The fascinating story behind one-horned creatures in rock artwork
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One-horned creatures are present in myths world wide. Though unicorns in several cultures have little to do with each other, they’ve a number of associations in European thought.
For instance, the Roman pure historian Pliny the Elder wrote about unicorns within the first century AD. The unicorn options in each medieval Christian and Celtic beliefs, and is Scotland’s nationwide animal. The unicorn’s prominence in European tradition unfold throughout the globe with colonization.
In southern Africa, colonial European concepts encountered older indigenous beliefs about one-horned creatures. I’ve highlighted this in a latest analysis article about a number of the area’s rock artwork.
Unicorns in Africa?
Within the age of pure science, unicorns have been step by step dismissed as legendary moderately than organic creatures. However some thought that actual animals with single horns would possibly but exist within the “unexplored wilds” of Africa.
A well-known seek for such proof was carried out by the English traveler, author and politician Sir John Barrow (1764-1848). He’d heard rumors about “unicorns” from the colonists and native folks he encountered on his southern African travels.
A kind of rumors was that unicorns have been depicted within the rock work made by the indigenous San (Bushman) inhabitants of the area. Barrow searched unsuccessfully for them. Then, in mountains in what’s now the Jap Cape province, he discovered and copied a picture of a unicorn (Determine 1).
However many have been skeptical of his claims. His printed copy resembles a European engraving moderately than a San rock portray. Extra usually, critics have argued that rock work of unicorns have been most likely impressed by side-on views of gemsbok or South African oryxes—antelope with lengthy, straight horns—or by rhinos (which could have one horn in India, however have two in southern Africa).
My analysis concludes that these criticisms do not take note of a number of components which have since come to gentle. My paper gives additional assist for the claims that some San rock work do certainly depict one-horned creatures.
A number of rock artwork depictions
Early documented rock work of one-horned creatures are recognized from nineteenth and twentieth century copies by British geologist George Stow and South African trainer M. Helen Tongue.
I draw consideration to further examples of rock work of one-horned creatures (Figures 2 and three).
Collectively, these present that rock work of one-horned creatures cannot be dismissed as naturalistic profile views of two-horned creatures, one horn masking the opposite.
Rain-animals
The second approach through which my analysis engages with early criticisms is to attract consideration to beforehand ignored indigenous beliefs regarding one-horned beings.
The proof means that the “unicorns” in indigenous legendary beliefs and rock artwork are literally animal-like types of rain, referred to as rain-animals.
Tongue’s colleague and co-worker, Dorothea Bleek, in contrast Stow’s and Tongue’s copies and recommended in 1909 that rock work of one-horned antelope have been most likely sorts of rain-animals, which she knew from |Xam San (Bushman) myths.
Rain-animals function prominently in San ritual, fable and artwork. They take many types, starting from four-legged creatures to serpents. They have been ritually captured and slaughtered by San rainmakers to trigger rain to fall in particular locations. Many |Xam myths inform of the harmful male rain, generally personified because the “Rain”, who turned pubescent ladies and their households into frogs when the women didn’t appropriately observe their initiation taboos.
Amongst different particulars, my paper highlights an interesting and beforehand missed reference to a one-horned water creature. In one of many variants of a story advised by |Han≠kass’o or Klein Jantje—a |Xam man who was an knowledgeable storyteller—a “water youngster” or juvenile rain-animal is alleged to have a single horn. The story was written down in phonetic script (to file the sounds of the San langauge) by Lucy Lloyd (Bleek’s aunt) and translated into English.
The woman in |Han≠kass’o’s story breaks the foundations of her ritual puberty seclusion by going to a pond and catching (like fish) the youngsters of the rain, which she cooks and eats. After just a few instances she struggles to catch one other one: in contrast to the others, this final creature is “a grown-up water”.
We all know what made it recognizably grown-up: in contrast to the others, it had a single horn that poked out of the water. We now have, due to this fact, the precise |Xam San phrases (which translate as “horned rain-child”) used to explain this sort of rain-animal, which we discover within the rock work in and across the Jap Cape.
An intersection of beliefs
Within the colonial interval, indigenous folks have been uncovered to European pictures of unicorns on crests, badges and buttons and thru tales. In one of many recorded cases, indigenous folks on the Cape noticed the British royal coat of arms and commented on the unicorn in it. They acknowledged it as their “god”, however this description, translated into English from an unknown indigenous idiom, most likely refers back to the creature’s legendary nature moderately than a real god-like standing.
International unicorn pictures could have step by step influenced native ones. Some rock work of one-horned creatures—dated by related human figures in European gown to the colonial interval—present horns pointing upward or ahead (Determine 4) just like the European unicorn, moderately than backwards like antelopes, such because the eland (Determine 5), on which many rock work of one-horned rain-animals are modeled.
One-horned animals depicted in rock artwork should not mere rhinos nor antelope, nor are they the creatures of European fable.
Indigenous beliefs assist us to elucidate that the uncanny resemblance between European unicorns and South African “unicorns” was pure likelihood. The blending of international beliefs with native ones in colonial South Africa has hidden the impartial, indigenous creature.
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