντοδαπὸν γοῦν γίγνεται
τοτὲ μέν γε βοῦς, νυνὶ δ᾽ ὀρεύς, τοτὲ δ᾽ αὖ γυνὴ
ὡραιοτάτη τις.”Διόνυσος: “ποῦ ‘στι; φέρ᾽ ἐπ᾽ αὐτὴν ἴω.”
Ξανθίας: “ἀλλ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ αὖ γυνή ‘στιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἤδη κύων.”
Διόνυσος: “Ἔμπουσα τοίνυν ἐστί.”
Ξανθίας: “πυρὶ γοῦν λάμπεται
ἅπαν τὸ πρόσωπον.”Διόνυσος: “καὶ σκέλος χαλκοῦν ἔχει;
Ξανθίας: “νὴ τὸν Ποσειδῶ, καὶ βολίτινον θάτερον,
σάφ᾽ ἴσθι.”
This means, in my own translation:
Xanthias: “And now by Zeus I see a big monster!”
Dionysos: “What sort is it?”
Xanthias: “A formidable one! It takes every sort of shape!
At least at one moment it’s a bull, but then it’s a mule, and then it’s a woman—a beautiful one.”Dionysos: “Where is she? I’ll bear against her.”
Xanthias: “But she’s not a woman now, but rather a dog!”
Dionysos: “She must indeed be the empousa!”
Xanthias: “Ah, her whole face shines with fire.”
Dionysos: “And does she have a bronze leg?”
Xanthias: “By Poseidon, yes! And the other is made of cowshit I reckon clearly.”
The scholar Raymond J. Clark hypothesizes in his chapter “The Eleusinian Mysteries and Vergil’s ‘Appearance-of-a-Terrifying-Female-Apparition-in-the-Underworld’ Motif in Aeneid 6” in the book Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia, published in 2009 by the University of Texas Press, edited by Giovanni Casadio and Patricia A. Johnson, that Aristophanes probably based his account of the descent of Dionysos and Xanthias into the Underworld on a now-lost epic poem about the descent of Herakles into the Underworld, in which Herakles encountered a Gorgon at the same point in his journey at which Dionysos and Xanthias encounter the empousa.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Greek actors Kostas Triantafyllopoulos and Thymios Karakatsanis playing Xanthias and Dionysos respectively in a performance of Aristophanes’s Frogs at the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros in 1990
Kynokephaloi
Also known as “Hemikynes,” the Kynokephaloi are a race of humanoid creatures said to dwell in a distant, far-off land. They have human bodies, but the heads of dogs. Their name in Greek is Κυνοκέφαλοι (Kynoképhaloi), which is derived from the Greek third-declension noun κύων (kýōn), meaning “dog,” and the first-declension feminine noun κεφαλή (kephalḗ), meaning “head.” The name therefore literally means “Dog-Headed People.” This name is sometimes Latinized as Cynocephali.
The earliest surviving mention of the Kynokephaloi occurs in Fragment 40A of the partially lost poem Catalogue of Women, which was attributed in ancient times to the poet Hesiodos of Askre, who lived in around the eighth century BCE in the region of Boiotia. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) briefly mentions the Kynokephaloi in his book The Histories 4.191.4.
The earliest known detailed description of the Kynokephaloi, however, comes from the Greek historian Ktesias of Knidos, who wrote a work titled Indika in the early fourth century BCE. Ktesias’s Indika has not survived, but a book review of it containing a summary written by the Byzantine patriarch Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) has. Photios summarizes Ktesias’s description of the Kynokephaloi in his Myriobiblon 72 as follows, as translated by J. H. Freese:
“On these mountains [in India] there live men with the head of a dog, whose clothing is the skin of wild beasts. They speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this manner make themselves understood by each other. Their teeth are larger than those of dogs, their nails like those of these animals, but longer and rounder. They inhabit the mountains as far as the river Indos. Their complexion is swarthy. They are extremely just, like the rest of the Indians with whom they associate. They understand the Indian language but are unable to converse, only barking or making signs with their hands and fingers by way of reply, like the deaf and dumb. They are called by the Indians Kalystrii, in Greek Kynokephaloi. They live on raw meat and number about 120,000 . . .”
