Ancient and Medieval People Believed that Unicorns Were Real—and Murderous

No one can deny that Death of a Unicorn, released in March of this year, is a very strange film. It is a horror comedy in which a man and his daughter driving their car through a remote forest accidentally hit and fatally injure a unicorn. Soon, the unicorn’s body ends up in the hands of Big Pharma executives, who discover its horn and blood can miraculously cure all ailments, and want to sell its ground-up horn and blood to wealthy customers for big profits—until the unicorn’s angry parents come to seek violent revenge for their child.

Readers may, however, be surprised to learn that this film, for all its surreal imagery, is actually much closer in important ways to how ancient and medieval sources describe unicorns than perhaps any other recent media depiction. While twenty-first-century popular culture generally portrays unicorns as friendly, docile creatures and associates them with plush toys and backpacks for young girls, in premodern traditions, the most consistent traits associated with unicorns are their fierceness, their impossibility to tame, their devotion to their foals, and their ability to kill humans who would seek to capture them in large numbers.

The earliest possible artistic depiction of a unicorn

To understand how premodern traditions describe unicorns, we need to begin by exploring where the idea of a unicorn originates from. Ancient Greek and Roman sources consistently describe the unicorn’s native range as the Indian subcontinent, so it makes sense to start our search there.

The oldest known civilization in South Asia is the Indus Valley Civilization, which was in its mature phase from around 2600 BCE to around 1900 BCE. Surviving seals from this civilization appear to depict four-legged animals with only one horn, and some modern viewers have described these creatures as unicorns.

I, however, reserve serious doubts about the accuracy of this characterization. Notably, all the surviving depictions are fairly two-dimensional and in profile, which means that the creature may have a second horn that is simply on the other side of its head. I think it is very likely that the animal depicted in the Indus Valley Civilization seals is simply an aurochs, which is an extinct bovine species that was still widespread at the time the seals were carved.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a mold from an Indus Valley Civilization seal dating between c. 2500 and c. 1500 BCE, on display in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai

The earliest surviving historical description of a unicorn

Setting aside the seals from the Indus Valley Civilization that might depict unicorns, the earliest known source that definitely describes unicorns is the book Indika, or Indian History, which the Greek historian and physician Ktesias of Knidos wrote around the late fifth century BCE.

Ktesias worked as a physician at the court of the Achaemenid shah Artaxerxes II (ruled 405/4 – 359/8 BCE), and his Indika is primarily based on stories about India that he heard during the time he spent at the Achaemenid court. He probably never visited India himself, which may explain why he seems to have believed that unicorns were real animals that existed there.

Ktesias’s Indika has not survived to the present day in its entirety, but the much later Greek patriarch Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) had access to Ktesias’s work and wrote a book review of it, in which he quotes Ktesias’s description of the unicorn, thereby preserving it for us. Photios’s quotation of Ktesias’s description can be found in his Myrobiblon 72. It reads as follows, adapted from the translation of J. H. Freese:

In India, there are wild asses as large as horses, or even larger. Their body is white, their head reddish purple, their eyes bluish, and they have a horn in their forehead about a cubit in length. The lower part of the horn, for about two palms distance from the forehead, is quite white, the middle is black, the upper part, which terminates in a point, is a very flaming red. Those who drink out of cups made from it are proof against convulsions, epilepsy, and even poison, provided that before or after having taken it they drink some wine or water or other liquid out of these cups.

The domestic and wild asses of other countries and all other solid-hoofed animals have neither huckle bones nor gallbladder, whereas the Indian asses have both. Their huckle bone is the most beautiful that I have seen, like that of the ox in size and appearance; it is as heavy as lead and of the color of cinnabar all through. These animals are very strong and swift; neither the horse nor any other animal can overtake them. At first, they run slowly, but the longer they run their pace increases wonderfully, and becomes faster and faster.

There is only one way of catching them. When they take their young to feed, if they are surrounded by a large number of horsemen, being unwilling to abandon their foals, they show fight, butt with their horns, kick, bite, and kill many men and horses. They are at last taken, after they have been pierced with arrows and spears; for it is impossible to capture them alive. Their flesh is too bitter to eat, and they are only hunted for the sake of the horns and huckle-bones.

