Scott Mardis: the "Pictish Beast" as a Short-Necked Plesiosaur

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictish_Beast

 

Pictish Beast

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Pictish Beast (sometimes Pictish Dragon or Pictish Elephant) is an artistic representation of an animal, and is depicted on Pictish symbol stones. It is not easily identifiable with any real animal, but resembles a seahorse, especially when depicted upright. Suggestions have included a dolphin, a kelpie (or each uisge) and even the Loch Ness Monster.
Recent thinking is that it may be related to the design of dragonesque brooches, S-shaped pieces of jewelry from the mid-1st to 2nd century CE that depict double-headed animals with swirled snouts and distinctive ears. These have been found in southern Scotland and northern England. The strongest evidence for this is the presence on the Mortlach 2 stone of a symbol very similar to such a brooch, next to and in the same alignment as a Pictish Beast.
The Pictish Beast comprises roughly 2 in 5 of all Pictish animal depictions, and so was obviously of great importance.
It is thought that it was either an important figure in Pictish mythology, and/or a political symbol.

See also

• Celtic art
• Jones, Duncan, A Wee Guide to The Picts, (Musselburgh, 2003)
• Cessford, Craig, The Heroic Age: A Journal of Medieval Northwestern Europe, issue 8 (2005) ISSN 1526-1857

External links

• Pictish Art And The Sea, Craig Cessford, The Heroic Age

 

Scott Mardis' interpretation is that the "Pictish Beast" is possibly a short-necked Plesiosaur, or alternatively possibly a kind of a dolphin (below). I argued against this, saying that it was obviously meant as a sort of a quadruped, and I thought the feet even relared specifically to the style of showing certain animal's hoofs (moreover I thought they were cloven hoofed, artiodactyl feet because they had obvious side toes shown.

 The Pictish Dragon has a quite different design and it seems to be a Sirrush-derived design like the Beasts of Nodens, also shown as opposing a twinned version of itself commonly.

 http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Post/796614

 These animal signs include depictions of certain animals otherwise thought to be extinct in Scotland , such as reindeer. It seems that it is admitted that reindeer and elk survived in Scotland at least as late as 1000 (an illustration of an Elk published in Scotland in the 1700s was printed earlier on this blog) The spirals as denoting hoofs are shown on the horse at right.I would draw attention to the fact that the "Head of the Beast" design here (11) seems to be a head-of the Hippocampus (15a) which does appear to be equipped with the proper Loch Ness Monster Flippers: I would opine that 11 represents a Euryapsid (hence a longnecked Plesiosaur)
The originating site included the comment "Doesn't (#11) Look familiar eh? Nessy is that you? "

 

 

http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/8/cessford.html

Pictish Beast

§9. The symbol usually referred to as either the "Pictish Beast" or the "swimming elephant" is a sinuous animal with a long snout, spiralled feet and a drooping, typically spiral-ended tail. It is one of the most common symbols in the Pictish repertoire, occurring twenty-nine times on Class I stones, twenty-five times on Class II stones, and five times on the walls of caves. Various origins and identifications have been suggested for this symbol. It has been argued that it is derived from the ornamental repertoire of eighth century Insular art; is based upon some unknown type of object (Mack 1997, 8-9); is a depiction of a deer (Thomas 1963, 49-52); a mythical animal such as the kelpie, eich uisge (water horse), or tarve uisge (water bull) of later Scottish folklore (Foster 1996, 74; G. Murray 1986, 243; Sutherland 1997, 86-88); or a sea mammal such as a dolphin (Foster 1996, 74; Thomas 1986, 166) or beaked whale (Macleod and Wilson 2001).
§10. The most coherent argument for it being a dolphin is that advanced by Carola Hicks (1996). She identifies a number of recurrent features that support the identification as a dolphin, including its diagonal posture as if plunging upwards, the head lappet indicated by a single or double line, a long snout curling outwards at the tip, limbs which end in coiled scrolls not feet and a rudimentary tail shown by a single line (Hicks 1996, 49-50). Whilst this identification of certain elements of the Pictish Beast as dolphin-based appears credible, Hick's view is perhaps a little simplistic and requires modification. Isabel Henderson (1996, 15) has argued that the Pictish Beast is "manifestly . . . an imaginative composite made up of parts of animals including horned and marine creatures, but essentially a pure hybrid with no core species." The view that this is a composite beast with dolphin elements has found support Carver 1999, 18). The more recent suggestion that it is a beaked whale rather than a dolphin (Macleod and Wilson 2001) is intriguing, but this argument is based largely on the shape of the head and does not explain the whole symbol.
§11. When attempting to identify the origins of Pictish symbols, it is important to remember that although the surviving examples, mainly carved in stone, date to the second half of the first millennium AD, it is likely that they were initially developed several centuries earlier, possibly around the first and second centuries AD, for utilisation on organic materials that have not survived. This means that the symbols that survive are relatively late and developed forms that do not necessarily have a particularly close relationship to the earliest forms, so even if it is possible to recognise typological developments (e.g., Henderson 1958, 51-52; G. Murray 1986, 243-49) these are not particularly helpful. Elements of the head of the Pictish Beast are apparently derived from the crested heads of dragonesque brooches of the first and second centuries AD, which it has been argued were then grafted on to the body of a quadruped or hippocamp (Laing and Laing 1993, 120-21). This raises the possibility that the Pictish Beast is based upon the dragonesque brooch.

