New Academic Paper Challenges Adrienne Mayor's Griffin-Protoceratops Link

​A new academic paper is challenging folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s identification of the dinosaur Protoceratops as the inspiration for the legendary griffin of mythology. Mayor’s claim, first made more than thirty years ago and most famously outlined in her turn-of-the-century book The First Fossil Hunters, posits that Central Asian merchants observed the exposed bones of Protoceratops, some with their nests, and passed these tales on. As they traveled westward, the creature turned into a winged lion with an eagle’s head, resembling the beaked skull of the Protoceratops.

Griffioen by Antonio Tempesta (ca. 1650).

​However, paleontologists Mark Witton and Richard Hing of the University of Portsmouth concluded that Mayor’s argument is little more than speculation, outlining a number of reasons that Protoceratops is unlikely to be the inspiration for the griffin. Many of their arguments are convincing, but some of their claims are seemingly erroneous (Protoceratops is not a horned dinosaur, for example).
 
At root, Witton and Hing argue that Mayor has exceeded the evidence by drawing conclusions that are neither necessary nor supported by paleontological nor Classical facts. They point out that no evidence of Protoeceratops bones being used as griffin bones exists from the ancient world, nor are the dinosaurs associated on the ground with key elements of griffin mythology, such as guarding gold. Further, images of griffin-like monsters exist in Mycenaean art (c. 1200 BCE), centuries before direct Greek contact with merchants from Central Asia. The authors correctly note that dinosaur bones are unnecessary to explain the creation of a legendary animal combining features from two known animals, eagles and lions, both of whom, as symbols of royalty and power, were appropriate legendary guardians for gold.
 
“The whole idea is conjecture and speculation,” Witton told The Guardian.
 
Witton and Hing identify a key inconsistency in Mayor’s argument, notably that, when speaking to popular audiences, as in the children’s book The Griffin and the Dinosaur, she often presents Protoceratops as “inspiring” the griffin myth, but in her academic work she writes instead that the bones merely enhanced a preexisting body of griffin lore, which they say originated in Greece. This is no small point. Throughout The First Fossil Hunters, Mayor fluctuates between ascribing every aspect of the griffin to a Protoceratops inspiration and recognizing that the lion-eagle combo existed thousands of years before contact with Central Asia. (The Egyptians also had eagle-headed, lion-bodied sphinxes.) It simply can’t be both.
 
The earliest griffin lore, given in Herodotus 3.116 and 4.27, is said to come from Aristeas, a seventh-century traveler cited elsewhere in Herodotus, and thus the authors argue that Aristeas misunderstood stories of gold-guarding creatures such as the roc told to him by the Issedones of Central Asia and misidentified them as (Greek) griffins. (The Persian-Arabian roc myth probably postdates this period.) Herodotus says he made use of Aristeas (4.16) to compile his summary and that Aristeas had mentioned gold-guarding griffins (4.13), but it is not entirely clear whether he was the only source for the stories told by the Issedones, as Herodotus also claims Scythian sources for some of his Issedonian information. (Two direct quotations from Aristeas exist, but neither the one in John Tzetzes [Chiliades 687-692] nor Longinus [On the Sublime, ch. 10] mentions griffins. It is assumed that the mention of griffins in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 790ff. derives from Aristeas, but this is only an inference based on reading the text against Herodotus.)
 
Nevertheless, no matter who originated the story, the authors raise an important point about Herodotus’ account, namely that the creature named as a griffin may be a Greek interpretation, interpolation, or misunderstanding relative to a genuine account. Such things happened often in Greek literature. One particularly egregious account involved Greek travelers learning of the Persian ayazana, or Zoroastrian fire-altars. They misunderstood the word as Iasonia, or Jasonia, that is, temples of Jason, of Argonauts fame. From this, they crafted an elaborate myth cycle of Jason’s conquest of the East and worship there as a god, something that did not appear in mythology prior to that time. It is not impossible that Herodotus’ informants applied the familiar word “griffin” to a poorly understood story of some other creature.
 
The authors raise this only as a minor point and prefer to focus on the incompatibility of the location of Protoceratops fossils with Classical accounts of griffins, though it is a mistake to read griffin lore in its entirety due to the piecemeal, contradictory nature of its development over many centuries. Mayor, for example, applies to her Protoceratops hypothesis to developments in the myth that first appear as many as seven centuries apart. Witton and Hing, similarly, propose a diffusion of griffin stories eastward from Greece rather than westward from the Near East that discounts the cross-cultural contacts and transfer of stories and motifs across the Near East. Near Eastern stories moved into Greece with regularity (cf. the succession of gods, the Flood, etc.) and Greek motifs also moved back the other way, even finding echoes in the Bible.
 
Mayor raises one important point that Witton and Hing did not counter: While other mythological creatures exist in what seems to be a fantastical time of gods and monsters before the Trojan War, the griffin is described as though it were a real animal, much like the manticore (tiger) and rhinoceros. She correctly concludes that the griffin can’t be a purely mythological creature like harpies or Pegasus. On the other hand, in those days, as Ctesias attests, all manner of weird creatures were presented as real, such as his story of men with long tails and other oddities whose stories still appeared in European and Arabian lore into the Middle Ages. Most of these fantastic creatures, treated as real, were stories acquired from other cultures, either distorted from life or adapted from foreign myths. Ctesias places griffins in India and describes them as quadruped birds (Photius, Bibl. 72) and seemingly recorded legends that mixed their story with that of the giant, furry gold-hoarding ants of India (likely marmots), a story also known to Herodotus. Because Herodotus knows about it, the story was likely in common enough Near Eastern circulation to have become confused with griffin lore somewhere along the line. (Frankly, if we are simply speculating, the furry, non-winged, gold-hoarding griffin, as opposed to the avian, winged artistic one, could easily be a marmot, whose conical muzzle and protruding front teeth could be distorted in storytelling into a beak.)
 
We could go on like this at much greater length, but I think the fairest summation is that nothing in the literary, artistic, or historical record requires us to identify the griffin or its gold-guarding or nesting with Protoceratops, since every aspect of the griffon story could have arisen independently or already existed in Greek culture as far back as Mycenaean times. But nothing prevents us from drawing parallels either. My own feeling is that Mayor makes an interesting circumstantial case, but, ultimately, the evidence doesn’t rise to conclusive.