Marine Equivalents of Land-Animals: Tracing the Idea from Antiquity to the Modern Period

Abstract

The idea that the various species of land-animals have marine equivalents (with some exception: the marten, the fox) is found in the early rabbinic literature, and medieval Jewish texts that depend on it, but Greek, Latin, and Talmudic Aramaic names for fishes patterned after the
name for some land-animal clearly show that such an idea was shared in the Graeco-Roman world. We are able to show that this idea was current among Scottish and Icelandic fishermen, as well as in early modern scholarly texts (thus representing elite belief), up to Telliamed, a book
first published posthumously in 1748, authored by Benoît de Maillet (1656–1738); an American edition appeared in Baltimore in 1797, apparently upon the initiative of D. Porter, who was affiliated with an observatory. Telliamed proposed a theory, an Origin of Species of sorts that had land-animal develop from supposedly similar aquatic animals, and what is more, Telliamed also was an Origin of Man of sorts, claiming as it did that among humans, different peoples developed polygenetically, separately, from aquatic men, and that more primitive peoples were relatively
closer to such origins. (As a precaution, the author had the fictitious Indian philosopher Telliamed expound the theory to a missionary. Being still unconverted, Telliamed could depart from human monogenesis as claimed by the Book of Genesis.) We also show how the idea of parallel land- and marine animals affected medieval art. Strikingly, an image shows Alexander the Great inside a glass barrel, watching underwater a fox and a ruminant, as well as humans, living on the seafloor among trees, while fish swim around. We show how prolific the idea was in Indian art depicting mythical composite animals. Composite animals have even appeared in TV commercials, and a current idea claims that chimaerae originated from finds of mixed fossil bones