Blemmyes

A Blemmyae. From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

The Blemmyes are a race of legendary creatures that were said to live in Africa, in Nubia, Kush, or Ethiopia, generally south of Egypt. They were believed to be acephalous (headless) monsters who had eyes and mouths in their bellies. Pliny the Elder writes of them that Blemmyes traduntur capita abesse, ore et oculis pectore adfixis ("It is said that the Blemmyes have no heads, and that their mouth and eyes are put in their chests").

In Umberto Eco's Baudolino, the protagonist meets blemmyes along with sciapods and a number of monsters from the medieval bestiary in his quest to find Prester John.

The Blemmyes were, in fact, a nomadic Nubian tribe described in Roman histories of the later empire. From the late third century on, along with another tribe, the Nobadae, they repeatedly fought the Romans.

One of the Blemmyes, from a 1544 woodcut illustrating the Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster.

Some authors derive the fable of the Blemmyes from this, that their heads were hid between their shoulders, by hoisting those up to an extravagant height. Samuel Bochart derives the word Blemmyes from two Hebrew terms, one a negation, the other meaning "brain", implying that the Blemmyes were people without brains.^[3]

Othello makes reference to them as "men with heads beneath their shoulders".

References

1. Blemmyes, in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)
2. Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis V.8.46
3. ^{^}  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chambers, Ephraim, ed. (1728). Cyclopædia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1st ed.). James and John Knapton, et al. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) [1]