Hippogriff: was Oscar Wilde connection?

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 7086

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Rhysenn <rhysenn at s...> wrote:

> I just picked up a book from the library -- an Oscar Wilde selected 
> poems compilation. (snip) read this particular poem, entitled, 
> "The Sphinx". (snip) I'm quoting the relevant bits:

> A thousand weary centuries are thine while I have hardly seen
> Some twenty summers cast their green for autumn's gaudy liveries.
> But you can read the hieroglyphs on the great sandstone obelisks,
> And you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on 
> Hippogriffs.

The Hipppogriff resembles the Griffin that both have an Eagle as 
their front half. The Griffon has the back half of a Lion as its back 
half and the Hippogriff has the back half of a Horse as its back 
half. The name Griffin (gryphon) comes from a Greek word meaning 'to 
grab' because it grabs things (like nice edible sheep, or humans) 
with its claws. The name Hippogriff combines Hippos (Greek for Horse, 
as in the name of the prehistoric mammal Eohippos for Dawn Horse) 
with the name Griffin.

I don't when the Hippogriff was invented (or discovered by Muggles), 
but the Griffin goes WAY back in both Greece and China. 

The Griffin is thought to have been brought to Greece by the 
Scythians, along with all that gold they hired Greek artisans to turn 
into jewelry -- the gold eroded out of IIRC Altai Mountains of the 
Red Desert in Chinese Mongolia, where Mongolians collected it and 
traded it to Scythians, along with stories of the dangerous griffins 
who guarded the gold. 

It is thought that the Mongolians (who also traded gold and griffin 
tales toward China at the same time) were exagerating about the 
danger of griffins, as they had never seen one that was not a fossil: 
specifically fossils of Oviraptor nesting on their eggs, which are 
the treasure that erodes out of those mountains nowadays. But it was 
easy for the Mongolians to recognize from the fossils that these huge 
critters had beaks and claws and nested on their eggs, thus 
resembling huge eagles, and had four legs with claws, thus resembling 
lions more than birds.