The History of Dragons

For thousands of years, dragons have played a role in lore and legend.

Although the time that dragons first appeared in myths isn't known for sure, they can be traced back as far as approximately 4000 B.C. Dragons are said to have been able to live almost anywhere, depending on the type of dragon mentioned. Their habitats range from the center of the earth to the middle of the ocean. They could also be found in caves, fire, or anywhere dark and damp.

Stories of dragons appear all throughout history and almost every culture has its own idea about dragons. There are stories about dragons in every part of the world, with the exception of Antarctica. Even though there are no people in Antarctica, which in that way would seem to make it attractive to dragons, the climate poses a problem for these creatures who like fire or live in water, but not ice water.

This page follows the dragon from its earliest appearances in the ancient world to the dragons of modern books, films, and games. For a look at how different peoples imagined dragons, see dragons across cultures.

Where Did the Idea of Dragons Come From?

No one knows exactly why so many cultures imagined dragons, but historians have several ideas. One is the finding of dinosaur fossils. Dragons could be used to describe the indescribable bones of unknown creatures. The historian Adrienne Mayor has argued that ancient Greeks and Romans did exactly this with fossil bones they found in the ground. In the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, a skull found in the 1300s and kept as a "dragon's skull" was later shown to belong to an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.

Dragons also seem to have come from exaggerated myths about huge snakes, lizards or other reptiles. Real dangers like pythons, cobras, and crocodiles may have grown in the telling. Some scholars point out that a dragon combines the things early humans feared most: snakes, big cats, and birds of prey. Others link dragons to storms, floods, and rivers, which can be life-giving and destructive at the same time. In many of the oldest stories, the dragon controls or hoards the water.

Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Ancient Near East

Some of the oldest dragon-like creatures in writing come from Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Mesopotamian art shows the mušḫuššu, a scaly serpent-dragon with lion's forelegs and eagle's hind talons. It became the sacred animal of the Babylonian god Marduk, and rows of them in glazed brick still decorate the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built in the 500s BC.

The Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, tells how Marduk defeated Tiamat, the goddess of the salt sea, and built the world from her body. The poem itself doesn't describe Tiamat's shape clearly, but later readers came to picture her as a great dragon of chaos, and that image has stuck.

In Egypt, the serpent Apep attacked the sun god Ra every night as Ra traveled through the underworld. The Hittites of Anatolia told of a storm god who fought the serpent Illuyanka, and the texts from the ancient city of Ugarit in Syria tell how the storm god Baal defeated Lotan, a twisting sea serpent. Lotan is closely related to the biblical Leviathan. Across the region, the same pattern repeats: a storm or sky god defeats a serpent of the sea or the underworld, and order wins out over chaos.

Ancient China

China has one of the longest unbroken dragon traditions in the world. At Xishuipo, in Henan province, archaeologists found a grave from around 6,000 years ago with a dragon and a tiger laid out in clam shells beside the body. Jade carvings of curled "pig dragons" come from the Hongshan culture of roughly the same era. The character for dragon, long, appears on Shang dynasty oracle bones over 3,000 years old.

Unlike the dragons of the Near East and Europe, Chinese dragons were generally good. They brought rain, ruled rivers and seas, and stood for strength and good fortune. Over time the dragon became the symbol of the emperor himself.

Other tales about dragons are more about their toes than the dragons themselves. How many toes a dragon has is quite significant. Many different kinds of dragons are said to have 3 toes. The 4 toed dragons are said to be the earth dragons. But the 5 toed dragons are the most respected of all. Under later Chinese dynasties, only the emperor and those he favored had the privilege of wearing a picture of the 5 toed dragon, and using the symbol without permission could bring severe punishment. Japanese art, by contrast, usually shows dragons with three claws.

Greece and Rome

Our word "dragon" comes from the Greek drakon, which meant a huge serpent. Greek myth is full of them. Apollo killed the serpent Python at Delphi. Heracles killed the many-headed Hydra. Jason had to get past the sleepless dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. Hesiod's Theogony describes Typhon, a monster with a hundred serpent heads, and his offspring, including (in most readings) the chimera.

Dragons have also appeared in stories that go back to the time of the gods in mythology. The story of Perseus and the sea monster of Poseidon tells of a vain queen, Cassiopeia, whose boasting nearly got her daughter Andromeda sacrificed to the monster, had it not been for Perseus.

