Macrocephali

Lore & Background

The Macrocephali were ancient tribes living near the Black Sea who performed artificial cranial deformation. Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, Scylax, and Hippocrates all mention a people specifically by this name living northeast of Pontus. While other writers, such as Strabo and the author of the Periplus of the Euxine Sea, identify the Macrocephali with the Macrones, Pliny clearly considers them separate groups. The Macrocephali were also treated as a mythical species on the same level as the Cynocephaly, Pygmies, and Skiapodes. In book 3 of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius, an Indian monk named Iarchas refutes the existence of all such creatures found in the books of Scylax besides the Pygmies.

Their cultural practice of artificially elongating the skulls of their children is mentioned in part 14 of Hippocrates' On Air, Water, and Places. It is described how, soon after birth while a child's head is still soft, it would be bound to increase its length. Hippocrates claimed that this was done because the Macrocephali equated head length to nobleness. However, even in his own writing, Hippocrates mentions that the practice is falling out of use due to interactions with other peoples. Juan Huarte wrote that the Macrocephali had heads like a sugar-loaf, in which the top was extended. His work claimed that due to the practice being done so often children were being born with naturally elongated heads, something which Hippocrates believed should have been happening but ultimately dismissed.

Reader's Guide

The Macrocephali hold significance as a documented example of artificial cranial deformation in antiquity, recorded by multiple classical authors. Their practice is described in detail by Hippocrates in On Air, Water, and Places, who notes that head elongation was associated with nobility, though the custom was already declining due to contact with other peoples. The tribe's status as both a historical people and a mythical species—grouped with Cynocephaly, Pygmies, and Skiapodes—reflects the ambiguous line between ethnography and legend in ancient sources. Later, Dr. Heinrich Rathke reported finding elongated skulls in the northern Caucasus during the early 1800s, which he attributed to the Macrocephali, with indentations showing the skulls had been bound by clothes. A drawing of such skulls was on display at a museum in Kerch as of 1842. The confusion over whether the Macrocephali were the same as the Macrones or Siginni, as noted by Strabo and others, underscores the difficulty of identifying ancient tribes from fragmentary accounts. Juan Huarte's later claim that the practice led to naturally elongated heads echoes Hippocrates' speculation, which Hippocrates himself ultimately dismissed.

Did You Know?

• The Macrocephali were considered a mythical species alongside the Cynocephaly, Pygmies, and Skiapodes.
• Hippocrates wrote that the Macrocephali bound their children's heads soon after birth to increase length, equating head length with nobleness.
• Juan Huarte claimed that the practice of cranial deformation was so common that children were born with naturally elongated heads.

Ancient Literary Attestations and Mythical Status

The Macrocephali occupied a peculiar position in the ancient Greek and Roman imagination of distant peoples. Several classical authors—Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, Scylax, and Hippocrates—each named this group explicitly, placing them northeast of Pontus near the Black Sea. Yet their status in the literary record was deeply ambiguous: they were frequently catalogued alongside creatures considered purely mythical, such as the Cynocephaly, Pygmies, and Skiapodes, suggesting that many readers encountered them as fabulist curiosities rather than documented neighbors. In Book 3 of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius, an Indian monk named Iarchas systematically dismisses the exotic peoples listed in Scylax's writings, granting an exception only to the Pygmies. This rhetorical move underscores how the Macrocephali had become shorthand for the far-fetched ethnographic claims that Greek and Roman audiences both consumed and doubted.

Cranial Deformation as Cultural Practice

Hippocrates, in part fourteen of his treatise On Air, Water, and Places, provides the most detailed ancient description of the Macrocephali's defining custom. According to his account, shortly after a child was born—while the skull was still pliable and soft—the infant's head would be bound in cloth to force it into an elongated shape over time. Hippocrates reported that the Macrocephali associated greater head length with nobility, making the deformation a deliberate marker of social distinction. Notably, he also observed that the practice was already declining in his era, attributing the shift to increasing contact with neighboring peoples who did not share the custom. Centuries later, Juan Huarte offered a vivid visual: he described the resulting heads as resembling a sugar-loaf, with the crown stretched upward. Huarte went further, asserting that the practice had become so widespread and persistent that children were now being born with naturally elongated skulls—a hereditary effect that Hippocrates himself had anticipated but ultimately rejected.

Osteological Evidence and Nineteenth-Century Discoveries

The gap between the Macrocephali's literary reputation as quasi-mythical beings and their possible material reality began to narrow in the early nineteenth century. Dr. Heinrich Rathke documented elongated skulls recovered from the northern Caucasus region and attributed them to the Macrocephali. His examination revealed physical indentations in the bone, which he interpreted as evidence that the skulls had been compressed and reshaped by tight binding with cloth during infancy—precisely the mechanism Hippocrates had described. By 1842, a drawing depicting such a deformed skull was on public display at a museum in Kerch, a city on the Crimean coast overlooking the Sea of Azov, placing the artifact within the broader Black Sea cultural sphere where ancient writers had located the tribe. Rathke's work thus provided a tangible, osteological bridge between the ancient textual descriptions and the physical remains, lending the Macrocephali a degree of empirical credibility that purely literary sources could not.

Tribal Identity and the Problem of Distinction

One of the most persistent difficulties in reconstructing the Macrocephali's identity is the confusion that ancient geographers and ethnographers introduced regarding their relationship to neighboring groups. Pliny the Elder drew a clear line, treating the Macrocephali and the Macrones as two distinct peoples. In contrast, Strabo and the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Euxine Sea collapsed the two into a single entity. Strabo additionally mentioned the Siginni, a tribe dwelling near the Caucasus Mountains, who also deliberately altered their head shape so that their foreheads projected beyond their chin. Yet Strabo explicitly classified the Siginni as a separate group from both the Macrocephali and the Macrones (whom he referred to as the Sanni). This web of overlapping and contradictory identifications makes it difficult to determine whether the Macrocephali were a single coherent tribe, a cluster of related groups sharing a cultural practice, or a literary composite assembled from multiple real and imagined peoples encountered along the Black Sea's northeastern shore.