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Examples
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Amazons and the Cynocephali are their allies: all three of these nations are continually at loggerheads with their neighbors, the
Jurgen A Comedy of Justice James Branch Cabell 1918
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What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men?
September 2nd, 2009 m_francis 2009
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THE KYNOKEPHALOI or Cynocephali were an Indian and African tribe of dog-headed men.
Archive 2008-01-01 2008
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And HERE you will be FURTHER AMAZED by the fact that the Cynocephali were an early form of man that interbred with Cromagnons and Neanderthals.
Archive 2008-01-01 2008
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THE KYNOKEPHALOI or Cynocephali were an Indian and African tribe of dog-headed men.
I'm a bad blogger! 2008
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What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men?
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What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men?
Archive 2008-05-01 2008
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And HERE you will be FURTHER AMAZED by the fact that the Cynocephali were an early form of man that interbred with Cromagnons and Neanderthals.
I'm a bad blogger! 2008
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Cynocephali: and thei ben fulle resonable and of gode undirstondynge, saf that thei worschipen an ox for here god.
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He was a spectacle of wildness as he sat before the blazing fire, — his joy by day, his companion and protector in the shades, the only step made by him in advance of his brethren the Cynocephali.
chained_bear commented on the word Cynocephali
"The basis for the imagery of Eastern wonders in the Middle Ages was largely classical lore accumulated in the wake of Alexander's conquests. ... Especially prominent among the tales of wonders were the fantastic semi-human peoples thought to inhabit parts of India, nations categorized into what would later be referred to as the 'monstrous races.' The definitive codification of the monstrous races, one that would influence the European view of the far-off borders of the world into the seventeenth century, was the work of the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder. In his 36-volume Natural History, among the 20,000 facts from a hundred authors he claimed to have collected, Pliny listed some forty peoples, some of them based on Greek precedents, some perhaps found in versions of Greek writings now lost, and some based on more recent speculation. According to Pliny, these humanoids are prolific in India and Ethiopia. In fact, 'Ethiopians' were among the races bequeathed to Pliny by his Greek predecessors, confusingly, as a black population in India. Other plausible or at least fully human groups among this catalogue were pygmies and cannibals. More fanciful were such peoples as the Cynocephali, with dogs' heads; Blemmyae, who have no heads but rather faces in their chests; 'Apple Smellers' (Astomi), who have heads but no mouths and who nourish themselves by the scent of apples; and Sciopods, who have one large leg that they hop around on and use to shade themselves from the tropical sun.
"It is worth pausing a little on these peculiar aspects of medieval images of the East, because the monstrous races came to be intertwined with spices and the other valuable products of the East, to the degree that when Columbus was searching for the realms of these precious commodities he was encouraged by reports of dog-headed people and other well-established semi-humans. Where they were to be found, he believed, so were spices."
Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008), 99
A lot can be said about the causes of the dehumanization of indigenous peoples based on this long-held Euro-centric bullshit.
November 28, 2017