Like the giant gold-digging ants herodotus described in the fifth century bc or this 16th-century depiction of shipwrecked portuguese sailors battling giant crabs in the indian ocean, the fantastic, the strange and the astonishing have always been ascribed to whatever lands were little-known and distant. For europeans, this was the east. Cambridge university library (bry, india orientalis, iv, 1601). Date: 1601.
Loading...