In ancient Rome, dragons were thought to hold the mysteries of the earth. Romans looked to dragons as a source of knowledge and used them as symbols of strength for their military. By the 100s and 200s AD, Roman cavalry units carried the draco, a standard with a metal dragon's head and a tube of cloth behind it that filled with wind and hissed as the riders charged. The Romans had borrowed the idea from peoples of the steppes and the Danube. Roman writers such as Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, also described dragons as real animals, giant snakes in India and Africa that fought with elephants. Read more about Roman dragons.

The Bible and Early Christianity

The Hebrew Bible mentions Leviathan, a sea monster that God defeats, as well as Rahab and the tannin, words often translated as "dragon" or "sea monster." The Greek story of Bel and the Dragon, included in some Bibles as an addition to the Book of Daniel, tells how Daniel destroyed a dragon worshiped in Babylon.

The most influential dragon of all appears in the Book of Revelation, which describes a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, identified with Satan, who is cast down from heaven by the archangel Michael. From then on, Christian art used the dragon as the symbol of the devil and of evil in general. See dragons in the Bible for more.

Norse and Germanic Dragons

The peoples of northern Europe had powerful dragons of their own. In Norse myth, the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr circles the world in the sea, and the dragon Nidhogg gnaws at the roots of the world tree. The Völsunga saga tells how the hero Sigurd killed the dragon Fáfnir, a man turned into a dragon by greed for gold. In England, the Old English poem Beowulf ends with the aged hero fighting a fire-breathing dragon that guards a treasure hoard, a scene that shaped the image of the greedy, treasure-hoarding dragon for centuries.

Like St. George and the Dragon, many other stories have been told about dragons and the heroes who kill them. One story like this comes from the Norse legends of Ragnar Lodbrok. Earl Herrauðr of Götaland, in what is now Sweden, gave his daughter Thora a tiny dragon as a gift. However, the dragon soon grew into a large monster. He soon became too good of a guardian when he grew large enough to wrap his body all around her bower and not let anyone near it. The only thing to do was to kill this dragon, so the earl offered the marriage of his daughter to anyone who could kill it. The Danish hero Ragnar finally killed the beast, and as his reward he married Thora.

Medieval Europe: Saints and Knights

Dragons appear most in fairy tales and myths. In most cases the dragon is the keeper of some treasure, either gold and precious jewels or a maiden in despair. A knight in these stories must come to rescue the girl, or to retrieve the riches. To do this he must slay the dragon.

In the Middle Ages, dragon-slaying became a sign of holiness. Many saints were said to have defeated dragons, often by prayer rather than by force. Saint Margaret burst out of a dragon that had swallowed her, and Saint Martha tamed the Tarasque of southern France. The most popular collection of these stories was the Golden Legend, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260.

Almost all young children have heard stories of dragons. A story that arose from the Middle Ages is about a knight, later called St. George, who rescued a princess from a dragon and in return was able to baptize the Pagan people to Christianity. The story says that every year a maiden was sacrificed to this dragon. One year when the princess was going to be sacrificed, St. George decided to rescue her. In later English retellings his sword is named Ascalon, and with it he was able to stab the dragon and later slay him. This may be one of the most popular heroic stories involving the death of dragons, although there are many. The story of St. George and the Dragon has been told for centuries and the event was even painted by the great artist Raphael.

Another story is about another young man who fought a dragon for the reward of bringing the king's daughter to his master for marriage. In this story Tristan, a knight of King Mark of Cornwall, kills a dragon in Ireland to win the princess Isolde for his uncle, but is tricked by another man who wants the princess for his own wife. In the end Tristan had cut out the dragon's tongue as proof of his accomplishment, and the lies of the other man were discovered.

Medieval bestiaries, illustrated books of animals and their moral lessons, described the dragon as the largest of all serpents, an enemy of the elephant, and a symbol of the devil. Local legends grew up all over Europe as well. In England, the families who claimed descent from dragon-slayers were sometimes rewarded with land, like the Conyers family and the Sockburn Worm, and the legend of the Lambton Worm is tied to the Lambton family of County Durham. See our collection of dragon legends for many more.

