The word "dragon" grouped together different creatures
The Greek drakon simply meant "big snake" - with no wings or fire. Later, the word became a translation label: it was used for the biblical serpent, Indian nagas, and the Chinese lung. But a lung is almost nothing like a European dragon: it does not guard a cave or burn villages, but governs rain and rivers, and people ask it for a good year.
That is where the feeling that every culture has dragons comes from. It is partly true: a huge serpent appears on nearly every continent - the Rainbow Serpent in Australia, the feathered serpent in Mesoamerica, nagas in India, and Jormungandr among the Norse. But "the same dragons" are largely our own sorting: the creatures differ, but we put them in the same box.
What dragons are made of
Take away the word, and the details left behind make for a short list. One hypothesis says it grew from 3 inborn fears in primates: snakes, big cats, and birds of prey. It has not really been confirmed, so a simpler explanation is more reliable: these were things that were dangerous and important almost everywhere.
Bones that needed an explanation
The second source lies literally underfoot. People keep coming across large bones: a river washes them out, a landslide exposes them, a shovel hits them. Mammoth, whale, rhino, dinosaur - a bone as long as a person demands an explanation, and before paleontology there was only one: a huge animal that lived here and is now gone.
In China, such finds were called "dragon bones": for centuries, they were dug up and sold in shops as raw material. This is how, at the very end of the 19th century, the oldest known Chinese writing was found: bought "dragon bones" were noticed to have scratched signs on them, and they turned out to be Shang-era oracle bones. Historian Adrienne Mayor collected similar stories from the Mediterranean, but there the link between a myth and a specific find is a reconstruction, not a document.
- Riverbank collapse
- Huge bone
- An explanation
- Dragon
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Sources
- Adrienne Mayor, "The First Fossil Hunters" (2000) - on fossil bones in ancient myths
- David Jones, "An Instinct for Dragons" (2000) - that same hypothesis about inborn fears, which has little evidence