Griffins and the Scythian Gold
The legend of the Griffin is as old as history itself.
Here’s Herodotus, the so-called ‘Father of History’ (or father of lies, depending on whose commentary you believe) writing of the griffin in the 5th century BC:
It is clear that it is the northern parts of europe which are richest in gold, but how it is procured I cannot say exactly. The story goes that one-eyed Arimaspians steal it from the griffins who guard it; personally, however, I refuse to believe in one-eyed men who in other respects are like the rest of men. In any case it does seem to be true that those countries which lie on the circumference of the inhabitted world produce the things which we believe to be the most rare and beautiful.
Herodotus tells us that the Greeks heard the story about one-eyed men and gold-guarding griffins from the Scythians:
It is amongst the Issedones themselves that the strange tales of the distant north originate- tales of the one-eyed men and the griffins which guard the gold- and the Scythians have passed them on to the rest of us, which explains why we call the one-eyed men by the Scythian name of Arimaspians- arima being the Scythian word for one, and spu for eye.
Scythian archers were renowned in the ancient world. Their bowcraft was key to their dominance of the broad Eurasian steppes.
Anyone who spent much of their lives sighting down a bow and arrow might euphemistically be described as ‘one-eyed’.
The Scythians left behind ample evidence of their love of gold in the form of their exquisite gold-work; were they the middlemen between Arimaspian gold and the Mediterranean world, or were they the one eyed Arimaspians themselves?
I have heard it said that the tale the of griffin was just a story ancient people told to explain dinosaur bones, particularly those that once littered the floor of the Gobi Desert before paleontologists following in the footsteps of Roy Andrews Chapman cleared them out.
We know that ancient Scythia extended as far as the mouth of the Gobi; if its true that the griffins in question were dead bones scattered across the Gobi,wcould the gold-loving Scythians have stood idle while the Arimaspian’s robbed the dead griffins without trying to wedge their way into the action?
The Scythians left behind ample evidence of their love of gold in the form of their exquisite gold-work (though these specimens are usually attributed to Greek workshops); were the Scythians the middlemen between the Arimaspian gold surplus and the Mediterranean, or did they defend their gold sources by inventing the legend of the one-eyed (bow-sighting) Arimaspians?
In the shadow of the Altai Mountains
The griffin may well have been a powerful egregore summoned by the verbal sorcery of Scythian prospectors to protect their gold routes.
Translated from Mongolian, the word altai means ‘golden mountains’.
A paper by A.A. Pozyakov and O.P. Reshetova takes us deeper into the etymology of the Altai;
Altai is a magic word to the Turkic tribes of that region. As much as it means ‘golden mountain’, it can also infer God, the Middle Heaven (earth) and the spirit of the earth (Altan). From this, the tribal people have forged a national identity: they call themselves Altai-kiji; God’s People, or, the people of the spirit-of-God-upon)-the-earth.
Using the Mongolian cipher, this could be taken to mean ‘the people of (or with) the gold’.
The Altai mountain range could be viewed as a sentinel watching over the salt wastes of the Gobi.
Conversely, the far-famed dinosaur bones of the Gobi could be thought of as sentinels guarding the approach to the Altai. Indeed, this lore is engrained into how the people of the region see the their land, and themselves.
The coat of arms of the Altai Republic, instituted in 1990, has a griffin on it.
Research indicates that gold and silver mining in the Altai region go back to at least the 14th century BC.
The ancient adits opened up on the sides of Gornaya Kolyvan, in the extreme northern reaches of the Altai mountains, range anywhere from fifteen to thirty meters deep.
The gold pits of Gornaya Kolyvan are quite a bit to the north of the Gobi desert; which leads me to wonder if the Herodotus’ Scythian story of the one-eyed Armispasians, gold-guarding griffins, and noble Issedones didn’t function as an encrypted set of instructions, a map for those who knew how to decode it.
Gold and silver artifacts unearthed within the bounds of what would have been ancient Persia and Hellas have been linked to the metal deposits of the Gornaya Kolyvan, while products from ancient Persia and Hellas have been found as far afield as Siberia. By all appearances, the frozen edge of the world that is Gornaya Kolyvan in modern Siberia had been united by trade and migratory networks to the greater flow of the pan-eurasian continent from an early date.
