Not to be confused with Unicron. The gentle and pensive maiden unicorn theme cake the power to tame the unicorn, fresco by Domenichino, c.

The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years or so been depicted as a white horse-like or goat-like animal with a long straight horn with spiralling grooves, cloven hooves, and sometimes a goat’s beard. A bovine type of unicorn is thought by some scholars to have been depicted in seals of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization, the interpretation remaining controversial. The unicorn continues to hold a place in popular culture. It is often used as a symbol of fantasy or rarity. It has a body more like a cow than a horse, and a curved horn that goes forward, then up at the tip.

In South Asia the unicorn is only seen during the IVC period — it disappears in South Asian art ever since. Unicorns are not found in Greek mythology, but rather in the accounts of natural history, for Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of unicorns, which they believed lived in India, a distant and fabulous realm for them. Ctesias got his information while living in Persia. Unicorns on a relief sculpture have been found at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis in Iran. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a merchant of Alexandria who lived in the 6th century, made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote works on cosmography. He gives a description of a unicorn based on four brass figures in the palace of the King of Ethiopia.

Wild woman with unicorn, tapestry, c. Medieval knowledge of the fabulous beast stemmed from biblical and ancient sources, and the creature was variously represented as a kind of wild ass, goat, or horse. The unicorn also figured in courtly terms: for some 13th-century French authors such as Thibaut of Champagne and Richard de Fournival, the lover is attracted to his lady as the unicorn is to the virgin. However, when the unicorn appears in the medieval legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, ultimately derived from the life of the Buddha, it represents death, as the Golden Legend explains.