Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants

Five brave defences of some of Herodotus' wilder claims:

Just ignore the legs.

1- Snakes with Wings sound far-fetched, yes. But only if you want to be all modern and nitpicky. There are several varieties of winged and flying lizards, which look pretty snakelike to my eyes. 

2- Wait, there's more. Some snakes fly - such as (you guessed it) the Flying Snake.  (Or, if you're feeling snooty, Chrysopelea.) It glides by using its ridge scales along its belly, pushing against rough bark surface of tree trunks, allowing it to move vertically up a tree. From there, it "leaps" and glides diagonally down wherever it wants to go.

3- Okay, I can't find any basis for gold-digging ants. But Heordotus is far from the only writer to talk about them, and they appeared in bestiaries well into the middle ages. 

4- Okay, so did Cyclops, the Phoenix and Griffins. But still.

5- Herodotus also described some pretty weird people, too.  Like the Gyzantes, all of whom paint themselves red and eat monkeys.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

4th Century BCE growth industry

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants is basically two books: the first section is a first-person travelogue.  Herodotus had been exiled from Halicarnassus after supporting the worst kind of coup d'etat - an unsuccessful one.  His subsequent travels and observations, mostly of Egypt, give us the world's first real travel literature. 

Unless you want to be cute and count The Odyssey, or even Exodus.  And I don't. 

Herodotus is a marvelous travel writer. He notices a lot, from accurate descriptions of animals strange to him but familiar to us, from the plover up to the mighty hippo and crocodile.  He's also a keen observer of people.  His depictions of Egypt's many and varied religious practices are fascinating, but better still are his detailed observations of mummification.  Not merely the process(es), which we still don't completely comprehend today, but the culture of mummification.

As any 19th century Egyptologist could tell you, the Egyptians mummified everything.  Pharaohs, priests, common people, pets, parts of pets - you name it, someone wanted it embalmed.  Once you decide that (a) life continues after death, and (b) you need your body and possessions afterward; (c) embalming everything but the kitchen sink is a natural conclusion. 

Like anything else, this became a class and status issue. The wealthy could afford more and better and more comprehensive procedures, and got them. The poor had to make do with just enough to keep them from revolting. 

"The peasants are always revolting...in odour! Ha ha ha! Old jokes are the best, no?"

The second is very different. It's wholehearted hearsay and rumour-mongering.  That's not really a criticism; after all, Herodotus is admirably honest:

"Up to this point I have confined what I have written to the results of my own observation and research...but from now on the basis of my story will be the accounts given to me by the Egyptians themselves."

That's good to know, because some of what you read after that point is fucking terrifying.  Consider the titular creatures themselves, the Gold-digging ants.

Not pictured: gold.

Eastward of India lies a desert of sand…. There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size—bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog…. These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just as our own ants throw up the earth…. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this is what the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert…. When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill the bags they have brought with them with sand and start for home again as fast as they can go; for if the ants—if we can believe the Persians’ story—smell them, they at once give chase.




Sorry, what?  Ants the size of FOXES?  That GIVE CHASE?  No way, man.  I saw that movie.