Why Dragons Appear in So Many Cultures

They slither through ancient myths and flap through modern fantasy. Sometimes they hoard gold, breathe fire or vacuum up horses into their mouths. Other times, they bring rain, protect a city or serve as the creator of the world. Yet no matter where you look—in medieval Europe, ancient China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica or ancient Mesopotamia—dragons are everywhere.

What exactly is a dragon and how did so many cultures around the world come to imagine their own version of this often scaly, fearsome creature? In myths and art, dragons frequently appear as hybrids, blending features of snakes, wolves, birds, lions, lizards and crocodiles. Many can swim and fly and wield extraordinary powers—sometimes benevolent, sometimes destructive.

In Beowulf, an English epic poem written around A.D. 1000, the hero slays a fire-breathing dragon, a portrayal that profoundly influenced modern fantasy literature. (J.R.R. Tolkien, who translated Beowulf, famously made a fire-breathing dragon the chief antagonist in The Hobbit.) But that’s just one take. Across time and cultures, dragons have symbolized everything from moral and existential threats that must be vanquished, to forces of nature and divine order, to mystical intermediaries with other worlds.

It’s unclear why dragon myths appear in so many cultures. Did ancient people use these stories to explain prehistoric fossils they found? Were they a way of explaining natural disasters or other phenomena? Or were they based on unusually large animal sightings? Even today, people can have trouble believing their eyes when they see just how large an alligator or a crocodile can get.

Below, see how dragons appear across cultures, geographical regions and time periods—in the stories we tell, the fears we face and the symbols we create.

Dragon-like figures appeared widely in Mesopotamian cultures, which flourished thousands of years ago along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a region commonly known as “the cradle of civilization.” One of the most prominent was the mušḫuššu, a four-legged creature with snake-like qualities. It was depicted as having scales, a long tongue, a serpentine head and a venomous bite. This made the mušḫuššu a formidable foe, but also a strong protector if it was on your side.

Ancient images of the god Marduk, a patron deity of Babylon, depict the god with a mušḫuššu at his feet. A carved relief of a mušḫuššu adorned the Processional Way in Babylon, and an inscription from a Babylonian king in the 6th century B.C. suggests mušḫuššu statues also guarded the city’s Ishtar Gate. It reads: “I cast seven bronze savage mušḫuššu, who spatter enemy and foe with deadly venom.”

Descriptions of dragons appear throughout Persian literature and art. Known as aždahā, these mythic dragons were portrayed as large, serpent-like creatures that lived in the sea, on land or in the air. Some had wings, some breathed fire and some could suck horses and people into their mouths like a vacuum. In the epic poem Shahnama (also known as Shahnameh), composed around A.D. 1000, the hero Prince Isfandiyar uses a dragon’s sucking ability to his advantage. Hiding inside a box on a horse-drawn cart, he waits until the dragon sucks him up, and then slays the creature from within.

In China, depictions of long, serpent-like dragons date back over 4,000 years. Unlike many other dragons, Chinese dragons serve as a positive force, bringing people luck and wealth or signifying that an emperor is a legitimate ruler. They also have a strong connection to life-giving rain and water. In stories, they swim in the sea or fly through the clouds.

In historical Chinese medical texts, dragon bones were treated as natural substances, often recommended in medicinal recipes to address a range of ailments. While it’s unclear  what ancient writers meant by “dragon bones,” modern scholars hypothesize that they were referring to fossilized remains. This theory gained traction in the early 20th century, when archaeologists excavating a well-known dragon bone collection site outside Beijing uncovered bones belonging to Peking Man, a type of Homo erectus.

As with dragon tales in other parts of the world, it’s an open question whether the belief in dragons in China might have been related to early encounters with dinosaur bones. In 2024, palaeontologists released a photo of a remarkably long-necked dinosaur fossil from China’s Guizhou province (Dinocephalosaurus orientalis) that bears a striking similarity to traditional images of Chinese dragons.

Stories of dragon-like creatures appear in ancient Greece and Rome, and persist through the European Middle Ages. In Christian mythology, St. George slaying a dragon remains one of the best-known. In the Germanic epic poem Nibelungenlied—an oral tradition written down around 1200—the hero Siegfried slays a gold-hoarding dragon. As in the Persian epic Shahnama, the dragon here is a fearsome adversary, rather than a guardian or bestower of good fortune. After killing the dragon, Siegfried bathes in its blood to become invincible.

One European dragon in particular has a striking prehistoric connection. In Austria, legend holds that the city of Klagenfurt was founded in the 13th century when knights killed a dragon that had been inhabiting the area. Early depictions of this dragon show it with a wolf’s head, a bird’s body and a snake’s tail. Sometime later, residents discovered part of a large skull. The city claimed it belonged to the dragon, and the skull may have served as inspiration for the 16th-century dragon statue that sits in the city’s town square. (The statue looks less like a wolf-bird and more like a modern European dragon.) In the 19th century, researchers examined the skull and determined it actually belonged to an extinct woolly rhinoceros.

Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist at Stanford University, has questioned whether a similar situation happened on the Greek island of Rhodes. In the 14th century, there were tales of crocodile-like dragons near the island. After a brave knight slew one of the beasts, residents publicly displayed its head. In Mayor’s book Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities, she wonders whether the head could have been a fossil from a prehistoric creature, or even a Nile crocodile, which can grow up to 16 or 18 feet long.

In the Toltec, Aztec and Mayan civilizations, the god who created the world was a feathered serpent. Known as Quetzalcóatl to the Aztecs, this dragon-like deity was also the god of wind and rain and associated with agriculture. A carved bust of this god appears at Teotihuacan, an ancient Mesoamerican city that predates the Aztec civilization. In the 20th century, paleontologists named a genus of prehistoric flying reptile Quetzalcoatlus after the famous god.

One of the most important deities in ancient Mesoamerica, he is known in the culture’s central creation myth for descending into the underworld and tricking the gods there so he could retrieve the bones from previous human races in order to create mankind anew. Once he stole the bones, he sacrificed his own blood to help bring them to life.

And dragon myths didn’t disappear thousands of years ago. In a much more recent example,  in 1909, a Maryland newspaper reported sightings of a creature with “enormous wings, a long pointed bill, claws like steel hooks and an eye in the center of its forehead.” According to the paper, the creature, dubbed the Snallygaster, had killed a man. In 1932, the Baltimore Evening Sun reported another sighting of the creature flying low over the highway outside Middletown, Maryland. In that incident, two witnesses (including the town’s ice cream manufacturer) reported that the beast changed color, had a wingspan of 12 to 14 feet and “at times threw out long streamers like the arms of an octopus.”

Colin Dickey, author of The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained, has suggested the Snallygaster tale could be a mix of German folklore, Appalachian mountain tales and racist tactics to deter Black Americans from going out at night. But if anything, the Snallygaster sheds light on how difficult it can be to untangle the origins of dragon myths. These stories emerged from layered, often opaque contexts that may never be fully understood. Sometimes, researchers discover important clues regarding a myth’s origin. But sometimes, the dragon wins—its origins obscured, its mythology intact.