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.
The Ath Kadha Lihini (Warana) of Sri Lankan mythology is a large bird which hunted elephants and cast a shadow as big as a cloud as it soared above.[4]Embekka Temple has wood carvings depicting its likeness.[5]
The rukh is identified in the abridged Arabic version of the Kebra Negast,[7][8] an Ethiopian holy book, as the agent responsible for delivering the blessed piece of wood to Solomon which enabled him 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 that Solomon built 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.[citation needed]
Marco Polo
Elephant Carried Away by a Roc after design by Stradanus, 1590
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.
1690 painting by Franz Rösel von Rosenhof showing two roc-like birds carrying a deer and an elephant; a third grapples with a lion.
Polo claimed that the roc flew to Mogadishu "from the southern regions",[9] and that the Great Khan sent messengers to the island who returned with a feather (likely the frond from a Raffia palm).[10] He explicitly distinguishes the bird from the griffin.[citation needed]
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.[11] Fronds of the raffia palm may have been brought to Kublai Khan under the guise of roc's feathers.[12][13]
In folklore
The merchants break the roc's egg, Le Magasin pitoresque, Paris, 1865
In The Arabian Nights the roc appears on a tropical island during Sinbad's second voyage. Because of Polo's account, others[who?] identified the island as Madagascar, which became the location for stories about other giant birds.[10]
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 the home grounds of the roc were the seas of China.[14] Such descriptions captured the imaginations of later illustrators, such as Stradanus c. 1590,[15] or Theodor de Bry in 1594 who showed an elephant being carried off in the roc's talons,[16] and depicting 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,[17]
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 Noah's 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.[18]
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.[19]
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.[20] There were reported elephant bird sightings at least in folklore memory as Étienne de Flacourt wrote in 1658.[10] 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".[21][22] 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,[10] though elephant birds were ratites, and thus did not resemble the roc at all.
↑ 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.
↑ Bezold, Carl. 1905. Kebra Nagast, die Herrlichkeit der Könige: Nach den Handschriften in Berlin, London, Oxford und Paris. München: K.B. Akademie der Wissenschaften. xliv-lx.
↑ Anonymous. 1922. The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek: Being the History of the Departure of God and His Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and the Establishment of the Religion of the Hebrews and the Solomonic Line of Kings in That Country: A Complete Translation of the Kebra Nagast. Translated by E. A. Wallis Budge. 1st ed. London: Medici Society Limited. xxxii-xlviii.
↑ “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
↑ 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.
↑ 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.
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.
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