Blemmyes
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The Blemmyes (Latin Blemmyae) are a race of legendary creatures that were said to live in Africa, in Nubia, Kush, or Ethiopia, generally south of Egypt. They were believed to be acephalous (headless) monsters who had eyes and mouths in their bellies. Pliny the Elder writes of them that Blemmyes traduntur capita abesse, ore et oculis pectore adfixis ("It is said that the Blemmyes have no heads, and that their mouth and eyes are put in their chests").
The Blemmyes were, in fact, a nomadic Nubian tribe described in Roman histories of the later empire. From the late third century on, along with another tribe, the Nobadae, they repeatedly fought the Romans.
Some authors derive the story of the Blemmyes from this, that their heads were hid between their shoulders, by hoisting those up to an extravagant height. Samuel Bochart derives the word Blemmyes from two Hebrew terms, one a negation, the other meaning "brain", implying that the Blemmyes were people without brains.[3]
[edit] In literature
Othello makes reference to them as "men whose heads | Do grow beneath their shoulders" [I.iii.143-144].
In Umberto Eco's Baudolino, the protagonist meets Blemmyes along with Sciapods and a number of monsters from the medieval bestiary in his quest to find Prester John.
In his 2006 book Tower, Valerio Massimo Manfredi features the Blemmyes as fierce, sand-dwelling creatures located in the southeastern Sahara, and suggests that they are the manifestation of the evil face of mankind.
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling wrote a short story entitled "The Blemmye's Stratagem", included in his collection "Visionary in Residence". The story describes a Blemmye during the Crusades.
Blemmyes appeared in the 2000 novel The Amazing Voyage of Azzam by Kelly Godel as cannibalistic tribesmen who guard a lost treasure of King Solomon. They use clubs, spears, and blow darts as weapons.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Blemmyes, in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)
- Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis V.8.46
- ^ This article incorporates content from the 1728 Cyclopaedia, a publication in the public domain. [1]