“The Kynokephaloi living on the mountains do not practise any trade but live by hunting. When they have killed an animal they roast it in the sun. They also rear numbers of sheep, goats, and asses, drinking the milk of the sheep and whey made from it. They eat the fruit of the Siptachora, whence amber is procured, since it is sweet. They also dry it and keep it in baskets, as the Greeks keep their dried grapes.”
“They make rafts which they load with this fruit together with well-cleaned purple flowers and 260 talents of amber, with the same quantity of the purple dye, and 1000 additional talents of amber, which they send annually to the king of India. They exchange the rest for bread, flour, and cotton stuffs with the Indians, from whom they also buy swords for hunting wild beasts, bows, and arrows, being very skilful in drawing the bow and hurling the spear. They cannot be defeated in war, since they inhabit lofty and inaccessible mountains. Every five years the king sends them a present of 300,000 bows, as many spears, 120,000 shields, and 50,000 swords.”
“They do not live in houses, but in caves. They set out for the chase with bows and spears, and as they are very swift of foot, they pursue and soon overtake their quarry. The women have a bath once a month, the men do not have a bath at all, but only wash their hands. They anoint themselves three times a month with oil made from milk and wipe themselves with skins.”
“The clothes of men and women alike are not skins with the hair on, but skins tanned and very fine. The richest wear linen clothes, but they are few in number. They have no beds, but sleep on leaves or grass. He who possesses the greatest number of sheep is considered the richest, and so in regard to their other possessions. All, both men and women, have tails above their hips, like dogs, but longer and more hairy. They are just, and live longer than any other men, 170, sometimes 200 years.”
The Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) describes the Kynokephaloi in his Natural History 7.23. He cites the Greek historian and ethnographer Megasthenes (lived c. 350 – c. 290 BCE), who served as an ambassador of the Hellenistic king Seleukos I Nikator to the court of the northwest Indian king Chandragupta Maurya and wrote a work about India titled Indika, as his source. Pliny writes, as translated by H. Rackham:
“Megasthenes states that on the mountain named Nulus there are people with their feet turned backwards and with eight toes on each foot, while on many of the mountains there is a tribe of human beings with dogs’ heads, who wear a covering of wild beasts’ skins, whose speech is a bark and who live on the produce of hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails as weapons; he says that they numbered more than 120,000 when he published his work.”
The later Roman orator Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE) also mentions the Kynokephaloi in his treatise On the Nature of Animals, which he wrote in Greek.
ABOVE: Illustration of a Kynokephalos from the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493
Even after the Greeks and Romans converted the Christianity, they continued to tell stories about the Kynokephaloi. In fact, since at least the fifth century CE, the Christian martyr Saint Christophoros has been frequently described as a Kynokephalos.
A story recorded in The Martyrdom of Saint Christopher claims that the emperor Decius, who didn’t know that Saint Christophoros had the head of a dog, sent two hundred soldiers to apprehend him, ordering them to chop him into pieces if he tried to resist and to bring his head to him on a platter. When the head was brought before him, Decius was supposedly so shocked and horrified that he nearly fell off his throne.
For most of the Middle Ages, Saint Christophoros was usually portrayed in art with the head of a man, since it went against tradition for icon-painters to portray him with the head of a dog. In the Byzantine Roman Empire during the Late Middle Ages and in Eastern Orthodox countries thereafter, however, he became more regularly portrayed in iconography with the head of a dog.
ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox icon dating to the seventeenth century CE from the city of Kermira in Kappadokia, depicting Saint Christophoros with the head of a dog
Akephaloi
The Akephaloi, also known as the Blemmyai, the Sternophthalmoi, or the “Headless Men,” are a race of bizarre humanoid creatures said by the ancient Greeks to reside in North Africa. They have no heads, but instead have their faces in their chests and their eyes where their nipples should be. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos makes the earliest known mention of the Akephaloi in his Histories 4.191.4, the same passage in which he mentions the Kynokephaloi. Herodotos writes:
“καὶ γὰρ οἱ ὄφιες οἱ ὑπερμεγάθεες καὶ οἱ λέοντες κατὰ τούτους εἰσὶ καὶ οἱ ἐλέφαντές τε καὶ ἄρκτοι καὶ ἀσπίδες τε καὶ ὄνοι οἱ τὰ κέρεα ἔχοντες καὶ οἱ κυνοκέφαλοι καὶ οἱ ἀκέφαλοι οἱ ἐν τοῖσι στήθεσι τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχοντες, ὡς δὴ λέγονταί γε ὑπὸ Λιβύων, καὶ οἱ ἄγριοι ἄνδρες καὶ γυναῖκες ἄγριαι, καὶ ἄλλα πλήθεϊ πολλὰ θηρία ἀκατάψευστα.”
This means, in my own translation:
“And indeed, according to them, there are overly large snakes and lions and elephants and bears and asps and donkeys who have horns and the Kynokephaloi and the Akephaloi who have their eyes in their chests (as at least these things are said by the Libyans) and there are savage men and savage women, and many other wild animals in great number that are not made-up.”
Herodotos is notorious for retelling all kinds of implausible folk tales, but it is noteworthy that, when he mentions the Kynokephaloi and the Akephaloi, he clearly dissociates himself from the report, carefully attributing the report to “the Libyans” to disclaim any personal stake in its trustworthiness. His use of the word “ἀκατάψευστα,” meaning “not fabulous” or “not made-up,” to describe the creatures he has not mentioned also hints that he is personally skeptical of the existence of some of the more fabulous creatures that he has just mentioned, undoubtedly including the Kynokephaloi and the Akephaloi in particular.
Although Herodotos was probably skeptical of the existence of the Akephaloi, they are widely referenced in later ancient works on anthropology and ethnography. For instance, Pliny the Elder briefly summarizes a description of the Akephaloi by Ktesias of Knidos in his Natural History 7.23. Pliny writes, as translated by H. Rackham:
“Ktesias writes that . . . westward from these there are some people without necks, having their eyes in their shoulders.”
The Akephaloi are frequently depicted in late medieval maps and manuscripts.
ABOVE: Illustration of an Akephalos from a map drawn by Guillaume Le Testu in his book Cosmographie Universelle, dating to 1556
Panotioi
The Panotioi, also known as “Phanesioi,” are another bizarre race of people from the far-flung corners of the globe described by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History 4.94. According to Pliny, the Panotioi, whose name in Greek means “All-Eared People,” reside in the barren, frozen islands of the far north. He tells us that they have enormous, floppy earlobes that cover their whole bodies and that they do not wear any other form of clothing aside from their own earlobes. Their earlobes are described as being so huge that they can snuggle up inside them as though they were blankets. Pliny writes, in H. Rackham’s translation:
“Also some islands called the Oeonae are reported of which the inhabitants live on birds’ eggs and oats, and others on which people are born with horses’ feet, which gives them their Greek name Hippopodes; there are others called the Islands of the Phanesii in which the natives have very large ears covering the whole of their bodies, which are otherwise left naked.”
The Panotioi appear in a number of late medieval maps and illustrations, just like the Kynokephaloi and the Akephaloi.
ABOVE: Illustration by Jean-Baptiste Coriolan in Ulyssis Aldovandi’s 1642 book Monstrorum Historia, depicting a Panotios
Skiapodes
The Skiapodes are a legendary race of humanoid creatures said to reside in the exotic lands of the far east. The earliest surviving mention of these creatures occurs in Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, which was first performed in Athens at the City Dionysia in 414 BCE. The chorus briefly mentions the Skiapodes in line 1553, using their presence to signal a remote location, saying:
“πρὸς δὲ τοῖς Σκιάποσιν λίμνη. . .”
