The roc appears in Arab geographies and natural history, popularized in Arabian fairy tales and sailors' folklore. Ibn Battuta tells of a mountain hovering in the air over the China Seas, which was the roc.[1] The story collection One Thousand and One Nights includes two tales, "Abd al-Rahman the Maghribi's Story of the Rukh" and "Sinbad the Sailor", both of which include the roc.
Etymology
The English form roc originates via Antoine Galland's French from Arabicruḵḵ (Arabic: الرُخّ, romanized:ar-ruḫḫ) and that from Persianruḵ (Dari pronunciation:[/rux/]).[2] In both languages, Arabic and Persian, the word is written in the Arabic script as رخ. Common romanizations are ruḵḵ for the Arabic form[2] and ruḵ,[2]rokh or rukh for the Persian form.
According to art historian Rudolf Wittkower, the idea of the roc had its origins in the story of the fight between the Indian solar bird Garuda[3] and the chthonic serpent Nāga. The mytheme of Garuda carrying off an elephant that was battling a crocodile appears in two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata (I.1353) and the Ramayana (III.39).
The Ath Kadha Lihini[4] (Warana) of Sri Lankan mythology was a large bird who hunted elephants and soared above casting a shadow as big as a cloud. Embekka Temple has wood carvings[5] depicting how it might have looked.
The merchants break the roc's egg, Le Magasin pitoresque, Paris, 1865
Western expansion
1690 painting by Franz Rösel von Rosenhof showing two roc-like birds carrying a deer and an elephant; a third grapples with a lion.
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported a story reminiscent of the roc in which shipwrecked sailors escaped from a desert island by wrapping themselves in ox-hides and letting griffins carry them off as if they were cattle.[6]
It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure.
Polo claimed that the roc flew to Mogadishu[7] "from the southern regions", and that the Great Khan sent messengers to the island who returned with a feather (likely a Raphia frond).[8] He explicitly distinguishes the bird from a griffin.
In The Arabian Nights the roc appears on a tropical island during Sinbad's second voyage. Because of Polo's account, others identified the island as Madagascar, which became the location for stories about other giant birds.[8] Doubtless, it was Polo's description that inspired Antonio Pigafetta, one of Ferdinand Magellan's companions, who wrote or had ghost-written an embroidered account of the circumglobal voyage: in Pigafetta's account[9] the home grounds of the roc were the seas of China. Such descriptions captured the imaginations of later illustrators, such as Stradanus c. 1590[10] or Theodor de Bry in 1594 who showed an elephant being carried off in the roc's talons,[11] or showed the roc destroying entire ships in revenge for destruction of its giant egg, as recounted in the fifth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor. Ulisse Aldrovandi's Ornithologia (1599) included a woodcut of a roc with a somewhat pig-like elephant in its talons,[12] but in the rational world of the 17th century, the roc was regarded more critically. In the modern era, the roc, like many other mythological and folkloric creatures, has entered the bestiaries of some fantasyrole-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons.
Rationalized accounts
The scientific culture of the 19th century introduced some "scientific" rationalizations for the myth's origins, by suggesting that the origin of the myth of the roc might lie in embellishments of the often-witnessed power of the eagle that could carry away a newborn lamb. In 1863, Bianconi suggested the roc was a raptor.[13] Recently a giant subfossil eagle, the Malagasy crowned eagle, identified from Madagascar was actually implicated as a top bird predator of the island, whose megafauna once included giant lemurs and pygmy hippopotamuses.[14]
Another possible origin of the myth is accounts of eggs of another extinct Malagasy bird, the enormous Aepyorniselephant bird, hunted to extinction by the 16th century, that was three meters tall and flightless.[15] There were reported elephant bird sightings at least in folklore memory as Étienne de Flacourt wrote in 1658.[8] Its egg, live or subfossilised, was known as early as 1420, when sailors to the Cape of Good Hope found eggs of the roc, according to a caption in the 1456 Fra Mauro map of the world, which says that the roc "carries away an elephant or any other great animal".[16][17] Between 1830 and 1840 European travelers in Madagascar saw giant eggs and egg shells. English observers were more willing to believe their accounts because they knew of the moa in New Zealand. In 1851 the French Academy of Sciences received three eggs. They and later fossils seemingly confirmed to 19th-century Europeans that Aepyornis was the roc, but the real bird does not resemble an eagle as the roc is said to.[8]
Elephant Carried Away by a Roc after design by Stradanus, 1590
In addition to Polo's account of the rukh in 1298, Chou Ch'ű-fei (周去非, Zhōu Qùfēi), in his 1178 book Lingwai Daida, told of a large island off Africa with birds large enough to use their quills as water reservoirs.[18] Fronds of the raffia palm may have been brought to Kublai Khan under the guise of roc's feathers.[19][20]
Religious tradition
Michael Drayton
Through the 16th century the existence of the roc could be accepted by Europeans. In 1604, Michael Drayton envisaged the rocs being taken aboard the Ark:
All feathered things yet ever knowne to men, From the huge Rucke, unto the little Wren; From Forrest, Fields, from Rivers and from Pons, All that have webs, or cloven-footed ones; To the Grand Arke, together friendly came, Whose severall species were too long to name.[21]
The rukh is also identified in the Ethiopian holy book Kebra Negast as the agent responsible for delivering the blessed piece of wood to Solomon which enabled the great king to complete Solomon's Temple. This piece of wood also is said to have transformed the Queen of Sheba's foot from that of a goat to that of a human. The piece of wood that the rukh brought was therefore given an honored place in the Temple and decorated with silver rings. According to tradition, these silver rings were given to Judas Iscariot as payment for betraying Jesus; the piece of wood became Jesus's cross.
