Amyctyrae

Also Known As: Greek Amykteres, “the noseless”; Amycteres in the Loeb translation of Strabo; Amyctyrae is the spelling used in the modern catalogue of the Plinian races
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A people with no noses and one lip grown so far beyond the other that later writers had them using it as a sunshade.
Role in Mythos: They are one entry in the list of marvellous peoples that Megasthenes brought back from India around 300 BCE, a list the Greek and Latin encyclopedists copied for nearly two thousand years.
Relation to Humans: Megasthenes did not claim to have met them; he said the Indian philosophers described them to him, and Strabo later named him a fabricator for repeating it. For medieval readers they were a question rather than a threat, one of the far peoples whose strange bodies raised the problem of whether they, too, descended from Adam.

Somewhere in India, if the report is to be believed, a man lies down at noon on burning ground, reaches up, and pulls his own lip over his face like a blanket. The sun beats on the fold of skin. Underneath it he sleeps in a small warm shadow of his own making, and when he wakes he goes looking for meat, and eats it raw.

That is the Amyctyrae in their fullest form, and very little of it arrived in one piece. The name, the missing nose and the diet come from a Greek ambassador in India. The sunshade comes more than nine hundred years later from a bishop in Spain. They were stitched together by the long habit of encyclopedists copying one another.

The ambassador was Megasthenes, sent by Seleucus to the court of Chandragupta Maurya around 300 BCE. His book on India, the Indica, is lost, but Strabo quotes it at length in the fifteenth book of his Geography, written in the early first century CE. In one passage Megasthenes runs through the peoples he had been told about but had not seen, and he is careful to say where the stories came from: the Indian philosophers reported them. There are men who outrun horses, men whose ears reach their feet so they can sleep wrapped in them, one-eyed men with dogs’ ears and hair that stands straight up. Then come the Amykteres. The name means “noseless”. They eat everything, including raw flesh, and they live only a short time, dying before old age. Their upper lip protrudes much further than the lower. That is the whole of it. Megasthenes gives them no country of their own, no story, no king, and no second telling.

Strabo did not believe a word. Earlier in the Geography, in his second book, he lists the men who have written about India and calls most of them liars, Deimachus first and Megasthenes second. His evidence is the same catalogue: the men that sleep in their ears, the men without mouths, the men without noses. He grouped them with the battle of the cranes and the pygmies as the sort of thing only a poet should be allowed to say. It is one of the rare cases where the ancient critic and the modern reader agree. It did not help. The list outlived its critic by a very long way.

The faces went travelling. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s CE, moves a similar set of features to Africa. In the sixth book of his Natural History he reports, as something “certainly reported”, tribes in the interior of Ethiopia who have no noses and faces perfectly flat, and others who have no upper lip. By then the missing nose and the strange lip had become portable parts that could be attached to any people living far enough away.

The decisive change came in the early seventh century, when Isidore of Seville compiled his Etymologies. In the eleventh book, among the portents and monstrous peoples, he lists three kinds of face in a row. Some peoples have no nostrils and a flat, formless face. Some have mouths grown shut and feed through a small hole with oat straws. And some have a lower lip so prominent that, in the heat of the sun, they cover their whole face with it while they sleep. Isidore gives this last group no name. Strabo’s upper lip had become a lower one, and for the first time the lip had a use.

Isidore was the standard reference of the Latin Middle Ages, and his sleepers under their own lips passed into the long medieval tradition of the monstrous races, the catalogue of far peoples drawn on maps and in manuscript margins. When John Block Friedman gathered that tradition into The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought in 1981, he listed the lip people under the name Amyctyrae and described them as a race whose lower lip, or sometimes the upper, protrudes so far that it can serve as an umbrella against the sun. The Greek name for the noseless and the Latin description of the sleepers had settled into a single entry. Anyone looking for the Amyctyrae now finds that composite, and it is worth knowing it was assembled rather than inherited.

What the Amyctyrae could do follows from how they were built. The great lip was their one advantage, a shade that never had to be carried and never blew away, under the Indian sun. Their appetite was the other: in Megasthenes’ Greek they are eaters of everything and eaters of raw meat, which spared them fire and cooking and made them, to a Greek audience, the opposite of civilised people. Nothing in the record gives them weapons, magic or any interest in travellers.

Their weakness is written into the same line of Strabo. They were short-lived and died before growing old, a people burning through their years under the sun. The larger weakness belongs to the report itself. The Amyctyrae have no myth, no origin and no ending in any source. They exist as one sentence in a lost book, attacked by the man who preserved it, and a second sentence, without their name, in a seventh-century encyclopedia. No one in any of these texts ever claims to have seen one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Amyctyrae?

The Amyctyrae are one of the monstrous races of ancient and medieval geography, a people said to have no noses and an enormous protruding lip. The Greek writer Megasthenes reported them from India around 300 BCE under the name Amykteres, meaning “the noseless”. Medieval tradition remembered them for using their lip as a sunshade.

Where do the Amyctyrae come from?

The earliest account of the Amyctyrae comes from Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador at the court of Chandragupta Maurya, whose lost Indica is quoted by Strabo. Megasthenes said the Indian philosophers told him about them, and he listed them among the marvellous peoples of India without giving them a country of their own.

Did the Amyctyrae really shade themselves with their lip?

Not in the earliest source. Strabo’s quotation of Megasthenes says only that the Amyctyrae had an upper lip jutting far past the lower. The sunshade appears in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies in the seventh century, which describes an unnamed people who cover their whole face with their lower lip while sleeping in the sun.

What did the Amyctyrae eat?

According to Megasthenes, as quoted by Strabo, the Amyctyrae ate everything, including raw meat. The same passage says they were short-lived and died before reaching old age.

Did ancient writers believe in the Amyctyrae?

Strabo did not. In his Geography he called Megasthenes a fabricator and cited the men without noses as proof. The story survived anyway through Pliny, Isidore of Seville and the medieval tradition of the monstrous races.