This means:
“And near the Skiapodes there is a pond. . .”
Aristophanes does not describe what the Skiapodes look like, but, in later sources, they are described as having only one leg in the middles of their bodies. They are said to lie on the ground with their feet in the air over their heads to keep themselves shaded. On account of this, their name in Greek is Σκιάποδες (Skiápodes), which literally means “Shadow-Feet.”
The earliest detailed description of the Skiapodes seems to have been given by Ktesias of Knidos in his Indika. Pliny the Elder cites Ktesias’s account in his encyclopedia Natural History 7.23. He writes, in Rackham’s translation:
“Ktesias writes that also among a certain race of India the women bear children only once in their lifetime, and the children begin to turn grey directly after birth; he also describes a tribe of men called the Monocoli who have only one leg, and who move in jumps with surprising speed; the same are called the Umbrella-foot tribe, because in the hotter weather they lie on their backs on the ground and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet; and that they are not far away from the Trogodytai.”
Like the Kynokephaloi, the Akephaloi, and the Panotioi, the Skiapodes are often depicted in late medieval maps and illustrations. They also appear in the children’s novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, written by the British author C. S. Lewis, which was published in 1952 as part of his series The Chronicles of Narnia.
ABOVE: Illustration of a Skiapous from the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493
Giant, furry, gold-digging ants in Pakistan
Herodotos of Halikarnassos records in The Histories 3.102–105 that, in one of the far eastern provinces of the Achaemenid Empire, in what is now Pakistan, where the land is mostly desert, there is a species of giant furry ants the size of dogs, who dig in the dirt and unearth large quantities of gold dust, which the locals then collect. Herodotos writes, as translated by A. D. Godley:
“Other Indians dwell near the town of Kaspatyros and the Paktyic country, north of the rest of India; these live like the Baktrians; they are of all Indians the most warlike, and it is they who are sent for the gold; for in these parts all is desolate because of the sand. In this sandy desert are ants, not as big as dogs but bigger than foxes; the Persian king has some of these, which have been caught there. These ants live underground, digging out the sand in the same way as the ants in Greece, to which they are very similar in shape, and the sand which they carry from the holes is full of gold. It is for this sand that the Indians set forth into the desert.”
“They harness three camels apiece, males on either side sharing the drawing, and a female in the middle: the man himself rides on the female, that when harnessed has been taken away from as young an offspring as may be. Their camels are as swift as horses, and much better able to bear burdens besides. I do not describe the camel’s appearance to Greeks, for they know it; but I shall tell them something that they do not know concerning it: the hindlegs of the camel have four thighbones and four knee-joints; its genitals are turned towards the tail between the hindlegs.”
“Thus and with teams so harnessed the Indians ride after the gold, being careful to be engaged in taking it when the heat is greatest; for the ants are then out of sight underground. Now in these parts the sun is hottest in the morning, not at midday as elsewhere, but from sunrise to the hour of market-closing. Through these hours it is much hotter than in Hellas at noon, so that men are said to sprinkle themselves with water at this time. At midday the sun’s heat is nearly the same in India as elsewhere. As it goes to afternoon, the sun of India has the power of the morning sun in other lands; as day declines it becomes ever cooler, until at sunset it is exceedingly cold.”
The giant, furry, gold-digging ants are perhaps the most utterly bizarre creatures mentioned in any work of ancient Greek literature. What makes them even more amazing is that the stories about them may have been inspired by real animals.
ABOVE: Illustration of the Indian gold hunters described by Herodotos from the book History of Darius the Great by Jacob Abbott, printed in 1854
The French ethnologist Michel Peissel published a book in 1984 titled The Ants’ Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the Himalayas, in which he presents his hypothesis that the story recorded by Herodotos may originate from the Himalayan marmots of the Deosai Plateau.