See also
Mount Qaf, the only place in this world where the roc will land[22]
Blackburn Roc, Second World War naval turret fighter
↑ Noted in Yule-Cordier, Cathay and the Way Thither IV (1916:146), noted by Wittkower 1938.
1 2 3 roc /[phonetic transcription]/ n. Also (earlier) ✝roche, ✝rock, ✝ruc(k), ✝rukh. L16 [Sp. rocho, ruc f. Arab. ruḵḵ, f. Pers. ruḵ.] A mythical bird of Eastern legend, imagined as being of enormous size and strength (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, Volume 2 N-Z, 1993 edition, page 2614)
↑ Wittkower noted the identification of the roc and Garuda made in Kalipadra Mitra, "The bird and serpent myth", The Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society (Bangalore) 16 1925–26:189.
↑ M. Komroff, Contemporaries of Marco Polo 1928:311f.
↑ “The island now known as Madagascar was named by no less a personage than Marco Polo, the famous Venetian explorer. Passing through Arabia on his way home from China in 1294, he wrote a description of "Madeigaskar" based on stories he heard from other travelers. The only problem was that he had confused the great island off the east coast of Africa with the bustling port of Mogadishu on the African coast, so none of the things he described were true of the real Madagascar. Besides getting the name wrong, he wrote of lions, giraffes, camels and huge flying birds on his mythical island that lifted elephants off the ground and dropped them to their deaths from a great height. The island was a source of indescribable wealth in his telling, full of gold, ivory and jewels.” - The Tragedy of Madagascar An Island Nation Confronts the 21st Century By Nathaniel Adams · 2022
↑ Or the Italian version in Ramusio'sDelle navigationi et viaggi, mentioned in Rudolf Wittkower, "'Roc': An Eastern Prodigy in a Dutch Engraving" Journal of the Warburg Institute1.3 (January 1938:255–257) p 255
↑ An engraving after Stradanus is reproduced in Wittkower 1938:fig 33c.
↑ De Bry's engraving is reproduced in Attenborough (1961: 35)
↑ Needham, Joseph (1971). Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge University Press. p.501. ISBN9780521070607.
↑ Major, Richard Henry (1868). The Life of Prince Henry of Portugal Surnamed the Navigator, and Its Results, Comprising the Discovery, Within One Century, of Half the World ... from Authentic Contemporary Documents. Biblioteca Nacional de Austria – Asher (Editor). p.311.
↑ Pearson & Godden (2002). In Search of the Red Slave. Sutton. p.121. ISBN0750929383.
↑ Yule's Marco Polo, bk. iii. ch. 33, and Academy, 1884, No. 620.
↑ Attenborough, D. (1961). Zoo Quest to Madagascar. Lutterworth Press, London. p.32-33.
↑ Drayton, Michael (1961). The works of Michael Drayton. Vol.3. Oxford: Blackwell. p.338.
Flacourt, E. de (1658). Histoire de la grande île de Madagascar. Paris. New edition 2007, with Allibert C. notes and presentation, Paris, Karthala ed. 712 pages
Goodman, Steven M. (1994). "Description of a new species of subfossil eagle from Madagascar: Stephanoaetus (Aves: Falconiformes) from the deposits of Amphasambazimba," Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 107: 421–428.
Miskelly, Colin M. (1987): The identity of the hakawai. Notornis34(2): 95–116. PDF fulltext
Hawkins, A.F.A. & Goodman, S.M. (2003) inGoodman, S.M. & Benstead, J.P. (eds.): The Natural History of Madagascar: 1019–1044. University of Chicago Press.
Pearson, Mike Parker & Godden, K. (2002). In search of the Red Slave: Shipwreck and Captivity in Madagascar. Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire.
Allibert C., Le monde austronésien et la civilisation du bambou: une plume qui pèse lourd: l'oiseau Rokh des auteurs arabes, in Taloha 11, Antananarivo, Institut de Civilisations, Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie, 1992: 167–181
Further reading
Al-Rawi, Ahmed. "A Linguistic and Literary Examination of the Rukh Bird in Arab Culture." Al-'Arabiyya 50 (2017): 105–17. www.jstor.org/stable/26451398.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
