The mighty fallen king

        The mythical European lion

     When we talk about majesty, beauty and strength, we cannot help but think of the lion nicknamed The King of Beasts in honor of that wild and fighting spirit that shows, although well currently when a lion is mentioned we cannot help but think of the African continent and the lions that live in this region, in its savannahs and grasslands but they were not the first known to Westerners.

In the not too distant past there were lions in European lands and in fact they were the first that Western civilization knew, help me analyze this.

The European lion, proposed name Panthera leo europaea, is a type of feline, possibly related to the lion, Said to have inhabited the region of Europe in historical times, these lions were seen in southern Europe and their habitat included the temperate and Mediterranean forests of the area, in which there were prey such as European bison, elk, aurochs, deer, and other European ungulates, it has sometimes been thought that these European lions may have been the last remnants of the cave lion, but this is considered unlikely, Already in the time of the Roman emperors there were reviews of the appearance of these animals, which show animals with large manes, while Cave lions always appear without manes in prehistoric cave art from cave hunts, making it clear that they may have actually existed as a stable population.

    [scene of a lioness hunt on a bronze dagger, made in Mycenae about 3800 years ago]

The European lion lived in the warm areas of the Mediterranean, such as the Italian Peninsula and the Balkan Peninsula, where they were victims of hunting by the civilizations that inhabited those places, but it is also believed that they were actually Asian lions that populated the warm places of the Mediterranean, but there is evidence that it is an extinct subspecies native to Europe, since in the helmets of the early Roman Images of lions were engraved on a shield of the city of Rome, long before its expansion to the African continent, Just as in Classical Greece, the texts of philosophers and historians described this extinct animal, before their explorations in Egypt; also as in the temples of the Kingdom of Macedonia and in the texts of different philosophers such as Aristotle or Herodotus.

[Lion of New Carteya, sculpture from between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. C.]

Due to its remote extinction, little is known about this subspecies of lion, at the beginning of the Holocene it is known that it was still present in northern Spain, until the time between 5500 to 2000 BC. C. the presence of the lion is confirmed by fossils in present-day Hungary and the Pontus region in Ukraine, But although there were presumably still lions in the area between the Haliacmon and Nesto rivers in northern Greece in the time of Herodotus, By the first century after Christ, Dion Chrysostom already noted that they were extinct in southern Europe. After this, lions in Europe were restricted to the Caucasus region, where a population of lions survived until the 10th century AD, these theories still need to be verified and their origin analyzed.

This species became extinct due to intensive hunting by European societies since hunting lions was a sport shared by all social classes, The rich, poor, princes, soldiers and commoners fully enjoyed the sport of hunting these animals, also with the rise of the Romans this species was possibly used in circuses, in the end luckily the memory of these majestic beasts was saved since the lions were Featured prominently in ancient Greek mythology and art, including the myth of the Nemean lion, also as a symbol of strength, majesty and prominence, something that Western cultures maintain to this day, so although the European lion is gone, its legacy continues.

As a bonus, it is possible that the last stronghold of this beast was Scotland, as there are supposed records of lion-like beasts roaming through the lands until the Middle Ages and inspired the heraldic symbols of the lion of that region, although there is little of this or no information, but if you find it I will write about it.

[Reading links]

https://carloscanales.net/clan/page8.html