![]() With the exception of its single horn, it is profoundly unlike the lithe unicorn of medieval art, and one can understand why Marco Polo wasn't exactly dazzled. But the Indian rhinoceros has a massive, ungainly body, stumpy legs, and a thick, folded hide that looks like plates of armor. He considered the wild ass very fleet and difficult to capture the Indian rhinoceros, despite its lumbering appearance, is swift, and its capture is both difficult and dangerous. Ctesias mentions the pharmaceutical value of the horn from the "Indian wild ass" rhinoceroses have suffered for centuries from the supposed value of their horns as aphrodisiacs and antidotes. The Indian rhinoceros and one other Far-Eastern species are the only land mammals with one horn (the two species of African rhinoceros have two horns). Swoon.) But it seems clear from several of Ctesias's statements that he actually had the Indian rhinoceros in mind (or perhaps someone's description of it-Ctesias himself never visited India). This early description gave the world the image of the horse-like body, the white color, and the single horn, an image that would later be transformed into the medieval unicorn. This animal is exceedingly swift and powerful, so that no creature, neither the horse nor any other, can overtake it…. … Other asses, tame or wild … do not have an ankle-bone… but these do have an ankle-bone … the most beautiful that I have ever seen…. They have a horn in the middle of the forehead that is one cubit in length the base of this horn is pure white … the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson, and the middle portion is black. Their bodies are white, their heads are dark red, and their eyes dark blue. There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses and even larger. She quotes from his book Indica, written around 400 BCE: As Margaret Beam Freeman reports in The Unicorn Tapestries, Ctesias was the first person to write about the one-horned animal. But where did this image come from? And what animal was Marco Polo so underwhelmed by?įirst things first: we can blame the Greek physician and historian Ctesias for the kernel of the ideal unicorn. Unique to this marvelous animal was one long and tapering horn that grew straight out from its forehead. Just like today, medieval depictions of unicorns varied from artist to artist, but in general it was similar to the one we know: it was a horse-like (or goat-like) creature, pure white in color and dainty and refined in appearance. Most of his contemporaries did too, as it was a very popular animal in the medieval equivalent of the Internet, i.e. Like the rest of us, he thought he knew what a unicorn looked like.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |