Bird Rukh - the winged monster of antiquity

What is the bird Rukh, Europeans learned afterDating with the fairy tale "A thousand and one nights". When this happened, it's difficult to say. Perhaps, after the long-term eastern voyage of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, and maybe a little earlier or later. The magical world of fairy tales, which absorbed a thousand-year folklore of the Eastern peoples, captivated Europeans.

According to some researchers, the creation ofThis fairy-tale cycle was extended not only by unknown tellers, but also by quite specific ancient writers of Persia, India and the Arab countries. Whatever it was, the Europeans appreciated the fabulous exotic world of the East, in which the magic bird Rukh occupied a worthy place.

In Europe there were no fairy tales in whichwould be a giant bird, so the Arab legends in which people fight this winged monster, they went, they say, "with a bang." Already later, historians, biologists and writers of the Old World began to wonder: why it happened that there is no information about huge birds in Europe, but there are more than a lot of them in the Arab legends. They began to look for where the fairy-tale bird Rukh or at least her prototype could be found.

With ostriches Europeans have met for a long time, butthey were too fluid to excite the writers of fairy tales with a fit of magical inspiration. When the researchers tried to analyze the tales for meetings of travelers with a bird, it turned out that almost all surprisingly unanimously point to the island of Madagascar.

But by the time of appearance on the island of Europeans inthey did not find anything of the kind in the seventeenth century. For a while, the view that information about a giant bird is nothing more than a poetic exaggeration, and perhaps a fiction from beginning to end, was established in science and society.

But very soon researchers of the fauna of Madagascarfound that the island was really inhabited by giant flightless birds, and they were destroyed after the European acquaintance with the island. Perhaps, the extermination was also extended by the numerous European pirates who even founded their state in Madagascar long enough, and only after the pirates became insolent beyond measure destroyed by the French troops. Chronicles did not conduct chronicles, newspapers did not publish, and their stories about hunting for a giant bird could well be regarded by contemporaries as traditional sea bikes.

According to modern estimates, the bird Rukh of Arabian tales(or epiorynis for the name adopted today) reached a height of five meters. Growth is more than solid, but not sufficient to name it "elephant bird", under which Rukh figures in some Arab sources.

According to the Arabs, Rukh was fed by elephants and couldin the air, according to various sources, from one to three of these huge animals. And the flight of the bird Rukh created a lot of inconvenience for the sailors: it covered the sun with wings and created such a strong wind that it allegedly even sank ships.

Of course, no five-meter highhe could not have done a disgrace, even if he really wanted to. Apparently, the Arabs, having become acquainted with the epierness, took him for a chick, and his mother, according to their ideas, was supposed to possess much larger sizes and certainly should be able to fly. And such a giant should also feed on giants, hence the tales of elephants raised into the air.

The ancient Arabs had no ideaecological balance, nor about aerodynamics. Otherwise, they would know that a bird of the sizes indicated by them in conditions of the planet Earth can not fly in principle. And to maintain the number of birds Rukh, sufficient for the normal reproduction of the population, there will not be enough elephants.

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