Thread by @ADalassio

As bizarre and fantastical as it sounds to our modern ears, there is a long history of recorded accounts of a race of creatures known as the dog-headed men. Everyone is probably familiar with the Egyptian depiction of Anubis, the jackal or dog-headed deity.

Anubis is a Greek translation of the ancient Egyptian word, Anpu, meaning "royal child". (Anubis, btw, was not the only Egyptian dog-headed deity). Being rational human beings, most people assume these depictions show a man wearing some sort of ceremonial mask

When we get past our assumptions and public educational indoctrination and look at the evidence of multitudes of documentation describing these creatures in ancient texts and by a variety of different witnesses we begin to venture into the fantastical realms of our reality

Did such creatures really exist. Is it even possible? Before you say this thread has gone to the dogs, let's look at the evidence.The fifth century BC Greek physician Ctesias wrote a book entitled Indica in which he reports the particulars of the dog-headed people living in India

in India's mountains, saying that they wore animal hides, hunted for their subsistence and communicated with barking sounds. Herodotus, writing a second-hand report from ancient Libyans, relates that the cynocephali lived in lands east of the Libyans.

There is a story of a battle between the Argonauts and the Cynocephali which was fought around the area of North Serbia, or South Hungary. In his book, The City of God, Book XVI, Chapter 8, Augustine of Hippo muses on the origin of the cynocephali and if they even really existed

and, if they did, would they be considered mortal, rational, ie: human animals. He concludes his ponderings by deciding that if they are indeed human, they must be descendants of Adam. The Orthodox Catholic Church doesn't like to admit in this day and age but their Eastern

Orthodox iconography depicts their most venerable St. Christopher as a dog-headed convert to Catholicism. The backstory to St. Christopher starts during Roman Emperor Diocletian's 3rd century reign, "when a man named Reprebus, Rebrebus or Reprobus (the "reprobate" or "scoundrel")

was captured in combat against tribes dwelling to the west of Egypt in Cyrenaica. To the unit of soldiers, according to the hagiographic narrative, was assigned the name numerus Marmaritarum or "Unit of the Marmaritae", which suggests an otherwise-unidentified "Marmaritae"

He was reported to be of enormous size, with the head of a dog instead of a man, apparently a characteristic of the Marmaritae.