From Tortoiseshell and the Turtle Eaters to the Beastly Turtle Island: Transformations of a Lovable Marine Reptilian

By Roxani Margariti.

In a class on Indian Ocean commodities, economy, and materiality, every year my students and I come across this scribe’s desk at the British Museum. 

It is one of several other similarly inlaid Ottoman-period objects that we study. We note that the desk’s inlays are made of ivory, mother-of-pearl, and tortoiseshell, which combined gracefully accentuate the intricacy and elegance of the decoration’s interlocking geometric patterns.  We then discuss these bio-materials’ long histories of extraction, trade, and craftsmanship.  Did the scribe or Ottoman lady or gentleman using the desk similarly linger on the dazzling effect of the inlay materials and did the mind then wander to the charismatic animals that gave them up?

That is, of course, rather impossible to know.  But the Ottomans were the inheritors of the deep cosmographical tradition of the Islamicate world.  For centuries, cosmographers and travelers had been writing in detail about the beauty and natural charisma of what the elephant, pearl-oyster, and sea turtle procured.  In this post, we’ll linger on dhabl—the medieval Arabic word for what in English is commonly if somewhat misleadingly called “tortoiseshell.”  And we’ll let this alluring and precious material lead us to its rightful owner: the hawksbill turtle of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and its many cousins across the world.  These resilient and long-suffering animals have inspired both beautiful objects and fabulous myths.

What’s in a name: sea turtles, fresh water turtles, land turtles

Turtles or tortoises?  The term turtle is a broad category descriptor that includes a variety of land and sea species of the Testudinae or Cheloniidae family.  Sea turtles are easy to recognize: given their marine habitat, they have flipper-like front limbs and webbed hind legs, very different from those of the tortoise and other land turtles.  Also, their carapace has a hydrodynamic shape, that does not allow them to retract their head. We should also note terrapins, a broad name for a variety of turtle species that inhabit fresh or brackish water environments.  Name giving for land turtles is rather less clear.  In English, the word tortoise denotes a particular class of land turtles.  Not all land turtles are tortoises!  For one thing, tortoises are generally sworn vegetarians, whereas all other turtles are omnivorous.  A good thing that we are not talking about those in this post!

All turtles share a carapace that is fused with their skeleton (some of their vertebrae are glued to it) and is made of scutes, or keratinous plates, arranged in a variety of patterns.

But to complicate things somewhat, in English, the term tortoiseshell turns out to be something of a misnomer. The material that humans covet and name thus most commonly comes not from tortoises (or any other land turtle species, for that matter), but rather from a charismatic cousin of theirs that lives in the sea: the magnificent hawksbill turtle, or Eretmochelys imbricata.  More rarely, the shell of green turtles, or Chelonia mydas, also ends up being harvested as tortoiseshell.  But the hawksbill turtle is special.  Its carapace is made of overlapping scutes, hence the name “imbricata.” The root of this word, the Latin imbrex, means a protective roof tile, usually curved, overlaid to cover the seams of flat roofing tiles and thus keep out the rain. The colors of the scutes’ surface range from golden to dark brown and are streaked with red, orange and yellow, and thus create a specially dazzling effect.

Hawksbill turtles live in tropical and subtropical waters around the world, but are absent from the Mediterranean, with rare sightings probably referring to visiting animals. In spite of their wide geographical range, they are presently endangered.  The challenges they face are many.  As for other marine species, the degradation of marine habitats and nesting environments, threats from invasive and native predators, widespread fishing that produces inadvertent by-catches, and direct strikes from increased shipping traffic have all taken a toll on hawksbill populations. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) further suggests that the historical harvesting of hawksbills for their shell has been a major challenge and is a primary reason for international legislation that prohibits their capture and trade.  Hawksbills have also historically been harvested by local communities for their meat and eggs.  Thus, as we look back into the historical record, let’s keep in mind the balance and connection between these two strands of exploiting the marine turtles: global commerce and local subsistence.

A lucrative commodity

Particularly abundant in the Red Sea and the Western Indian Ocean, hawksbill turtles from these waters became sought after for the beauty of their shells very early.  We know this from the first two authors to write extensively about this region: Agatharchides of Cnidos and the anonymous Egyptian Greek who wrote The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

In the first century CE the Periplus specifically suggests that χελώνη, the Greek term for tortoiseshell, was part of the luxuries traveling westward along Indian Ocean and Red Sea routes ultimately leading to Rome.  The Greek term actually denoted much more than tortoiseshell: the animal itself (both terrestrial and marine), the sounding board of a lyre, an instrument sometimes made of tortoise or other turtle carapaces, the famous coin of Aegina that bore an image of a sea turtle, a hut, a hill, and more.

The χελώνη referred to in the Periplus was obtained by Roman traders at the port of Adulis from the islanders of Alalaiou.  The toponym Alalaiou clearly refers to the Dahlak archipelago in the Southern Red Sea, a place remained a source for tortoiseshell into the 20^th century.  Agatharchides, as we shall see below, has a more ethnographic bent to this writing about the Red Sea and offers us a glimpse of turtle hunting.

