Before we “lost our cool”, we “lost our heads”. The latter idiom dates back to the eighteenth century, but the literal phrase from which it stems (read: decapitation) was in use since at least the time of Chaucer. Long before English existed as a language, however, a headless tribe was thought to roam the distant reaches of the world. They were known variously as Blemmyes or Akephaloi, and later discovered again in the New World as Ewaipanoma. It wasn’t that this species lacked a face. The eyes, nose, and mouth were all present on their chest. Where the brain supposedly resided. . . well that’s lost to history.

The earliest known reference to headless men comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, during a discussion of the eastern region of Libya in the fourth century BCE. “In that country are the huge snakes, and the elephants and bears and asps, the horned asses, the dog-headed men and the headless that have their eyes in their breasts, as the Libyans say”. Pliny the Elder offered a parallel account in his Natural History, describing a people who “have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts”.

No matter that a headless tribe of people never existed, their inclusion in ancient histories made them popular fodder for later bestiary and travelogue traditions. Beginning with their appearance in the late-tenth century Marvels of the East, the Blemmyes often look just as confused as we are — staring out at the viewer, as if trying to understand where, exactly, their neck went wrong. In these illustrations, Blemmyes frequently keep equally strange bedfellows. The thirteenth-century Rutland Psalter illustrates a headless archer aiming an arrow at some kind of merman who plays the trumpet with his butt; a circa 1475 manuscript of the Miroir Historial has a Blemmye cavorting with a dog-faced friend and a man with a tongue like an elephant’s trunk; an illustration from Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri’s 1585 monster book shows a Blemmye in the midst of regretting what he wished for: he finally has a head and a neck, but it is grafted from an enraged swan. Sometimes they are terrifying, wielding clubs and crossbows, and other times unexpectedly cute, such as in a sixteenth-century copy of Zakariya al-Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation (1280), where an orange Blemmye looks embarrassed for the bipedal jackals that dance above his missing head.

The inclusion of Blemmyes in the Alexander Romance spawned a subtradition all its own. In a fifth-century Armenian variation of the tale, translated by Albert M. Wolohojian, they are remembered as a rather gregarious, seafood-loving people.

Moving on, we came to a place where there were headless men. They had no heads at all, but had their eyes and their mouths on their chests, and they talked with their tongues like men. They were hairy and dressed in skins, a fish-eating sea people. And they gathered there, on land and from the sea, hydna, which we have at home. They got twenty-five liters worth and gave them to us. And we saw many huge sea lions slithering on the ground. And we saw, too, lobsters as big as ships.

In the mid-fourteenth century Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the Blemmyes seem to have migrated, from Africa to the Andaman Islands. The narrator describes seeing “ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest” as well as “headless men whose eyes are mouths are on their backs”.

The Blemmyes were resurrected yet again during the Age of Exploration. In the Discovery of Guiana (1596), Sir Walter Raleigh reports rumors about the existence of men called Ewaipanoma: “folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders”. Illustrations accompanying this travelogue and other contemporary voyage narratives depict the headless men as smiling slyly, luscious hair sprouting directly out of their upper trapezius. Even Shakespeare could not resist the image. Othello speaks of men whose “heads do grow beneath their shoulders”; in The Tempest, Gonzalo recounts stories of “such men whose heads stood in their breasts”.

Calling these mythical humanoids “Blemmyes” is slightly confusing, as there was a real Eastern Desert people — ancestors of today’s Beja — once known by this name. How this name also became associated with headlessness is unclear. Some speculate that ancient travelers were actually witnessing warriors carrying shields adorned with painted faces, held over the head and breast, or may have been describing another species of primate entirely, one more capable of lowering their eyes beneath the shoulder line. Or, more likely, this was all one long game of historical telephone, the marvelous details merely noise in the chain of transmission, or even, perhaps, an intentional act of dehumanization that got consecrated as fact along the way.

Indeed, it’s hard to ignore the logic of exoticization present in these images: as if venturing to the limits of the familiar world — whether by foot, on a ship, or in the historical and visual imagination — warped the ability to accurately perceive the strange, the new. One might say it was these illustrators and adventurers, and not the mythical Blemmyes, who truly lost their heads.

Below you will find a half a millennium of Blemmyes, ordered chronologically.