Manticore | Mythic Creature

Manticora is a mythological creature, similar to chimeras, with the head of a man, three sharp rows of shark teeth and with a thunderous voice - and the body of a lion (usually with red hair), eyes of different colors and scorpion or dragon tail with which it can shoot poisonous spines, which kill any being, except the elephant.

In some descriptions, it appears with dragon or bat wings, and the descriptions vary, as far as its size is concerned, a common manticora is 70 meters, an alpha manticora is 84 to 94 meters, and the progenitors (mother of other manticoras) are over 120 meters.

Origin

It originated in Persian mythology, where it was presented as an anthropophagous monster; the term that identifies it also comes from the Persian language: from martiya (man) and khvar (eat).

The word was later used by the Greeks, in the form Mantikhoras, which gave rise to the Latin Mantichora. The figure came to be referred to in Europe through the accounts of Cthesias of Knidus, a Greek physician at the court of King Artaxerxes II, in the 4th century BC, in his notes on India ("Indika").

This work, widely used by Greek natural history writers, has not survived to the present day. Pliny the Elder included it in his Natural History. Later, the Greek writer Flavius Philostratus mentioned it in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana (book III, chapter XLV).

They have a skin that repels almost all known spells. According to some legends, manticores arose when a king was cursed and turned into a manticore. Apparently these creatures were inspired by tigers.

To this day, many stories of missing persons in India are linked to manticores. Today we know that, in fact, the responsible for the disappearances were the tigers. The manticora is famous for humming softly while eating its prey in order to distract and/or frighten it.