Tortoiseshell qualifies as a natural polymer and is “thermoplastic.”  Thanks to its cellular structure, it can be heated and fused into thicker plates, and bent to the desirable shape.  The individual scutes are separated from the bony skeleton with the use of heat.  They are then cut and polished, and their surface flattened or curved with further use of heat and pressure.  A great variety of objects of various shapes, curvatures, and sizes can thus be made with this material, which is basically nature’s plastic! Imitation tortoiseshell, made with other thermoplastic materials such as horn and of course plastic, has been around for a long time, due to the material’s price and increasing rarity of its long-suffering owners.

By the Middle Ages, Western Indian Ocean turtles appear to have been heavily exploited.  The Syrian cosmographer al-Dimashqi (d. 727/1329) provides an extensive entry in a section on “on the sea of Yemen, its borders, its islands and its wonders” and introduces the animal by focusing on its size and the beauty of its shell:

“There is an animal called “al-bassa.” Its length is about 20 cubits (1 cubit is a little less than half a meter).  Its back is very large and black embellished with yellow in a beautiful embellishment. It is fine, and it is the floor of its skin and it is “tortoiseshell” (dhabl) with which people make combs, knife hilts, rings and the like.” Curiously, the term that Dimashqi uses, al-bassa, is a word for cat.  A marine cat is a strange idea—until you put side by side the coloring of the hawksbill turtle with that of what’s known as a “tortoiseshell cat”!  A variety of other terms are used for sea turtles in other Arabic sources, the most easily recognizable being al-sulaḥfa al-bahriyya, meaning simply the marine turtle. Also, the reported size of the animal conveys more wonder more than reality: even the larger green turtle does not reach almost 10 meters in length! In any case, Dimashqi leads with the description of the most striking characteristic of a hawksbill turtle, its dazzling appearance, thus emphasizing the importance of dhabl, tortoiseshell, for the Islamicate world’s commerce and luxury crafts.

Of the different objects made of the sea turtle’s carapace that Dimashqi lists in the 14th century, tortoiseshell combs are a standard across many cultures.  To give one spectacular example from a different sea and century, combs (as well as hair ornaments) of hawksbill tortoiseshell were a prized object of colonial cultures in the 17^th-century Caribbean, where hawksbill turtles also thrived.

Slow food for thought: turtles as nutritious local fare and a culinary exotic

While the commerce-minded Periplus of the Erythraean Sea focuses on tortoiseshell and while al-Dimashqi introduces the animal with a similar emphasis on its shell, there’s another dimension of the sea turtle that ancient and medieval authors were aware of: the local use of sea turtles as food.   To rhetorically mark populations of the southern seaboards as different but in the process also revealing practices that differed from those of the Mediterranean, Greek authors coined a special term, in parallel to the term Ichthyophagi that we have discussed in a previous post: Chelonophagi, or Turtle Eaters!  The Turtle Eaters were islanders.  The main source describing this “turtle eating population” is Agatharchides of Cnidus, the Alexandrian geographer and ethnographer who lived in the 2^nd century BCE, and whose text survives in the work of subsequent Roman savants (Diodorus, Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy, etc).  The location of the Chelonophagi varies across classical authors, but it seems most likely from the context of Agatharchides’s text that he imagined them as inhabitants of Red Sea and Gulf of Aden island.

Agatharchides provides a vivid picture of turtle hunting (or “turtling”) by the Chelonofagoi: the turtles are captured while sleeping on the surface of the water “between the islands…on the surface, facing towards the sun and bobbing like ferry boats”.  The islanders approach, rope the floating turtles and pull them onto shore.  In an alternative technique described by Agatharchides, the Chelonofagoi “swim out to the turtles” in pairs, turn them over, tie their tails and drag them to shore.  Reportedly, they feast on the turtle meat after leaving the animals on shore to bake for a little while in the sun! And they also use the turtles’ shells as houses or boats!!  Between reality and poetic license, in his version of Agatharchides’ text the Roman author Diodorus is thus inspired to conclude that “nature seems to have granted them with one gift, the satisfaction of many needs, for one and the same gift is their food, container, house, and boat.”

If a turtle-house seems far-fetched, the turtle-hunting techniques and wide variety of uses for turtle carapaces attested by the ancient authors should not be discounted.  Both are well attested ethnographically to the present-day!  The editor and translator of Agatharchides’s text notes that similar turtle hunting techniques were described by the British naval officer James Raymond Wellsted while observing the natives near Ras Banas (Egypt) in the early 19^th century.  And in his fascinating study of fishing techniques on the island of Socotra, Yemen, Julian Van Rensburg reports seeing sea turtle carapaces around the islanders’ houses and explains that “the shells, although no longer sold, were used as covers, water troughs, and serving dishes”!  Although turtles had been declared a protected species in Yemen at the time, Socotrans kept turtle meat both as a store of nutrition and as a treat for special guests; they saw it as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac.

