Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages | Hacker News Reader

Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages

uliwestphal.de

161 pointsrobalicious43 comments

I'm curious on the approach taken. Are the arrows based on known derivation/influences, or based on perceived similarity? It's a master's thesis.

This here:

https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/soloelephan...

Does not seem to be an elephant to me. Maybe a vomiting deer, or with a bad case of worms of serpentitis. (:

http://corsair.themorgan.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=257528

> Notes: The text refers to elephants; the miniature may be a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the standard Bestiary image of the elephant battling a dragon.

Seems to be speculation that the artist saw an image like https://64.media.tumblr.com/07d4ec88f9250ff97d244dd316bd5e2e... or had it described to them, and didn't really understand it but knew it was called an elephant.

Ah! Interesting. The color plate makes it quite clear that the "trunk" is actually another creature (a snake).

I wonder if the motif of elephants battling dragons comes out as a kind of origin story of how the elephant got its trunk.

This is like the gif where everyone draws a picture on the back of the person in front and the end result is nothing like the original. Chinese whispers in art form!

gartic phone!

I've never seen that, would love a link

You can almost hear the not-quite-accurate descriptions that inspired these. Like the (many) images that are almost accurate, except the tusks grow upward: probably the description called them "horns" and mentioned where on the head they grew from, but not the direction, so the artists simply inferred the horn-growth direction they were familiar with from other large mammals.

How long is the Emporer's nose? https://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm

So, I know the meme that the European middle ages were some time of great civilizational downfall ("dark ages") is itself pretty much debunked by now.

But there must have been some kind of change between antiquity and middle ages that caused so much knowledge and international exchange to simply vanish.

I really wonder what exactly went on there.

I recommend David Hackett fishers "the great wave" for one take

Sounds interesting. Thanks!

Doesn't the fall of the Roman Empire explain it?

At its peak it was a huge unified empire, it should be expected a lot of commerce and knowledge would move freely within its borders. The (slow) fall of the Roman Empire would be like watching the end of civilisation, a dystopian fiction of the survivor-apocalyptic kind.

The following centuries, all the way to our modern age, rulers tried to claim the title of Cæsar (Kaiser, Czar, ...), tried to claim a continuity of the empire (e.g. Nazi's III Reich) or even invoked past roman imagery (the roman eagle ["aquila"] is also present as a symbol of power in the USA [american eagle], in Russia [romanov coat of arms], in Germany [both the nazi's eagle and the bundestag's eagle]).

It's as if the world is still trying to "get over" the end of the Roman Empire.

> even invoked past roman imagery (the roman eagle ["aquila"] is also present as a symbol of power in the USA

Perhaps even more clearly than the adoption of the American bald eagle echoing the Roman eagle is the bronze fasces in the House rostrum, a direct replication of the Roman symbol of authority from which, also, Italian fascism derives its name.

Yes, that's the "root cause" - but from what I understand, the fall of the roman empire was not a singular event but rather some gradual development. Which is why it seems to be so difficult to define a specific point in time at which the middle ages began [1][2]

I wonder if one could define e.g. an "elephant horizon" - some point in time where, before, how an elephant looks was common knowledge (among the educated) and after which the knowledge was lost or replaced by myths so we got depictions like in the OP.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity

> Precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate, but Brown proposes a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD.

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ende_der_Antike (German only unfortunately)

Probably a number of things: the Roman empire collapsed so infrastructure fell to ruin and it became much more difficult to travel and trade across long distances. In addition, with the collapse came a lack of protection from an organized military, Rome itself was sacked multiple times but communities would regularly get invaded and raided by bandits and various tribes and gangs. That's perhaps why we see the development of castles in the middle ages, as a defense mechanism for an age in which each community was more or less on their own.

There was also a major volcanic winter in the 500s that triggered global cooling and caused droughts and starvation.

There was also the Justinian plague in the 500s which was supposedly worse than the Bubonic plague.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian

Plagues and droughts have killed off more than a few civilizations, but seeing that these occurred in the wake of the collapse of the Roman empire, it probably accelerated the gradual decline that would have occurred and maybe prevented any sort of recovery.

I remember a college lecture on this topic and the professor mentioned that Catholic clergy always retained knowledge of reading and writing, but there was 1 or 2 generations in France where the aristocracy couldn't read. I think Charlemagne famously learned to read as an adult. And of course slaves/peasants/serfs never really gained the ability to read until public education came around much later.

