Creature of the Week: Gold-digging Ants

Creature of the Week: Gold-digging Ant

Name: Gold-digging Ant, Indian Pismire, Gold-guarding Ant, somehow a griffin according to Ctesias

You may know it from: Herodotus 

Dear Reader,
For the last Creature of the Week I was focused on a massive bird, but I’ve decided to shake things up today and focus on massive ants. I suppose “massive” should be given an asterisk. Gold-digging Ants are accounted as “bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog” by Herodotus, from whom they originate. They burrow into the sand and in casting it up, cast up gold as well. The ants defend their gold with their quick speed, which allows them to overtake camels and horses. Thus, to take the gold from them, trickery is a requirement. The most common trick is to use the desert environment; in extremely hot weather, the ants burrow underground, so it is possible to put the gold into sacks and escape on camels. If the ants are above ground it is possible to get away by delaying them with food. Megasthenes (who isn’t known for accurate accounts) uses pieces of meat, and in a passage in Marvels of the East, male camels are used. Sir John Mandeville’s trick relies on an opposite idea that “the ants easily tolerate all sorts of animals.” The ants have an intrinsic need to fill up anything empty, so if a jar is attached to a horse they will fill it and the horse can be lured away. 

In general, the ants are said to originate in India, but their specific location of origin varies. They are said to be in Pactyica (Western Pakistan), Erythrae (Western Turkey), Dardistan (Southern Pakistan), beyond the River Gorgoneus (???), and on the Isle of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The ants are never identified in the same place twice. Despite all of the separate states the ants were found in, including some not even in modern India, they were always called Indian, since ancient Europeans defined India differently than how we do now. India, in its distance from Europe, abstracted itself and became a nebulous term for all of Asia (a similar thing happened with Ethiopia). The distance mattered more than the location to the Europeans, and with that distance came the idea of a disparate reality, one in which gigantic ants could exist.

Of course, like all monsters, there is an element of truth behind them, although scholars have many different ideas of what that truth could be. The most popular idea is that the ants are actually marmots. To understand this theory, it is first necessary to understand that these ants did not look like insects. In The Wonders of the East they are drawn as small, quadrupedal, doglike creatures, and Nearchus claims that he saw their skins in a Macedonian camp. In the Dansar Plain (around Dardistan at the time), marmots bigger than foxes who dug up gold actually existed, although they did not defend it. In addition, gold from that area was called pipilika or “ant” in Sanskrit, possibly because of the small size of the grains. Thus, ants that dug up gold was really just a confusion on Herodotus’ part regarding a common word. There are other theories regarding the ants, all of which are based on some form of translation confusion. For example, one posits that “ant” was a term typically used to refer to mine workers. Another posits that the mix-up may have been between shirghol, the Mongolian word for ant, and the Shiraighol, which was a Mongolian tribe. These types of theories are supported by the fact that Greeks already had experience with calling humans ants; the Myrmidons were considered to be transformed from ants into warriors (although there is another version of this story that I don’t want to talk about for Zeus-related reasons). Aside from that evidence, ant-human theories are half-baked.

No matter what theory you choose to believe, Gold-digging Ants are wrapped in a fog of uncertainty. Everything from their origin, their home, and their stories are entrenched in conflicting information. They embody how Europeans viewed India (or Asia) as a land severed from their own. Ironically, it is that view that made the ants seem probable, as no person who wrote accounts of the ants (besides Megasthenes, who was known for his lies) ever saw them in person, instead describing other people encountering and tricking them.