Ktesias’s description is very interesting, because the unicorn he describes is startlingly different from the unicorn that most westerners are familiar with today. For instance, you will notice that Ktesias does not describe the unicorn as a kind of horse, but rather as a very large wild ass. To get a sense of what sort of creature Ktesias might have been imagining, below are some photographs of actual Indian wild asses.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of two Indian wild asses

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an adult male Indian wild ass

Unicorns in the Hellenistic and Roman world

Ktesias may have been the first ancient author to describe the unicorn, but he was far from the last. As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in 2020, the translators of the Septuagint, the Greek-language translation of the texts of the Hebrew Bible produced over the course of the third and second centuries BCE, mistranslated the Hebrew word רְאֵם (rĕʾēm), which most likely originally referred to an aurochs, as μονόκερως (monókerōs), which means “unicorn.” This is the reason why some English Bible translations such as the King James Version (KJV) mention “unicorns,” even though no reference to such creatures occurs in the original Hebrew.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) includes in his Natural History 8.31 an influential summary of Ktesias’s description of the unicorn from four centuries earlier. He writes, as translated by H. Rackham for the Loeb Classical Library:

He [i.e., Ktesias] says that in India there are also oxen with solid hoofs and one horn, and a wild animal, named axis, with the hide of a fawn but with more spots and whiter ones, belonging to the ritual of Father Liber (the Orsaean Indians hunt monkeys that are a bright white all over the body); but that the fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead. They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive.

Although Pliny cites Ktesias as his source, his description of unicorn departs from Ktesias’s in crucial details. Notably, he makes the unicorn’s horn all black, rather than just black for a section in the middle. Nonetheless, he agrees with Ktesias about the most important fact: unicorns are the fiercest of all animals, and it is impossible to capture one alive.

The Physiologos and the Christian theological interpretation of the unicorn

Pliny the Elder lived at a time when the Jesus movement that would become Christianity was just starting to emerge and spread. Within a few centuries, Christianity would spread throughout the Roman Empire to become first a significant minority religion and, eventually, in the fourth century CE, the hegemonic religion of the Roman world.

Many early Christians believed that, when God created animals, he intentionally designed each animal’s anatomy and behavior to convey symbolic messages about theology and morality. Christians believed that they could “discover” these symbolic messages by studying animals through the lens of faith.

Some early Christians even believed that the hidden allegorical meanings of animal anatomy were crucial to the correct understanding of scripture. The early Christian theologian and apologist Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) in his Paidagogos 2.10.85–86 argues at length that the prohibition against eating hyenas in Deuteronomy 14:7 should be interpreted allegorically as a prohibition against same-sex intercourse, since hyenas are addicted to promiscuous sex, and the male hyena has an orifice resembling a vagina that it frequently uses to have sex with other males.

(Clement goes on for several paragraphs discussing the hyena’s reproductive anatomy and sexual habits in detail. His discussion is so explicit that multiple nineteenth-century translators censored this chapter of the Paidagogos by translating it into Latin instead of English!)

ABOVE: Illustration by the French engraver André Thévet in his 1584 work Les Vrais Portraits Et Vies Des Hommes Illustres, showing what he imagined the church father and noted hyena orifice enthusiast Clement of Alexandria might have looked like. (No one knows what Clement really looked like.)

It was in this context that, sometime between the second and fourth centuries CE, an anonymous Christian author wrote a work in Greek titled Physiologos, which describes the anatomy and behavior of various animals and the theological and moral messages that God meant to convey to believers when he designed them.

The Physiologos became one of the most widely read and translated early Christian texts. By the fifth century CE, it had already been translated into Latin; over the course of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, it was translated into Coptic, Geʿez, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Old English, Old High German, Old French, Old Icelandic, and various Slavic languages. There was hardly a European language that didn’t have a translation of the Physiologos at some point or another.

Because of its popularity, the Physiologos was expanded and abridged many times, and many different versions of it have been passed down, but one thing most of them have in common is a section describing the unicorn and its theological significance.

The Physiologos repeats the familiar tradition from Ktesias and Pliny that the unicorn is extremely ferocious and impossible to capture through force, but it adds that, if a pure virgin girl presents herself to the unicorn, it will lay its head in her lap and go to sleep. The text interprets this as an allegory for the Incarnation of Jesus, with the virgin girl representing the Virgin Mary.

Many medieval manuscripts of the Physiologos feature elaborate and beautiful illustrations. One of the earliest surviving illustrated copies of the work is the Bern Physiologus, also known as Codex Bongarsianus 318, a manuscript of the Latin version of the Physiologos that was most likely produced sometime between c. 825 and c. 850 CE at Rheims, probably based on an earlier fifth-century CE manuscript.

The Bern Physiologus on folio 16 verso bears what is possibly the oldest surviving artistic depiction of the encounter between a virgin girl and a unicorn. The unicorn in the illustration, however, looks very different from the unicorns that modern people are used to seeing in popular culture. Overall, it bears less resemblance to a horse and far more resemblance to a goat. Its body and horn are both entirely black; its fur is mangy; it has a short, goat-like tail rather than a long, horse-like tail; its hooves are cloven like a goat’s (unlike a horse’s hooves, which are solid); and its horn is curved back like a goat’s.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Bern Physiologus fol. 16v showing the encounter between a virgin and a unicorn

Unicorns in the High Middle Ages

The Physiologos transformed the unicorn from merely one of the many exotic animals described by ancient Greek and Roman geographers into a powerful Christian symbol associated with Christ, virginity, and the Incarnation. By the thirteenth century, images of unicorns not only appear in the pages of bestiaries but have also begun to decorate European churches.