Dragons in Heraldry and on Flags

As knights began to decorate their shields and banners with coats of arms in the 1100s and 1200s, dragons became popular symbols of power and courage. Heralds developed strict rules for them: a dragon had four legs and wings, while the two-legged wyvern counted as a separate creature.

The most famous heraldic dragon is the red dragon of Wales, Y Ddraig Goch. Welsh tradition links it to the story of two dragons, one red and one white, fighting beneath the hill of Dinas Emrys, told in the Historia Brittonum and later by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The red dragon was used by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and it became the official flag of Wales in 1959. Read more about Welsh dragons.

Maps, Exploration, and Early Science

One type of dragon, or sea monster, was feared by sailors in the age of Christopher Columbus and long after. Educated Europeans of the time knew the world was round, but the unexplored oceans were still a place of mystery, and mapmakers often filled empty spaces with sea serpents and other monsters. The 1539 Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus, a map of Scandinavia and its seas, is crowded with them.

The famous phrase "Here Be Dragons" was almost never actually printed on maps. The Latin version, HC SVNT DRACONES ("here are dragons"), is known from only a couple of early globes, most famously the Hunt-Lenox Globe from around 1510, where it appears off the coast of Asia.

Early naturalists still treated dragons as real animals. The Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner included them in his huge books on animals in the 1500s, and the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote a whole volume on serpents and dragons, published in 1640. Showmen of the period sold fake "dragons" made from dried rays and skates. Dragon belief only faded as the scientific study of animals and fossils grew in the 1700s and 1800s.

One type of dragon is actually called the Wyrm, and has a very snake-like form, with a dragon head. Another smaller form of dragon is called a dragonlet. These dragons are also venomous and can be deadly. Mount Pilatus, near Lucerne in Switzerland, collected many dragon legends.

Dragons in Modern Fantasy

In the 1800s, dragons moved from folklore into children's books and literature. Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," from Through the Looking-Glass and shown at the top of this page, gave readers a strange new dragon-like monster. Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" (1898) imagined a gentle dragon who would rather write poetry than fight.

The single biggest influence on modern dragons was J.R.R. Tolkien. A scholar of Old English and Norse literature, Tolkien drew on Beowulf and Fáfnir to create Smaug, the clever, treasure-hoarding dragon of The Hobbit (1937). Smaug's love of conversation and riddles made the dragon a character rather than just a beast.

From there, dragons spread everywhere. Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories (from 1967) and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books (from 1968) offered intelligent dragons with their own minds and languages. The game Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and its early supplements sorted dragons into chromatic and metallic types by color, an idea that shaped countless video games. Later came How to Train Your Dragon, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and the dragons of Skyrim. Many of these are listed among our famous dragons and dragon books.

Even real animals have taken the name. The Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, was first described by Western scientists in 1912. In almost every culture and all throughout history there are stories of these magical creatures called dragons.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did dragons first appear in history?

Dragon-like figures appear in Chinese graves about 6,000 years old and in Mesopotamian art from the third millennium BC. Written dragon stories appear in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hittite texts.

Did people really believe in dragons?

Many did. Ancient and medieval writers such as Pliny the Elder treated dragons as real animals, and naturalists were still describing them in the 1600s.

Did old maps really say "Here Be Dragons"?

Almost never. The Latin phrase is known from only a couple of early globes, including the Hunt-Lenox Globe of around 1510, though many maps did show sea monsters.

Why are Western dragons evil and Chinese dragons good?

Western dragons grew out of Near Eastern chaos monsters and were linked to the devil by Christianity. Chinese dragons were tied to rain and harvest, so they were seen as givers of life and symbols of imperial power.

Sources and Further Reading

• Enūma Eliš (The Epic of Creation) and Anzû, in Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford University Press, 1989).
• Harry A. Hoffner Jr., trans., Hittite Myths, 2nd ed., ed. Gary M. Beckman (Scholars Press, 1998).
• Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith, eds. and trans., Stories from Ancient Canaan, 2nd ed. (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012).
• The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, New Revised Standard Version, 5th ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 2018).
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 3, books 8–11, trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library 353, Harvard University Press, 1940).
• Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
• The Saga of the Volsungs, trans. Jesse L. Byock (Penguin Classics, 1999).
• Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton University Press, 2012).
• Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton University Press, 2000).
• Daniel Ogden, The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend (Oxford University Press, 2021).