Simplified illustration of some dragonesque brooches from Scotland, the Mortlach 2 symbol and some Pictish Beast symbols (based mainly upon Allen and Anderson 1903, vol. III and Kilbride-Jones 1980). [It should be noted that the older stylization left off the forelegs but definitely showed a more moose-like  palmate set of antlers on the head and a thick shoulder hump-DD]

§12. This idea receives support from a number of pieces of evidence. The most basic is that in general terms of shape and appearance the main elements of the Pictish beast are a reasonably close approximation of a dragonesque brooch. As a piece of high status metalwork of the first and second centuries AD the dragonesque brooch is a likely candidate for the origin of a Pictish symbol as many other symbols appear to be based on metalwork of this date (Thomas 1963; Cessford forthcoming). The body of the Pictish Beast is infilled with interlace, fretwork, or spirals; this makes it similar to symbols that are either based on objects or are abstract rather than animal symbols (Allen and Anderson 1903, vol. I:lxiii). This makes it almost certain that those who carved the symbols did not think of the Pictish Beast as an animal-based symbol.
§13. Another possible piece of supporting evidence is a symbol on the Mortlach 2 stone, described as "hitherto unrecorded and I am unable to hazard even a conjecture as to what it may represent" (Simpson 1926, 274-78). This symbol was so unusual that Henderson failed to list it in her catalogue of symbols, recording only the Pictish Beast on the stone above it (Henderson 1958, 58) and the RCAHMS catalogue(1994, 13) describes it simply as a "curvilinear symbol." This symbol has been identified as either a dragonesque brooch (Thomas 1963, 57) or a uniquely shaped version of a symbol known as the ogee (Mack 1997, 103). This identification as an ogee appears unlikely and Thomas's identification is more plausible. The striking thing about the symbol on Mortlach 2 is its similarity in alignment and overall form to the Pictish Beast symbol above it, with projections corresponding to the head, tail and upper and lower limbs of the Pictish Beast identifiable. The relationship is so close that it seems impossible to escape the conclusion that the carver of the Mortlach 2 stone is depicting the Pictish Beast symbol and its origins.
§14. Dragonesque brooches are S-shaped pieces of jewellery depicting double-headed animals with large upstanding ears and curled snouts that appear to date from between the mid-first and later second centuries AD (Bulmer 1938; Feachem 1951; Johns 1996, 151-53; Kilbride-Jones 1980, 170-83; MacGregror 1976, vol. 1:127-29). Their distribution is concentrated in northern England and southern Scotland, with the closest examples to the area of the Pictish symbols being six from Traprain Law. Although none have been found further north, several other types of artifact that Pictish symbols are based upon, such as mirrors (Cessford 1997) or cauldrons (Cessford 2001a), are also completely or largely absent from the area where the symbols are found. If dragonesque brooches are the origin of the Pictish Beast symbol then this raise the question what animal do the brooches depict? Unfortunately it is impossible to tell if they are based on a real or mythical creature, although if it is a real animal then the most likely candidate is thought to be a hare (Johns 1996, 152).
§15. It seems likely the Pictish Beast symbol originated as a depiction of a dragonesque brooch and subsequently acquired elements based upon sea mammals such as dolphins and beaked whales. Why this should have happened is uncertain. Dolphins were an attribute of Neptune and Venus in the Classical world and were frequently shown on funerary monuments, including some in Northern Britain. Later on they were adopted as a Christian symbol because of their role on pagan funerary monuments. In Early Christian art they have a dual nature, with a fish element symbolising Christians and Christ and a whale element relating to Jonah, whose story prefigures Christ's death and resurrection. It could therefore be argued that as dragonesque brooches went out of use and faded from memory the general form of the symbol was enough to suggest dolphins, and that either the Classical or Christian overtones of this animal were appropriate to the meaning of the symbol. It is also possible that dolphins had a pre-existing local significance in the beliefs of northern Scotland that could have played a role. Certainly there is evidence from bones recovered from archaeological sites that various sea mammals were known to the inhabitants of the area (Mulville 2002).
§16. If the Pictish Beast is originally a depiction of a dragonesque brooch then although it appears to incorporate marine elements it cannot be considered a strong piece of sea related symbolism in Pictish art.

I personally think the Pictish Beast illustrates a swimming Moose or Elk, ie, the Water Horse, and that the continuing usage of the symbol is a confirmation of the survival of the Elk in Scotland beyond the Roman age and lasting up into the Viking Age, at least. The Pictish Beast is a specific stylisation of a swimming quadruped animal, and the head shows antlers laid back along the spine and also perked up ears at the base of the antlers. From the apparent scale it is a large animal, 6 feet high at the shoulder (=the height of a human figure)

 

This photo of a cow moose's profile shows how the moose can have
a most elongated snout such as the "Pictish Beast" is shown with.
The eye  prominently placed on the top of the head is also featured.

This one is more obviously an Elk (Moose), probably from ca 700

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose 

 BTW, this appears to represent a Pictish Wudewasa or Wild Man (=Urisk?)

