Such wonder-tales have a truly phenix-like quality of indestructibility. As late as the time of Charles I of England there lived in Lambeth, on the Surrey side of London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and florist, who accumulated an extensive “physic-garden” and museum of antiquities and curiosities. He was a man of science, but to satisfy the popular taste of the time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a feather alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin. “You might have found here two feathers of the tail of the _phoenix_, and the claw of the _rukh_, a bird capable to _trusse_ an elephant.” This collection after the death of Tradescant’s son in 1622, became the property of Elias Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum founded at Oxford in 1682.
But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang and others that have not been mentioned, such as Yel, the mythical raven of our Northwest, and those of Malaya described by Skeat,[7] are all, apparently, members of the brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and still flying amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable.
The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets recovered from Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the mystic antiquity of the Summerian kingdom of Ur and its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, “the divine bird Imgig” was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr. Ward[23] discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian cylinders, people told one another tales of monstrous and fantastic birds of prey that could fly away with an antelope in each talon, and which fought, usually victoriously, against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies like those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads. Such representations of demons were the prototypes of the grotesque combinations of animal features, and of men and animals, more familiar to us in the Egyptian Sphinx, the classic centaurs, and medieval angels and devils.
When the elders in Babylon expounded the reason for faith in these antagonistic supernatural creatures, they explained that the “divine” eagle symbolized beneficence and protective power in the universe, while the feathered monsters stood for the baffling forces of malignancy and harm. In this philosophy, probably, is the underlying relationship that connects all this Oriental flock of fabulous fowls—visionary flight-beings in varying forms and phases that seek to portray the powers of the air, mysterious, uncontrollable, overwhelming, capable of all the mind of primitive man could conceive or his gods perform. All of them became endowed in time with the luxuriant colorings of Eastern poetry and fiction, and appear now heroic and picturesque, as one expects of everything in the dreamy Orient of tradition.