198 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



gift of perpetual life. "And now the phenix . . . lives a 

 thousand years, then shrivels up till it is the size of an 

 tgg, and then from himself emerges beautiful again." 

 In the Middle Ages this deathless bird was supposed to 

 inhabit the sacred garden of the Earthly Paradise. 



Peacocks carved on early Christian sarcophagi are 

 perched on a palm tree (the conventional sign of martyr- 

 dom in primitive Christian iconography), and hence elo- 

 quent of that rapturous belief in immortality character- 

 istic of the catacombs, as Mrs. Jenner expresses it. Repre- 

 sentations of the bird rising from a flaming nest and 

 ascending toward the sun are less common, but do occur 

 in medieval heraldry, by which pictorial path, it is prob- 

 able, the notion has come down to our own day and be- 

 come the cognizance of one of the oldest American in- 

 surance companies. 



The association with the palm mentioned above re- 

 calls another line of legendry, for some etymologists say 

 that the name "phenix" should be so written (not 

 phoenix), and that it is the older name of the date-palm. 

 This tree was regarded in ancient Egypt as the emblem 

 of triumph, whence, perhaps, our modern symbolic use 

 of its fronds; and Pliny was informed that "in Arabia 

 the phenix nested only on a palm," and that "the said 

 bird died with the tree and revived of itself as the tree 

 sprang again." 



Now, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages had much 

 to say of a mythical bird, "anka," that lived 1700 years; 

 and they explained that when a young anka grows up if it 

 be a female the old female burns herself, and if it be a male 

 the old male does so. This is very phenix-like, but the anka 

 is distinguished by huge size, the Arabic writer Kazweenee, 

 as quoted by Payne," describing the anka as the greatest 



