Skye Alexander in her 2012 book Mermaids: the Myth, Legends and Lore, Avon Mass. has collected stories about Mermaids, mermen and other magical creatures of the sea from British Isles and Ireland, other European countries, from Russia and other Slavic regions, from Africa, India, the SE Asia, the south seas and Australia and from the whole American continent, in other words from everywhere in the world!
For a diachronic examination of mermaids in Middle Eastern literature, folklore and art see Manal Shalaby, “The Middle Eastern Mermaid: Between Myth and Religion,” in Philip Hayward ed., Scaled for Success: The Internationalisation of the Mermaid (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018), 7–20. The volume in which this piece is published offers a fascinating exploration of mermaids in modern literature, art and thought across space and time.
A very interesting study on how the Nereids of the ancient Greek world turned into mermaids, objects of erotic desire, in art, departing from the analysis of the work of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin has been published by Han Tran in 2018: “When the Nereid became Mermaid: Arnold Böcklin’s Paradigm Shift”. Shima 2, vol. 12, pp. 92-103. The paper, besides the commentary on Böcklin’s work, provides the reader with a panorama of hybrid marine creatures and of their genealogy.
This thorough study by Katharine Shepard, 1940. The Fish Tailed Monster in Greek and Etruscan Art, PhD dissertation, New York:Bryn Mawr College remains a basic point of reference for those who want to be introduced to the subject of hybrid marine creatures.
For the Itanian coins with the representation of Triton and the sea monsters the most complete reference is still the work of Ioannis Svoronos of 1890, Numismatique de la Crète ancienne: accompagnée de l’histoire, la géographie et la mythologie de l’île, Protat frères. The entire volume is freely available at https://archive.org/details/SvoronosNumismatiqueDeLaCrteAncienne
The Roman writer Aelian, in his work “On the Characteristics of Animals” dedicated a whole chapter on the discussion of merfolk. The text and its English translation can be found here https://archive.org/details/L449AelianCharacteristicsOfAnimalsIII1217/page/n1/mode/2up
For ancient Mesopotamian marine hybrids, see Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary (London: The British Museum Press, 1992; Second Edition 1998). Also see the helpful review of fish-based composite creatures by Constance Ellen Gane, “Composite Creatures of the Neo-Babylonian Art,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.
The maritime bestiary of medieval Arabic literature is wildly fascinating and still little studied. The usual suspects of geography, travel and wonders literature—including al-Masudi, Buzurg b. Shahriyar, Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, the Book of Curiosities, and others—contain multifarious references to interactions between merpeople and humans.
The encyclopaedic works of natural history—including al-Qazwini (ca. 1203–1283), al-Dimashqi (1256–1327) and al-Nuwayri (1279–1333)—and their manuscripts from subsequent periods provide most of the illustrations. The delightful sardine-maid illustrated in the post comes from an Indian 17th-18th-century manuscript of Qazwini’s ‘Aja’ib al-makhkluqat wa-ghara’ib al-mawjudat (Wonders of Creation and Curiosities of Existence), accessible via Princeton University Library’s digitized special collections here. To get a taste of the differences in illustration that may reflect differences in familiarity with actual marine creatures, peruse another Qazwini manuscript, this one from the 17th-century Ottoman realm, held at Baltimore’s Walters Museum here. A brief reference to the wise merman in the esoteric work of Jabir b. Hayyan and the figure of the virtuous merman in the Arabian Nights round up the gamut of merpeople in medieval Islamicate imagination.About the religious and mystical symbolisms of ‘Abdallah the Merman see Amira el-Zein, “The Symbolical and Mystical Meanings in ‘Abdallah of the Sea and ‘Abdallah of the Land’ (TheArabianNights),” IslamandChristian-MuslimRelations19 (2008): 397–409.
Detailed article on a wide range of analyses applied to various mermaid mummies, and that of the Horniman Museum, in the excellent article Viscardi, P., Hollinshead, A., Macfarlane, R. and Moffatt, J., 2014. Mermaids uncovered, Journal of Museum Ethnography, (27), pp.98-116. The mystery of the construction of mermaid exhibits is solved.
For the mermaid in the Greek folk tradition see