Avians and Humans, in Antiquity and Today

A review by Alison L. Beringer

Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words, by Jeremy Mynott

Oxford University Press, 2018

426 pages—hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14880

At the risk of revealing that I am a slow reader—and an even slower writer—I admit that I began reading Jeremy Mynott’s Birds in the Ancient World while I was in central Nebraska, where I had met up with my family to view the springtime crane migration. This circumstance is not superfluous: It ties in well with both the overarching theme of Mynott’s work and an important detail. 

The book is about the history of the interaction between humans and birds; its author sees his role as that of “a cultural and ornithological guide” to the Greek and Roman past. The result is a thoroughly well-researched and richly evocative book exploring ancient and modern conceptions of the natural world. Thus, this is not so much a book about birds as it is a book about human representations of birds—physical, imaginative, literary, and pictorial. Mynott draws extensively on primary sources (all translated), inviting the reader to recognize the familiar, to pursue the obscure, and above all to consider why either matters. One thing becomes astoundingly clear: the powerful effect that birds have and continue to have on humans. Though we no longer study the entrails of birds to make our next political decisions, anyone who has witnessed a crane migration—be it the Sandhill Cranes of North America or the Common Cranes of Europe—can attest to the sense of awe and respect those birds call forth in us.

The detail that resonates with my visit to Kearney is at the very beginning of Mynott’s first chapter, where he notes the first reference to birds in all of European literature: Homer’s comparison of the flocking and flying, the calling and crying of cranes, geese, and swans to the arrival of the Greek army preparing to attack Troy. Having heard the cranes earlier that day—and having recently taught the Iliad—I found the selection of Mynott’s book as my holiday reading serendipitous. 

I was not in any way disappointed with the choice. Divided into six thematic parts, each with a brief introduction followed by three or four chapters, Birds in the Ancient World covers roughly the thousand years from 700 BCE to 300 CE, drawing largely on textual sources but also including visual material. The six parts investigate the different roles that birds play in human culture. For example, the section titled “Birds in the Natural World,” as one might expect, includes analyses of classical sources that record birds as marking seasonal changes, but also contains a chapter about the auditory aspect of birds and how humans respond to it. 

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