Peissel notes that, just as Herodotos reports, gold dust really is plentiful on the Deosai Plateau. The Himalayan marmots are furry and the same size as the “ants” Herodotos describes. Furthermore, Peissel notes that he interviewed members of the Minaro tribes that inhabit the region, who told him that the marmots unearth large quantities of gold dust when digging their burrows and that, for generations, they and their ancestors have collected the gold dust from their burrows.
Finally, Peissel notes that the Old Persian word for “marmot” literally means “mountain ant.” Herodotos did not speak Old Persian, so it is highly probable that a report about the Himalayan marmots that originated in Old Persian got muddled in translation, leading Herodotos to mistakenly believe that there were giant ants in Pakistan.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Himalayan marmot, which may be the true inspiration for the story of the giant, furry, gold-digging ants
Oh really nice one! Thank you so much!
I actually wrote the first draft of this article over two whole years ago, because I was planning to sell it for money to a website that publishes fun articles about pop historical topics, but I ended up never submitting it because I didn’t think the website was credible enough and I was uncomfortable with the idea of giving someone else exclusive ownership of my work. Then, last Saturday, I discovered the article saved as a Word document on my computer and realized that I could turn it into an article for my website. Thus, I heavily revised it, added pictures and direct quotations from the ancient sources, and published it.
I think that the overall tone of the article is a bit uneven, since I originally wrote it as a sort of fun, easy-to-understand article about weird creatures from ancient Greek folklore, but then, when I revised it, I added quotations in Greek and detailed analysis of Greek words and their etymologies. The result feels like a bizarre mish-mash of the most childish giddiness about weird imaginary creatures and the most extreme scholarly pedantry about the Greek language.
But, then again, I suppose that is kind of my writing style in general.
I think is refreshing from timt to time to have somerhing else. Glad you found the article and punlished it
On the contrary you have stuck the right note in exegesis. Digests are to be suspected and subjects devoid of humour and surprise are to be suspected. This is a rare blog for balance.
Your translation of the exchange between Dionysus and Aeschylus on what a hippalectryon is gave me a genuine chuckle.
In the Greek, Aischylos addresses Dionysos as “ὦμαθέστατ᾽.” I suppose that the most literal translation of this would be “Oh most unlearned person!” I, however, decided that “You freaking idiot!” best captures the sentiment.
The ancient Greeks sure had one heck of a imagination. Great article, btw.
Thank you so much!
How the hell did the greek imagined this creatures, I need answers! Great article!
Well, I don’t think that these creatures are really so difficult to imagine. You just need a little bit of creativity. I know that my sister and I made up creatures just as bizarre as any of the ones mentioned here, if not even more bizarre, when we were children.
According to a guy who commented on a recent tweet of mine called Joseph A P Wilson, it could also be a complex game of telephone, particularly when talking about mythical creatures in far off lands. For example, the Sciapods who shade themselves with their foot could just be garbled information of Indians using parasols, overtime as it was passed down from person to person it became distorted and embellished, not too different to how Herodotus confused marmots for giant gold digging ants.
A great article! By coincidence yesterday I visited one of those stately homes that are open to the public in England (West Wycombe house). All the ceilings were painted and one of the ceilings had Ichthyocentaurs painted on it. These have the head and upper body of a man the lower body and front legs of a horse and the rear is a fish’s tail.
I had never heard of Ichthyocentaurs before so I looked them up. They are not mentioned in Greek or Roman literature but do appear in Greek art – the first example being the Pergamum altar of the second century BCE.
An ichthyosaur could have (far earlier) been visual shorthand for immigrants that brought horses, or maybe shipborne cavalry.
I highly doubt it. What you’re doing here is a kind of mythological interpretation known as “euhemerism,” which is when someone assumes that a myth must have some historical basis and then tries to imagine what that historical basis might have been without evidence. In general, I tend to be highly skeptical of this sort of mythological speculating.