Frankincense and the Flying Serpents: Drakontes 146

Final Episode of 2024, have a Merry Christmas!!!

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The mysterious legend of a flying serpent….

The “Legend” was first written about a few hundred years before Christ. There was a great Greek chronicler called Herodotus, who lived from 484 to 424 BC. He became fascinated by Egyptian tales of flying snakes.

According to his writings, the Frankincense groves were protected by brightly-coloured winged serpents known as Drakontes (Ophies pteretoi). These venomous flying snakes lived in and under the Frankincense trees and guarded the trees from intruders.

They were apparently drawn to the Frankincense tree’s delicious aroma. However, this also made it much more difficult for the owners of the trees to harvest the previous resin. Herodotus wrote that the only way to drive the snakes away was to burn the resin of the Liquidambar tree (Styrax). This made the gathering of Frankincense resin a particularly dangerous art!

Herodotus described the flying serpents as being shaped like a water snake. They were small and had variegated markings, and had a wing-like membrane like bat wings.

“I went to try to get more information about the flying snakes,” says Herodotus. He ended up in the region of “Boutos” in Arabia, where he was shown a “narrow mountain pass leading to a broad plain which joins the plain of Egypt.” There he saw “heaps of skeletons and spines in incalculable numbers; some skeletons were large, others smaller, and others smaller still.”

The Arabs told Herodotus that these creatures would reach plague-like proportions except for two reasons. Firstly, the female kills the male serpent during mating by “biting clean through his neck.” And secondly, the female gives birth to live young. Herodotus writes, “they are born by eating their way out of the womb thus killing their mother”.

 The snakes are also the prey of Ibis birds. These jet-black birds gobble up the serpents as they fly east from the desert towards Egypt in Spring.

The Arabs were most likely referring to either the Glossy Ibis or the Northern Bald Ibis, both birds being a jet black colour.

It sure is starting to sound like a great story told to deter unwanted trespassers!

It’s interesting that a similar story was told by Strabo, a Greek geographer, philosopher and historian. He wrote:

“….the trees which bear the frankincense are guarded by winged serpents, small in size, and of varied colours, whereof vast numbers hang about every tree. They are of the same kind as the serpents that invade Egypt; and there is nothing but the smoke of the styrax which will drive them from the trees. The Arabians say that the whole world would swarm with these serpents, if they were not kept in check… Such, then, is the way in which the Arabians obtain their frankincense”.

Margaret Hamilton

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