The author also has a page with text descriptions for various animals in a similar vein: https://www.uliwestphal.de/retrozoology/index.html

> The octopus as a rule does not live the year out. It has a natural tendency to run off into liquid; for, if beaten and squeezed, it keeps losing substance and at last disappears.

Well, can't say that I won't do about the same if beaten and squeezed.

Also, another animal with plenty of wild depictions is the tiger. East-Asian paintings especially walk between hilarious and cool, and it's often clear that the artists didn't particularly want to see a real tiger close.

Itō Jakuchū: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/14/63/f8/1463f891232e00f9165d05809...

Marked as ‘Meiji’, so fairly recent, but I like it: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/9e/d1/6a/9ed16aad46e17fcbe521d68e0...

Really a cool project. Thinking about how to describe and elephant: like a giant ox but with big ears a long protruding nose and tusks (not not for female Asian elephants). Can easily see how that game of telephone would go sideways.

Assumes the receiver of the description knows what an ox and tusks looks like.

Yes. I assumed basic knowledge of the fauna of Northern Europe which includes oxen and walruses.

The page is from 2008 - unfortunately a lot of links to the original pictures do not work anymore.

> a lot of links to the original pictures do not work anymore

When I research something that's important to me, I take screenshots or save the source code because I know that the referenced web page is likely to disappear within a few years.

And it'd be nice to have a tool to automatically replace broken links with copies of your saved screenshots.

Perhaps the Web Archive can help in some cases.

The linkrot is definitely sad to see, especially since (at least some of) these images are line art based upon originals that were a lot more textured

This one looks like a dragon: https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/soloelephan...

So I immediately googled "dragophant" as the name that immediately came into my mind after seeing this, and there are quite a few interesting links and images Only a few examples:

- https://i.pinimg.com/originals/77/87/31/778731af0a982a047e7a...

- https://i.redd.it/3c9mii0uc1b51.jpg

- https://www.deviantart.com/tag/dragophant

Some of these are pretty wild. Makes me wonder if similar mischaracterized/illustrated of animal depictions were the source for the belief in dragons and other monsters

I’ve heard that the idea of dragons sleeping in caves arose because cave bears lived in well, caves throughout Europe and it’s quite possible their skeletons would be mistaken for a dragons.

Dinosaur bones!

This one is my personal favourite: https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/soloelephan...

Who drew that one? The 3 year old prince or court jester?

There is a theory that elephant skulls inspired the myth of cyclops. http://www.strangehistory.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...

I convinced myself that Mushu on the Ishtar gat must be a horse because horses are said to have come from the north and mare, a Germanic-Celtic isogloss would somewhat match the description if rhotacism was involved. Then I went on about Amazons and Mars just because their origin may be uncertain. So no, here be dragons.

The domestication of the horse keeps being challenged anyhow.

The early drawings remind me of the "Yee" video art direction. https://youtu.be/q6EoRBvdVPQ

What was going on in the mid to late 1400s? They had some crazy psychedlic drawings of elephants. Even more so than most earlier times. Though, maybe that is the answer. Maybe people in earlier times had actually seen a Roman elephant. Then maybe people in later times had actually seen a real elephant. Then in the middle (1400s) you have people that are hundreds of years removed from anyone actually seeing one.

One thing is certain - We can be pretty sure that MOST of our depictions and ideas of long ago extinct animals are scarcely any better than these. Even with the highest scientific rigor intended, they almost always do a better job of reflecting the preconceptions and biases of the artists than the reality of the animal itself...

Years ago I read a fascinating article (that I cannot locate again) about the wildly inaccurate illustrations of animals available in old books, often drawn by artists who had never seen the animal, but drew one from verbal descriptions by people who had. Something like a visual game of telephone.

this one is just a meme shitpost https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/soloelephan...

How many of these artists had seen an elephant in real life. How many were drawing it from descriptions (e.g. fan like ears. ribbed long arm like nose, large feet could describe some early drawings)

Makes me wonder how far off are our modern depictions of dinosaurs

I wish there was context for the pictures. Where they came from, who drew them

it would be fun to animate them and put them in a game about elephants

https://sketch.metademolab.com/canvas

Let's try

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