Dragons Around the World: Could the Legends Remember Real Animals?

Few creatures have traveled as far as the dragon. It coils around Chinese imperial robes, guards treasure in Old English poetry, appears in Babylonian art and flies through medieval Bibles. The word “dinosaur,” by contrast, is less than two centuries old: according to Wikipedia, Sir Richard Owen coined it in 1842.

So here is a question that Dennis R. Petersen asks in Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation, in chapters titled “Can ancient reports of real dragons be taken seriously?” and “Where do dragon legends originate?” Is it possible that people all over the world told dragon stories because their ancestors had actually seen large reptiles, including some we now call dinosaurs?

This article lays out what the sources say, the creationist answer, and the other explanations scholars have offered.

A worldwide pattern

Even mainstream scholarship agrees on the basic fact. Wikipedia’s survey of the subject states that “draconic creatures appear in virtually all cultures around the globe,” and it lists examples from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Greece, France, Albania, the Lakota of North America, the Aztecs and the Norse world, along with the dragon in Beowulf.

A few examples show how varied, and how old, these traditions are:

• Mesopotamia. A horned creature with a snake’s body and neck, lion’s forelegs and bird’s hind legs appears in Mesopotamian art from the Akkadian period onward. Its Akkadian name, mušḫuššu, means “furious serpent.”
• China. The Chinese dragon (lóng) is the highest-ranking creature in the Chinese animal hierarchy, with ancestors traceable to Neolithic pottery and Bronze Age ritual vessels. Old Chinese stories even describe dragons being tamed and raised: the Zuo zhuan tells of a man given the family name Huanlong, “dragon-raiser.”
• Greece and Rome. Greek drakontes were large, supernatural serpents. Roman writers told of a giant serpent that blocked the army of Marcus Atilius Regulus at the Bagrada River during the First Punic War.
• Medieval Europe. Dragons fill bestiaries, heraldry and saints’ lives, and in Beowulf an aging king dies killing a treasure-guarding dragon.

An ancient historian goes looking

One of the most intriguing early reports comes from Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC. He wrote that he traveled to a place in Arabia near the town of Buto specifically to learn about winged serpents:

“When I arrived there, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents: many heaps of backbones, great and small and even smaller.”Herodotus, Histories 2.75, trans. A. D. Godley

He added that winged serpents “are said to fly from Arabia at the beginning of spring, making for Egypt,” and that ibis birds kill them in a mountain pass. Elsewhere in the Histories, according to Wikipedia’s summary, he describes small winged serpents in Arabia with wings like a bat’s. Herodotus reports what he saw (heaps of bones) and what he was told (flying serpents) separately, which is exactly the distinction a careful reader should keep. Unconfirmed What animal the bones came from is unknown.

Dragons and the Bible

The Bible contributes two famous descriptions. In Job 40, God points Job to a creature called behemoth:

“Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox… He moveth his tail like a cedar… His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.”Job 40:15, 17–18, KJV

Creationist writers, including the Institute for Creation Research, connect behemoth’s “tail like a cedar” with the large dinosaurs; the animals most often proposed instead, the elephant and the hippopotamus, have small tails. In Job 41, leviathan is described in startling terms:

“Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.”Job 41:19–20, KJV

Interpreters differ widely on these chapters. Wikipedia notes that some scholars read leviathan as a mythical sea dragon, and that elsewhere in the Old Testament the word is used as a symbol for nations opposed to God. Creationists generally read Job 40–41 as descriptions of real animals that Job could picture.

The creationist explanation

Creationist organizations offer a straightforward answer to the dragon puzzle. Answers in Genesis summarizes it this way:

“Dragons represent the collective, though exaggerated, memory of dinosaurs before that word was invented in 1841 to describe their remains.”Answers in Genesis, “Dragon Legends”

(Wikipedia dates the coining of the word to 1842; the difference of a year does not affect the argument.) The reasoning follows the biblical timeline. Genesis 1 places land animals and humans on the same day of creation. Creationists hold that representatives of the dinosaur kinds were on Noah’s Ark and lived on for a time afterward, before dying out, possibly with help from human hunters. In that view, dragon-slayer stories are exactly what we should expect.

The Institute for Creation Research argues that the sheer number and similarity of the accounts is the key: “Genuine dinosaur encounters best explain the sheer number of dragon descriptions and their similarities across space and time.” Creationist writers also point to details that seem to fit real animals: pterosaur fossils show wing shapes like those of dragons, and, as one AiG article notes, certain beetles really do spray hot chemicals, so fire-breathing is not biologically unthinkable.

The other explanations

To be fair, scholars have proposed several natural explanations, and each deserves to be understood:

• Instinct. Anthropologist David E. Jones, in An Instinct for Dragons (2000), suggested that humans inherited a fear of snakes, big cats and birds of prey, and that dragons combine these fears.
• Fossils. Historian Adrienne Mayor, in The First Fossil Hunters (2000), argued that some dragon stories were inspired by ancient discoveries of large fossil bones. In China, fossil bones of large animals have long been called “dragon bones.” Mayor herself notes that this cannot explain everything, since Scandinavia is rich in dragon stories but has long been considered barren of large fossils.
• Nature and weather. Robert Blust, in The Origin of Dragons (2000), connected dragons to pre-scientific thinking about rain, drought and rainbows.

Notice that the fossil theory and the creationist view agree on one important point: dragon legends may point to real animals. They differ on whether people saw living creatures or only their bones.

What we can and cannot say

An honest summary:

• Well documented Dragon stories appear in cultures around the world, many of them ancient.
• Well documented Some ancient writers, like Herodotus, reported bones and flying serpents as matters of fact.
• Interpretation Whether those stories preserve memories of living dinosaurs is an inference, not something the legends themselves can prove.

For the creationist, the legends fit the Bible’s history remarkably well: people and great reptiles sharing the same world, not separated by millions of years. For the skeptic, they are a puzzle that needs several different explanations stitched together. Either way, the dragon is one of the most remarkable threads running through human history, and it is worth taking seriously.

See also our look at a famous piece of evidence in this debate: The Ta Prohm “Stegosaurus.”