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The Flying Snakes of Arabia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Extract

Herodotus has told us some queer tales but it is always unsafe to discredit them merely because they seem strange to us. Who would have thought that his story of the bald-headed Argippaioi who sat under trees judging the Scythians was literally true until the recent discovery in Russia of a felt wall hanging providing a contemporary illustration of these queer tribunals ?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1958

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References

1 Compare Barnett, R. D., Illustrated London News, 1 Jan. 1955, p. 26,Google Scholar and coloured supplement fig. 3; Rudenko, S. I., Kultura Naseleniya Gorno-Altaya v Skifs'koe Vremya, Acad. U.S.S.R. 1953, pis. lxxxviii and xcv.Google Scholar

2 Or many-coloured.

3 Or ‘spines’; cf. Herodotus 4. 72, where means the whole spine.

4 Schoff, W. H., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1912), p. 131.Google Scholar

1 Smith, W. Robertson, Religion of thi Semites (1894), p. 133.Google Scholar

2 The tutelary deity of Pa-Uazt incident ally was Uazit, sometimes represented as a winged serpent.

3 Edmonds, S. M., Elegy and Iambics II, Anacreontea (Loeb Edition), no. 35.Google Scholar

4 Science from an Easy Chair, p. 124;Google Scholar he notes that the Egyptian emblem for Uazi might be a stylized locust. Lawrence, A. W., Herodotus, p. 185, note 1, quotes this theory but rejects it because of the bones Herodotus saw, without realizing that might mean the exuviae of the insects.Google Scholar

5 I hesitate to suggest that the word is related to aphis but I should be pleased if it were.