The myth of unicorn: How it appears in different cultures  

You must have seen unicorns in pictures and toy stores. These magnificent supernatural animals resemble ordinary horses. However, they have a single horn in the middle of their forehead and are white in appearance. These animals are popular in mainstream culture. In movies like My Little Pony (2013) or Deadpool (2016), unicorns are everywhere, starting from on toys and birthday cakes to T-shirts and water bottles. Have you ever wondered where the story of this mythical creature originated? Or where did the word 'unicorn' come from? Let's investigate its origin and implication in various cultures.  

The origin story 
What if we told you that the word unicorn was a result of mistranslation? Yes, it is true.  Mistranslations played a part in transforming unicorns from perplexing composite animals into glorious white beings. Scholars who were translating the Bible from Hebrew into Greek during the 3rd century B.C. took the Hebrew term 're'em,' which was most likely the name for aurochs (extinct wild ox) and transformed it into the Greek word 'monokeros,' which meant 'one horn,' and had been used for rhinos. The term later became 'unicornus' in Latin translations of the Greek Bible and 'unicorn' in English translations of Latin. And this is how the word unicorn came to be! But where did the myth about unicorns come from? The myth of the unicorn originates at least as far back as 400 BCE when the Greek historian Ctesias described an animal like unicorn in his writings about India.  

 Unicorns in the western culture 
Ctesias wrote the first book Indica in Greek about the countries of Tibet, India and the Himalayas. This book contains the earliest mention of a creature like unicorn. The earliest written reference to unicorns in Western literature also originated from Ctesias’ book in the stories that travellers via the silk route reported. They were described as horse-sized 'wild asses' with white bodies, blue eyes, red heads and a multicoloured horn around 1.5 feet long. The bright  animal that Ctesias portrays is perhaps a fantastical interpretation of the Indian rhinoceros! Were Indian rhinoceroses really unique? In India, rhinoceroses horns were thought to have medicinal benefits and therefore occasionally fashioned into drinking containers with different bands of colour.  Nonetheless, the unicorn myth in the west eventually evolved to include the notion that the horn has healing abilities.  

Unicorns in the Indian culture 
The Indian culture has its own unicorn, let us see where this idea of unicorn came from! Various seals have been discovered in South Asian archaeological sites that depict a side profile of what appears to be a horse with a single horn. Yes, it was a creature resembling a unicorn. The unicorn imagery stretches back to the Indus Valley Civilization in South Asia (about 3300 B.C. to 1300 B.C.), including modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  

Unicorns in the Chinese culture 
According to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Chinese descriptions of an Asian unicorn date back 2700 B.C. This 'unicorn' appeared to be a hybrid of many creatures, with the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, a coat that was either multicoloured or scaled like a dragon and a horn covered in flesh. 

Unicorn in the eyes of Marco Polo 
You may have realised by this point that confusing a rhinoceros with a unicorn was relatively common. This is how the Greek historian Ctesias mistook Indian rhinoceros for a unicorn in his writings! However, he was not the only one to do so. Let's find out what the Italian explorer Marco Polo did. While travelling through the islands of Sumatra, Indonesia, in the thirteenth century, he saw what he initially believed to be a unicorn and said that unicorn myths only partially correspond to reality! How do we know this?  
His experience is recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, written in the same century. In his book, Marco Polo states that unicorn is an ugly beast to look upon who likes dwelling in dirt and mud! According to the Brown University Library, U.S., it is now acknowledged that the 'unicorn' Marco Polo observed was a rhinoceros! So, Ctesias was not the only one to mistake rhinoceros for a unicorn!