All of this is old news; German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who visited the Altai Mountains in 1829, expressed the view that Herodotus could have been talking about the defunct gold pits of Gornaya Kolyvan when he wrote on the northern European origins of Greek gold.
Maybe The Real Griffin Gold Was The Bones We Found Along The Way
Here’s a Paleontologist visiting in the Gobi and treating the gold-guarding griffins of Herodotus like a meme in 1993.
I’ve arrived pretty late to the party:
" Several feet away, near the very apex of the saddle, was a stunning skull and partial skeleton of a Protoceratops, a big fellow whose beak and crooked fingers pointed west to our small outcrop, like a griffin pointing the way to a guarded treasure.... We continued to pounce on precious specimens with remarkable consistency.... Mark would sing out, 'Skull!' and, almost on cue I would find one too. The surface of the gentle slopes and shallow gullies was splattered with white patches of fossils, as if someone had emptied a paint can in a random fashion over the ground."
Michael Novacek was likely riffing on the work of Adrienne Mayor when he referred to the Gobi dinosaurs as griffins.
Wikipedia credits Mayor with originating the idea that the legend of the griffin was a sauced up and mixed down version of early Iron Age accounts of the fossilized dinosaur bones that litter the floor of the Gobi desert; fossils of beaked dinosaurs like protoceratops or psittacosaurus.
Paleontologist Mark P. Witton rejected Mayor’s hypothesis, deferring to the practical intelligence of the ancients: Why would they describe that which was obviously dead as living?
Witton underestimates the practical intelligence of one who has a source of wealth to protect. It is entirely possible that Herodotus’ Scythians were as adept at bullshitting as they were at animal husbandry and shooting bows from horseback. Probable, even; the Scythians of Herodotus demonstrate no small portion of wit.
The state of preservation witnessed in the dinosaur specimens that the Polish-Mongolian paleontological expeditions to the Gobi Desert documented between 1967 and 1971 make it seem as if the animals are just on the edge of living and breathing; the quantity and quality both lend weight to the idea that these are exactly the griffins that the Scythians were talking about, but it begs the question:
just what the hell happened in the Gobi that lead to all of these animals being essentially flash-frozen in time and en masse?
Photographic Plates From The Polish-Mongolian Expedition
!!!
The American Museum of Natural History tells us what the professionals think happened in the Gobi during the Age of the Dinosaurs:
Recent studies suggest that collapsing sand dunes, triggered by torrential rains, buried these animals alive 80 million years ago. Such a catastrophic event quickly killed and buried its victims before scavengers could peck at them, leaving behind pristine skeletons frozen in action.
There is probably something very obvious that the experts understand which I, a layperson, am missing, but what was all that megafauna doing surviving in a desert as barren as the Gobi, which was, according to their own findings, still a desert (a real desert, mind you. One made of dunes) 80 million years ago?
One outstanding feature of desert ecology is that the true desert is almost always barren of all megafauna. Meanwhile, The Gobi is absolutely littered with bodies.
This desert is reported to be so long that it would take a year to go from end to end; and at the narrowest point it takes a month to cross it. It consists entirely of mountains and sands and valleys. There is nothing at all to eat.
For Reference: The Gobi Desert vs. Altai Region.
Orient yourself using the convergence point of the borders of the four nations in the heart of the Altai Mountains
When I was a kid, dinosaurs were always fully reptile;
It wasn’t until some time in the 1990s that a challenge to the orthodoxy of scaly dinosaurs arose in the form of fossil evidence suggestingd that some of them had feathers.
That griffins were feathered animals is a constant feature of Griffin mythology; the avian character of the griffin is what set it apart from other winged hybrid creatures of stature, like the Iranian Simurgh.
The lithe and wingless (but still feathered) griffins of the Minoan palatial complex at Knossos demonstrate that the griffin was a known motif during the earliest phases of complex urban civilization in Hellas.
While the presence of feathers could have been inferred from the beaks of dead dinosaurs, it took modern paleontologists over eighty years of dedicated, well-funded, and careful study to make the inference.
I’ll just spell out my radical suggestion
what if ancient people knew about the feathers of griffins because they had seen them first-hand?
What if the griffins were actually what we call dinosaurs?
What if the Griffins of Old were walking proof of the Dinosaur Survival Hypothesis?