REPOSTING: Roman Relocations of Sirrush Dragons

My Friend Jeff Albertson was just asking about a comparison made on the Living Dinosaurs site:

To which some discussion followed:

Dale Drinnon The Mesopotamian seal is well known, and it is a Mushush or a Dragon-of-Ishtar-gate type, but identical to the Egyptian "Serpopards" at about the same date. Speculation has always been that these are representations of Mokele-mbembes. That does not rule out the possibility that they DO represent them AND the M-Ms are actually big monitor lizards

3 hours ago · Like · 2

Dale Drinnon The representation certainly look like sauropod dinosaurs, but they also are derived at a very great distance from the source and there is no reason to assume they are very accurate

3 hours ago · Like · 3

Scott Mardis There are very similar images of the Beasts of Nodens from Lyndney Park, U.K.

[Graphic unfortunately not available: reprinted in In Search of Lake Monsters and other sources]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodens

 

Dale Drinnon BTW, I have a couple of blogs up on this, my guess is that the Beast of Nodens is a recycling of the same emblem used in later days by some Roman Legions. Many Roman legions used Dragons as emblems, down to just big snakes, but from the looks of things at one time some units were pushing a somehat feline-looking, long-necked and long-legged sort of dragon as their emblem. It was an unusual variation, not known in the Roman world at the time otherwise. The older forerunners for the design come from Saharan rock art. [there is an older Frontiers of Anthropology blog which remarks on this as a cultural marker]

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirrush

Sunday, 28 August 2011

More Gargoyle Dragons but Out of Africa by Way of Rome

The Peluda, The Questing Beast, and The Dragons of Nodens

...And while we are on the subject of snakeheaded and necked dragons, the Questing Beast of Arthurian tales seems to have a strongly Plesiosaurian shape without counting the feet, and there is some uncertainty as to what kind of feet it is supposed to have:
The Questing Beast seems to have been added on to Arthurian lore in the versions that were circulating in France at about 1300-1500, the end of the Middle Ages, but the type of dragon seems to be traditional in both France and England from long before then. It is a fourlegged and wingless dragon coloured like a leopard with a spotted tawny-red coat and a lighter belly: but all that goes to say is that it is very similar to the Sirrush.

The story goes that it makes a noise like a few dozen hunting dogs baying wherever it goes, which is a feature piously interpreted by the church fathers; and yet since the whole point of the story is that the creature is continually hunted but is never caught, the sound of the hunting dogs would be due to the hunting dogs that are always supposed to be pursuing it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questing_Beast



Questing Beast





From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant (Barking Beast), is a monster from Arthurian legend. It is the subject of quests undertaken by famous knights such as King Pellinore, Sir Palamedes, and Sir Percival.

The strange creature has the head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a hart. Its name comes from the great noise it emits from its belly, a barking like "thirty couple hounds questing". 'Glatisant' is related to the French word glapissant, 'yelping' or 'barking', especially of small dogs or foxes.

The questing beast is a variant of the mythological giraffe.
[This is also said of the Sechet, Sirrush and Serpopard. It is obviously incorrect in any of those cases-DD]
The first accounts of the beast are in the Perlesvaus and the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. The Post-Vulgate's account, which is taken up in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, has the Questing Beast appear to King Arthur in Chapter 19 of Caxton's version, after he has had an affair with his sister Morgause and begotten Mordred. (They did not know that they were related when the incestuous act occurred.)

Arthur sees the beast drinking from a pool just after he wakes from a disturbing dream that foretells Mordred's destruction of the realm (no noise of hounds from the belly is emitted while it is drinking); he is then approached by King Pellinor who confides that it is his family quest to hunt the beast. After his death, Sir Palomide followed the beast....

The beast has been taken as a symbol of the incest, violence, and chaos that eventually destroys Arthur's kingdom [The many barking dogs are also said to represent individual sins-D]



Gerbert de Montreuil provides a similar vision of the Questing Beast in his Continuation of Perceval, the Story of the Grail, though he says it is "wondrously large" and interprets the noise and subsequent gruesome death by its own offspring as a symbol of impious churchgoers who disturb the sanctity of Mass by talking. Later in the Post-Vulgate, the Prose Tristan and the sections of Malory based on those works, the Saracen knight Sir Palamedes hunts the Questing Beast. It is a futile venture, much like his love for Sir Tristan's paramour Iseult, offering him nothing but hardship. In the Post-Vulgate, his conversion to Christianity allows him relief from his endless worldly pursuits, and he finally slays the creature during the Grail Quest after he, Percival and Galahad have chased it into a lake.

The Questing Beast appears in many later works as well, including stories written in French, Spanish, and Italian.
However, in a few stories, the symbolic meaning of the Questing Beast is much more benign. For example, in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, the Questing Beast is actually a misunderstood creature. There is, in fact, no good reason for Pellinore to be hunting him, and the Pellinore's long search for the beast epitomizes all the meaningless knightly pursuits encouraged by a chivalry grounded in the "might makes right" purpose.

http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/quests/monsters/abeasts.html




The Questing Beast looks a good deal like the Egyptian monster Ameimat here.

Amended Deviant Art Contest Submission for an Egyptian Dragon. This was the closest thing I could find to a Sechet design on the internet so I simplified the dragon to bring it in line with the original Sechet design, then added some colours to the background to make it show up better. No slight is meant on the original artist, but this Egyptian Dragon design is more authentic. The Sechet is illustrated in E.A. Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quite near the start. Like all derived creatures it is supposed to be coloured like a leopard-tawny-red with darker spots and a lighter belly. It was the colouring associated with red that made the Sirrush to be known as The Red Serpent., and the mythical multiheaded Dragon of Revelation in the Bible is also red.


A very old Saharan water-monster, 10000 years old or more, marked near a water source. these were rather along the line of bunyips and depictions of them could commonly be confused with giraffes but not always so. The long legs represented rain or flowing streams and this one has rather an ostrich head and neck with a horse's tail at the rear. Note it does have four legs. At a very early age this representational water monster became confused with the giant water-lizard or Congo Dragon (depicted in parallel usually as a recognisably llizard-shape but shown as 12 to 24 feet long to scale with human figures)
The Water Monsters here became Serpopards in earliest Egypt and Mesopotamia and identified with Sechets and Sirrushes: the original idea may have been that they were also the same as Mokele-mBembe because they were identified with control of the water supply. They are also close to some grafitti-dragons in Europe of the Megalithic age which are also four-legged and Sirrush-like: some of these show up on very old rock art in Spain. Some of the "Brontosaurs" shown on South African rock art are also basically of the Sirrush design-but NOT in Central Africa for some reason.

Pallate of Narmer being the best-known representation of "Serpopards". The Saharan Water-monsters developed a specifically-paired stylisation probably around 6000-4000 BC. At first it was the tail that went all the way around in a circle, and because the body was rather oblong with feline-like feet, this stylisation came very close to the North American representations of Water-Panthers or Mishipizhws.







The Paired-entwined-necks version is not represented exactly that way in the Sahara but it seems to borrow from the design of the cadyseus. The Saharan examples I have seen show the two bodies divided down the middle at the spine and the creatures mirror-imaged on either side: the original idea seems to have been that one of them is male and the other is female. So presumably they are "Necking" and not wrestling.

That the same design simultaneously appeared also in Mesopotamia is also significant. There is also a stylized version from the early Balkan cultures and this has the four-legged bodies forming a box, the dragon heads on either side, and a dish or basin in between.




Yet another Egyptian depiction of "Serpopards"




Sechets have several similar names in Egypt and one surprising fact is that a very similar name turns up as a sea monster in the Northwest Coast area! One of the other names in Egypt is Sent (ends in hard-t so I suppose it should be "Sentt") which means "The Terror"-presumably in reference to the fact that it is a frightening creature. The Hieroglyphic for "Sent" at one time looked very much like a Plesiosaur but later it was "corrected" to be a cooked goose!





On this seal of Tutmose III shown below the Sechet design is not standing up like a quadruped bt it is stretched out horizontally for swimming. Yet the (not nearly so log) snakelike neck, four limbs on a shorter body and this time a crocodile like tail, are all of similar proportions. The limbs are more flipperlike (the left fore one is showing on the opposite side at "a") and the whole creature is more recognisably Plesiosaurian (as indeed this example was already labelled) "c" is the creature's head turned back in a half-circle.





Several Roman Legions adoted the Dragon as their emblem: most likely it was the windsock-dragon of Dacia (that could well be the personification of a destructive comet) But in the case of legions stationed in Egypt, it seems that some soldiers used the Egyptian dragon or Sechet, the one thay was most like the Sirrush of Ishtar gate. and because of their favoritism for this emblem some unusual associations came about. One result was that Sirrush-like dragons turned up afterwards in Tang China, just about in the Dark ages BUT appearing in China at the same time as Nestorian Christians and Goddess depictions which resembled the Virgin Mary.











For those of us that read Peter Costello's book In Search of Lake Monsters the next depiction is easily recognised: the two neck-entwined dragons were found in the mosaic still preserved at a temple complex at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. It seems Nodens was identified with Mars, the War God of the Romans, and the dragons were imported by military men (although carrying over a marine decorative theme) But it is clear the dragons are carrying on the Serpopard tradition, and some similar depictions of intertwined dragons appear so late as to be contemporary with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.









One final thing is that the four legged "Red Dragon" or Sirrush seems to be the basic underlying reason for the dragon on the flag of Wales, with only the addition of wings modifying the original design very much. If Folklore is any indication, there were originally two dragons, one white and one red, and facing each other in contention, but the red dragon supporters won out and kept their own dragon on the flag, leaving the white one off. Possibly the white dragon was originally meant to be female.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

Some More On Oriental Dragon Development



"Lifesized" dragon state in a Chinese park, from Wikipedia.



Characteristics of Chinese Dragons and Their Developmental Stages

Chinese art and cultural beliefs have been dominated by dragons for thousands of years. A mix of animal features are seen in Chinese dragons, and thanks to the scholarship of Wang Fu some time between 206 B.C. and A.D. 220 during the Han Dynasty, the features and complex stages of dragon growth and maturity were described.

