The Headless Men: 5 Unexplained Ancient Creatures скачать в хорошем качестве

The Headless Men: 5 Unexplained Ancient Creatures

A man stands frozen on the yellowed page of a medieval manuscript. His broad chest is muscular, his shoulders unnaturally high—yet his face, hollow-eyed and expressionless, appears where his chest should be. He is a Blemmy, one of the many headless beings said to inhabit the world’s unexplored edges. For over two millennia, the Blemmyes drifted through histories and maps, their homeland shifting like a mirage—from Africa to India, and finally to the Americas. The mystery is not just their existence but their persistence throughout written record. The first mentions come from Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE. He describes the akephaloi—literally “headless ones”—inhabiting Libya’s distant east. The Romans expanded on the idea. Geographers like Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder described the Blemmyae, their faces fixed on their chests, dwelling somewhere in Ethiopia or Nubia alongside other fantastical creatures—dog-headed men, horned donkeys, and tribes with backward-facing feet. By the Middle Ages, they were a fixture of European imagination. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, a 1300 world map, planted them deep in Africa. Later manuscripts, like the Livre de Merveilles, illustrated them in vivid ink—squat, powerful, and grotesquely headless. But then something strange happened. As European exploration expanded, so did the Blemmyes’ supposed range. Venetian cartographer Andrea Bianco placed them in India in 1436. By the early 1500s, they had crossed an ocean. The Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, whose 1513 map remains one of the earliest depictions of the Americas, marked a headless man near Brazil. A century later, in 1596, the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, while seeking El Dorado, became convinced the Blemmyes—now called the Ewaipanoma—roamed South America. He never saw one, but every native he spoke to, he claimed, insisted they were real. Even Shakespeare included references to the “men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” in Othello and The Tempest. But why did this impossible figure persist?