Between the ancient authors and the ethnographic reports of recent and current use, medieval Arabic-language geographers and cosmographers confirm the sense that eating turtle is a long-standing practice in the Indian Ocean region. In his entry on the turtle presented above, Dimashqi does not fail to mention the sea turtle as a nutritional and culinary boon, both for their meat and for their eggs:

“The meat of this animal is good, fatty, oily, tasty, quite delicious to eat, and it does not stink.  The fishermen say that al-bassa bears offspring.  The principle is that the animals that do not have protruding ears bear eggs and hatch them, while the animals that have protruding ears bear offspring.  God knows best.”

As fits their widespread distribution around the world, chelonians have indeed been appreciated as food by different cultures.  In the Americas, it was a staple both for indigenous populations and colonial newcomers of various professions and persuasions. “As good as steak” is how turtle meat was described by Cushing, the archaeologist who dug the Marco Island native mounds in the end of the 19^th century and was among the first to produce significant primary data for the history of the Gulf of Mexico.  Turtling and the canning of turtle meat were brisk trades in that rapidly changing region at the time. But further afield, turtle meat, especially in turtle soup, came to be regarded as a delicacy.  The fresh water chelonian species, terrapins, were the subject of what one recent article has described as “a frenzied culinary affair.” But the marine green turtle supplied a lot of meat and also came to be in high demand. Hawksbill turtles on the other hand do not appear to have been as sought after for meat as they were for their incomparable carapace; feeding on sponges, they apparently often consumed species that were toxic and rendered their meat dangerous to humans.

Mightily maritime: sea turtle imaginary

In addition to providing sustenance, exotic materials, and valuable objects, turtles have long captured human imagination.  As befits mythological creatures, it’s not always clear that the imaginary turtles correspond to land or sea turtles, let alone to specific species. Take Kurmavatara, or Lord Vishnu’s second avatar (a manifestation of divinity in a concrete, incarnate form): it is usually described as a “tortoise”—but could it be imagined as a sea turtle instead?  The sacred story tells us that Vishnu took a chelonian shape and that his back was used to steady the pole that churned the cosmic ocean of milk and bring out all good things that had gotten lost in it.  While often represented as a land animal, kurma appears under the waters of the cosmic ocean in some artists’ renditions, allowing us to imagine Vishnu’s chelonian avatar as a sea turtle rather than as its land cousins.

In the imaginative rendition of Alexander of Macedon’s life known as Alexander Romance (or sometimes by the authorial name Pseudocalisthenes), Alexander’s trusted companion Pheidon meets a drowning death on an island that turns out to be a marine beast (a therion). The monster dives to abysmal depths as soon as Pheidon’s force disembarked on its back!  Composed about the same time as the Alexander Romance and equally popular down the centuries, a early Christian bestiary entitled the Physiologos, similarly tells the story of a marine creature that sailors mistake for an island; they disembark and light fires, disturbing and waking up the creature that then dives and causes them to drown.  While classifying it as a giant marine creature (a ketos), however, the Physiologos gives the monster a chelonian name: aspidochelone.  

The term aspidochelone itself means “shield-turtle;” as just mentioned it thus clearly conjures a chelonian species, but it also strongly emphasizes its carapace, its shield.  Later authors retained from the Physiologos the term ketos and presumably imagined the creature to be a whale.  Artists, moreover, generally and somewhat confusingly depict a scaly whale fish.  It seems that cetaceans that have no scales and chelonians that have scutes became merged!

Geographers and cosmographers of the Islamicate world have a lot to say about sea turtles as providers of beautiful dhabl and delicious meat in the southern seas but they also marvel at them, especially about their size.  In the tradition of writing about natural marvels, they often exaggerate what’s physically possible!  In the 11^th century, the anonymously authored Egyptian text known as The Book of Curiosities (Kitab Aja’ib al- wa-Ghara’ib al-Funun) describes sea turtles in the Persian Gulf that are “20 cubits in diameter, sometimes more and sometimes less” and that carry in their bellies “1000 egg, sometimes more and sometimes less.” The author concludes that “such a turtle is sometimes as large as an island”!  Buzurg b. Shahriyar’s anthology of salty dog tales, dated to the late 10th or early 11th century, tells a fascinating turtle tale that resembles uncannily that of the Aspidochelone–albeit with a happy ending! Having lit fires and unwittingly disturbed the beast, the sailors jump into the water and live to tell the tale.

The medieval Arabic sources give us a wealth of names and stories regarding chelonians.  As with the term aspidochelone, it is in some cases challenging to be certain about whether a turtle is intended at all. But the balance between fact and fiction, between real turtles and fanciful chelonian creatures, that is observable in the Arabic sources, is to be expected in a tradition whose maritime geography centered on two oceanic systems—the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean—both home to a variety of these remarkable animals!

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