Pliny did not share Pausanias' skepticism. Apollonius of Tyana also dismissed the mantichore as a tall tale, according to the biography by Philostratus (c. The Romanised Greek Pausanias was skeptical and considered it an unreliable exaggerated account of a tiger. Legacy Ĭtesias purportedly saw a martichora presented to the Persian king by the Indians. But he also described the crocotta and the mantichora of Aethiopia together, and while the crocotta imitated the voices of men the mantichora of Aethiopia too also mimicked human speech, on authority of Juba II, with a voice like the pipe ( panpipe, fistula) mixed with trumpet. Pliny also introduced the confused notion that the manticore might occur in Africa, because he had discussed this and other creatures (such as the yale) within a passage on Aethiopia. 77 AD) having relied on a faulty copy of Aristotle's natural history that contained the misspelling ("martikhoras"). Pliny described the "mantichora" in his Naturalis Historia (c. And the Indians take their young captive, disabling its tail by crushing it with stone before the growth of sting begins. Aelian citing Ctesias adds that the Mantichora prefers to hunt humans, lying in wait, taking down even 2, 3 men at a time. ![]() The beast's name means "maneater", as already noted. And it overcomes every beast except the lion. Only the elephant was immune to the poison. The stings could be fired sideways, forward, or backward, by orienting the tail accordingly, up to a 1 plethron distance range, and these stings regenerated afterwards. It also had a scorpion-like tail with a (main) terminal sting that measured over 1 cubit, plus two rows of auxiliary stings, each a Greek foot long. It has three rows of teeth, feet and claws like lions. It was the size of the largest lion, with cinnabar-red fur. ![]() (Paraphrase) The martichora was allegedly a blue-eyed, human-faced wild beast of India. Photius's Myriobiblon (or Bibliotheca, 9th century) serves as base text, but Aelian ( De Natura Animalium, 3rd century) preserves the same information and more: Classical literature Īn account of the manticore was given in Ctesias's lost book Indica ("India"), and circulated among Greek writers on natural history, but has survived only in fragments and epitomes preserved by later writers. ![]() Ĭtesias was also later cited by Pausanias regarding the martichoras or androphagos of India. But the name was mistranscribed as 'mantichoras' in a faulty copy of Aristotle, through whose works the notion of the manticore was perpetuated across Europe. Ctesias himself wrote that the martichora ( μαρτιχόρα) was its name in Persian, which translated into Greek as androphagon or anthropophagon ( ἀνθρωποφάγον), i.e., "man-eater". The ultimate source of manticore was Ctesias, Greek physician of the Persian court during the Achaemenid dynasty, and is based on the testimonies of his Persian-speaking informants who had travelled to India. The term "manticore" descends via Latin mantichora from Ancient Greek μαρτιχόρας (martikhórās) This in turn is a transliteration of an Old Persian compound word consisting of martīya 'man' and x uar- stem, 'to eat' (Mod. There are some accounts that the spines can be shot like arrows. It has the head of a human, the body of a lion and a tail of venomous spines similar to porcupine quills, while other depictions have it with the tail of a scorpion. The manticore or mantichore ( Latin: mantichōra reconstructed Old Persian: merthykhuwar Modern Persian: مردخوار mardkhor) is a Persian legendary creature similar to the Egyptian sphinx that proliferated in western European medieval art as well. ― Johannes Jonston (1650) Historiae NaturalisĬopperplate engraving by Matthäus Merian.Ĭourtesy of The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology
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