"Dog-headed people have existed..." Topic

"What do Marco Polo, Augustine, Paul the Deacon, Vincent of Beauvais and the Buddhist missionary, Hui-Sheng all have in common? Well, to keep things short – Beachcombing is on bedtime duty tonight for his insomniac daughter – they all described and (with the exception of Augustine) believed in tribes of dog-headed human beings in lands distant from their own. And how was it that so many intelligent authors and travellers came to convince themselves of the existence of these peculiar creatures: a legend that can be traced from the fifth century B.C. up to early modern times – artists were still painting dog heads onto maps of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century?

Well, Beachcombing must come clean. He has not the slightest idea. He once spent an afternoon looking through a medical textbook to see if any tropical illness could account for dog-like faces – nothing doing. He has also wondered if the Egyptian god Anubis glimpsed in statue form by foreigners might not have set off the mania among dog-head spotters: and he still has, in truth, his suspicions there. Any opinions please send to drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

However, he came across, last week, a plausible suggestion for our oldest surviving dog-head reference and, with some excitement, he offers both the original passage and the explanation here…"
Full article here
link

You can make your own Fantasy Army! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Those are Gnolls.

St. Andrew preached to the dog-headed people. It's true, read his Gospel.

Forehead flattening, maybe?

Most likely it was locals with masks playing pranks on the tourists. Had to have been a large amount of drink involved for both parties… ;-)

That explains some of the strange folk I've seen.

On the basis of the evidence I'm much more convinced of the reality of pig-headed people.

Vargr that had a really, really bad misjump.