Horse Eggs and Unicorns

རྟ་ཡི་སྒོ་ང་། Egg of Horse

I’ll admit my ability to think stopped cold when my eyes fell on this object in a Bhutanese museum back in 2015. It threw me for a loop. I’m still curious about it, as I think anyone ought to be. I don’t think we should dismiss miraculous or anomalous objects until we’ve heard the whole story. I’m as skeptical as the next guy, and unwilling to play the sucker or the fool gladly, but the predisposition to dismiss miracles with alacrity can sometimes look more like fear than rationality, fear our accustomed categories might come into question. It’s the pangolin problem all over again, and those lizards don’t lay eggs.

I wish I could tell you what it is even now. It surely seems like it is made of stone. It might be a fossilized egg of some kind, one that has over the millennia lost much of its outer shell. That's what I saw then, and that’s what I see now. Certainly the words written in clear Dharma Language (ཆོས་སྐད་) on its surface predisposes me to think it is what it says it is, and since I can find no other interesting way to think about it, I prefer to leave my thinking in a state of suspension. Suspense is better than foregone conclusions, at least it is a lot more exciting.

If you would like to look into this a little more, assuming you aren’t ready to pay the high price of entry to Bhutan in order to physically enter the museum, you can go right now to the website of The National Museum of Bhutan for free, and even take a virtual tour of the building online. 

Here is what it says about the egg: 

“It is alleged that a horse gave birth to this oval-shaped object at Lhadrag village in Trasgiyangtse in 1928. The horse belonged to a merchant named Tsongpen Wangdue,* later on he is said to have become very rich owing to his possession of this object.”

(*ཚོང་དཔོན་དབང་འདུས་ — “merchant” is what the first two syllables mean.)

The definitive dating given here doesn’t exactly jive with the 19th-century dating in the published catalog I brought home in my suitcase. Its full bibliographical details are these:

Khenpo Phuntsok Tashi and Ariana Maki, eds., Artful Contemplation: Collections from the National Museum of Bhutan, The National Museum of Bhutan (Paro 2014). The authors are Singye Samdrup, Kinley Gyeltshen, Tashi Namgay and Ariana Maki. 

The color illustrations are quite good, printed on stiff photographic paper. Its photo of the Horse Egg, much better than what you see above, may be seen on p. 110. Here the egg is assigned to the 19th century, a gift of the Royal Grandmother. It also suggest that eggs and hoof-prints made in stone sometimes if quite rarely found in Bhutan, come from a special horned horse. It even explicitly refers to this horned horse as a ‘unicorn.’ I understand some young girls these days are particularly fond of unicorns, and even believe in them, so I won’t get all judgmental about the possibility they might be real. I try to respect other people’s beliefs.

And in my defense, imagining all the constitutionally unbelieving out there hot to string me up and flay me with their kind of science, I have to say: In recent years there have been press accounts assuring us that unicorns once roamed the earth, even if they didn’t look exactly as we imagine them. But they were done in by climate change, as we all will be quicker than you think.

Elasmotherium sibiricum

Read me

Gobran Mohamed, “2nd-Century Statue of Buddha Found in Ancient Egyptian Seaport,” Arab News, posted online (April 27, 2023). https://arab.news/bt2pd.

Pavel Kosintsev, Kieren J. Mitchell, Thibaut Devièse, Johannes van der Plicht, Margot Kuitems, Ekaterina Petrova, Alexei Tikhonov, Thomas Higham, Daniel Comeskey, Chris Turney, Alan Cooper, Thijs van Kolfschoten, Anthony J. Stuart and Adrian M. Lister, “Evolution and Extinction of the Giant Rhinoceros Elasmotherium sibiricum Sheds Light on Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinctions,” Nature, Ecology & Evolution (November 26, 2018). These scientists seem unaware if this extinct creature had any egg laying capabilities. I did my best to find out, and this seems to be the one and only literary source that inspired all those newspaper people. However, their newspaper stories started coming out in 2016, so ‘Houston, we have a problem’!

Christopher Parker, “Archaeologists Unearth Buddha Statue in Ancient Egyptian Port City — The new find sheds light on the rich trade relationship between Rome and India,” Smithsonian Magazine (May 1, 2023). Next thing we know those über-skeptics will be telling us that a 2nd century made-in-Egypt Buddha image isn’t possible either. Maybe they never heard of those Brahmi inscriptions in the Ḥoq Cave in Socotra. And have they never heard of the Helgö Buddha? It, too, was excavated extremely far from Siddhârtha's home, in fact, on an island inside Sweden, on July 17th, 1956. This Swedish Buddha is in a style characteristic of the Swat Valley in northern Afghanistan in around the 8th century or so. None of those newspaper stories coming out in recent weeks about the Berenike Buddha have noticed, but the style of the rays in the halo are just like those often found in Mithra images (you don't seem to see it in early South Asian Buddhas, not like this). I'd like to know more about the Sanskrit inscription found with the Buddha.

Marga Reimer, “Could There Have Been Unicorns?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (1997), pp. 35-51. If you follow the careful reasoning here, the prospects are not good.

Richard Salomon, “Epigraphic Remains of Indian Traders in Egypt,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 111, no. 4 (1991), pp. 731-736.

Ingo Strauch, “Buddhism in the West? Buddhist Indian Sailors on Socotra (Yemen) and the Role of Trade Contacts in the Spread of Buddhism,” contained in: Birgit Kellner, ed., Buddhism and the Dynamics of Transculturality, De Gruyter (Berlin 2019), pp. 15-51.

Francesca Tagliatesta, “Iconography of the Unicorn from India to the Italian Middle Ages,” East & West, vol. 57, nos. 1-4 (December 2007), pp. 175-191.  

Helgö Buddha on a Swedish Postage Stamp

Note: There is a Tibetan word rwa-gcig-pa (or, with feminine ending, rwa-gcig-ma) corresponding to the Sanskrit ekaśṛṅga. It could mean unicorn, I suppose, but in my experience it has always meant rhinoceros. The far more often encountered word bse-ru means rhinoceros and corresponds to Sanskrit khaḍga, or khaḍgaviṣāṇa.

 

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PS (May 12, 2023)

Bear with me as I change track, but it may be that the Bhutanese stone egg is a “horse bezoar.”  Bonhams sold one, five-&-a-half inches in diameter, for US 1,410. Go look what they have to say about it. 

Yet another horse bezoar in a Taiwan collection looks even more like the one from Bhutan.

A Traditional Chinese Medicine site also depicts one, but with a cross section so you can see its interior structure.

The usual Tibetan word for bezoars in general is gi-wang, with other spellings including 'gi-wam. A Tibetan-Tibetan medical dictionary explains it as a borrowing from Chinese ghi’u. Does Chinese in fact have a word like that? The English bezoar most likely had its ultimate origins in a Persian word that means “poison antidote.” A primary usage in early European medicine is just that.

The 17th-century Tibetan medical training charts depict three types of bezoars, those from elephant, cattle and pig. See Yuri Parfionovitch, Fernand Meyer, and Gyurme Dorje, Tibetan Medical Paintings, Harry N. Abrams (New York 1992), vol. 1, p. 64, row D, items 3-5 (vol. 2, p. 220, items 38-40).

Before you entirely make up your mind, I advise a Google image search for “enteroliths in horses” just to see what pops up before your eyes.