One-Horned Beasts Around the World

Imagine an animal with a hollow horn, full of little holes like a flute. When the wind blows across it, the horn plays music all by itself — and every other animal comes out of the forest to listen. That creature is the shadhavar, and people wrote about it in Persian and Arabic books hundreds of years ago.

The shadhavar is not a unicorn. It has one horn, but it is nobody's white horse. That is the point of this lesson: the unicorn is not one story from one place. All across the world, in countries that had never heard of each other, people drew and wrote about creatures with a single horn — and gave every one of them a different personality. Lining those stories up next to each other tells you something important about how legends are made.

Start with the oldest pictures. About four and a half thousand years ago, in the great cities of the Indus Valley — Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, both in what is now Pakistan, in a civilisation that spread on into north-west India — people carved tiny stone stamps called seals, about the size of a postage stamp. Thousands of them have been dug up. The animal carved on them more often than any other is a beast with one horn.

The oldest written description comes from a Greek doctor called Ctesias, about two thousand four hundred years ago. He worked at the court of the Persian king, and he collected stories from travellers about India — a country he never visited himself.

Ctesias wrote about a wild ass in India, as big as a horse, with a white body, a dark red head and blue eyes, and one horn on its forehead: white at the bottom, black in the middle, red at the tip. Cups made from that horn, he said, kept you safe from poison. Today most scholars think the travellers he listened to had really seen an Indian rhinoceros.