High medieval European depictions of unicorns are highly variable. One illustration found in the Aberdeen Bestiary, which was produced in England in the early thirteenth century, depicts a unicorn as mostly resembling a horse, with solid hooves, but a short tail like a goat, and an extremely long, forward-curved horn. Meanwhile, a mosaic dated c. 1213 from the floor of the San Giovanni Evangelista in Ravenna depicts a unicorn with cloven, goat-like hooves, a short, goat-like tail, and a short, stout, mostly straight horn at a downward angle from its head.

ABOVE: Medieval manuscript illustration of a unicorn from the Aberdeen Bestiary fol. 15r, dated c. 1200

ABOVE: Mosaic of a unicorn dated 1213 from the floor of the San Giovanni Evangelista in Ravenna

The late medieval standardization of unicorns’ appearance

In the Late Middle Ages, unicorns became a pervasive motif of late Gothic art. They appear most commonly in Dutch and French art around the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These depictions make the unicorn’s theological significance central; they most commonly show the unicorn in the act of laying down before a virgin girl, and, in scenes of the Annunciation, it appears laying its head on the lap of the Virgin Mary herself.

It is in the Late Middle Ages that the unicorn’s appearance finally became standardized. The late medieval and early modern unicorn has an entirely white body; a long, straight, white horn; cloven hooves like a goat; a long, horse-like tail; and, in many depictions, a goat-like beard. Because of its mix of goat-like and horse-like characteristics, the late medieval unicorn is not straightforwardly a horse with a horn, as it is often described, but rather its own creature.

Despite its widespread use as a Christian symbol, writers and artists continued to believe that the unicorn was a real, but extremely rare and reclusive, animal that existed in the distant land of India. Late medieval and early modern accounts treat the unicorn exactly the same as—and often mention it alongside—real exotic animals that Europeans had heard of through second-hand reports and had rarely actually seen, such as elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, dolphins, whales, and great apes.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration from a Dutch Book of Hours, dating c. 1500, depicting a unicorn laying its head in the lap of the Virgin Mary while the angel Gabriel, holding a pair of hunting dogs on a leash, proclaims that the Virgin will give birth to Jesus

ABOVE: Tapestry depicting a unicorn laying down before a virgin girl, woven in Flanders around 1500, part of the set of six “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries now held in the Musée de Cluny in Paris

ABOVE: Virgin with a Unicorn, fresco painted by the Italian Baroque painter Domenichino c. 1604–1605 for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome

The most famous late medieval depictions of a unicorn, however, are the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of seven tapestries made in the southern Netherlands between c. 1495 and c. 1505, which tell a cohesive story about a group of hunters who attempt to capture a unicorn.

At first, the hunters’ efforts are unsuccessful, and the unicorn kills many of them and their dogs. Then, they send a pure virgin before the unicorn, and the unicorn surrenders itself to her, allowing the hunters to kill it and bring it back. The last and most famous tapestry of the series depicts the unicorn, mysteriously resurrected, surrounded by a fence in a garden.

The Unicorn Tapestries were displayed in the house of the aristocratic Rochefoucauld family from at least 1680 until the French Revolution, when revolutionaries looted the house, including the tapestries. The tapestries were missing for over half a century, until they turned up in a barn in the mid-nineteenth century. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought them in 1922, and, in 1938, he donated them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where they have remained on display ever since.

ABOVE: The Unicorn Defends Itself, one of the seven Unicorn Tapestries in the Met Cloisters

ABOVE: The Unicorn Surrenders to the Maiden, one of the Unicorn Tapestries

ABOVE: The Unicorn in Captivity, one of the Unicorn Tapestries

Conclusion

Some readers may deplore ancient and medieval writers as unintelligent or gullible for thinking that unicorns really existed, but we should withhold our judgement. Ancient and medieval people had no way of verifying whether or not reports of unicorns were true. How would a writer living in Persia, Roman Italy, or medieval Europe determine whether or not an animal that he has heard is extremely rare and only found in India really exists? All he could do was assess the report based on its superficial plausibility.

Although contemporary culture has conditioned us to see unicorns as obviously fantasy creatures, there is nothing inherently or obviously improbable about the existence of a horse- or goat-like creature with a single horn extending from its forehead. In fact, a unicorn seems to be a much more superficially plausible animal than many of the extraordinary animals that medieval Europeans knew of only through indirect accounts and few had ever actually seen that turned out to be completely real, such as elephants, giraffes, gorillas, and giant squid. It just so happened that, with the unicorn, they were wrong, while, with those other creatures, they were right.