This animal is exceedingly swift and powerful, so that no creature, neither the horse nor any other, can overtake it…. … Other asses, tame or wild … do not have an ankle-bone… but these do have an ankle-bone … the most beautiful that I have ever seen….
They have a horn in the middle of the forehead that is one cubit in length the base of this horn is pure white … the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson, and the middle portion is black. Their bodies are white, their heads are dark red, and their eyes dark blue. There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses and even larger. She quotes from his book Indica, written around 400 BCE: As Margaret Beam Freeman reports in The Unicorn Tapestries, Ctesias was the first person to write about the one-horned animal. But where did this image come from? And what animal was Marco Polo so underwhelmed by?įirst things first: we can blame the Greek physician and historian Ctesias for the kernel of the ideal unicorn.
Unique to this marvelous animal was one long and tapering horn that grew straight out from its forehead. Just like today, medieval depictions of unicorns varied from artist to artist, but in general it was similar to the one we know: it was a horse-like (or goat-like) creature, pure white in color and dainty and refined in appearance. Most of his contemporaries did too, as it was a very popular animal in the medieval equivalent of the Internet, i.e. Like the rest of us, he thought he knew what a unicorn looked like.
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