Medieval bestiaries are among the most popular primary sources for tales of fabulous creatures. Scattered among the fascinating, and, at times wildly exaggerated, moralizing tales of familiar creatures are a variety of enigmatic, yet oddly plausible, creatures including the Catoblepas, the Yale, the Aurumvorax and the ubiquitous Unicorn. However, some of the creatures to be found in the pages of bestiaries are neither plausible, nor clearly derived from descriptions of any known living creature.
Among the most peculiar of the creatures in this category is the ant-lion, which is, as its name clearly suggests, half ant and half lion. Some bestiaries illustrate the beast as having a lion- scale head and an ant-scale body. How could such a bizarre creature, and apparently such an obvious fabrication, come to appear in a serious work of natural history? The answer is really very simple: Medieval bestiaries made a point of describing every Biblical creature, and the ant lion does appear the Bible. Sort of.
The origins of this truly bizarre creature actually begin with the translation of a fairly unremarkable line of Biblical scripture. In the 3rd century BC, approximately seventy Biblical scholars assembled to collaborate on what was to be the definitive Ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, a version referred to as the Septuagint, in honor of the number of participating translators. A few remarkable misunderstandings are bound to occur in any translation project of this size, but, in this case, the confusing translation of a single line produced a monster.
The line in question (Job IV: 11) can be accurately translated as: "The old lion perisheth for lack of prey." However, in the original Hebrew, the word used to refer to the animal was "layish', an uncommon word for "great cat" or "lion". Since it was fairly clear that the reference was to an eastern cat, rather than to African savannah lions, the translators opted to use an equally exotic term in the Greek version. The word finally selected as the Greek counterpart for "layish" was "myrmex", an unusual term used by Aelian in reference to the great cats of the Middle East.
Since, co-incidentally, the word "myrmex" can also be taken to mean "ant" in Ancient Greek, the translators attempted to clarify their meaning by coining the term "myrmecoleon" or "myrmex-lion". Unfortunately, the reasoning behind this rather awkward attempt at linguistic ingenuity was quickly forgotten or misinterpreted by Grrek readers, who tended to read the phrase as "the ant-lion perisheth for lack of prey".
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