Cross-Post: The Creature on the Persepolis Staircase
In early June I wrote a guest post for the L. Sprague de Camp Fan Blog about the wild animal which one of the delegations on the Apadana at Persepolis brings as tribute. Its common to read that the animal above is a giraffe (!) but there are two other plausible theories. Below the fold I have some additional bibliography.
de Camp gave Loveecraft a hard time for publishing things in places with small audiences and no pay, but he published a good deal in fan publications himself. And its always easier to tell others how to live than to follow those precepts yourself.
Additional Bibliography
Burchard Brentjes, “Der geschichtliche Tierweltwechsel in Vorderasien und Nordafrika in altertumskundlicher Sicht.” Säugetierkundliche Mitteilungen 13, 1963, Heft 3, pp. 101-109. Brentjes also wrote a book about Atlantis and was interested in zoology and archaeology so I bet he and de Camp would have gotten on!
Oliver Hampe. “Das Okapi von Persepolis – erstes Dokument von Okapia johnstoni (Artiodactyla : Giraffidae).” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan, Band 33, 2001, pp. 203-218 This article goes hard for the Okapi theory.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “Keeping and Displaying Royal Tribute Animals in Ancient Persia and the Near East,” in Thorsten Fögen and Edmund V. Thomas, eds., Interactions Between Animals and Humans in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017) pp. 305-338
(scheduled 5 June 2024)