From Hatchling to Maturity – The Fantastic Stages of Chinese Dragon Development

The profound influence the dragon has had on Chinese culture can be seen in the complexity and detail with which their mythical character has been envisioned. Chinese dragons go through a lengthy series of metamorphic stages before becoming the rare wonder of a winged Chinese dragon.
To begin, a Chinese dragon does not even hatch from its gem-like egg (1) until 1,000 years after it has been laid. The hatchling dragon looks like a water snake (2) and 500 years will pass before it develops the head of a carp. (3) Then over another 1,000 years the carp scales will cover its body and four short limbs will grow. During this time the tail will grow long, the face will become elongated, a beard will develop, and sharp claws will emerge from the feet.(4)
Antlers will grow over the next 500 years, and strangely the Chinese dragon hears through its antlers. (this legend arose because some reports specify "ears" and others say "Horns" for evidently the same protrusions on the head) Despite the presence of ears, it has been deaf until the growth of antlers.(5) Not until the passing of another 1,000 years will the dragon grow wings and achieve the ultimate state of a mature and glorious Chinese dragon. (6)
[Source: "Dragons: A Natural History." 1995. Dr. Karl Shuker. Simon & Schuster , New York . Pages 87-89.The photo is from another source, a book which is named A Natural History of Unnatural Things in the edition I own. This is a book of pretend-Cryptozoology and not the "Real Thing"]
Despite the description, Chinese dragons are almost universally wingless. Stage 6 does not ordinarily apply.
The story of eggs lying dormant for a thousand years is part of a separate tradition which has nothing to do with dragons. That the eggs are "Jewel-like" or "Pearl-like" is due to a confusion of the dragon's egg with the disc or "Pearl" that is often shown near the dragon's head in some representations. Peter Costello made the suggestion (unusual for him) that perhaps Plesiosaurs were ovoviviparous but occasionally dropped the bad eggs, similar in size and shape to an ostrich's eggs, which then in turn gave rise to the legend of dragon's eggs (In Search of Lake Monsters) This may be true but I think there is an actual reptile involved at the base of dragon stories and that is where the legend came from (Oddly enough, the lizard has also been suggested to be ovoviviparous, which is to say, laying eggs but reetaining them in the body until they hatch, and then giving birth to fully-developed young)

However stage 3 is the part which I'd like to point out first. It seems obvious to me that this is nothing more nor less than a depiction of the Chinese giant salamander. the earlier stages 1) and 2) therefore only represent its tadpole stages (Lasting a few months instead of many years)

Stage 4 is the Kao-Lung or the "Deaf" (Hornless) dragon. it has fully-developed and clawed digits and lives mostly in the water although it is also amphibious. Its measurements are identical to those given for the Buru and it seems certain that this is a large aquatic lizard akin to the Buru (as mentioned in one of my early CFZ Blogs) http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/09/dale-drinnon-buru.html

Saturday, September 05, 2009

DALE DRINNON: The Buru

On August 6th Richard Freeman posted an article about Chinese lake monsters, and I'm going to say the dreaded word again: some of those Lake Monster reports from Richard sound like Burus and especially the mention of the forelimbs with five distinct digits....

The reason I say "Buru" is because it seems that the Tibetan reports are from off the Bramaputra River and just north of the region of the regular Buru reports. And when I went through my home files for Lake Monster reports in Tibet, Yunnan and Sichuan, I got a distinctive pattern: lizard-shaped creatures; usually about 10-12 feet long, with a head the size of a horse's; long neck about that long again; body as long as head and neck together; and tail about as long as head, neck and body together; with four regularly-shaped legs, with five distinct clawed toes on the feet. All of this is in agreement with the Buru and Meikong River Monster (One of the Yunnan reports is on the upper Meikong River) and those Chinese reports from Charles Gould's Mythical Monsters quoted here before (records allgedly from 200 BC to 1500 AD at the very least).

And once again, there is a sightings mockup of the types on file in this group, which has a photo of a Komodo dragon representing the Buru: that photo has the lizard in mud up to its elbows and knees, if an explanation for the one report of "Flanges not legs" still needs to be accounted for. That file is named 'Scale Mockup for Unknown Monitor Lizards.'

Not only are there adequate local fossils for Komodo-dragon-sized monitor lizards in India, their ancestors were in the Himalayan region at the same time as the highlands were building. Populations of them could conceivably have stayed put and adapted to the highland conditions. Viviparous lizards in Northern Scandinavia live under a similar climate and hibernate a long time, and the Burus could have become viviparous in parallel to them. I imagine the creatures ordinarily derive much of their diet from grubbing up crustaceans and molluscs out of the muddy bottoms, but that the will take fishes when possible and the old Chinese records speak of such creatures greedily eating birds and eggs when they can be had. They may only swallow solid food under water. I don't think that they are ambush predators like crocs, although that has been alleged, but that they would gladly eat carrion of drowned corpses. In other words, I doubt if they would drag a yak into the water but if there was the body of a drowned yak in the water, surely then they would be seen eating it.

Chinese Buru Dragon, from

Charles Gould's Mythical Monsters

APPENDIX VII.

EXTRACTS FROM THE "PAN TSAOU KANG MU."

THE KIAO-LUNG. (The four-footed coiled Dragon. The Iguanodon.
—Eitel.)

