The cinnamon bird, also known as Cinnamologus, Cinomolgus, or Cynnamolgus is a

mythical Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrati ...

creature described in various

bestiaries A bestiary (from ''bestiarum vocabulum'') is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. The natural history ...

as a giant

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...

that collected cinnamon to build its nests.

According to Herodotus

According to

Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society ...

in his ''The History'', the cinnamon bird inhabited

Arabia The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plat ...

, the only country known to produce cinnamon at the time. The giant cinnamon birds collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew, and used them to construct their nests, fastened to sheer

cliff In geography and geology, a cliff is an area of rock which has a general angle defined by the vertical, or nearly vertical. Cliffs are formed by the processes of weathering and erosion, with the effect of gravity. Cliffs are common on co ...

s. The Arabians employed a trick to obtain the cinnamon. They cut oxen and other beasts of burden into pieces, laid them near the birds' nests and withdrew to a distance; the birds were then tempted down to carry the chunks of meat back to their nests, where the weight of the carcasses broke them from the cliffs, leaving the Arabians to collect the fallen cinnamon.

According to Aristotle

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...

's ''

Historia Animalium ''History of Animals'' ( grc-gre, Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν, ''Ton peri ta zoia historion'', "Inquiries on Animals"; la, Historia Animalium, "History of Animals") is one of the major texts on biology by the ancient Gr ...

'' (''History of Animals''), one of his works of natural history, he explains that the cinnamon bird brought the cinnamon from unknown locations to build its nest on the slender branches in the tops of high trees. The inhabitants of the bird's home attached leaden weights to their arrowtips to topple the nests, collecting the cinnamon sticks within. Aristotle referred to the bird as .

According to Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic ' ...

adopted a more skeptical view of the cinnamon bird, erroneously named ''cinnamolgus''. He discredited Herodotus specifically and antiquity in general in his ''Naturalis historia'' (''Natural History'') by asserting that the tales were invented by the natives to raise the price of their commodities.

Other appearances in classical literature

*''De Natura Animalium'' (''On Animals'') by

Claudius Aelianus Claudius Aelianus ( grc, Κλαύδιος Αἰλιανός, Greek transliteration ''Kláudios Ailianós''; c. 175c. 235 AD), commonly Aelian (), born at Praeneste, was a Roman author and teacher of rhetoric who flourished under Septimius Severu ...

* Solinus' ''Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium'' (''Collection of Remarkable Facts'') *''

Physiologus The ''Physiologus'' () is a didactic Christian text written or compiled in Greek by an unknown author, in Alexandria; its composition has been traditionally dated to the 2nd century AD by readers who saw parallels with writings of Clement of Al ...

'', a collection of moralized animal tales expanded upon over 1000 years *A

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

prose bestiary from the 12th century with Aristotle's version of the cinnamon bird *''How We Visited the Land of Satin'' from ''

Gargantua and Pantagruel ''The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel'' (french: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, telling the adventures of two giants, Gargantua ( , ) and his son Pantagruel ...

'' by François Rabelais, referred to as cinnamologi

References

* Nigg, Joseph. ''The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings from Ancient Times to the Present''. Oxford University Press, 1999. * Françoise Lecocq, ** « L’œuf du phénix. Myrrhe, encens et cannelle dans le mythe du phénix », ''L’animal et le savoir, de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance'', 2009, Presses univ. de Caen ; preprint on line : , p. 107-130

{{Bare URL PDF, date=May 2022 ** « ''Kinnamômon ornéon'' ou phénix ? L’oiseau, la viande et la cannelle », ''Prédateurs dans tous leurs états. Evolution, biodiversité, interactions, mythes, symboles'', XXXIe Rencontre Internationale d'Archéologie et d'Histoire d’Antibes, dir. J.-P. Brugal, A. Gardeisen, A. Zucker, Éditions APDCA, Antibes, 2011, p. 409–420. Legendary birds Greek legendary creatures Roman legendary creatures Cinnamon