Griffin

Middle Persian Sēnmurw in Sasanian culture was a fabulous composite creature, and Russian archaeologist Boris A. Litvinskij [ru] argued for the possibility that the application of this term may extend to the griffin.

[41] Benson's emphasis is that the Greeks attached a stylized "anorganic" topknot[41] or an "inorganic" plug on the griffin's head (due to lack of information),[41][k] while in contrast, a known oriental example (stone protomes from Nimrud) is simple but more "plausible" (naturalistic), resembling a forelock.

[56][8] Bernard Goldman maintains the position that Luristan examples must be counted as developments of the "lion-griffin" type, even when it exhibits "stylization .. approaching the beak of a bird".

A golden frontal half of a griffin-like animal from the Ziwiye hoard (near Saqqez city) in Kurdistan province, Iran resembles the western protomes in style.

[70] Griffin-type creatures combining raptor heads and mammalian bodies were depicted in the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia during the Middle Bronze Age,[71][72] dated at about 1950–1550 BC.

[74] One early example of griffin-types in Minoan art occurs in the 15th century BC frescoes of the Throne Room of the Bronze Age Palace of Knossos, as restored by Sir Arthur Evans.

[78] It has thus been controversially argued (by Ulf Jantzen [de]) that these attachments had always since the earliest times been crafted by Greek workshops,[n] added to the plain cauldrons imported from the Near East.

[citation needed] The Golden Pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla, interred in Scythian king's burial site, perhaps commissioned to Greek goldsmiths, who engraved the image of a griffin attacking a horse.

Local lore on the gryps or griffin was gathered by Aristeas of Proconnesus, a Greek who traveled to the Altai region between Mongolia and NW China in the 7th century BC.

[82][83] Herodotus explains (via Aristeas) that the gold-guarding griffin supposedly dwelled further north from the one-eyed Arimaspi people[p] who robbed the gold from the fabulous creatures.

[82] Herodotus also mentions elsewhere that there are gold-collecting ants in Kashmir, India, and this has been interpreted by modern scholars as "doublets or garbled versions" of the lore of gold-hoarding griffins.

After that comes a region of very rich soil but quite uninhabitable because griffins, a savage and tenacious breed of wild beasts, love.. the gold that is mined from deep within the earth there, and because they guard it with an amazing hostility to those who set foot there.

[100] The griffin has been associated with various deities (Apollo, Dionysus, Nemesis), in Greek mythography but here, the identifiable attested "accounts" presented in scholarship are largely not literary, but artistic,[101] or numismatic.

[102][103] And even the main Temple of Apollo at Delphi featured a statue of the god flanked by griffins, or so it can be presumed based on the representation struck on the tetradrachm coinage of Attica.

The vessel was attached griffin heads around the rim (like the protomes,[116] described above): it was an Argolic or Argive krater, according to the text,[v] standing on a tripod shaped like colossal figures.

[117] Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) attributes to other writers the claim that "this bird places an 'eagle-stone' (echytem) or agate (gagatem) among its eggs" to change the ambient temperature and enhance reproduction.

[3][additional citation(s) needed] Attestation of griffin's feather as cure for blindness does occur in an Italian folktale,[141] classed as "The Singing Bone" tale type (ATU 780).

[147] In British heraldry, a male griffin is shown without wings, its body covered in tufts of formidable spikes, with a short tusk emerging from the forehead, as for a unicorn.

[147] When Genoa emerged as a major seafaring power in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, griffins commenced to be depicted as part of the republic's coat of arms, rearing at the sides of the shield bearing the Cross of St. George.

[157][136]John Milton in Paradise Lost he mentions the griffin as an allusion to Satan:[158] As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale, Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stelth Had from his wakeful custody purloind

[159] This speculation is based on Greek and Latin literary sources and related artworks in a specific time frame, beginning with the first written descriptions of griffins as real animals of Asia in a lost work by Aristeas (referenced by Herodotus, ca.

Mayor took a paleo-cryptozoological approach, trying to identify the unknown creature by its features: body like a mammal but head with raptor's beak, dwelling in Eastern deserts on way to gold deposits, lays eggs in nest on the ground.

Traffic went both ways on the ancient trade routes; this means that tales related to strange creatures with four legs and beaks, and nests and eggs on the ground, were recounted by traders and gold seekers traveling west from China, and transmitted to the Greco-Roman world through translators.

On their way to the gold-dust-bearing gullies of the Altai ("Gold") Mountains and Tien Shan gold belts, travelers from the east would pass through the Gobi and then arrive in Issedonian territory (Issedon Serica and Issedon Scythica, desert stations where the griffin was first described to Greeks), having observed or heard garbled descriptions of strange beaked quadrupeds east of those points.

[161] She argues that repeated oral descriptions and artistic attempts to illustrate a bony neck frill (which is rather fragile and may have been frequently broken or entirely weathered away) may have been rendered as large mammal-type external ears, and its beak may be treated as evidence of a part-bird nature and led to stylized wings being added to accord with the creature's avian-like attributes.

[163] Witton and Richard A. Hing argue that it ignores the existence of depictions of hybrid creatures bird's heads on mammal bodies throughout the Near East dating to long before the time when Mayor posits the Greeks became aware of Protoceratops fossils in Scythia.

An archaic griffin design, created by artist Thomas Fanourakis [el] (1915–1993), was adopted as the official symbol of the city of Heraklion on 22 March 1961 (cf.

In an episode of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper mentions that he attempted to create a griffin but could not obtain the "necessary eagle eggs and lion semen".

General Atomics has used the term "Griffin Eye" for its intelligence surveillance platform based on a Hawker Beechcraft King Air 35ER civilian aircraft.

But they have no great power of flying, not more than have birds of short flight; for they are not winged as is proper with birds, but the palms of their feet are webbed with red membranes, such that they are able to revolve them, and make a flight and fight in the air; and the tiger alone is beyond their powers of attack, because in swiftness it rivals the winds".And the griffins of the Indians and the ants of the Ethiopians, though they are dissimilar in form, yet, from what we hear, play similar parts; for in each country they are, according to the tales of poets, the guardians of gold, and devoted to the gold reefs of the two countries.