This animal, according to Shi Chan, belongs to the dragon family. Its eye-brows are crossed, hence its name signifies "the crossed reptile." The scaled variety is called the Kiao-Lung, the winged the Ying-Lung. The horned kind are called K‘iu, the hornless kind Li. In Indian books it is called Kwan-P‘i-Lo.[=Buru]
Shi Chan, quoting from the Kwan Cheu Ki, says: “The Iguanodon (?) is more than twelve feet long; it resembles a snake, it has four feet, and is broad like a shield. It has a small head and a slender neck, the latter being covered with numerous protuberances. The front of its breast is of a red colour, its back is variegated with green, and its sides as if embroidered. Its tail is composed of fleshy rings; the larger ones are several. Its eggs are also large. It can induce fish to fly, but if a turtle is present they will not do so.
“The Emperor Chao, of the Han, when fishing in the river Wéi, caught a white Iguanodon. It resembled a snake, but was without scales. Its head was composed of soft flesh, and tusks issued from the mouth. The Emperor ordered his ministers to get it preserved. its flesh is delicious; bones green, flesh red.”
From the above it may be seen the Iguanodon is edible.

On this blog the pertinent posting is "The Real Dragons" from 11th February of the current year:

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/02/real-dragons.html

And it can be easily understood that it has no horns or external ears (nor yet mane or beard imparted onto the dragon's image from other sources) but that it would be deaf because it had no horns would be a needless superstiotion. The real reason is that its ears are not noticeable and some people assumed that since it had no ears it must be deaf: a lizard's ears are flat to the head in any species anyway.

Now the point I wanted to impart especially is that the pig-dragon jade amulets are not the earliest representations of dragons in Chinese archaeology. There are lizardlike representations of dragons in the same Neolithic culture. A most important one is illustrated by the arrangement of shells in a royal grave.

Which appears to show a creature at least comparable to a Komodo dragon in size, although probably the tail would be longer in life. This is no doubt an early representation of the hornless Kiao-Lung

By the Zhou (Chou) dynasty, which follows the Chang, the larger-end of "Developed Dragons" are depicted a little more clearly. Here the lower extended dragon is another Kiao-Lung and it corresponds to some of the longbodied jade "dragon-pigs" of the Hongshan period. I would suggest that these be relabelled as "Water-Tigers" instead, and some of them could indeed be mant to represent giant otters (Megalenhydris?) But in this case the larger and more elongated dragon at the top has a definite long snaky neck and four flippers indicated on the sides of the

body at approximately the correct places where Plesiosaurs would have flippers. The more convoluted jade dragon shown below it starts to have the traditional problem with the traditional dragon, depicting a long and winding body and yet getting the perspective of the different limbs right. The body shape is still pretty well Plesiosaurian with the body being the more or less horizontal section in the middle with limbs on both ends, and the shorter tail shown as a fishtail. note that the four limbs are once again shown as winglike flippers. The head once again has thatcurlicue behind the eye to indicate a Euryapsid skull.

In fact the Hongshan Neolithic might well include the oldest forerunner of the Taotie mask if this goat head is meant to represent a dragon's head: we have plenty of Long-necked Water Monster reports that say it has a head like a goat, and in which case we can see where the traditional beard got stuck on the Oriental Dragon (The mane is evidently meaning the maned "Merhorse" males of the LongNeck, which can otherwise be called a lion's mane in other traditions) In this case the correspondance to a Euryapsid skull is once again striking but for the fact the nostrils are in the wrong place (A common enough mistake) The spot in the forehead where the pineal "Eye" would be located also might be indicated here.




Please also see the earlier blog on Taotie masks as representing Euryapsid Chinese Dragons:

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/08/taotie-tao-tieh-dragon-faces.html

Here are another couple of Zhou white jade dragons indicating somehat more clearly the breakdown of the body length into head and neck, body and tail, and the four flipperlike limbs at the front and rear end of the body section. I also assume that the heads are once again indicating the Euryapsid condition:


white jade dragons, tomb marquis of zeng, Zhou (Chou)dynasty

And if the dimensions given by the dragon statue at the start of this article (Which is from Wikipedia) are anywhere near accurate, the standard Chinese dragon has about the same linear proportions (Length of neck, body and tail) as Tim Dinsdale's reconstruction for the Loch Ness Monster, and the difference is of course that the statue does not have the same extreme variation in diameters of the body parts that Dinsdale's reconstruction shows. The dragon (Lung) statue might be construed as indicating two shallow humps along the back, also.



Odd late "Serpopard" as Astrological figure,
presumably imported from Babylon, Han Dynasty
(approx. equal to the Classical age Mediterranean)

And this last one is an oddity but seems to indicate once again that the Babylonian "Sirrush" dragon design had been imported Eastward into China during about Roman times, something which was suspected already and mentioned in the earlier blog posting on the matter.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

More Gargoyle Dragons but Out of Africa by Way of Rome

The Peluda, The Questing Beast, and The Dragons of Nodens



















One of the specifically-named Gargoyle-type dragons of the North of France (Loire River area) was the Peluda or La Velue, which means The Hairy One. This one had the classic Plesiosaur description of a snake's head and neck threaded through a turtle's body, but also had as a defense a back full of spines like porcupine quills. It is plain enough to see that this is another maned Merhorse only the mane is not said to be made of hair it is said to be made of spines. Actually in most traditional descriptions, the mane is said to be of (keratinized or horny) spines instead of just hair, and in our culture we tend to think of the mane like a horse's mane and assume it is made out of just hair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peluda




Peluda
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Peluda (sometimes called the "Shaggy Beast" or La Velue which is French for "Hairy One") is a supposed dragon or mythical beast that terrorized La Ferté-Bernard, France, in medieval times. It is said to have come from and lived near the Huisne river near the town. Despite the French origins, its more recognized name is Occitan —or any latin origin— for "hairy". Depending on the account, it had an ox-sized porcupine-like body["Covered with porcupine quills" probably an exaggeration for "having a crest like quills". The older depictions do not make the quills cover the body-DD] . Consistently, it was said to have these poisonous stingers that it could also shoot off its body, a snake's scaly neck, head, and tail, large, tortoise-like [sea turtle like?] body and legs, and a green color.

