Golden ant
The golden ant is described in the third book of Herodotus' Histories . According to this, there are ants in India that are “smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes” and also faster than any other animal. Because of their sensitivity to heat, they dug underground tunnels and brought large amounts of gold to the surface with the excavation . The Indians collected this gold, but they had to hurry because the ants recognized people by their smell and chased them.
Pliny the Elder adopted Herodotus' descriptions of the golden ant in his Naturalis historia (11,111) without adding anything to them.
backgrounds
The use of the gold ants in Herodotus histories was probably due to a lack of knowledge of Herodotus. In the histories he describes the basic requirements for the Persian War. This also includes tribute payments to the Persian King Dareios I from Indian tribes. There is no other way to explain the high volume of gold in this region. Another reason is the reader's expectation of a description of India in the time of ancient Greece. But this Herodotian fable probably also contains a true core: According to the research of the ethnologist Michel Peissel, Herodotus golden ants are to be equated with the golden marmots that live in the Himalayas. The Briton Alexander Cunningham already expressed this thought, who suspected Ladakh as a possible land of gold-digging ants. It was also considered that the golden ants could be people who, clad in skins, looked from a distance like animals digging for gold.
According to Herodotus, the size of the animals is a peculiarity of India. According to Herodotus, all animals in India are larger than in other countries. It is not a peculiarity that only applies to giant ants, but has general validity for almost all animals. The ants are thus described in Herodotus' histories according to the ideas of ancient people from the edge of the world. Examples of a description of the edges of the world are provided by Hecataeus of Miletus and other geographers of antiquity. They are models and sources for Herodotus.
literature
- Reinhold Bichler : Herodotus world . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-305003429-4 .
- Manfred Landfester : The view of the other. Herodotus and the beginnings of the ancient reports about non-Greek peoples and countries . In: Chloe 31 (2000), pp. 3-36.
- Berthold Laufer: The legend of the gold digging ants . In: T'oung-pao , Series II, Vol. IX, No. 3, Leiden 1908, p. 29 ff.
- Grant Parker: The Making of Roman India . In: Greek Culture of the Roman World . Cambridge University Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-052185834-2 .
- Michel Peissel: The Ant's Gold: The Discovery of the Greek El Dorado in the Himalayas . HarperCollins, London 1984. ISBN 978-0002725149
- Thomas Reimer: Smaller than dogs, but bigger than foxes: Herodotus' golden ants; an ancient fairy tale and its background . Nodus publications, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-89323292-3