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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

The historical distribution of lions is quite surprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lion_distribution.png

I never would have thought that lions were native to Africa north of the Sahara and even in Greece.

Every good classicist has heard the story why unlike every other Greek tribe the Makedonians did not erect tropaia on the battlefield. They used to, but after a major battle a lion came down from the hills, found the new scratching post, knocked it over, and left. They considered that a message from Zeus and stopped.

I pay attention to how old certain words are in some languages. The ones I've seen have very old words for "lion." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D5%A1%D5%BC%D5%AB%D6%82%D5%A... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Ira...

Lions are mentioned in the Odyssey, implying that Greek listeners would have been familiar with them. I'd always assumed these were some sort of mountain cat, but that map suggests no, actual lions!

Romans used to call the Sahara region on maps with the phrasing "hic sunt leones" (which translated from latin literally means "here lie the lions").

translated from latin literally means "here are (pl.) lions"

if you scroll all the way East on the Tabula Peutengeriana (a medieval copy of an ancient Roman road map) you get to India where "in his locis elephanti nascuntur" meaning "in this place Elephants are born" and a little West of that the same thing for scorpions. Some detail pics in this blog post including the Elephants one, and you can find full size scans of it but I don't want to deep link to them because they're huge.

https://digitalmapsoftheancientworld.com/ancient-maps/tabula...

A good heuristic that I use is:

>can pigs live in this environment?

If yes, in most cases, lions (and probably other big cats) will thrive.

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