The lore proposed that the beast was denied access to Noah's Ark, yet survived the biblical flood by seeking refuge in a cave near the Huisne River. After many years, it returned to rampage across the countryside, wilting crops with its breath and devouring both livestock and humans. It was finally defeated after it killed a man's fiancée. He tracked it down and cut off its tail. This was the only vulnerable point on the beast, and it died immediately.[Heuvelmans notes in a case of a sea-serpent report when the creature was killed and its tail brought back that the tail is the least convincing part of the body to prove the story of a horrible beast-and it indicates a hoax to his way of thinking. The same could be said in this case-Dd]

The Peluda was said to be capable of the following feats, which vary between tales:

Searing breath that could wither crops.
Firing off its quills like arrows.
Invulnerability except for its tail.
Creating floods by stepping into rivers.
A single strike from its tail was lethal to a full grown man.
Breathing out fire as a typical dragon.
Spitting out a powerful stream of water

[It seems to me this started out as a typical waterspouting Gargoyle-Dragon, with the traditional power of water control ascribed to it. It would not be the searing breath that withered crops, but the presumed ability for it to withhold rain. most of the description "which vary between tales" would be later embellishments, although I don't doubt that it could kill a man with just a stroke of its tail.-DD]

References:

Rose, Carol. Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 217, 289. ISBN 0-393-32211-4.

Shuker, Karl (1995). Dragons: A Natural History. Simon & Schuster, New York. ISBN 0-684-81443-9

The Shaggy Beast of La Ferte-Bernard, from Book of Imaginary Beings by J.L. Borges

See also: Gargouille


And while we are on the subject of snakeheaded and necked dragons, the Questing Beast of Arthurian tales seems to have a strongly Plesiosaurian shape without the quills, and there is some uncertainty as to what kind of feet it is supposed to have:
The Questing Beast seems to have been added on to Arthurian lore in the versions that were circulating in France at about 1300-1500, the end of the Middle Ages, but the type of dragon seems to be traditional in both France and England from long before then. It is a fourlegged and wingless dragon coloured like a leopard with a spotted tawny-red coat and a lighter belly: but all that goes to say is that it is very similar to the Sirrush.

The story goes that it makes a noise like a few dozen hunting dogs baying wherever it goes, which is a feature piously interpreted by the church fathers; and yet since the whole point of the story is that the creature is continually hunted but is never caught, the sound of the hunting dogs would be due to the hunting dogs that are always supposed to be pursuing it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questing_Beast



Questing Beast





From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant (Barking Beast), is a monster from Arthurian legend. It is the subject of quests undertaken by famous knights such as King Pellinore, Sir Palamedes, and Sir Percival.

The strange creature has the head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a hart. Its name comes from the great noise it emits from its belly, a barking like "thirty couple hounds questing". 'Glatisant' is related to the French word glapissant, 'yelping' or 'barking', especially of small dogs or foxes.

The questing beast is a variant of the mythological giraffe.
[This is also said of the Sechet, Sirrush and Serpopard. It is obviously incorrect in any of those cases-DD]
The first accounts of the beast are in the Perlesvaus and the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. The Post-Vulgate's account, which is taken up in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, has the Questing Beast appear to King Arthur in Chapter 19 of Caxton's version, after he has had an affair with his sister Morgause and begotten Mordred. (They did not know that they were related when the incestuous act occurred.)

Arthur sees the beast drinking from a pool just after he wakes from a disturbing dream that foretells Mordred's destruction of the realm (no noise of hounds from the belly is emitted while it is drinking); he is then approached by King Pellinor who confides that it is his family quest to hunt the beast. After his death, Sir Palomide followed the beast....

The beast has been taken as a symbol of the incest, violence, and chaos that eventually destroys Arthur's kingdom [The many barking dogs are also said to represent individual sins-D]




Gerbert de Montreuil provides a similar vision of the Questing Beast in his Continuation of Perceval, the Story of the Grail, though he says it is "wondrously large" and interprets the noise and subsequent gruesome death by its own offspring as a symbol of impious churchgoers who disturb the sanctity of Mass by talking. Later in the Post-Vulgate, the Prose Tristan and the sections of Malory based on those works, the Saracen knight Sir Palamedes hunts the Questing Beast. It is a futile venture, much like his love for Sir Tristan's paramour Iseult, offering him nothing but hardship. In the Post-Vulgate, his conversion to Christianity allows him relief from his endless worldly pursuits, and he finally slays the creature during the Grail Quest after he, Percival and Galahad have chased it into a lake.

