Karkadann

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Karkadann

The karkadann (Arabic: كركدن) is a unicorn known to the Muslims. It is described as the fiercest and most terrible beast alive. It inherits solitary and territorial character from the monoceros and carries it to such lengths that it will not suffer another animal grazing within a hundred parasangs from itself. It is a mortal enemy with an elephant; when it sees one, it jumps to a nearby tree and sharpens its horn on the trunk. Then it charges and thrusts its horn through the elephant's soft underside. However, it finds itself unable to remove the carcass from its horn. The elephant's fat melting in the sun gets into the eyes of the karkadann, blinding it so that it lies down on the shore. In the end, there comes the giant bird rukh and carries both the karkadann and the elephant off to feed its young.

The only animal karkadann tolerates is the ring dove.

Name

The name has many variants. The most common are كركدنّ (karkadann) or كركدّن (karkaddan). Others include: كردنّ (kardunn), كركند (karkand or karakand), fem. كركندة (karkanda), كركدآن (karkadān) and كزكزان (kazkazān). Persian literature often uses كركدن (karkadan), کرگدن (kargadan) and کرگ (karg). They come most likely from Sanskrit खड्ग (khaḍga), which means "sword" or "rhinoceros", and खड्गधेनु (khaḍgadhenu), which is a name for a female of the species.

In the past "karkadann" was a generic name for a unicorn, so all other kinds have been described with that name, leading to much confusion. In modern Arabic, the word denotes a rhinoceros.

Evolution of Descriptions

An early description of the karkadann comes from the 10/11th century Persian scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (Al-Biruni, 973–1048). He describes an animal which has "the build of a buffalo...a black, scaly skin; a dewlap hanging down under the skin. It has three yellow hooves on each foot...The tail is not long. The eyes lie low, farther down the cheek than is the case with all other animals. On the top of the nose there is a single horn which is bent upwards." A fragment of Al-Biruni preserved in the work of another author adds a few more characteristics: "the horn is conical, bent back towards the head, and longer than a span...the animal's ears protrude on both sides like those of a donkey, and...its upper lip forms into a finger-shape, like the protrusion on the end of an elephant's trunk." These two descriptions leave no doubt that the Indian Rhinoceros is the basis for the animal. But the future confusion between the rhinoceros and the unicorn was already in the making since the Persian language uses the same word, karkadann, for the mythological animal as it does for the rhinoceros, and this confusion is evident also in the illustrations of the creature.

After Al-Biruni, Persian scholars took his description and formed ever more fanciful versions of the beast, aided by the absence of first-hand knowledge and the difficulty of reading and interpreting old Arabic script. A decisive shift in description concerned the horn: where Al-Biruni had stuck to the short, curved horn, later writers made it a long, straight horn, which was shifted in artists' representations from the animal's nose to its brow.

The Persian physician Zakariya al-Qazwini (Al-Qazwini, d. 1283) is one of the writers who at the end of the thirteenth century links the karkadann's horn with poison, in his ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt. He lists a few beneficial effects: holding the horn opens up the bowels to relieve constipation, and it can cure epilepsy and lameness. Later authors have the horn perspire when poison is present, suggesting the horn is an antidote and connecting it to alicorn, though this connection is not made by all writers.

In the 14th century, Ibn Battuta, in his travelogue, calls the rhinoceros he saw in India a karkadann, and describes it as a ferocious beast, driving away from its territory animals as big as the elephant; this is the legend that is told in One Thousand and One Nights, in the "Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor".

The karkadann is referred to by Elmer Suhr as the "Persian version of the unicorn". The name appears also in medieval European bestiaries, such as those from Escorial and Paris, where the name karkadann appears in the captions of unicorn illustrations.

Horn

Al-Qazwini, one of the earliest authors to claim the horn is an antidote to poison, also notes that it is used in the manufacturing of knife handles. According to Chris Lavers, The Natural History of Unicorns, khutu, a somewhat enigmatic material possibly consisting of ivory or bone, had been ascribed alexipharmic properties. Both of these "enigmatic horns," Lavers argues, were used in making cutlery, and so became associated; this is how in the 13th century Al-Qazwini could consider karkadann horn as an antidote, and this is how the karkadann became associated with the unicorn.

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