PYGMY, a term for a diminutive human being. Homer, in the Iliad (iii. 6) uses it of a race of tiny folk dwelling in a far southern land, whither the cranes fly when inclement winters and piercing frosts visit the northern shores. Fierce battles were often mentioned by later writers as occurring between the pygmies and cranes, and were even represented on their vases. On these the pygmies were depicted as dwarfs with large heads, negro features, close, curly hair, and sometimes armed with lances. Aristotle firmly believed in the existence of these pygmies, whom he characterized as a race of men of small stature inhabiting the marshes of upper Egypt towards the sources of the Nile. Herodotus (ii. 32), describes how five Nasamonians, while journeying through the African desert, came at last to a plain where fruit-trees grew. While gathering the fruit they were seized by some dwarfish men of strange speech, who led them to a town, where dwelt people of a similar appearance, and near which a great river flowed from west to east containing crocodiles. This river was probably the Ni ger, and the people referred to were no doubt the ancestors of the existing pygmies of equatorial Africa. Representations of pyg
mies are sculptured on the tombs at Sakkarah, the Vth Dynasty, c. 2500 B.C. They faithfully re produce the racial characteristics of the present race of pygmies inhabiting the Ituri and Central forests.
Pliny mentions dwarfed races in both Asia and Africa, of the Catizi dwarfs in Thrace, and a similar race in Caria. Ctesias, a century after Herodotus, de scribed a race of pygmies in the heart of India, as black and ugly, and only two pygmai in height.
The Chinese author, Chao Fu-Kua, in the beginning of the 13th century, described a tribe of black pygmies dwelling in the Philip pine Islands, called Hai-tan, small in size, with round, yellow eyes, curly hair, and with the teeth showing through their lips, no doubt the ancestors of the p Aetas. The existing pygmy races are divided into two groups : (a) the African pygmies, Negrillos, (b) the Asiatic pygmies, Negritos (q.v.).