The Fish-Tailed Women Who Haunted Sailors' Dreams

Long before Hans Christian Andersen gave the world his tragic Little Mermaid, sailors across the ancient Near East already whispered of women who lived beneath the waves. The earliest known mermaid tale comes from Assyria around 1000 BCE: the goddess Atargatis, mother of Queen Semiramis, fell in love with a mortal shepherd. When he died, grief drove her to leap into a lake and become a fish — but the water refused to hide her beauty, leaving her with a human torso, a fish's tail, and the ability to breathe underwater. Early images of Atargatis show her as a fish with a human head and legs, much like the Babylonian god Ea. The Greeks later identified her with Derketo and placed her alongside Aphrodite.

A popular Greek legend tells of Thessalonike, sister of Alexander the Great, who was said to have become a mermaid after death, living in the Aegean Sea. Sailors who encountered her were asked a single question: does King Alexander still live? Only the answer 'He lives and still reigns' would satisfy her — any other reply would turn her into a Gorgon who sank ships and drowned crews.

The Syrian writer Lucian, writing in the second century CE, described visiting temples in Syria and seeing a likeness of Derketo in Phoenicia: half a complete woman, and from the waist to the feet, covered in a fish's tail. In Jerusalem, however, her image appeared entirely human. Fish were considered sacred there and never eaten, while other birds — except the dove, itself sacred because Semiramis was believed to have transformed into one — were freely consumed.

The word 'mermaid' itself has deep linguistic roots. English 'mermaid' first appears in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale around 1390, built from 'mere' (sea) and 'maid'. An older, now obsolete word, 'mermin', traces back to Old English mæremænen, itself a compound of mære (sea) and mænen (female slave), first recorded around 725 CE as a gloss for 'siren'. Cognate words appear across Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Old Swedish texts, showing how widespread and ancient the image of the sea-woman truly was.

The siren of Greek mythology, originally imagined as a bird with a human head, gradually merged with the mermaid image during the medieval period. Some Romance languages still use words derived from 'siren' to mean mermaid — French sirène, Spanish and Italian sirena. The earliest text describing sirens with fish tails appears in the Liber Monstrorum, written between the seventh and mid-eighth centuries, which calls them 'sea girls' whose beauty and sweet song lure sailors, though beneath their human upper bodies lies a scaled fish tail. By the eleventh century, an Old High German Physiologus explicitly stated that sirens are mermaids.```