A plague of snakes

June 15, 2009

Speaking of Iraq, classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has emailed me about an interesting ancient link to a news story from the southern province of Nasiriyah.

There, an unprecedented plague of snakes is driving people to leave their land.

According to Mayor, the mass migration of snakes helps explain a passage in Herodotus (4.105, 5th century BC Greek historian), about a tribe called the Neurians. Their story was thought to be folklore.

Herodotus referred that the Neurians, who lived north of the Black Sea, "had been forced to leave their homeland beacuse a great number of snakes which suddenly appeared in their territory, and continued assailing them from the north," in the 6th century BC.

"Finally, under the great pressure and stress from the onslaught of snakes, the Neurians left and settled in lands farther east," Herodotus wrote.

Indeed, the land the Neurians left behind became known as Ophioussa, "Snake-Land."

The Neurians also claimed that they turned into "werewolves" for a few days each year. Herodotus was dubious about their claim; modern historians interpret this Neurian tale as a garbled description of a religious ritual.

Mayor writes: “The plague of invading snakes was thought to be a story that the Neurians made up to justify their invasion of the territory of the neighboring tribe. But the recent plague of snakes in southern Iraq, caused by drought, now suggests that the Neurians' story of the infestation of migrating snakes was a real natural phenomenon, a historical event in the history of the tribe.

In southern Iraq today, the snake plague is due to depletion of Euphrates wetlands due to dams and irrigation further north. In antiquity, the snakes migrated en masse from the north, due to drought conditions brought about by natual causes.

Yet another example of information related by Herodotus--once pooh-poohed by skeptics--turning out to have a basis in fact after all.”