The Karkadann (Arabic كركدن karkadann or karkaddan from Kargadan, Persian: كرگدن) is a mythical creature said to have lived on the grassy plains of India and Iran.
The word kargadan also means rhinoceros in Persian and Arabic.
Depictions of karkadann are found also in North Indian art. Like the unicorn, it can be subdued by virgins and acts ferociously toward other animals.
After Al-Biruni, Persian scholars took his description and formed ever more fanciful versions of the beast, aided by the absence of first-hand knowledge and the difficulty of reading and interpreting old Arabic script. A decisive shift in description concerned the horn: where Al-Biruni had stuck to the short, curved horn, later writers made it a long, straight horn, which was shifted in artists' representations from the animal's nose to its brow.
The Persian physician Zakariya al-Qazwini (Al-Qazwini, d. 1283) is one of the writers who at the end of the thirteenth century links the karkadann's horn with poison, Later authors had the horn perspire when poison is present, suggesting the horn is an antidote and connecting it to alicorn, though this connection is not made by all writers. this is the legend that is told in One Thousand and One Nights in the "Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor".
The karkadann is referred to by Elmer Suhr as the "Persian version of the unicorn". The name appears also in medieval European bestiaries, such as those from Escorial and Paris, where the name karkadann appears in the captions of unicorn illustrations. Fritz Hommel suspects that the word entered Semitic languages via Arabs from Abyssinia. Other spellings and pronunciations include karkaddan, karkadan, and karkend.
It has been conjectured that the mythical karkadann may have an origin in an account from the Mahabharata.
The initial portion of Persian kargadan resembles the Sanskrit word "khaRga" for rhinoceros also meaning sword, where "R" represents a retroflex flap sound. The rhinoceros is "sword horned".
The karkadann in modern scholarship and culture
Scholarship on the karkadann
Much of the available material on the karkadann was collected by Richard Ettinghausen in his 1950 publication The Unicorn, a book highly praised and often referred to as a standard reference on the unicorn.
Notable appearances and references
The karkadann is the topic of a long poem by Tawfiq Sayigh (d. 1971), "A Few Questions I Pose to the Unicorn," which was hailed by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra as "the strangest and most remarkable poem in the Arabic language."
Modern Iraq still has a tradition of "tears of the karkadann," dumiu al-karkadan, which are reddish beads used in the Misbaha, the Muslim prayer beads (subuhat). The accompanying legend says that the rhinoceros spends days in the desert looking for water; when he does, he first weeps "out of fatigue and thirst-pain." These tears, as they fall into the water of the drinking hole, turn into beads.