Creatures from English folklore with no heads and a mouth in their chests. Their diminutive brain was located in their groin, and their eyes on their shoulders.
While they were made widely known by William Shakespeare in Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Othello (1605), they were not created by William Shakespeare, and indeed were mentioned as early as the 5th century BC in "the Histories" by Herodotus as Androphagi.
In the fifth century BC, Herodotus, dubbed by Cicero "the father of history", wrote his famous work known as "The histories". In his fourth book he relates some almost incredible stories of cannibalism practised by some of the tribes inhabiting the region of the Euxine, which we call the Black Sea.
The people Herodotus calls the Androphagoi, or man-eaters, were a branch of the Scythians, dressing like them but speaking their own language. One of the tribes, the Issedones, had a curious custom:
- "When a man's father dies all his relations bring cattle, and then having sacrificed them and cut up the flesh, they cut up also the dead parent of their host, and having mingled all the flesh together, they spread out a banquet; then having made bare and cleansed his head, they gild it and afterwards they treat it as a sacred image, performing grand annual sacrifices to it."