Illustrations of Blemmyes (ca. 1175–1724) — The Public Domain Review

No matter that a headless tribe of people never existed, their inclusion in ancient histories made them popular fodder for later bestiary and travelogue traditions. Beginning with their appearance in the late-tenth century Marvels of the East, the Blemmyes often look just as confused as we are — staring out at the viewer, as if trying to understand where, exactly, their neck went wrong. In these illustrations, Blemmyes frequently keep equally strange bedfellows. The thirteenth-century Rutland Psalter illustrates a headless archer aiming an arrow at some kind of merman who plays the trumpet with his butt; a circa 1475 manuscript of the Miroir Historial has a Blemmye cavorting with a dog-faced friend and a man with a tongue like an elephant’s trunk; an illustration from Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri’s 1585 monster book shows a Blemmye in the midst of regretting what he wished for: he finally has a head and a neck, but it is grafted from an enraged swan. Sometimes they are terrifying, wielding clubs and crossbows, and other times unexpectedly cute, such as in a sixteenth-century copy of Zakariya al-Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation (1280), where an orange Blemmye looks embarrassed for the bipedal jackals that dance above his missing head.