India's Myrmex Indikoi: Myth or History or BOTH? - Extra Mythology

okay everyone this episode of extra mythology is going to be a little different around our humble animated campfire we've always said that myths are not stories that are untrue rather they are tales that don't fit neatly into the historical record you know stories like in the mountains lies sleeping Kings or that we can toast marshmallows only because this fire was stolen from the gods or that marshmallows are actually the eyes of the marsh dwelling demon Eric his gooey insides be praised you know all not untrue except that last one of course because myths serve indisputably as the foundations two cultures and in that is where their truth lies but what if that changed what if a myth did fit neatly into the historical record is it then still a myth or a fact or something else entirely well that's a question I want you to keep in the front of your minds as I tell you today's tale of the giant gold-digging ants of India Lord thanks so much to factor for keeping us well fed fast if you've ever been to the Kashmir region you've probably seen some amazing sites the glittering doll Lake the Himalayas but you probably won't remember seeing massive ants hauling up fine gold from the ground oh but they exist well at least according to Herodotus the so-called father of History his first hand Chronicle of the ancient world the histories introduced Greek readers of 430 BC to the cultures and customs of South and Western Asia to their economies and most importantly the parts that ants played in them in India Herodotus traveled the Eastern desert and River marshes taking notes on the languages diets and sexual practices of the population he wrote of sheep's wool That Grew on trees and camels with backwards genitals so you know in that context giant ants were nothing out of the ordinary in his telling these ants the size of dogs were truly burrowing machines and the pile of sand and soil that they displaced would be cut through with Gold Dust so much gold in fact that if you looked at it while the sun was reflecting off its surface you would go blind and the ancient Greeks called these gold digging creepy crawlies the mermax indicoy which just means Indian ants I mean if there were any other ants in India the Greeks didn't really want to know about them because they surely weren't pulling their weight like these fellas were seated the Greeks this story made India sound like an absolute Paradise ants who would dig gold for you and lots of it whoa and you could just go and take it right I mean what would an ant need with gold ah it's not that simple because the mermax in decoy knew the gold had value the people of darnistan west of the Himalayas found this out the hard way they figured they could just scoop some of that valuable sand into baggies and skedaddle which was a big mistake the ants were on the darts in a second and tore them limp from limb leaving their remains as a warning to all comers but if we know anything about humankind it's that it won't let a couple of ants stand in the way of some easy money over time the darts and other treasure Seekers would learn how to outsmart the bug for instance the ants dug mostly in Winter preferring I suppose to not work much in these Summer's brutal heat so if you stole from them in the summer there might be less plunder sure but also less chance of a giant mandible separating your head from your neck oh I'm sorry are you fighting this historical recounting a little implausible at this point okay okay well you're not alone because herodotus's critics certainly did as well even in his time the read on his great work of history was that it was stuffed with blindly reported fables heck he also wrote that cyclopses were real that Ethiopians communicated like bats and that a dolphin once saved a famous musician from drowning so giant gold-digging ants huh yeah okay pal we'll believe that when we see it I've seen it so said nyarkis an admiral of Alexander the Great who sailed the Indus River through cashmere a hundred years after herodotus's histories he said he saw the ants himself and added to herodotus's account one unsettling detail that these critters have the Farid skin of leopards and shed them like snakes still only two forces one a supposed and the other a conquest thirsty acolyte of Alexander the Great three okay that was megustanies another Greek historian who went to India in the early 3rd century and wrote a whole book on the place Miramax indicoy he said it checked out but of course he wasn't entirely reliable either I mean 300 years later the historian strabo threw some doubt on megastini's description of the Indian subcontinent for instance he claimed that it was found by Heracles which strabo said was total nonsense so if magustanies believed that then the stuff about the giant ants oh that that's real strabo said that part I totally buy okay then came uh Pliny the Elder to confirm that the ants not only existed but they were bigger than they first reported okay now they were the size of lions with Leon encouraged to match short no spineless insects these were now Gladiators who would go to war for their one true love gold and if you think this conviction these ancient historians had that the ants were real ended with the age of antiquity you would be mistaken in the Middle Ages questing Knights dreamed of slaying such legendary beasts and peasants fantasized about how their Lots in life might be transformed by the treasure but then finally came the Age of Reason and we all know that it's called that because that was the time that someone finally stood up and said you know those big ants you keep talking about yeah those are people you see over the mountains from Kashmir was Tibet and its gold mines when Herodotus said that the ants wanted to work in Winter that was probably due to actual human gold miners preferring to work on Frozen soil less likely to cave in meaning that the Arcus probably did see leopard skins lying about because that could be what miners were wearing for warmth not these shed furry skins of giant insects and when all of these guys wrote in awe of these Mighty again air quotes ants defending their prize gold from thieves I mean that seems like a pretty rational human reaction to someone trying to take your stuff because they think you were an ant for some reason but all this begs the question how could Herodotus have gotten this so wrong could he really not tell the difference between a person and an insect honestly maybe I mean in the histories he did confuse a horse for a hippopotamus but you know that's a whole other thing what's more likely though is back in the day in the ladakh part of Kashmir people did casually talk about gold as ant gold in reference to how ants might sometimes inadvertently expose a gold nugget when building their ant hills so maybe Herodotus saw a marmot or something in the distance burrowing fiercely in the sand and thought oh is that what they're talking about when they mention the ants of course if you lived in Lara this concept of ant gold would have been straightforward but Herodotus got his wires crossed because he didn't understand the culture he was observing he didn't know how to correctly interpret it so intentionally or not he confused the story embellished it and exported it around the world as fact and since for his readers India only existed in the imagination why couldn't massive ants loaded with gold plausibly walk the earth and then one day if you got to visit that far away land that you've heard Fantastical stories about your whole life I mean you might just go looking for evidence to support sad stories you turn gold miners in leopard skins into big furry ants until you have a tail that not even Herodotus would recognize you know if that is in fact what happened because the only other explanation I can think of about how we got here is that Herodotus looked at that Marmot I mentioned before and said I genuinely think that is an ant then New Yorkers and magustanis went to India saw the Tibetan gold miners and said hey there were those ants he was talking about and friends that's not really mythology at all that's not history that is just bad eyesight and you know something else I enjoy not overthinking is lunch and dinner and now thanks to factor I never have to now if you've been watching this channel for a while you know I've talked about meal delivery services like hellofresh which I do love because I really do enjoy cooking when I have the time which is not often these days so what am I supposed to do right I can't just have frozen meals all the time because there's just too many preservatives and they always kind of taste like Garbo and then my bank account can't really handle more than a few takeout orders a month so my solution honestly has been factor which is this amazing pre-prepared meal delivery service that takes the guesswork out of my breakfast lunch and dinner that all of my friends are just very 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fantastic legendary patrons because I sure did [Music] [Applause] [Music] and

Channel: Extra History

Views: 147,224

Keywords: animated, extra history, extra Mythology, documentry, history lectures, history documentary, history explained, educational videos, civilization, history, lecture, documentary history ancient, weird history, Indias myth, Indias mythology, Indias myths, fun myths, Mythology, India Mythology, animated stories, folklore, monsters, mythology unleashed, mythical beasts, fairytale, storytime, literature, india myth, india mythology, ancient civilizations, Myrmex Indikoi, gold digging ants

Id: UJT3CzYcgFU

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023