Anqa (ʿAnqāʾ; also Anka, Anqa Mughrib, Anqa al-Mughrib)

Somewhere past the last mapped well, where the sun drops behind the rim of the world, a golden bird the size of a storm front settles onto a peak no caravan has ever reached. The old Arab lexicographers wrote that the Anqa could be found at the place of the setting of the sun, which was their polite way of saying she could not be found at all. She is the bird at the edge of everything: beautiful, enormous, ancient, and so far out of reach that her name became the Arabic shorthand for a thing that does not exist.

The name does the first part of the describing. ʿAnqāʾ is the feminine form of a word meaning long-necked, which suggests something built along the lines of a heron or a crane, or perhaps an eagle with a neck of unusual reach and power; the sources never settle the question. A second tradition derives the name from a ring of white feathers circling her throat like a collar, bright against the gold. Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, compiling the first Arabic dictionary in the eighth century, gave her the most honest entry she ever received: a bird of which nothing remains in people’s hands but the name.

Later writers were less restrained. The fuller portrait is of a bird of staggering size and color, the long neck rising to a human face, four pairs of wings folded along her flanks, and, strangest of all, some likeness to every living creature, as if she had been assembled from samples of the whole of creation. One account places her in the time of Moses; another has her older than that. Nothing about the Anqa is modest, including the contradictions.

On her beginning, the tradition agrees: God created her with every perfection a bird could carry. What happened next is the oldest story told about her, and it is not flattering. She turned scourge. In the telling preserved in Islamic tradition, the Anqa took to hunting the people of al-Rass, and a youth was surrendered to her every day. A shadow slides across a dusty courtyard, wide enough to swallow it whole; by the time anyone looks up, the talons have already closed, and the heat of the afternoon goes on as before. The prophet Hanzala ibn Safwan prayed against her, and God ended her reign, in some versions killing her outright. The scholars who recorded the story admitted its chains of transmission were weak. They recorded it anyway. The same people of al-Rass later murdered Hanzala and threw him in a well, and were destroyed for it.

The Persian cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini, writing in the thirteenth century, preserved a gentler ending. In his Wonders of Creation, God does not kill the bird but removes her, carrying her to an island in the encircling sea below the equator, a place no human ship reaches. The island’s animals, elephants and buffalo and leopards and birds of prey, all live under her authority, and she does not hunt them. At first light she drops out of the cloud bank and takes an elephant off the plain the way a falcon takes a dove; what she leaves of the carcass feeds the beasts that serve her, who wait their turn. She hunts nothing smaller than elephants, great fish, and sea dragons.

Qazwini also knew her as the recluse of Mount Qaf, the mountain range that rings the edge of the world, where she lives alone as the elder kin of all birds, a wise creature seasoned by long ages who gives admonitions and moral advice to those who reach her. Her clock runs on a scale of its own. She lives 1,700 years and first mates at 500, and when her egg cracks, the chick stays inside the broken shell for another 125 years before it consents to come out. Nothing about the Anqa happens quickly.

She brushed against scripture’s edges too. One of the earliest written accounts, in the ninth-century Dala’il al-Nubuwwah, has King Solomon conversing with the birds about fate and destiny while the Anqa raises an objection, the one voice in the flock prepared to argue the point.

Mostly, though, she hardened into proverb. ʿAnqāʾ came to share a root with a word for misfortune, and ʿanqāʾ mughrib could mean a calamity as easily as a bird; mughrib itself carries senses of strange, remote, western, and desolate. Arabic speakers came to name her the way English speakers invoke unicorns, as the standard of the nonexistent and the unattainable. That reputation is exactly why the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi reached for her around the turn of the thirteenth century. His Book of the Fabulous Gryphon, the ʿAnqāʾ Mughrib, written entirely in rhymed prose and laced with riddles, uses the most unreachable of birds as the figure for the Seal of the Saints and the sun rising in the west, the furthest limits of sainthood dressed in feathers.

By then she was no longer entirely herself. As Islamic art and story spread through the lands of the fallen Persian empire, the Anqa fused with the Persian Simurgh until the two names became interchangeable, and the Turkic world knew the same bird as the Konrul, or Zümrüdü Anka, the emerald Anqa. Translators flattened all of them into the phoenix, and in Modern Standard Arabic the word now simply means phoenix or griffin, though the Arabian bird never had a rebirth-in-fire story to her name. Some have guessed that under all the gold she began as a heron standing in some Egyptian shallows. The guess is as unprovable as everything else about her.

Her powers are the kind that need no embellishment: a body vast enough to make a meal of elephants, a life measured in spans of seventeen centuries, the accumulated wisdom of those centuries, and the obedience of every animal on her island. Her limits are just as stark. She exists on God’s sufferance and nothing else; created perfect, she was unmade as a menace by a single prophet’s prayer, and no strength of wing could appeal the verdict. And her deepest weakness is the one the lexicographers caught early: she is remote to the point of vanishing. A bird remembered only by name is very close to no bird at all, and the Arabs, who coined the phrase, knew it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Anqa?

The Anqa is a colossal golden bird from pre-Islamic Arabian mythology, later absorbed into Islamic tradition. She is described with a very long neck ringed in white, a human face, and four pairs of wings, and her name became an Arabic expression for something that does not exist.

Why was the Anqa killed?

In Islamic tradition the Anqa was created perfect by God but became a scourge, preying on the youth of the people of al-Rass, who surrendered one to her every day. The prophet Hanzala ibn Safwan prayed against her and God ended her predation, in some versions killing her. Other versions say she was not killed but banished to an unreachable island.

Where does the Anqa live?

Tradition places the Anqa on Mount Qaf, the mythical mountain range at the edge of the world, or on an unreachable island below the equator where every animal lives under her command. Both locations make the same point: the Anqa lives where no human can go.

What does the Anqa eat?

According to Zakariya al-Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation, the Anqa hunts only elephants, great fish, and sea dragons. Whatever she leaves of a kill feeds the animals of her island, which live under her authority and wait their turn.

Is the Anqa the same as the Simurgh or the phoenix?

The Anqa became virtually synonymous with the Persian Simurgh after Islamic art and story spread through the former Persian lands, and the Turkic Konrul, called Zümrüdü Anka, is the same bird again. Translators usually gloss the Anqa as a phoenix, and in Modern Standard Arabic the word now means phoenix or griffin, though the original Arabian bird has no rebirth-in-fire myth.

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