Dragons, Dogs & Amadillos?

[Linda]

I revoke everything I've posted to this thread before and replace it by this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In short, I think the picture was taken, directly or indirectly, from the chapter on sea monsters from a MS in the Cantimpré tradition. There are a number of creatures depicted in this way, with scales, a split tail and paws:

Koen, do you know what the text on the kylions and karabo et al says or where i can find more info on translation?  Just looking for a bit of shortcut to such info if you have any.

These creatures are starting to grow on me due to having recently seen some interesting info on another topic, i am trying to see if it all rolls into itself.

When you say Cantimpre tradition, liber de rerum natura was an encyclopedia with topics taken from many sources, and as Nick mentioned in your blog comments, can lead to older text only info. I recall much of it being attributed to Aristotle, and I know that the shadefoot sciapod image (with two feet, interesting) in one of the examples came from Pliny and others, for instance, but i hadnt come across your creatures as yet.

Also i thought this one was interesting, it has an armadillo looking something along with something with a dog body with scales, and a human head...it is supposed to be a hermit crab. I see some coincidences with the kylions here too though, as well as with the vms creature, and just in general how descriptions of things translated from Greek to Arabic to Latin and then copied ad nauseum with little changes each time can make for some interesting visual telephone whisper results. Purple monkey dishwasher, so to speak.



Here is the google translated report from which this came, and an excerpt below re kylions.

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There are two examples of the same type which bear witness to the deformation of names during transmission: kylion and ludolachra . The kylion of Thomas de Cantimpré is probably the kilo of Michel Scot (520 to 16), which must correspond to the Greek καλλιώνυμος, that is to say the uranoscope ( Uranoscopus scaber Linné, 1758). We find in fact in Michel Scot the following detail: (520 to 16) [...] and multispaces inhabited by sinistro and splen in dextro, ut kili You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , and Thomas de Cantimpré (VI, 30), placing under the authority of Aristotle, writes: [ natura ] epar in dextro, splen vero posuerit in sinistro, in kylione tamen splen in dextro, epar vero posuit in sinistro You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . It remains unclear how Thomas de Cantimpré came to name the animal kylion , if he read kili at Michel Scot. It would be necessary to have the state of the text of Michel Scot that the encyclopaedist had in front of him. As for the mysterious Ludolachra , it could be a deformation of the labrax (the wolf, Dicentrarchus labrax Linnaeus, 1758), of which Aristotle speaks when he mentions his four fins. The Latin translation of the Arab Aristotle (Arist., HA 489 b 28 MS) allows us to partially grasp how we arrived at the fabulous ludolachra : Animalia vero aquosa natabilia habent alas, sicut piscis. And ex eo is quod habet quartet alas, duas in facie and duas in dorso ejus, sicut piscis who vocatur harchea kidolatra You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Where Michel Scot writes harchea kidolatra , the Greek text carries χρύσοφρυς καὶ λάβραξ, "the bream and the wolf". The final latra may represent, after transposition by Arabic, the λάβραξ of the Greek text, and ki - or kido - the conjunction καὶ. As for the rest of the word, which is reminiscent of the Greek, it seems very distorted, so that one can not explain further how one arrived at Ludolachra . Again, the documentation of Thomas de Cantimpré and Michel Scot should be available.


And just for funsies here is Uranoscopus scaber