Roc bird - the winged monster of antiquity

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

What is the Rukh bird, the Europeans learned after getting acquainted with the fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights". When this happened is hard to say. Perhaps after Marco Polo's many years of eastern voyage in the thirteenth century, or maybe a little earlier or later. The magical world of fairy tales, which absorbed the thousand-year-old folklore of the Eastern peoples, captivated the Europeans.

According to some researchers, not only unknown storytellers, but also very specific ancient writers of Persia, India and the Arab countries had a hand in creating this fairy tale cycle. Be that as it may, the Europeans appreciated the fabulous exotic world of the East, in which the magical bird Rukh occupied a worthy place.

There were no fairy tales in Europe in which a giant bird would appear, so the Arab legends in which people fight this winged monster went there, as they say, with a bang. Later, historians, biologists and writers of the Old World began to wonder: why did it happen that in Europe there is no information about huge birds, but there are more than a lot of them in Arab legends. Becomelook for where the fabulous Roc bird or at least its prototype could be found.

Europeans have known ostriches for a long time, but they were too thin to arouse an attack of magical inspiration in the writers of fairy tales. When the researchers tried to analyze the legends on the subject of meetings of travelers with a bird, it turned out that almost all, surprisingly unanimously, point to the island of Madagascar.

But by the time the Europeans appeared on the island in the seventeenth century, they had not found anything of the kind. For some time, the opinion that information about a giant bird is nothing more than a poetic exaggeration, and possibly fiction from beginning to end, was established both in science and in society.

But very soon the researchers of the fauna of Madagascar discovered that the island really had giant flightless birds, and they were destroyed after the acquaintance of Europeans with the island. It is possible that numerous European pirates also had a hand in the extermination, who even founded their own state in Madagascar, which existed for a long time, and only after the pirates became insolent beyond measure, destroyed by French troops. The pirates did not keep chronicles, they did not publish newspapers, and their stories about the hunt for a giant bird could well be regarded by contemporaries as traditional sea tales.

According to modern estimates, the Rukh bird of Arabian fairy tales (or epiornis by its current name) reached a height of five meters. Growth is more than solid, but by no means sufficient to call her name “bird-elephant”, under which Rukh appears in some Arabic sources.

According to the Arabs, Rukh ate elephants and could lift into the air, according to various sources, from one to three of these huge animals. And the flight of the Roc bird created a lot of inconvenience for sailors: it covered the sun with its wings and created such a strong wind that it supposedly even sank ships.

Of course, no five-meter epiornis could do such disgrace, even if he really wanted to. Apparently, the Arabs, having met epiornis, mistook him for a chick, and his mother, according to their ideas, should have had a much larger size and, of course, should be able to fly. And such a giant must also eat giants, hence the stories about elephants raised into the air.

The ancient Arabs had no idea about either ecological balance or aerodynamics. Otherwise, they would know that a bird of the sizes indicated by them, under the conditions of the planet Earth, cannot fly in principle. And to maintain the number of the Roc bird, sufficient for the normal reproduction of the population, there will not be enough elephants.