The manticore is a Persian legendary creature similar to the Egyptian sphinx that proliferated in western Europeanmedieval art as well. It has the head of a human, the body of a lion and a tail of venomous spines similar to porcupine quills, while other depictions have it with the tail of a scorpion. There are some accounts that the spines can be shot like arrows, thus making the manticore a lethal predator. It devours its prey whole, using its triple rows of teeth, leaves no traces of its victims behind. The mantyger is a creature of medieval invention, having the body of a heraldic tiger with mane, and the head of an old man, the tusks of a boar and with long spiral horns. Some heraldic authorities make the horns more like those of an ox, and the hands and feet like those of a monkey.
's The Historie of Foure-footed Beasts . Prepared for Felix Platter's Historiae animalium.
Name
Its name literally means "man-eater". The English term "manticore" was borrowed from Latin mantichora, itself derived from the Greek rendering of the Persian name, μαρτιχόρα, martichora. The Greeks called it androphagos, which also means "man-eater".
Origin
The manticore myth was of Persian origin. It passed into European folklore first through a remark by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court of King Artaxerxes II in the fourth century BC, in his book Indica, which circulated among Greek writers on natural history but has survived only in fragments, or references by those other writers. Aelian, in his work Characteristics of Animals, had a complete section dedicated to manticore: The Romanised Greek Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, recalled strange animals he had seen at Rome and commented: Pliny the Elder did not share Pausanias' skepticism. He followed Aristotle's natural history by including the martichoras – mistranscribed as manticorus in his copy of Aristotle – among his descriptions of animals in Naturalis Historia 8:30, c. 77 AD. Later, in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Greek writer Flavius Philostratus wrote:
Medieval and post-medieval appearances
Pliny's book was widely enjoyed through the European Middle Ages, during which the manticore was sometimes described or illustrated in bestiaries. Through false etymology, it was sometimes assumed that the name was an amalgamation of man and tiger. However, other sources regarded the mantyger as a different creature entirely. The mantyger was often depicted as having monkey-like feet, being apparently inspired by the baboon, and sometimes being represented with either tusks or short horns. There was further confusion as to whether the manticore should be identified with or distinguished from the satyral and the lampago. Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, depicted the mythical Geryon as a manticore, following Pliny's description. The manticore first appeared in English heraldry in c. 1470, as a badge of William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings; and in the 16th century, it was used as a badge by Robert Radcliffe, 1st Earl of Sussex, and by Sir Anthony Babyngton. Edward Topsell, in 1607, described the manticore as: Randle Holme drew on this description in 1688, when he described the manticore as having: The heraldic manticore influenced some Mannerist representations of the sin of Fraud, conceived as a monstrous chimera with a beautiful woman's face – for example, in Bronzino's allegory Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, and more commonly in the decorative schemes called grotteschi. From here it passed by way of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French conception of a sphinx. Gerald Brenan linked the manticore to the mantequero, a monster feeding on human fat in Andalusian folklore. In some modern depictions, such as in the tabletop role-playing gameDungeons & Dragons and the card game , manticores are depicted as having wings.
