Strange Things Found On Medieval Manuscripts

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This is from BL Royal MS 20 B xx, f. 80r and depicts Alexander the Great encountering the Blemmyae. The Blemmyae were a tribe of African men with their faces set upon their chests, according to ancient Greeks. They were commonly depicted in medieval bestiaries, and in the Terra Incognita illustrations of atlases, as well as on mappa mundi.

Pliny the Elder tells us:

"Ctesias writes that . . . westward from {the Red Sea coast of Africa} there are some people without necks, having eyes in their shoulders." - Natural History 7

Herodotus wrote:

"For the eastern region of Libya [i.e. North Africa], which the nomads inhabit, is low-lying and sandy as far as the Triton river; but the land west of this, where the farmers live, is exceedingly mountainous and wooded and full of wild beasts. In that country are the huge snakes and the lions, and the elephants and bears and asps, the horned asses, the Dog-Headed (Kynokephaloi) and the Headless (Akephaloi) men that have their eyes in their chests, as the Libyans say, and the wild men and women, besides many other creatures not fabulous." - Histories 4. 191. 3

Tales of headless people persisted well into the Renaissance. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville speaks of a headless tribe of people near India. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of headless people living on the banks of the Caura River in the 16th century.

Now, the actual Blemmyae people were a nomadic tribe living in northern Nubia from 600 BCE to 300 AD, when they were wiped out by the Roman Empire. They might have acquired the myth of being headless due to the armor and tactics used in warfare: squatting with one knee on the ground, with their chins tucked close to their chest, hiding their faces under their helms to combat enemy archers. A position that would give the impression of an army of headless warriors. Another explanation is that the actual Blemmyae painted faces on their shields or on their breastplates, however, depictions of the headless Blemmyae all speak of how naked they were.  

Or, it could have just been a ministration that people just ran with. Samuel Bochart expounded that the Greek word Blemmye was derived from the Hebrew bly (without) and moach (brain). Since the brain resides in the head; if there is no brain there is no head, therefore headless. The early Hebrews could have had contact with the Blemmyae, and calling them "brainless" might have been an insult. On the face, this doesn't sound plausible; the Greeks using a derivation of a Hebrew insult to create a myth about a nomadic kingdom. But, some people, living today, firmly believe that Jews have horns because someone mistranslated a passage of Exodus (34:29) into Latin and turned "did not know his {Moses} face had become radiant" into "did not know his face had become horned." So, anything is possible. 

It could have been an insult that was taken at face value, It could have been armor or battle tactics. It could even have been a genetic thing: the Blemmyae might have been a stocky people with thick necks and hunched shoulders that were depicted in art as having no necks at all. Somehow this morphed into having no heads. 

Or, it could have been something more sinister.