Myrmekes

Herodotus reported them with the careful hedging of a man who knew how it sounded. In India, he wrote, there lived ants larger than foxes but smaller than dogs. They burrowed into the sandy earth, and the sand they excavated was rich with gold dust. The locals had developed a system for collecting this gold that was as dangerous as it was lucrative.

Teams of riders on fast camels would approach the ant-mounds during the hottest part of the day, when the myrmekes retreated underground to escape the heat. The riders filled sacks with gold-bearing sand as quickly as possible, then fled at maximum speed. The ants, once disturbed, pursued with terrifying swiftness. Any rider too slow was caught and killed.

Herodotus claimed the Persian king kept several of these ants, captured alive, as curiosities. He attributed his information to Persian sources, placing the ants in the northern reaches of India near what is now Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Modern scholars have proposed explanations ranging from marmots (whose burrowing behaviour in the gold-rich Himalayas may match the description) to a linguistic confusion between the Persian words for "ant" and "gold-miner." The French ethnologist Michel Peissel identified Himalayan marmots on the Deosai Plateau that do indeed excavate gold-dust-bearing soil, and whose local name may have been confused with the word for ant.

Whatever the source, the myrmekes became one of antiquity's most famous marvels — gold-guarding ants, too perfect a metaphor for greed and danger to ever be debunked away.