Griffin

The griffin belongs first to the ancient Near East, not to Greece. Lion-bodied and eagle-headed, it appears in Elamite, Mesopotamian, Levantine and Egyptian art across the third and second millennia BCE, on cylinder seals, palace reliefs and ivories, long before it is named in Greek. The Greek gryps enters literature through the lost poem of Aristeas of Proconnesus and is reported by Herodotus, who places griffins in the far north guarding gold and warring with the one-eyed Arimaspians, a story he transmits while noting he does not vouch for it. In this early form the griffin is above all a guardian, of treasure and of sacred space, and that guardian role, rather than any single adventure, is the constant that carries across cultures and centuries.

Medieval Europe inherited the guardian role but gave it a new frame. Bestiaries and heraldic writers read the griffin as a union of the two ruling creatures of earth and sky, the lion's body and the eagle's head and wings, and took that union itself as an emblem of vigilance, courage and a divine or princely authority spanning both realms; the figure became a common charge in European heraldry from the twelfth century onward, signifying valour and protection rather than the treasure-hoarding it does in Herodotus. A separate medieval legend, unconnected to the classical guardian tradition, had Alexander the Great attempt to fly to heaven harnessed to a pair of griffins, an image that circulated widely in illuminated manuscripts and church carvings quite apart from the Scythian gold-guarding beast.

Two later developments should be kept apart from the ancient record. The first is medieval and Christian: writers read the griffin allegorically, its lion and eagle natures made a figure of Christ's dual kingship, while heraldry adopted it as a charge signifying vigilance and valour. The second is modern and contested.

The folklorist and historian of science Adrienne Mayor, in The First Fossil Hunters (2000), proposed that the Greek griffin image was shaped by nomads encountering the fossil beds of Central Asia, where the beaked, four-legged skeletons of Protoceratops and its relatives lie near gold-bearing ground, a "geomythology" that would explain the beak, the four legs and the gold in one stroke. It is an elegant hypothesis and it remains a hypothesis: the griffin image is attested in the Near East long before, and independently of, any Scythian fossil field, and the ancient pedigree and the fossil conjecture are not the same claim.