e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture

Aggressive and defensive behaviour of birds takes various forms and has multiple causes. Besides intraspecies and interspecies aggressivity that comes through in skirmishes taking place during wooing, defending one's territory and food source, the attack or defence of a bird is also caused by efforts to protect its progeny or the whole community from an imminent danger. For this purpose, the birds use in particular wide array of acoustic and optical signals, partly to warn other members of the flock, partly to distract the enemy or to intimidate and chase away the intruder. Some of these aspects of birds' behaviour were already noticed by authors of antiquity and Middle Ages; descriptions of conflicts between various bird species and of their defence against each other or against the raptors and predators from other animal classes can be found in Latin sources of the Czech Middle Ages too. In these texts, many descriptions of birds are connected with Latin names known from the works of Roman natural philosophers and encyclopaedists, and their origin and meaning were explored and ascertained satisfactorily. Other terms, however, have been not deciphered yet, and the often sketchy descriptions of the appearance and behaviour of these birds together with sometimes obscure equivalents in the Old Czech don't make the identification of these Latin words any easier. The names of birds achantis and ibos, featuring in the Glossary of the 14th century lexicographer Bartholomaeus de Solencia called Claretus, in the 15th century encyclopaedia Liber viginti arcium by Pavel Zidek, and in the 15th/16th century Vocabularius dictus Lactifer by a Franciscan preacher Iohannes Aquensis, have so far belonged to similarly unclear words. Whereas the term achantis has been described and determined to a degree in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Czech Lands, the word ibos has still been lacking any explanation whatsoever. During a closer examination of these terms it turned out that both have a rich history: they got to the medieval works by different ways from ancient treatises where they denote one and the same bird that was called alpha nu theta o sigma in Greek. The name of this bird is preserved in two works of antiquity: in the Metamorphoses written by a mythographer Antoninus Liberalis, and in the zoological treatise Historia animalium written by Aristotle. In both of these tracts, the main topic is the hostility between the bird aiwaos and the horse, resulting either in chasing away of one or another from the meadow they both feed on, or in a death of one or another. From Aristotle, this name made its way to Middle Ages through two different ways and in two completely different forms. The first way led through the Plinius Maior who latinised the term into anthus. Plinius's work was a source for a medieval encyclopaedist Thomas of Cantimpre who, however, mistakenly connected the description of this bird with the name of acanthis denoting the goldfinch. The other way led through the translation of Aristotle's treatise from Greek to Arabic, and then from Arabic into Latin by Michael Scotus. Here the name of the bird appears in the form of ibos and iboz that originated possibly during the transcription of the Greek term into Arabic and then into Latin. The purpose of this paper is not only to search for the origin of the word iboz but also to identify the bird who was called civOos and iboz. Besides the traditional determination of the Greek name as the Cattle Egret or the Yellow Wagtail, the paper proposes a third possible identification the Lapwing. Nevertheless, mediaeval authors surely didn't know which birds were denoted by Latin variants achantis and iboz. The uncertainty of the Czech lexicographers is evidenced by the Czech equivalent konystrass ("horse-intimidator"), obscure Czech word komur (or konur) and a loan word ybozek that were used to translate the Latin names.