The tales of Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, lay out a life of excitement and wonder. Conquests, foreign lands, and bizarre creatures. Stories from his life reach so far into the fanciful that you could begin to question if he ever existed at all.
When I was young I was obsessed with mythical beasts (OK I still am) and one that always stuck in my mind was his ‘horse’ Bucephalus – I had found a description of the stead as being a fearsome equine creature with a single horn and the tail of a peacock. A terrible unicorn that devoured the flesh of men and was unable to be tamed.
This representation is not one seen depicted often in the frescoes, sculptures, and classical paintings but it was one that branded into my brain. Even now, years later, I can recall it. In my minds eye I can see a peacock tail gracefully dragging behind the massive beast, and I wonder what his mane looked like.
I have not been able to source a visual example of the full description from my youth, but below is a remarkable image from a manuscript titled Romance of Alexander*. It depicts, in the lower right-hand corner, the ferocious Bucephalus as a man-eating unicorn – the bones of his victims strewn across the floor of his cage. It is the moment of his taming and Alexander stands in front of him holding a hammer.
As for why exactly Bucephalus came to be known as a unicorn – Andrew Runni Anderson’s article Bucephalus and His Legend gives a far better breakdown of the thematics than I could summarize in a few sentences. His work is a fascinating and rich exploration of the entwined legends of the horse and his master. It addresses far more than the unicorn myth surrounding the creature.
Bucephalus was not the only single-horned creature to be involved in the tales of Alexander the Great. Richard Ettinghausen writes in Studies in Muslim Iconography 1. The Unicorn about a variety of single-horned beasts from Muslim myth (all of them, incidentally, dangerous and fierce). He makes reference to Al-Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation (to which I have provided a link to a free online version – it’s in Arabic and exquisitely illuminated) and a beast gifted to Iksandar (Alexander the Great) by the inhabitants of Jazirat al-Tinnin in the Indian Ocean as a reward for defeating the Sea-Serpent that was consuming their livestock.
The gifted beast? It is referred to in the text as either a mi’raj or al-mi’raj and is described as a great yellow hare with a single black horn that caused all the beasts to run from it in terror. Below are examples from various versions of the Al-Qazwini manuscript.
The creature, as far as my basic research has found, is not mentioned in other contemporary sources beyond this single tale. However, the manuscript itself has numerous copies that can be hunted down and inspected for their illustrations. Some feature two horns such as in the Walters Manuscript, shown below.
There is a consistency in the colored versions supporting the yellow fur and black horns, and three of the four examples above definitely read as leporine – having long ears, rounded snouts, and long rear feet. The odd one out appears more like a dog with a backwards-facing horn but definitely is a quadruped and a mammal.
The brief story and its fantastic creature raises several questions. What was this animal doing on the island? What kind of reward for slaying a vicious sea serpent is an equally vicious one-horned rabbit? Perhaps the people living on the island saw an opportunity to unload another problem, or were they truly helping to build out Alexander’s menagerie (for which he is reported to have a variety of exotic creatures).
What the origins of the al-mi’raj are and whether or not it was a mythological beast in other cultures may never be truly revealed. I have found it to be one of the most elusive single-horned animals to find examples of – surpassing the karkadann, shadhavar, and Bucephalus himself. Yet the creature remains one that fascinates me and continues to influence my work.
Citations
*“Alexander Romance.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Aug. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Romance.
Anderson, Andrew Runni. “Bucephalas and His Legend.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 51, no. 1, 1930, pp. 1–21.
Ettinghausen, Richard. “Studies in Muslim Iconography: The Unicorn.” Freer Gallery of Art Occasional Papers, vol. 1, no. 3, 1950, https://archive.asia.si.edu/research/downloads/occasional-papers/Ettinghausen%20Unicorn.pdf.
al-Qazwīnī , Zakarīyā. “The Wonders of Creation. | Library of Congress.” Library of Congress, 1280, www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_08962/?sp=1&st=gallery.
