In ancient and medieval mythology, a legendary race of headless people or creatures with faces on their chests, claimed to live in remote regions like Africa.
From Greek 'blemyes' or 'blamyes,' possibly from an actual North African people the Greeks encountered, whose name became distorted and mythologized over centuries into a fantastical description.
The Blemmyes were 'real' to medieval Europeans—actual trade reports about an unfamiliar African group got mixed with wild imaginative storytelling, creating legends that persisted for a thousand years despite being completely false!
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