Creatures

Duineach (Centaurs)
Humans from the waist up and horse from the waist down. (107)

Greeu, Greffon, Gryphon, Grifon, Greffon (Greife: Griffin)
Fabulous monsters with the upper part of the body a vulture or eagle and the lower part like a lion. Wings are white, their backs are covered with black feathers and they have red breasts and red fire eyes. They lay agate stone eggs in nests of gold and can find precious stones and emeralds. Gryphons are the guardians of goldmines and ‘were in perpetual strife with the Arimaspians, a people of Scythia, who rifled the mines for the adornment of their hair’. The Gryphons live on Riphey Mountain [Ural Mountains]. The Дон Don River also called the Tanakvisl: Tanais River flows from the mountains. The BC Greek settlement of Southern Russia at the Don river delta flowing into the Asov Sea called Tanais. The cave where Borus: the North Wind rises is nearby and is called the Earth’s Door Bolt.
In Aeschylos’ 5th century BC play Prometheus Desmotes has Prometheus warning Io to be careful of the Gryphons who are the hounds of Zeus and the one-eyed Arimaspians who dwell around a river of gold that is known as the Ferry of Plouton. Flavius Philostratos writes in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana that Apollonius is told by Iarcus that the mountain rocks are spotted with drops of gold and that the Gryphons are sacred to the sun in India. Their feathers cure blindness. Ariosto writes in Orlando Furioso that the Hippogriff is the offspring of the Gryffon and the Scythian horse. (172, 210)