For more than two thousand years, the learned geography of Europe and the Islamic world agreed on one thing: somewhere past the edge of the known world lived people with no heads. Their eyes, nose, and mouth were all in their chests — where the brain was supposed to be. The Public Domain Review gathers half a millennium of the illustrations, from a thirteenth-century English psalter to eighteenth-century natural histories.
- Earliest reference: Herodotus, fourth century BCE, describing eastern Libya — “the headless that have their eyes in their breasts, as the Libyans say.” Pliny the Elder repeats it in the Natural History.
- They were called Blemmyes, or Akephaloi — and later, in the New World, Ewaipanoma.
- The late tenth-century Marvels of the East puts them on the illustrated page; the Rutland Psalter pairs a headless archer with a merman who plays a trumpet with his butt.
- The Alexander Romance spawned its own subtradition: in the fifth-century Armenian version the headless are a gregarious, seafood-loving sea people who hand over twenty-five liters of hydna.
- Mandeville’s Travels migrates them from Africa to the Andaman Islands — eyes in each shoulder, mouths like horseshoes in the middle of the chest.
- Walter Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana (1596) reports them as Ewaipanoma: “folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders.”
- Shakespeare used them twice — Othello’s men whose “heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” and Gonzalo’s “men whose heads stood in their breasts” in The Tempest.
- The printed monster books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries kept recycling them: Cavalieri (1585), Liceti, Schott, Zahn, Lafitau.
The name is the giveaway. “Blemmyes” belonged to a real Eastern Desert people, ancestors of today’s Beja. How a name for a living population also became a synonym for headlessness has no settled answer: warriors carrying shields painted with faces, a misread primate, centuries of garbled transmission — or, as the essay puts it, “an intentional act of dehumanization that got consecrated as fact along the way.”
That is the collection’s real subject. The exoticizing logic in these images is a record of what happens when travel reaches the limits of the familiar and perception fails — “One might say it was these illustrators and adventurers, and not the mythical Blemmyes, who truly lost their heads.”