Whatever disaster struck the Gobi, what if some of it’s megafauna had survived? What if real, true and living, fucking, griffins, survived in some hidden valley of the Altai Mountains, mountains that already share a folkloric identity with Lost Lands by way of the legends surrounding the peak of Mount Belukha, where it is said may be found one of the gates to Shambhala?
As useless a conjecture as all of this is, the possibility is is thrilling.
Addendum: A Wild Griffin Appears
Later references to the griffin describe it in terms of the mortal fear that a man-eater of surpassing beauty and power might inspire:
While these lands [Asiatic Scythia] abound in gems, the gryphons hold universal sway over them. Gryphons are extremely ferocious birds, and have a rage worse than any madness.
Owing to the necessity of facing the gryphon's cruelty, the approach of visitors is rare. Indeed the gryphons mangle anyone they see, as though born to punish the rashness of greed.
By the Christian era, perhaps because of the seeds of greed and gold that Herodotus had invested in the myth during the earliest phases of recorded history in the west, a cult had developed which saw in the griffin an instrument of divine wrath. But the griffin’s close association with the principalities of the Divine predates the crucifixion of Christ by at least half a millenia.
In the 5th century BC play ‘Prometheus Bound’ attributed though no longer believed to have been written by that god among god-like dramatists, Aeschylus, the griffin appears bearing the chariot of the god Oceanus. Furthermore, Prometheus gives the moon goddess Io very precise instructions on where the Griffin might be found:
But now listen to another and a fearsome spectacle.
Beware of the sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that do not bark, the gryphons, and the one-eyed arimaspian folk, mounted on horses, who dwell about the flood of plutos stream that flows with gold.
Do not approach them. Then you shall come to a far-off country of a dark race that dwells by the waters of the sun, where the river Aethiop is.
Follow along its banks until you reach the cataract, where, from the Bybline moountains, Nile sends forth his hallowed sweet stream. He will conduct you on your way to the three angled land of Nilotis, where, at last, it is ordained for you, O Io, and for your children to found your far-off colony.
The Griffins are called ‘the hounds of Zeus’. That is, ‘the Hounds of the Highest God’.
A sharp-beaked Hound as in… a flightless bird, perhaps? like those depicted in the throne room of the palatial complex at Knossos?
The map to the land of Io’s rest which Prometheus lays out from atop his mountain in the greater Caucasus takes us south (that is, in the opposite direction of Altaic Siberia) and puts us within range of ancient Persia, where representations of ferocious winged hybrid creatures of great stature were very popular.
While the Simurgh, a hybridization of a panther and a great bird, would constitute the imperial seal of the later Iranian Sassanid Dynasty, the earlier Achaemenid capital city of Persepolis was hilt-deep in fucking griffins.
I had wondered if the griffin in later European heraldric tradition wasn’t a cultural bequestment of the much older Persian aristocracies. Some researchers believe the old Achaemenid bloodlines to be one and the same as those which occupy the highest rungs of power and prestige in modern Europe.
Other researchers believe that the Achaemenid Empire was entirely fake.
I dont know what to believe. I’m just a guy on the internet who thinks griffons are neat.
To Be Continued…
Apollo, the oracular god who made the will of Zeus manifest to mortals, was often depicted either being pulled in a chariot by or riding on the back of a griffin.
According to Wikipedia, an image struck on the reverse side of a silver tetradrachm coin from ancient Attica shows two griffins flanking the statue of Apollo at his primary sanctuary in Delphi. I could not find an image of said coin, but I did find this red-figure pottery image of what is believed to be Apollo riding on a griffin, as well as this 4th century BC red-figure attic hydria depicting the same theme.
A legend has made the rounds that griffins would carry Apollo home to his native Hyperborea each winter, which is either an unsophisticated way of explaining the waning influence of the sun every year or a tacit admission that ancient Greek civilization knew something about the cycles of night and day in the Arctic Circle. I have not been successful in deriving primary sources for the legend of Apollo and the Griffins, but it was a popular motif.
Along with the swan, the griffin appears to have been one of the animals most sacred to Apollo. As mediator between Man and Zeus, Apollo was the god most reverenced by the Greeks of the classical period— so the idea that the Griffin was a Holy Animal is an old one.
The Cult of Apollo would become synonymous with the Roman Imperial Cult after the reign of Caesar Augustus (31-14 BC)
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