In later adventures, he dipped his arrows in the blood to kill other monsters. The story behind the name: The constellation Hydra is most closely associated with the legend of the second labor of Heracles, which may echo a Babylonian. Then he collected the monster's poisonous blood. After removing the Hydra's immortal head, Hercules buried it under a large rock. As soon as Hercules cut off one head, Iolaus would cauterise the wound with a flaming torch so that nothing could grow to replace it. To defeat the Hydra, Hercules called on his nephew Iolaus for help. The monster also had one immortal head that was in the middle. ( fantasy) A dragon -like creature with many heads and the ability to regrow them when maimed. ![]() The second of the 12 labors of Hercules was to kill the Hydra. The Hydra monster lurking beneath the waters of the Halcyon Lake of ancient Lerna, which figured as one of the heroic exploits of Hercules in Greek mythology, was credited with attributes of. hydra ( plural hydras or hydrae or hydræ ) Any of several small freshwater polyps of the genus Hydra and related genera, having a naked cylindrical body and an oral opening surrounded by tentacles. Lerna was also the site of the myth of the Danaids. The lake itself is older even than the Mycenaean city of Argos. The second of the 12 labors of Hercules was to kill the Hydra. The number of heads is variously reported from as few as 5 to more than 100. The Hydra lived in the lake of Lerna in the Argolis. In Greek mythology, the Hydra was a giant water snake with many heads that lived in a swamp near Lerna in the land of Argos. Hercules (who is called "Heracles" in Greek mythology) kills the Hydra as one of his labors. There are pictures of the Hydra on vases and bronze plates dating back as far as the 7th century BC. It is also said that the Hydra's teeth were able to raise skeletons from the dead. According to Theogony 313, the Hydra is the child of Typhon and Echidna. They were able to build a new town, 15 feet above the old one.In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra was a serpent-like monster. But unlike the unsuccessful attempts to drain Lake Lerna, the people at Tiryns did succeed eventually in damming the stream that brought the mud. Heavy forest cutting over the centuries of the prosperous civilization led to much erosion, flooding, and eventually the burial of the delta town. At Tiryns, where the ancient temple has long been visible, Zangger found evidence that the city once surrounding it was buried in mud within a few years sometime between 12 B.C. In the nearby city of Tiryns, Zangger has found evidence of another environmental disaster that may have affected the course of ancient civilization. He believes the shutting of the bay and the stagnation of the lake may have been one of the factors in Mycenaean decline. Zangger used drill cores to pull up samples of dirt, examined the sea sediments and microfossils and analyzed Landsat satellite images to puzzle out the state of the landscape at Lerna over the past several thousand years. The struggle, Zangger said, was against the water. ![]() People returning from trips to the area spoke of the monster of Lerna and the long struggle after the Trojan war. "This is the legend of the Hydra, that if you cut off one head, two grow in its place," said Zangger. For centuries, the people of the region tried to stanch the flow of water into the lake, but where one stream was dammed, others appeared. The lake quickly filled with silt, swamps developed, and malaria became rampant, as bones unearthed from the area show. The bay became a lake, Lake Lerna, into which two streams began pouring fresh water and silt. But thousands of years ago, a Mediterranean current eroded a nearby coast and redeposited it across the mouth of the Mycenaean bay. ![]() Zangger has discovered that in the region around the ancient cities of Tiryns and Lerna there was once a saltwater bay that may have made these legendary and now-inland cities seaports. The culture, which had flourished there for millennia, vanished about 1100 B.C.Įberhard W. Mycenae - from which legendary King Agamemnon launched the Greek expedition against Troy in Homer's epic poem, "The Iliad" - was well-situated on the Peloponnesian peninsula behind protective mountains, near good farmland and good harbors. The disappearance of the Mycenaean culture from the Mediterranean has long been a major mystery of archeology. The tale of the monster described a real and desperate situation in ancient Greece, according to a Cambridge University researcher who has reconstructed the story of the land around the key cities of the Mycenaean empire. ![]() Hydra, the many-headed monster of Greek mythology, has its roots in reality.
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