Orabou

Region/Culture: Middle East / Arabia (Mount Marzouan)
Mythos: Renaissance cosmography (André Thevet, Cosmographie universelle, 1575, fol. 138v)
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A fish nine or ten feet long, plated like a brigandine, though Thevet notes its scales are not as tough as a crocodile’s hide.
Role in Mythos: Described in André Thevet’s “Cosmographie universelle,” the Orabou is an armoured aquatic creature reported in the waters off Mount Marzouan.
Relation to Humans: The Orabou’s meat is considered unpalatable, reportedly causing kidney stones in those who consume it. Beyond the report of its unpalatable flesh, Thevet records no dealings between the orabou and people. Later writers, Ambroise Paré among them, repeat the account with additions of their own.

The orabou is not the folklore of any living people, and it is worth saying so before anything else. It is one page in a French book. André Thevet, cosmographer to the king, described it in La Cosmographie universelle (Paris: Guillaume Chaudière, 1575), at folio 138 verso. That page is the whole record.

Thevet reports a fish called the orabou in the sea off Mount Marzouan, which he says was formerly called Mount Orabou. It is nine or ten feet long and plated like a brigandine, the studded coat a foot soldier wore, although he is careful to add that its scales are not as tough as a crocodile’s hide. He has a low opinion of it as food. Its flesh is execrable, and he ranks old camel meat and Livonian mastiff above it. Worse, eating it gives you kidney and bladder stones. The people of the coast eat it anyway, and treat the stones afterwards with a diuretic made from orabou fat, two handfuls of false gold dust and cyclamen.

That is everything Thevet says. There is no behaviour, no attack, no encounter, and no account of anyone hunting it. Several details that circulate freely online, including a cat-like cry, webbed feet and a prowling gait, are in no source at all, and this page has been rewritten to remove them.

There is a second early appearance, and whether it counts as a second witness is an open question that this page will not pretend to answer. Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges carries a plated fish called the orobon, with a woodcut, in his chapter on marine monsters. The name is close enough to be the same word misheard, and Paré’s version places it at a Mount Mazouan and adds a ferocity towards other fish that Thevet does not mention. The obvious reading is that Paré took the creature from Thevet.

The obvious reading may be wrong, and the dating is why. Des monstres et prodiges was first published in 1573, two years before the Cosmographie universelle. If the orobon is in that 1573 text, Paré cannot have taken it from Thevet, and the orabou has two independent early-modern witnesses. If it entered in Paré’s augmented edition of 1579, which is known to have absorbed animals from Thevet, then there is one witness and a copy. Nobody has checked which. Asserting a direction of transmission without opening the 1573 edition would be inventing a fact about the history of the book, and that is precisely the sort of claim this site tries not to make. The question is recorded here as open.

What might be behind the report is a fair question and an unanswerable one. A large armoured fish of the Red Sea, or one of the region’s monitor lizards, would fit a second-hand description of something plated and man-sized, and Thevet compiled at second hand at least as often as he observed. But that is a guess about a guess. The orabou’s documented existence is a page of Renaissance cosmography, one probable copy of it by a surgeon, and four and a half centuries of retelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the orabou?

An armour-plated fish, nine or ten feet long, described by the French cosmographer André Thevet in La Cosmographie universelle of 1575 as living in the sea off Mount Marzouan. It is a book-monster rather than a creature of any living folk tradition.

Where does the record come from?

One page: Thevet, La Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), folio 138 verso. Everything else written about the orabou either copies that page or copies something that copied it.

Did Ambroise Paré also describe it?

Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges carries a plated fish called the orobon with a woodcut. Whether that is an independent report or a copy of Thevet depends on which edition it first appears in, and that has not been checked. This page treats the question as open.

What did Thevet say it was like to eat?

Execrable. He ranked old camel meat and Livonian mastiff above it, and said it caused kidney and bladder stones. He also records the local remedy: a diuretic of orabou fat, two handfuls of false gold dust and cyclamen.

Is the orabou a real animal?

Unknown. A large plated fish of the Red Sea or a monitor lizard would fit a second-hand description, but that is speculation. Thevet’s own reliability varied, and he often compiled reports rather than observing them.