Syrbotae

Also Known As: Greek Συρβώται, Syrbotai; Latin Syrbotae; the name has no accepted translation
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Their single recorded attribute is extraordinary stature, given in Latin as eight cubits, roughly twelve feet.
Role in Mythos: They belong to the catalogue of marvellous peoples that Greek and Roman geography placed at the southern edge of the known world, beyond the Aethiopian kingdom of Meroe.
Relation to Humans: No ancient source records any encounter, conflict or exchange between the Syrbotae and anyone else, and no traveller claims to have met them. They exist purely as an entry in a list of Nile peoples, reported at second hand and hedged with the phrase “who are said to be”.

The Nile above Meroe narrows into a list. Pliny the Elder, working down the peoples of the African bank, sets out the Medimni, then a nomad group that keeps herds of dog-faced apes and lives on their milk, then the Alabi, then the Syrbotae, who are said to be eight cubits tall. Then he moves on to the next stretch of river. That clause is the whole of it. Twelve feet of human being, filed between a milk diet and a place name, with no story attached and nobody left to tell one.

He comes back to them once, in a different mood. Book 7 of the Natural History drops geography for a catalogue of the unbelievable, and there, among cannibals and one-eyed miners and women who kill with a look, Pliny credits Crates of Pergamum with the report that the Trogodytae beyond Ethiopia are swifter than horses, and that there are Ethiopians more than twelve feet in height, and that this race is called the Syrbotae. Crates ran the library at Pergamum in the second century BC and built a globe of the world big enough to walk around. He was a reader. Whatever he knew of the upper Nile he knew from other men’s scrolls, in a room that smelled of lamp oil and dust.

The Latin is octonum cubitorum. A cubit is a forearm, elbow to fingertip, and the standard reckoning puts eight of them at twelve feet. Eight cubits, twelve feet: one claim in two units, and it is the only physical fact the ancient world ever produced about these people. There is no face in the record. No hair, no skin, no dress, no weapon, no gesture. Set them beside their neighbours in the same catalogue and the silence gets loud. The Blemmyae carried their eyes in their shoulders. The Panotti had ears they could sleep inside. The dog-heads barked and hunted with their nails. Every one of those could be drawn, and was, for the better part of a thousand years. The Syrbotae are a measurement.

What Pliny gives them instead of a body is a neighbourhood. Upstream of the last Meroitic towns, a people who milk baboons, the sour warmth of that milk going off in the heat, herds moved between thorn scrub and water. Somewhere past them, in the same flat glare, the tall ones. The list is a route, so the two are neighbours on the river, and that is as close as the ancient world ever brings anyone to them.

How the name arrived matters more than what it means, because nobody has produced a convincing translation of it. The assembly of the list, though, can be reconstructed. Around AD 61 Nero sent a small party of praetorian guards up the Nile past Meroe, part survey, part reconnaissance for an invasion that never came. They pushed several hundred miles beyond the city and stopped at the Sudd, a swamp so wide and so shallow that a boat would not float and a man could not wade, warm water lying over rotting papyrus, insects rising off it in sheets. They turned back and reported to Rome. Pliny sets that expedition down a few paragraphs before he reaches the Syrbotae, and the names that follow it sit alongside older Greek reports he had been reading for years.

The upper Nile does grow tall people. The Dinka and the Nuer of the southern Sudan are among the tallest populations ever measured, and surveys taken in the 1950s returned averages a little over six feet for some Dinka groups, which in the first-century Mediterranean would have looked like a different order of creature. That gets part of the way. It does not get anywhere near eight cubits. Nobody has ever been twelve feet tall.

In Pliny’s scheme the height needs no explanation beyond geography. India and Ethiopia teem with marvels, he writes, because the far edges of the world are where nature entertains herself and astonishes everyone else, the extremes of climate throwing up extremes of body. Height is the entirety of their power. They guard no treasure, hunt no hero, want nothing, and are owed nothing. Whatever a twelve-foot man could do, the Syrbotae are never once shown doing it.

That is also their limit. No hero fights a Syrbota. No army meets them in the field, no god made them, no curse accounts for them, and there is no charm, weapon or ritual against them, because nothing in the record ever puts them to the test. They have no weakness for the same reason they have no myth. Later compilers ransacked Pliny for wonders and took away whatever could be pictured, and a people whose only attribute is a number gives an illuminator nothing to hold. They survive the way a footnote survives, carried along by the sentences on either side of them: the ape-milk drinkers upstream, the runners faster than horses, the twenty days’ march to the ocean.

Whoever the Roman traveller actually saw on that riverbank, if he saw anybody at all, he did not write down their faces. He wrote down how tall they were. That number outlived everything else about them, which is a strange kind of immortality, and the only one they got.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Syrbotae?

The Syrbotae are a people of extraordinary height recorded in Greek and Roman geography, said to live in Africa beyond the Aethiopian kingdom of Meroe. They appear only in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, twice, and in both places their height is the only thing said about them. No myth, story or encounter involving them survives.

How tall were the Syrbotae supposed to be?

Pliny gives their height as eight cubits, which is the Latin octonum cubitorum, and eight cubits works out at roughly twelve feet. A cubit is measured from the elbow to the fingertip. In Book 7 he puts it slightly differently, calling them Ethiopians more than twelve feet in height.

Where did the Syrbotae live?

Pliny places them on the African side of the Nile beyond Meroe, in what is now northern Sudan, among a run of peoples that includes the Medimni, the Alabi, and a nomad group that lived on the milk of dog-faced apes. The location is the far southern edge of the world as Greek and Roman geographers understood it.

Who wrote about the Syrbotae?

Pliny the Elder is the only ancient author who names them, in Natural History 6.194 and again at 7.31. In the second passage he attributes the report to Crates of Pergamum, a Greek scholar of the second century BC who ran the library at Pergamum. Everything else written about the Syrbotae since then traces back to those two sentences.

Are the Syrbotae based on a real people?

There is no way to identify them with certainty, and Pliny himself reports the claim rather than vouching for it. The upper Nile is home to some of the tallest populations on earth, including the Dinka and the Nuer, so unusually tall people genuinely lived in that region. Even so, no human population comes close to eight cubits, and the figure is an exaggeration rather than a measurement.