The Questing Beast appears in many later works as well, including stories written in French, Spanish, and Italian.
However, in a few stories, the symbolic meaning of the Questing Beast is much more benign. For example, in T.H. White's The Once and Future King, the Questing Beast is actually a misunderstood creature. There is, in fact, no good reason for Pellinore to be hunting him, and the Pellinore's long search for the beast epitomizes all the meaningless knightly pursuits encouraged by a chivalry grounded in the "might makes right" purpose.


http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/quests/monsters/abeasts.html

The Questing Beast looks a good deal like the Egyptian monster Ameimat here.

Amended Deviant Art Contest Submission for an Egyptian Dragon. This was the closest thing I could find to a Sechet design on the internet so I simplified the dragon to bring it in line with the original Sechet design, then added some colours to the background to make it show up better. No slight is meant on the original artist, but this Egyptian Dragon design is more authentic. The Sechet is illustrated in E.A. Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quite near the start. Like all derived creatures it is supposed to be coloured like a leopard-tawny-red with darker spots and a lighter belly. It was the colouring associated with red that made the Sirrush to be known as The Red Serpent., and the mythical multiheaded Dragon of Revelation in the Bible is also red.


A very old Saharan water-monster, 10000 years old or more, marked near a water source. these were rather along the line of bunyips and depictions of them could commonly be confused with giraffes but not always so. The long legs represented rain or flowing streams and this one has rather an ostrich head and neck with a horse's tail at the rear. Note it does have four legs. At a very early age this representational water monster became confused with the giant water-lizard or Congo Dragon (depicted in parallel usually as a recognisably llizard-shape but shown as 12 to 24 feet long to scale with human figures)
The Water Monsters here became Serpopards in earliest Egypt and Mesopotamia and identified with Sechets and Sirrushes: the original idea may have been that they were also the same as Mokele-mBembe because they were identified with control of the water supply. They are also close to some grafitti-dragons in Europe of the Megalithic age which are also four-legged and Sirrush-like: some of these show up on very old rock art in Spain. Some of the "Brontosaurs" shown on South African rock art are also basically of the Sirrush design-but NOT in Central Africa for some reason.

Pallate of Narmer being the best-known representation of "Serpopards". The Saharan Water-monsters developed a specifically-paired stylisation probably around 6000-4000 BC. At first it was the tail that went all the way around in a circle, and because the body was rather oblong with feline-like feet, this stylisation came very close to the North American representations of Water-Panthers or Mishipizhws.







The Paired-entwined-necks version is not represented exactly that way in the Sahara but it seems to borrow from the design of the cadyseus. The Saharan examples I have seen show the two bodies divided down the middle at the spine and the creatures mirror-imaged on either side: the original idea seems to have been that one of them is male and the other is female. So presumably they are "Necking" and not wrestling.

That the same design simultaneously appeared also in Mesopotamia is also significant. There is also a stylized version from the early Balkan cultures and this has the four-legged bodies forming a box, the dragon heads on either side, and a dish or basin in between.




Yet another Egyptian depiction of "Serpopards"




Sechets have several similar names in Egypt and one surprising fact is that a very similar name turns up as a sea monster in the Northwest Coast area! One of the other names in Egypt is Sent (ends in hard-t so I suppose it should be "Sentt") which means "The Terror"-presumably in reference to the fact that it is a frightening creature. The Hieroglyphic for "Sent" at one time looked very much like a Plesiosaur but later it was "corrected" to be a cooked goose!





On this seal of Tutmose III shown below the Sechet design is not standing up like a quadruped bt it is stretched out horizontally for swimming. Yet the (not nearly so log) snakelike neck, four limbs on a shorter body and this time a crocodile like tail, are all of similar proportions. The limbs are more flipperlike (the left fore one is showing on the opposite side at "a") and the whole creature is more recognisably Plesiosaurian (as indeed this example was already labelled) "c" is the creature's head turned back in a half-circle.





Several Roman Legions adoted the Dragon as their emblem: most likely it was the windsock-dragon of Dacia (that could well be the personification of a destructive comet) But in the case of legions stationed in Egypt, it seems that some soldiers used the Egyptian dragon or Sechet, the one thay was most like the Sirrush of Ishtar gate. and because of their favoritism for this emblem some unusual associations came about. One result was that Sirrush-like dragons turned up afterwards in Tang China, just about in the Dark ages BUT appearing in China at the same time as Nestorian Christians and Goddess depictions which resembled the Virgin Mary.











For those of us that read Peter Costello's book In Search of Lake Monsters the next depiction is easily recognised: the two neck-entwined dragons were found in the mosaic still preserved at a temple complex at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. It seems Nodens was identified with Mars, the War God of the Romans, and the dragons were imported by military men (although carrying over a marine decorative theme) But it is clear the dragons are carrying on the Serpopard tradition, and some similar depictions of intertwined dragons appear so late as to be contemporary with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.









One final thing is that the four legged "Red Dragon" or Sirrush seems to be the basic underlying reason for the dragon on the flag of Wales, with only the addition of wings modifying the original design very much. If Folklore is any indication, there were originally two dragons, one white and one red, and facing each other in contention, but the red dragon supporters won out and kept their own dragon on the flag, leaving the white one off. Possibly the white dragon was originally meant to be female.

Best Wishes, Dale D.